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Mars Base

SpaceX Dragon Recovers from Frightening Propulsion System Failure - Sunday Docking Set - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...tem-failure-sunday-docking-set

scibyte84 dragon

shared by Mars Base on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • By late Saturday afternoon sufficient recovery work had been accomplished to warrant NASA, ISS and SpaceX managers to give the go-ahead for the Dragon to rendezvous with the station early Sunday morning, March 3.
  • despite the one-day docking delay, the Dragon unberthing and parachute assisted return to Earth will still be the same day as originally planned on March 25.
  • There are numerous docking opportunities available in the coming days if SpaceX and NASA determined that more time was needed to gain confidence that Dragon could safely carry out an attempt.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • the Dragon could stay on orbit for several additional months if needed
Mars Base

NASA - Curiosity Rover Hits Paydirt - 0 views

www.nasa.gov/...curiosity20130315.html

scibyte86 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 17 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • This week the Curiosity science team released its initial findings from its first ever drilled sample on Mars
  • Curiosity obtained her first drill sample and passed that sample on to her onboard analytical lab instruments, called CheMin and SAM
  • These powerful instruments tell us about what minerals are present in these rocks and whether they contain the ingredients necessary to sustain life as we know it.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • When we combine what we have learned from our remote sensing and contact science instruments with the data that's coming in from CheMin and SAM, we get a picture of an ancient watery environment, which would have been habitable had life been present in it.
  • the information that we're getting from the CheMin instrument, tells us that the minerals that are present in this lakebed sedimentary rock at John Klein are very different from just about anything we've ever analyzed before on Mars
  • they tell us that the John Klein rock was deposited in a fresh water environment
  • This is an important contrast with other sedimentary environments that we've visited on Mars, like the Meridiani Planum landing site where the Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity, has been operating since 2004.
  • At that site, the sedimentary rocks record evidence of an environment that was only wet on a very intermittent basis, and when it was, the waters that were there were highly acidic, very salty, and not favorable for the survival of organic compounds.
  • direct contrast to the fresh water environment we're seeing here at the John Klein Site
  • The SAM instrument is telling us that these rocks contained all of the ingredients necessary for a habitable environment
  • We found carbon, sulfur and oxygen, all present and a number of other elements in states that life could have taken advantage of.
  • these few tablespoons of powder from a Martian rock have provided the Curiosity science team with an exciting new dataset
Mars Base

Mars Science Laboratory: NASA Mars Rover Curiosity Drills Second Rock Target - 0 views

mars.jpl.nasa.gov/...index.cfm

scibyte94 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 21 May 13 - No Cached
  • The first was Curiosity's drilling at a target called "John Klein" three months ago
  • Cumberland resembles John Klein and lies about nine feet (2.75 meters) farther west
  • The hole that Curiosity drilled into Cumberland on May 19 is about 0.6 inch (1.6 centimeters) in diameter and about 2.6 inches (6.6 centimeters) deep
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The science team expects to use analysis of material from Cumberland to check
  • Preliminary findings from analysis of
  • rock powder by Curiosity's onboard laboratory instruments indicate that the location long ago had environmental conditions favorable for microbial life
Mars Base

mars-rover-breaks-us-record-off-planet-driving_2.jpg (JPEG Image, 600 × 1012 ... - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...ecord-off-planet-driving_2.jpg

scibyte94 opportunity

shared by Mars Base on 18 May 13 - No Cached
  • Mars Base on 18 May 13
     
    Comparisons among the distances driven by various wheeled vehicles on the surface of Earth's moon and Mars | Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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

NASA - Astronauts Complete Spacewalk to Repair Ammonia Leak, Station Changes Command - 0 views

www.nasa.gov/...e35_051113_eva.html

scibyte94 iss ViewerFeedback

shared by Mars Base on 19 May 13 - No Cached
  • Expedition 35 Flight Engineers
  • completed a spacewalk
  • to inspect and replace a pump controller box on the International Space Station’s far port truss (P6) leaking ammonia coolant
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • A little more than 2 1/2 hours into the spacewalk
  • removed the 260-pound pump controller box from the P6 truss and replaced it with a spare that had been stowed nearby
  • Spacewalkers practice underwater in the facility and divers provide assistance and dive safety protection during spacewalk simulations
  • The spacewalk is the 168th in support of the assembly and maintenance of the space
  • The device contains the mechanical systems that drive the cooling functions for the port truss.
Mars Base

More Insight on How NASA Might Revive the Kepler Space Telescope - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...ive-the-kepler-space-telescope

scibyte94 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 19 May 13 - No Cached
  • there’s still a year and a half’s worth of data in the pipeline that scientists will analyze to identify other candidate planets, and there will continue to be Kepler science discoveries for quite some time
  • There are two possible ways to salvage the spacecraft
  • they could try turning back on the reaction wheel that they shut off a year ago. It was putting metal on metal, and the friction was interfering with its operation
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • could see if the lubricant that is in there, having sat quietly, has redistributed itself, and maybe it will work
  • The other scheme,
  • this has never been tried, involves using thrusters and the solar pressure exerted on the solar panels to try and act as a third reaction wheel and provide additional pointing stability
  • Kepler carries a photometer, not a camera, that looks at the brightness of stars, and so its optics deliberately defocus light from stars to create a nice spread of light on the detector, which is not ideal for spotting asteroids
Mars Base

Moon Probes' Crash Site Named After Sally Ride | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/ail-moon-crash-sally-ride.html

scibyte75 Grail

shared by Mars Base on 18 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • The spot on the lunar surface where NASA intentionally crashed its twin gravity-mapping moon probes
  • Dec. 17) has been named after the late Sally Ride, America's first woman in space
  • Ebb and Flow, slammed into a crater rim near the moon's north pole at 5:28 p.m. EST (2228 GMT)
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • f Sally Ride, who played a key role in Grail's education and outreach efforts
  • Ride had led Grail's MoonKAM project, which allowed schoolkids around the world to select lunar sites for Ebb and Flow to photograph
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.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 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

Mars Science Laboratory: Curiosity Rover Nearing Yellowknife Bay - 0 views

marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/...index.cfm

scibyte75 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 16 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • The NASA Mars rover Curiosity drove 63 feet (19 meters) northeastward early Monday, Dec. 10, approaching a step down into a slightly lower area called "Yellowknife Bay," where researchers intend to choose a rock to drill.
  • Curiosity ended Monday's drive about 30 percent shorter than planned for the day when it detected a slight difference between two calculations of its tilt, not an immediate risk, but a trigger for software to halt the drive as a precaution
  • Curiosity is approaching a lip where it will descend about 20 inches (half a meter) to Yellowknife Bay. The rover team is checking carefully for a safe way down. Yellowknife Bay is the temporary destination for first use of Curiosity's rock-powdering drill, before the mission turns southwestward for driving to its main destination on the slope of Mount Sharp.
Mars Base

NASA Buys Private Inflatable Room for Space Station | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/inflatable-module-bigelow.html

scibyte77 BigelowAerospace

shared by Mars Base on 12 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • NASA officials have said that BEAM could be on orbit about two years after getting an official go-ahead
  • The module will likely be launched by one of the agency's commerical cargo suppliers, California-based SpaceX or Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp
  • The company wants to launch and link up several of its larger expandable modules to create private space stations, which could be used by a variety of clients.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Bigelow is also eyeing a possible outpost on the moon, for which the company envisions using its BA-330 modules (so named because they offer 330 cubic meters of usable internal volume).
  • Several BA-330 habitats, along with propulsion tanks and power units, would be joined together in space and then flown down to the lunar surface.
  • Lunar dirt would be piled over the modules to protect against radiation, thermal extremes and micrometeorite strikes.
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
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • 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

Most Earthlike planets yet seen bring Kepler closer to its holy grail | Atom & Cosmos |... - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...epler_closer_to_its_holy_grail

scibyte91 scibyte92 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 19 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • five-planet system around a star called Kepler-62, some 1,200 light-years away in the constellation Lyra
  • Astronomers found the planets by analyzing nearly three years’ worth of data
  • Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f are far more accommodating. They are 1.6 and 1.4 times the diameter of Earth
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • early evidence supports the optimistic view that at least 62f is rocky
  • biggest uncertainty about both planets is their composition
  • an astronomer at the University of Washington
  • not involved in the research
  • Kepler-62e
  • may be too close to its star – and therefore too hot – to sustain life
  • if 62e is a rocky planet, it’s almost certainly tidally locked with its star, with one half of its surface always illuminated and the other perpetually dark
  • Kepler 62 is about two-thirds the size of the sun and several hundred degrees Celsius cooler
  • Finding planets in the habitable zones of larger stars
  • harder because those planets have relatively long orbits and barely cast a shadow as they pass across the faces of their suns
  • another study
  • led by
  • NASA Ames Research Center
  • identified two planets around a sunlike star called Kepler-69, some 2,700 light-years away
  • One of the planets is 1.7 times the size of Earth and teeters on the inner edge of the habitable zone
  • probably too hot for life
  • almost certainly a super-Venus rather than a super-Earth
  • even a planet 75 percent larger than Earth is potentially habitable
  • Next-generation missions like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which NASA approved earlier this month for launch in 2017, will take on the task of finding nearer planets that astronomers can study in depth
Mars Base

Soviet Lander Spotted by Mars Orbiter - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...emains-spotted-by-mars-orbiter

scibyte90 MarsSovietLander MRO

shared by Mars Base on 12 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • On May 28, 1971, the Soviet Union launched the Mars 3 mission which
  • consisted of an orbiter and lander destined for the Red Planet. Just over six months later on December 2, 1971, Mars 3 arrived at Mars
  • The Mars 3 descent module separated from the orbiter and several hours later entered the Martian atmosphere, descending to the surface via a series of parachutes and retrorockets
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Once safely on the surface, the Mars 3 lander opened its four petal-shaped covers to release the 4.5-kg PROP-M rover contained inside… and after 20 seconds of transmission, fell silent
  • Due to unknown causes, the Mars 3 lander was never heard from or seen again
  • The set of images
  • shows what might be hardware from the 1971 Soviet Mars 3 lander, seen in a pair of images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
  • Russian citizen enthusiasts found four features in a five-year-old image from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that resemble four pieces of hardware from the Mars 3 mission: the parachute, heat shield, terminal retrorocket and lander. A follow-up image by the orbiter from last month shows the same features
  • the largest Russian Internet community about Curiosity.
  • subscribers did the preliminary search for Mars 3 via crowdsourcing
  • modeled what Mars 3 hardware pieces should look like in a HiRISE image, and the group carefully searched the many small features in this large image, finding what appear to be viable candidates
  • Each candidate has a size and shape consistent with the expected hardware, and they are arranged on the surface as expected from the entry, descent and landing sequence
  • The predicted Mars 3 landing site was at latitude 45 degrees south, longitude 202 degrees east, in Ptolemaeus Crater
  • HiRISE acquired a large image at this location in November 2007, and promising candidates for the hardware from Mars 3 were found on Dec. 31, 2012
  • The candidate parachute is the most distinctive feature
  • an especially bright spot for this region, about 8.2 yards (7.5 meters) in diameter
  • The parachute would have a diameter of 12 yards (11 meters) if fully spread out over the surface
  • this set of features and their layout on the ground provide a remarkable match to what is expected from the Mars 3 landing, but alternative explanations for the features cannot be ruled out
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