Nasa's next Martian rover will attempt to make oxygen on the surface of the red planet when it lands there in 2021.
The rover will carry seven scientific projects, aimed at paving the way for future manned missions, seeking evidence of life and storing samples to be brought back in the future.
Among them is a device for turning the CO2 that dominates the thin Martian air into oxygen.
This could support human life or make rocket fuel for return missions.
I could go to my brothers' place in North Carolina if it would help. :)That's a very kind offer, but please don't make any plans yet: having missed most of totality of the 1999 eclipse due to an inconveniently placed cloud, I'm keen to find somewhere with skies as clear as possible. Also, there's likely to be an extensive US tour constructed around this, so I'd expect to be in Ohio at some point anyway.
I also saw that the previous rocket was self-destructed due to the launch being flawed somehow (looked fine to me).
All systems appeared to be performing nominally until approximately T+15 seconds at which point the failure occurred. Evidence suggests the failure initiated in the first stage after which the vehicle lost its propulsive capability and fell back to the ground impacting near, but not on, the launch pad. Prior to impacting the ground, the rocket’s Flight Termination System was engaged by the designated official in the Wallops Range Control Center.
How in the hell would they know that so soon?I would guess that there's a prescribed safe path, dictating where the rocket should be at what time after the launch. If it deviates from that path, either in location or not accelerating correctly, then it's considered unsafe and is destroyed.
Not sure if this is the place to put it but: http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/what-if-our-planet-had-rings-like-saturn
A haul of planets from Nasa's Kepler telescope includes a world sharing many characteristics with Earth.
Kepler-452b orbits at a very similar distance from its star, though its radius is 60% larger.
Mission scientists said they believed it was the most Earth-like planet yet.
Such worlds are of interest to astronomers because they might be small and cool enough to host liquid water on their surface - and might therefore be hospitable to life.
Nasa's science chief John Grunsfeld called the new world the "closest so far" to Earth.
I remember reading about NASA's EM drive. The most fun part for me was that they were astounded that it actually works, despite the fact that it's not supported by the current fundamental laws of physics. :PMore about it on this thread (http://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=4492.0).
The two satellites that make up the BepiColombo mission to Mercury were presented to the media on Thursday.
This joint European-Japanese venture has been in development for nearly two decades, but should finally get to the launch pad in 15 months' time.
The two spacecraft will travel together to the baking world but separate on arrival to conduct their own studies.
Thursday's event in the Netherlands was the last chance for journalists to view the so-called "flight stack".
(https://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/0A33/production/_97811620_3.jpg)
The American-led Cassini space mission to Saturn has just come to a spectacular end.
Controllers had commanded the probe to destroy itself by plunging into the planet's atmosphere. It survived for just over a minute before being broken apart. Cassini had run out of fuel and Nasa had determined that the probe should not be allowed simply to wander uncontrolled among Saturn and its moons.
The loss of signal from the spacecraft occurred pretty close to the prediction. Here at mission control, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, the drop-off was timed at 04:55 PDT (11:55 GMT; 12:55 BST).
I'll just wait here then.You shouldn't have to wait too long - just under six months. There's a lunar eclipse on 21 January 2019 for which North America is perfectly positioned - details here (https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/LEplot/LEplot2001/LE2019Jan21T.pdf).
- North America :'(
Parker sun probe launching today
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-45058911
NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places.
SOFIA has detected water molecules (H2O) in Clavius Crater, one of the largest craters visible from Earth, located in the Moon’s southern hemisphere. Previous observations of the Moon’s surface detected some form of hydrogen, but were unable to distinguish between water and its close chemical relative, hydroxyl (OH). Data from this location reveal water in concentrations of 100 to 412 parts per million – roughly equivalent to a 12-ounce bottle of water – trapped in a cubic meter of soil spread across the lunar surface. The results are published in the latest issue of Nature Astronomy.
“We had indications that H2O – the familiar water we know – might be present on the sunlit side of the Moon,” said Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Now we know it is there. This discovery challenges our understanding of the lunar surface and raises intriguing questions about resources relevant for deep space exploration.”
As a comparison, the Sahara desert has 100 times the amount of water than what SOFIA detected in the lunar soil. Despite the small amounts, the discovery raises new questions about how water is created and how it persists on the harsh, airless lunar surface.
Under NASA’s Artemis (https://www.nasa.gov/Artemis#_blank) program, the agency is eager to learn all it can about the presence of water on the Moon in advance of sending the first woman and next man to the lunar surface in 2024 and establishing a sustainable human presence there by the end of the decade.This might be old news, but I'd never heard of this ambitious plan. Perhaps we have an exciting space decade to come! ;D
An instrument on Nasa's Perseverance rover on Mars has made oxygen from the planet's carbon dioxide atmosphere.
I wonder how much of the Whipple shield not capturing the science fiction imagination is just the name. It unfortunately sounds like a specially designed cup lid for messy drinkers of cream topped coffee, more than a piece of brilliantly conceived space engineering.It could be worse, an early sexologist was named Dr. Beverly Whipple. I don't know if the story that the "Whipple tickle" almost became a piece of official scientific nomenclature is true, but it should be.
Mm. I think it's common to discuss things people assumed we'd have in the past that never worked out (the "where's my hovercar" line of argument) but much less common to discuss the things people actively assumed were impossible that we've achieved.I think that people often do discuss the things people actively assumed were impossible that we've achieved, but they are telling urban legends ("a physicist said that a bumblebee can't fly!" "first they ignore you then they mock you then you win!") not history.
NASA's safety culture after Apollo 11 is a weird mix of safety-conscious (carefully calculating incremental increases in cancer risk to International Space Station crew) and reckless (all those deaths in the Shuttle program)Is this something that's actually traceable as a single block change, or is it more that it's gone through several phases since? We're quite a few careers down the line from Apollo 11 now!
Simultaneous in different parts of the organization! They lost the Columbia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster)while teams were carefully trying to calculate obscure long-term health risks to highly-paid idealistic volunteers.NASA's safety culture after Apollo 11 is a weird mix of safety-conscious (carefully calculating incremental increases in cancer risk to International Space Station crew) and reckless (all those deaths in the Shuttle program)Is this something that's actually traceable as a single block change, or is it more that it's gone through several phases since? We're quite a few careers down the line from Apollo 11 now!