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But rather than have NASA focus on getting to the Moon so soon, the bill would push the deadline to 2028. The legislation also adds another big milestone: get humans in orbit around Mars by 2033. In fact, the bill places more of a focus on that long-term goal, and rewrites NASA’s lunar plans in order to meet the objective of getting to the Red Planet sooner rather than later. Notably, it directs NASA to start working on a Mars transport vehicle ASAP, something the agency isn’t quite focused on at the moment. //
Perhaps the biggest concern revolves around the construction of Artemis’ lunar lander. Right now, NASA hopes to obtain multiple landers from commercial companies through public-private partnerships. With these collaborations, NASA would invest in the development of the landers, but the companies would create, control, and own the final products themselves. The new bill wants to instead make NASA the sole owner of this hardware, with full oversight on development. This is the same way NASA has built its biggest spacecraft for decades, and it can often be a costly way of doing business. //
The bill argues that using the Moon’s resources doesn’t make it easier to get to Mars, so any lunar prospecting and mining has to be funded through other programs outside of Artemis. In fact, the bill states that NASA shouldn’t focus on any activities on the Moon that don’t contribute to getting to Mars. //
Additionally, the bill dictates how the lander is supposed to reach the Moon. The legislation says the lander has to be integrated with the SLS and the massive upper stage of the vehicle that Boeing plans to build for it. That means whoever is assigned to build the landers must be well-versed in Boeing’s hardware, potentially giving Boeing the leg up in the competition. //
Numerous organizations have come out against the bill, including The Planetary Society and the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. Others like the Aerospace Industries Association and the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration have expressed their desire to continue to review portions of the legislation.
The Curiosity rover has performed admirably on Mars for more than seven years, but there have been a few bumps along the way. After all, it was only designed to last a few years. NASA reports that Curiosity has suffered a system failure that left the robot unaware of its position and attitude on the red planet. Until it recovers, Curiosity is frozen in place. //
Mars is far enough away that we can’t directly control Curiosity in real-time — the rover gets batches of commands and then carries them out. That means it needs to have precise awareness of the state of all its joints, as well as environmental details like the location of nearby obstacles and the slope of the ground. This vital information ensures the rover doesn’t bump anything with its arm or clip large rocks as it rolls along.
Curiosity stores all this attitude data in memory, but something went wrong during operations several days ago. As the rover was carrying out its orders, it suddenly lost track of its orientation. The attitude data didn’t add up, so Curiosity froze in place to avoid damaging itself. While the rover is physically stuck in place, it’s still in communication with the team here on Earth.
Here on Earth, the ability to generate electricity is something we take for granted. We can count on the sun to illuminate solar panels, and the movement of air and water to spin turbines. //
Since 2015, NASA and the United States Department of Energy have been working on the Kilopower project, which aims to develop a small, lightweight, and extremely reliable nuclear reactor that they believe will fulfill this critical role in future off-world exploration. Following a series of highly successful test runs on the prototype hardware in 2017 and 2018, the team believes the miniaturized power plant could be ready for a test flight as early as 2022. Once fully operational, this nearly complete re-imagining of the classic thermal reactor could usher in a whole new era of space exploration. //
it’s more like an evolved version of the radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) which NASA has used to power everything from the Voyager missions to the Curiosity rover. There’s no dangerous high pressure steam, finicky turbines to spin, or coolant pumps to fail. Thermal energy is passively carried away from the reactor core using sodium-filled heat pipes, which lead to the “hot” side of a Stirling engine array. With a large deployable radiator on the other side, the Stirling engines would use the temperature differential to produce reciprocal motion that can drive a small generator.
The Kilopower has been designed as a self-regulating system where everything happens automatically and without the need for external control. There would naturally be sensors for basic diagnostics, for example checking temperatures at key points in the system, the RPMs of the Stirling engines, and the output of the generators. But outside of monitoring for these possible signs of trouble, the human crew could largely ignore the Kilopower and go about their mission.
"To look forward to the Moon, we need to learn from the past." //
The reality is that, even with a healthy budget increase, NASA can barely afford a human landing program on the Moon in the 2020s—at least using its Space Launch System rocket and usual ways of doing business, as it appears set on doing. This is more than enough for a space agency that has not flown a human into deep space for 47 years.
Talk of Mars is historically unsupportable with current budgets or NASA's existing technology. (As just one example, NASA at best can build one SLS rocket a year, and a single human mission to Mars would require six to eight SLS rocket launches). Past efforts to go to the Moon, Mars, or both have all ended in cancellation. So by talking about an all-of-the-above Moon-to-Mars exploration plan now, NASA's administration seems to be moving from the edge of the possible into the realm of the impossible
Last week, NASA’s Curiosity rover detected a belch of natural gas on the red planet. The gas has since dissipated, leaving only a mystery.
It roved a staggering 45.16 kilometers across the red planet. //
Late Tuesday night, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent their final data uplink to the Opportunity rover on Mars. Over this connection, via the Deep Space Network, the American jazz singer Billie Holiday crooned "I'll Be Seeing You," a song which closes with the lines:
I'll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I'll be looking at the moon
But I'll be seeing you
Opportunity landed on Mars more than 15 Earth years ago, on January 25, 2004. So much time has passed since then. Facebook would not be created until a month later. YouTube would not get its first video upload for more than a year. George W. Bush was still in his first presidency. NASA's Cassini spacecraft had not yet even arrived in the Saturn system.
And yet from that moment on, Opportunity and its sister rover, Spirit, began plugging along the surface of Mars. Originally designed for 90-day lifetimes, the rovers persisted. Spirit lasted until 2010, when its batteries were unable to keep the spacecraft's critical components from freezing.