NASA Testing Super Black Material

Imagine something so black, so devoid of any reflected light that it is impossible to see when it is folded! This new material absorbs 99.5% of all visible light that hits it and 99.8% of all infrared. This is seriously dark material!

Scientist, astronomers and engineers alike hope that this material, that they hope to coat devices like components going on to space telescopes (or even land based scopes). This would drastically cut down on the light reflected into the optics and optical sensors.

NASA sent a little round of the coating to the International Space Station, aboard a recent resupply flight. This delivery also contained experimental robotic systems for fixing satellites in orbit.  It is NASA's plan that the coating module will stay on an unpressurized platform, on the outside of the ISS, exposing it to the rigors of space, for a year, before being sent back to Earth for analysis.

Read the rest of the Popular Science article HERE

Testing Orion's Parachutes

 

NASA's Orion crew module  is said to be "the safest spacecraft ever built to carry humans",

One of the most critical components on the Orion is the parachute system.  The team responsible for  Orion's parachute have demonstrated every type of failure they could imagine. But recently they began tests that center on failures that did not involve the parachutes but the launch system during the early stages of a mission - failure on the pad or sub-orbital, they tested how the parachutes would perform.

  Its called the Launch Abort System.  (from the article on Science Daily)

•  In an emergency on the launch pad or during the early stages of ascent, it can activate in milliseconds to pull the crew to safety. Once it has pulled the crew away from the emergency, it's up to the parachutes to bring them down for a safe landing..


• To simulate those conditions, a test version of Orion was dropped from a C-17 at 13,000 feet above the U.S. Army's Yuma Proving Ground, with the main parachutes deploying soon after leaving the plane, before the capsule had a chance to straighten out. All the elements worked together and the parachutes reached a fully open state setting up a soft landing as expected. But the real value of the test will come with the data the engineers were able to gather from it. 

Orion's first mission will be four hours long and unmanned.   The capsule will be launched 3600 miles into space and make two orbits of Earth   and re-enter the atmosphere at 20,000 mph and temperatures nearing 4000 degrees Fahrenheit .

Again, from the Science Daily blog:

• (This first flight will be) to test several of its most critical systems, including its parachutes.

Coldest Plance on Earth?

Nope, it is not what you think.  It is Chamber A NASA’s vacuum chamber.    Chamber A can subject anything within its 400,000 cubic feet to the  deadly conditions of deep space while maintaining the scrubbed conditions of a clean room. To give you a sense of scale, look at the two people standing in the door of the massive chamber.  The door itself weighs in at  40-tons.   Chamber A can also reach 11 Kelvin, making it the coldest place on Earth.

The chamber was originally commisioned to test Apollo equipment in a space environment and was later refitted to test air bag landing systems used by some of the earlier Martian rovers. 

Chamber A recently went through a refit for testing the James Webb Space Telescope. 

Wikipedia listing Here