Posts tagged space
ARKYD stretch goals announced on Kickstarter.
Planetary Resources claim their ARKYD space telescope is the ‘first publicly accessible space telescope’, and with 13 days left on their Kickstarter campaign there’s still time to support the project and have a say in how the telescope is used.
The campaign is about to reach it’s US$1,000,000 goal, and if they can double that the telescope will be modified to allow it to search for exoplanets.
Photo: NASA suborbital rocket launch.
A NASA Black Brant XII suborbital rocket streaks into the night sky following its launch on June 5, 2013 from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The rocket carried the Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRiment (CIBER) to an altitude of approximately 358 miles above the Atlantic Ocean by the four-stage rocket. The launch, seen here with multiple stages firing off, was reportedly seen from as far away as central New Jersey, southeastern Pennsylvania and northeastern North Carolina. With CIBER, scientists are studying when the first stars and galaxies formed in the universe and how brightly they burned their nuclear fuel.
Photo: Sun Over Earth’s Horizon
The sun is captured in a “starburst” mode over Earth’s horizon by one of the Expedition 36 crew members aboard the International Space Station, as the orbital outpost was above a point in southwestern Minnesota on May 21, 2013.
NASA Funding 3D Pizza Printer.
In order to feed astronauts on long trips, such as a journey to Mars, NASA is funding a six month research program into creating powdered foods which can be rehydrated and mixed together later to feed the crew.
In one variation of the prototype, a variation of a 3D printer creates each layer separately to form a pizza. It’s also been noted that because the food is being put into powered form, “so long as we’re including the right proportions of variables like carbs, proteins and sugars, we could shift our input source from animals over, say, to insects.”
“Long distance space travel requires 15-plus years of shelf life. The way we are working on it is, all the carbs, proteins and macro and micro nutrients are in powder form. We take moisture out, and in that form it will last maybe 30 years.”
Given all the evidence presently available, we believe it entirely reasonable that Mars is inhabited with living organisms and that life independently originated there
The conclusion of a study by the National Academy of Sciences in March 1965, after 88 years of surveying the red planet through blurry telescopes. Four months later, NASA’s Mariner 4 spacecraft would beam back the first satellite images of Mars confirming the opposite.
After Earth and Mars were born four and a half billion years ago, they both contained all the elements necessary for life. After initially having surface water and an atmosphere, scientists now believe Mars lost it’s atmosphere four billion years ago, with Earth getting an oxygenated atmosphere around half a billion years later.
According to the chief scientist on NASA’s Curiosity mission, if life ever existed on Mars it was most likely microscopic and lived more than three and a half billion years ago. But even on Earth, fossils that old are vanishingly rare. “You can count them on one hand,” he says. “Five locations. You can waste time looking at hundreds of thousands of rocks and not find anything.”
Image: NASA’s Xenon Ion propulsion system in testing.
This image shows a cutting-edge solar-electric propulsion thruster in development at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., that uses xenon ions for propulsion. An earlier version of this solar-electric propulsion engine has been flying on NASA’s Dawn mission to the asteroid belt.
This engine is being considered as part of the Asteroid Initiative, a proposal to robotically capture a small near-Earth asteroid and redirect it safely to a stable orbit in the Earth-moon system where astronauts can visit and explore it. This image was taken through a porthole in a vacuum chamber at JPL where the ion engine is being tested.
Video: Mars Science Laboratory time lapse.
This time lapse video shows the first 282 days of the Curiosity Rover on Mars, condensed down into one minute, which is still too long for my attention span.
Meteor impact on the Moon bright enough to see with the naked eye.
The impact of a 40kg meteor on the Moon on March 17 was bright enough to see from Earth without a telescope, according to NASA, who captured the impact through a Moon-monitoring telescope.
Now NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will try and search out the impact crater, which could be up to 20 metres wide.
Tens of thousands apply for one-way trip to Mars.
Mars One opened applications for their Astronaut Selection Program two weeks ago, with hopes to start sending humans one-way to Mars in 2023.
The company has revealed that 78,000 people from over 120 countries have already applied. Applications are still being accepted for another three months, here.
Opportunity breaks NASA’s distance record.
The Mars rover Opportunity has clocked up 22.22 miles since arriving on Mars, breaking NASA’s previous record for distance covered on another planet which was previously set in 1972 when two astronauts drove 22.21 miles on the surface of the Moon.
The international record is still held by the Russians, however. In 1973 the then Soviet Union’s remote-controlled Lunokhod 2 rover traveled 23 miles (37 kilometers) on the surface of the Moon.
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