Skip to main content

Home/ Groups/ SciByte
Rss Feed
Sort By: Most Recent | Popular Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Mars Base

Curiosity says 'Goodbye Kimberley' after Parting Laser Blasts and Seeking New Adventure... - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...d-seeking-new-adventures-ahead

scibyte132 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 22 May 14 - No Cached
  • NASA’s rover Curiosity said ‘Goodbye Kimberley’ having fulfilled her objectives of drilling into a cold red sandstone slab
  • sampling the
  • grey colored interior and pelting the fresh bore hole with a pinpoint series of parting laser blasts
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Since then, the 1 ton robot carefully scrutinized the resulting 2.6 inches (6.5 centimeters) deep bore hole
  • the mound of dark grey colored drill tailings piled around for an up close examination of the texture and composition with the MAHLI camera and spectrometers
  • successfully delivered pulverized and sieved samples to the pair of onboard miniaturized chemistry labs
  • Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument (CheMin)
  • Sample Analysis at Mars instrument (SAM)
  • for chemical and compositional analysis.
  • rover’s
  • decided that one drill campaign into Kimberley was enough.
  • So the rover will not be drilling into any other rock targets here
  • it may be a very long time before the next drilling
  • the guiding team of scientists and engineers wants
  • arrive at the foothills of Mount Sharp as soon as possible.
  • further analysis of the ‘Windjana’ sample along the way
  • there’s plenty of leftover sample material stored in the CHIMRA sample processing mechanism to allow future delivery of samples when the rover periodically pauses during driving.
  • Windjama lies some 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) southwest of Yellowknife Bay
  • still has about another 4 kilometers to go to reach the foothills of Mount Sharp sometime later this year
Mars Base

ISEE-3 Reboot Project Status and Schedule for First Contact - Space College - 0 views

spacecollege.org/...chedule-for-first-contact.html

scibyte132 ISEE-3 SpacecraftUpdate

shared by Mars Base on 18 May 14 - No Cached
  • Technical Progress The Learning Curve
  • reliminary evaluation of the spacecraft and its systems so as to better understand it.
  • Most of the best information that we have been able to find has been from the people who worked on the project in the 1980's when the spacecraft was fully operational
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • have also obtained several documents from NASA as part of the development of our Space Act Agreement
  • Since there is no computer on board the ISEE-3 spacecraft our task is actually much easier since we are going to be directly commanding various subsystems
  • This is an ongoing process and we have, as usual, dug some of the pertinent information out of 35 year old IEEE or AIAA papers that are publicly available
  • The ISEE-3/ICE spacecraft was never really designed to be an interplanetary cruiser and thus the thrusters on board are very small
  • estimate that if we wait until mid-June to do the course correction that it will take 17 hours of thrusting to get the course change of about 40 meters/second that we will need at that time
Mars Base

Guest Post: No turning back, NASA ISEE-3 Spacecraft Returning to Earth after a 36 Year ... - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...-earth-after-a-36-year-journey

scibyte132 ISEE-3

shared by Mars Base on 25 May 14 - No Cached
  • 30 years later and documents and magnetic tapes have predictably disappeared.
  • The software and hardware to program, command and transmit to ISEE-3 are long gone
  • An independent team of engineers
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • recovering old imagery on magnetic tape reels from the first lunar orbiter missions),
  • operating outside the ranks and hallways of NASA
  • to accomplish a landmark achievement: to turn on, command and maneuver a NASA spacecraft long ago abandoned
  • Amateur radio operators now have technology sufficient to acquire the signal and through the internet are also a part of the recovery effort
  • without the original hardware transmitter, today’s high-speed electronics are able to emulate in software the hardware from 36 years ago
Mars Base

International Cometary Explorer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...nternational_Cometary_Explorer

scibyte132 ISEE-3

shared by Mars Base on 25 May 14 - No Cached
  • Original mission: International Sun/Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3)
  • to investigate solar-terrestrial relationships at the outermost boundaries of the Earth's magnetosphere
  • to examine in detail the structure of the solar wind near the Earth and the shock wave that forms the interface between the solar wind and Earth's magnetosphere
  • ...38 more annotations...
  • investigate motions of and mechanisms operating in the plasma sheets
  • continue the investigation of cosmic rays and solar flare emissions in the interplanetary region near 1 AU
  • Second mission: International Cometary Explorer
  • On June 10, 1982, after completing its original mission, ISEE-3 was repurposed. It was renamed the International Cometary Explorer (ICE)
  • The primary scientific objective of ICE was to study the interaction between the solar wind and a cometary atmosphere
  • a series of lunar orbits over the next 15 months. Its last and closest pass over the Moon, on December 22, 1983, was a mere 119.4 km above the Moon's surface. By the beginning of 1984, ICE was in heliocentric orbit
  • Giacobini-Zinner encounter
  • on a trajectory intercepting that of Comet Giacobini-Zinner.
  • On 11 September 1985, the craft passed through the plasma tail of Comet Giacobini-Zinner
  • ICE carried no cameras. It instead carried instruments for measurements of energetic particles, waves, plasmas, and fields
  • Halley encounter
  • transited between the Sun and Comet Halley in late March 1986, when other spacecraft
  • were in the vicinity of Comet Halley
  • ICE flew through the tail
  • Heliospheric mission
  • mission was approved by NASA in 1991
  • consisting of investigations of coronal mass ejections in coordination with ground-based observations
  • End of mission
  • On May 5, 1997, NASA ended the ICE mission, and ordered the probe shut down, with only a carrier signal left operating
  • Further contact
  • In 1999, NASA made brief contact with ICE to verify its carrier signal. On September 18, 2008
  • NASA, with the help of KinetX, located ICE using the Deep Space Network after discovering that it had not been powered off after the 1999 contact
  • status check revealed that all but one of its 13 experiments were still functioning, and it still has enough propellant
  • Reboot effort
  • A team webpage said, "We intend to contact the ISEE-3 (International Sun-Earth Explorer) spacecraft, command it to fire its engine and enter an orbit near Earth, and then resume its original mission...If we are successful we intend to facilitate the sharing and interpretation of all of the new data ISEE-3 sends back via crowd sourcing."
  • Sometime after NASA's interest in the ICE waned
  • A team of engineers, programmers, and scientists
  • realized that the spacecraft might be steered to pass close to another comet
  • began to study the feasibility and challenges involved
  • On May 15, 2014, the project reached its crowdfunding goal
  • which will cover the costs of writing the software to communicate with the probe, searching through the NASA archives for the information needed to control the spacecraft, and buying time on the dish antennas
  • The project then set a 'stretch' goal of $150,000
  • The project members are working on deadline: if they get the spacecraft to change its orbit by late May or early June 2014, it can use the Moon's gravity to get back into a useful halo orbit.
  • Earlier in 2014, officials with the Goddard Space Flight Center had said that the Deep Space Network equipment necessary to transmit signals to the spacecraft had been decommissioned in 1999, and that replacing it was not economically feasible
  • oject members obtained the needed hardware (power amplifier, modulator/demodulator[12]), and installed it on the 305-meter Arecibo dish antenna on May 19, 2014
  • Although NASA is not funding the project, it made advisors available and gave approval to try to establish contact
  • On May 21, 2014, NASA announced that it had signed a Non-Reimbursable Space Act Agreement with the ISEE-3 Reboot Project
  • "This is the first time NASA has worked such an agreement for use of a spacecraft the agency is no longer using or ever planned to use again," officials said
Mars Base

ISEE-3 Reboot Project | Astronomy News - 0 views

nineplanets.org/...isee-3-reboot-project

scibyte132 ISEE-3 SpacecraftUpdate

shared by Mars Base on 18 May 14 - No Cached
  • The IEEE-3 spacecraft was launched on 12 August 1978
  • Originally the mission was cooperative effort between NASA and ESRO/ESA to study the interaction between the Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind.
  • On 10 June 1982 IEEE-3 became the International Cometary Explorer with the primary scientific objective of ICE was to study the interaction between the solar wind and a cometary atmosphere
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The mission required the spacecraft to leave the Earth/moon system and orbit around the sun instead
  • After encounters with comet Giacobini-Zinner in 1985 and the famous Halley’s comet in 1986 and the study of CME’s from the sun in 1991, the “plug” was pulled in the spacecraft on 5 May 1997
Mars Base

Images - Mars Science Laboratory - 0 views

mars.jpl.nasa.gov/...images

scibyte131 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 18 May 14 - No Cached
  • NASA's Curiosity Mars rover used the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) instrument on its robotic arm to illuminate and record this nighttime view of the sandstone rock target "Windjana."
  • The rover had previously drilled a hole to collect sample material from the interior of the rock and then zapped a series of target points inside the hole with the laser of the rover's Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument
  • The hole is 0.63 inch (1.6 centimeters) in diameter.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • That instrument provides information about the target's composition by analysis of the sparks of plasma generated by the energy of the laser beam striking the target
  • This view combines eight separate MAHLI exposures, taken at different focus settings to show the entire scene in focus
  • The exposures were taken after dark on the 628th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars (May 13, 2014)
  • MAHLI includes light-emitting diodes as well as a color camera.
  • Using the instrument's own lighting yields an image of the hole's interior with less shadowing than would be seen in a sunlit image
  • The camera's inspection of the interior of the hole provides documentation about what the drill bit passed through as it penetrated the rock -- for example, to see if it cut through any mineral veins or visible layering
Mars Base

Global "Selfie" to Be Beamed to Outer Space - 0 views

news.nationalgeographic.com/...fie-message-new-horizons-space

scibyte131 NewHorizons NewHorizonsMessage

shared by Mars Base on 18 May 14 - No Cached
  • This summer, you will get that chance to send a message to other worlds.
  • leaders of an initiative called New Horizons Message Initiative, announced
  • at the Smithsonian Future Is Here Festival in Washington, D.C., that NASA has agreed to upload a digital crowd-sourced message to the New Horizons spacecraft
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • The content of the message will be determined by whomever wants to participate in the planet-wide project
  • The message itself will be transmitted sometime after New Horizons does a flyby of Pluto in 2015 and sends back the scientific data that it collects
  • If all goes according to plan, New Horizons will become the fifth man-made object to travel beyond the solar system—after Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2.
  • it's the only one of the five not to launch with a message for any alien travelers it might encounter along the way
  • The Pioneer spacecrafts bore plaques on their sides, and the Voyagers each carried golden records (and the means to play them).
  • When New Horizons' journey was being planned
  • other missions had been scrapped and the budget was extremely tight
  • didn't have the bandwidth for
  • the message
  • . "Now
  • It doesn't cost massive amounts because there's no hardware, just uplinking ones and zeroes
  • Lomberg, who worked closely with Carl Sagan on the Voyager golden record in 1977, had an epiphany last year about sending the message digitally
  • In September 2013, Lomberg launched a website with a petition to NASA. By February 2014, 10,000 people from over 140 countries had signed it.
  • Lomberg approached Stern, who advised him that NASA would need evidence of public support
  • This message will be very different from the one Lomberg designed with Sagan almost 40 years ago
  • The 21st-century version will be a global self-portrait, pieced together by many willing hands
  • Anyone on Earth will be able to upload potential content (images, sounds, software—the formats haven't been finalized)
  • Then everyone will be able to vote on what to include
  • "Our team is going to provide the overall architecture of the message," says Lomberg, "but we'll try to keep ourselves open to what we will send."
  • , a National Geographic emerging explorer
  • will have to figure out how to wrangle a planet's worth of opinions into the roughly 100 MB of memory New Horizons will have available on its computer.
  • the project will officially launch August 25, the final file may not be sent for several years
  • The New Horizons computer won't have any room in its memory until the data from Pluto are transmitted back to Earth, which could take more than a year
  • "The spacecraft is so far away," says Lomberg, "that download times are like dial-up Internet."
  • Pluto may not be the final mission target
  • hopes that the spacecraft will have a shot at a flyby of another object in the Kuiper Belt of the solar system
  • If that happens, the message upload will be delayed
  • As long as the spacecraft is healthy and the radio is working," he says, "there's no particular rush to send it
  • cosmic radiation may eventually corrupt the spacecraft's electronic memory
  • The New Horizons message won't last nearly as long as the metal missives attached to Pioneer and Voyager will
Mars Base

NASA May Put Tiny Greenhouse on Mars in 2021 | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/se-rover-plant-experiment.html

scibyte131 ViewerFeedback MarsPlantExperiment

shared by Mars Base on 11 May 14 - No Cached
  • Researchers have proposed putting a plant-growth experiment on NASA's next Mars rover
  • scheduled to launch in mid-2020 and land on the Red Planet in early 2021.
  • known as the Mars Plant Experiment (MPX),
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • could help lay the foundation for the colonization of Mars,
  • its designers say
  • The MPX team
  • isn't suggesting that the 2020 Mars rover should
  • digging a hole with its robotic arm and planting seeds in the Red Planet's dirt.
  • the experiment would be entirely self-contained, eliminating the chance that Earth life could escape and perhaps get a foothold on Mars.
  • MPX would employ a clear "CubeSat" box
  • which would be affixed to the exterior of the 2020 rover
  • This box would hold Earth air and about 200 seeds of Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant that's commonly used in scientific research
  • The seeds would receive water when the rover touched down on Mars, and would then be allowed to grow for two weeks or so.
  • MPX would provide an organism-level test
  • how Earth life deals with the Red Planet's relatively high radiation levels and low gravity, which is about 40 percent as strong as that of Earth,
  • "It also would be the first multicellular organism to grow, live and die on another planet
« First ‹ Previous 101 - 120 of 2613 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page