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Category: space – Page 853

Astronauts Finalize Preps Before Wednesday’s Battery Spacewalk

The Expedition 63 crew is set for its second spacewalk on Wednesday at 7:35 a.m. EDT to continue upgrading International Space Station power systems.

Commander Chris Cassidy will lead the spacewalk and exit the Quest airlock in the U.S. spacesuit with the red stripes. He’ll be followed by Flight Engineer Bob Behnken in his spacesuit with no stripes.

Both astronauts are being joined today by Flight Engineer Doug Hurley as they finalize procedure reviews, organize tools and perform suit leak checks before tomorrow’s spacewalk. Hurley will be on duty helping the spacewalkers in and out their spacesuits and monitoring the excursion. Roscosmos cosmonaut Ivan Vagner will assist the NASA trio on Wednesday.

Habitat Mars: Learning to live sustainably on the red planet

There’s quite a bit of buzz these days about how humanity could become a “multiplanetary” species. This is understandable, considering that space agencies and aerospace companies from around the world are planning on conducting missions to low earth orbit (LEO), the moon, and Mars in the coming years, not to mention establishing a permanent human presence there and beyond.

To do this, humanity needs to develop the necessary strategies for sustainable living in hostile environments and enclosed spaces. To prepare humans for this kind of experience, groups like Habitat Marte (Mars Habitat) and others are dedicated to conducting simulated missions in analog environments. The lessons learned will not only prepare people to live and work in space but foster ideas for sustainable living here on Earth.

Habitat Marte was founded in 2017 by Julio Francisco Dantas de Rezende, the professor of sustainability in the Department of Product Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) and the director of innovation with the Research Support Foundation (FAPERN). He is also the coordinator of Habitat Marte and Mars Society Brazil.

Graze’s solar-powered, self-driving mower is a view of Elon Musk’s fully-autonomous future

Tesla’s Autonomy Day in April 2019 gave supporters of the company a look into Elon Musk’s vision of a fully-autonomous future. While the event featured the company’s strategies for the future as it prepares to “free investors from the tyranny of having to drive their own cars,” the $100 billion agriculture sector is also looking into sustainable, self-driving technologies that would revolutionize the industry.

Santa Monica, California-based lawn and landscaping startup Graze is developing a solar-powered, fully-autonomous lawn mower that requires no human interaction. The battery-operated, fully-autonomous mower is being developed by Graze CEO John Vay who has an extensive background in landscaping, and CTO Roman Flores whose past employers include NASA and the Caltech Curiosity Mars Rover Team. The two minds are developing the product in an attempt to revolutionize commercial agriculture as we know it.

Quantum Entanglement Demonstrated Aboard Orbiting CubeSat – Step Toward Space-Based Global Quantum Network

Advance poised to enable cost-effective space-based global quantum network for secure communications and more.

In a critical step toward creating a global quantum communications network, researchers have generated and detected quantum entanglement onboard a CubeSat nanosatellite weighing less than 2.6 kilograms and orbiting the Earth.

“In the future, our system could be part of a global quantum network transmitting quantum signals to receivers on Earth or on other spacecraft,” said lead author Aitor Villar from the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. “These signals could be used to implement any type of quantum communications application, from quantum key distribution for extremely secure data transmission to quantum teleportation, where information is transferred by replicating the state of a quantum system from a distance.”

First measurement of spin-orbit alignment on planet Beta Pictoris b

Astronomers have made the first measurement of spin-orbit alignment for a distant ‘super-Jupiter’ planet, demonstrating a technique that could enable breakthroughs in the quest to understand how exoplanetary systems form and evolved.

An international team of scientists, led by Professor Stefan Kraus from the University of Exeter, has carried out the measurements for the exoplanet Beta Pictoris b—located 63 light years from Earth.

The planet, found in the Pictor constellation, has a mass of around 11 times that of Jupiter and orbits a young star on a similar as Saturn in our solar system.

Newborn Pluto Was Hot and Had Subsurface Ocean: Study

Pluto is thought to possess a subsurface ocean beneath its thick ice shell. It has generally been assumed that the dwarf planet formed out of cold material and then later developed its ocean due to warming from radioactive decay. By combining numerical simulations with geological observations by NASA’s New Horizons mission, a team of researchers from the University of California Santa Cruz and the Southwest Research Institute demonstrated that Pluto was instead relatively hot when it formed, with an early subsurface ocean.

Gorgeous NASA Simulations Show What Sunsets Would Look Like on Other Worlds

How would the Sun look as it dipped below the horizon on a long (17 hour) day on Uranus? Or what would a late-night sunset on Mars look like, when we finally get there? Thanks to some NASA computer modelling, these scenarios are now a little easier to imagine.

What makes a sunset is the interplay of light from the Sun – which includes all the colours of the rainbow – together with the gases and dust in the atmosphere. The less atmosphere, the less impressive the sunset.

Planetary scientist Geronimo Villanueva, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, has created simulations of how sunsets might look on Venus, Mars, Uranus, the Saturn moon Titan, and Trappist-1e.

Spectacular New Images Capture the Space Station Cruise Across the Sun

Moving at eight kilometers (five miles) per second, the International Space Station (ISS) circles our planet every 90 minutes. In a 24-hour period, crew members on the ISS experience 16 sunrises and sunsets. Despite how often the station passes directly between Earth and the Sun, capturing an image of the ISS transiting our nearest star is rare.

On June 24, 2020, NASA photographer Joel Kowsky captured such an occurrence from Fredericksburg, Virginia. The image above is a composite, made from six frames, and shows the ISS in silhouette as it moved from right to left across the solar disk while orbiting 400 kilometers (250 miles) above Earth.

The image below shows the position of the ISS in its orbit as Kowsky snapped his photos at approximately 1:15 p.m. U.S. Eastern Daylight Time. The transit lasted approximately 0.54 seconds and was captured while his camera was shooting at 10 frames per second. Watch a video of the transit below.

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