NASA/MSFC
The momentous launch has been years in the making. NASA finally means to send its Orion capsule on its journey to the moon and back this month after a long string of delays exacerbated by concerns that the project had gone wildly over budget.
South Korea’s Moon mission
The mission will circle the Moon for about a year at about 100 kilometers above the surface, searching for possible landing sites for future missions, conducting scientific research on the lunar environment, and testing space internet technology, South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT said in a statement. This mission will help prepare the country’s small space program for future exploration, as they hope to send a lander to the Moon by 2030.
If it successfully goes into orbit at the Moon, South Korea will become the seventh nation to undertake lunar exploration.
Skin healing processes and spacewalk preparations filled the work schedule aboard the International Space Station on Friday. The Expedition 67 crew members are also readying a U.S. space freighter for its return to Earth next week.
Four astronauts aboard the orbiting lab practiced surgical techniques to heal wounds in microgravity on Friday in the Kibo laboratory module. The quartet split up in groups of two with NASA astronaut Bob Hines joining ESA (European Space Agency) Flight Engineer Samantha Cristoforetti for the first practice session during the morning. In the afternoon, NASA Flight Engineers Kjell Lindgren and Jessica Watkins began their session studying how to take biopsies and suture wounds inside the Life Science Glovebox.
During the middle of the day, the foursome had time set aside time for gathering frozen research samples inside science freezers and preparing them for departure back to Earth inside the SpaceX Dragon resupply ship. Dragon is due to leave the station on Aug. 18 loaded with over 4,000 pounds of station supplies and science experiments after 33 days docked to the Harmony module’s forward port. The commercial cargo craft will parachute to a splashdown off the coast of Florida the next day for retrieval by NASA and SpaceX personnel.
Sustained space exploration will require infrastructure that doesn’t currently exist: buildings, housing, rocket landing pads.
So, where do you turn for construction materials when they are too big to fit in your carry-on and there’s no Home Depot in outer space?
“If we’re going to live and work on another planet like Mars or the moon, we need to make concrete. But we can’t take bags of concrete with us—we need to use local resources,” said Norman Wagner, Unidel Robert L. Pigford Chair of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware.
He was the first expert on the scene after two farmers found pieces of fallen space machinery.
How do you identify a piece of space debris that’s partially burned up on re-entry before falling down to Earth like a comet? It turns out that, in the case of a piece of SpaceX’s Crew-1 capsule that recently came crashing down onto a sheep field in Australia, it wasn’t too hard at all.
Before he saw the piece of fallen space machinery in person, Dr. Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist from the Australian National University, was pretty sure it was going to be a piece of Crew-1, he tells IE in an interview.
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Dr. Brad Tucker was the first expert on the scene after two farmers found pieces of space debris, now known to have come from SpaceX’s Crew-1 mission.
Imagine driving home after a long day at work. Suddenly, a car careens out of an obscured side street and turns right in front of you. Luckily, your autonomous car saw this vehicle long before it came within your line of sight and slowed to avoid a crash. This might seem like magic, but a novel technique developed at Caltech could bring it closer to a reality.
With the advent of autonomous vehicles, advanced spacecraft, and other technologies that rely on sensors for navigation, there is an ever-increasing need for advanced technologies that can scan for obstacles, pedestrians, or other objects. But what if something is hidden behind another object?
In a paper recently published in the journal Nature Photonics, Caltech researchers and their colleagues describe a new method that essentially transforms nearby surfaces into lenses that can be used to indirectly image previously obscured objects.
Worry not though, as the Mars-bound spacecraft could finally make its orbital test flight on September 1. That’s because SpaceX set out a six-month window that opens on the first day of September. The license was granted by the FCC on Wednesday, August 10, according to Space.com.
The space between the planets in our solar system is filled with a wispy sea of charged particles that flow out from the Sun’s atmosphere. This particle population is augmented by cosmic rays — speedy protons and atomic nuclei accelerated in extreme environments across the universe — which ebb and flow against the 11-year solar activity cycle. This undulating particle background is punctuated by bursts of high-energy particles from the Sun, which can be unleashed suddenly in violent solar storms.
Spacecraft that venture out from the protection of Earth’s magnetic field must navigate this ocean of particles and weather solar storms. And if we someday wish to send astronauts to other planets, we’ll need to know how high-energy solar particles, which pose a risk to the health of astronauts and electronic systems alike, travel through the solar system.
In a new publication, a team led by Shuai Fu (Macau University of Science and Technology), Zheyi Ding (China University of Geosciences), and Yongjie Zhang (Chinese Academy of Sciences) studied the high-energy solar particles produced in an event in November 2020, when the Sun emitted a solar flare and a massive explosion of solar plasma called a coronal mass ejection.