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Universe Today
28 Jul 2017, 03:37 UTC
Historic 1st descent down Martian gully. Panoramic view looking down Perseverance Valley after entry at top was acquired by NASA’s Opportunity rover scanning from north to south. It shows numerous wheel tracks at left, center and right as rover conducted walkabout tour prior to starting historic first decent down a Martian gully – possibly carved by water – and looks into the interior of Endeavour crater. Perseverance Valley terminates down near the crater floor in the center of the panorama. The far rim of Endeavour crater is seen in the distance, beyond the dark floor. Rover mast shadow at center and deck at left. This navcam camera photo mosaic was assembled from raw images taken on Sol 4780 (5 July 2017) and colorized. Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell/Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com/Marco Di Lorenzo From the precipice of “Perseverance Valley” NASA’s teenaged Red Planet robot Opportunity has begun the historic first ever descent of an ancient Martian gully – that’s simultaneously visually and scientifically “tantalizing” – on an expedition to discern ‘How was it carved?’; by water or other means, Jim Green, NASA’s Planetary Sciences Chief tells Universe Today. Since water is an indispensable ingredient for life as we know it, the ‘opportunity’ for Opportunity to ...
Opportunity Starts Historic Descent of Tantalizing Martian Gully to Find Out How Was It Carved
28 Jul 2017, 03:37 UTC
Historic 1st descent down Martian gully. Panoramic view looking down Perseverance Valley after entry at top was acquired by NASA’s Opportunity rover scanning from north to south. It shows numerous wheel tracks at left, center and right as rover conducted walkabout tour prior to starting historic first decent down a Martian gully – possibly carved by water – and looks into the interior of Endeavour crater. Perseverance Valley terminates down near the crater floor in the center of the panorama. The far rim of Endeavour crater is seen in the distance, beyond the dark floor. Rover mast shadow at center and deck at left. This navcam camera photo mosaic was assembled from raw images taken on Sol 4780 (5 July 2017) and colorized. Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell/Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com/Marco Di Lorenzo From the precipice of “Perseverance Valley” NASA’s teenaged Red Planet robot Opportunity has begun the historic first ever descent of an ancient Martian gully – that’s simultaneously visually and scientifically “tantalizing” – on an expedition to discern ‘How was it carved?’; by water or other means, Jim Green, NASA’s Planetary Sciences Chief tells Universe Today. Since water is an indispensable ingredient for life as we know it, the ‘opportunity’ for Opportunity to ...
David Reneke's World of Space and Astronomy
28 Jul 2017, 03:29 UTC
Breakthrough Starshot First Steps to The Stars
28 Jul 2017, 03:29 UTC
DSFP's Spaceflight History Blog
28 Jul 2017, 02:27 UTC
NASA abandoned work toward piloted Mars and Venus flyby missions based on hardware developed for Apollo and its planned successor, the Apollo Applications Program, during the final months of the pivotal year 1967. Until August of that year, however, the concept was viewed by many as a plausible interim step between 1960s Apollo moon landings and 1980s piloted Mars landings. Though NASA awarded no new piloted flyby study contracts, studies performed in 1965, 1966, and 1967 continued to report out at aerospace conferences and in NASA briefings during 1968 and 1969. In March 1968, for example, North American Rockwell (NAR) engineers W. Morita and J. Sandford summed up a study they completed in April 1967 for NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, which examined whether a modified NAR-built S-II rocket stage could boost a piloted Mars flyby spacecraft out of Earth orbit (that is, "inject" it onto an interplanetary trajectory) toward Mars on 20 September 1975. They presented results of their study at the Fifth Space Congress in Cocoa Beach, Florida.
Flyby's Last Gasp: North American Rockwell's S-IIB Interplanetary Booster (1968)
28 Jul 2017, 02:27 UTC
NASA abandoned work toward piloted Mars and Venus flyby missions based on hardware developed for Apollo and its planned successor, the Apollo Applications Program, during the final months of the pivotal year 1967. Until August of that year, however, the concept was viewed by many as a plausible interim step between 1960s Apollo moon landings and 1980s piloted Mars landings. Though NASA awarded no new piloted flyby study contracts, studies performed in 1965, 1966, and 1967 continued to report out at aerospace conferences and in NASA briefings during 1968 and 1969. In March 1968, for example, North American Rockwell (NAR) engineers W. Morita and J. Sandford summed up a study they completed in April 1967 for NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, which examined whether a modified NAR-built S-II rocket stage could boost a piloted Mars flyby spacecraft out of Earth orbit (that is, "inject" it onto an interplanetary trajectory) toward Mars on 20 September 1975. They presented results of their study at the Fifth Space Congress in Cocoa Beach, Florida.
Universe Today
27 Jul 2017, 18:14 UTC
Mars’ moon Phobos is a pretty fascinating customer! Compared to Mars other moon Deimos, Phobos (named after the Greek personification of fear) is the larger and innermost satellite of the Red Planet. Due to its rapid orbital speed, the irregularly-shaped moon orbits Mars once every 7 hours, 39 minutes, and 12 seconds. In other words, it completes over three orbits of Mar within a single Earth day.
Hubble Sees Tiny Phobos Orbiting Mars
27 Jul 2017, 18:14 UTC
Mars’ moon Phobos is a pretty fascinating customer! Compared to Mars other moon Deimos, Phobos (named after the Greek personification of fear) is the larger and innermost satellite of the Red Planet. Due to its rapid orbital speed, the irregularly-shaped moon orbits Mars once every 7 hours, 39 minutes, and 12 seconds. In other words, it completes over three orbits of Mar within a single Earth day.
NASA Space Station Blog
27 Jul 2017, 15:49 UTC
It is less than one day before three new International Space Station crew members start a 4-1/2 month mission in space. The trio from Russia, United States and Italy will launch aboard the Soyuz MS-05 spacecraft Friday at 11:41 a.m. EDT from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Cosmonaut Sergey Ryazanskiy and astronauts Randy Bresnik and Paolo Nespoli will dock to the Rassvet module having left Earth just six hours and 19 minutes earlier. After pressure checks the hatches will open and the crew will fly into their new home. They will join their Expedition 52 crewmates Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and Flight Engineers Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer.
Trio Ready to Begin Space Mission Lasting till Mid-December
27 Jul 2017, 15:49 UTC
It is less than one day before three new International Space Station crew members start a 4-1/2 month mission in space. The trio from Russia, United States and Italy will launch aboard the Soyuz MS-05 spacecraft Friday at 11:41 a.m. EDT from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Cosmonaut Sergey Ryazanskiy and astronauts Randy Bresnik and Paolo Nespoli will dock to the Rassvet module having left Earth just six hours and 19 minutes earlier. After pressure checks the hatches will open and the crew will fly into their new home. They will join their Expedition 52 crewmates Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and Flight Engineers Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer.
The Planetary Society Blog
27 Jul 2017, 14:00 UTC
4...3...2...1. The rocket shot up into the air. A few seconds later, we heard the large boom. Even though we were miles away, we could feel the force in our chests. All were in awe. It was happening after months of hard work—our experiments were getting sent into space. This year was the fifth year of the Cubes in Space program. Overall, 59 countries have participated and tens of thousands of proposals submitted to the program thus far. The rocket only gets 60 cubes and the balloon holds 100 cubes. That’s only 160 proposals selected to fly out of the thousands that are submitted. The Cubes in Space program is run by a company called idoodle Learning, who partners with NASA. The idea behind the program is that students design experiments and write up scientific proposals for those experiments, then they send them to Cubes in Space for them to review. There is a certain format that they ask for, and they do provide guide sheets on how to write the proposal. Other than that, the students must do everything else themselves. Once the final decisions have been made, the students that were approved need to create their experiments inside ...
Cubes in Space
27 Jul 2017, 14:00 UTC
4...3...2...1. The rocket shot up into the air. A few seconds later, we heard the large boom. Even though we were miles away, we could feel the force in our chests. All were in awe. It was happening after months of hard work—our experiments were getting sent into space. This year was the fifth year of the Cubes in Space program. Overall, 59 countries have participated and tens of thousands of proposals submitted to the program thus far. The rocket only gets 60 cubes and the balloon holds 100 cubes. That’s only 160 proposals selected to fly out of the thousands that are submitted. The Cubes in Space program is run by a company called idoodle Learning, who partners with NASA. The idea behind the program is that students design experiments and write up scientific proposals for those experiments, then they send them to Cubes in Space for them to review. There is a certain format that they ask for, and they do provide guide sheets on how to write the proposal. Other than that, the students must do everything else themselves. Once the final decisions have been made, the students that were approved need to create their experiments inside ...
Red Dots
27 Jul 2017, 12:52 UTC
Perhaps the least known star in the Red Dots campaign, Ross 154, is a rapidly rotating M dwarf star that shows elevated activity levels and and flares on its surface. This makes the Red Dots campaign targets more diverse than they otherwise would be – rapid rotation is typically interpreted as a sign of young age of such stellar objects as the rotation period is thought to gradually increase due to magnetic friction resulting in old M dwarfs with slow rotation rates such as Proxima Centauri whose rotation period has been estimated to be 83 days1. Indeed, Ross 154 has been estimated to have an age of less than one billion years2. The rotation of Ross 154 induces a clear photometric cycle of 2.87 days in our All Sky Automated Survey V-band observations but the brightness of the star also varies with another cycle of 740 days that we interpret to be caused by the star’s magnetic cycle (Fig. 1). Knowing these two “fundamental” cycles helps interpreting any and all periodicities in the radial velocity data because periodicities that are independent from both rotation and magnetic activity cycle could correspond to planets orbiting the star. Fig. 1. Likelihood-ratio periodogram of ...
The rapidly rotating Ross 154 – by Mikko Tuomi
27 Jul 2017, 12:52 UTC
Perhaps the least known star in the Red Dots campaign, Ross 154, is a rapidly rotating M dwarf star that shows elevated activity levels and and flares on its surface. This makes the Red Dots campaign targets more diverse than they otherwise would be – rapid rotation is typically interpreted as a sign of young age of such stellar objects as the rotation period is thought to gradually increase due to magnetic friction resulting in old M dwarfs with slow rotation rates such as Proxima Centauri whose rotation period has been estimated to be 83 days1. Indeed, Ross 154 has been estimated to have an age of less than one billion years2. The rotation of Ross 154 induces a clear photometric cycle of 2.87 days in our All Sky Automated Survey V-band observations but the brightness of the star also varies with another cycle of 740 days that we interpret to be caused by the star’s magnetic cycle (Fig. 1). Knowing these two “fundamental” cycles helps interpreting any and all periodicities in the radial velocity data because periodicities that are independent from both rotation and magnetic activity cycle could correspond to planets orbiting the star. Fig. 1. Likelihood-ratio periodogram of ...
SPACE.com
27 Jul 2017, 11:30 UTC
For the first time, scientists have demonstrated laser communications between a microsatellite and a ground station while using the quantum nature of photons to secure the data being transmitted.
Unhackable Data: In a First, Secure Quantum Communications Is Tested Via Microsatellite
27 Jul 2017, 11:30 UTC
For the first time, scientists have demonstrated laser communications between a microsatellite and a ground station while using the quantum nature of photons to secure the data being transmitted.
Tom's Astronomy Blog
27 Jul 2017, 04:44 UTC
What a great image from Cassini! Click the image for a larger version and you can see the haze in the very upper reaches of Saturn’s atmosphere. NASA – This false-color view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft gazes toward the rings beyond Saturn’s sunlit horizon. Along the limb (the planet’s edge) at left can be seen a thin, detached haze. This haze vanishes toward the left side of the scene. Cassini will pass through Saturn’s upper atmosphere during the final five orbits of the mission, before making a fateful plunge into Saturn on Sept. 15, 2017. The region through which the spacecraft will fly on those last orbits is well above the haze seen here, which is in Saturn’s stratosphere. In fact, even when Cassini plunges toward Saturn to meet its fate, contact with the spacecraft is expected to be lost before it reaches the depth of this haze. This view is a false-color composite made using images taken in red, green and ultraviolet spectral filters. The images were obtained using the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 16, 2017, at a distance of about 777,000 miles (1.25 million kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is about 4 miles (7 kilometers) per ...
Saturn’s Haze
27 Jul 2017, 04:44 UTC
What a great image from Cassini! Click the image for a larger version and you can see the haze in the very upper reaches of Saturn’s atmosphere. NASA – This false-color view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft gazes toward the rings beyond Saturn’s sunlit horizon. Along the limb (the planet’s edge) at left can be seen a thin, detached haze. This haze vanishes toward the left side of the scene. Cassini will pass through Saturn’s upper atmosphere during the final five orbits of the mission, before making a fateful plunge into Saturn on Sept. 15, 2017. The region through which the spacecraft will fly on those last orbits is well above the haze seen here, which is in Saturn’s stratosphere. In fact, even when Cassini plunges toward Saturn to meet its fate, contact with the spacecraft is expected to be lost before it reaches the depth of this haze. This view is a false-color composite made using images taken in red, green and ultraviolet spectral filters. The images were obtained using the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 16, 2017, at a distance of about 777,000 miles (1.25 million kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is about 4 miles (7 kilometers) per ...
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- 28 Jul 2017
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