Copernical Team
Could we replace Ingenuity with a swarm of robotic bees?
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Humans finally achieved controlled flight on another planet for the first time just a few years ago. Ingenuity, the helicopter NASA sent to Mars, performed that difficult task admirably. It is now taking a well-deserved rest until some intrepid human explorer someday comes by to pick it up and hopefully put it in a museum somewhere.
But what if, instead of a quadcopter, NASA used a series of flexible-wing robots akin to bees to explore the Martian terrain? That was the idea behind the Marsbee proposal by Chang-Kwon Kang and his colleagues at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. The project was supported by a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant back in 2018—let's see what they did with it.
The concept was initially inspired by work at the University of Tokyo on a dragonfly-like micro aerial vehicle (MAV). It is one of the few drones able to fly in Earth's gravity using flexible wings that flap.
Image: Orion spacecraft prepares for upcoming launch
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Technicians lift NASA's Orion spacecraft out of the Final Assembly and System Testing cell on June 28, 2024. The integrated spacecraft, which will be used for the Artemis II mission to orbit the moon, has been undergoing final rounds of testing and assembly, including end-to-end performance verification of its subsystems and checking for leaks in its propulsion systems.
A 30-ton crane returned Orion into the recently renovated altitude chamber where it underwent electromagnetic testing.
The spacecraft will now undergo a series of tests that will subject it to a near-vacuum environment by removing air, thus creating a space where the pressure is extremely low.
This results in no atmosphere, similar to the one the spacecraft will experience during future lunar missions.
The data recorded during these tests will be used to qualify the spacecraft to safely fly the Artemis II astronauts through the harsh environment of space.
Provided by NASA
To guard against cyberattacks in space, researchers ask 'what if?'
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If space systems such as GPS were hacked and knocked offline, much of the world would instantly be returned to the communications and navigation technologies of the 1950s. Yet space cybersecurity is largely invisible to the public at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions.
Cyberattacks on satellites have occurred since the 1980s, but the global wake-up alarm went off only a couple of years ago. An hour before Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, its government operatives hacked Viasat's satellite-internet services to cut off communications and create confusion in Ukraine.
I study ethics and emerging technologies and serve as an adviser to the U.S. National Space Council. My colleagues and I at California Polytechnic State University's Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group released a U.S. National Science Foundation-funded report on June 17, 2024, to explain the problem of cyberattacks in space and help anticipate novel and surprising scenarios.
Space and you
Most people are unaware of the crucial role that space systems play in their daily lives, never mind military conflicts.
A new set of studies offers the most comprehensive look at spaceflight health since NASA's Twins Study
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Only about 600 people have ever traveled to space. The vast majority of astronauts over the past six decades have been middle-aged men on short-duration missions of fewer than 20 days.
Today, with private, commercial and multinational spaceflight providers and flyers entering the market, we are witnessing a new era of human spaceflight. Missions have ranged from minutes, hours and days to months.
As humanity looks ahead to returning to the moon over the coming decade, space exploration missions will be much longer, with many more space travelers and even space tourists. This also means that a wider diversity of people will experience the extreme environment of space—more women and people of different ethnicities, ages and health status.
Since people respond differently to the unique stressors and exposures of space, researchers in space health, like me, seek to better understand the human health effects of spaceflight.
A concentrated beam of particles and photons could push us to Proxima Centauri
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Getting to Proxima Centauri b will take a lot of new technologies, but there are increasingly exciting reasons to do so. Both public and private efforts have started seriously looking at ways to make it happen, but so far, there has been one significant roadblock to the journey—propulsion.
To solve that problem, Christopher Limbach, now a professor at the University of Michigan, is working on a novel type of beamed propulsion that utilizes both a particle beam and a laser to overcome that technology's biggest weakness.
Engineers send 3D printer into space
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Imagine a crew of astronauts headed to Mars. About 140 million miles away from Earth, they discover their spacecraft has a cracked O-ring. But instead of relying on a dwindling cache of spare parts, what if they could simply fabricate any part they needed on demand?
A team of Berkeley researchers, led by Ph.D. student Taylor Waddell, may have taken a giant leap toward making this option a reality. On June 8, they sent their 3D printing technology to space for the first time as part of the Virgin Galactic 07 mission.
Their next-generation microgravity printer—dubbed SpaceCAL—spent 140 seconds in suborbital space while aboard the VSS Unity space plane. In that short time span, it autonomously printed and post-processed a total of four test parts, including space shuttles and benchy figurines from a liquid plastic called PEGDA.
"SpaceCAL performed well under microgravity conditions in past tests aboard parabolic flights, but it still had something to prove," said Waddell.
Blue Origin logs SpaceX Starship concerns as it preps for 1st New Glenn launch
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As Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin prepares for the first launch of its New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral this year, the company has taken time to voice concerns over future launches of competitor SpaceX's massive Starship and Super Heavy, also planning to launch from the Space Coast.
Elon Musk's company continues development of the most powerful rocket ever to reach orbit from its test site in Texas, but has plans for launch pads at both Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and neighboring Kennedy Space Center.
The Department of the Air Force is the midst of an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the new rocket to launch from Canaveral's Space Launch Complex 37 aiming to take over the space that was used by United Launch Alliance until its final launch of the Delta IV Heavy earlier this year.
Meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration is performing a similar environmental impact assessment on a Starship launch pad from KSC's Launch Complex 39-A where SpaceX currently flies its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.
The period for public comment on the FAA's assessment continued through June 24 before the EIS moved into its next phases.
With its latest moon mission success, China's space program has the US in its sights
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June 25 2024 marked a new "first" in the history of spaceflight. China's robotic Chang'e 6 spacecraft delivered samples of rock back to Earth from a huge feature on the moon called the south pole–Aitken basin. After touching down on the moon's "far side," on the southern rim of the Apollo crater, Chang'e 6 came back with around 1.9kg of rock and soil, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA).
The moon's south pole is designated as the location for the future China-led International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). This truly international endeavor has partners including Russia, Venezuela, South Africa and Egypt, and is being coordinated by an ad hoc kind of international space agency.
China has a strategic plan to build a space economy and become the world leader in this field.
Eight CubeSats lift off for NASA on Firefly Aerospace rocket
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As part of NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative, Firefly Aerospace launched eight small satellites on July 3 aboard the company's Alpha rocket. Named "Noise of Summer," the rocket successfully lifted off from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 9:04 p.m. PDT.
The CubeSat missions were designed by universities and NASA centers and cover science that includes climate studies, satellite technology development, and educational outreach to students.
Firefly Aerospace completed its Venture-Class Launch Services Demonstration 2 contract with this launch. The agency's venture-class contracts offer launch opportunities for new providers, helping grow the commercial launch industry and leading to cost-effective competition for future NASA missions.
NASA's Parker Solar Probe completes 20th close approach to the sun
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NASA's Parker Solar Probe completed its 20th close approach to the sun on June 30, 2024, matching its own distance record by coming about 4.51 million miles (7.26 million kilometers) from the solar surface.
The close approach (known as perihelion) occurred at 3:47 UTC (11:47 p.m. EDT on June 29), with Parker Solar Probe moving 394,736 miles per hour (635,266 kilometers per hour) around the sun, again matching its own record.
On July 2, the spacecraft checked in with mission operators at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland (where the spacecraft was also designed and built), with a beacon tone indicating it was in good health and all systems were operating normally.
The milestone also marked the midpoint in the mission's 20th solar encounter, which began June 25 and continues through July 5.
Parker will fly around the sun at the same distance and speed one more time this year—on Sept.