SCIENCE BOND

Posts

Showing posts with the label Nasa

Skywatchers can see close and larger bright Mars this month

Mars makes its closest approach to Earth in a decade this month, providing sky-watchers with a celestial show from dusk to dawn starting this week, NASA said on Thursday. The red planet already looms large in the nighttime skies, appearing as a bright, fire-yellow, star-like light as a result of Earth, the third planet from the sun, and Mars, the fourth, coming into close alignment. “Just look southeast after the end of twilight, and you can’t miss it,” Sky & Telescope magazine editor Alan MacRobert said in a statement. This alignment occurs about every 26 months. On Thursday, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released a photograph of Mars taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as the planet neared Earth last week. The detailed image showed polar caps and clouds above Mars' rust-hued landscape. On May 30, Mars and Earth will come closer than they have been in a decade, NASA said. Mars will be 46.8 million miles away. The di...

Nasa and the amazing space printer

There has only ever been one way to get something into space: blast it up there. It is expensive - every ounce of weight costs thousands of pounds. If we are ever going to survive in space, this simply will not do. Sooner or later, we are going to have to start making things without relying on Earth. The first step of this inspiringly significant process was unveiled recently by Nasa at its research park in Silicon Valley.On 23 March, a 3D printer will be blasted up to the six-strong crew in the ISS. It will be used to make spare parts, as well as experiments. A prototype printer - the first manufacturing device ever in space - has already been trailed by the ISS crew. This new model, however, will see the project move into being fully operational. "You can bring us a USB stick with your file, and we can digitally send it to space," says Andrew Rush, chief executive of Made In Space, the Nasa-funded start-up developing the technology. "Via 3D printing we...

Europe excited by Dream Chaser mini-shuttle

Nasa has extended contracts to existing commercial cargo carriers, Orbital ATK and SpaceX, but has added a third team: the Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC). This new entrant will fly an automated mini-shuttle called Dream Chaser. Esa has agreements to co-operate with SNC, which should now lead to European companies providing components. Chief among these contributions will be the International Berthing and Docking Mechanism (IBDM) - a new system developed in Europe to join spacecraft together. Dream Chaser will have one at its rear to make a sealed connection to a free port on the orbiting platform. Astronauts will move through the IBDM to access the vehicle's several tonnes of supplies.The selection of SNC by Nasa to run at least six cargo sorties to the ISS, starting no earlier than 2019, should trigger a multi-million-euro contract between Esa and QinetiQ of Belgium. The firm will lead a consortium in the production of the first IBDM - a prototyp...

Scientists in the US are making detailed 3D maps of the cavities carved by comet dust

Stardust visited Comet Wild 2 in 2004, catching samples from its dusty tail in specially made slabs of "aerogel". By studying the tracks with microscopes and synchrotron X-rays, researchers aim to reconstruct exactly what kind of particles first hit the gel. They are also identifying extra, tiny grains to be extracted and tested. "We want to tell people where the interesting grains are," said Amanda White, a student working on the project at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.She presented her work this week at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Florida. Most work on Stardust samples to date has selected the grains using regular optical images, concentrating on the relatively large particles that burrowed their way right into the foam. But when the dust first slammed into the gel at 6km/s (13,421mph) it carved out complex shapes, often resembling a teardrop, with a large bulb near the entry point that gradually n...

Nasa has suspended its next mission to Mars because of a fault in a key research instrument

Nasa said a problem with a seismometer provided by the French space agency meant the launch could not go ahead. It is feared the mission could now face a two-year delay. The InSight spacecraft was scheduled to take off between 4-30 March and land on the Red Planet six months later to examine Mars' geology in depth. Nasa said it had decided to call off the launch because the agency was unable to fix a leak affecting the seismometer, which required a vacuum seal to cope with harsh conditions on Mars. The instrument is designed to measure ground movements. "A decision on a path forward will be made in the coming months, but one thing is clear: Nasa remains fully committed to the scientific discovery and exploration of Mars," Nasa's John Grunsfeld was quoted as saying by the AFP news agency. The next time the earth and Mars are favourably aligned for a launch will be in 2018. The mission is also intended to monitor the temperature on Mars, as wel...

Scientists are getting closer to explaining precisely how Mars lost its atmosphere

Researchers working on the US space agency's Maven satellite have reported their first big set of results in a clutch of scholarly papers. These detail how Martian air today is being removed at high altitudes through its interactions with the Sun. They calculate the rates at which gases escape, and suggest why these rates may have been even higher in the past. "We're well on the way to answering many of our questions; much further along actually than I thought we would be at this stage," said Bruce Jakosky, the principal investigator on Nasa's Maven spacecraft. "What we're reporting today is data from just the first 6-7 months from our primary mission.All the observations by previous satellites and landers at the Red Planet indicate that it was once shrouded in a thick blanket of gases, which supported the presence of liquid water at its surface. This is evident in the many landscape features that resemble the remains of river channels, de...

Cassini probe taste water chemistry over Saturn's moon Enceladus

water flowing in moon The Nasa craft swept just 50km above the moon's surface in a final attempt to "taste" the chemistry of water jets spewing from its south pole. Enceladus has produced a series of major discoveries that mean it is now considered one of the most promising places to find life beyond Earth. Scientists say it has an ocean beneath its icy crust. What is more, the conditions in this global body of liquid water could be benign enough to support microbial organisms. "Enceladus is not just an ocean world - it's a world that might provide a habitable environment for life as we know it," said Cassini program scientist Curt Niebur, in a media briefing on Monday. "On Wednesday we'll plunge deeper into that magnificent plume coming from the South Pole than ever before. And we will collect the best sample ever from an ocean beyond earth."Cassini will attempt to detect molecular hydrogen during Wednesday's encounter. ...

First scientific paper published

Appearing in Science magazine, the article is largely a collation of information already made public through media briefings and press releases. It includes the mission team’s initial impressions of Pluto and its moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra. And, of course, it details some of the basic numbers that can now be used to describe these far-flung objects. Every week, we have something new and wonderful to look at and speculate aboutDr John Spencer, Southwest Research Institute. One key early result from the US space agency (Nasa) probe is the precise measure of Pluto's radius, of 1,187km, plus or minus 4km. "This doesn't sound particularly exciting but you have to remember estimates of Pluto's radius varied from 1,150km to 1,200km, so this will really help those people modelling how Pluto/Charon formed, their atmospheres and the material exchange between them," said team member Dr Carly Howett from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) ...

Nasa's Curiosity rover on Mars

Whale rock on Mar One explanation for Whale is a static model, and the other is a dynamic time model," explains Prof Gupta, from Imperial College London. The latter may be right, and that would be really exciting because it is telling us something about the water budget changing. But the important thing is that we are seeing the interface between the rivers and the lakes. Whale is a marker for us that they existed at the same time, and that really gives us confidence in particular that we are seeing ancient lake deposits. At the point when researchers first saw it in pictures came back from Nasa's Curiosity meanderer on Mars, they truly weren't certain what to make of it. Sitting glad on top of a heap of finely layered mudstones, this coarser sandstone outcrop appeared a bit strange. Along these lines, the group charged the robot to drive here and there for a bit, to take a gander at some other tempting geography in Gale Crater. Be that as it may, ...