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US Space Program - a thread

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During a press conference held on Thursday, Jan. 14, 2016, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, NASA announced the winners of the second phase of contracts for its Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program. Those announced included names established under CRS, as well as one new one – Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Dream Chaser space plane.

Catching a dream: SNC's tenacious spacecraft selected for NASA's CRS-2 contract - SpaceFlight Insider

This could be described as my favourite design reentering the field with a nurtured to life by government contract akin to SpaceX and Orbital.

Also, this:

PARIS — Sierra Nevada Corp.’s win of a NASA contract to ferry cargo to the International Space Station will trigger a $36 million investment by the 22-nation European Space Agency following a cooperation agreement to be signed in the coming weeks, ESA said

Europe to invest in Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser cargo vehicle - SpaceNews.com

Also, little bit of background, when Sierra Nevada was not chosen at a tender of this kind a few years back, it went on to sign cooperation deals with German DLR, whose then president is now Director General at ESA.
If it all works out in regards to technical issues and alike, i give this option a slightly larger chance of success than above mentioned companies in scoring government contracts in the future. If only for political reasons....
 
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Catching a dream: SNC's tenacious spacecraft selected for NASA's CRS-2 contract - SpaceFlight Insider

This could be described as my favourite design reentering the field with a nurtured to life by government contract akin to SpaceX and Orbital.

Also, this:



Europe to invest in Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser cargo vehicle - SpaceNews.com

Also, little bit of background, when Sierra Nevada was not chosen at a tender of this kind a few years back, it went on to sign cooperation deals with German DLR, whose then president is now Director General at ESA.
If it all works out in regards to technical issues and alike, i give this option a slightly larger chance of success than above mentioned companies in scoring government contracts in the future. If only for political reasons....

 
http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/27/10853426/spacex-dragon-spacecraft-parachute-test-successful


SpaceX successfully tests parachutes that will help bring astronauts back to Earth

SpaceX has successfully tested four large parachutes that will eventually be used to help lower its crewed Dragon spacecraft back to Earth. NASA published a videoof the drop test today, which shows the four large parachutes deploying and slowing a mock spacecraft beneath them.

NASA has been paying SpaceX to make cargo runs to and from the International Space Station since 2012. Despite one big loss, the contract has gone so well that NASA is going to use SpaceX (and Boeing) to shuttle astronauts to and from the space station in the coming years. SpaceX is building a crew-rated version of its Dragon spacecraft for this express purpose.

But before that can happen, the company has a long series of milestone tests it needs to pass, and the parachute test was the most recent. Using a giant weight in place of an actual spacecraft, the company dropped the test rig from a C-130 aircraft thousands of feet in the air over Coolidge, Arizona. All four parachutes properly deployed.

Though the test rig settled down somewhere in the desert, the current plan is to have the Dragon crew capsule splash down in the ocean. It will be the first time that astronauts have landed in water since the late 1970s. Those first missions are slated for late 2017 or early 2018.

At the same time that SpaceX is testing for a parachute-assisted landing in the water, it's also testing propulsive landings. Just last week, the company published a video of the Dragon crew spacecraft successfully hovering in place using the eight built-in SuperDraco rocket engines. Despite what NASA wants, SpaceX's goal is to use these engines to safely lower returning crews onto landing pads, and save the parachutes for emergencies only.
 
Opportunity Mars Rover Marks 12 Years on Red Planet

http://www.space.com/31735-opportunity-rover-12-years-mars.html

NASA's Opportunity Mars rover just keeps rolling along, a dozen years after touching down on the Red Planet.

Opportunity landed on Mars 12 years ago Sunday (Jan. 24), a few weeks after its twin, Spirit, hit the red dirt. (Opportunity's landing occurred on Jan. 25, 2004, in the GMT time zone, but it was still Jan. 24 in the PST time zone, where the rover's home base, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, is located.) The two robots were tasked with finding signs of past water activity on Mars, and both of them quickly turned up plenty of evidence near their disparate landing sites.

Spirit and Opportunity were originally supposed to explore for just 90 days, but both rovers far outlasted their warranties. Spirit stopped communicating with Earth in 2010 and was declared dead a year later, and Opportunity is still going strong today. [See Mars photos by Spirit and Opportunity]

While Opportunity has suffered some memory problems in the past year, its solar panels are working well, rover team members said. The robot has been able to keep working through the minimum-power months of the southern Martian winter instead of staying still to conserve energy. (The southern winter solstice occurred Jan. 2.)

"Opportunity has stayed very active this winter, in part because the solar arrays have been much cleaner than in the past few winters," Mars exploration rover project manager John Callas, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement.

This month, Opportunity's rock abrasion tool carved the crust of a rock target nicknamed "Private John Potts" after a member of Lewis and Clark's expedition. Opportunity is working on the south side of a feature called Marathon Valley, to take advantage of the sun crossing the northern sky.

Over the years, Opportunity's controllers have developed new techniques to keep the rover going even in minimum-power situations. They take advantage of sun-soaked areas of the Martian terrain and try to pick spots that are a little breezy, to clear dust off the panels. This prevents lengthy work outages, such as a four-month stay on the sidelines that Opportunity experienced during its first Mars winter.

The golf-cart-size rover has been exploring the rim of Endeavour crater, which is 14 miles (22 kilometers) wide, since August 2011. Its work in Endeavour's Marathon Valley should conclude this year, NASA officials said.

Opportunity has traveled 26.5 miles (42.65 km) on Mars to date — more than a marathon, and farther than any other robot has ever traveled on the surface of a world beyond Earth.

Opportunity is one of two active NASA rovers on the Red Planet; the car-size Curiosity rover touched down in August 2012, and is currently exploring the foothills of the 3-mile-high (5 km) Mount Sharp, far from Opportunity's location.

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Pluto’s Bedrock Is Made Of Frozen Water: There’s More H2O On The Dwarf Planet Than We Thought


http://www.techtimes.com/articles/1...e-h2o-on-the-dwarf-planet-than-we-thought.htm
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New maps released by NASA show that the dwarf planet has more water ice than previously thought. The data taken by the New Horizons spacecraft captures more prevalent frozen water on Pluto's surface, an "important discovery," according to researchers.

A false-colored map taken by the Ralph/Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA) instrument shows the areas on Pluto's surface are concentrated with frozen water. The images were taken on July 14, 2015 during New Horizons' flyby from a range of about 67,000 miles.

NASA has stitched together two images taken about 15 minutes apart. Instead of having a flat image, scientists combined the images to have a multispectral "data cube" of Pluto covering the full hemisphere visible to the spacecraft as it flew past the dwarf planet.

LEISA shows mapped concentrations of water ice, but the scientists have found that the spectral readings could be thrown off if water ice is combined with frozen methane. They have also modeled the contributions, and in effect, the map now shows wider concentrations and stretches where water ice should be present.

"The much more sensitive method used on the right involves modeling the contributions of Pluto's various ices all together. This method, too, has limitations in that it can only map ices included in the model, but the team is continually adding more data and improving the model," NASA said.

Though the map shows widespread frozen water concentrations on the surface of the planet, there is little or no water ice on the western region of Pluto's "heart", dubbed Sputnik Planum, and the far north on the encounter hemisphere, Lowell Regio.

Where's the water ice on Pluto? False-color pic from @NASANewHorizons shows us: https://t.co/6ffUfOrE0w pic.twitter.com/yjUm4rThbL

— NASA (@nasa) January 29, 2016

According to prevailing hypothesis, Sputnik Planum is a gigantic glacier made of methane ice, nitrogen ice and carbon monoxide, which makes it free from water ice. In these areas, frozen ice might be hidden under a thick blanket of the giant glacier.

The New Horizons spacecraft has sent photos that revealed bright methane ices located on various rims of the planet's craters. The photos show a collection of little, red soot-like particles called tholins created by reactions between methane and nitrogen.

Take a flight over dwarf planet Ceres with a new colorful animation from NASA

http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/29/10868264/nasa-ceres-video-tour-dwarf-planet

It's unlikely that we'll ever get to personally visit all the fascinating locations in our Solar System, but NASA is great at bringing the joys of space to us. Today, the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory released an incredibly detailed color animation depicting what it would look like to fly over the dwarf planet Ceres. The video was made using images taken from NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which is currently in orbit around Ceres in the asteroid belt.

NASA is great at bringing the joys of space to us

The video is extra vibrant because Ceres is depicted in false color; that means the colors have been exaggerated to highlight the subtle differences in the materials on the dwarf planet's surface. The areas that shine blue are thought to be made of materials much younger than the rest of the surface. The video tour also takes viewers to Ceres' most famous attractions of craters and mountains, including the ultimate headliner: the huge bright crater named Occator. The origins of these bright spots are still a bit of a mystery, but scientists think that Occator and the other shiny areas are likely made out of some kind of salt.

The images used for this video were taken when Dawn was at an altitude of about 900 miles above Ceres. In late October, Dawn descended into its final orbit around the dwarf planet, just a mere 240 miles from the surface. That's where Dawn will remain for the rest of its mission life. In fact, the spacecraft is in such a stable orbit that it is expected to become a new permanent satellite of Ceres, circling the small world for many years to come.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)

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Orion Crew module for Exploration Mission-1 Arrives at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center

https://blogs.nasa.gov/kennedy/2016...sion-1-arrives-at-nasas-kennedy-space-center/

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NASA’s Super Guppy aircraft, carrying the Orion crew module pressure vessel for NASA’s Exploration Mission-1, arrived at the Shuttle Landing Facility operated by Space Florida at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Photo credit: NASA/Brittney Mostert

The Orion crew module pressure vessel for NASA’s Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1) arrived today at the Shuttle Landing Facility operated by Space Florida at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Arrival of the module marks an important milestone toward the agency’s journey to Mars.

The crew module arrived aboard the agency’s Super Guppy aircraft from NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. Welding work on the pressure vessel, which is the underlying structure of the crew module, was completed at Michoud.

The crew module was offloaded from the Super Guppy and readied for transport to the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building high bay for processing. In the high bay, NASA and Orion manufacturer Lockheed Martin will outfit the crew module with its systems and subsystems necessary for flight, including its heat-shielding thermal protection system.

NASA’s Space Launch System rocket will be the largest rocket ever built. It will carry the Orion spacecraft on EM-1, a test flight scheduled for 2018. During EM-1, Orion will travel thousands of miles beyond the moon over the course of a three-week mission.

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NASA Space Launch System’s First Flight to Send Small Sci-Tech Satellites Into Space

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The first flight of NASA’s new rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), will carry 13 CubeSats to test innovative ideas along with an uncrewed Orion spacecraft in 2018.

These small satellite secondary payloads will carry science and technology investigations to help pave the way for future human exploration in deep space, including the journey to Mars. SLS’ first flight, referred to as Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1), provides the rare opportunity for these small experiments to reach deep space destinations, as most launch opportunities for CubeSats are limited to low-Earth orbit.

“The 13 CubeSats that will fly to deep space as secondary payloads aboard SLS on EM-1 showcase the intersection of science and technology, and advance our journey to Mars,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman.

The secondary payloads were selected through a series of announcements of flight opportunities, a NASA challenge and negotiations with NASA’s international partners.

“The SLS is providing an incredible opportunity to conduct science missions and test key technologies beyond low-Earth orbit," said Bill Hill, deputy associate administrator for Exploration Systems Development at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This rocket has the unprecedented power to send Orion to deep space plus room to carry 13 small satellites – payloads that will advance our knowledge about deep space with minimal cost.”

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The Lunar Flashlight, flying as secondary payload on the first flight of NASA’s Space Launch System, will examine the moon’s surface for ice deposits and identify locations where resources may be extracted.
Credits: NASA


NASA selected two payloads through the Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) Broad Agency Announcement:

  • Skyfire - Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, Denver, Colorado, will develop a CubeSat to perform a lunar flyby of the moon, taking sensor data during the flyby to enhance our knowledge of the lunar surface
  • Lunar IceCube - Morehead State University, Kentucky, will build a CubeSat to search for water ice and other resources at a low orbit of only 62 miles above the surface of the moon
Three payloads were selected by NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate:

  • Near-Earth Asteroid Scout, or NEA Scout will perform reconnaissance of an asteroid, take pictures and observe its position in space
  • BioSentinel will use yeast to detect, measure and compare the impact of deep space radiation on living organisms over long durations in deep space
  • Lunar Flashlight will look for ice deposits and identify locations where resources may be extracted from the lunar surface
Two payloads were selected by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate:

  • CuSP – a “space weather station” to measure particles and magnetic fields in space, testing practicality for a network of stations to monitor space weather
  • LunaH-Map will map hydrogen within craters and other permanently shadowed regions throughout the moon’s south pole
Three additional payloads will be determined through NASA’s Cube Quest Challenge – sponsored by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate and designed to foster innovations in small spacecraft propulsion and communications techniques. CubeSat builders will vie for a launch opportunity on SLS’ first flight through a competition that has four rounds, referred to as ground tournaments, leading to the selection in 2017 of the payloads to fly on the mission.

NASA has also reserved three slots for payloads from international partners. Discussions to fly those three payloads are ongoing, and they will be announced at a later time.

On this first flight, SLS will launch the Orion spacecraft to a stable orbit beyond the moon to demonstrate the integrated system performance of Orion and the SLS rocket prior to the first crewed flight. The first configuration of SLS that will fly on EM-1 is referred to as Block I and will have a minimum 70-metric-ton (77-ton) lift capability and be powered by twin boosters and four RS-25 engines. The CubeSats will be deployed following Orion separation from the upper stage and once Orion is a safe distance away. Each payload will be ejected with a spring mechanism from dispensers on the Orion stage adapter. Following deployment, the transmitters on the CubeSats will turn on, and ground stations will listen for their beacons to determine the functionality of these small satellites.
 
SpaceX Is Gearing Up To Build Lots and Lots of New Rockets

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It’s been a few really good months for SpaceX, and now, the commercial spaceflight company is kicking rocket production into high gear in anticipation of a packed launch schedule.

Speaking on Thursday at the Federal Aviation Administration’s Commercial Space Transportation Conference, SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell explained that the company was transitioning from testing and development of its Falcon 9 rocket cores to mass production.

“Now we’re in this factory transformation to go from building six or eight a year to about 18 cores a year. By the end of this year we should be at over 30 cores per year,” Shotwell said. “So you see the factory start to morph.”

SpaceX has not yet announced a date for its next launch, which will carry the SES-9 communications satellite into orbit, but Shotwell indicated that the launch would be taking place within the next several weeks. After that, the company could be flying missions “every two to three weeks”.

Meanwhile, crewed Falcon 9 flights are still on track to begin next year, with an in-flight test of the Crew Dragon spacecraft’s launch escape system set to take place before the end of 2016. This first-of-its-kind failsafe system will allow the crew capsule to separate during ascent in event of a booster failure on the way to orbit.

Development of the Falcon Heavy rocket is still underway. When the first Falcon Heavy launches later this year, it’ll be the most powerful rocket on Earth by a factor of two, capable of lifting over 53 metric tons of mass into orbit.

Exciting times we live in.
 
NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover at Namib Dune (360 Video)


Go full screen and love your mouse around the pic
 
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NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover at Namib Dune (360 Video)


I don't know if you're interested or not, but I've moved the bulk of my contributions here:

US Space Program Thread | Page 2 | The American Military Forum

We're always welcoming new additions. People on this site have been(and are) getting on my nerves a bit too much:sick:.
 
I don't know if you're interested or not, but I've moved the bulk of my contributions here:

US Space Program Thread | Page 2 | The American Military Forum

We're always welcoming new additions. People on this site have been(and are) getting on my nerves a bit too much:sick:.

Doh! I didn't know that
 
Mysterious Martian "Cauliflower" May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life | Science | Smithsonian

Unusual silica formations spotted by a NASA rover look a lot like structures formed by microbes around geysers on Earth

The hunt for signs of life on Mars has been on for decades, and so far scientists have found only barren dirt and rocks. Now a pair of astronomers thinks that strangely shaped minerals inside a Martian crater could be the clue everyone has been waiting for.


In 2008, scientists announced that NASA’s Spirit rover had discovered deposits of a mineral called opaline silica inside Mars's Gusev crater. That on its own is not as noteworthy as the silica’s shape: Its outer layers are covered in tiny nodules that look like heads of cauliflower sprouting from the red dirt.

No one knows for sure how those shapes—affectionately called “micro-digitate silica protrusions”—formed. But based on recent discoveries in a Chilean desert, Steven Ruff and Jack Farmer, both of Arizona State University in Tempe, think the silica might have been sculpted by microbes. At a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December, they made the case that these weird minerals might be our best targets for identifying evidence of past life on Mars.

If the logic holds, the silica cauliflower could go down in history as arguably the biggest discovery ever in astronomy. But biology is hard to prove, especially from millions of miles away, and Ruff and Farmer aren’t claiming victory yet. All they’re saying is that maybe these enigmatic growths are mineral greetings from ancient aliens, and someone should investigate.


Spirit found the silica protrusions near the “Home Plate” region of Gusev crater, where geologists think hot springs or geysers once scorched the red planet's surface. To understand what that long-dormant landscape used to be like, we have to look closer to home: hydrothermal regions of modern Earth that resemble Mars in its ancient past.

To that end, Ruff has twice in the past year trekked to Chile’s Atacama Desert, a high plateau west of the Andes cited as the driest non-polar place on Earth. Scientists often compare this desert to Mars, and not just poetically. It’s actually like Mars. The soil is similar, as is the extreme desert climate.

In this part of the Atacama, it rains less than 100 millimeters per year, and temperatures swing from -13°F to 113°F. With an average elevation of 13,000 feet above sea level, lots of ultraviolet radiation makes it through the thin atmosphere to the ground, akin to the punishing radiation that reaches the surface of Mars.

Just as we interpret others’ behavior and emotions by peering into our own psychology, scientists look around our planet to help them interpret Mars, find its most habitable spots and look for signs of life. While the Atacama does have breathable oxygen and evolutionarily clever foxes (which Mars does not), its environment mimics Mars’s pretty well and makes a good standin for what the red planet may have been like when it was warmer and wetter.

So when geologists see something in the Atacama or another Mars analog that matches a feature on the red planet, they reasonably conclude that the two could have formed the same way. It’s not a perfect method, but it’s the best we’ve got.

“I don't think there is any way around using modern Earth analogs to test where Martian microbes may be found,” says Kurt Konhauser of the University of Alberta, who is the editor-in-chief of the journal Geobiology.

To understand Home Plate, it makes sense that Ruff turned to El Tatio, a region in the Atacama that is home to more than 80 geysers. While most other earthly animals wouldn’t last long here, many microbes do just fine, and fossil evidence suggests they also thrived in the distant past. By inference, Mars’s Home Plate might have once made a nice microbial home.

But the comparison goes further: When Ruff peered closely at El Tatio’s silica formations, he saw shapes remarkably similar to those that Spirit had seen on Mars. Fraternal cauliflower twins also exist in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and the Taupo Volcanic Zone in New Zealand. In both of those places, the silica bears the fossilized fingerprints of microbial life.

Since microbes sculpted the silica features in Wyoming and New Zealand, it's possible they also helped make the formations at El Tatio. And if microbes were involved with the cauliflower at El Tatio, maybe they made it grow on Mars, too.

But making a logical leap from one region on Earth to another—from New Zealand to Chile, for example—isn’t trivial or always correct. And it’s even more tenuous to then hop to a whole other planet where, so far, scientists have seen no signs of life. After all, history doesn’t favor life-friendly interpretations of data from Mars.

The Viking 1 lander, which set foot on the red planet in 1976, performed the first life-seeking experiments there. Three of them came up empty. One, called the Labeled Release experiment, found that something in the soil absorbed the nutrient solution that scientists fed it and then released an excretory plume of carbon dioxide, as if it were metabolizing the nutrients. But the team couldn’t replicate those results, and after much excitement, the researchers had to declare the experiment inconclusive.

Twenty years later, a Mars meteorite found in Antarctica in 1984 caused a similar kerfuffle. NASA scientist David McKay published a paper in 1996 suggesting that the space rock might hold the fossils of once-living things, creating a media uproar. But other scientists soon demonstrated that the “bacteria-shaped objects” and biology-friendly molecules could have formed abiotically, or without the help of life.

Similarly, the carbon dioxide that Viking detected could have been a geochemical, not a biological, reaction. According to Konhauser, most potential biosignatures could also come about non-biologically. Scientists would have to rule out all those non-living possibilities before they could say for sure that we’re not alone.

That lesson definitely applies to the Martian cauliflower.

“Having worked on modern hot springs, I have seen all forms of structures that look biological but are not,” Konhauser says. Silica can come from non-biological processes and water, geography, wind or other environmental factors can then shape it into complex structures. “Because it looks biological doesn’t mean it is,” he says.

For the moment, Ruff and Farmer are calling attention to the Martian cauliflower because they believe it's worth further study. For instance, research teams can take hard looks at the various processes that could have spawned the formations on Mars and help to rule out non-biological alternatives.

“Only when something that we have identified as a potential biosignature is proven to have been produced only by life, and not by any abiotic means, can we make the claim that definitive evidence for life has been found,” says Sherry Cady of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, who is a member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

She agrees that the silica growths at Home Plate look like those near hot springs on Earth. But she would like to examine the evidence up close—and not just in portraits. “I would certainly like to see some of those samples brought back,” she says.

While Spirit stopped its scientific roving in 2010, NASA’s Mars 2020 rover, due to launch in a few years, is supposed to collect samples for eventual return to Earth. And the most recent meeting to narrow down landing-site choices for the rover kept Gusev crater on the list of candidates. Maybe the rover should pick some of that cauliflower and potentially turn Home Plate into a home run.

While they wait for additional data from Mars, Ruff and Farmer will do more digging on Earth. They plan to investigate El Tatio to see if its silica does, in fact, show the handiwork of living beings. If they find positive results, they will have made their chain of logic one loop smaller, perhaps bringing us closer to finding out whether any single-celled cousins once squirmed around on the red planet.
 

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