Tag: nasa
How to watch a NASA spacecraft smash into an asteroid live
Can we deflect an asteroid by crashing into it? NASA is going to try
Next week, a spacecraft will deliberately crash into an asteroid to see if its orbit can be changed. Dr Stefania Soldini explains the reason for this test and how it will work.
Read more: Can we deflect an asteroid by crashing into it? NASA is going to try
NASA reveals clearest image of Neptune and its rings in more than 30 years
NASA loads Artemis I rocket with fuel in major troubleshooting test
Today, NASA got its next-generation Moon rocket all tanked up with nowhere to go. Liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen fuel were loaded into the Space Launch System (SLS) today in an hours-long test of its troublesome fueling system.
It was what NASA called a “kinder, gentler” fueling procedure that was being tested after a hydrogen leak stymied the second launch attempt of the rocket and the Artemis I mission on September 3rd. The new procedures were “designed to transition temperature and pressures slowly during tanking to reduce the likelihood of leaks that could be caused by rapid changes in temperature or pressure,” NASA said in a blog post.
“I am extremely encouraged by the test today,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, launch…
NASA Declares Tanking Test of SLS Megarocket a Success
A demonstration to confirm a repaired hydrogen leak appears to have gone well, with NASA declaring Wednesday’s cryogenic tanking test a success. Engineers still need to review the results, but the space agency could be on track to perform its third launch attempt of its SLS megarocket in just six days—a mission that…
NASA Wants Ideas for a New Lunar Lander
NASA, through its upcoming Artemis program, is planning to make frequent trips to the lunar surface, requiring multiple Moon lander options. The space agency is now reaching out to U.S. companies for potential solutions.
What an ‘excited’ NASA found (and didn’t) on Mars
This week, NASA announced it was “excited” about finding something called organics on Mars.
Life, as we know it, is comprised of organic things, like carbon. Your body is teeming with carbon. So how excited should you be about the organics found on Mars?
We’ll let you decide. In short, the space agency’s hi-tech Perseverance rover — which is a car-sized laboratory on six wheels — collected valuable rock samples that contain organics. These rocks formed in a once-watery Martian place where life could have indeed thrived. It is an inarguably intriguing, compelling, and cool finding.
But it’s certainly not evidence of life. Not even close.
What NASA found on Mars
NASA is using the Perseverance rover to, among a variety of tasks, collect rock samples for a later mission to rocket back to Earth in the early 2030s. (The rocks will be stored in “ultra-clean sample tubes” to avoid contamination with earthly life.)
The space agency landed the robot in the Jezero Crater because it’s a place where microbial life — if it ever existed — could have evolved and flourished. This region of Mars contains a dried up river delta, a place where water once flowed from a Martian river into a lake. NASA’s planetary scientists think rocks collected there will give them a good shot at identifying indicators of past life (if, of course, it existed).
“The burden of proof for establishing life on another planet is very, very high.”
But don’t expect NASA to announce that the rover identified convincing evidence of life anytime soon. Those samples almost certainly must be carefully scrutinized on Earth to sleuth out such momentous, unprecedented evidence.
“The burden of proof for establishing life on another planet is very, very high,” Perseverance project manager Ken Farley recently said at a press conference.
This summer, NASA devoted special attention to a three-foot-wide rock they’ve named “Wildcat Ridge.” It likely formed in a saltwater lake, so the space agency zapped the rock with a specialized laser to reveal the chemicals on this ancient boulder. They indeed found “organic materials.”
But organic materials don’t mean life. Their main ingredient is carbon, along with elements like oxygen and hydrogen (sound familiar?), among others. They give planetary scientists a hint that a rock or area on Mars is a place that merits investigation.
“The presence of these specific molecules is considered to be a potential biosignature – a substance or structure that could be evidence of past life but may also have been produced without the presence of life,” explains NASA.
The space agency has found organics before. What makes the organic findings in the Jezero crater so “exciting,” however, is life might have survived in such a habitable river delta.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU / MSSS
“The fact the organic matter was found in such a sedimentary rock – known for preserving fossils of ancient life here on Earth – is important,” NASA’s Farley said in a statement. “However, as capable as our instruments aboard Perseverance are, further conclusions regarding what is contained in the Wildcat Ridge sample will have to wait until it’s returned to Earth for in-depth study as part of the agency’s Mars Sample Return campaign.”
It’s perfectly reasonable to be curious, or even thrilled, about what NASA’s rover observed on Mars. Yet any announcement of life is a whole different ballgame. If such an announcement happens, potentially in the 2030s, it would be one of the most significant discoveries ever. Our view of the cosmos would be forever altered.
For now, there’s still only one place we know life exists. Treat it well.
Why NASA blew up a space habitat in Texas
When a future house for astronauts explodes, a celebration might seem inappropriate, but engineers at a commercial space company couldn’t be prouder of their shredded outer space house.
Sierra Space, working on one of three NASA contracts to develop commercial space stations, just completed something called the “Ultimate Burst Pressure” test on a mockup of its low-Earth orbit space dwelling. The LIFE habitat, short for Large Inflatable Flexible Environment, could one day serve as rooms on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space station, Orbital Reef. If all goes well, the companies hope to start building the station in 2026.
But first NASA has to run the structure through a gauntlet to ensure it’s safe for humans.
The inflatable house was pumped to its breaking point on July 9 to find out the maximum internal pressure it could withstand before failing. The test was recorded on video from various angles at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The company released footage of the demonstration this week.
Turn up the video below for the aural experience.
“Some news outlets thought ‘blow up’ meant inflate,” Alex Walker, a spokesman for Sierra Space, told Mashable. “No, ‘blow up’ means explode.”
The team was thrilled to learn the house didn’t pop until it reached 192 pounds per square-inch (psi), exceeding the safety requirement of 182.4 psi.
For context, the International Space Station, like airplanes, is pressurized so that the people onboard can breathe. The space laboratory has an internal pressurized volume equal to that of a Boeing 747. The normal cabin pressure is 14.7 pounds per square-inch, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
Credit: Sierra Space
NASA awarded a $130 million contract to Blue Origin for the commercial space station as the U.S. space agency tries to transition to a model in which businesses own and operate destinations in low-Earth orbit and NASA becomes one of many customers who live and work in them. NASA hopes this shift will drop the cost of doing orbital science so it can focus on its human exploration missions to the moon and perhaps Mars.
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The LIFE habitat is made out of a woven fabric called Vectran, which engineers say is five times stronger than steel and has protective layers against space radiation. Other required tests ensure it won’t get punctured by meteors and other debris flying about in space.
A “soft” material might not seem strong enough for the harsh reality of space or other worlds — in fact, it might seem a bit like a little pig building his house out of straw — but experts say it’s both strong and ideal for packing compact loads on rockets. Vectran is relatively light, which translates into less rocket fuel costs, and it can be easily folded like a parachute within a rocket’s nose cone.
Before:
Sierra Space is testing a material for building space habitats.
Credit: Sierra Space
After:
The LIFE habitat popped at a pressure of 192 pounds per square inch [psi].
Credit: Sierra Space
“This material, when it’s inflated on orbit, you can hit it with a sledgehammer,” Walker said.
“You can hit it with a sledgehammer.”
Many human space exploration experts say inflatable buildings are the way of the future. Such bubble houses could be used not just for orbiting space stations but structures on the face of the moon and Mars. Just one of Sierra Space’s LIFE habitats is about one-third the size of the Space Station, Walker said.
The next step for the habitat is for engineers to test a full-scale model. One already exists at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, but the team will build a duplicate to explode at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, next year.
“It’s one step closer for humans living and working in low-Earth orbit,” Walker said.
What we’ll see when NASA crashes into an asteroid on purpose
Since November 2021, a NASA spacecraft the size of a vending machine has zipped through space on a never-before-attempted journey of self destruction to ram into a harmless asteroid.
Why, you ask? Target practice.
Now the DART spacecraft, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, is just a week away from landing its blow, crashing head on into Dimorphos, a 525-foot space rock about the size of the High Roller ferris wheel in Las Vegas, zooming at 14,000 mph. For the U.S. space agency, intentionally destroying this $330 million metal box is part of its first planetary defense mission — training for the day humans may need to stop an asteroid barreling toward Earth.
“My heart rate has increased a little bit,” said Michelle Chen, lead engineer of DART’s autopilot system, known as SMART Nav.
Credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins APL / Ed Whitman
What exactly will engineers see from the mission operations center at a distance of 6.8 million miles from the crash? Perhaps more than you’d think, and NASA plans to share its front-row seat with the rest of the world.
Pictures from a camera, the only instrument on the spacecraft, will come back live before the collision. NASA plans to broadcast the mission starting at 6 p.m. ET on Sept. 26 and share the images publicly as DART beams them down, right up to the 7:14 p.m. impact.
But don’t expect the hit to look like a planet obliterating in the sky, Armageddon-style, with glowing space ripples and chunks of rock blowing off, intermixed with close-ups of Bruce Willis’ pained face. The spacecraft, at some 1,300 pounds, is going to give Dimorphos more of a nudge than annihilation — a type of strategy intended to shove an asteroid off a collision course without creating a massive spray of debris that could be dangerous in its own right.
“Sometimes we describe it as running a golf cart into the Great Pyramid,” said Nancy Chabot, who oversees the project at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. “This really is about asteroid deflection, not disruption.”
“Sometimes we describe it as running a golf cart into the Great Pyramid.”
Like a moon, Dimorphos orbits another larger asteroid, Didymos. The pair makes an oval-shaped orbit around the sun, stretching from beyond Mars to just outside Earth’s orbit. It takes about two years for them to make a complete loop.
Though Dimorphos won’t explode, the smack of the spacecraft will leave a crater and blast up to 220,000 pounds of pulverized rock into space.
The sharp spacecraft images should be “spectacular,” Chabot said, with a new one snapped every second.
At first, people will see the asteroid as a mere point of light. That speck will eventually grow in the frame, until the DART spacecraft goes kaput.
“It will start filling the field of view … at about two minutes out and closer,” Chen said.
Credit: Johns Hopkins APL / Ed Whitman
More pictures will come afterward from a toaster-size spacecraft supplied by the Italian Space Agency. The LICIACube will fly by the disaster site three minutes later and capture shots of the collision and debris with its two cameras. Those first pictures from the aftermath won’t be available for a few days, with more to follow over weeks and months.
Scientists also will try to observe the crash with space telescopes Webb and Hubble, along with the Lucy probe, a spacecraft on a 12-year asteroid tour in the outer solar system.
But none of these instruments will tell NASA how much DART moved the asteroid. For that, the team will need ground-based telescopes to take measurements. Dimorphos goes around its bigger companion Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes. With observatories on Earth, scientists hope to confirm the collision bumped it closer, making its orbit somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 minutes shorter.
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Threatening asteroids
Millions of asteroids orbit the sun. They’re the rocky rubble left over from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. The majority are in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but occasionally rocks get nudged into the inner solar system.
Such stray asteroids rarely come close to home, but at least three have caused mass extinctions throughout history, the most notorious of which wiped out the dinosaurs.
Today astronomers watch for space rocks in the 30 million-mile vicinity. There are currently no known asteroids on an impact course with Earth. Scientists are, however, keeping an eye on 30,000 large objects out there — including 10,000 about 460 feet wide or larger — a size big enough to devastate a city or region if it were to become earthbound. They estimate there could be 15,000 more waiting to be discovered.
Credit: Oleg Kargopolov / AFP via Getty Images
But even smaller rocks can cause a lot of harm. An undetected meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February 2013, causing an airburst and shockwave that affected six cities. About 1,600 people were injured in the blast. The rock was just about 60 feet across, according to NASA.
While there’s no immediate threat to the planet known, NASA believes tests such as DART are necessary studies to protect life on Earth in the future.
“This is what you would want to do for planetary defense,” Chabot said. “You’re trying to just give something a small nudge, which only changes its position slightly, and that adds up to a big change in position over time.”