Tag: nasa
NASA Chooses Axiom Space for Third Private Mission to ISS
As the Axiom-2 crew prepares to take off to the International Space Station (ISS) in a few weeks from now, NASA is already looking ahead to the third private mission to the orbiting space station later this year, in a mission that will once again involve Axiom.
Yes, NASA astronauts will still pee in their new spacesuits
The first astronauts to walk on the moon in more than 50 years will wear spacesuits built with the latest 21st century technology, looking a little less bulky than the marshmallowy garments of the past.
But one relic that hasn’t changed in all that time: They’re still going to have to pee their space pants.
NASA unveiled Wednesday new prototypes of the clothing astronauts will wear during the Artemis III mission, when the first woman and person of color will step on the lunar surface, this time near the moon’s south pole. There scientists believe they’ll find water ice within dark, cold craters. The launch is slated for 2025.
“We have not had a new suit since the suits that we designed for the Space Shuttle, and those suits are currently in use on the space station,” said Vanessa Wyche, NASA Johnson Space Center director. “So for 40 years, we’ve been using the same suit based on that technology.”
What exactly the moonsuits will look like is still cloaked in mystery, quite literally. The sample suit modeled during a press event at Space Center Houston’s Moon 2 Mars Festival was covered in a sleek black outer layer. Suits worn on the moon must be white to reflect heat, but Axiom Space representatives said the cover was necessary to protect their proprietary design.
The exterior shown Wednesday with the Axiom logo was created with costume designer Esther Marquis, who worked on Apple TV’s “For All Mankind” sci-fi series.
“We have not had a new suit since the suits that we designed for the Space Shuttle.”
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Unlike in the Apollo era, NASA won’t own these new cutting-edge suits — moonships in their own right. Axiom, which won the nearly $229 million contract last year to develop the equipment, will essentially rent them out to the space agency. The new approach is intended to encourage commercial use of the technology to gather more data that could be helpful for NASA in the future.
A fully equipped spacesuit for moonwalking is essentially a spacecraft shaped like a human. It protects the wearers from space radiation, moondust, and the extreme temperatures on the moon, ranging from -250 degrees in the shade to 250 degrees Fahrenheit in sunlight. The suits provide the proper pressure, drinking water, and air. They’re also outfitted with power and a communication system.
Credit: Axiom Space
“The moon is definitely a hostile place, and the south pole is going to really be a challenge,” said Lara Kearney, NASA’s manager of extravehicular activity and human surface mobility. “A lot of thermal requirements.”
Engineers have made several improvements, including integrating dust-resistant materials. Until Apollo 11, the biggest worry about the lunar soil was that it wouldn’t support the weight of a lander or the astronauts. Experience has taught NASA the greater concern is that the soil is made up of tiny glass-like shards.
The new portable life support system, worn like a backpack, is more compact, thanks to smaller modern electronics and plumbing. This has allowed engineers to build backup systems so failures are less of a concern. Almost everything inside the life support system is new, said Russell Ralston, Axiom’s deputy program manager for extravehicular activity. Some of the innovations could soon translate into improvements in health care equipment on Earth, he said.
Bending and rotating at the hips should be easier, and hiking-style boots with flexible soles are expected to be less of a tripping hazard. The sizes should be a bit more customizable, with mix-and-match pieces to fit each astronaut’s limbs and torsos. A model demonstrated the less-rigid design by squatting, twisting, and even kneeling as an astronaut might on the lunar surface to pick up a rock or use a geology tool.
Another change will be how astronauts get into them. The suit has a hatch that swings open like a door, allowing the crew to shimmy through the back, down into the boots. A single person should be able to do this without help from other astronauts, an upgrade from suits in use right now on the International Space Station.
There’s something in the suit for all the people watching back on Earth as well. On the side of the suit is an HD video camera that should provide better quality home-viewing of moonwalks.
But underneath all of that new high-tech innovation is still essentially an adult-size Pampers. Astronauts try to “hold it,” but during an eight-hour moonwalk, extraterrestrial nature might call.
“If it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” Rallston told Mashable during the press conference. “We’re still using diapers in the spacesuits. They’re just honestly a very effective solution. Sometimes simplicity is best.”
“Sometimes simplicity is best.”
The crew for the mission has not been decided yet, but NASA intends to announce the astronauts aboard the preceding mission on April 3. Those astronauts — on Artemis II — will fly the Orion spacecraft around the moon but won’t land.
Axiom plans to deliver a full set of training spacesuits to NASA later this summer.
NASA Partners With Microsoft to Bring Space Missions to Minecraft
NASA warns city-destroying asteroid could smash into Earth on Valentine’s Day 2046
NASA smacked an asteroid with a spacecraft. Watch what happened next.
The 1998 blockbuster Armageddon was about a fictional last-ditch attempt by NASA to stop a speeding asteroid headed toward Earth.
Now, 25 years later, the U.S. space agency has a movie showing just what asteroid-kicking really looks like.
During the immediate aftermath of the DART mission — NASA’s first asteroid target practice — the Hubble Space Telescope captured the hour-by-hour changes as the space rock cast off over 1,000 tons of debris. The time-lapse, shown below, depicts the rock and dust spraying out into a complex pattern for days after the impact.
“We’ve never witnessed an object collide with an asteroid in a binary asteroid system before in real time, and it’s really surprising,” said Jian-Yang Li, who led a study published in the journal Nature about the mission, in a statement. “Too much stuff is going on here. It’s going to take some time to figure out.”
Hubble was able to record a much wider view than could be seen by the Italian LICIACube satellite, which flew past the wreckage mere minutes after DART’s hit.
NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into a harmless asteroid through the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, better known as DART, on Sept. 26, 2022. The exercise tested the space agency’s capability to thwart a hazardous space rock in the future, should one be on a collision course with Earth.
A couple of weeks later, astronomers reported that the experiment was effective, giving Earthlings a bit of peace of mind. Scientists used ground-based telescopes to measure how the impact to Dimorphos, a smaller asteroid orbiting a larger one, Didymos, changed its orbit. They could see that its travel time around Didymos had shortened by about 32 or 33 minutes.
Five papers published in the journal Nature on March 1 confirm the mission worked and begin to answer why the smash was so successful at changing the asteroid’s trajectory. The experiment vastly exceeded their hopes of a 10-minute reduction in the orbit time.
“Too much stuff is going on here. It’s going to take some time to figure out.”
The nameless spacecraft, about 1,300 pounds, carried no explosives. Its “weapon” was its own body and the sheer force of plowing into an asteroid at 14,000 mph. Scientists have likened the mission to running a golf cart into the Great Pyramid of Giza.
But it was the slap heard ’round the solar system.
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The key was that the spacecraft wasn’t the only thing to give Dimorphos a push, according to the new research. When the asteroid flung out pulverized rock, it sustained a kickback like a shooter feels after firing a gun, with almost four times the momentum of the initial hit.
Credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins APL
Hubble’s movie, free of cameos from Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck, shows three primary stages following the crash: the forming of a blast cone, a pinwheel of debris surprisingly tied to the asteroid’s companion, Didymos, and a tail swept behind the asteroid.
The first post-impact snapshot in the time-lapse captures debris flying away over 4 mph — fast enough to break free of the asteroid’s gravitational pull. About 17 hours after the hit, the blast cone begins to morph into different structures, including spiraling pinwheels.
“When I first saw these images, I couldn’t believe these features,” Li said in a statement. “I thought maybe the image was smeared or something.”
Then, the asteroid grows a comet-like tail of debris. In a baffling turn of events, it splits into two tails for a few days.
Scientists say the DART crash will give them many more years of research as they continue to observe the debris and await follow-up missions. The European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft will show up at Dimorphos in three years to get a close look at the crater.
The mission was an important first step in an international effort to prepare for these types of existential threats, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said last year.
“NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us,” he said.
NASA Mars Rover Has a New Pet Rock Along for the Ride – CNET
Does NASA Video Show Aliens Flying 2 Rectangular UFOs? – Snopes Fact Check
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NASA Launches ‘Open-Source Science Initiative’, Urges Adoption of Open Science
But LWN.net notes that the talk went far beyond just the calibration software for the James Webb Space Telescope and the Mars Ingenuity copter’s flight-control framework.
In his talk, Crawford presented
NASA’s Open-Source
Science Initiative. Its goal is to support scientists to help them
integrate open-science principles into the entire research workflow. Just a
few weeks before Crawford’s talk, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate
published its new
policy on scientific information.
Crawford summarized this policy with “as open as possible, as restricted
as necessary, always secure”, and he made this more concrete: “Publications
should be made openly available with no embargo period, including research
data and software. Data should be released with a Creative Commons Zero
license, and software with a commonly used permissive license, such as
Apache, BSD, or MIT. The new policy also encourages using and contributing
to open-source software.” Crawford added that NASA’s policies will be
updated to make it clear that employees can contribute to open-source
projects in their official capacity….
As part of its Open-Source Science Initiative, NASA has started its
five-year Transform
to Open Science (TOPS) mission. This is a $40-million mission to speed
up adoption of open-science practices; it starts with the White House and
all major US federal agencies, including NASA, declaring 2023 as the “Year of Open Science”. One of NASA’s
strategic goals with TOPS is to enable five major scientific discoveries
through open-science principles, Crawford said.
Interesting tidbit from the article: “In 2003 NASA created a license to enable the release of software by civil servants, the NASA Open
Source Agreement. This license
has been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), but the Free Software Foundation doesn’t consider
it a free-software license because it does not allow changes to the code that come from third-party free-software projects.”
Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for sharing the article!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NASA just found a new type of ancient asteroid loaded with water
Scientists have identified a new type of large, dark space rock in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that is flush with water.
This asteroid group has striking similarities to Ceres, the only dwarf planet within the inner part of the solar system, known for being chock-full of H2O. But these asteroids — though relatively close to Ceres — are orbiting farther out in the belt than their much larger sibling.
The discovery, made with measurements taken at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, adds to the mounting evidence indicating asteroids in the main belt migrated there from a cold nether region, perhaps beyond the orbit of Neptune or Pluto. Such clues suggest the massive gravity of giant planets in the primitive solar system changed their travel plans, nudging the asteroids to their present location, relatively closer to the sun.
How Earth got water
The new class of asteroids might thrill astronomers who are proponents of the theory that Earth’s oceans formed from icy comets and asteroids smashing into the planet. While some scientists believe primitive Earth vented out gasses 4.5 billion years ago, eventually creating an atmosphere that allowed rain to fall and pool, many believe the large bodies of water formed because space rocks from the outer edge of the solar system brought water to it or some combination of the two. The mystery hasn’t been solved yet.
Though this group of asteroids isn’t quite a “missing link” to Earth’s hydration history, the research does back up the idea that super faraway rocks brought ingredients for water to an otherwise arid region of the solar system, said Andy Rivkin, a planetary astronomer at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab. Rivkin, who wasn’t involved in this study, is an expert on asteroids with water and organic materials.
“This would be perhaps the kind of objects that made it into the solar system and brought ice and organics with them,” Rivkin told Mashable. “Their cousins might have hit the Earth and brought some of that, as well as hitting Mars.”
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA
Millions of asteroids orbit the sun. They’re the rubble left over from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Often asteroids get stereotyped as menaces of the planetary neighborhood, snatching sensational headlines for coming “close to Earth,” even when they’re safely tumbling millions of miles off in the distance. Astronomers tend to think of them as menial rocks that couldn’t quite hack it, never coalescing and amounting to an actual planet.
But their scientific value is undeniable, providing an ancient record of the complex chemical and physical changes that happened over time in the solar nebula — the gas and dust cloud from which the sun and planets formed, said Driss Takir, lead author of the study published in Nature Astronomy this week. The new Ceres-like class of asteroids, rich in water and carbon, possess the same ingredients essential to life on Earth.
“These asteroids can help us better understand the origin and evolution of our solar system,” he told Mashable.
“These asteroids can help us better understand the origin and evolution of our solar system.”
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Scientists from Heidelberg University in Germany who collaborated on the research used computer simulations to study how these asteroids could have migrated from the outer solar system to today’s asteroid belt.
After observing 100 carbonaceous asteroids with infrared spectroscopy, a process of measuring the light reflected from a surface to reveal information about its minerals, Takir has detected 15 dark and water-rich asteroids like Ceres. With more observations, he believes scientists will be able to estimate just how many others like them exist in the main asteroid belt.
What Ceres is made of
As cosmic objects go, Ceres was pretty obscure before 2006, known to experts then as a huge, 500-mile-wide asteroid more than 250 million miles from the sun. At the same time the scientific community demoted Pluto from planet to dwarf planet, Ceres was being upgraded to dwarf planet. Then, in 2015, a NASA spacecraft got a closer look at the unusual bright patches visible on Ceres’ surface.
Through the Dawn mission, scientists learned that Ceres was an ocean world. Its white spots were a salty crust of sodium carbonate, the same type of salt people use as a water softener. After looking at the mission data, scientists concluded that the salt was the residue of a vast, briny reservoir about 25 miles underground and hundreds of miles wide. Meteorite impacts either melted slush just below the surface or created large fractures in the dwarf planet, allowing salt water to ooze out of ice volcanoes.
Astrobiologists are interested in whether primitive lifeforms could exist on Ceres, the closest ocean world to Earth. The National Academies Planetary Science Decadal Survey recently recommended that NASA send a robotic spacecraft to land on Ceres to collect samples.
Just like Ceres, the discovered asteroids have minerals on their surfaces that derive from an interaction with liquid water. The research suggests at least some of these asteroids may also have water ice.
“Especially asteroid 10 Hygiea, the largest dark Ceres-like asteroid with a near-spherical shape,” Takir said. “We will need high-resolution spacecraft observations to search for water ice on these asteroids.”
Despite the strong case for outer solar system objects bringing water ingredients inward, the research team didn’t find any meteorite material on Earth matching the new class of asteroids. That wouldn’t seem to bode well for the theory if those objects never make the long journey to Earth.
But scientists say just because you don’t find pieces of them on the ground, doesn’t mean they’re not here.
“If you throw a snowball at Earth, it’s going to not really make it through the atmosphere because it’ll kind of heat up and melt and vaporize,” Rivkin said. “But the water would be added to the atmosphere.”