James T. Kirk Goes to Mars

James T. Kirk is going to Mars or better said, the actor, who famously portrayed Capt. James T. Kirk in the original "Star Trek" TV series and a number of movies, is one of more than 2.4 million people who have signed up to send their names to Mars aboard NASA's InSight lander.

The signatures will ride aboard two microchips affixed to InSight, which is scheduled to launch toward the Red Planet in May 2018. The first microchip is already aboard; it has been engraved with 827,000 names, which were collected in 2015.

Mars exploration took a big leap 20 years ago on July 4, 1997.  NASA's Pathfinder mission touched down on the Red Planet, delivering a lander and a small rover called Sojourner — the agency's first wheeled Mars craft — to the surface.

Pathfinder helped pave the way for two decades of eight other NASA robots to have reached Mars, and five of them remain active today.

Mars_2020 Rover

from NASA-JPL_This image is from computer-assisted-design work on the Mars 2020 rover. The design borrows heavily NASA's Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012.  Though similar in appearance the newest rover adds new science instruments and a sampling system to carry out new goals for the 2020 mission.

NASA Selects Five Mars Orbiter Concept Studies

NASA has selected five U.S. aerospace companies to conduct concept studies for a potential future Mars orbiter mission. 

The companies contracted are: The Boeing Company in Huntington Beach, California; Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver; Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems in Redondo Beach, California; Orbital ATK in Dulles, Virginia; and Space Systems/Loral in Palo Alto, California.

For complete NASA article, click HERE

NASA is ready to proceed with final design and construction of its next Mars rover, currently targeted to launch in the summer of 2020 and arrive on the Red Planet in February 2021.

The Mars 2020 rover will investigate a region of Mars where the ancient environment may have been favorable for microbial life, probing the Martian rocks for evidence of past life. Throughout its investigation, it will collect samples of soil and rock and cache them on the surface for potential return to Earth by a future mission.

Mars Mystery Plumes

In 2012 Amateur astronomers using telescopes on Earth were the first to report cloud-like plumes that reached heights of 155 miles above the surface of Mars. The feature developed in less than 10 hours, covered an area of up to 621 x 311 miles, and remained visible for around 10 days.

Frozen carbon dioxide and water are not thought to be able to form clouds of 155 miles high in the atmosphere.

The high altitude corresponds to the ionosphere, where the atmosphere directly interacts with the incoming solar wind of electrically charged atomic particles.  

Get complete article at the ESA page HERE

Space- The Final Beer Frontier

Listener Barry sent me in this hilarious YouTube video

You know the commercials with the hook "The Most Interesting Man"  well here is the ultimate twist...

Solar Wind stripped Mars' Atmosphere

There is no doubt that the Solar System is several billion years old.

Many dramatic changes have taken place system wide. Mars for example has undergone extreme geological and meteralogic transformations. 

 For example, Mars, several billion years ago was a warm, moist place quite capable of supporting life. Now Mars is a cold,dry place. 

 Even today, scientists report, solar winds strip about 100 grams of atmosphere a day. 

 Not much by previous amounts however in the far distant past, huge solar storms travelling at several times the present speeds, allowed for 10 to 20 times as much material. Because of their strength and speed, These solar storms were capable of gutting Mars' atmosphere from warm and moist to cold and dry desert of today. 

 For more read this CBCnews article HERE

Orion Spacecraft is one Weld Closer to it's Next Mission

NASA is one step closer to sending astronauts to Mars. Engineers at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans welded together the first two segments of the Orion crew module that will fly atop NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on a mission beyond the far side of the moon.

The primary structure of Orion’s crew module is made of seven large aluminum pieces that must be precisely welded together.  The first weld connects the tunnel to the forward bulkhead, which is at the top of the spacecraft and houses many of Orion’s critical systems, such as the parachutes that deploy during reentry. Orion’s tunnel, with a docking hatch, will allow crews to move between the crew module and other spacecraft. 

During the coming months as other pieces of Orion’s primary structure arrive at Michoud from machine houses across the country, engineers will inspect and evaluate them to ensure they meet precise design requirements before welding. Once complete, the structure will be shipped to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida where it will be assembled with the other elements of the spacecraft.

Read the complete article HERE

Whoa NASA! Just What the Heck WAS That?

A NASA image showing a strange object on Mars has sparked the imagination of many who think this is finally the smoking gun evidence that “crab monsters” exist on the red planet.  

If you examine the rock formation more closely you’ll see something odd-looking – but not entirely uncommon.
 

See More Photos and the rest of the article HERE

Opportunity Rover Completes Marathon

NASA's wonder rover Opportunity has set yet another benchmark, one that should prove difficult to copy by any of its contemporaries.  Opportunity, it seems, has set a very high bar by completing   a marathon distance of better than 26 miles, and doing so in 11+ years to boot! (the rover is a bit on the, dare I say, curious side and managed to stop and explore many times)  

The rover (which has long since passed the "best used by" date) set the mark during a drive of 153 feet.

According to the NASA post:

• Opportunity became the long-distance champion of all off-Earth vehicles, Last year, when it topped the previous record set by the former Soviet Union's Lunokhod 2 moon rover.
• Opportunity's original three-month prime mission in 2004 yielded evidence of environments with liquid water soaking the ground and flowing on planet’s surface. As the rover continued to operate far beyond expectations for its lifespan, scientists chose the rim of Endeavour Crater as a long-term destination. Since 2011, examinations of Endeavour's rim have provided information about ancient wet conditions less acidic, and more favorable for microbial life, than the environment that left clues found earlier in the mission

Continue reading the NASA article HERE 

Missing Beagle May Have Been Found

On December 19, 2003, the Mars Express orbiter released a tiny spaceship called the Beagle 2. The small lander streaked through the thin Martian atmosphere at well over 12 thousand miles per hour and was never heard from again. 

From the Global News article:

• After more than 11 years, European Space Agency officials reported that the Beagle 2 had been finally found – thanks to extensive detective work based on new photos taken by the high-resolution camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
• The photos show the craft landed safely on Mars and partially deployed — but was unable to fully deploy and start communicating.

The 143-pound Beagle 2 was designed to descend through the Martian atmosphere, deploy parachutes, and “bounce” to a safe landing on inflatable bags.

More from the Global News article:

• Experts who helped identify the lander at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Lab said the photographs are “consistent” with only a partial deployment of the Beagle 2 upon landing. They said a failure to fully deploy would explain why no data or signals from the craft were ever received, since a complete deployment of all of its solar panels would have been needed for successful transmissions.

Complete article @ Global News  HERE

Don't Dismiss Life on Mars Just Yet.

 

NASA's rover Curiosity was sent to Mars to explore Gale's crater, looking for the most part for the chemical markers that could indicate that in Mars' distant past, the Martian environment could have supported life.

Maven gets inserted 9/21/14

Oh you have such a dirty mind!  NASA's MAVEN, a Mars science package, will enter the Martian atmosphere at an altitude of 236 (what wildly accurate shooting huh?) to begin a 33 minute deceleration burn that will consume more than half of the on-board fuel carried by the satellite.   This combination of  atmosphere and  engine burn will insert Maven into a 35 hour capture orbit.  

MAVEN will then begin a calibration phase a part of which includes maneuvering the spacecraft into its final 4.5 hour orbit.  During this period, controller, will  test its instruments and science-mapping commands.  After-which MAVEN will begin its one-Earth-year mission to take measurements of the composition, structure and escape of gases in Mars’ upper atmosphere and its interaction with the sun and solar wind.

NASA Maven article   HERE

NASA's Next Rover in 2020 Will Step Up the Science

The next rover NASA will send to Mars in 2020 will carry  carefully-selected instruments to conduct  science and exploration  investigations on the Red Planet at an unprecedented level.

NASA announced that it has selected 7 instruments out of a pool of 58 for the Mars 2020 rover.  The Mars 2020 rover will be based on the design of the highly successful Curiosity, which  is still operating on Mars, after it's landing 2 years ago.

From the NASA article:

• Scientists will use the Mars 2020 rover to identify and select a collection of rock and soil samples that will be stored for potential return to Earth by a future mission.

Here is the link to the NASA ARTICLE

Sat Comm for Mars?

 

Wow, tell me that this in not an innovative idea!  It seems that NASA may be trying to get out of the Sat Comm business, as far as Mars is concerned. 

NASA has ask for information from commercial partners to supply satellite communications on future Mars rover missions.  The commercial partner would own and operate a satellite communications network that would provide communication to NASA.  

NASA is not just limiting the field to US commercial entities but also, universities, nonprofits, NASA centers, federally funded research and development centers, in addition to U.S. government and international organizations. 

This call for information on alternative communications network does begin to make sense when one takes into account that NASA is concerned about communications gaps in the 2020s.  

At this time, NASA has the  Curiosity and Opportunity rovers on the Martian surface.  For high speed communications with these rovers, NASA uses the high gain and high power relay radios aboard  Odyssey, which was launched in 2001, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter(MRO), launched in 2005. These two will be augmented by  the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft which arrives Sept. 21, and the 2016 arrival of the European Space Agency’s ExoMars/Trace Gas Orbiter.  This should more than double the communication bandwidth.  But NASA has nothing scheduled after MAVEN arrives.  

From the NASA article:

• This creates the need to identify cost-effective options to ensure continuity of reliable, high-performance telecommunications relay services for the future

Read the complete article from NASA HERE

NASA Waiting For Calm Skies to Launch Martian Lander Test Vehicle

NASA is still hoping to  launch a "flying saucer" into Earth's atmosphere. The intent is to test Mars mission tech.  In part NASA wants to test areo breaking and super sonic parachutes to slow down future probes and rovers.  Bad weather at the initial launch facility is preventing the system from launching the test vehicles. 

The test bed for now is a helium balloon to carry the disc-shaped vehicle over the Pacific. 

The mission is designed to test a new supersonic vehicle and giant parachute in Earth's stratosphere where conditions are similar to the red planet.

From the article HERE:

• For decades, NASA relied on the same parachute design to slow spacecraft streaking through the thin Martian atmosphere. The 1-ton Curiosity rover that landed in 2012 used the same basic parachute as the twin Viking landers in 1976.

Complete NASA article on ABC news is HERE

NASA Spots Huge New Crater on Mars

Scientists using images taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, discovered a new crater on the surface of Mars.   The crater was formed by a March 2012 impact and is large enough to cover half of a football field.  

The culprit that created the crater was most likely  a car-size asteroid.  The Martian event is similar to an impact event over Chelyabinsk, Russia, which shattered windows, damaged hundreds of buildings and left more than 1,000 people injured.

Read the complete Science article HERE

NASA to Test Supersonic Saucer Shaped Mars Lander

NASA has chosen several days in early June, the first being June 3, for balloon launched test flights of the saucer shaped Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator  or LDSD experimental vehicle that will carry technology that will allow supersonic atmospheric entry and low speed parachute landings on Mars.

From the article:

• NASA's LDSD test is designed to investigate breakthrough technologies that will benefit landing future human and robotic Mars missions, as well as aid in safely returning large payloads to Earth
• The NASA LDSD test over the Pacific Ocean will simulate the entry, descent and landing speeds a spacecraft would be exposed to when flying through the Martian atmosphere. During the test a large saucer-shaped disk carrying an inflatable inner tube-shaped decelerator and parachute system will be carried to an altitude of 120,000 feet by a giant balloon. After release from the balloon, rockets will lift the disk to 180,000 feet while reaching supersonic speeds. Traveling at 3.5 times the speed of sound, the saucer's decelerator will inflate, slowing the vehicle down, and then a parachute will deploy to carry it to the ocean's surface.

Here is a short film of NASA testing the parachute for the LDSD

NASA Wants to Terraform Mars?

That's what I read in this Gizmodo article .....wwwweeeeeeell terraforming may be stretching it, but NASA is considering sending plants on the next rover mission.  Nope, no furrows or holes with seeds in them.... there WILL be a modified Cubesat box with Earth air, dirt and a small handful of seeds from a plant that is a cousin to the mustard plant.  Oh and the box will be no where near Martian dirt but  positioned on the back of the rover (less and less glamorous ).   However this experiment, called the Mars Plant Experiment, would be entirely self-contained and will hopefully help lay the foundation for a long-term, sustainable base and possibly even colonization of Mars

Now don't go looking for a brand new rover on Mars, anytime soon.  NASA's next Mars rover, which is scheduled to launch in mid-2020 and land on the Red Planet in early 2021.

Read the Space.com article HERE