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Category: space – Page 965

Back in September 2015, Gooch & Housego reported on our work with cold atom technology on the FreezeRay project. Now, just over a year later, we’re happy to say that Gooch & Housego has successfully won funding for involvement in two further programs, CASPA and REVEAL, in a competition for the commercialization of quantum technologies. The contest is supported by Innovate UK and the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme.

CASPA (Cold Atom Space Payload) has the aim of developing a payload compatible with CubeSat and capable of producing cold atoms in space. As with all such projects, we are breaking new ground here and an effective demonstration of the prototype system – in this instance space will be the crucial first step towards commercializing instrumentation systems capable of recording minuscule changes in the earth’s gravitational strength. Such changes when mapped across the earth’s surface have the potential to be used in resource exploration or to geo-monitoring of polar ice mass, ocean currents and sea level changes.

CASPA will also evaluate the viability of using the technology in the provision of higher precision timing sources for next generation global positioning system (GPS) and also for deep space navigation. The program partners are e2v technologies Ltd, ClydeSpace, XCAM, Covesion, the University of Birmingham and the University of Southampton.

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The first pioneers on Mars may build their homes using the ice beneath their feet.

In November, a University of Texas research team reported that Mars’ Utopia Planitia region contains about as much water, in the form of buried ice, as Lake Superior does here on Earth.

This ice layer, which spans a greater area than the state of New Mexico, lies in Mars’ mid-northern latitudes and is covered by just 3 feet to 33 feet (1 to 10 meters) of soil, the scientists determined. [Photos: The Search for Water on Mars].

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ExoMars will soon start aerobraking in Mars orbit in a years-long effort to sample Mars super-thin lower atmosphere in the ongoing search for trace gases indicative of life and active geology.

ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter is preparing to aerobrake into parts of the unexplored Martian lower atmosphere in search of methane, water vapor and other possible signatures of life on the Red Planet.

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Slight variations in the moon’s gravitational tug have hinted that kilometers-wide caverns lurk beneath the lunar surface. Like the lava tubes of Hawaii and Iceland, these structures probably formed when underground rivers of molten rock ran dry, leaving behind a cylindrical channel. On Earth, such structures max out at around 30 meters across, but the gravitational data suggest that the moon’s tubes are vastly wider.

Other satellites had found the openings of large lunar lava tubes and caves.

  • The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has now imaged over 200 pits that show the signature of being skylights into subsurface voids or caverns, ranging in diameter from about 16 feet (5 meters) to more than 2,950 feet (900 m), although some of these are likely to be post-flow features rather than volcanic skylights.

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John Glenn, who captured the nation’s attention in 1962 as the first American to orbit the Earth during a tense time when the United States sought supremacy over the Soviet Union in the space race, and who rocketed back into space 36 years later, becoming the oldest astronaut in history, died Dec. 8 at a hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Mr. Glenn, who in his post-NASA career served four terms as a U.S. senator from Ohio, was 95.

The death was confirmed by Hank Wilson, communications director at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University. Mr. Glenn had a stroke after heart-valve replacement surgery in 2014, but the immediate cause was not announced.

Mr. Glenn was one of the seven original astronauts in NASA’s Mercury program, which was a conspicuous symbol of the country’s military and technological might at the height of the Cold War. He was not the first American in space — two of his fellow astronauts preceded him — but his three-orbit circumnavigation of the globe captured the imagination of his countrymen like few events before or since. Mr. Glenn was the last survivor of the Mercury Seven.

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