No matter if you enjoy taking or just watching images of space, NASA has a treat for you. They have made their entire collection of images, sounds, and video available and publicly searchable online. It’s 140,000 photos and other resources available for you to see, or even download and use it any way you like. …

Searchable

NASA has selected two cubesat missions to launch as part of the Artemis project to return humans to the moon.

“We could have lost a spacecraft twice during this mission.” //

By declaring the Starliner mishap a "close call," Loverro also formally opened a process during which the space agency's Safety Office will investigate the organization elements that may have led to the incident—likely focusing on why NASA did not detect the errors in Starliner's flight software.

Loverro said no decisions are close to being made on when Starliner will return to flight or whether Boeing will have to fly another uncrewed demonstration test flight before NASA astronauts fly on Starliner. The next step, he said, is for Boeing to prepare a "corrective action plan" to implement the review team's findings, and that will include a schedule. NASA will evaluate that plan and then it may be in a position to decide whether another test flight is needed. //

As part of its initial review NASA has also studied whether Boeing's problems with Starliner will affect other areas of human spaceflight. So far, Loverro said, there appear to be no spillover effects on the other company working with NASA as part of the commercial crew program, SpaceX. NASA appears satisfied with that company's end-to-end software testing procedures. SpaceX is continuing preparations for a crew flight of its Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station, likely sometime in May.

To interact: Use the controls in the top left (or pinch) to zoom in and out of the image. Click (or touch) and drag your cursor to move around in the image.

NASA's Curiosity rover captured its highest-resolution panorama yet of the Martian surface between Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 2019. A version without the rover contains nearly 1.8 billion pixels; a version with the rover contains nearly 650 million pixels. Both versions are composed of more than 1,000 images that were carefully assembled over the following months.

The rover's Mast Camera, or Mastcam, used its telephoto lens to produce the panorama and relied on its medium-angle lens to produce a lower-resolution panorama that includes the rover's deck and robotic arm.

NASAs Curiosity rover captured its highest-resolution panorama of the Martian surface between Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 2019.

The successful rescue mission was thanks to superb Nasa organisation //

After a torrid hour of failed troubleshooting, a new shift of flight controllers arrived, as well as a new flight director, waiting to take their turn. They were at this point still in the thick of the fight and the temptation for Kranz to keep going and refuse to relinquish control must have been enormous. Nevertheless he passed the baton to the incoming team, recognising that fresh eyes and minds were what was needed. This is the true spirit of teamwork – the ability to know when your part is done, when someone new can bring something better than you can. //

That ability to relinquish control and delegate authority didn’t stop there. The Apollo missions were complex endeavours. Nobody could be across it all and Nasa knew that in mission control it had a team of people who, as a whole, were far greater than the sum of their individual parts.

In approaching this crisis, their delegation of authority and deference to expertise is almost total. In the face of high-stakes scenarios, it is tempting to wrest control from more junior colleagues. But in 1970 the approach of mission control was quite different. They empowered their most junior team members, giving them total ownership of their specialist stations. They would interrogate their recommendations but not second-guess them. It is a lesson that industry and wider society has largely failed to heed. //

But what surprised me was how little of the response to the accident demanded improvised solutions. Nasa had learned to be wary of creativity and inventiveness in the heat of the moment. That doesn’t mean it refused to improvise, nor that it wasn’t capable of doing it well – only that it knew plans hatched in the heat of battle often harbour hidden flaws. //

Incredibly, Nasa had already rehearsed many of the contingency and fallback plans required to rescue Apollo 13. In earlier missions, it had experimented with using the lunar module’s engines to drive both it and the command module. It had a checklist ready to manage the sudden powering down of the command module that was required to save dwindling battery power. Nasa even had a procedure for flying the spacecraft without their primary navigation and guidance computer. And then, when finally it had no choice but to improvise, it did it with same obsession and attention to detail it brought to everything else.

She mapped Apollo 11’s path to history. Now, her legacy lives on in the trajectories of future spaceflights—including the moon landing planned for 2024. //

SOPHIA CHEN02.28.20 8:00 AM
SCIENCE
Katherine Johnson’s Math Will Steer NASA Back to the Moon
She mapped Apollo 11’s path to history. Now, her legacy lives on in the trajectories of future spaceflights—including the moon landing planned for 2024.
Katherine Johnson looking at paper with data being printed
PHOTOGRAPH: NASA
Katherine Johnson blazed trails, not just as a black female mathematician during the Cold War, but by mapping literal paths through outer space. Her math continues to carve out new paths for spacecraft navigating our solar system, as NASA engineers use evolved versions of her equations that will execute missions to the moon and beyond.

The retired NASA mathematician, who died Monday at the age of 101, calculated the trajectories of the agency’s first space missions, including John Glenn’s 1962 spaceflight in which he became the first American to orbit the planet, and the first moon landing in 1969. But Johnson’s contributions to spaceflight extend beyond such historic moments, several of which are dramatized in the 2016 movie Hidden Figures. Her work forms part of the mathematical foundation of NASA’s missions today. “She had a big contribution to trajectory design in general,” says NASA aerospace engineer Jenny Gruber. //

These missions are not unlike trying to hit a rotating bull’s-eye with a dart while jumping off a carousel, the dart being the astronaut, the Earth the spinning carousel, and the bull’s eye a spot on the moon. As Johnson told a PBS interviewer in 2011, “It was intricate, but it was possible.” //

So just as Johnson's team did in the 1960s, Gruber and her team are trying to calculate and plan for all possible scenarios on the way to the moon. “If you get it wrong, people die,” she says. “And then people see it on TV.” //

SOPHIA CHEN02.28.20 8:00 AM
SCIENCE
Katherine Johnson’s Math Will Steer NASA Back to the Moon
She mapped Apollo 11’s path to history. Now, her legacy lives on in the trajectories of future spaceflights—including the moon landing planned for 2024.
Katherine Johnson looking at paper with data being printed
PHOTOGRAPH: NASA
Katherine Johnson blazed trails, not just as a black female mathematician during the Cold War, but by mapping literal paths through outer space. Her math continues to carve out new paths for spacecraft navigating our solar system, as NASA engineers use evolved versions of her equations that will execute missions to the moon and beyond.

The retired NASA mathematician, who died Monday at the age of 101, calculated the trajectories of the agency’s first space missions, including John Glenn’s 1962 spaceflight in which he became the first American to orbit the planet, and the first moon landing in 1969. But Johnson’s contributions to spaceflight extend beyond such historic moments, several of which are dramatized in the 2016 movie Hidden Figures. Her work forms part of the mathematical foundation of NASA’s missions today. “She had a big contribution to trajectory design in general,” says NASA aerospace engineer Jenny Gruber.

At NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Gruber works on the Artemis mission, which plans to send the first woman and the next man to the moon in 2024. Gruber plans trajectories for Artemis, just as Johnson did for the first lunar landing. Gruber’s basic task remains essentially the same as Johnson’s was in 1962: to calculate the speed, acceleration, and direction required to lob a spacecraft of certain size and fuel capacity to hit a moving target, without a lot of room for extra maneuvering.

These missions are not unlike trying to hit a rotating bull’s-eye with a dart while jumping off a carousel, the dart being the astronaut, the Earth the spinning carousel, and the bull’s eye a spot on the moon. As Johnson told a PBS interviewer in 2011, “It was intricate, but it was possible.”

Once launched, astronauts have limited means for adjusting their trajectory, and small errors committed either by trajectory planners or the astronauts themselves can result in dire consequences. For example, Scott Carpenter, who replicated Glenn’s flight and was the sixth human in space, overshot his target landing spot in the Atlantic Ocean by 250 miles because he fell behind preparing for re-entry. (A US Navy team safely recovered him about three hours later.) So just as Johnson's team did in the 1960s, Gruber and her team are trying to calculate and plan for all possible scenarios on the way to the moon. “If you get it wrong, people die,” she says. “And then people see it on TV.”

The job has always had crazy high pressure. One of the most important aspects of Johnson’s mathematical prowess is that her calculations involved real people, real objects interacting at the limits of human engineering. During these missions, human lives were at stake, and so was the outcome of the space race between the US and the former Soviet Union. “The space program was in overdrive, trying to get ahead of the Russians,” says NASA historian Bill Barry. And, of course, the whole world was watching the Apollo 11 moon landing on television.

Although the basics of space missions have remained the same, much has evolved in mission planning since Johnson’s time. In ’60s, NASA employed so-called “human computers”—mostly women like Johnson—to perform the calculations. “The main reason women were hired to be computers was that it was drudge work,” says Barry. “The engineers didn’t want to do it.”

But even if the public didn’t know much about these mathematicians, the astronauts relied on them. While preparing for the 1962 Friendship 7 mission, Glenn famously did not trust NASA’s “new” electronic computer, the multimillion-dollar IBM 7090, to plan his trip. He specifically requested that Johnson, who worked at NASA’s Flight Research Division, double-check the IBM’s computations with pen and paper. “‘Get the girl,’” Glenn said, according to Barry. “Everyone knew which ‘girl’ he meant. Katherine Johnson was the premier mathematician doing this type of work.” //

Today, it’s a cliché that “space is hard.” But in Johnson’s time, it wasn’t just hard—up until then, it had seemed impossible; Johnson helped make it possible. Barry credits her work, in part, for enabling current ventures such as commercial rocket companies like SpaceX. “So much of what she did is buried in the mathematical DNA of how to do spaceflight,” says Barry. Thanks to Johnson's pioneering math, spaceflight is now routine. “It’s well-known rocket science now.”

"Anything that could be counted, I did." //

Katherine Johnson, a trailblazing mathematician best known for her contributions to NASA's human spaceflight program and who gained fame later in life due to the movie Hidden Figures, died Monday. She was 101 years old.

"At NASA, we will never forget her courage and leadership and the milestones we could not have reached without her," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. "We will continue building on her legacy and work tirelessly to increase opportunities for everyone who has something to contribute toward the ongoing work of raising the bar of human potential." //

Most notably, in 1962, she performed the critical calculations that put John Glenn into a safe orbit during the first orbital mission of a US astronaut. NASA engineers had run the calculations on electric computers, but when someone was needed to validate the calculations, Glenn and the rest of the space agency turned to Johnson. “If she says they’re good,” Johnson recalled the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go." //

NASA named a new building after her in 2016, the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility //

What an amazing lady - her work will live on for centuries, as we explore further out into the solar system. RIP Katherine
From another article, but appropriate-
Quote:

Bill Barry, NASA’s chief historian:
“If we go back to the moon, or to Mars, we’ll be using her math.”

In the new children's book "How We Got to the Moon: The People, Technology and Daring Feats of Science Behind Humanity's Greatest Adventure" (Random House Children's Books, 2020), award-winning author and illustrator John Rocco beautifully recounts humanity's journey to the moon.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has snapped its first photo of Earth from the surface of the Red Planet, an amazing image that also includes the moon. See the photos here.

NASA has digitally dusted off the Voyager mission's iconic 'Pale Blue Dot' image to celebrate the photograph's 30th anniversary.

Although he admits the charger might not survive the trip to space. //

Fly me to the Moon, and let me... charge... among the stars

"If it had gone uncorrected it would have led to erroneous thruster firing." //

During its quarterly meeting on Thursday, NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel dropped some significant news about a critical commercial crew test flight. The panel revealed that Boeing's Starliner may have been lost during a December mission had a software error not been found and fixed while the vehicle was in orbit.

The software issue was identified during testing on the ground after Starliner's launch, said panel member Paul Hill, a former flight director and former director of mission operations at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The problem would have interfered with the service module's (SM) separation from the Starliner capsule. //

"While this anomaly was corrected in flight, if it had gone uncorrected it would have led to erroneous thruster firing and uncontrolled motion during SM separation for deorbit, with the potential for catastrophic spacecraft failure," Hill said during the meeting.

Starliner's December test flight had to be cut short due to a well-publicized timing error that delayed the spacecraft's service module from performing an orbital insertion burn. This caused the thrusters on board the service module, which provides power to Starliner during most of its mission, to fire longer than expected. As a result, the spacecraft did not have enough fuel to complete a rendezvous with the International Space Station, a key component of the test flight in advance of crewed missions. //

However, as part of reporting on a story about Starliner software and thruster issues three weeks ago, a source told Ars about this particular problem. According to the source, Boeing patched a software code error just two hours before the vehicle reentered Earth's atmosphere. Had the error not been caught, the source said, proper thrusters would not open during the reentry process, and the vehicle would have been lost. //

the public remarks by Hill on Thursday appear to underscore the seriousness of the issue, and the safety panel recommended several reviews of Boeing. "The panel has a larger concern with the rigor of Boeing's verification processes," Hill said. "As a result, the panel recommends that NASA pursue not just the root cause of these specific flight-software anomalies but also a Boeing assessment of and corrective actions for Boeing's flight-software integration and testing processes."

The safety panel also recommended that NASA conduct "an even broader" assessment of Boeing's Systems Engineering and Integration processes

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 Spitzer Space Telescope lasted over 16 years //

Spitzer is one of four space telescopes operated by NASA known as the Great Observatories. Its fellow “greats” are the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the famous Hubble Space Telescope. Combined, the four telescopes were meant to observe the Universe in as many wavelengths of light as possible — ranging from the visible light that we can see, to the kinds of light our eyes cannot register. Spitzer’s charge has been to observe infrared light, a type of light that humans can’t see but can sense as heat. Objects that are faint and super cold can still be seen by the infrared light that they produce, so Spitzer can show us things that might otherwise seem invisible. //

This afternoon, NASA scientists will send a command to Spitzer, telling it to stop taking observations and no longer send pings back to Earth. Conceivably, NASA could wake Spitzer back up again someday, but as more time passes, the tougher that will be. Spitzer will no longer be pointing its antenna back at Earth and sending a strong signal that NASA can pick up. So making a link with the spacecraft will become harder and harder.

But even as Spitzer hangs up its hat, there are still other infrared telescopes in the works — notably, NASA’s next great space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope. Designed to study the Universe in infrared, the James Webb will be the most powerful space telescope ever when it launches, and will be able see back in time to the beginning of the Universe. //

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.

SpaceX successfully launched a unique Falcon 9 rocket at LC-39A for the in-flight abort test…

Cueball has added together all the runtimes of the Star Wars movies (episodes I-IX) and then calculated the exact time at which a message sent to Voyager 1 will have that exact duration in light speed delay. He announces this information to Megan and Beret Guy only seconds before it occurs, allowing him to signal the moment by saying "Now!"
Megan expresses surprise that the event isn't being celebrated with fireworks. Judging by the fact that she doesn't look up from her book, her surprise is insincere. Beret Guy breaks into song with the New Year's traditional "Auld Lang Syne".

This comic highlights a coincidental relationship between the Star Wars Episodes and the NASA Space Probe "Voyager 1", which most likely no one else has thought about, but most likely fitting well with fans of both xkcd and Star Wars.

The first Star Wars episode was released on 25th May 1977 only four months before Voyager 1 was launched on 5th September 1977. The last episode was released more than 42.5 years later on 20th December 2019 only three weeks before this comic.

That is approximately 20.6 light hours away. With the recently released last episode the total viewing time of the nine episodes is 20.35 hours (not including the two spin-off movies Rogue One and Solo).