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I don't believe manned space flight is being gated by unwillingness to pay to explore space.Longknife
Thank you for sharing these stuningly beautiful images of space. Getting back to the topic of the latest space news and discoveries, what do you personally think about the possibility of sending humans to the red planet one day. I guess it's feasible but the endevour like that involves so many decisions that need to be made on a super high level that a flight to Mars is still in our dreams only and might never happen. Besides, the current global economic system is quite unstable and there's no country that would invest big bucks into space exploration if it's not sure that returns will exceed costs
Earlier this year, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft lost its second gyroscope wheel. Although there are a total of four wheels, three operational ones are necessary to allow Kepler to position itself to point at the right patch of sky. With two of these wheels down, Kepler's search for habitable exoplanets came to an end. Since then, it’s just been floating out there in space, although NASA never gave up on using it for something. NASA, along with a team of engineers from Ball Aerospace, have figured out a way to recover the ability to position Kepler, by using the Sun. In other words, the Kepler search for habitable planets is back in business.
The Sun, which provides energy to Kepler's solar panels, moves the spacecraft around as photons hit the spacecraft. NASA believes they can use the solar pressure by distributing it evenly across the spacecraft, giving it some of the stability which was lost with the failing of the gyroscope wheels. However, Kepler will need to be in an exact position in relation to the sun.
Nov 27,2013
Korea plans to launch an exploratory lunar probe aboard its own launch vehicle by June 2020 and later embark on missions to Mars and asteroids by 2040, the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning announced yesterday.
This represents a revision of the space development blueprint that moves up the time frame of the lunar landing mission and outlines a budget and other long-term space plans.
Venus is one of the brightest objects in the night sky, and there's still much to be learned about this planet named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. For example, did the planet ever have water? Scientists at NASA think so, and have sent a rocket, VeSpR, with an onboard telescope into space to study the planet’s atmosphere and learn if water ever existed on its surface.
What we currently know about Venus and its potential for water comes from data gathered back in 1978. Then, scientists believed that Venus might have once held enough water to cover the entirety of the planet. However, we need updated information about the levels of hydrogen and deuterium (heavy hydrogen) in the planet’s atmosphere to confirm or disprove that. Deuterium is a heavier hydrogen isotope and might have stayed in Venus’ atmosphere even after the sun’s UV rays broke apart regular hydrogen atoms, releasing them into space. By comparing how much hydrogen and deuterium is present, scientists can create theories on how much water might have once existed on the planet and what happened to it.
Read more at: China readies to launch first moon rover missionChina will launch its first ever moon rover mission on Monday, state media said, as Beijing embarks on the latest stage in its ambitious space programme.
A rocket carrying the vehicle, named "Jade Rabbit" in a nod to Chinese folklore, will blast off at 1:30 am local time (Sunday 1730 GMT).
"The Chang'e 3 is set to be launched for its moon mission from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on Dec. 2," state broadcaster CCTV said on its verified Twitter account on Saturday.
China has launched its first lunar rover mission, the next key step in the Asian superpower's ambitious space programme.
The Chang'e-3 mission blasted off from Xichang in the south at 01:30 Monday local time (17:30 GMT Sunday).
The Long March rocket's payload includes a landing module and a six-wheeled robotic rover called Yutu (or Jade Rabbit).
The mission should land in the Moon's northern hemisphere in mid-December.
Chinese state TV carried live pictures of the launch of the Chinese-developed Long March 3B rocket carrying the lunar probe.
This will be the third robotic rover mission to land on the lunar surface, but the Chinese vehicle carries a more sophisticated payload, including ground-penetrating radar which will gather measurements of the lunar soil and crust.
With our recent trips to Mars and beyond, it's easy to take a "been there, done that" attitude towards exploration of the Moon. But not for China, which has been steadily building up its space program over the last few years.
China has successfully launched a Long March rocket on a mission named Chang'e-3, carrying a lunar rover called Jade Rabbit. The rover is about the size of a small camping trailer and weighs a little over 300 pounds. Its mission is to do a bunch of typical science related stuff, like analyzing rocks and soil, mapping the landing area, and making astronomical observations using an optical telescope and ultraviolet cameras. Of course, seeing as the mission is being run by the top secret Chinese military, there's no telling what else they might be planning to do up there.
Chang'e-3 will be the first man-made object to land in a controlled manner on the Moon since the Soviets landed Luna 24 in August of 1976. The U.S. hasn't landed anything on the Moon's surface since the manned Apollo 17 mission way back in 1972. In the 37 years since Luna 24, there have been eight missions that have intentionally crashed into the Moon's surface, but that's a whole lot easier than making a soft landing and sending back data.
The next generation of spacesuits is here. Engineers at Kansas State University are working on a prototype suit that can monitor an astronaut’s vital signs by providing power to integrated electronic components. What makes this spacesuit so unique, though, is that it gets its power from an astronaut’s body heat.
This new suit is a replica of the spacesuit used in the now-defunct space shuttle program. Using this model, engineers want to convert energy generated from an astronaut’s body heat into power for on-board electronics like sensors and radios. Batteries are too dangerous to use with spacesuits because of the oxygen they generate, so an alternate energy source is necessary.
(Phys.org) —Using the powerful eye of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, two teams of scientists have found faint signatures of water in the atmospheres of five distant planets.
The presence of atmospheric water was reported previously on a few exoplanets orbiting stars beyond our solar system, but this is the first study to conclusively measure and compare the profiles and intensities of these signatures on multiple worlds.
The five planets—WASP-17b, HD209458b, WASP-12b, WASP-19b and XO-1b—orbit nearby stars. The strengths of their water signatures varied. WASP-17b, a planet with an especially puffed-up atmosphere, and HD209458b had the strongest signals. The signatures for the other three planets, WASP-12b, WASP-19b and XO-1b, also are consistent with water.
After two delays, private US company SpaceX on Tuesday successfully launched its first commercial satellite, after repairs were made to the Falcon 9 rocket.
Ever since Google announced that they'd be going to the moon in 2015, NASA has been planning to hitch a ride with the tech giant. The space agency's goal is to stow a few hitchhiking plants aboard the eventual winner of Google's Lunar X Prize and then unload them upon the surface of the moon.
Once upon the lunar surface, these plants, encapsulated in their own little greenhouses, will test whether plants can grow upon the moon. So far NASA is planning on sending basil, turnips and some flowers to the lunar surface in the hopes that they will be capable of surviving the radiation that the moon's thin atmosphere experiences. As seedlings, plants can be just as susceptible to damage from radiation as we are, so you could say that the turnips and flowers will actually function in part as a human analogue.
The team of NASA, L’Guarde, and Space Services Inc. are preparing for the Sunjammer space mission that in 2015 will see the first deep space deployment of a solar sail. On September 30, the Sunjammer team completed a milestone when they successfully deployed a quarter panel of the spacecraft’s solar sail.
An international team of astronomers, led by a University of Arizona graduate student, has discovered the most distantly orbiting planet found to date around a single, sun-like star. It is the first exoplanet a planet outside of our solar system discovered at the UA.
One big problem when sending things into space is, well, space. Rockets have limited payload capacity and given the costs involved, every inch counts. That's why Brigham Young University researchers have turned to origami as their inspiration. Their folding solar array is designed to be compact at launch and expand to around 10 times its size once it's deployed in outer space.
China's first lunar rover entered the moon's orbit on Friday, state media reported, a key step towards the vessel's planned landing later this month.
The rover -- known as Yutu, or Jade Rabbit -- reached lunar orbit late Friday, the official Xinhua news agency said, about 112 hours after it was launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwestern China.
It is expected to touch down on the moon in mid-December to explore its surface and search for natural resources.
The ancient lake environment found in Mars' Gale Crater could have supported microbes called chemolithoautotrophs - if they had been present.
That is the conclusion of scientists after reviewing all the pictures and other data gathered in the deep impact bowl by Nasa's Curiosity rover.
Chemolithoautotrophs do not need light to function; instead, they break down rocks and minerals for energy.
On Earth, they exist underground, in caves and at the bottom of the ocean.
In Mars' Gale Crater, such organisms would have found just as conducive a setting, and one that the scientists now think could have lasted for many millions of years.
"For all of us geologists who are very familiar with what the early Earth must have been like, what we see in Gale really doesn't look much different," Curiosity chief scientist Prof John Grotzinger told BBC News.
He was speaking here in San Francisco at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the largest annual gathering of Earth and planetary researchers.
Late last week, a crowd of thousands gathered in Las Vegas to see the unveiling of a squat little object that could almost be mistaken for an innertube wearing a tutu. But there's a lot more going on under this contraption's skirts than you might assume. It's the MX-1 lunar lander, and it just might be the invention that brings private enterpise to the moon.
The company behind the MX-1 is Moon Express, a NASA-partnered company founded in 2010. The company's goal for the MX-1 isn't just to walk away with $30 million of Google's prize money. They want to use it to mine the surface of the moon and establish our satellite as Earth's "eighth continent."
