Newswise — In a study published in Nature Communications, scientists assess a new technique which could convert renewable, green energy from outside the Earth’s atmosphere. They are taking advantage of photosynthesis – the chemical process plants undergo every day to create energy – to help the space industry become more sustainable.
The research led by the University of Warwick evaluates the use of a special device known as semiconductor to absorb sunlight on Moon and Mars. It is hoped that the devices could promote Martian life support systems.
These “artificial photosynthesis devices” undergo the same processes which keeps plants alive on Earth – they convert water into oxygen using only sunlight whilst recycling carbon dioxide. These integrated systems have the advantage of directly using solar power and could save on weight on long-term space travels in comparison to traditional systems currently in use on the International Space Station – making space travel more efficient.
There is a need for efficient and reliable energy sources in space to enable the exploration of our solar system. It is hoped that the technology could be installed on the Moon and Mars to harvest green energy to help power rockets and complement life support systems for the production of oxygen and other chemicals as well as the recycling of carbon dioxide. The insights gained in this study with respect to improving device efficiencies also feed back into their optimization for Earth applications and also provide insights into the performance of traditional solar cells in space.
Assistant Professor Katharina Brinkert, Department of Chemistry, said: “Human space exploration faces the same challenges as the green energy transition on Earth: both require sustainable energy sources. With sunlight being so abundantly available in space, we have shown how this source could be used to harvest energy – much like plants back on Earth – for life support systems for long-term space travel. The technology could provide ample oxygen production and carbon dioxide recycling on both Moon and Mars.”
Associate Professor Sophia Haussener, at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, added: “In this study, we finally quantify the potential of such devices for extra-terrestrial use and provide initial design guidelines for their potential implementation.”
The research project was funded by the European Space Agency via the Open Space Innovation Platform – https://ideas.esa.int.
In a first of its kind event, the European Space Agency on Friday livestreamed images of Mars in what it called an opportunity “to get as close as it’s currently possible” to the Red Planet.
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Newswise — A new study has uncovered intriguing insights into the liquid core at the centre of Mars, furthering understanding of the planet’s formation and evolution.
The research, led by the University of Bristol and published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, reveals the first-ever detections of sound waves travelling into the Martian core. Measurements from this acoustic energy, called seismic waves, indicate its liquid core is slightly denser and smaller than previously thought, and comprises a mixture of iron and numerous other elements.
The findings are all the more remarkable, as the research mission was initially only scheduled to last for a little over one Mars year (two Earth years). Despite Martian storms hastening the accumulation of dust and reducing power to the NASA InSight Mars lander, NASA extended its stay, so geophysical data, including signals of marsquakes, continued to be gathered until the end of last year.
Lead author Dr Jessica Irving, Senior Lecturer in Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, said: “The extra mission time certainly paid off. We’ve made the very first observations of seismic waves travelling through the core of Mars. Two seismic signals, one from a very distant marsquake and one from a meteorite impact on the far side of the planet, have allowed us to probe the Martian core with seismic waves. We’ve effectively been listening for energy travelling through the heart of another planet, and now we’ve heard it.
“These first measurements of the elastic properties of Mars’ core have helped us investigate its composition. Rather than being just a ball of iron, it also contains a large amount of sulfur, as well as other elements including a small amount of hydrogen.”
The team of researchers used data from NASA’s InSight lander, a robotic spacecraft designed to probe the interior of Mars, to compare seismic waves travelling through the planet’s core with those transiting Mars’ shallower regions, and modelled properties of its interior.
The InSight lander deployed a broadband seismometer on the Martian surface in 2018, allowing for the detection of seismic events, including marsquakes and meteorite impacts. The multi-disciplinary team of scientists, including seismologists, geodynamicists and mineral physicists, used observations of two seismic events located in the opposite hemisphere from the seismometer to measure the travel times of seismic waves that passed through the core relative to seismic waves that remained in the mantle.
Dr Irving said: “So-called ‘farside’ events, meaning those on the opposite side of the planet to InSight, are intrinsically harder to detect because a great deal of energy is lost or diverted away as waves travel through the planet. We needed both luck and skill to find, and then use, these events. We detected no farside events in the first Martian year of operations. If the mission had ended then, this research couldn’t have happened.
“The sol 976 marsquake was the most distant event found during the mission. The second farside event, S1000a – the first event detected on day 1,000 of operations – was particularly useful because it turned out to be a meteorite impact which we heard all the way through the planet, so we knew where the seismic signals came from. These events came after the Marsquake Service (MQS) had honed their skills on hundreds of days of Martian data; it then took a lot of seismological expertise from across the Insight Team to tease the signals out from the complex seismograms recorded by the lander.”
The authors used these measurements to build models describing physical properties of the core, including its size and elastic wave-speed. The results suggested Mars’ core is slightly denser and smaller than previous estimates, with a radius of approximately 1,780–1,810 km. These findings are consistent with the core having a relatively high fraction of light elements alloyed with iron, including abundant sulfur and smaller amounts of oxygen, carbon and hydrogen.
Co-author Ved Lekic, Associate Professor of Geology at the University of Maryland College Park, in the US, said: “Detecting and understanding waves that travel through the very core of another planet is incredibly challenging, reflecting decades of efforts by hundreds of scientists and engineers from multiple countries. We not only had to utilise sophisticated seismic analysis techniques, but also deploy knowledge of how high pressures and temperatures affect properties of metal alloys, leveraging the expertise of the InSight Team.”
Dr Irving added: “The new results are important for understanding how Mars’ formation and evolution differ from those of Earth. New theories about the formation conditions and building blocks of the red planet will need to be able to match the core’s physical properties as revealed by this new study.”
Dr Jessica Irving and co-author Dr Anna Horleston, a seismologist from the University of Bristol, were supported with funding from the UK Space Agency.
Paper
‘First observations of core-transiting seismic phases on Mars’ by Jessica Irving et al in PNAS
Newswise — Researchers solving today’s most important and complex energy challenges can’t always conduct real-world experiments.
This is especially true for nuclear energy research. Considerations such as cost, safety and limited resources can often make laboratory tests impractical. In some cases, the facility or capability necessary to conduct a proper experiment doesn’t exist.
At Idaho National Laboratory, computational scientists use INL’s supercomputers to perform “virtual experiments” to accomplish research that couldn’t be done by conventional means. While supercomputing can’t replace traditional experiments, supercomputing is an essential component of all modern scientific discoveries and advancements.
“Science is like a three-leg stool,” said Eric Whiting, director of Advanced Scientific Computing at INL. “One leg is theory, one is experiment, and the third is modeling and simulation. You cannot have modern scientific achievements without modeling and simulation.”
HIGH-DEMAND RESOURCES
INL’s High Performance Computing program has been in high demand for years. From INL’s first supercomputer in 1993 to the addition of the Sawtooth supercomputer in 2020, the demand for high-performance computing has only increased.
Sawtooth and INL’s other supercomputers are flexible enough to tackle a wide range of modeling and simulation challenges and are especially suitable for dynamic and adaptive applications, like those used in nuclear energy research. INL’s supercomputers are one of the Nuclear Science User Facilities’ 50 partner facilities and its only supercomputers.
Whether it’s exploring the effects of radiation on nuclear fuel or designing nuclear-powered rockets for a trip to Mars, INL’s High Performance Computing center is the Swiss Army knife of advanced computing.
THE POWER OF 100,000 LAPTOPS
On a recent tour of the Collaborative Computing Center, Whiting led the way through the rows of Sawtooth processors. Each row looked like dozens of tall black refrigerators standing side by side. The room hummed with the pumping of thousands of gallons of water needed to keep Sawtooth cool.
Sawtooth contains the computing power of about 100,000 processors all dedicated to very large, high-fidelity problems, which means orders of magnitude more processing power and memory when compared to a traditional laptop computer.
All that computing power allows researchers from around the world to run dozens of complex simulations at the same time. “If your program is designed right, it runs thousands of times faster than the best-case scenario on your desktop,” Whiting said.
Some of these simulations — modeling the performance of fuel inside an advanced reactor core, for instance — require the computer to solve millions or billions of unknowns repeatedly.
“If you have a multidimensional problem in space, and then you add time to it, it greatly adds to the size of the problem,” said Cody Permann, a computer scientist who oversees one of the laboratory’s modeling and simulation capabilities. Modeling and simulation started decades ago by solving simplified problems in one or two dimensions. Modern supercomputers, like INL’s Sawtooth, significantly increased the accuracy of these simulations, bringing them closer to reality.
To solve these complicated problems, researchers break down each simulation into thousands upon thousands of smaller units, each impacting the units surrounding it. The more units, the more detailed the simulation, and the more powerful the computer needed to run it.
THE ATOMIC EFFECTS OF RADIATION ON MATERIALS
For Chao Jiang, a distinguished staff scientist at INL, a highly detailed simulation means peering down to the level of individual atoms.
Jiang’s simulations, funded by the Department of Energy Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation program and the Basic Energy Sciences program, help nuclear scientists understand the behavior of materials when their atoms are constantly knocked around by neutrons in a reactor core. These displaced atoms will create defects, changing the microstructure of the material, and therefore its physical and mechanical characteristics. These changes in microstructure can damage the materials and reduce the lifetime of the reactor. Understanding these changes helps scientists design better and safer reactors.
“The work we are doing is extremely challenging,” Jiang said. “They are computer-hungry projects. We are big users of the high-performance computers.”
Understanding the radiation damage in materials is difficult. This change involves physical processes that occur across vastly different time and length scales. “When the high energy neutrons hit the material,” Jiang said, “it will locally melt the material.”
Heating and cooling inside an operating reactor takes place in picoseconds, or one trillionth of a second. During this heating and cooling, the material will re-solidify, but will leave defects behind, Jiang said. “These residual defects will migrate and accumulate to form large-scale defects in the long run.”
While large defects, such as dislocation loops and voids, can be directly seen using advanced microscopy techniques, there are many small-scale defects that remain invisible under microscope. These small defects can significantly impact the materials, making the use of computer simulations to fill this knowledge gap critical. INL computational scientists combine their simulations with the advanced characterization techniques performed by material scientists at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex to advance the understanding of material behavior in a nuclear reactor.
SIMULATING THE IMPACTS OF EARTHQUAKES ON REACTOR MATERIALS
Another INL scientist, Chandu Bolisetti, also simulates the damage to materials, but on a much different scale.
Bolisetti, who leads the lab’s Facility Risk Group, uses high-performance computing to simulate the effects of seismic waves — the shaking that results from an earthquake — on energy infrastructure such as nuclear power plants or dams.
In early 2021, funded by the DOE Office of Technology Transitions, Bolisetti and his colleagues performed a particularly complex type of simulation — they simulated the impacts of seismic waves on a nuclear power plant building that houses a molten salt reactor.
A molten salt reactor is a particularly difficult physics problem because the coolant/fuel circulates through the reactor in liquid form. The team also placed their hypothetical reactor on seismic isolators, giant shock absorbers that help reduce the impacts of earthquakes on buildings.
Bolisetti’s team ran the simulation using MOOSE, which stands for Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment, a software framework that allows researchers to develop modeling and simulation tools for solving multiphysics problems. For these earthquake simulation problems, Bolisetti’s team uses MASTODON, which they developed using MOOSE specifically for seismic analysis.
Another project funded by INL’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program looks at how a molten salt reactor behaves in an earthquake in much more detail. It extends the analysis to include neutronics and thermal hydraulics — in other words, how the shaking impacts nuclear fission and the distribution of heat in the reactor core.
“All three of these physics — earthquake response, thermal hydraulics and neutronics — are pretty complicated,” Bolisetti said. “No one has ever combined these into one simulation. How the power in the reactor fluctuates during an earthquake is important for safety protocols. It affects what the operators would do during an earthquake and helps us understand the core physics and design safer reactors.”
“Real-world experiments to simulate this are close to impossible, especially when you add neutronics,” Bolisetti said. “That’s where these kinds of multi-physics simulations really shine.”
SIMULATING NUCLEAR ROCKETS FOR A TRIP TO MARS
Mark DeHart, a senior reactor physicist at INL, uses MOOSE to simulate an entirely different kind of complex machine: a thermonuclear rocket that could someday take humans to Mars.
The rocket would use hydrogen as both a propellant and a coolant. When the rocket is in use, hydrogen would run from storage tanks through the reactor core. The reactor would rapidly heat the hydrogen before it exits the rocket nozzles.
“The hydrogen that comes out is pure thrust,” DeHart said.
Compared with chemical rockets, thermonuclear rockets are faster and twice as efficient. The rockets could cut travel time to Mars in half.
One big challenge is rapidly heating the reactor core from about 26 degrees Celsius (80 degrees Fahrenheit) to nearly 2,760 Celsius (5,000 Fahrenheit) without damaging the reactor or the fuel.
DeHart and his colleagues are using Griffin, a MOOSE-based advanced reactor physics tool, for multiphysics modeling of two aspects of the NASA mission.
The first project tests the fuel’s performance as it experiences rapid heating in the reactor core. The real-world fuel samples are placed in INL’s Transient Test Reactor (TREAT) where they are rapidly brought up to temperature.
The data from those experiments are used to create and validate models of the fuel’s neutronics and heat transfer characteristics using Griffin.
“If we can show that Griffin can model this real-world sample correctly, we can have confidence that Griffin can calculate correctly something that doesn’t exist yet,” DeHart said.
The second project is designing the rocket engines themselves. Automated controllers rotate drums in the reactor core to bring the temperature up and down. “We’ve developed a simulation that will show how you can use the control drums to bring the reactor from cold to nearly 5,000 F within 30 seconds,” DeHart said.
Without high-performance computing and MOOSE, developing a thermonuclear rocket would take dozens of small experiments costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR COLLABORATION
In the end, high-performance computing makes INL a gathering place for researchers with a wide range of expertise, from rocket design to artificial intelligence. About half the system’s users are from national labs, with a quarter coming from universities and a quarter from industry. The resulting collaborations are especially important for nuclear energy research.
“INL cannot attract all the experts in our field, but by sharing a computer, INL’s team can work with 1,200 experts across the United States,” Whiting said. “INL’s supercomputers are helping build the expertise and develop the tools so they can deploy next-generation reactors.”
And the demand for these modeling and simulation resources is only growing. Sawtooth added more than four times the capacity to INL’s high-performance computing capabilities, and already the line of projects waiting in the queue can reach into the thousands.
“We need years of research with the High Performance Computing facility,” said Jiang. “We need to understand the high energy state of nuclear materials as accurately as possible, so we need to explore a huge space. Without high-performance computing, basic energy research would suffer. It’s critical.”
If you are interested in accessing INL’s supercomputers for your work, visit inl.gov/ncrc or nsuf.inl.gov.
About Idaho National Laboratory Battelle Energy Alliance manages INL for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy. INL is the nation’s center for nuclear energy research and development, and also performs research in each of DOE’s strategic goal areas: energy, national security, science and the environment. For more information, visit www.inl.gov. Follow us on social media: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Trump attorney Christina Bobb appeared before a federal grand jury in Washington, DC, in recent weeks in connection with the investigation into former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents, two sources have told CNN.
Bobb’s appearance marks the second Trump lawyer involved with Trump’s handling of government documents to meet with the grand jury recently. CNN reported that Trump attorney Evan Corcoran appeared before the grand jury last month.
The Wall Street Journal first reported Bobb’s appearance.
The disclosure of the testimony by the Trump lawyers comes amid a steady drip of recent moves by special counsel Jack Smith to obtain grand jury testimony from very close contacts of the former president, in many cases about what Trump was told and what he said at the end of his presidency and afterward.
It also comes amid an escalation of activity in Smith’s other Trump probe, looking into the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and efforts to impede the transfer of power following the 2020 election.
Smith issued a subpoena in that investigation to former Vice President Mike Pence in recent days, seeking documents and testimony. Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien also received a subpoena, as CNN first reported.
It’s now been half a decade since SpaceX turned heads around the world with its decision to launch Elon Musk’s personal Tesla roadster into outer space, sending the car on an endless journey into the cosmic wilderness where it’s expected to remain for millennia to come.
As of Monday, February 6, the cherry-colored sports car has officially been in space for exactly five years.
At the time of its anniversary, data estimates show that it had completed about three and one quarter loops around the sun and was positioned about 203 million miles (327 million kilometers) from Earth, according to the tracking website whereisroadster.com.
The roadster has logged more than 2.5 billion miles in space (4 billion kilometers), mostly through a barren vacuum. Though, in 2020, the vehicle made its first close approach to Mars, passing within 5 million miles of the planet, or about 20 times the distance between the Earth and the moon.
It is difficult, however, to say where the vehicle is with absolute certainty — or to determine if it’s still in one piece, as it’s possible the car may have been dinged or obliterated by a meteoroid or eroded beyond recognition by radiation. There haven’t been any direct observations of the roadster since 2018, in the weeks just after it was blasted into orbit atop a three-million-pound Falcon Heavy rocket. Current data is based only on calculated estimates of the car’s trajectory.
The Tesla was ultimately intended to serve as a throw-away “dummy payload” for the Falcon Heavy’s first mission in February 2018, a launch that even Musk had predicted would have only a 50-50 shot at success.
But the launch did, after all, go off without a hitch. And the car has been circling the sun ever since, taking an oblong paththat swings as far out as Mars’ orbital path and as close to the sun as Earth’s orbit.
As of Monday, it was just intersecting with Mars’ path, though the planet itself was on the opposite side of the sun.
Before its 2018 launch, SpaceX loaded up the car with various Easter eggs. Behind the wheel was a spacesuit-clad mannequin, nicknamed Starman, and on the dashboard, a sign that read “Don’t Panic,” a reference to the famed science fiction story, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” There was also a data storage device loaded with the works of sci-fi writer Isaac Asminov and a plaque inscribed with the names of thousands of SpaceX employees.
Musk said at the time of launch that he hoped humans will one day establish settlements on other planets in the solar system — a long-running Musk fantasy that also underpins SpaceX’s stated mission to colonize Mars. If and when that happens, Musk said he hopes his “descendants will be able to drag (the roadster) back to a museum.”
For now, however, the roadster isn’t likely to pass near another planet until 2035 when it’ll brush by Mars again. It’ll then make two passes within a few million miles of Earth in 2047 and 2050, according to NASA data.
One 2018 academic paper also estimated that the chances the car collides with the Earth within the next 15 million years at about 22%. The odds of it crashing into Venus or the Sun each stand at 12%.
If the car does wind up taking a crash course with Earth, we’ll have to hope it’s ripped into pieces as it slams back into the thick atmosphere. (Spaceborne objects running into Earth are actually fairly common, and typically burn up in the atmosphere during entry. Such hits rarely impact populated areas.)
To keep tabs on the roadster’s predicted location, it has its own entry in NASA’s Horizons database, which follows all the “bodies” of the solar system, including exploration probes, planets, moons, comets and asteroids. The Tesla is listed as object -143205, “SpaceX Roadster (spacecraft) (Tesla).”
To view a simulation of the Tesla’s orbit (based on the data in Horizons), go to OrbitSimulator.com and search for “roadster.”
The candy company Mars is removing M&M’s “spokescandies” from its marketing campaigns in favor of actress Maya Rudolph. This comes after social media backlash over the changes in the appearance of the candy characters. Northwestern University clinical professor of marketing Timothy Calkins joined CBS News’ Vladimir Duthiers and Anne-Marie Green to discuss what it means for the brand and the impact social media can have on decisions in the boardroom.
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M&M’s tried to update its anthropomorphized candy’s characters and caused a meltdown. It’s a problem that can only be solved by one thing: a Super Bowl commercial starring Maya Rudolph.
No Kill is all about innovation, and working together to save lives. That’s why we were so excited to have two Mars Ambassadors join us at Austin Pets Alive! for two weeks, to help us save puppies with canine parvovirus and distemper—diseases that are often fatal, and for which puppies are routinely euthanized at many animal shelters and clinics because of the false belief they cannot be treated and adopted.
APA! operates one of the country’s only Parvo Puppy ICUs, where around 1,000 puppies per year are treated, and we run a specialized distemper treatment program. Many more puppies could be saved, still, with more animal shelters adopting and using the lifesaving protocols we’ve developed, and greater public awareness of how to prevent and treat parvo and distemper.
Mars Ambassadors Devon Arcuri, BluePearl’s Creative Specialist, and Violet Matarico, Banfield Pet Hospital’s Practice Manager for the Woodbridge and Edison hospitals in New Jersey, came to do just that.
The Mars Ambassador program dispatches Mars employees to other organizations and communities, where they lend their expertise and build partnerships. Devon and Violet embedded with the APA! marketing and communications team, to develop critical materials and messaging.
Working alongside APA!’s staff, Devon and Violet produced web pages and resources, including FAQs, website banners and pages, social media recommendations, printed handouts and posters, and more.
It’s two weeks’ of work that will have a meaningful impact on animals’ lives. More puppies will get and stay well, and get to live as loved members of families, thanks to Devon and Violet’s time with APA! as Mars Ambassadors.
We asked Devon and Violet what their time at APA! meant to them.
“Mars focuses on sustainability; the world we want tomorrow starts with how we do business today,” Devon said. “With this project, Violet and I wanted to ensure that our work could keep growing after we left.”
“With development being one of my passions, the opportunity to provide insight and support for APA!’s Puppy Parvo ICU on a grand scale has been an experience of a lifetime,” said Violet. “These puppies and young dogs deserve a fighting chance, and APA! has paved the way.”
Thank you to Devon and Violet for sharing your knowledge and your passion to save the lives of vulnerable puppies!
In the fervor-filled days leading up to the November 16 launch of the long-awaited Artemis I mission, an uncrewed trip around the moon, some industry insiders admitted to having conflicting emotions about the event.
On one hand, there was the thrill of watching NASA take its first steps toward eventually getting humans back to the lunar surface; on the other, a shadow cast by the long and costly process it took to get there.
“I have mixed feelings, though I hope that we have a successful mission,” former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao said in an opinion roundtable interview with The New York Times. “It is always exciting to see a new vehicle fly. For perspective, we went from creating NASA to landing humans on the moon in just under 11 years. This program has, in one version or another, been ongoing since 2004.”
There have been numerous delays with the development of the rocket at the center of the Artemis I mission: NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), the most powerful rocket ever flown — and one of the most controversial. The towering launch vehicle was originally expected to take flight in 2016. And the decade-plus that the rocket was in development sparked years of blistering criticism targeted toward the space agency and Boeing, which holds the primary contract for the SLS rocket’s core.
NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) repeatedly called out what it referred to as Boeing’s “poor performance,” as a contributing factor in the billions of dollars in cost overruns and schedule delays that plagued SLS.
“Cost increases and schedule delays of Core Stage development can be traced largely to management, technical, and infrastructure issues driven by Boeing’s poor performance,” one 2018 report from NASA’s OIG, the first in a series of audits the OIG completed surrounding NASA’s management of the SLS program, read. And a report in 2020 laid out similar grievances.
For its part, Boeing has pushed back on the criticism, pointing to rigorous testing requirements and the overall success of the program. The OIG report also included correspondence from NASA, which noted in 2018 that it “had already recognized the opportunity to improve contract performance management” and agreed with the report’s recommendations.
Despite all the heated debate that has followed SLS, by all accounts, the rocket is here to stay. And officials at NASA and Boeing said its first launch two months ago was practically flawless.
“I worked over 50 Space Shuttle launches,” Boeing SLS program manager John Shannon told CNN by phone. “And I don’t ever remember a launch that was as clean as that one was, which for a first-time rocket — especially one that had been through as much as this one through all the testing — really put an exclamation point on how reliable and robust this vehicle really is.”
The Artemis program manager at NASA, Mike Sarafin, also said during a post-launch news conference that the rocket “performed spot-on.”
But with its complicated history and its hefty price tag, SLS could still face detractors in the years to come.
Many have questioned why SLS needs to exist at all. With the estimated cost per launch standing at more than $4 billion for the first four Artemis missions, it’s possible commercial rockets, like the massive Mars rocket SpaceX is building, could get the job done more efficiently, as the chief of space policy at the nonprofit exploration advocacy group Planetary Society, Casey Dreier, recently observed in an article laying out both sides of the SLS argument.
(NASA Administrator Bill Nelson noted that the $4 billion per-launch cost estimate includes development costs that the space agency hopes will be amortized over the course of 10 or more missions.)
Boeing was selected in 2012 to build SLS’s “core stage,” which is the hulking orange fuselage that houses most of the massive engines that give the rocket its first burst of power at liftoff.
Though more than 1,000 companies were involved with designing and building SLS, Boeing’s work involved the largest and most expensive portion of the rocket.
That process began over a decade ago, and when the Artemis program was established in 2019, it gave the rocket its purpose: return humans to the moon, establish a permanent lunar outpost, and, eventually, pave the path toward getting humans to Mars.
But the SLS is no longer the only rocket involved in the program. NASA gave SpaceX a significant role in 2021, giving the company a fixed-price contract for use of its Mars rocket as the vehicle that will ferry astronauts to the lunar surface after they leave Earth and travel to the moon’s orbit on SLS. SpaceX’s forthcoming rocket, called Starship, is also intended to be capable of completing a crewed mission to the moon or Mars on its own. (Starship, it should be noted, is still in the development phases and has not yet been tested in orbit.)
Boeing has repeatedly argued that SLS is essential and capable of performing tasks that other rockets cannot.
“The bottom line is there’s nothing else like the SLS because it was built from the ground up to be human rated,” Shannon said. “It is the only vehicle that can take the Orion spacecraft and the service module to the moon. And that’s the purpose-built design — to take large hardware and humans to cislunar space, and nothing else exists that can do that.”
Starship, meanwhile, is not tailored solely to NASA’s specific lunar goals. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has talked for more than a decade about his desire to get humans to Mars. More recently, he has said Starship could also be used to house giant space telescopes.
Yet, another reason critics remain skeptical of SLS is because of its origins. The rocket’s conception can be traced back to NASA’s Constellation program, which was a plan to return to the moon mapped out under former President George W. Bush that was later canceled.
But the SLS has survived. Many observers have suggested a big reason was the desire to maintain space industry jobs in certain Congressional districts and to beef up aerospace supply chains.
Much of the criticism levied against SLS, however, has focused on the actual process of getting the rocket built.
At one point in 2019, former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine considered sidelining the SLS rocket entirely, citing frustrations with the delays.
“At the end of the day, the contractors had an obligation to deliver what NASA had contracted for them to deliver,” Bridenstine told CNN by phone last month. “And I was frustrated like most of America.”
Still, Bridenstine said, when his office reviewed the matter, it found “there were no options that were going to cost less money or take less time than just finishing the SLS” — and the rocket was never ultimately sidelined. (Bridenstine noted he was also publicly critical of delayed projects led by SpaceX and others.)
The SLS rocket ended up flying its first launch more than six years later than originally intended. NASA had allocated $6.2 billion to the SLS program as of 2018, but that price tag more than tripled to $23 billion as of 2022, according to an analysis by the Planetary Society.
Those escalating costs can be traced back to the type of contracts that NASA signed with Boeing and its other major suppliers for SLS. It’s called cost-plus, which puts the financial burden on NASA when projects face cost overruns while still offering contractors extra payments, or award fees.
In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Science last year, current NASA Administrator Bill Nelson criticized the cost-plus contracting method, calling it a “plague.”
More in vogue are “fixed-price” contracts, which have a firm price cap, like the kind NASA gave to Boeing and SpaceX for its Commercial Crew Program.
In an interview with CNN in December, however, Nelson stood by cost-plus contracting for SLS and Orion, the vehicle that is designed to carry astronauts and rides atop the rocket to space. He said that without that type of contract, in his view, NASA’s private-sector contractors simply wouldn’t be willing to take on a rocket designed for such a specific purpose and exploring deep space. Building a rocket as specific and technically complex as SLS isn’t a risk many private-sector companies are anxious to take on, he noted.
“You really have difficulty in the development of a new and very exquisite spacecraft … on a fixed-price contract,” he said.
“That industry is just not willing to accept that kind of thing, with the exception of the landers,” he added, referring to two other branches of the Artemis program: robotic landers that will deliver cargo to the moon’s surface and SpaceX’s $2.9 billion lunar lander contract. Both of those will use fixed-price — often referred to as “commercial” — contracts.
“And even there, they’re getting a considerable investment by the federal government,” Nelson said.
Still, government watchdogs have not pulled punches when assessing these cost-plus contracts and Boeing’s role.
“We did notice very poor contractor performance on Boeing’s part. There’s poor planning and poor execution,” NASA Inspector General Paul Martin said during testimony before the House’s Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics last year. “We saw that the cost-plus contracts that NASA had been using…worked to the contractor’s — rather than NASA’s — advantage.”
Shannon, the Boeing executive, acknowledged in an interview that Boeing and SLS have faced loud detractors, but he said that the value of the drawn out development and testing program would become evident as SLS flies.
“I am extremely proud that NASA — even though there were significant schedule pressures — they could set up a test program that was incredibly comprehensive,” he said. “The Boeing team worked through that test process and hit every mark on it. And you see the results. You see a vehicle that is not just visually spectacular, but its performance was spectacular. And it really put us on the road to be able to do lunar exploration again, which is something that’s very important in this country.”
But the rocket is still facing criticism. During a Congressional hearing with the House’s Science, Space, and Technology Committee in March 2022, NASA’s Inspector General said that current cost estimates for SLS were “unsustainable,” gauging that the space agency will have spent $93 billion on the Artemis program from 2012 through September 2025.
Martin, the NASA inspector general, specifically pointed to Boeing as one of the contractors that would need to find “efficiencies” to bring down those costs as the Artemis program moves forward.
In a December 7 statement to CNN, Boeing once again defended SLS and its price point.
“Boeing is and has been committed to improving our processes — both while the program was in its developmental stage and now as it transitions to an operational phase,” the statement read, noting the company already implemented “lessons learned” from building the first rocket to “drive efficiencies from a cost and schedule perspective” for future SLS rockets.
“When adjusted for inflation, NASA has developed SLS for a quarter of the cost of the Saturn V and half the cost of the Space Shuttle,” the statement noted. “These programs have also been essential to investing in the NASA centers, workforce and test facilities that are used by a broad range of civil and commercial partners across NASA and industry.”
The successful launch of SLS was a welcome winning moment for Boeing. Over the past few years, the company has been mired in controversy, including ongoing delays and myriad issues with Starliner, a spacecraft built for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, and scandal after scandal plaguing its airplane division.
Now that the Artemis I mission has returned safely home, NASA and Boeing can turn to preparing more of the gargantuan SLS rockets to launch even loftier missions.
SLS is slated to launch the Artemis II mission, which will take four astronauts on a journey around the moon, in 2024. From there, SLS will be the backbone of the Artemis III mission that will return humans to the lunar surface for the first time in five decades and a series of increasingly complex missions as NASA works to create its permanent lunar outpost.
Shannon, the Boeing SLS program manager, told CNN that construction of the next two SLS rocket cores is well underway, with the booster for Artemis II on track to be finished in April — more than a year before the mission is scheduled to take off. All of the “major components” for a third SLS rocket are also completed, Shannon added.
For the third SLS core and beyond, Boeing is also moving final assembly to new facilities Florida, freeing up space at its manufacturing facilities to increase production, which may help drive down costs.
Shannon declined to share a specific price point for the new rockets or share any internal pricing goals, though NASA is expected to sign new contracts for the rockets that will launch the Artemis V mission and beyond, which could significantly change the price per launch.
Nelson also told CNN in December that NASA “will be making improvements, and we will find cost savings where we can,” such as with the decision to use commercial contracts for other vehicles under the Artemis program umbrella.
How and whether those contracts bear out remain to be seen: SpaceX needs to get its Starship rocket flying, a massive space station called Gateway needs to come to fruition, and at least some of the robotic lunar landers designed to carry cargo to the moon will need to prove their effectiveness. It’s also not yet clear whether those contracts will result in enough cost savings for the critics of SLS, including NASA’s OIG, to consider the Artemis program sustainable.
As for SLS, Nelson also told reporters December 11, just after the conclusion of the Artemis I mission, that he had every reason to expect that lawmakers would continue to fund the rocket and NASA’s broader moon program.
“I’m not worried about the support from the Congress,” Nelson said.
And Bridenstine, Nelson’s predecessor who has been publicly critical SLS, said that he ultimately stands by SLS and points out that, controversies aside, it does have rare bipartisan support from its bankrollers.
“We are in a spot now where this is going to be successful,” Bridenstine said last month, recalling when he first realized the Artemis program had support from the right and left. “All of America is going to be proud of this program. And yes, there are going to be differences. People are gonna say well, you should go all commercial and drop SLS…but at the end of the day, what we have to do is we have to bring together all of the things that are the best programs that we can get for America and use them to go to the moon.”
InSight—or, less elegantly, the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport mission—is a robot that NASA’s JPL (with help from the European Space Agency) sent to Mars back in 2018.
It’s job was fairly simple. Or as simple as “a highly complex robot built on Earth then fired from a rocket into deep space then landed on another planet” can be, anyway. InSight put a seismometer on Mars and has sat around for the last four years reading and interpreting the data received from it, killing its time providing “accurate 3D models of the planet’s interior” and measuring “internal heat transfer using a heat probe called HP3 to study Mars’ early geological evolution”.
A selfie taken by InSight back in 2018Photo: NASA
Aside from its main role, InSight has also been useful because it has a camera attached, allowing it to take some very nice photos of the surface of Mars. Its coolest achievement, however, at least for anyone not in the field of hardcore space science, is the fact that the robot was able—via vibrations detected on its solar panels—to record the sound of wind on Mars, which is the first time anyone had ever heard wind from another planet.
Sounds of Mars: NASA’s InSight Senses Martian Wind
So yeah, nice robot! But like any robot sent into space, InSight is running on a battery, and while solar panels and judicious use of its systems have helped prologue its life, the time is fast approaching where it runs out of juice for good and is forced to power down.
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This should be a routine matter. This is a machine, it’s going to stop working, we will all get on with our lives. But somebody at NASA had the bright/terrible idea to anthropomorphize InSight’s final days, and so instead of a press report saying “machine stopped working, it did neat stuff”, we have to read this:
Excuse me. I just have some…Martian dust in my eye.
I hope, one day soon, we ourselves are able to travel to Mars. And when we get there, I hope one of the first things we do is find InSight, and give it a hug.
BEIJING — Three Chinese astronauts landed in a northern desert on Sunday after six months working to complete construction of the Tiangong station, a symbol of the country’s ambitious space program, state TV reported.
A capsule carrying commander Chen Dong and astronauts Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe touched down at a landing site in the Gobi Desert in northern China at approximately 8:10 p.m. (1210 GMT), China Central Television reported.
Prior to departure, they overlapped for almost five days with three colleagues who arrived Wednesday on the Shenzhou-15 mission for their own six-month stay, marking the first time China had six astronauts in space at the same time. The station’s third and final module docked with the station this month.
The astronauts were carried out of the capsule by medical workers about 40 minutes after touchdown. They were all smiles, and appeared to be in good condition, waving happily at workers at the landing site.
“I am very fortunate to have witnessed the completion of the basic structure of the Chinese space station after six busy and fulfilling months in space,” said Chen, who was the first to exit the capsule. “Like meteors, we returned to the embrace of the motherland.”
Liu, another of the astronauts, said that she was moved to see relatives and her fellow compatriots.
The three astronauts were part of the Shenzhou-14 mission, which launched in June. After their arrival at Tiangong, Chen, Liu and Cai oversaw five rendezvous and dockings with various spacecraft including one carrying the third of the station’s three modules.
They also performed three spacewalks, beamed down a live science lecture from the station, and conducted a range of experiments.
The Tiangong is part of official Chinese plans for a permanent human presence in orbit.
China built its own station after it was excluded from the International Space Station, largely due to U.S. objections over the Chinese space programs’ close ties to the People’s Liberation Army, the military wing of the ruling Communist Party.
With the arrival of the Shenzhou-15 mission, the station expanded to its maximum weight of 100 tons.
Without attached spacecraft, the Chinese station weighs about 66 tons — a fraction of the International Space Station, which launched its first module in 1998 and weighs around 465 tons.
With a lifespan of 10 to 15 years, Tiangong could one day be the only space station still up and running if the International Space Station retires by around the end of the decade as expected.
China in 2003 became the third government to send an astronaut into orbit on its own after the former Soviet Union and the United States.
China has also chalked up uncrewed mission successes: Its Yutu 2 rover was the first to explore the little-known far side of the moon. Its Chang’e 5 probe also returned lunar rocks to Earth in December 2020 for the first time since the 1970s, and another Chinese rover is searching for evidence of life on Mars.
Officials are reported to be considering an eventual crewed mission to the moon, although no timeline has been offered.
WASHINGTON (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in Washington on Tuesday for the first state visit of Joe Biden’s presidency — a revival of diplomatic pageantry that had been put on hold because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Biden-Macron relationship had a choppy start. Macron briefly recalled France’s ambassador to the United States last year after the White House announced a deal to sell nuclear submarines to Australia, undermining a contract for France to sell diesel-powered submarines.
But the relationship has turned around with Macron emerging as one of Biden’s most forward-facing European allies in the Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This week’s visit — it will include Oval Office talks, a glitzy dinner, a news conference and more — comes at a critical moment for both leaders.
The leaders have a long agenda for their Thursday meeting at the White House, including Iran’s nuclear program, China’s increasing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific and growing concerns about security and stability in Africa’s Sahel region, according to U.S. and French officials. But front and center during their Oval Office meeting will be Russia’s war in Ukraine, as both Biden and Macron work to maintain economic and military support for Kyiv as it tries to repel Russian forces.
The visit also comes as both Washington and Paris are keeping an eye on China after protests broke out last weekend in several mainland cities and Hong Kong over Beijing’s “zero COVID” strategy. At a red carpet arrival ceremony after landing in Washington on Tuesday evening, Macron ignored a shouted question from a reporter about whether he and Biden planned to discuss the China protests — the biggest show of public dissent in China in decades.
In Washington, Republicans are set to take control of the House, where GOP leader Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday following a meeting with Biden and fellow congressional leaders again vowed that Republicans will not write a “blank check” for Ukraine. Across the Atlantic, Macron’s efforts to keep Europe united will be tested by the mounting costs of supporting Ukraine in the nine-month war and as Europe battles rising energy prices that threaten to derail the post-pandemic economic recovery.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Monday described Macron as the “dynamic leader” of America’s oldest ally while explaining Biden’s decision to honor the French president with the first state visit of his presidency.
The U.S. tradition of honoring foreign heads of state dates back to Ulysses S. Grant, who hosted King David Kalakaua of the Kingdom of Hawaii for a more than 20-course White House dinner, but the tradition has been on hold since 2019 because of COVID-19 concerns.
“If you look at what’s going on in Ukraine, look at what’s going on in the Indo Pacific and the tensions with China, France is really at the center of all those things,” Kirby said. “And so the president felt that this was exactly the right and the most appropriate country to start with for state visits.”
Macron was also Republican Donald Trump’s pick as the first foreign leader to be honored with a state visit during his term. The 2018 state visit included a jaunt by the two leaders to Mount Vernon, the Virginia estate of George Washington, America’s founding president.
French government spokesperson Olivier Veran said Tuesday that Macron’s second state visit is “a strong symbol of the partnership between France and the United States.” It shows “very strong ties” between the countries and comes at a moment where the world is faced with important international issues, including the war in Ukraine, food security, climate and energy, he said.
Veran added that there is a need for “re-synchronizing” the agendas of the European Union and the United States to face crises, especially on energy and rising prices.
Macron has a packed day of meetings and appearances in and around Washington on Wednesday — including a visit to NASA headquarters with Vice President Kamala Harris and talks with Biden administration officials on nuclear energy.
On Thursday, Macron will have his private meeting with Biden followed by a joint news conference and visits to the State Department and Capitol Hill before Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron, are feted at the state dinner. Grammy winner Jon Batiste is to provide the entertainment. The White House prepared for days for Macron’s arrival, setting up a large tent for the festivities on the South Lawn and decorating light poles bordering the White House complex with French flags.
Macron will head to New Orleans on Friday, where he is to announce plans to expand programming to support French language education in U.S. schools, according to French officials.
For all of that, there are still areas of tension in the U.S.-French relationship.
Biden has steered clear of embracing Macron’s calls on Ukraine to resume peace talks with Russia, something Biden has repeatedly said is a decision solely in the hands of Ukraine’s leadership.
Perhaps more pressing are differences that French and other European Union leaders have raised about Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, sweeping legislation passed in August that includes historic spending on climate and energy initiatives. Macron and other leaders have been rankled by a provision in the bill that provides tax credits to consumers who buy electric vehicles manufactured in North America.
The French president, in making his case against the subsidies, will underscore that it’s crucial for “Europe, like the U.S., to come out stronger … not weaker” as the world emerges from the tumult of the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to a senior French government official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity to preview private talks.
Macron earlier this month said the subsidies could upend the “level playing field” on trade with the EU and called aspects of the Biden legislation “unfriendly.”
The White House, meanwhile, plans to counter that the legislation goes a long way in helping the U.S. meet global efforts to curb climate change. The president and aides will also impress on the French that the legislation will also create new opportunities for French companies and others in Europe, according to a senior Biden administration official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity to preview the talks.
Macron’s visit comes about 14 months after the relationship hit its nadir after the U.S. announced its deal to sell nuclear submarines to Australia.
After the announcement of the deal, which had been negotiated in secret, France briefly recalled its ambassador to Washington. A few weeks later Macron met Biden in Rome ahead of the Group of 20 summit, where the U.S. president sought to patch things up by acknowledging his administration had been “clumsy” in how it handled the issue.
Macron’s visit with Harris to NASA headquarters on Wednesday will offer the two countries a chance to spotlight their cooperation on space.
France in June signed the Artemis Accords, a blueprint for space cooperation supporting NASA’s plans to return humans to the moon by 2024 and to launch a historic human mission to Mars.
The same month, the U.S. joined a French initiative to develop new tools for adapting to climate change, the Space for Climate Observatory.
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Corbet reported from Paris. Associated Press writers Colleen Long and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed reporting.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA’s new moon rocket blasted off on its debut flight with three test dummies aboard Wednesday, bringing the U.S. a big step closer to putting astronauts back on the lunar surface for the first time since the end of the Apollo program 50 years ago.
If all goes well during the three-week, make-or-break shakedown flight, the crew capsule will be propelled into a wide orbit around the moon and then return to Earth with a Pacific splashdown in December.
After years of delays and billions in cost overruns, the Space Launch System rocket thundered skyward, rising from Kennedy Space Center on 8.8 million pounds (4 million kilograms) of thrust and hitting 100 mph (160 kph) within seconds. The Orion capsule was perched on top and, less than two hours into the flight, busted out of Earth’s orbit toward the moon.
“It’s a great day,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
The moonshot follows nearly three months of vexing fuel leaks that kept the rocket bouncing between its hangar and the pad. Forced back indoors by Hurricane Ian at the end of September, the rocket stood its ground outside as Nicole swept through last week with gusts of more than 80 mph (130 kph). Although the wind caused some damage, managers gave the green light for the launch.
An estimated 15,000 people jammed the launch site, with thousands more lining the beaches and roads outside the gates, to witness NASA’s long-awaited sequel to Project Apollo, when 12 astronauts walked on the moon from 1969 and 1972. Crowds also gathered outside NASA centers in Houston and Huntsville, Alabama, to watch the spectacle on giant screens.
Cheers accompanied the rocket as it rode a huge trail of flames toward space, with a half-moon glowing brightly and buildings shaking as though hit by a major quake.
“For the Artemis generation, this is for you,” launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson called out, referring to all those born after Apollo.
The liftoff marked the start of NASA’s Artemis lunar-exploration program, named after Apollo’s mythological twin sister. The space agency is aiming to send four astronauts around the moon on the next flight, in 2024, and land humans there as early as 2025.
“You have earned your place in history,” Blackwell-Thompson told her team following liftoff.
The 322-foot (98-meter) SLS is the most powerful rocket ever built by NASA, with more thrust than either the space shuttle or the mighty Saturn V that carried men to the moon. A series of hydrogen fuel leaks plagued the summertime launch attempts as well as countdown tests. A fresh leak erupted at a new location during Tuesday night’s fueling, but an emergency team managed to tighten the faulty valve on the pad. Then a U.S. Space Force radar station went down, resulting in another scramble, this time to replace an ethernet switch.
“The rocket, it’s alive. It’s creaking. It’s making venting noises. It’s pretty scary. … My heart was pumping. My nerves were going,” said Trent Annis, one of the three men who entered the blast danger zone to fix Tuesday night’s leak.
Orion should reach the moon by Monday, more than 230,000 miles (370,000 kilometers) from Earth. After coming within 80 miles (130 kilometers) of the moon, the capsule will enter a far-flung orbit stretching about 40,000 miles (64,000 kilometers) beyond.
The $4.1 billion test flight is set to last 25 days, roughly the same as when crews will be aboard. The space agency intends to push the spacecraft to its limits and uncover any problems before astronauts strap in. The mannequins — NASA calls them moonequins — are fitted with sensors to measure such things as vibration, acceleration and cosmic radiation.
The rocket was supposed to have made its dry run by 2017. Government watchdogs estimate NASA will have spent $93 billion on the project by 2025.
Ultimately, NASA hopes to establish a base on the moon and send astronauts to Mars by the late 2030s or early 2040s.
But many hurdles still need to be cleared. The Orion capsule will take astronauts only to lunar orbit, not the surface.
NASA has hired Elon Musk’s SpaceX to develop Starship, the 21st-century answer to Apollo’s lunar lander. Starship will carry astronauts back and forth between Orion and the lunar surface, at least on the first trip in 2025. The plan is to station Starship and eventually other companies’ landers in orbit around the moon, ready for use whenever new Orion crews pull up.
Reprising an argument that was made during the 1960s, Duke University historian Alex Roland questions the value of human spaceflight, saying robots and remote-controlled spacecraft could get the job done more cheaply, efficiently and safely.
“In all these years, no evidence has emerged to justify the investment we have made in human spaceflight — save the prestige involved in this conspicuous consumption,” he said.
NASA is waiting until this test flight is over before introducing the astronauts who will be on the next one and those who will follow in the bootsteps of Apollo 11′s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
Most of NASA’s corps of 42 active astronauts and 10 trainees were not even born yet when Apollo 17 moonwalkers Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt closed out the era, 50 years ago next month.
“We are jumping out of our spacesuits with excitement,” astronaut Christina Koch said Tuesday.
After a nearly yearlong space station mission and all-female spacewalk, Koch, 43, is on NASA’s short list for a lunar flight. So is astronaut Kayla Barron, 35, who finally got to witness her first rocket launch, not counting her own a year ago.
“It took my breath away, and I was tearing up,” Barron said. “What an amazing accomplishment for this team.”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
LOS ANGELES — A satellite intended to improve weather forecasting and an experimental inflatable heat shield to protect spacecraft entering atmospheres were launched into space from California on Thursday.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying the Joint Polar Satellite System-2 satellite and the NASA test payload lifted off at 1:49 a.m. from Vandenberg Space Force Base, northwest of Los Angeles.
Developed for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, JPSS-2 was placed into an orbit that circles the Earth from pole to pole, joining previously launched satellites in a system designed to improve weather forecasting and climate monitoring.
NASA said there was no immediate data confirming deployment of the satellite’s electricity-producing solar array, but late in the day the space agency announced that it was fully extended.
“The operations team will continue to evaluate an earlier solar array deployment issue, but at this time, the satellite is healthy and operating as expected. The team has resumed normal activities for the JPSS-2 mission,” a NASA statement said.
The array has five panels that were collapsed in an accordion fold for launch. The fully deployed array extends 30 feet (9.1 meters).
Mission officials say the satellite represents the latest technology and will increase precision of observations of the atmosphere, oceans and land.
After releasing the satellite, the rocket’s upper stage reignited to position the test payload for re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere and descent into the Pacific Ocean.
Called LOFTID, short for Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator, the device is an “aeroshell” that could be used to slow and protect heavy spacecraft descending into atmospheres, such as those of Mars or Venus, or payloads returning to Earth.
According to NASA, effectively slowing heavy spacecraft will require greater atmospheric drag than can be created by traditional rigid heat shields that fit within the shrouds that surround payloads aboard rockets.
The LOFTID shield inflates to about 20 feet (6 meters) in diameter.
In the thin atmosphere of Mars, for example, having such a large shield would begin slowing the vehicle at higher altitudes and reduce the intensity of heating, according to the space agency.
Video showed the inflated heat shield separate from the rocket and descend toward Earth. A camera aboard a recovery vessel a few hundred miles east of Hawaii showed the it splash down under a parachute.
NASA said the shield was picked up by the boat, which then headed to recover a backup data module that was ejected during the descent.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Two NASA spacecraft at Mars — one on the surface and the other in orbit — have recorded the biggest meteor strikes and impact craters yet.
The high-speed barrages last year sent seismic waves rippling thousands of miles across Mars, the first ever detected near the surface of another planet, and carved out craters nearly 500 feet (150 meters) across, scientists reported Thursday in the journal Science.
The larger of the two strikes churned out boulder-size slabs of ice, which may help researchers look for ways future astronauts can tap into Mars’ natural resources.
The Insight lander measured the seismic shocks, while the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provided stunning pictures of the resulting craters.
Imaging the craters “would have been huge already,” but matching it to the seismic ripples was a bonus, said co-author Liliya Posiolova of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego. “We were so lucky.”
Mars’ atmosphere is thin unlike on Earth, where the thick atmosphere prevents most space rocks from reaching the ground, instead breaking and incinerating them.
A separate study last month linked a recent series of smaller Martian meteoroid impacts with smaller craters closer to InSight, using data from the same lander and orbiter.
The impact observations come as InSight nears the end of its mission because of dwindling power, its solar panels blanketed by dust storms. InSight landed on the equatorial plains of Mars in 2018 and has since recorded more than 1,300 marsquakes.
“It’s going to be heartbreaking when we finally lose communication with InSight,” said Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the lander’s chief scientist who took part in the studies. “But the data it has sent us will certainly keep us busy for years to come.”
Banerdt estimated the lander had between four to eight more weeks before power runs out.
The incoming space rocks were between 16 feet and 40 feet (5 meters and 12 meters) in diameter, said Posiolova. The impacts registered about magnitude 4.
The larger of the two struck last December some 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) from InSight, creating a crater roughly 70 feet (21 meters) deep. The orbiter’s cameras showed debris hurled up to 25 miles (40 kilometers) from the impact, as well as white patches of ice around the crater, the most frozen water observed at such low latitudes, Posiolova said.
Posiolova spotted the crater earlier this year after taking extra pictures of the region from orbit. The crater was missing from earlier photos, and after poring through the archives, she pinpointed the impact to late December. She remembered a large seismic event recorded by InSight around that time and with help from that team, matched the fresh hole to what was undoubtedly a meteoroid strike. The blast wave was clearly visible.
Scientists also learned the lander and orbiter teamed up for an earlier meteoroid strike, more than double the distance of the December one and slightly smaller.
“Everybody was just shocked and amazed. Another one? Yep,” she recalled.
The seismic readings from the two impacts indicate a denser Martian crust beyond InSight’s location.
“We still have a long way to go to understanding the interior structure and dynamics of Mars, which remain largely enigmatic,” said Doyeon Kim of ETH Zurich’s Institute of Geophysics in Switzerland, who was part of the research.
Outside scientists said future landers from Europe and China will carry even more advanced seismometers. Future missions will “paint a clearer picture” of how Mars evolved, Yingjie Yang and Xiaofei Chen from China’s Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen wrote in an accompanying editorial.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Four SpaceX astronauts returned to Earth after staying at the International Space Station for six months. They studied how to grow vegetables in space and the effects of space travel in humans.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Ancient Mars may have had an environment capable of harboring an underground world teeming with microscopic organisms, French scientists reported Monday.
But if they existed, these simple life forms would have altered the atmosphere so profoundly that they triggered a Martian Ice Age and snuffed themselves out, the researchers concluded.
The findings provide a bleak view of the ways of the cosmos. Life — even simple life like microbes — “might actually commonly cause its own demise,” said the study’s lead author, Boris Sauterey, now a post-doctoral researcher at Sorbonne University.
The results “are a bit gloomy, but I think they are also very stimulating.,” he said in an email. “They challenge us to rethink the way a biosphere and its planet interact.”
In a study in the journal Nature Astronomy, Sauterey and his team said they used climate and terrain models to evaluate the habitability of the Martian crust some 4 billion years ago when the red planet was thought to be flush with water and much more hospitable than today.
They surmised that hydrogen-gobbling, methane-producing microbes might have flourished just beneath the surface back then, with several inches (a few tens of centimeters) of dirt, more than enough to protect them against harsh incoming radiation. Anywhere free of ice on Mars could have been swarming with these organisms, according to Sauterey, just as they did on early Earth.
Early Mars’ presumably moist, warm climate, however, would have been jeopardized by so much hydrogen sucked out of the thin, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, Sauterey said. As temperatures plunged by nearly minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 200 degrees Celsius), any organisms at or near the surface likely would have buried deeper in an attempt to survive.
By contrast, microbes on Earth may have helped maintain temperate conditions, given the nitrogen-dominated atmosphere, the researchers said.
The SETI Institute’s Kaveh Pahlevan said future models of Mars’ climate need to consider the French research.
Pahlevan led a separate recent study suggesting Mars was born wet with warm oceans lasting millions of years. The atmosphere would have been dense and mostly hydrogen back then, serving as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that eventually was transported to higher altitudes and lost to space, his team concluded.
The French study investigated the climate effects of possible microbes when Mars’ atmosphere was dominated by carbon dioxide and so is not applicable to the earlier times, Pahlevan said.
“What their study makes clear, however, is that if (this) life were present on Mars” during this earlier period, “they would have had a major influence on the prevailing climate,” he added in an email.
The best places to look for traces of this past life? The French researchers suggest the unexplored Hellas Planita, or plain, and Jezero Crater on the northwestern edge of Isidis Planita, where NASA’s Perseverance rover currently is collecting rocks for return to Earth in a decade.
Next on Sauterey’s to-do list: looking into the possibility that microbial life could still exist deep within Mars.
“Could Mars still be inhabited today by micro-organisms descending from this primitive biosphere?” he said. “If so, where?”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Ancient Mars may have had an environment capable of harboring an underground world teeming with microscopic organisms, French scientists reported Monday.
But if they existed, these simple life forms would have altered the atmosphere so profoundly that they triggered a Martian Ice Age and snuffed themselves out, the researchers concluded.
The findings provide a bleak view of the ways of the cosmos. Life — even simple life like microbes — “might actually commonly cause its own demise,” said the study’s lead author, Boris Sauterey, now a post-doctoral researcher at Sorbonne University.
The results “are a bit gloomy, but I think they are also very stimulating.,” he said in an email. “They challenge us to rethink the way a biosphere and its planet interact.”
In a study in the journal Nature Astronomy, Sauterey and his team said they used climate and terrain models to evaluate the habitability of the Martian crust some 4 billion years ago when the red planet was thought to be flush with water and much more hospitable than today.
They surmised that hydrogen-gobbling, methane-producing microbes might have flourished just beneath the surface back then, with several inches (a few tens of centimeters) of dirt, more than enough to protect them against harsh incoming radiation. Anywhere free of ice on Mars could have been swarming with these organisms, according to Sauterey, just as they did on early Earth.
Early Mars’ presumably moist, warm climate, however, would have been jeopardized by so much hydrogen sucked out of the thin, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, Sauterey said. As temperatures plunged by nearly minus-400 degrees Fahrenheit (minus-200 degrees Celsius), any organisms at or near the surface likely would have buried deeper in an attempt to survive.
By contrast, microbes on Earth may have helped maintain temperate conditions, given the nitrogen-dominated atmosphere, the researchers said.
The SETI Institute’s Kaveh Pahlevan said future models of Mars’ climate need to consider the French research.
Pahlevan led a separate recent study suggesting Mars was born wet with warm oceans lasting millions of years. The atmosphere would have been dense and mostly hydrogen back then, serving as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that eventually was transported to higher altitudes and lost to space, his team concluded.
The French study investigated the climate effects of possible microbes when Mars’ atmosphere was dominated by carbon dioxide and so is not applicable to the earlier times, Pahlevan said.
“What their study makes clear, however, is that if (this) life were present on Mars” during this earlier period, “they would have had a major influence on the prevailing climate,” he added in an email.
The best places to look for traces of this past life? The French researchers suggest the unexplored Hellas Planita, or plain, and Jezero Crater on the northwestern edge of Isidis Planita, where NASA’s Perseverance rover currently is collecting rocks for return to Earth in a decade.
Next on Sauterey’s to-do list: looking into the possibility that microbial life could still exist deep within Mars.
“Could Mars still be inhabited today by micro-organisms descending from this primitive biosphere? he said. “If so, where?”
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President Obama, Boeing CEO and Elon Musk Are Competing to Place the First Human on Mars, But According to Leaked Intel by Whistleblower Corey Goode, They Lost The Space Race Decades Ago
Press Release –
Oct 13, 2016
Richardson, Texas, October 13, 2016 (Newswire.com)
– On Tues, Oct. 11th President Barack Obama wrote an Opinion Editorial via CNN.com announcing to the citizens of the United States that, “America has set a clear goal to send humans to Mars by the 2030s…we do what’s possible before anyone else.” The problem here is that during a Nov. 2015 video interview with Gaia.com, whistleblower Corey Goode from the US Secret Space Program (SSP) said, “There are humans already on Mars and it’s been colonized.” In Dec. 1986, Goode was recruited into SSP – UNSAP (Un-Acknowledged Special Access Programs) under Project Solar Warden. He was assigned to a research vessel in space to study the solar system from Dec. 1986 – Dec. 2007.
President Obama and the US government join a heavy-hitter list of private-sector visionaries, such as Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg and Elon Musk (SpaceX), as they compete to make a historical dent in space. On Oct. 4th, according to Bloomberg Technology, Muilenburg said, “It’s my company that’s sending the first humans to Mars, not Musk. I’m convinced the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding a Boeing rocket.”
“Mars was first visited by the Germans as far back as the 1930s, but during the 70s, US space programs were actively exploring Mars and other planets to establish bases.”
Corey Goode , SSP Whistleblower
“Mars was first visited by the Germans as far back as the 1930s, but during the 70s, US space programs were actively exploring Mars and other planets to establish bases. In 1980 the US SSP became – Solar Warden. Under Project Solar Warden, vast development and colonization occurred on Mars and other planets. Goode continues, “Bases on Mars were built under the surface.”
Alongside New York Times best-selling author and researcher David Wilcock (“Ascension Mysteries”), Goode is co-host of Gaia’s successful original show: Cosmic Disclosure. With over 70 episodes and a viewership reaching over 68,000 per episode, the show reveals in-depth access to Goode’s astounding, yet controversial, revelations during his 20-year service.
