Posts Tagged: "space"

Now that NASA has announced its goal of sending a manned space mission to Mars sometime in the 2030s, the race is on to accomplish many of the scientific discoveries that will be required to support human life in space. On October 7th, NASA announced the In Situ Resource Utilization Challenge to drum up new ideas on how to use the resources available on the Red Planet to support life there. A prize pool of $15,000 will be distributed amongst three winning entries that will be announced by NASA next January; first place will receive $10,000, while the two runner-ups will each receive $2,500. Discoveries coming from this scientific competition will help to dramatically reduce the costs associated with sending a manned mission to Mars. The competition will close on December 3rd.

It’s unfortunate that NASA has had to operate in such a unfavorable climate, being pushed for more and more answers out of its space exploration program while suffering uncertainty in its federal funding amounts. It would be a mistake for Congress to ground NASA unless fine details on its Mars program are forthcoming. Having a goal oriented target has proven helpful for NASA, but scientific discoveries and the innovations that come therefrom are not easily or even appropriately quantifiable on a spreadsheet, business plan or budget. Historically, NASA space exploration mission objectives have led to great benefits for the American people, even when their plans and mission goals have been a little light on the technical details.

For this story Steve Brachmann interviewed Tim Kopra, who will be Commander of Expedition 47 aboard the International Space Station… Noting that ISS astronauts were more like lab technicians than scientists, Kopra separated ISS experiments into three main categories. “For some experiments we are the subjects,” Kopra said, especially for those experiments leading to a better understanding of how spending an elongated amount of time in zero-gravity environments affects the human body. Other experiments only require some setup from astronauts after which they run fairly autonomously while still more experiments are installed on the exterior of the ISS and require no astronaut intervention at all.

Over the past three months, Boeing has received 252 U.S. patents, a quarterly pace of innovation that would best last year’s results if maintained throughout the year. The text cluster here, provided by the analytical tools available through Innography, shows us that wireless communications and optical fiber tech have been areas of recent R&D focus at Boeing. Recently, Boeing has increased its unmanned aircraft tech holdings, and has also pursued R&D in unmanned underwater vehicles.

Powering Cassini towards the sixth planet of our solar system, and helping it to perform the braking techniques required to pull the craft into orbit around Saturn, is a propulsion module constructed by Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE:LMT). This module, the largest U.S. planetary spacecraft propulsion system ever constructed, was fired up 16 times while Cassini traveled to Saturn and will be used more than 100 times over the entire course of the already extended mission. Lockheed also built the Titan IV/Centaur rocket that launched Cassini-Huygens into space back in 1997.

We’re now just a little bit closer towards putting a human being on the surface of Mars thanks to the completion of a series of developmental tests on an RS-25 engine that will power NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket in the future. The tests, which took place at the agency’s Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis, MI, were…

According to the Summary of the Invention, the disclosed space elevator is a self supporting tower for the delivery of payloads to a platform above the surface of the Earth. The patent explains that the space elevator tower provide access to lower altitude regions, but can also be scaled to access altitudes above15 km, which is a bit higher than the typical altitude ceiling for a Boeing 777 commercial aircraft. The patent also goes on to say that the space elevator tower could be further scaled to provide direct access to altitudes above 200 km.

The scientific instruments installed upon New Horizons were dormant for the vast majority of the trip so as to make sure that they were all in good working condition when the craft reached its target. However, those instruments were woken up during the Jupiter flyby and were able to capture some incredible sights. For instance, a time lapse of images taken by New Horizon’s camera recorded a volcanic explosion happening on the Jupiter moon of Io, marking the first volcanic explosion observed outside of Earth.

SpaceX and NASA suffered a serious setback when the unmanned SpaceX Falcon 9 craft exploded, rendering its mission to deliver supplies and hardware to ISS a complete failure. Excessive pressure building up in a liquid oxygen tank of one of the craft’s upper stages caused the space launcher to break up shortly after leaving Cape Canaveral, FL. Air Force safety officers gave the command for the SpaceX Falcon 9 to self-destruct, largely so that fuel reserves could be burnt off and not dropped into the ocean.

Those who remember the earliest days of the Hubble mission will recall the tension surrounding a mechanical problem afflicting the Hubble. Even though the first images returned by Hubble were better than anything captured by telescopes here on Earth, NASA scientists quickly realized that the images weren’t as sharp as they should have been. Instead of letting the ill-formed telescope languish in space, incapable of fully realizing its mission, NASA embarked on a project that would eventually restore the Hubble Space Telescope to its intended clarity of vision.

Images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope also helped the global science community learn more about the formation of planets and galaxies. In 1995, Hubble captured images in the Orion Nebula of intense radiation jets reaching trillions of miles long as well as the gaseous protoplanetary disks which serve as raw material for the stars and planets of a forming solar system. Other planetary discoveries pioneered by Hubble researchers include the first visible-light image ever captured of a planet outside of our solar system, Fomalhaut b, located 25 light years from earth in the Piscis Australis constellation.

Flash forward to the present and it’s easy to see that NASA is experiencing a lot of activity in some very interesting areas. Mars has been the subject of fascination for scientists over the course of centuries, inspiring many people other than David Bowie to question whether there is life on it. Just last week NASA released a report indicating that there are atmospheric conditions that would allow liquid brine to form on the surface of the Gale Crater; the data came from one years’ worth of temperature and humidity measurements collected by NASA’s Curiosity rover. Detecting the presence of water in any formulation on the surface of Mars is a giant leap for mankind, and it’s not the only development that NASA is currently pursuing.