Free Republic

NASA seeking proposals for human-rated lunar lander systems Derek Richardson February 9th, 2019 An artist’s illustration of a completed lunar Gateway flying around the Moon with a commercially-developed lunar lander. Image Credit: NASAWith SLS and Orion in the latter stages of development, NASA wants to work with industry to develop a human-rated lunar lander by the mid-to-late 2020s.NASA is working to return astronauts to the Moon under Space Policy Directive-1. In order to do that sustainably, the agency announced plans on Dec. 13, 2018, to work with U.S. companies to develop systems to land on the lunar surface. A formal...

The appearance of a massive white cap on Uranus may seem alarming, but as planetary scientists are learning, this is what a prolonged summer looks like on the remote ice giant. Ice giants Uranus and Neptune have water-rich interiors coated with hydrogen, helium, and a pinch of methane, the latter of which gives these outer planets their distinctive cyan complexion. Unlike Earth, where seasons last just a few months, Neptune and Uranus experience seasons that last for decades, resulting in strange and intense atmospheric phenomena. New images released by the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program highlight a evolving atmospheric...

The first two tiny satellites to ever go interplanetary have fallen silent in deep space for some unknown reason, and it’s likely we may never hear from them again. But for NASA, which launched the probes last year, this loss of communication isn’t considered a failure. Before the pair went quiet, these vehicles demonstrated that tiny satellites could become critical tools for exploring other worlds deep within our Solar System. The silent satellites are the two MarCO probes — nicknamed EVE and WALL-E from Pixar’s sci-fi movie — which flew to Mars along with NASA’s InSight lander last year. Both...

SpaceX had been targeting Feb. 23 for Crew Dragon's shakeout cruise to the ISS, an uncrewed flight called Demo-1. Starliner was scheduled to perform a similar mission in March. But launch dates for both flights have just been pushed to the right, NASA announced today (Feb. 6). "These adjustments allow for completion of necessary hardware testing, data verification, remaining NASA and provider reviews, as well as training of flight controllers and mission managers," they added. The next big box to check after these demonstration flights will be tests of the private vehicles' emergency escape systems, which would get the capsules...

The light released from around the first massive black holes in the universe is so intense that it is able to reach telescopes across the entire expanse of the universe. Incredibly, the light from the most distant black holes (or quasars) has been traveling to us for more than 13 billion light years. However, we do not know how these monster black holes formed. New research led by researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology, Dublin City University, Michigan State University, the University of California at San Diego, the San Diego Supercomputer Center and IBM provides a new and extremely promising...

Those promoting CO2 as the reason for global warming are hucksters and those taken in by hucksters. Please consider NASA Sees Climate Cooling Trend Thanks to Low Sun Activity. “We see a cooling trend,” said Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.” The new data is coming from NASA’s Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry or SABER instrument, which is onboard the space agency’s Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft has obtained new images of Bennu, a 1,614-foot (492 m) wide asteroid that orbits the Sun relatively close to the Earth.

Latest image reveals Ultima Thule’s surface features Laurel Kornfeld January 27th, 2019 Ultima Thule as imaged by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. Image Credit:NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research InstituteThe most detailed image of Ultima Thule returned by New Horizons reveals surface details, including pits on both the object’s lobes and contrasting patterns of darkness and light in various regions.Taken by the wide-angle Multicolor Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), part of the spacecraft’s Ralph instrument, this latest image, sent back on January 18-19, has a resolution of 440 feet (135 meters) per pixel. It was taken at 12:26 am EST on...

Jan 28, 1985: I was one of the accident investigators. NASA knew there were serious problems but launched anyway. @NASA wanted publicity & the press was leaving after waiting a couple days. Well, they got their publicity. #Challenger #Challengeraccident

When Apollo 11‘s Eagle lunar module landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had to do something hard: Wait. They were scheduled to open the door of their lunar lander and step onto the unknown surface of a completely different world. But for now, their mission ordered them to take a pause before the big event. And so Aldrin spent his time doing something unexpected, something no man had ever attempted before. Alone and overwhelmed by anticipation, he took part in the first Christian sacrament ever performed on the moon—a rite of Christian...

Critics are raving about the new documentary, Apollo 11, which features an unearthed treasure trove of behind-the-scenes footage of the moon landing, following the movie's premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival in Utah. The movie, deemed a 'masterful work of archival research' by Vulture, was created using a cache of 65mm, behind-the-scenes footage of the 1969 moon landing, and thousands of hours of vintage audio recordings of NASA employees talking about the mission. Unlike traditional documentaries, the 93-minute-long Apollo 11 is said to not include any voice-overs or cutaways to talking heads. Instead, director Todd Douglas Miller uses a...

Engineers haven't heard from the beleaguered robot since June 10, 2018, shortly before a global dust storm developed on Mars. The Opportunity rover, which is solar-powered, has ignored hundreds of calls from Earth since it first fell silent, which made team members worry that its mission has come to an end. As the silence stretched on over the summer, mission members hoped that the storm had simply dropped dust on the solar panels that power Opportunity and that a natural seasonal weather phenomenon on Mars could clear that dust away, letting the rover recharge.... That hope led the team to...

"The oblique lighting of this image reveals new topographic details along the day/night boundary, or terminator, near the top," according to the APL release. "These details include numerous small pits up to about 0.4 miles in diameter. The large circular feature, about 4 miles across, on the smaller of the two lobes, also appears to be a deep depression. "Not clear is whether these pits are impact craters or features resulting from other processes, such as 'collapse pits' or the ancient venting of volatile materials." The two lobes show "intriguing light and dark patterns of unknown origin, which may reveal...

Russia's State Space Corporation Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin has said that NASA had asked Roscosmos to create a lunar version of the Soyuz spacecraft as a backup manned space transport system for flights to the Moon. A senior Russian space industry source told Sputnik that Moscow will develop an ugraded Soyuz version at its own expense, and no funding from NASA is expected. To ensure the capability of the Soyuz spacecraft to fly to the Moon, an accelerating unit and a new thermal protection that will allow the ship to return to the Earth’s atmosphere at the second cosmic velocity...

The most distant object humanity has ever visited looks something like a spinning snowman or hourglass that’s lost in space.Researchers who work on NASA’s nuclear-powered New Horizons mission released a movie on Tuesday showing the rotation of the mountain-size rock, which is known formally as (486958) 2014 MU69.(It’s more commonly referred to as “Ultima Thule”.)Mu69 is about 4 billion miles (6 billion kilometres) from Earth and 1 billion miles (2 billion kilometres) beyond Pluto.New Horizons flew by the object on New Year’s Day at a speed of 32,200 miles per hour (52,000 kilometres per hour), and came within about 2,200 miles...

China has declared its latest moon mission a success, hailing it as a landmark in its quest to become a strong space power by 2030. The country’s Chang’e-4 probe, named after a moon goddess of Chinese legend, was the world’s first spacecraft to land on the far side of the moon, which is not visible from the Earth. The landing on January 3 was the latest leap for Beijing as it tries to catch up with the United States in space. The Chang’e-4 mission did not stop with the historic landing. Here are five other things China’s moon probe has...

Elon Musk and SpaceX's ambitious plans to reach around the moon and all the way to Mars require a big effin' rocket. Now we know what it looks like. Musk tweeted out an image on Thursday of an assembled early version of the SpaceX Starship, which was once known in polite company as the Big Falcon Rocket. Starship test flight rocket just finished assembly at the @SpaceX Texas launch site. This is an actual picture, not a rendering. pic.twitter.com/k1HkueoXaz — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 11, 2019 "Starship test flight rocket just finished assembly at the @SpaceX Texas launch site. This...

The Falcon 9 rocket launch originally planned for early this week has been rescheduled to Friday, SpaceX announced on Twitter. The launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base is set for 7:31 a.m., according to the tweet. “Weather is 60 percent favorable,” the company said. Read more here: https://www.modbee.com/living/article224126380.html#storylink=cpy

Acquiring space launch company Orbital ATK in an all-cash $7.8 billion merger, Northrop took possession of Orbital's Minotaur and Antares medium-lift rocket families. It acquired Orbital's ongoing project to build a new "OmegA" class heavy lift rocket as well, with which to compete against the likes of United Launch Alliance and SpaceX for large commercial and military satellite launches. Northrop Grumman also inherited Orbital's ongoing NASA contract to resupply crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS) with needed consumables under the agency's CRS-1 and CRS-2 "Commercial Resupply Services" contracts -- missions valued at as much as $14 billion across the...

The world’s largest airborne observatory was supposed to be parked in Seattle this week, so thousands of scientists attending the “Super Bowl of Astronomy” could behold this marvel: a Boeing 747 outfitted with a massive telescope used to study the fundamental mysteries of the universe. But conference-goers will not be able to see NASA’s space-exploring plane. Its visit to the 233rd Meeting of the American Astronomical Society was canceled, one of a growing list of scientific casualties of the partial government shutdown now stretching into its third week. Along with the plane, hundreds of government scientists are also no longer...