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Category: space travel – Page 145

NASA and SpaceX have announced the date for the upcoming Crew-5 launch to the International Space Station. The space station is also orbiting higher today to prepare for next month’s Soyuz crew vehicle swap.

The fifth crewed operational mission aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft has been given a launch date of Oct. 3 from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. The four SpaceX Crew-5 crewmates, Commander Nicole Mann, Pilot Josh Cassada, and Mission Specialists Koichi Wakata and Anna Kikina will dock Dragon Endurance to the forward port on the station’s Harmony module about 24 hours later.

Several days after that, the four SpaceX Crew-4 astronauts will enter the Dragon Freedom crew ship and undock from Harmony’s space-facing port for a parachute-assisted splashdown off the coast of Florida. Freedom Commander Kjell Lindgren, Pilot Bob Hines, with Mission Specialists Jessica Watkins and Samantha Cristoforetti, have been living and working on the orbital lab as Expedition 67 Flight Engineers since April 27.

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Blue Origin’s announcement of next weeks’ New Sheppard 23 sub-orbital flight, which will feature a NASA-funded Tipping Point hydrogen fuel cell experiment designed and manufactured by Infinity Fuel Cell and Hydrogen, Inc. It will be the first fuel cell to fly into space since the space shuttle was retired ten years ago this summer, and the first ever to fly into space on a commercial flight.

On August 31, New Shepard’s 23rd mission, a dedicated payloads flight, will fly 36 payloads from academia, research institutions, and students across the globe. The launch window opens at 8:30 AM CDT / 13:30 UTC from Launch Site One in West Texas.

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Since we began space exploration in the mid-20th century, space agencies have relied on sending humans and robots into space. But should we leave space exploration entirely to robots?

Or should we consider sending humans to explore a new space world instead of robots? You are about to find satisfying answers to these curious questions.

Unlike traveling from one destination to another on Earth, exploring space comes with greater responsibilities. Space agencies hoping to explore a new space world must make a lot of planning to guarantee their success.

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The journey of half a million miles – the first flight of the Artemis Generation – is about to begin. The uncrewed Artemis I mission will jump-start humanity’s return to the Moon with the thunderous liftoff of NASA’s powerful new Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. This critical flight test will send Orion farther than any human-rated spacecraft has ever flown, putting new systems and processes to the test and lighting the way for the crew missions to come. Artemis I is ready for departure – and, together with our partners around the world, we are ready to return to the Moon, with our sights on Mars and beyond.

Producer: lisa allen, barbara zelon, alysia lee. writer & director: paul wizikowski

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NASA is about to perform the first-ever launch of its next-generation rocket and spacecraft in a highly anticipated lunar mission, and you can watch the entire event online.

The Artemis I mission, which is scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday, August 29, will usher in a new era of space exploration as NASA eyes lengthy crewed stays on the moon and the first astronaut voyage to Mars.

Monday’s launch involves the 98-meter-tall Space Launch System (SLS), the most powerful rocket NASA has ever built, and the Orion spacecraft, the space agency’s next-generation crew capsule.

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The stunning observation of the Cartwheel galaxy by JWST has revealed the exceptional ability that the latest space observatory has. The birthplace of new stars, the hot gas, and the activity of the supermassive black hole are all shining in this incredible photograph. But there’s more. Now you can sit back, relax, and fly towards that galaxy like a starship captain thanks to a video reconstruction that takes you from here to there.

It is located 500 million light-years away and you’ll start by passing a lot of nearby stars and the odd galaxy until the cartwheel galaxy and some near and far galaxies come into view and get closer and closer. The released image itself was incredible but seeing in the video how a little speck of darkness becomes a galaxy 145,000 light-years across is absolutely mind-blowing.

The Cartwheel is a galaxy merger. It underwent a bullseye-style collision with a smaller companion within the last one billion years, causing the spiral arms that would be expected for such a galaxy to disappear into two expanding circles. And the “spokes” are the galaxy slowly trying to reform its normal spiral shape. This is a process that will last for millions of years so we can continue to enjoy the incredible object for a long time yet.

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Most materials—from rubber bands to steel beams—thin out as they are stretched, but engineers can use origami’s interlocking ridges and precise folds to reverse this tendency and build devices that grow wider as they are pulled apart.

Researchers increasingly use this kind of technique, drawn from the ancient art of , to design spacecraft components, medical robots and antenna arrays. However, much of the work has progressed via instinct and trial and error. Now, researchers from Princeton Engineering and Georgia Tech have developed a general formula that analyzes how structures can be configured to thin, remain unaffected, or thicken as they are stretched, pushed or bent.

Kon-Well Wang, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the research, called the work “elegant and extremely intriguing.”

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