• Category Archives Space

  • Asteroid hunters want to launch private telescope

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    In a bold plan unveiled Thursday, the group of former NASA employees wants to launch its own space telescope to spot and track small and mid-sized space rocks capable of wiping out a city or continent. They could sound early warnings if a rogue asteroid appeared headed toward our planet.

    So far, the idea from the B612 Foundation is on paper only.

    Such an effort would cost upward of several hundred million dollars. Behind the nonprofit are a space shuttle astronaut, Apollo 9 astronaut, former Mars czar, deep space mission manager and other non-NASA types.

    Asteroids are leftovers from the formation of the solar system some 4.5 billion years ago. Most reside in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but some get nudged into Earth’s neighborhood.

    NASA and a network of astronomers routinely scan the skies for these near-Earth objects. They’ve found 90 percent of the biggest threats — asteroids that are considered major killers. Scientists believe one such asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.

    But the group thinks more attention should be paid to the estimated half a million smaller asteroids — similar in size to the one that exploded over Siberia in 1908 and leveled more than 800 square miles (2,071 square kilometers) of forest.

    “We know these objects are out there, and we can do something to prevent them” from hitting Earth, said former Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who helped establish the foundation a decade ago.

    Asteroids are getting attention lately. NASA turned down a return to the moon in favor of a manned landing on an asteroid. Last month, Planetary Resources Inc., a company founded by space entrepreneurs, announced plans to extract precious metals from asteroids within a decade.

    Full article: http://phys.org/news/2012-06-asteroid-hunters-private-telescope.html


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  • Huge Mars Rover’s Landing Will Be ‘7 Minutes of Terror’

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    In just six weeks, NASA’s next Mars rover will attempt an unprecedented landing on the Red Planet that will have mission engineers on the edge of their seats with excitement and worry.

    The 1-ton Curiosity rover — the centerpiece of NASA’s $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission — is due to touch down inside the Red Planet’s Gale Crater on the night of Aug. 5. But it won’t be easy.

    “Entry, descent and landing, also known as EDL, is referred to as the ’seven minutes of terror,’” EDL engineer Tom Rivellini, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., said in a recent JPL video.

    “We’ve got literally seven minutes to go from the top of the atmosphere to the surface of Mars, going from 13,000 miles per hour to zero in perfect sequence, perfect choreography, perfect timing,” Rivellini added. “And the computer has to do it all by itself, with no help from the ground. If any one thing doesn’t work just right, it’s game over.”

    Curiosity’s landing will likely be more anxiety-inducing than most planetary touchdowns. The robot is too big to land cushioned by airbags like previous Red Planet rovers, so researchers had to come up with an entirely new method.

    They settled on a rocket-powered sky crane, which will lower Curiosity to the Martian surface on cables before flying off to crash-land on purpose a safe distance away.

    “When people look at it, it looks crazy,” EDL engineer Adam Steltzner, also of JPL, said in the video. “That’s a very natural thing. Sometimes when we look at it, it looks crazy. It is the result of reasoned engineering thought, but it still looks crazy.”

    On the night of Aug. 5, the MSL spacecraft will hit the Martian atmosphere going about 13,000 mph (21,000 kph). As it barrels through the Red Planet air, MSL’s heat shield will literally glow, reaching temperatures of about 2,900 degrees Fahrenheit (1,600 degrees Celsius).

    The relatively thin Martian atmosphere will slow MSL down to only 1,000 mph (1,600 kph) or so, Rivellini said. So the spacecraft will also deploy a parachute, one that can withstand 65,000 pounds (29,500 kilograms) of force despite weighing just 100 pounds (45 kg) itself.

    But even the parachute won’t be enough.

    “This big huge parachute that we’ve got, it’ll only slow us down to about 200 miles per hour,” Rivellini said. “And that’s not slow enough to land. So we have no choice, but we’ve got to cut it off and then come down on rockets.”

    The rockets can’t fire all the way to the ground, however, or they’d raise a huge dust cloud that could damage the rover’s instruments and mechanisms, researchers said. To avoid such a ruckus, Curiosity will be lowered to the Martian surface on 21-foot-long (6.4 meters) cables. When the rover is safely down, the cables will be released and the rocket-propelled sky crane will fly off so it doesn’t crash into Curiosity.

    The 14-minute communications lag between Earth and Mars means that the MSL team won’t be getting real-time updates about the rover’s perilous journey.

    “When we first get word that we’ve touched the top of the atmosphere, the vehicle has been alive, or dead, on the surface for at least seven minutes,” Steltzner said.

    Full article: http://www.space.com/16296-curiosity-mars-rover-landing-terror.html


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  • ArduSat Kickstarter project puts an Arduino-based satellite up for rent

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    While most of us wouldn’t know where to start if we were given access to a satellite, the ArduSat Kickstarter project aims to enable people who would. The project involves designing a CubeSat — a standardized satellite form factor measuring just under four inches per side — based on Arduino hardware and which will be leased to scientists, students, and hobbyists as they need it. The ArduSat is loaded with sensors, cameras, and radios that will be available for use in just about any experiment you can think of, and that’s the point: the team is trying to create an open source, crowd-funded opportunity to run experiments in space without having to undergo months of planning and fundraising.

    The ArduSat will be equipped with three cameras, an open source spectrometer, magnetometer, and even a Geiger counter. It will also come with accelerometers, a gyroscope, a flight navigation system, and a spare GPS chip just for research purposes, among many others. Data collected during the experiments will be stored on SD cards and transmitted back to earth via UHF radios, where it will be passed on by the staff of ArduSat. The entire satellite will be powered by solar panels located on 4 inch square exterior frame.

    Because of the Arduino’s well documented, open-source nature and multitude of add-ons, the open source prototyping platform has become a hit with engineers, scientists, and students since its debut in 2005. By choosing a platform with such a widespread adoption rate, the ArduSat team is hoping that peoples’ familiarity with the programming language will help them stage experiments faster than they could have otherwise.

    Full article: http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/21/3108858/ardusat-kickstarter-arduino-satellite-cubesat


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