Mars rovers safe from lightning strikes, research finds
Thursday, 18 February 2021 15:59
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If experiments done in small bottles in a University of Oregon lab are accurate, the friction of colliding Martian dust particles are unlikely to generate big electrical storms or threaten the newly arrived exploration vehicles or, eventually, human visitors.
For 50 years since Viking landers and later orbiters detected silts, clays, wind-blown bedforms and dust devils on Mars, scientists have worried about the potential for large lightning storms and whether static electricity generated by the planet's mostly basaltic rock particles could damage vehicles or human protective gear.
In the journal Icarus, a UO team reports that the friction caused by dust particles making contact with each other may indeed produce electrical discharges at the surface and in the planet's atmosphere, but any resulting sparks are likely to be small.
Such concerns had resurfaced in relation to the new NASA Mars mission, which successfully put the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity robotic helicopter on the red planet Feb. 18.
In the lab of volcanologist Josef Dufek, researchers used a vertical glass tube comparable in size to a water bottle measuring some 4 inches in diameter and 8 inches in length.
Satellite radar interferometry effective for mapping crops
Thursday, 18 February 2021 14:38 Write a comment
Traditionally, optical, or ‘camera-like’, satellite images are used to map different crops from space, but a recent study shows that Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar data along with interferometric processing can make crop-type mapping even better. This, in turn, will help improve crop-yield forecasts, production statistics, drought and storm damage assessments, and more.
Has Earth been visited by an alien spaceship? Harvard Professor Avi Loeb vs. everybody else
Thursday, 18 February 2021 14:12 Write a comment
A highly unusual object was spotted traveling through the solar system in 2017. Given a Hawaiian name,ʻOumuamua, it was small and elongated—a few hundred meters by a few tens of meters, traveling at a speed fast enough to escape the Sun's gravity and move into interstellar space.
I was at a meeting when the discovery of ʻOumuamua was announced, and a friend immediately said to me, "So how long before somebody claims it's a spaceship?" It seems that whenever astronomers discover anything unusual, somebody claims it must be aliens.
Nearly all scientists believe that ʻOumuamua probably originates from outside the solar system. It is an asteroid- or comet-like object that has left another star and traveled through interstellar space—we saw it as it zipped by us. But not everyone agrees. Avi Loeb, a Harvard professor of astronomy, suggested in a recent book that it is indeed an alien spaceship.
Week in images: 15 - 19 February 2021
Thursday, 18 February 2021 14:11 Write a comment
Week in images: 15 - 19 February 2021
Discover our week through the lens
Landspace closes in on orbital launch with liquid methane rocket
Thursday, 18 February 2021 13:52 Write a comment
HELSINKI — Chinese private firm Landspace is working towards a potential first orbital launch attempt with a methane-fueled launch vehicle later this year.
Researchers developing drugs to enable longer space missions
Thursday, 18 February 2021 13:51 Write a comment
The University of Adelaide is sending pills to the International Space Station (ISS) to determine if it will be possible to produce medicine in space to enable longer-term space missions.
Scheduled to launch from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Sunday 21 February, the pills will contain Ibuprofen and vitamin C as active ingredients, in addition to excipients that can be found on the moon's surface. These include silica, magnesium silicate (talcum) and calcium phosphate.
University of Adelaide professor and research director for Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources Volker Hessel said the project was making the first step towards "autonomous on-board pharmaceutical manufacturing."
The 60 pills will be packaged in blister packs and will be placed outside the ISS for six months to discover how exposure to microgravity and space radiation affects the stability of pharmaceutical tablet formulations.
"Radiation protection was incorporated into the design of the pills," Hessel said.
"By altering the interaction between the ingredients and the drug we will be able to examine how these variations affect their stability."
Space technology companies Alpha Space and Space Tango have partnered with the University of Adelaide to send the pills to space.
'Perseverance will get you anywhere': After 300-million-mile journey, NASA's Mars rover shares Twitter updates
Thursday, 18 February 2021 13:50 Write a comment
"I'm safe on Mars" isn't a tweet you see every day.
It's the update provided by the Twitter account for NASA's Perseverance rover (@NASAPersevere) after it successfully landed Thursday on the Red Planet. The tweet went out to a rapidly-growing audience of more than 1.2 million followers, with promises of more to come in the future.
The tweet, which gathered more than 480,000 likes as of Thursday night, punctuated a 300-million-mile voyage and coincided with the rover's 3:55 p.m. EST landing. "Perseverance will get you anywhere," indeed.
Perseverance landing wins broad political praise
Thursday, 18 February 2021 12:49 Write a comment
WASHINGTON — When the White House called to congratulate NASA on the successful landing of the Mars rover Perseverance, acting administrator Steve Jurczyk new immediately it was the real deal.
“About an hour after landing, I got a phone call from the president of the United States, and his first words were, ‘Congratulations, man,’” Jurczyk recalled during a Feb.
Etna erupts
Thursday, 18 February 2021 12:42 Write a comment
Image:
Italy’s Mount Etna, one of the world’s most active volcanoes, has erupted twice in less than 48 hours, spewing a fountain of lava and ash into the sky. This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image has been processed to show the lava flow in bright red. Astronauts training for space station missions
Thursday, 18 February 2021 11:44 Write a comment
Chinese astronauts have started receiving intensive training for spaceflights tasked with building the nation's space station, the China Manned Space Agency said on Tuesday.
Several astronauts have spent the past year in hard training and are now in the prelaunch training phase, focusing on extravehicular activities and some other operations, it said in a news release.
The agency sai On the quest for other Earths
Thursday, 18 February 2021 11:44 Write a comment
In the search for planets capable of sustaining life, an international research team with members from ETH has taken a significant step forward. As the researchers reported recently in the journal Nature Communications, they found signs of a Neptune-sized planet in the Alpha Centauri star system, a mere 4.4 light years away from Earth.
This exoplanet is located in a zone that may offer sui Northrop Grumman's SharkSat Payload Showcases Agility from the Ground to Orbit
Thursday, 18 February 2021 11:44 Write a comment
A shark moves through the water with speed and agility, always focused on moving forward. It is in this same vein that Northrop Grumman recently developed SharkSat, a pioneering payload to demonstrate on-orbit mission agility and meet demands for rapid development and deployment in space.
In January, after completing a three-month stay at the International Space Station hosted aboard the c RUAG Space positions itself for the future
Thursday, 18 February 2021 11:44 Write a comment
To respond to a changing market environment and to create the basis for the successful implementation of its growth ambition, RUAG Space is repositioning itself along a flatter organization that will take effect as of...
RUAG International's Space business is currently being reorganized as part of a project called Ambition 21. The reorganization is a response to a changing market environme Spaceflight readies its largest satellite contracted to date, Amazonia-1, for Launch
Thursday, 18 February 2021 11:44 Write a comment
Spaceflight Inc has provided details about the upcoming launch of its largest customer satellite launch to date, the Amazonia-1 spacecraft. To accommodate the nearly 700-kilogram satellite, Spaceflight purchased an entire NewSpace India Limited's (NSIL) Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV). The mission, named PSLV-C51/ Amazonia-1, is targeted for launch at the end of February from Satish Dhawan Arch Mission Foundation announces first in series of Earth Archives
Thursday, 18 February 2021 11:44 Write a comment
The Arch Mission Foundation, a nonprofit designed to preserve human heritage forever, has successfully placed the first in a series of terrestrial Earth Archives. The Lava Library is the longest lasting time capsule ever deployed on Earth, and follows the placement of Arch Mission's Lunar Library on the Moon in 2019.
The Arch Mission Foundation creates and maintains ultra-long-term data st