Copernical Team
Volcanoes on Mars could be active, raise possibility of recent habitable conditions
Evidence of recent volcanic activity on Mars shows that eruptions could have taken place within the past 50,000 years, a paper by Planetary Science Institute Research Scientist David Horvath says.
Most volcanism on the red planet occurred between 3 and 4 billion years ago, with smaller eruptions in isolated locales continuing perhaps as recently as 3 million years ago. But, until now, ther Why Ingenuity's fifth flight will be different
Around the time of our first flight, we talked a lot about having our "Wright brothers moment" at Mars. And that makes a lot of sense, since those two mechanically-minded bicycle builders executed the first powered, controlled flight on Earth, and we were fortunate enough to do the same 117 years later - on another planet.
But the comparisons shouldn't stop with a first flight. Ingenuity's "I felt really heavy:" astronauts describe returning to Earth on SpaceX capsule
Four astronauts just returned from the International Space Station described on Thursday their reentry into Earth's atmosphere and ocean splashdown after more than 160 days in space.
A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying the crew back to Earth splashed down off Florida early Sunday in NASA's first nighttime ocean landing in more than 50 years.
"There was a point where I was just saying Starliner completes full space station mission simulation
NASA and Boeing recently completed an integrated mission dress rehearsal of Starliner's uncrewed Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) mission to the International Space Station for NASA's Commercial Crew Program. The campaign conducted largely inside Boeing's Houston-based Avionics and Software Integration Lab (ASIL) culminated in a five-day end-to-end mission simulation known as the ASIL Mission Rehea Lunar crater radio telescope: Illuminating the cosmic dark ages
After years of development, the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) project has been awarded $500,000 to support additional work as it enters Phase II of NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. While not yet a NASA mission, the LCRT describes a mission concept that could transform humanity's view of the cosmos.
The LCRT's primary objective would be to measure the long-wavelength radio waves generated by the cosmic Dark Ages—a period that lasted for a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, but before the first stars blinked into existence. Cosmologists know little about this period, but came the answers to some of science's biggest mysteries may be locked in the long-wavelength radio emissions generated by the gas that would have filled the universe during that time.
"While there were no stars, there was ample hydrogen during the universe's Dark Ages—hydrogen that would eventually serve as the raw material for the first stars," said Joseph Lazio, radio astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and a member of the LCRT team.
NASA's On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing 1 (OSAM-1) mission ready for spacecraft build
NASA is one step closer to robotically refueling a satellite and demonstrating in-space assembly and manufacturing thanks to the completion of an important milestone.
In April 2021, NASA and Maxar Technologies successfully completed the On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing 1 (OSAM-1) mission spacecraft accommodation Critical Design Review (CDR). This milestone demonstrates that the maturity of the design for the OSAM-1 spacecraft bus is appropriate to support proceeding with fabrication, assembly, integration, and testing.
OSAM-1 will, for the first time ever, robotically refuel a U.S. government satellite not designed to be serviced. The spacecraft will consist of a servicing payload, provided by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with two robotic arms that will be attached to the spacecraft bus. The bus will also incorporate a payload called Space Infrastructure Dexterous Robot (SPIDER) that will demonstrate in-space assembly and manufacturing. SPIDER will use a third robotic arm to assemble a communications antenna and an element called MakerSat built by Tethers Unlimited to manufacture a beam. The spacecraft bus and SPIDER are being built by Maxar Technologies.
Image: NASA's Lucy high gain antenna up close
Lucy's epic journey to observe Jupiter's Trojan asteroids requires a reliable communications link back to Earth, and so the spacecraft is outfitted with a 6.5-ft. (2-meter)-wide high gain antenna for this task.
Designed and built by Lockheed Martin, this same style antenna has been used to return science data from Mars and transfer back photos of asteroid Bennu. Lucy's antenna will send back the first-ever close up images and spectra of Trojan asteroids.
The signal from the antenna will also help determine the mass of these never-before-visited space objects revealed by tiny changes in frequency caused by the Doppler effect.
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Space weather is difficult to predict—with only an hour to prevent disasters on Earth
Recent developments at the forefront of astronomy allow us to observe that planets orbiting other stars have weather. Indeed, we have known that other planets in our own solar system have weather, in many cases more extreme than our own.
Our lives are affected by short-term atmospheric variations of weather on Earth, and we fear that longer-term climate change will also have a large impact. The recently coined term "space weather" refers to effects that arise in space but affect Earth and regions around it. More subtle than meteorological weather, space weather usually acts on technological systems, and has potential impacts that range from communication disruption to power grid failures.
Boeing's troubled Starliner capsule now aiming for July launch
NASA and Boeing are now targeting July 30 for an uncrewed test flight of the aerospace company's troubled Starliner capsule to the International Space Station, they announced Thursday.
The launch has been postponed multiple times, with the last announced date of April scuppered due to a cold snap that caused extensive power outages in Texas in March.
The NASA Commercial Crew program is run partly from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, though it launches from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
Lift-off is now scheduled for 2:53 pm Eastern Time (1853 GMT) on July 30.
"NASA and Boeing have done an incredible amount of work to get to this point," said Steve Stich, Commercial Crew program manager.