Space Stuff

redrumloa said:
David Lee Roth confirms it successfully landed?
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Here it is approaching touch down:
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Lockheed Martin proposes a mega-lunar lander: 62 tons and an elevator
"What we chose to do is jump to the end game."

With the Trump administration setting lunar exploration as the principal human spaceflight goal in the near-term, NASA has begun devising a plan for how best to meet that goal. As part of this development process companies have begun pitching ideas to the space agency's human exploration program about how they could help (and why they should be funded).

Some companies have talked with NASA privately about their proposed spaceflight hardware, while others have been more publicly forthcoming. Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin One is of the latter—the company is already building the Orion spacecraft for NASA to carry its astronauts into deep space, and says it can extend the utility of this blueprint down to the surface of the Moon.

The company's proposal for a "crewed lunar lander" is fairly ambitious. The 14-meter, single-stage spacecraft can carry up to four astronauts to the lunar surface, where they can stay for up to 14 days before the vehicle's engines blast it back into lunar orbit. This vehicle would be twice as tall as the Lunar Module used during the Apollo missions to the Moon nearly half a century ago. That vehicle carried two astronauts for short stays of no more than a few days.

"There is a lift elevator platform to get the crew down from the cabin to the surface," said Lockheed Martin principal space exploration architect Tim Cichan in an interview with Ars.

The lander would have considerable dry mass—22 metric tons—and would require an additional 40 tons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuel for its sorties down the surface of the Moon from the proposed Lunar Gateway. The vehicle's preliminary design uses four modified RL10 engines, but other engines could be employed. The reusable vehicle could be re-fueled on the surface of the Moon, or in orbit, and should be capable of at least five to 10 flights.
 
Astroboffins may hay have found the first exomoon lurking beyond the Solar System
It's so big that it's possible that it could have its own little moons
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Artist's impression of Kepler-1625b and its hypothetical moon.

Scientists have spotted what may be the first Moon to be discovered outside the Solar System, according to a paper published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.

Finding exoplanets is a difficult task, let alone exomoons. David Kipping, assistant professor at Columbia University, has kept at it for almost a decade. Now, working together with Alex Teachey, a graduate student, they may have finally hit the jackpot.

Kepler-1625b is an exoplanet that orbits Kepler-1625, a Sun-like star, about 8,000 light years away. It was detected by the transit method, where a star’s brightness dips periodically when a body blocks the light as it crosses the star's orbit. Observations of the light curves made by the Hubble Space Telescope reveals two anomalies, clues that there might be something else lurking there too.

“The first is that the planet appears to transit one and a quarter hours too early, that’s indicative of something gravitationally tugging on the planet. The second anomaly is an additional decrease in the star’s brightness after the planetary transit has completed,” Kipping said, during a telephone conference.
 
Organic stuff, radiation, unexpected methane... Yes, we're talking about Saturn's surprising rings
Boffins take a good look at the cosmic formations – they won't be there forever
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Scientists are only beginning to discover just how complex Saturn’s ring system is after digging into the data collected by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

In a series of papers published in Science and the Geophysical Review Letters, different groups of researchers have found that the rings shed organic compounds and they may not be a permanent feature. Additionally, the whole planet is shrouded in a newly discovered radiation belt made up of energetic protons and electrons.

The last of Cassini’s fuel was saved for one last nosedive into the depths of Saturn’s atmosphere, where it vaporized. Before then, the spacecraft dipped in and out of the planet’s rings a total of 22 times. The Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) found that they contained not only water, but methane, ammonia, carbon monoxide, molecular nitrogen and carbon dioxide as well.

“What was a surprise was the mass spectrometer saw methane – no one expected that," said Thomas Cravens, coauthor of the paper published in Science and a professor at the University of Kansas, in the US, on Thursday.
 
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The Orion spacecraft may carry more than NASA missions to the Moon
"I've long argued that capitalism should not stop at low-Earth orbit."

Lockheed Martin, which is manufacturing the Orion spacecraft for NASA's deep space missions, plans to study whether some commercial payloads could fly along for the ride toward the Moon. The company says it expects to have some limited capacity inside the Orion spacecraft, as well as room outside the spacecraft for CubeSats, experiments, or other privately developed payloads.

"We’d like to go understand what market interest there would be in using Orion during the exploration missions for commercial, static payloads mounted externally or internally," Rob Chambers, Lockheed's director of Human Spaceflight Strategy for Commercial Civil Space, said in an interview with Ars.
 
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Beautiful 3D model of stars explains changes in brightness
Helium absorbs light, heats star. Star expands, blows off material, collapses.

The Universe abounds with things that we think we might understand but aren’t really sure about. What it often comes down to is our ability to compute: to answer the question of whether models based on the physics we know about generate the behavior we see around us. In response to that question, researchers have turned their computation gun on a long-standing problem: why do luminous blue variable stars exist?
 
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Voyager 2 about to go where, er, Voyager 1 has been for a while?

NASA has announced that its veteran probe Voyager 2 may be about to leave the solar system. Voyager 2 is currently about 17.7 billion kilometres from Earth after best part of 41 years.

Scientists have been gradually turning off instruments on the spacecraft in order to eke out its remaining reserves of power for as long as possible. And also because, frankly, there is little point in keeping cameras that were designed to look at planets activated when there are no more planets to look at.

One of the instruments that is still powered up, the Cosmic Ray Subsystem, has measured a 5 per cent increase in cosmic rays hitting the spacecraft compared to the same time in August. The Low Energy Charged Particle Instrument has gathered similar results.

Voyager 1 experienced a similar change three months before it crossed the heliopause and headed out into interstellar space. The fact that Voyager 2 is reaching this point six years behind its sibling is also significant because the heliopause moves in and out during the Sun's activity cycle.

It is vaguely astonishing that the spacecraft continues to be able to do useful science after so long in space and at such mind-boggling distances. Voyager project scientist Ed Stone remarked: "We're going to learn a lot more in the coming months, but we still don't know when we'll reach the heliopause."

Boffins expect to have to start turning off the remaining instruments on Voyager 2 in 2020, with the last one shutting down in 2025.
 
Space crew abort flight after post-launch rocket failure
US and Russian crew of Soyuz spacecraft reported safe after emergency landing
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A view of the Soyuz MS-10 space capsule which crash landed after the launch failure of a Soyuz-FG rocket booster with Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague of the ISS Expedition 57/58 prime crew aboard. Photograph: TASS

A Russian-American space crew have been forced to make an emergency landing in Kazakhstan after their Soyuz rocket suffered a failure shortly after launching from Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome in one of the most serious space incidents in recent years.

The launch began as a routine affair. Missions bound for the International Space Station (ISS) have been conducted every few months for the past 20 years. But 119 seconds into Thursday’s flight, mission controllers on the Nasa broadcast began to speak of a failure.

Shaky footage from the capsule’s cabin seen during the live broadcast appeared to show objects floating mid-launch. The crew told mission control they felt weightless, an indication of a problem during that stage of the flight.
 
I read rumours of a potential catastrophe yesterday afternoon, very glad to hear they are okay.
 
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