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Post by swamprat on Apr 2, 2020 17:17:15 GMT
... send astronauts to the moon in approximately one second and Mars in less than 13 minutes,.. And what happens to the people on the ship when subject to the gravitational forces involved ? HAL. Good question. I don't think they've figured that out yet.
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Post by swamprat on Apr 3, 2020 15:29:31 GMT
SpaceX's Starship SN3 prototype collapses in pressure tank test By Meghan Bartels 39 minutes ago
Elon Musk says a test configuration mistake may be to blame.PLAY SOUND
SpaceX began testing its newest prototype of a massive Starship vehicle in Texas overnight, and video footage suggests that process did not go smoothly.
Starship is the company's massive spacecraft designed to colonize Mars and tackle other heavy-lift deep-space missions. For about a year now, SpaceX has been building and testing various prototypes of the vehicle, including a miniature Starhopper that flew in August 2019. The latest version, dubbed SN3 (short for Serial No. 3) was scheduled to undergo a series of tests culminating in short, "hopping" flights. But something went wrong in an early test conducted yesterday (April 2).
"We will see what data review says in the morning, but this may have been a test configuration mistake," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a post on Twitter.
"Some valves leaked at cryo temp. Fixing & will retest soon," Musk added in a follow-up tweet.
The test, a cryogenic pressure test, was intended to demonstrate that SN3 could withstand the high pressure of very cold fuel that such a vehicle will need to endure before flights. In another tweet, Musk said that SN3 had passed an ambient temperature test the night prior to the failed cryogenic pressure test.
The cryogenic pressure test would have been followed by a static fire, during which the vehicle's engines would have briefly lit while SN3 was held in place, and a hopping test, when SN3 would have made the first flight of a full-size Starship prototype.
SpaceX's Starship SN3 prototype collapses during cryogenic pressure test on April 3, 2020 at the company's Boca Chica, Texas facility. (Image credit: SPadre.com)
Instead, the video footage taken near SpaceX's Starship hub in Boca Chica, Texas, appears to show SN3 collapse under pressure.
SN3 is the third SpaceX Starship prototype to be lost during testing. The company's first Starship Mk1 was destroyed during a failed pressure test in November 2019. Its successor, the Starship SN1 (or Serial Number 1), was lost in a pressure test in Feb. 28 of this year. A subsequent prototype, called Starship SN2, successfully passed the same pressure test on March 8. Each iteration of Starship has included tweaks and improvements over its predecessor.
The Starship SN3's failed test means that the company will presumably move on to SN4 as it continues to sort out design issues. Musk had previously said he wanted to see that vehicle reach as high as 12 miles (20 kilometers) above Earth's surface.
SpaceX has been pushing hard on Starship development in recent months despite the test failures. The spacecraft (and a planned megabooster called Super Heavy) form the core of SpaceX's plan for deep-space missions to the moon, as well as for Mars colonization.
During a recent Falcon 9 rocket launch carrying 60 Starlink internet satellites las month, SpaceX put out a call for welders and other professionals to join the company's push to build new Starships. Musk also held a career day in February at the Boca Chica site to interview new workers.
Earlier this week, SpaceX unveiled a users' guide for Starship describing the different payloads and missions, crewed and uncrewed, it could fly for customers.
SpaceX has already signed one customer for a Starship flight. Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has booked a trip around the moon on the spacecraft, with a target launch date of 2023.
www.space.com/spacex-starship-sn3-pressure-test-failure.html
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Post by swamprat on Apr 20, 2020 15:37:19 GMT
Spacex Starlink Satellites over Europe Apr 19 2020 Posted by Deborah Byrd in HUMAN WORLD | SPACE | April 20, 2020
On April 19, 2020, many in western Europe were stunned to spot a line of satellites crossing the night sky. They were the SpaceX Starlinks satellites.
We woke up this morning to many email questions from EarthSky readers in Europe, who saw a line of lights last night (April 19, 2020), trailing each other across the sky. Some on Twitter compared them to a string of Christmas lights, although they were all one color, and they moved. Others weren’t so gentle in their descriptions, because, indeed, these were a SpaceX Starlink satellites, which some fear will ruin the night sky for astronomy. The satellites seen last night over Europe were part of a much-larger group of thousands of satellites that SpaceX has launched or will launch to low-Earth orbit, with the goal of providing global Internet access. For example, Chris Jones wrote to EarthSky:
"Hi, you’re probably inundated with the same question this evening but, I watched approximately 30 ‘star like’ objects traveling at speed from a general west to east direction at around 21:50 GMT. They all seemed to be in-line following each other … Now I realize we are having the Lyrid meteor showers at present but didn’t expect them to be in such a uniform trajectory …"
Right! The meteors would not look as these artificial satellites did; instead, meteors are bright streaks across the sky that typically appear one by one, or just a few at a time. The Starlink satellites, on the other hand, can be seen in a group – sometimes referred to as a “constellation” of satellites – all moving across the sky together.
The video above, by the way, was posted last night by ViralVideoLab. There’s not much of a description at VVL’s YouTube page, but the video itself appears to be the same one posted by the Daily Mail last night. Both videos show a SpaceX satellites, as you would see them in the night sky. If you go to YouTube, and search for “Starlink satellites,” you can find a number of videos showing various sightings of Starlink satellites.
The first test launches of Starlink satellites were in February, 2018. But the satellites blasted into the consciousness of amateur (and probably many professional) astronomers in May, 2019, after a launch of 60 of the first true working satellites by SpaceX. Netherlands-based satellite tracker Marco Langbroek stunned space fans shortly afterwards with a video of dozens of the Starlink satellites soaring overhead. See Marco’s video here: earthsky.org/space/wow-photo-video-spacex-starlink-satellite-train
We skywatchers had, frankly, never seen anything quite like this.
At first, it seemed exciting. Then, many astronomers got mad.
www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8235355/Elon-Musks-Starlink-satellites-cause-stir-streak-skies-western-Europe.html#i-961c59779bc039a5
SpaceX plans to launch some 12,000 of these satellites in all. SpaceX – and astronomers around the world – have been surprised at their brightness in the night sky, and many worry that our night skies will become polluted with these SpaceX Starlink satellite trains, as they’re sometimes called. Many fear they will adversely affect studies of the universe around us that can be done from the ground.
Last I heard, SpaceX was trying to find a way to make future satellites less bright. But so far they haven’t accomplished it. The next SpaceX satellite launch will be this week, April 23.
Bottom line: Skywatchers in western Europe last night were stunned to see a line of bright satellites, perhaps 30 according to some estimates, trailing each other across the night sky on April 19, 2020. They were part of the SpaceX Starlink fleet.
earthsky.org/space/spacex-starlink-satellite-over-europe-apr-19-2020
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Post by swamprat on Apr 23, 2020 22:18:23 GMT
Two lines of Starlinks crossing:
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Post by Deleted on Apr 23, 2020 22:44:26 GMT
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Post by swamprat on May 19, 2020 23:27:57 GMT
Uh Oh, not a good time.....
NASA human spaceflight chief Doug Loverro resigns on eve of historic SpaceX launch By Mike Wall 2 hours ago
The timing is surprising.
Doug Loverro, NASA's Associate Administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, resigned from his post on May 18, 2020, just over a week from a historic astronaut launch on a SpaceX spacecraft. (Image: © NASA/Bill Ingalls)
Doug Loverro, NASA's chief of human spaceflight, resigned from his post Monday (May 18) after less than a year on the job, the agency announced today (May 19).
Loverro's resignation as Associate Administrator for NASA's Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) Mission Directorate is a stunning development, as the agency counts down to the first orbital crew launch from U.S. soil in nearly a decade, which will take place on May 27.
Loverro's former deputy, former NASA astronaut Ken Bowersox, has taken over HEO in an acting capacity and will therefore oversee Demo-2, the first crewed mission of SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule. Demo-2, which will send NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station (ISS), is scheduled to lift off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida next week.
No crewed mission has launched to orbit from the United States since NASA retired its space shuttle fleet in 2011. Since then, the space agency has relied completely on Russian Soyuz rockets and spacecraft to get its astronauts to and from the ISS.
The HEO leadership change comes just days ahead of a critical flight readiness review for Demo-2, which Loverro would have overseen. NASA Associate Administrator Steve Jurczyk will oversee that meeting in Loverro's place, agency officials told Space.com.
If all goes well with Demo-2, SpaceX will be clear to start flying operational missions to and from the orbiting lab for NASA. Elon Musk's company holds a $2.6 billion contract with the agency's Commercial Crew Program for six such operational flights.
Though NASA described Loverro's departure as a resignation, Politico reports that there may be more to the story. Two industry sources told the outlet that Loverro was actually pushed out over disagreements with NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. Bridenstine made no mention of the shakeup today in remarks to the National Space Council, which is led by Vice President Mike Pence.
Loverro's departure continues a string of recent shakeups at the top of HEO.
The division's longtime leader, Bill Gersteinmaier, was reassigned in July 2019. Bowersox then took over as acting HEO chief until Loverro was announced as the successor in October.
The top HEO job obviously comes with high expectations and a lot of pressure, especially these days. NASA is working to land two astronauts near the moon's south pole in 2024, a tight timeline laid out by the administration of President Donald Trump just last year.
"Loverro hit the ground running this year and has made significant progress in his time at NASA. His leadership of HEO has moved us closer to accomplishing our goal of landing the first woman and the next man on the moon in 2024. Loverro has dedicated more than four decades of his life in service to our country, and we thank him for his service and contributions to the agency," NASA officials wrote today in an emailed statement about Loverro's departure.
"Next week will mark the beginning of a new era in human spaceflight with the launch of NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station," the statement added. "We have full confidence in the work Kathy Lueders and her entire Commercial Crew team have done to bring us here. This test flight will be a historic and momentous occasion that will see the return of human spaceflight to our country, and the incredible dedication by the men and women of NASA is what has made this mission possible."
www.space.com/nasa-human-spaceflight-chief-doug-loverro-resigns.html
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Post by swamprat on Jun 6, 2020 16:20:45 GMT
Northrop Grumman snags $187 million to design NASA's lunar Gateway habitat for astronauts By Mike Wall 2 hours ago
The money will fund the module's design through a key review by the end of 2020.
Artist's concept of the Gateway power and propulsion and Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) in orbit around the moon. (Image: © NASA)
NASA has awarded Northrop Grumman $187 million to design the habitat module for the space agency's lunar Gateway, a planned moon-orbiting space station for astronauts.
We learned last year that NASA had tapped Virginia-based Northrop Grumman to build Gateway's pressurized crew cabin, called the habitation and logistics outpost (HALO). The company will base HALO on its Cygnus spacecraft, which has been flying contracted robotic cargo missions to the International Space Station for NASA since 2014.
On Friday (June 5), the space agency announced some terms of the deal: Northrop Grumman will receive $187 million to fund HALO's design through a key milestone called preliminary design review, which is expected to be complete by the end of this year.
"This contract award is another significant milestone in our plan to build robust and sustainable lunar operations," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement. "The Gateway is a key component of NASA’s long-term Artemis architecture, and the HALO capability furthers our plans for human exploration at the moon in preparation for future human missions to Mars."
Artemis is NASA's program of crewed lunar exploration, which aims to land two astronauts near the moon's south pole in 2024 and establish a sustainable human presence on and around the cosmic body by 2028. As Bridenstine noted, the agency envisions such work paving the way for the next giant leap: getting astronauts to Mars, which NASA aims to do in the 2030s.
Gateway likely won't be involved in the 2024 landing, but NASA sees the mini space station as crucial to its longer-term lunar plans. The outpost will serve as a jumping-off point for sorties, both crewed and uncrewed, to the lunar surface.
The current plan calls for launching Gateway's first two elements — HALO and the power and propulsion element (PPE), which will be built by Maxar Technologies — together in 2023. NASA expects to award Northrop Grumman a second contract by the end of the year, to build HALO and integrate it with the PPE, agency officials said.
Also key to the Artemis vision are NASA's Orion crew capsule and Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket, which together will get astronauts off the ground and on their way to deep space.
Orion has one flight under its belt, an uncrewed test mission to Earth orbit that took place in December 2014. SLS has not launched yet; it's scheduled to debut late next year on the Artemis 1 mission, which will send an uncrewed Orion on a test flight around the moon.
Orion will provide life support for astronauts aboard the Gateway, along with HALO, which will provide about as much living space as a small studio apartment.
Gateway, and the Artemis program overall, will leverage considerable cooperation from partners in the international community and the private sector. For example, the European Space Agency will provide Orion's service module, and the landers that ferry NASA astronauts from the outpost to the lunar surface will be privately built.
www.space.com/nasa-lunar-gateway-habitat-module-contract.html
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Post by swamprat on Jun 16, 2020 14:28:40 GMT
Solar Orbiter spacecraft makes its 1st flyby of the sun By Meghan Bartels
15 June 2020
An artist's depiction of the joint NASA-European Space Agency Solar Orbiter at work studying the sun. (Image: © ESA/Medialab)
Solar Orbiter, a joint mission by NASA and the European Space Agency, has hit its first big milestone of its sun-watching mission — and the spacecraft will soon have pictures to prove it.
The probe is designed to give scientists a view of our sun unlike any they've ever seen before. That's because Solar Orbiter carries technology to gather images of our star, and its trajectory will allow it to study the poles of the sun, which never align toward Earth. And the science starts now, with the spacecraft executing its first flyby of the sun, or perihelion, today (June 15). The orbital maneuver brought the probe to about half the distance between the Earth and the sun, or about 48 million miles (77 million kilometers).
"We have never taken pictures of the sun from a closer distance than this," Daniel Müller, ESA's Solar Orbiter project scientist, said in a statement.
According to the statement, the spacecraft's first imaging campaign will occur in the week following this close approach, or perihelion. It will take the spacecraft another week to beam those images back to Earth given its current distance from home, and the mission team expects to publish the resulting images in mid-July.
(NASA's Parker Solar Probe is already flying several times closer to the sun than Solar Orbiter is, but that spacecraft is not equipped to photograph the sun; instead it observes its immediate surroundings.)
Solar Orbiter launched in February and carries a total of 10 instruments: six telescopes and four instruments designed to study the spacecraft's immediate surroundings. Mission team members have been powering up and checking each instrument since shortly after the spacecraft's launch, but this week's data-gathering will be a new test for the probe.
"For the first time, we will be able to put together the images from all our telescopes and see how they take complementary data of the various parts of the sun, including the surface, the outer atmosphere, or corona, and the wider heliosphere around it," Müller said.
And although scientists are excited for these images, the spacecraft hasn't yet begun its main science work. It will complete another perihelion early next year; the first perihelion of its main science campaign will occur in early 2022.
www.space.com/solar-orbiter-first-sun-flyby.html
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Post by swamprat on Jun 16, 2020 21:21:07 GMT
And we need more of this kind of thing!Boeing Grant Expands Destination Mars Program, Inspires Brevard Students With STEM Activities By Space Coast Daily, May 24, 2020
BREVARD SCHOOLS FOUNDATION RECEIVED A $120,000 GRANT FROM THE BOEING COMPANY
Watch video:
ABOVE VIDEO: Brevard Schools Foundation received a $120,000 grant from The Boeing Company that is providing funding for a lively, day-long competition among 5th and 6th graders from across Brevard County.
The Destination Mars Virtual Event, is the culmination of the year-long efforts put forth by elementary students and will take place on May 21. Sixteen teams representing 12 schools will be competing in four mission areas.
The Destination Mars Virtual Event is in its second year and was moved to an online platform this year due to COVID-19. Its goal is to cultivate tomorrow’s innovators by engaging students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) challenges.
The projects are designed to develop real-world problem-solving skills, simulation-based inquiry and collaboration. Teams were presented with four standards-aligned STEM challenges that were planned and executed in class and in after-school STEM clubs.
During the Destination Mars Virtual Event, the teams will have an opportunity to present their solutions to judging panels comprised of professionals from The Boeing Company, Brevard County Public Schools and other organizations.
Student teams selected one of the following challenges: Mission Base Camp- Students identified one of the challenges that humans might face living or working on Mars and then designed a pod for their base camp that would address the challenge they identified.
The teams also built and programmed Piper Computer Kits to simulate an alert or warning and integrated these into their pods.
Watch video: ABOVE VIDEO: The projects are designed to develop real-world problem-solving skills, simulation-based inquiry and collaboration. Teams were presented with four standards-aligned STEM challenges that were planned and executed in class and in after-school STEM clubs.
Mission iWear: Teams designed a wearable device that would assist a member of their mission or another organism with maintaining homeostasis on Mars.
Mission Robotic Rover EV3: Teams used block programming to program their rover (the LEGO Mindstorm EV3) to complete missions on Mars.
Mission Bio-Dome: Teams used Mindcraft: Education Edition to design and build a Martian Bio-Dome that would allow members of the mission to maintain homeostasis on Mars.
“The most positive impact of Destination Mars was the collaboration and teamwork the students demonstrated,” said Holly Mentillo, Vista teacher at Ocean Breeze Elementary. “Twelve kids worked together to complete multiple missions. There was a lot of arguing, debating, compromise, leadership, and supporting others, but most of all, there was learning to work together to complete the missions! A very valuable lesson!”
The grant from The Boeing Company also provided funding for Destination Space, an experiential field program at Kennedy Space Center for all 6th-grade students (5,600+) in Brevard Public Schools held earlier this school year.
“Boeing works toward a future where all students have access to learning so that they can develop their skills, do what they dream and build something better,” said Ingrid Piedrahita, Boeing Global Engagement Community Investor.
“Providing students with hands-on experiences where they can learn to think critically and analytically, collaborate well with others, be creative and communicate effectively will prepare them to make the next giant leap to Mars.”
“STEM education is vital to ensure that we are developing the next generation of innovators,” said Janice Kershaw, CEO/President of Brevard Schools Foundation. “STEM skills prepare students for high-demand tech jobs and are key talents needed in our ever-changing and complex world. We are grateful to partner with The Boeing Company to bring this engaging STEM education experience to our students.”
spacecoastdaily.com/2020/05/boeing-grant-expands-destination-mars-program-inspires-brevard-students-with-stem-activities/
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Post by swamprat on Jun 20, 2020 17:05:09 GMT
These New Technologies Could Make Interstellar Travel Real Long considered science fiction, leaving the solar system and speeding amid the stars may soon be within reach
By Corey S. Powell, March 12, 2019
(Credit: Charles Carter/Keck Institute for Space Studies via NASA)
On October 31, 1936, six young tinkerers nicknamed the “Rocket Boys” nearly incinerated themselves in an effort to break free of Earth’s gravity. The group had huddled in a gully in the foothills of California’s San Gabriel Mountains to test a small alcohol-fueled jet engine. They wanted to prove that rocket engines could venture into space, at a time when such ideas were widely met with ridicule. That goal was disrupted when an oxygen line caught fire and thrashed around wildly, shooting flames.
The Rocket Boys’ audacity caught the attention of aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman, who already worked with two of them at Caltech. Not far from the location of their fiery mishap, he established a small test area where the Rocket Boys resumed their experiments. In 1943, the site became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and von Karman its first director. JPL has since grown into a sprawling NASA field center with thousands of employees, yet it has managed to retain its founding motivation: test the limits of exploration, convention be damned.
They’ve had many successes over the years. In the early 1970s, JPL engineers built Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to reach escape velocity from the solar system. A few years later, they followed up with Voyagers 1 and 2, the fastest of the many objects aimed at interstellar space. From the beginning of the Space Age to the launch of the Voyager spacecrafts — a span of just two decades — rocket scientists more than doubled flight speeds. But in the decades since, only one more spacecraft has followed the Voyagers out of the solar system, and nothing has done so at such a high speed. Now JPL’s rocketeers are getting restless again, and quietly plotting the next great leap.
The consistent theme of the new efforts is that the solar system is not enough. It is time to venture beyond the known planets, on toward the stars. John Brophy, a flight engineer at JPL, is developing a novel engine that could accelerate space travel by another factor of 10. Leon Alkalai, a JPL mission architect, is plotting a distant journey that would begin with an improbable, Icarus-esque plunge toward the sun. And JPL research scientist Slava Turyshev has perhaps the wildest idea of all, a space telescope that could provide an intimate look at a far-off Earth-like planet — without actually going there.
These are all long shots (not entirely crazy, according to Brophy), but if even one succeeds, the implications will be huge. The Rocket Boys and their ilk helped launch humans as a space-faring species. The current generation at JPL could be the ones to take us interstellar.
NASA's Dawn spacecraft used ion propulsion to explore Ceres. Future missions could take the tech even further. (Credit: NASA-JPL/Caltech)
Rocket Reactions
For Brophy, inspiration came from Breakthrough Starshot, an extravagantly bold project announced in 2016 by the late Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. The ultimate aim of the project is to build a mile-wide laser array that could blast a miniature spacecraft to 20 percent the speed of light, allowing it to reach the Alpha Centauri star system (our closest stellar neighbor) in just two decades.
Brophy was skeptical but intrigued. Ambitious aspirations are nothing new for him. “JPL encourages people to think outside the box, and my wacky ideas are getting wackier in time,” he says. Even by that standard, the Starshot concept struck him as a little too far from technological reality. But he did begin to wonder if he could take the same concept but scale it down so that it might actually be feasible within our lifetimes.
What especially captivated Brophy was the idea of using a Starshot-style laser beam to help deal with the “rocket equation,” which links the motion of a spacecraft to the amount of propellant it carries. The rocket equation confronts every would-be space explorer with its cruel logic. If you want to go faster, you need more fuel, but more fuel adds mass. More mass means you need even more fuel to haul around that extra weight. That fuel makes the whole thing heavier still, and so on. That’s why it took a 1.4 million-pound rocket to launch the 1,800-pound Voyager probes: The starting weight was almost entirely fuel.
Since his graduate student days in the late 1970s, Brophy has been developing a vastly more efficient type of rocketry known as ion propulsion. An ion engine uses electric power to shoot positively charged atoms (called ions) out of a thruster at high velocity. Each atom provides just a tiny kick, but collectively they can push the rocket to a much greater velocity than a conventional chemical rocket. Better yet, the power needed to run the ion engine can come from solar panels — no heavy onboard fuel tanks or generators required. By squeezing more speed out of less propellant, ion propulsion goes a long way toward taming the rocket equation.
But ion engines come with drawbacks of their own. The farther they get from the sun, the more limited they are by how much electricity their solar panels can generate. You can make the panels huge, but then you add a lot of weight, and the rocket equation slams you again. And ion engines have such gentle thrust that they can’t leave the ground on their own; it then takes them a long time in space to accelerate to their record-breaking speeds. Brophy knows these issues well: He helped design the ion engine aboard NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which just completed an 11-year mission to asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres. Even with its formidable 65-foot span of solar cells, Dawn went from zero to 60 in an unhurried four days.
An orbiting laser system could power an ion propulsion vehicle through the solar system, and prove reusable. (Credit: Jay Smith/Discover)
Ion the Prize
While Brophy was pondering this impasse between efficient engines and insufficient solar power, the Breakthrough Starshot concept came out, and it got the gears turning in his head. He wondered: What if you replaced sunshine with a high-intensity laser beam pointed at your spacecraft? Powered by the more efficient laser, your ion engine could run much harder while still saving weight by not having to carry your power source on board.
Two years after his epiphany, Brophy is giving me a tour of an SUV-size test chamber at JPL, where he puts a high-performance ion engine through its paces. His prototype uses lithium ions, which are much lighter than the xenon ions Dawn used, and therefore need less energy to attain higher velocities. It also runs at 6,000 volts compared with Dawn’s 1,000 volts. “The performance of this thing would be very startling if you had the laser to power it up,” he says.
There’s just one minor issue: That laser does not exist. Although he drastically downsized the Starshot concept, Brophy still envisions a 100-megawatt space-based laser system, generating 1,000 times more power than the International Space Station, aimed precisely at a fast-receding spacecraft. “We’re not sure how to do that,” he concedes. It would be by far the biggest off-world engineering project ever undertaken. Once built, though, the array could be used over and over, with different missions, as an all-purpose rocket booster.
As an example, Brophy describes a lithium-ion-powered spacecraft with 300-foot wings of photovoltaic panels powering a full-size version of the engine he is developing at JPL. The laser would bathe the panels in light a hundred times as bright as sunshine, keeping the ion engine running from here to Pluto, about 4 billion miles away. The spacecraft could then coast along on its considerable velocity, racking up another 4 billion miles every year or two.
At that pace, a spacecraft could rapidly explore the dim areas where comets come from, or set off for the as-yet-undiscovered Planet 9, or go ... almost anywhere in the general vicinity of the solar system.
“It’s like we have this shiny new hammer, so I go around looking for new nails to pound in,” Brophy says dreamily. “We have a whole long list of missions that you could do if you could go fast.”
Only the Voyager probes have passed the heliopause, leaving the sun’s influence. New probes may one day study the interstellar medium lying beyond. (Credit: NASA-JPL/Caltech)
Interstellar Medium Well
After Brophy’s genial giddiness, it is a shock to talk to Alkalai, in charge of formulating new missions at JPL’s Engineering and Science Directorate. Sitting in his large, glassy office, he seems every bit the no-nonsense administrator, but he, too, is a man with an exploratory vision.
Like Brophy, Alkalai thinks the Breakthrough Starshot people have the right vision, but not enough patience. “We’re nowhere near where we need to be technologically to design a mission to another star,” he says. “So we need to start by taking baby steps.”
Alkalai has a specific step in mind. Although we can’t yet visit another star, we can send a probe to sample the interstellar medium, the sparse gas and dust that flows between the stars.
“I’m very interested in understanding the material outside the solar system. Ultimately, we got created from that. Life originated from those primordial dust clouds,” Alkalai says. “We know that there’s organic materials in it, but what kind? What abundances? Are there water molecules in it? That would be huge to understand.”
The interstellar medium remains poorly understood because we can’t get our hands on it: A constant blast of particles from the sun — the solar wind — pushes it far from Earth. But if we could reach beyond the sun’s influence, to a distance of 20 billion miles (about 200 times Earth’s distance from the sun), we could finally examine, for the first time, pristine samples of our home galaxy.
Alkalai wants answers, and he wants to see the results firsthand. He’s 60, so that sets an aggressive schedule — no time to wait for giant space lasers. Instead, he proposes a simpler, albeit still unproven, technology known as a solar thermal rocket. It would carry a large cache of cold liquid hydrogen, protected somehow from the heat of the sun, and execute a shocking dive to within about 1 million miles of the solar surface. At closest approach, the rocket would let the intense solar heat come pouring in, perhaps by jettisoning a shield. The sun’s energy would rapidly vaporize the hydrogen, sending it racing out of a rocket nozzle. The combined push from the escaping hydrogen, and the assist from the sun’s own gravity, would let the ship start its interstellar journey at speeds up to 60 miles per second, faster than any human object yet —and it only gets faster from there.
“It’s very challenging, but we’re modeling the physics now,” Alkalai says. He hopes to begin testing elements of a thermal-rocket system this year, and then develop his concept into a realistic mission that could launch in the next decade or so. It would reach the interstellar medium another decade after that. In addition to sampling our galactic environment, such a probe could examine how the sun interacts with the interstellar medium, study the structure of dust in the solar system and perhaps visit a distant dwarf planet along the way.
It would be a journey, Alkalai says, “like nothing we’ve done in the past.”
How a solar gravitational lens works. (Credits: Courtesy of Slava Turyshev; The Aerospace Corp.; Jim Deluca/Jimiticus via YouYube (2); Jay Smith)
Catch A Glimpse
Solar thermal rockets and laser-ion engines, impressive as they may be, are still absurdly inadequate for crossing the tremendous gulf between our solar system and exoplanets — planets orbiting other stars. In the spirit of the Rocket Boys, Turyshev is not letting absurdity stop him. He is developing a cunning workaround: a virtual mission to another star.
Turyshev tells me he wants to send a space telescope to a region known as the solar gravitational lens (SGL). The area begins a daunting 50 billion miles away, though that’s still hundreds of times closer than our closest stellar neighbors. Once you get far enough into the SGL, something marvelous happens. When you look back toward the sun, any object directly behind it appears stretched out, forming a ring, and hugely magnified. That ring is the result of our star’s intense gravity, which warps space like a lens, altering the appearance of the distant object’s light.
If you position yourself correctly within the SGL, the object being magnified from behind the sun could be an intriguing exoplanet. A space telescope floating at the SGL, Turyshev explains, could then maneuver around, sampling different parts of the light ring and reconstructing the snippets of bent light into megapixel snapshots of the planet in question.
I have to interrupt him here. Did he say megapixel, like the resolution you get on your camera phone? Yes, he really is talking about an image measuring 1,000 by 1,000 pixels, good enough to see details smaller than 10 miles wide on a planet up to 100 light-years (600 trillion miles!) away.
“We could peek under the clouds and see continents. We could see weather patterns and topography, which is very exciting,” Turyshev says. He doesn’t mention it, but he doesn’t need to: That kind of resolution could also reveal megacities or other giant artificial structures, should they exist.
Assuming the JPL boffins can solve the transportation issues of getting to the SGL, the mission itself is fairly straightforward, if enormously challenging. Turyshev and his collaborators (Alkalai among them) will need to develop a Hubble-size space telescope,
or a mini-fleet of smaller telescopes, that can survive the 30-year journey. They will need to perfect an onboard artificial intelligence capable of running operations without guidance from home. Above all, they will need a target — a planet so intriguing that people are willing to spend decades and billions of dollars studying it. NASA’s TESS space telescope is doing some of that reconnaissance work right now, scanning for Earth-size worlds around local stars.
“Ultimately, to see the life on an exoplanet, we will have to visit. But a gravity lens mission allows you to study potential targets many decades, if not centuries, earlier,” Turyshev says merrily.
A journey to the SGL would take us beyond Alkalai’s baby steps, well onto the path toward interstellar exploration. It’s another audacious goal, but at least the odds of catching fire are much lower this time around.
www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/these-new-technologies-could-make-interstellar-travel-real?utm_source=dscfb&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dscfb&fbclid=IwAR3PDCcgAGDhPzGd08MUHoo-1D2PPhNXtssf_MSBMtY203JGCKwmObpG0Ro
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Post by swamprat on Jul 9, 2020 15:18:53 GMT
New map of the universe unveils a stunning X-ray view of the cosmos By Chelsea Gohd 3 hours ago
"This all-sky image completely changes the way we look at the energetic universe."
A map of the universe made using over a million X-ray sources observed by eROSITA. (Image credit: Jeremy Sanders, Hermann Brunner, eSASS team (MPE); Eugene Churazov, Marat Gilfanov (IKI))
Wish you had X-ray vision? An extraordinary new map showcases the universe in striking, X-ray radiation.
Scientists created this stunning X-ray map of the universe using eROSITA (Extended Roentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array), an instrument on the German-Russian satellite mission Spectrum-Röntgen-Gamma, or Spektr-RG.
The scientists completed a full sweep of the sky over the course of about six months, looking for sources of X-ray radiation — a type of high-energy electromagnetic radiation. These X-ray sources include black holes, galaxy clusters and leftover remnants from supernova explosions.
In scouring the skies, eROSITA spotted over a million sources of X-ray radiation from all across the cosmos, with most of the sources being active galactic nuclei, or the luminous, compact region at the center of galaxies. This number of sources roughly doubles the number of known X-ray sources that have been discovered over the 60-year history of X-ray astronomy, according to a statement from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany. By studying clusters of galaxies with this new, detailed map, researchers hope to track how these cosmic structures grow.
"This all-sky image completely changes the way we look at the energetic universe," Peter Predehl, the Principal Investigator of eROSITA at MPE, said in the same statement. "We see such a wealth of detail — the beauty of the images is really stunning."
Because it is not only stunning but incredibly detailed, this new X-ray map could "revolutionize" the way that we look at the cosmos, Kirpal Nandra, head of the high-energy astrophysics group at MPE, said in the same statement.
"With a million sources in just six months, eROSITA has already revolutionized X-ray astronomy, but this is just a taste of what's to come," Nandra said. "This combination of sky area and depth is transformational. We are already sampling a cosmological volume of the hot Universe much larger than has been possible before. Over the next few years, we'll be able to probe even further, out to where the first giant cosmic structures and supermassive black holes were forming."
www.space.com/amazing-x-ray-map-universe-erosita-results.html
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Post by swamprat on Jul 10, 2020 18:59:34 GMT
If you study how life started and evolved on planet Earth, if you read about what circumstances create a "habital zone", if you study the Universe and do the math, if you still think Earth might be the only planet in the Universe with life on it, then you are a pathetic SCIENCE DENIER. Astronomers discover South Pole Wall, a gigantic structure stretching 1.4 billion light-years across By Adam Mann - Live Science Contributor 11 hours ago
Strands in the intergalactic web
A visualization showing the South Pole Wall, a large cluster of galaxies near the southernmost part of the sky. (Image: © D. Pomarede, R. B. Tully, R. Graziani, H. Courtois, Y. Hoffman, J. Lezmy.)
Spectacular 3D maps of the universe have revealed one of the biggest cosmic structures ever found — an almost-inconceivable wall stretching 1.4 billion light-years across that contains hundreds of thousands of galaxies.
The South Pole Wall, as it's been dubbed, has been hiding in plain sight, remaining undetected until now because large parts of it sit half a billion light-years away behind the bright Milky Way galaxy. The South Pole Wall rivals in size the Sloan Great Wall, the sixth largest cosmic structure discovered. (One light-year is roughly 6 trillion miles, or 9 trillion kilometers, so this "biggest cosmic structure" is mind-bendingly humongous.)
Astronomers have long noticed that galaxies are not scattered randomly throughout the universe but rather clump together in what's known as the cosmic web, enormous strands of hydrogen gas in which galaxies are strung like pearls on a necklace that surround gigantic and largely empty voids.
Mapping these intergalactic threads belongs to the field of cosmography, which is "the cartography of the cosmos," study researcher Daniel Pomarede, a cosmographer at Paris-Saclay University in France, told Live Science.
Previous cosmographic work has charted the extent of other galactic assemblies, such as the current structural record holder, the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, which spans 10 billion light-years, or more than a tenth the size of the visible universe.
In 2014, Pomarede and his colleagues unveiled the Laniakea supercluster, a galactic collection in which our own Milky Way resides. Lanaikea is 520 million light-years wide and contains roughly the mass of 100 million billion suns.
For their new map, the team used newly-created sky surveys to peer into a region called the Zone of Galactic Obscuration. This is an area in the southern part of the sky in which the bright light of the Milky Way blocks out much of what's behind and around it.
Cosmographers typically determine the distance to objects using redshift, the speed at which an object is receding from Earth due to the expansion of the universe, which depends on their distance, Pomarede said. The farther away an object is, the faster it will appear to be receding from Earth, an observation first made by astronomer Edwin Hubble in 1929 and which has held up ever since.
But he and his colleagues used a slightly different technique, looking at the peculiar velocity of galaxies. This measurement includes redshift but also takes into account the motion of galaxies around one another as they tug at each other gravitationally, Pomarede said.
The advantage of the method is that it can detect hidden mass that is gravitationally influencing how galaxies move and therefore uncover dark matter, that invisible stuff that emits no light but exerts a gravitational tug on anything near enough. (Dark matter also makes up the bulk of the matter in the universe.) By running algorithms looking at peculiar motion in galactic catalogs, the team was able to plot the three-dimensional distribution of matter in and around the Zone of Galactic Obscuration. Their findings are detailed today (July 9) in The Astrophysical Journal.
The resulting map shows a mind-boggling bubble of material more or less centered on the southernmost point of the sky, with a great sweeping wing extending north on one side in the direction of the constellation Cetus and another stubbier arm opposite it in the direction of the constellation Apus.
Knowing how the universe looks on such large scales helps confirm our current cosmological models, Neta Bahcall, an astrophysicist at Princeton University in New Jersey who was not involved in the work, told Live Science. But determining where exactly these enormous, crisscrossing structures begin and end is tricky, she added.
"When you look at the network of filaments and voids, it becomes a semantic question of what's connected," she said.
In their paper, the team acknowledges that they may not have plotted yet the entirety of the vast South Pole Wall. "We will not be certain of its full extent, nor whether it is unusual, until we map the universe on a significantly grander scale," they wrote.
(And that's just one piece of our vast Universe.)
www.livescience.com/south-pole-wall-discovered-in-space.html
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Post by swamprat on Jul 18, 2020 0:37:14 GMT
SpaceX's historic 1st crewed mission set to end on Aug. 2 By Mike Wall 5 hours ago
Bob and Doug have two weeks left in space.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon "Endeavour" is seen approaching a docking with the International Space Station with NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken aboard, Sunday, May 31, 2020. (Image: © NASA)
SpaceX's first-ever crewed mission will come to an end in two weeks.
NASA is targeting an Aug. 2 splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean for the Demo-2 test flight, which sent NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Crew Dragon capsule, agency chief Jim Bridenstine announced today (July 17).
If all goes according to plan, Behnken and Hurley will depart the ISS on Aug. 1 and come back to Earth a day later, Bridenstine said via Twitter today. But those dates aren't set in stone, he stressed: "Weather will drive the actual date. Stay tuned."
Demo-2 launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on May 30 and reached the ISS a day later. The mission's duration was uncertain until today; NASA officials had previously said that Demo-2 would last between one and four months, depending on how Crew Dragon performed.
Demo-2 is the first orbital human spaceflight to lift off from the United States since the retirement of NASA's space shuttle fleet in July 2011. Ever since then, NASA had relied on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to get American astronauts to and from orbit, at a cost, most recently, of about $90 million per seat. The U.S. space agency didn't want this dependency to last too long, so, over the last decade, it has been funding the development of private astronaut taxis to fill the shuttle's shoes.
In 2014, SpaceX and Boeing each received multibillion-dollar contracts from NASA's Commercial Crew Program to finish work on their human spaceflight systems and launch at least six operational missions to the ISS.
After Demo-2's successful splashdown, SpaceX will be clear to launch the first of those contracted flights. That mission, known as Crew-1, is scheduled to lift off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Aug. 30.
Boeing's capsule, called CST-100 Starliner, is not yet ready to carry astronauts to orbit; it must first refly an uncrewed test flight to the ISS later this year. During its first attempt at this mission, which launched in December 2019, Starliner suffered a glitch with its onboard timing system and failed to rendezvous with the orbiting lab. (SpaceX notched this milestone with its uncrewed Demo-1 flight in March 2019.)
www.space.com/spacex-demo-2-mission-splashdown-date.html
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Post by maxxhazzard on Jul 21, 2020 15:18:30 GMT
thanks for all the recon.... alls I gotta say about money is u get what u pay for... and... if u hv an opposing force to the end goal... sabotage has to always be a consideration.... I lv the spaceHopper.. did u notice that when the spaceHopper has completed the injection of all unnecessary machanitics the spaceHopper looks like a cigar shape craft... haha... peace
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Post by Deleted on Aug 2, 2020 20:24:19 GMT
SpaceX's historic 1st crewed mission set to end on Aug. 2 By Mike Wall 5 hours ago
Bob and Doug have two weeks left in space.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon "Endeavour" is seen approaching a docking with the International Space Station with NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken aboard, Sunday, May 31, 2020. (Image: © NASA)
SpaceX's first-ever crewed mission will come to an end in two weeks.
NASA is targeting an Aug. 2 splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean for the Demo-2 test flight, which sent NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Crew Dragon capsule, agency chief Jim Bridenstine announced today (July 17).
If all goes according to plan, Behnken and Hurley will depart the ISS on Aug. 1 and come back to Earth a day later, Bridenstine said via Twitter today. But those dates aren't set in stone, he stressed: "Weather will drive the actual date. Stay tuned."
Demo-2 launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on May 30 and reached the ISS a day later. The mission's duration was uncertain until today; NASA officials had previously said that Demo-2 would last between one and four months, depending on how Crew Dragon performed.
Demo-2 is the first orbital human spaceflight to lift off from the United States since the retirement of NASA's space shuttle fleet in July 2011. Ever since then, NASA had relied on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to get American astronauts to and from orbit, at a cost, most recently, of about $90 million per seat. The U.S. space agency didn't want this dependency to last too long, so, over the last decade, it has been funding the development of private astronaut taxis to fill the shuttle's shoes.
In 2014, SpaceX and Boeing each received multibillion-dollar contracts from NASA's Commercial Crew Program to finish work on their human spaceflight systems and launch at least six operational missions to the ISS.
After Demo-2's successful splashdown, SpaceX will be clear to launch the first of those contracted flights. That mission, known as Crew-1, is scheduled to lift off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Aug. 30.
Boeing's capsule, called CST-100 Starliner, is not yet ready to carry astronauts to orbit; it must first refly an uncrewed test flight to the ISS later this year. During its first attempt at this mission, which launched in December 2019, Starliner suffered a glitch with its onboard timing system and failed to rendezvous with the orbiting lab. (SpaceX notched this milestone with its uncrewed Demo-1 flight in March 2019.)
www.space.com/spacex-demo-2-mission-splashdown-date.html
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