Meet the 10-foot-tall (3 meters) Mars Ascent Vehicle.
The 10-foot-tall (3 meters) Mars Ascent Vehicle will blast rock, sediment and atmospheric samples off Mars in the early 2030s, in the first-ever rocket launch from the surface of another planet.
Category: space – Page 451
The Space Force has assumed command of a new unit that will be focused on keeping an eye out for foreign threats in space, but it comes as Congress is warning the small service branch that it has to prepare to slow its growth.
Delta 18 and the brand-new National Space Intelligence Center were officially commissioned late last month at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. It will be staffed by nearly 350 civilian and military personnel.
Delta 18’s mission is to “deliver critical intelligence on threat systems, foreign intentions, and activities in the space domain to support national leaders, allies, partners and joint war fighters,” according to a press release.
After analyzing data gathered when NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected a sample from asteroid Bennu in October 2020, scientists have learned something astonishing.
Analyses of seismic waves picked up by NASA’s InSight lander shed new light on the planet’s core and give clues to the thickness of the crust.
Mars has had its first CT scan, thanks to analyses of seismic waves picked up by NASA’s InSight lander. Diagnosis: The Red Planet’s core is at least partially liquid, as some previous studies had suggested, and is somewhat larger than expected.
InSight reached Mars in late 2018 and soon afterward detected the first known marsquake (SN: 11/26/18; SN: 4/23/19). Since then, the lander’s instruments have picked up more than a thousand temblors, most of them minor rumbles. Many of those quakes originated at a seismically active region more than 1,000 kilometers away from the lander. A small fraction of the quakes had magnitudes ranging from 3.0 to 4.0, and the resulting vibrations have enabled scientists to probe Mars and reveal new clues about its inner structure.
Simon Stähler, a seismologist at ETH Zurich, and colleagues analyzed seismic waves from 11 marsquakes, looking for two types of waves: pressure and shear. Unlike pressure waves, shear waves can’t pass through a liquid, and they move more slowly, traveling side to side through solid materials, rather than in a push-and-pull motion in the same direction a wave is traveling like pressure waves do.
The motion of a tiny number of charged particles may solve a longstanding mystery about thin gas disks rotating around young stars, according to a new study from Caltech.
These features, called accretion disks, last tens of millions of years and are an early phase of solar system evolution. They contain a small fraction of the mass of the star around which they swirl; imagine a Saturn-like ring as big as the solar system. They are called accretion disks because the gas in these disks spirals slowly inward toward the star.
Scientists realized long ago that when this inward spiraling occurs, it should cause the radially inner part of the disk to spin faster, according to the law of the conservation of angular momentum. To understand conservation of angular momentum, think of spinning figure skaters: when their arms are outstretched, they spin slowly, but as they draw their arms in, they spin faster.
Researchers want to know more about the Red Planet’s enigmatic geology and thin atmosphere.
An early-stage Martian sailplane soared aloft, tethered to a balloon, as engineers ponder the possibilities to expand Red Planet flight.
The University of Arizona released a progress update on its sailplane project June 30 in conjunction with a recent journal publication exploring Mars exploration using motorless sailplanes.
On Tuesday, July 5, space physics and human studies dominated the science agenda aboard the International Space Station. The Expedition 67 crew also reconfigured a US airlock and put a new 3D printer through its paces.
The lack of gravity in space impacts a wide range of physics revealing new phenomena that researchers are studying to improve life for humans on and off the Earth. One such project uses artificial intelligence to adapt complicated glass manufacturing processes in microgravity with the goal of benefitting numerous Earth-and space-based industries. On Tuesday afternoon, NASA
Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. Its vision is “To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.” Its core values are “safety, integrity, teamwork, excellence, and inclusion.”
Understanding what’s inside of a planet is like trying to figure out what’s inside of a gift without unwrapping it. But because we can’t simply tear open a planet, instead, we must rely on secondary evidence, like the waves generated by geologic events.
Seismology — the study of quakes and seismic waves — lets us take “images” of the interiors of planets. NASA’s Viking landers brought the first seismometers to Mars in 1976, but they were plagued by noise, which rendered them largely ineffective. It took more than 40 years until Mars hosted another mission equipped with a quake-measuring instrument: NASA’s InSight lander.
And although InSight is expected to retire later this year, ever since the lander touched down in 2018, this stationary surveyor has been studying marsquakes, slowly unveiling the interior of the Red Planet.
Powerful radio pulses originating deep in the cosmos can be used to study hidden pools of gas cocooning nearby galaxies, according to a new study appearing in the journal Nature Astronomy.
So-called fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are pulses of radio waves that typically originate millions to billions of light-years away (radio waves are electromagnetic radiation like the light we see with our eyes but have longer wavelengths and frequencies). The first FRB was discovered in 2007, and since then, hundreds more have been found. In 2020, Caltech’s STARE2 instrument (Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission 2) and Canada’s CHIME (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) detected a massive FRB that went off in our own Milky Way galaxy. Those earlier results helped confirm the theory that the energetic events most likely originate from dead, magnetized stars called magnetars.
As more and more FRBs roll in, researchers are now asking how they can be used to study the gas that lies between us and the bursts. In particular, they would like to use the FRBs to probe halos of diffuse gas that surround galaxies. As the radio pulses travel toward Earth, the gas enveloping the galaxies is expected to slow the waves down and disperse the radio frequencies. In the new study, the researchers looked at a sample of 474 distant FRBs detected by CHIME, which has discovered the most FRBs to date, and showed that the subset of two dozen FRBs that passed through galactic halos were indeed slowed down more than non-intersecting FRBs.