Posted by
mwallis on
10 August 2010, 3:43 pm
Swallowing its pride, NASA says it wants to learn from future commercial missions to the moon – and it is willing to pay up to $30 million for the privilege.
The space agency wants to take advantage of the flurry of activity sparked by the Google-funded Lunar X Prize, says Michael Braukus, a spokesperson at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC.
That competition, announced in 2007, offers $20 million for the first non-government entity to land a robotic rover on the moon, provided it occurs before the end of 2012. Twenty-one teams are vying for the prize (see a gallery showing some of the rover prototypes).
NASA believes it can learn from these missions, Braukus says. The agency is prepared to spend a total of $30 million – up to $10 million per mission – for data returned to Earth that would be useful for future human or robotic missions of its own, it has announced. Continue reading ‘NASA seeks secrets of commercial moon landers’ »
Posted by
mwallis on
23 July 2010, 5:21 pm
ANOTHER LUNAR DAWN, and the powdery dust on the moon’s surface begins to stir. Without a breath of wind, the finest motes swirl across the ancient landscape as electrostatically charged dust grains repel one another. Larger grains join the dance in a line that stretches more than 3,000 miles from the lunar north pole to the south pole, along the edge of advancing daylight.
Within hours the dance has become frenzied and vertical, with microscopic grains hurtling miles overhead, the tiniest ones flying the farthest, until the weak lunar gravity stops their rise and pulls them back to the dusty surface. Instead of resting there, many jump up to begin the dance anew, surrounding the moon with a veritable atmosphere of dust—glassy, abrasive, toxic grit that could spell “No Trespassing” to future explorers.
So begins a fascinating 2006 article by Trudy Bell on the Air & Space Magazine website.
Posted by
mwallis on
23 July 2010, 4:49 pm
Ever wonder what it takes to launch a shuttle? I found this on the Air & Space Magazine web site:
Go For Launch!
In this unique time-lapse video created from thousands of individual frames, photographers Scott Andrews, Stan Jirman and Philip Scott Andrews condense six weeks of painstaking work into three minutes, 52 seconds (read here how they did it). The action starts in the hangar-like Orbiter Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where Discovery has been outfitted for its STS-131 mission. The vehicle is then towed to the 525-foot-high Vehicle Assembly Building, hoisted into a vertical position and lowered onto its external fuel tank and twin solid rocket boosters. Then it’s off to the pad on the giant Mobile Launcher Platform, where the shuttle is encased in its protective Rotating Service Structure until just before launch on April 5, 2010. The film ends with a glimpse of Discovery and the STS-131 astronauts coming in for a landing 15 days later, back in Florida where it all started.
Continue reading ‘Go For Launch’ »
Posted by
mwallis on
21 July 2010, 12:06 am
NASA Radar returns first high-resolution view of an unusual crater near Moon’s north pole.
Mini-RF, a synthetic aperture radar on board NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, recently imaged a potentially ice-rich crater near the north pole of the Moon. Located at 84°N, 157°W, this permanently shadowed crater, about 5 miles (8 kilometers) in diameter, lies on the floor of the larger, more degraded crater Rozhdestvensky (110 miles, or 177 kilometers in diameter). With no sunlight to warm the crater floor and walls, ice brought to the Moon by comets or formed through interactions with the solar wind could potentially collect here.
Continue reading ‘Unusual North Pole Crater’ »
Posted by
mwallis on
19 July 2010, 12:34 pm
SpaceShipTwo took to the skies over Mojave, California recently in the first capture flight test with a pilot on board.
The double-hulled WhiteKnight2 lifted the commercial suborbital vehicle into the blue desert skies July 16th and did some manouvering before returning to the tarmac.
There’s video from VG at:
http://quietube.com/v.php/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-FeuOvdK0E&feature=player_embedded
and more pictures on VG’s Flickr account:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/virgingalactic/ Continue reading ‘SpaceShipTwo Testing’ »