With this picture, I think Curiosity is trying to communicate "it's a party going on here!"

9/16/2013 12:24:16 PM

9/24/2013 9:49:52 AM

On mars? Want a couple of pints of water?

Dig up a cubic foot of mars dirt and you will be good to go! (assuming you have spent the past several years building up an immunity to iocane Perchlorate)


http://www.space.com/22949-mars-water-discovery-curiosity-rover.html

(yes, space.com is a very "pop" science news site, but interesting none the less)

[Edited on September 26, 2013 at 7:57 PM. Reason : b]

9/26/2013 7:53:02 PM

^ I just posted a thread in chitchat only to realize in hindsight you probably would have already seen this

9/27/2013 8:24:24 AM

9/30/2013 12:50:15 PM

You see these pictures all the time now, but I always try to remember how amazing it is that we managed to land a SUV on another freaking planet and its driving around up there sending us these pictures.

9/30/2013 2:10:13 PM

how'd that penny get on mars?

9/30/2013 2:17:11 PM

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia15285.html

Quote :

"The Lincoln penny in this photograph is part of a camera calibration target attached to NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, which is on track for a landing on Mars the night of Aug. 5 to Aug. 6, 2012. "

9/30/2013 4:12:46 PM

Quote :

"“Curiosity will be put in a protective mode for the security of the rover,” NASA spokesman Allard Beutel says. “But no new data-gathering will take place.”"

http://www.ibtimes.com/us-government-shutdown-science-curiosity-goes-sleep-flu-monitoring-goes-offline-1412850

10/1/2013 1:04:08 PM

Fuck that there is no government on Mars!!

10/1/2013 2:14:40 PM

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/09/tech/innovation/diamonds-saturn-jupiter/index.html

Wasn't this part of the premise behind 2063 by Arthur C Clarke?

10/10/2013 2:58:25 PM

latest SpaceX "Grasshopper" test...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZDkItO-0a4

10/16/2013 11:00:44 PM

Sierra Nevada's Dreamchaser "mini shuttle" commercial crew vehicle conducts it's first freefall test flight...

only to have a landing gear failure and disaster on the landing. the good news is that it flew beautifully.

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/10/dream-chaser-landing-failure-first-flight/

10/26/2013 3:19:40 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgdFotAkUEU

here's the video of the flight.

10/29/2013 9:40:50 AM

i do like the fact that it does feel that eventually we will indeed end up back with something like this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUbGkSfaKrs

10/29/2013 2:05:59 PM

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/12/china-jade-rabbit-lunar-arrival/

First lunar landing in my lifetime...

12/14/2013 5:58:10 PM

It's not a trivial achievement, in any century. Good for them.

12/14/2013 7:03:41 PM

^indeed.

12/14/2013 7:25:09 PM

Deployment of rover:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFb1E63AxNI#t=332

First Picture:

12/14/2013 7:48:07 PM

Hopefully this will light a fire under our government/space agency again.

12/15/2013 9:46:21 AM

Anyone know if this is the first lunar rover? unmanned (I know we had a "car" back in the apollo days).

Ive never heard of a rover on the moon before...

12/15/2013 10:48:25 AM

the soviet union had a rover on the moon in the 70's... i believe it still has the record for the farthest distance traveled by an off-world rover.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_programme

[Edited on December 15, 2013 at 11:33 AM. Reason : ]

12/15/2013 11:29:13 AM

^ 2nd farthest.

Opportunity has gone a tad bit farther.

12/15/2013 12:15:48 PM

^I read several months ago that the distance that Lunokhod 2 drove was underestimated and the official number has been revised to reflect that, putting it well ahead of Opportunity.

12/15/2013 12:28:39 PM

Opportunity's total odometry as of November 5, 2013 (sol 3478) is 23.94 miles (38.53 km).

Lunokhod 2 operated for about 4 months, covered 42 km (26 miles) of terrain

322 Earth days of operations, Lunokhod 1 traveled 10.5 km


http://www.space.com/21923-soviet-moon-rover-driving-record.html

Evidently there were 2 successful soviet rovers (4 were planned).

12/15/2013 2:27:52 PM

Is it easier to drive on the moon than Mars? I would imagine so.

But it's more complicated than that. I think that the site selection would favor "interesting" places, although Mars may have plenty of flat planes.



That's a recent satellite image enhanced to show the tracks of the rover.

1/21/2014 9:13:47 PM

Morpheus Lander Tests...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=164kcbTPH5A

from a few days ago.

on board view: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7gbRwUbXn8



and another test from earlier today...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG5FXAZd-Xg



[Edited on January 21, 2014 at 11:56 PM. Reason : ]

1/21/2014 11:51:47 PM

Boo Morpheus! Go Mighty Eagle! (despite it's stupid name).

1/22/2014 9:26:53 AM

^^ so that's for landing on the moon?

1/22/2014 12:01:02 PM

from my understanding it's more of a testbed for technologies that would be adapted for specific landing missions.

1/22/2014 12:41:17 PM

^Correct. Current landers (Mighty Eagle and Morpheus) won't be flying in space or the Moon or whatever. They are to test controls algorithms and lander technology for the design and analysis of full scale landers that WILL be used in the future.

1/22/2014 3:28:10 PM

I watched them test fire that thing every other week at JSC

1/23/2014 11:15:35 AM

The old shuttle/Apollo pad 39A has been officially closed (well the gate has been "chained") in preparation for SpaceX to take over the facility in march. will build a vehicle integration building on the old crawlerway.

[Edited on January 23, 2014 at 4:28 PM. Reason : ]

1/23/2014 4:15:37 PM

^ While im glad to hear of progress and wish SpaceX luck, I kinda would love to see that site designated as a historical site.

1/23/2014 10:16:46 PM

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2014/01/dream-chasers-ksc-vision-2016-debut/

dreamchaser update.

1/24/2014 11:42:58 AM

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2014/02/affordable-habitats-more-buck-rogers-less-money-bigelow/

Article about more ideas from Bigelow Aerospace concerning inflatable space habitats... including moon bases, carrier space craft, and other awesomeness. Most of this is still powerpoint right now, but they DO have a contract to send a test inflatable to hook up to the international space station.

2/7/2014 8:47:36 PM

But where do they put the Kerbals?

2/7/2014 11:42:53 PM

they could fit like 50 kerbals in this thing.

2/7/2014 11:50:00 PM

Those things large enough to eat a satellite or reentry module are sick!

But the ISS attachment (as I understand it) is a very scaled-down version of what Bigelow wants to do. I don't think it will serve much purpose, other than verification for future modules.

2/8/2014 2:04:13 PM

yeah it's essentially a closet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigelow_Expandable_Activity_Module

2/8/2014 4:29:18 PM

^^^

Quote :

"The Olympus module resembles the BA-330, but at a much larger scale. It has 2,258 cubic meters of internal volume and can accommodate a crew of 24 to 30 astronauts."

Is your conversion from humans to Kerbals really 3-to-5? Sure, on a size basis, that might work. But I've heard the Kerbin regulators are a little more lax on margin requirements.

2/9/2014 4:15:07 PM

They are all tiny right now. The 500 day configuration concept design mockup that we have here at MSFC is about the same size as my freshman year dorm room in Owen Hall and it is designed to house 4 astronauts for years at a time.

2/10/2014 9:23:05 AM

Here's today's "why did I Google this?" fact for you:

It it notably more expensive to buy cocaine in the street than it is to send that same cocaine into space.

So for future space tourists, it will be cheaper to do coke than it will be to get drunk.

2/11/2014 10:06:24 AM

so does NASA have a gameplan as to where we are going as far as space exploration? i know there was an idealistic plan to head back to the moon by 2020 but where does that stand? its a shame the constellation program got axed.

4/2/2014 12:33:41 AM

the official statement is "an asteroid mid 2020's and mars by mid 2030's"

4/2/2014 1:38:08 AM

This is a super cool graph

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2014/03/nasa-asteroid-capture-mission-definitions/



This displays the maximum asteroid mass we can transport, given the mission length and launch vehicle. Really changes your perspective about space. You can move very large things at low cost if you're willing to take a long time to do it.

I think it sounds like a really worthwhile mission. It is validly new, and it actually has potential for an economic return via asteroid mining (however unlikely). But getting the rock off the surface of Itokawa is a bit of a buzz kill. We already have asteroid material. The scientific value of this will be to obtain a low density asteroid that carries information about how it spent the last billion years. If the asteroid spent the last billion years sitting on the surface of Itokawa, then it's not perfectly representative of what we want.

Also, this thing is going to have something like a ton of propellant. Considering this is an ion drive, might that make it the highest impulse engine ever?

4/2/2014 8:21:44 AM

There is a more definite plan for scheduling that was just determined. They just told us about it on Monday actually. I'm not allowed to talk about it though so who knows when they'll release it to the public, they may change it some more.


Interesting thing about the asteroid retrieval -- they had a brainstorming here meeting about a year ago that was open to all NASA folks. They had a few asteroids they were looking at but since then they discovered that these asteroids, although fairly large in mass, were not dense at all. They were composed of loosely held together dust, giving them the consistency of a like a dust bunny you'd find under the bed.

4/2/2014 3:01:51 PM

http://spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=45536

Quote :

"NASA Internal Memo: Suspension of NASA contact with Russian entities Status Report Source: NASA HQPosted Wednesday, April 2, 2014 From: O'Brien, Michael F (HQ-TA000) Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2014 9:33 AM To: [Deleted] Cc: [Deleted] Subject: Suspension of NASA contact with Russian entities Dear Colleagues, Given Russia's ongoing violation of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, until further notice, the U.S. Government has determined that all NASA contacts with Russian Government representatives are suspended, unless the activity has been specifically excepted. This suspension includes NASA travel to Russia and visits by Russian Government representatives to NASA facilities, bilateral meetings, email, and teleconferences or videoconferences. At the present time, only operational International Space Station activities have been excepted. In addition, multilateral meetings held outside of Russia that may include Russian participation are not precluded under the present guidance. If desired, our office will assist in communication with Russian entities regarding this suspension of activities. Specific questions regarding the implementation of this guidance can be directed to Ms. Meredith McKay, 202.358.1240 or meredith.mckay@nasa.gov, in our office. We remain in close contact with the Department of State and other U.S. Government departments and agencies. If the situation changes, further guidance will be disseminated. Obie Michael F. O'Brien Associate Administrator for International and Interagency Relations National Aeronautics and Space Administration"

4/2/2014 3:18:10 PM

Quote :

"They had a few asteroids they were looking at but since then they discovered that these asteroids, although fairly large in mass, were not dense at all. They were composed of loosely held together dust, giving them the consistency of a like a dust bunny you'd find under the bed."

hmm... that's interesting.

The most common type are the carbonaceous chondrite, which is worth studying because they don't make it through our atmosphere with their structure in tact. But those tend to cluster around specific gravities of 1 - 2. There are even large asteroids, like Mathilde at 1.3, with low densities.

What you're talking about is validly new to science. For the class of ~5 m asteroids, we can't hope to discover (much less profile) any except a small few very close to Earth. If they have similar composition to the larger ones we do understand, then we would still be talking about specific gravities around unity.

Presumably all the NASA people know this, so it makes me wonder what kinds of compositions we're talking about. Maybe the average 5 m asteroid has a density of 0.1 g/cm3 or something.

4/2/2014 5:51:11 PM

pretty good article about the importance of the commercial crew program

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2014/04/growing-importance-nasas-commercial-crew-program/

4/11/2014 8:07:37 PM