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World Largest Heat Shield Attached to NASA's Orion Crew Capsule for Crucial Fall 2014 T... - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...-crucial-fall-2014-test-flight

scibyte133 orion

shared by Mars Base on 01 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • technicians at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida have attached the world’s largest heat shield to a pathfinding version of NASA’s Orion crew capsule
  • test flight later this Fall on a crucial mission dubbed Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1)
  • One of the primary goals of NASA’s eagerly anticipated Orion EFT-1 uncrewed test flight is to test the efficacy of the heat shield in protecting the vehicle – and future human astronauts
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • A trio of parachutes will then unfurl to slow it down for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean
  • Orion is NASA’s next generation human rated vehicle now under development to replace the now retired space shuttle
  • “The Orion heat shield is the largest of its kind ever built. Its wider than the Apollo and Mars Science Lab heat shields,” Todd Sullivan
  • heat shield senior manager
  • The heat shield measures 16.5 feet in diameter
  • It is constructed from a single seamless piece of Avcoat ablator
  • The ablative material will wear away as it heats up during the capsules atmospheric re-entry thereby preventing the 4000 degree F heat from being transferred to the rest of the capsule
  • The Delta IV Heavy is the only rocket with sufficient thrust to launch the Orion EFT-1 capsule and its attached upper stage to its intended orbit of 3600 miles altitude above Earth
  • 15 times higher than the International Space Station (ISS) and farther than any human spacecraft has journeyed in 40 years
  • At the conclusion of the two-orbit, four- hour EFT-1 flight, the detached Orion capsule plunges back and re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere at 20,000 MPH (32,000 kilometers per hour).
  • “That’s about 80% of the reentry speed experienced by the Apollo capsule after returning from the Apollo moon landing missions,” Scott Wilson, NASA’s Orion Manager of Production Operations
  • The big reason to get to those high speeds during EFT-1 is to be able to test out the thermal protection system
  • Numerous sensors and instrumentation have been specially installed on the EFT-1 heat shield and the back shell tiles to collect measurements of things like temperatures, pressures and stresses during the extreme conditions of atmospheric reentry
  • data gathered during the
  • flight will aid in confirming. or refuting, design decisions and computer models as the program moves forward to the first flight
  • in late 2017 on the EM-1 mission and more human crewed missions thereafter
Mars Base

Lawmakers Vote to Rename NASA Dryden After Neil Armstrong | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/rmstrong-nasa-center-name.html

scibyte84

shared by Mars Base on 27 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The U.S. House of Representatives has voted to rename a NASA flight research center after the late Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon
  • was approved unanimously in the House, calls for NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in southern California to be renamed the Neil A. Armstrong Flight Research Center.
  • also renames the surrounding Western Aeronautical Test Range after Hugh L. Dryden to continue honoring the aeronautical engineer.
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  • Dryden was the visionary behind NASA's X-15 rocket plane and the Apollo program. Neil Armstrong was the one who flew the spacecraft Dryden envisioned
  • This is at least the third time since 2007 that the House of Representatives has tried to rename the NASA center after Armstrong
  • the bill now passed in the House, it will be referred on to the Senate for consideration
  • Dryden recommended to President John F. Kennedy that the goal of putting a man on the moon within 10 years was achievable and something the American people could rally behind
  • Neil Armstrong, flying with his Apollo 11 crewmates Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, accomplished Kennedy's goal of landing on the moon
  • Armstrong died Aug. 25 at age 82 following complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures
  • Dryden was not able to see his dream become reality, as he died in 1965
  • honor both men's legacies by naming the Flight Research Center after Neil Armstrong and the surrounding Test Range after Hugh Dryden
Mars Base

Mercury Surprises: Tiny Planet Has Odd Interior, Active Past | Messenger Spacecraft | S... - 0 views

www.space.com/ries-messenger-spacecraft.html

scibyte39 MarMedia mercury messenger

shared by Mars Base on 21 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • interior unlike that of any other rocky planet in our solar system and a surprisingly dynamic history,
  • remained geologically active for a surprisingly large chunk of its evolutionary history, researchers said
  • planet's huge iron core is even larger than they had thought
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • likely overlain with a solid shell of iron and sulfur
  • layered structure not known to exist on Earth, Venus or Mars
  • Messenger has taken nearly 100,000 images and made more than 4 million measurements of the planet's surface
  • probe is mapping Mercury's surface and gathering data on the planet's composition, magnetic environment and tenuous atmosphere, among other features
  • s original science campaign was designed to last one Earth year
  • NASA announced in November that it had granted the spacecraft a one-year mission extension
  • officially began its extended mission earlier this week.
  • In one study
  • They found that the range of elevations was smaller than that found on either Mars or the moon.
  • also observed that the floors of many Mercury craters have been tilted substantially
  • suggest that internal forces pushed the craters up after the impacts created them
  • not out of the question that Mercury is still active today
  • not very likely
  • have not observed an active eruption or extrusion
  • determined that Mercury has "mascons," large positive gravity anomalies associated with big impact basins
  • first discovered on the moon in 1968 and caused great problems in the Apollo program because they tugged low-orbiting spacecraft around and made navigation difficult
  • Subsequently mascons were discovered on Mars
  • find out that Mercury has
  • appear to be a common feature of terrestrial planetary bodies
  • gravity calculations also suggest that Mercury has an iron core that comprises roughly 85 percent of the planet's radius
  • Earth's iron core covers about half of its radius
  • new findings should help shed light on Mercury's past
  • formation and evolution of rocky planets in general
  • looks like a layer of solid iron sulfide overlies Mercury's core — a feature not known to exist on any other terrestrial planet
Mars Base

Runaway Planets Tossed From Galaxy at Fraction of Speed of Light | Space.com - 1 views

www.space.com/speed-planets-light-speed.html

scibyte40 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 24 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Planets in tight orbits around stars that get ejected from our galaxy may actually themselves be tossed out of the Milky Way at blisteringly fast speeds of up to 30 million miles per hour, or a fraction of the speed of light, a new study finds.
  • would be some of the fastest objects in the galaxy, aside from photons
  • In terms of large, solid objects, they would be the fastest. It would take them 10 seconds or so to cross the diameter of the Earth
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • In 2005, astronomers found evidence of a runaway star that was flying out of the Milky Way galaxy at a speed of 1.5 million mph (2.4 million kph).
  • part of a double-star system that wandered too close to the supermassive black hole
  • In the seven years since, 16 of these hypervelocity stars have been found
  • typical runaway planet would likely dash outward at 7 to 10 million mph (11.3 to 16.1 million kph), but given the right circumstances, a small fraction could have their speeds boosted to up to 30 million mph (48.3 million kph).
  • hypervelocity planets will escape the Milky Way and travel through interstellar space
  • a civilization on such a planet, they would have a very exciting journe
  • Once the planet exits from the local group of galaxies, it will be accelerated away by cosmic expansion. So, within 10 billion years, it would go from the center of the galaxy to all the way to the edge of the observable universe
  • planet that tightly orbits a runaway star will cross in front and cause its brightness to dim slightly in what astronomers call a "transit
  • To hitch a ride on a hypervelocity star, a planet would have to be locked in a tight orbit, which ups the odds of witnessing a transit to around 50 percent
  • first time someone is talking about searching for planets around hypervelocity stars
Mars Base

Ministry of Supply: The Future of Dress Shirts. by Ministry of Supply - Kickstarter - 0 views

www.kickstarter.com/...ply-the-future-of-dress-shirts

scibyte53 ApolloShirt

shared by Mars Base on 03 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • the proprietary Apollo blend of fibers. And it’s ready for production.  
  • already manufactured and sold incredible, premium dress shirts
  • After the campaign, the Apollo Shirt will likely retail for $129
Mars Base

Neil Armstrong Dead at 82: First Man to Walk on Moon, American Icon | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/irst-moonwalker-apollo-11.html

scibyte60 NeilArmstrong

shared by Mars Base on 25 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Armstrong and pilot David Scott achieved the first docking of two spacecraft in orbit, linking up with an unmanned Agena target vehicle
  • was a near disaster, suffering the first critical in-space failure of a U.S. spacecraft after a stuck thruster set the Gemini spacecraft spinning
  • Armstrong ultimately regained control by using their re-entry system thrusters, steadying the spacecraft and forcing an early, but safe end to the mission
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  • "He was the best, and I will miss him terribly," Apollo 11 command module pilot Michael Collins
  • Soon after returning from the moon, Armstrong announced he would not fly in space again.
  • He resigned from NASA
  • later in 1971
Mars Base

New Deep Space Capsule Passes NASA Chief's Inspection NASA & Orion Multipurpose Crew Ve... - 0 views

www.space.com/cv-spacecraft-exploration.html

scibyte29 NASA Orion capsule multimedia

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • engineers have completed a suite of structural, acoustic and vibration tests on key components of the spaceship
  • Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle
  • stacked hardware stretching 53 feet (16 meters)
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • unmanned 2014 EFT-1 mission will blast Orion into space aboard a Delta 4-Heavy rocket. The capsule will orbit Earth twice while climbing to an altitude of several thousand miles, then rocket back in a high-speed plunge to validate its heat shield and other systems.
  • Artist's rendering of the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle on a deep space mission.CREDIT: NASA
  • Acoustic testing
  • recent acoustic testing of the Orion crew module/launch abort system structure involved hundreds of sensors planted throughout the hardware.
  • subjected it to the flight environment
  • chamber gets up to 150 decibels…like a rifle shot right next to your ear. It's pretty loud. All that sound…it's like a really loud rock concert
  • Huge heat shield
  • underside of Orion's crew module is the heat shield
  • measuring 16.5 feet (5 m) in diameter
  • Thermal Protection System advances heritage materials from the NASA's space shuttle and Apollo programs to create a next-generation system that can withstand the extreme environments of piloted deep space missions.
Mars Base

Mystery of Moon's Lost Magnetism Solved? | Magnetic Moon Rocks Caused by Lunar Dynamo |... - 0 views

www.space.com/gnetic-field-lunar-dynamo.html

moon magnetism scibyte21

shared by Mars Base on 10 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • One of the abiding mysteries of our moon is why it apparently once had a magnetic field
  • When Apollo astronauts brought back samples of moon rocks from their lunar landing missions
  • some of them shocked scientists by being magnetic.
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  • This can happen to rocks with the right minerals inside them, if they cool in the presence of a magnetic field
  • A magnetic field is generated by what's called a dynamo, which is caused by the fluid motion of a conducting material, such as liquid iron
  • the moon isn't large enough for convection to take place
  • In one new proposal
  • The strength of this stirring is determined by the angle between the core and the mantle
  • researchers think this happens because the moon's core and its mantle rotate around slightly different axes
  • suggest that the moon's solid-rock middle layer, called its mantle, stirs up its liquid iron core
  • because the tidal gravitational tug from the Earth causes the moon's mantle to rotate differently than the core
  • This model would explain why the moon used to have a magnetic field, but no longer does
  • researchers estimate the lunar magnetic field might have lasted for about a billion years
  • isn't the only possible solution to the moon's mystery
  • another explanation for the ancient lunar magnetic field.
  • suggests that the moon's mantle might have stirred up the liquid in its core
  • Instead of tidal interactions between the Earth and the moon, the researchers posit that impacts by large space rocks slamming into the moon have changed its rotation rate
  • would induce brief periods of especially strong stirring of the core, creating spikes of a magnetic field on the moon
  • either option may be correct, it's also possible that both mechanisms played a role in causing an ancient magnetic field on the moon
Mars Base

Water on the Moon in Pictures | Lunar Ice | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/on-water-lunar-ice-photos.html

LunarWater

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • In July 2008, water was found conclusively for the first time inside ancient moon samples brought back by Apollo astronauts
  • gathered by the Apollo 15 mission
  • new analytic technique to detect water
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • strongly suggests that water has been a part of the Moon since its early existence – and perhaps since it was first created
  • 2009 discovery of water on the moon
  • images show a very young lunar crater on the side of the moon that faces away from Earth
  • NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper on the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft
  • distribution of water-rich minerals (light blue) is shown around a small crater
  • 2009, observations from three spacecraft showed signals of water across moon's surface
  • stream of charged hydrogen ions carried from the sun to the moon by the solar wind
  • might explain the possible presence of hydroxyl or water on the moon.
  • NASA's Mini-SAR instrument, which flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to 15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it's estimated there could be at least 600 million metric tons of water ice. The red circles denote fresh craters; the green circle mark anomalous craters.
  • NASA's Mini-SAR instrument
  • aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft
  • found more than 40 small craters with water ice
  • total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater
  • estimated there could be at least 600 million metric tons of water ice
  • the moon's permanently shadowed regions may hide stores of water
  • photo of the moon's south pole
  • January 2011 study suggested that water on the moon most likely came from comets that pelted the lunar surface after its formation
  • In October 2010, scientists reported that a frigid crater called Cabeus at the moon's south pole is jam-packed with water ice, with some spots wetter than Earth's Sahara desert
  • NASA's LCROSS probe discovered beds of water ice at the lunar south pole when it impacted the moon in October 2009. This visible camera image shows the ejecta plume at about 20 seconds after LCROSS's impact on the moon.
  • Recent studies have found vast amounts of water ice at or near the lunar surface. But the inside of the moon is bone dry, an August 2010 study found.
Mars Base

Chang'e 3 Lander Beams Back New Lunar Panorama Photos - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...back-new-lunar-panorama-photos

scibyte117 ChineseSpaceProgram

shared by Mars Base on 19 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • the lander beamed back a series of new photos taken with its panoramic camera
  • Stitched together, they give us a more detailed and colorful look of the rover’s surroundings in northern Mare Imbrium
  • The final mosaic unfortunately doesn’t have the resolution yet of the other images. Perhaps one will be published soon
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  • One thing that stands out
  • is the brown color of the lunar surface soil or regolith
  • Color images of the moon’s surface by the Apollo astronauts along with  their verbal descriptions indicate a uniform gray color punctuated in rare spots by patches of more colorful soils
  • Apollo visited six different moonscapes – all essentially gray
  • wonder if the color balance in the Chinese images might be off. Or did Chang’e 3 just happen to land on browner soils
Mars Base

F-1 Engine Recovery | Bezos Expeditions - 0 views

www.bezosexpeditions.com/updates.html

scibyte87 apollo

shared by Mars Base on 22 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The Remotely Operated Vehicles worked at a depth of more than 14,000 feet, tethered to our ship with fiber optics for data and electric cables transmitting power at more than 4,000 volts
  • bringing home enough major components to fashion displays of two flown F-1 engines
  • upcoming restoration will stabilize the hardware and prevent further corrosion
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  • 5,000 mile per hour re-entry and subsequent impact with the ocean surface
Mars Base

Nine-Year-Old Mars Rover Passes 40-Year-Old Record - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory - 0 views

www.jpl.nasa.gov/...news.php

scibyte94 opportunity

shared by Mars Base on 18 May 13 - No Cached
  • Apollo 17 astronauts
  • for three days in December 1972
  • drove their mission's Lunar Roving Vehicle 19.3 nautical miles (22.210 statute miles or 35.744 kilometers
Mars Base

Twin NASA spacecraft deliberately crash into moon - 0 views

phys.org/...cecraft-deliberately-moon.html

scibyte75 Grail

shared by Mars Base on 18 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • By design, the final resting place was far away from the Apollo landing sites and other historical spots on the moon
  • The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter circling the moon will pass over the mountain and attempt to photograph the skid marks left by the washing machine sized-spacecraft as they hit the surface at 3,800 mph
  • the crash site was in darkness, the final act was not visible from Earth.
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  • During the primary mission, they flew about 35 miles above the lunar surface. After getting bonus data-collecting time, they lowered their altitude to 14 miles (22 kilometers) above the surface
Mars Base

T. K. Mattingly Oral History - 0 views

www.jsc.nasa.gov/...MattinglyTK_11-6-01.htm

scibyte91 Apollo13

shared by Mars Base on 18 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • The Race to the Moon book’s description is probably a little better
  • The way back, the spacecraft started drifting off its trajectory, and now they had to make their midcourse corrections to get back
  • turns out that, too, we had practiced in some simulation somewhere. It’s not very accurate, but it doesn’t have to be
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  • It was hard to get people to recognize that we do that, but you don’t need to be the nearest five degrees
  • didn’t solve any problems in the simulator
  • actually ran those procedures, verified them, made some red lines, I think, brought them back over
  • They had to take their flight plan and turn it over and tear out pages and write on the back of it. The only thing they had were pencils and ball pens
  • actually had extra electrical power in the lunar module batteries
  • Somebody came in and found a way to do a jumper cord and take battery power out of the lunar module and top off the command module and to use that power to help get the command module stuff started so we didn’t use all the power from the batteries. So we ended up with a good margin on the batteries
  • Because all our procedures were based on two practical rules. One of them is, structural things don’t break. Actually, that drove everything. Fluid lines and structural—you know, joints can leak, shorts can happen to wires, but physical structure doesn’t break
  • if you admitted to that, then the number of things that you could have to prepare for is infinite.
  • had done a lot of testing of this, a lot of margin of safety in the hardware, so we never looked at those kinds of implications
  • Got in the car to drive back up. This is two days, I think, two days before launch, I think. I’m driving up the road, turned the radio on, and they interrupt the news announcement that this afternoon NASA has announced that they have changed and substituted Jack Swigert for me.
  • Gene says, “Sy, didn’t Jim say that he looked out the window and there’s stuff out in the sky and he heard something?” He says, “Does that sound like instrumentation to you?”
  • thanks to the kind of simulation training program we had, maybe the things weren’t exactly the same or in an exactly the same order, but everything we ended up doing had been done somewhere.
  • somewhere in an earlier sim, there had been an occasion to do what they call LM lifeboat, which meant you had to get the crew out of the command module and into the lunar module, and they stayed there
  • when you get out in space, that all those black spots in between the stars are filled with stars, and those constellations are nowhere near as obvious as they were
  • The guys in the lunar module electrical system had calculated how much time we had, and the two numbers didn’t match. So bringing on this platform is probably the biggest energy user in the spacecraft. Didn’t want to do it
  • They had a capability to maneuver, and they knew where they were, and now they could figure out what to do
  • a big debate about what to do next, as I recall, the books and the movies and all don’t really capture.
  • That debate of what to do next was also rather charged because there was one group of people that said, “You know, this has really been a bad day. We don’t know the condition of any piece of hardware we’ve got. We don’t want to do anything. Don’t touch anything. Let’s just figure this out.”
  • There’s others that said, “There’s only this much electricity and water in the lunar module. We need to turn around and come home as fast as possible.
  • Somewhere in there—I don’t remember all the details—we found out that a family that had gone to a picnic with Charlie and his family over the weekend, one of their kids had the measles, and Charlie was considered exposed
  • One of the many lessons out of all this is starting on day one it was from the very first moment, assume you’re going to succeed and don’t do anything that gets in the way.
  • you had to write down all the numbers in the command module, put them on a list, and then do some math, and then punch the numbers into the lunar module computer
  • you could get a very good alignment so that now you could go in with the lunar module and make a little tweak to tighten up the alignment
  • to get back before the batteries run out
  • while
  • debating what to do with this inertial unit in the command module we had to bring up from scratch, these units are very, very delicate
  • they were allowed to run at a temperature of like 70 plus or minus one. They were tested to see that they would work at plus or minus 10.
  • had one that we don’t know what its temperature is, but we know it’s below freezing
  • didn’t do any testing at those kind of temperatures
  • semi-apocryphal story is that one of the employees at the company
  • had a snowstorm
  • last winter
  • had an IMU in the back of the station wagon
  • took it inside
  • hooked it up and ran it, and they didn’t have any trouble
  • they had had a problem down on the spacecraft, some kind of a problem with detanking the oxygen from the service module
  • took all night and a good bit of the next day
  • to review
  • they’d seen a problem like this before, and even though the regular drain system wasn’t working, they could boil the oxygen out
  • the oxygen tank that we discussed prior to launch was, in fact, the culprit in the explosion. It was damaged in the process that we used in ways that we didn’t anticipate
Mars Base

Pioneering Moon, Mars Scientist David McKay Dies at 76 | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/-mckay-obituary-moon-mars.html

scibyte83

shared by Mars Base on 26 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • McKay, who served as chief scientist for astrobiology at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston,died peacefully in his sleep on Feb. 20
  • As a graduate student, McKay was in the audience
  • when President John F. Kennedy gave his legendary "We choose to go to the moon" speech
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • McKay joined NASA in June of 1965
  • participating extensively in astronaut training leading up to 1969's historic Apollo 11 mission
  • McKay was lead author of a 1996 paper in the journal Science that suggested ALH84001 may contain evidence of past life on Mars.
  • The claim still spurs controversy, but it also sparked a shift in perspectives that is alive and well within NASA today
  • McKay developed innovative new technology for both life detection and the use of lunar regolith as feedstock, radiation protection, fuel, nutrient source for microbial bioreactors and long-term lunar habitation.
Mars Base

Astronomers Calculate Orbit and Origins of Russian Fireball - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...nd-origins-of-russian-fireball

scibyte83 RussianMeteor

shared by Mars Base on 26 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Just a week after a huge fireball streaked across the skies of the Chelyabinsk region of Russia, astronomers published a paper that reconstructs the orbit and determines the origins of the space rock
  • University of Antioquia in
  • Colombia used a resource not always available in meteorite falls: the numerous dashboard and security cameras that captured the huge fireball
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Using the trajectories shown in videos posted on YouTube, the researchers were able to calculate the trajectory of the meteorite as it fell to Earth and use it to reconstruct the orbit in space of the meteoroid before its violent encounter with our planet.
  • The results are preliminary
  • and they are already working on getting more precise results
  • But through their calculations, Zuluaga and Ferrin determined the rock originated from the Apollo class of asteroids
  • due to variations in time and date stamps on several of the videos
  • some which differed by several minutes
  • they decided to choose two videos from different locations that seemed to be the most reliable
  • used this data and Google Earth to reconstruct the path of the rock as it entered the atmosphere and showed that it matched an image of the trajectory taken by the geostationary Meteosat-9 weather satellite.
  • From triangulation, they were able to determine height, speed and position of the meteorite as it fell to Earth
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