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Image enhancement techniques have been used to reveal life aboard Nasa's stricken Apollo 13 spacecraft in unprecedented detail.
Fifty years ago, the craft suffered an explosion that jeopardised the lives of the three astronauts aboard.
Unsurprisingly, given they were locked in a fight for survival, relatively few onboard images were taken.
But imaging specialist Andy Saunders created sharp stills from low-quality 16mm film shot by the crew.
One of the techniques used by Mr Saunders is known as "stacking", in which many frames are assembled on top of each other to improve the image's detail.
NASA released a series of panoramic images of the Apollo landing sites for the 50th anniversary of the moon mission.
With data from NASA's LRO mission, researchers have recreated what the Apollo 13 astronauts saw on their trip around the moon.
The water ice and other lunar resources that will help the United States establish a long-term human presence on the moon are there for the taking, the White House believes.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order today (April 6) establishing U.S. policy on the exploitation of off-Earth resources. That policy stresses that the current regulatory regime — notably, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty — allows the use of such resources.
This view has long held sway in U.S. government circles. For example, the United States, like the other major spacefaring nations, has not signed the 1979 Moon Treaty, which stipulates that non-scientific use of space resources be governed by an international regulatory framework. And in 2015, Congress passed a law explicitly allowing American companies and citizens to use moon and asteroid resources.
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.
The moon and Earth may be more different than long thought, challenging existing models for how the moon formed, a new study finds. //
The moon and Earth may be more different than previously thought, challenging existing models for how the moon formed, a new study finds.
Earth originated about 4.5 billion years ago, and previous research suggested that the moon arose a short time after that. For the past three decades, the prevailing explanation for the moon's origin was that it resulted from the collision of two protoplanets, or embryonic worlds. One of those was the newborn Earth, and the other was a Mars-size rock nicknamed Theia, after the mother of the moon in Greek myth. "Once the dust settled, two bodies were left — Earth and the moon," new study co-author Zachary Sharp, a planetary scientist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, told Space.com.
“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.
A similar challenge two decades ago boosted a nascent SpaceX.
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.”
Northrop says this is a first step toward a fleet of satellite-servicing vehicles. //
On Tuesday, a spacecraft that was launched four months earlier docked with a communications satellite about 36,000km above the Earth. Northrop Grumman reported the historic docking on Wednesday, and the company heralded the mission as an "historic accomplishment" in the field of satellite servicing. Prior to this mission, no two commercial spacecraft had ever docked in orbit before.
Launched on a Proton rocket in October, the Mission Extension Vehicle-1 (MEV-1) has a fairly long history of development under various companies. Ultimately, it was brought to space by SpaceLogistics, a wholly owned subsidiary of Northrop Grumman. After the company's rideshare launch in October, its MEV-1 spacecraft used electric-propulsion thrusters to raise its orbit 290km above geosynchronous orbit. //
a communications satellite launched in 2001 (Intelsat-901) was pulled from active service in December 2019 as it ran low on fuel. Operators commanded the satellite to move into a "graveyard orbit" above geostationary space. It is here that MEV-1 linked up with the communications satellite on Tuesday.
According to Northrop Grumman, the combined spacecraft stack will now perform on-orbit checkouts before MEV-1 starts to relocate the combined vehicle back into geostationary orbit, where Intelsat 901 will continue in service for five additional years. //
Northrop says its MEV-1 spacecraft uses a mechanical docking system that attaches to existing features on a satellite, and it is designed for multiple docking and undockings and can deliver over 15 years of life-extension services. The company plans to launch its second Mission Extension Vehicle, MEV-2, later this year. Northrop also said this is its first step toward establishing a fleet of satellite servicing vehicles that not only extend the life of satellites but provide inclination changes and spacecraft inspections and perform in-orbit repair and assembly. ///
This design has been on paper for several decades, but kept getting killed by company execs who didn't want to kill their cash cow of building and launching new satellites. Northrop Grumman doesn't have a big satellite manufacturing or launch business, but now they have the potential for a satellite refueling and repair business....
Compared to existing shields, rust gives much better protection per unit weight. //
Protecting astronauts from cosmic rays is one of the great challenges that needs to be solved before space agencies can send a crewed mission to Mars or beyond — that much exposure is simply too dangerous given current shielding technology.
But oxidized metal, especially gadolinium (III) oxide, blocks more radiation by weight than anything else out there, according to research published last month in the journal Radiation Physics and Chemistry. The study, a joint effort of Lockheed Martin and North Carolina State University, could give engineers a new tool for keeping crewmembers safe during long forays into space.
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.
"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
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. //
Is Russia checking out one of our assets?
written by Thomas Burghardt
December 21, 2019
After a maiden flight that was shortened by an off-nominal orbit insertion, Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner conducted its first landing from orbit. Touchdown at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico occurred at 5:58 AM MST (12:58 UTC) on December 22.
The spacecraft approached from the southwest, overflying the Pacific Ocean and Baja California.
If, at any point leading up to the deorbit burn, NASA or Boeing teams felt the need to reevaluate landing options, there was a backup landing opportunity at 1:48 PM MST (20:48 UTC). Had this backup attempt is utilized, the spacecraft would have approached from the northwest. However, the first opportunity was taken.
Sunday’s landing attempt came six days earlier than originally intended. The Orbital Flight Test (OFT) mission to demonstrate end-to-end performance of the uncrewed spacecraft was cut short by an error with Starliner’s Mission Elapsed Timer (MET).
During launch, Starliner sets its MET based on data retrieved from its Atlas V launch vehicle. During Friday’s nominal launch, Starliner retrieved the wrong data, resulting in an incorrectly set MET.
After nominally separating from the rocket, Starliner’s MET indicated that the spacecraft was at a point in the mission profile different than its actual location. This disagreement resulted in the orbit insertion (OI) burn, which moves Starliner into a stable orbit, not occurring on time.
Additionally, Starliner and its antennae were not oriented properly, again due to the MET error. This created a challenge for ground controllers attempting to command the OI burn, as establishing a data link between NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS) and Starliner was delayed.
Once a positive command link was established, ground controllers commanded the spacecraft to conduct two burns in order to reach a circular 250 kilometer orbit.
While this orbit was stable, it was lower than the International Space Station’s altitude. After reaching a stable orbit, NASA and Boeing evaluated the possibility of maneuvering to the station, but concluded that an insufficient amount of fuel remained on board Starliner to conduct an approach. Starliner burned a significant amount of propellant while maneuvering to a stable orbit and maintaining the incorrect orientation after launch. //
In addition to the two burns conducted to reach Starliner’s 250 km orbit, several small checkout burns of Starliner’s propulsion systems have been successfully conducted. Station keeping and attitude control demonstrations were also completed.
Another major milestone was testing of Starliner’s Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) systems. This included successfully using the VESTA star tracking system for navigation. Also successfully established was a command link from ground controllers through the International Space Station to the Starliner spacecraft.