- NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Fired a Laser at a Spacecraft on the Moon. Here’s the Reason Why. The Debrief
- NASA Spacecraft’s Retroreflector ‘Pinged’ Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram Lander On the Moon | Weather.com The Weather Channel
- Chandrayaan-3 mission: NASA’s LRO ‘pings’ Vikram Lander with laser instrument | Oneindia News Oneindia News
- NASA Spacecraft ‘Pings’ India’s Chandrayaan-3 Lander On Moon, Know Significance Jagran Josh
- ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 Comes Back To Life; Watch How It Will Guide Astronauts Landing On Moon Hindustan Times
Tag Archives: NASAs
NASA’s modified U-2 spy plane is hunting for ‘strategic minerals’ in the desert. Here’s why – Space.com
- NASA’s modified U-2 spy plane is hunting for ‘strategic minerals’ in the desert. Here’s why Space.com
- USGS provides $2 million to states to identify critical mineral potential in mine waste – MINING.COM MINING.com
- Media Alert: Low-Level Helicopter Flights to Image Geology in Western Nevada | U.S. Geological Survey United States Geological Survey (.gov)
- NASA Maps Minerals and Ecosystem Function in Southwest U.S. Regions NASA
- USGS provides $2 million to states to identify critical mineral potential in mine waste | U.S. Geological Survey United States Geological Survey (.gov)
- View Full Coverage on Google News
NASA’s James Webb snaps a stunning photo of a rainbow ‘lightsaber’ shooting out of a newborn sun-like star – Daily Mail
- NASA’s James Webb snaps a stunning photo of a rainbow ‘lightsaber’ shooting out of a newborn sun-like star Daily Mail
- Webb Telescope captures supersonic jets shooting outwards from young star Sky at Night Magazine
- NASA just released the picture of a baby star, and it’s the most impressive thing you’ll see today Softonic EN
- What Are You Actually Looking At In This Glorious JWST Image? IFLScience
- James Webb telescope snaps rainbow ‘lightsaber’ shockwaves shooting out of a newborn sun-like star Livescience.com
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NASA’s moon program mobile launcher rolls back to the launch pad for testing – Spaceflight Now – Spaceflight Now
- NASA’s moon program mobile launcher rolls back to the launch pad for testing – Spaceflight Now Spaceflight Now
- Mobile Launcher Rolls to Launch Pad for Artemis ll Testing – Artemis NASA Blogs
- Lockheed Martin, NASA working around the clock to finish Artemis II Orion assembly and hold 2024 launch date – NASASpaceFlight.com NASASpaceflight.com
- NASA’s mobile launcher rolls to launch pad for Artemis II testing WKMG News 6 & ClickOrlando
- NASA Is Designing a Larger CubeSat Adapter for the SLS Rocket ExtremeTech
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Surprising Phenomena Observed by NASA’s NuSTAR in Brightest Cosmic Explosion Ever Detected – SciTechDaily
- Surprising Phenomena Observed by NASA’s NuSTAR in Brightest Cosmic Explosion Ever Detected SciTechDaily
- Largest explosion since the Big Bang was powered by a bizarre energy jet unlike any other Livescience.com
- Brightest cosmic explosion on record is even weirder than first thought Business Insider
- Recording the entire process of a tera-electron volt gamma-ray burst during the death of a massive star Phys.org
- Brightest Cosmic Burst Since The Big Bang Observed And There’s Something Strange Going On Giant Freakin Robot
- View Full Coverage on Google News
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captures spectacular image of ultra-bright merging galaxies – Fox News
- NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captures spectacular image of ultra-bright merging galaxies Fox News
- Stunning James Webb Space Telescope photo shows merging galaxies shining with light of a trillion suns Fox Weather
- New James Webb photo shows the Fornax constellation like we’ve never seen it before Yahoo News
- Merging galaxies shine with the light of a trillion suns in gorgeous James Webb Space Telescope photo Space.com
- Cosmic Collision Ignites a Trillion-Sun Spectacle: James Webb Space Telescope Unveils Arp 220 SciTechDaily
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Inside Nasa’s new fake Moon created to test out conditions for upcoming human missions
NASA has unveiled an ultra-realistic fake Moon environment that it will use to simulate activities on the lunar surface.
The US space agency has big plans for the Moon within the next decade including putting humans on its surface again.
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The fake Moon is said to have realistic lunar lighting and conditions that astronauts will experience when they stand on the real thing.
Nasa will also be testing out some of its new robots on the fake Moon.
This includes the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), which is Nasa’s latest Moon robot.
The lunar experiment is officially called the Lunar Lab and Regolith Testbed and it’s located in Nasa’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.
The fake Moon is technically made up of two large sandy areas filled with simulated lunar dust.
The first lunar “sandbox” has been around for a few years but the second one is brand new and full of 20 tons of lunar dust.
Nasa says both indoor areas can simulate the Moon with high accuracy.
The new testbed can be resized from its current 62 feet by 13 feet shape so it can create a deeper lunar simulation.
Nasa’s original Moon testbed was much smaller at just 13 by 13 feet.
The US space agency said: “Future human and robotic explorers of off-planet polar regions will need to contend with the incredibly abrasive and “sticky” lunar dust, known as regolith.
“Moon dust has grains as fine as powder, as sharp as tiny shards of glass, and a curious capacity to electrostatically cling to everything, due to the way it was formed.
“Add in the lack of an atmosphere and the fact that the Moon is home to some of the coldest places in our solar system, and the lunar environment will pose a challenge to machinery and spacesuits, at best.
“At worst, it could be a hazard.”
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Completes Mars Sample Depot – Captures Amazing Variety of Martian Geology
Perseverance’s Three Forks Sample Depot Selfie: NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took a selfie with several of the 10 sample tubes it deposited at a sample depot it is creating within an area of Jezero Crater nicknamed “Three Forks.” Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Ten sample tubes, capturing an amazing variety of Martian geology, have been deposited on
Throughout its science campaigns, the rover has been taking a pair of samples from rocks the mission team deems scientifically significant. One sample from each pair taken so far now sits in the carefully arranged depot in the “Three Forks” region of Jezero Crater. The depot samples will serve as a backup set while the other half remain inside Perseverance, which would be the primary means to convey samples to a Sample Retrieval Lander as part of the campaign.
NASA Sample Retrieval Lander: This illustration shows a concept for a proposed NASA Sample Retrieval Lander that would carry a small rocket (about 10 feet, or 3 meters, tall) called the Mars Ascent Vehicle to the Martian surface. After being loaded with sealed tubes containing samples of Martian rocks and soil collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover, the rocket would launch into Mars orbit. The samples would then be ferried to Earth for detailed analysis. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Mission scientists believe the igneous and sedimentary rock cores provide an excellent cross-section of the geologic processes that took place in Jezero shortly after the crater’s formation almost 4 billion years ago. The rover also deposited an atmospheric sample and what’s called a “witness” tube, which is used to determine if samples being collected might be contaminated with materials that traveled with the rover from Earth.
The titanium tubes were deposited on the surface in an intricate zigzag pattern, with each sample about 15 to 50 feet (5 to 15 meters) apart from one another to ensure they could be safely recovered. Adding time to the depot-creation process, the team needed to precisely map the location of each 7-inch-long (18.6-centimeter-long) tube and glove (adapter) combination so that the samples could be found even if covered with dust. The depot is on flat ground near the base of the raised, fan-shaped ancient river delta that formed long ago when a river flowed into a lake there.
“With the Three Forks depot in our rearview mirror, Perseverance is now headed up the delta,” said Rick Welch, Perseverance’s deputy project manager at 
WATSON Documents Final Tube Dropped at ‘Three Forks’ Sample Depot: NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover dropped the last of 10 tubes at the “Three Forks” sample depot on Jan. 28, 2023, the 690th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Next Science Campaign
Passing the Rocky Top outcrop represents the end of the rover’s Delta Front Campaign and the beginning of the rover’s Delta Top Campaign because of the geologic transition that takes place at that level.
“We found that from the base of the delta up to the level where Rocky Top is located, the rocks appear to have been deposited in a lake environment,” said Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist at Caltech. “And those just above Rocky Top appear to have been created in or at the end of a Martian river flowing into the lake. As we ascend the delta into a river setting, we expect to move into rocks that are composed of larger grains – from sand to large boulders. Those materials likely originated in rocks outside of Jezero, eroded and then washed into the crater.”
Perseverance’s ‘Three Forks’ Sample Depot Map: This map shows where NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover dropped each of its 10 samples – one half of every pair taken so far – so that a future mission could pick them up. After five weeks of work, the sample depot was completed Jan. 24, 2023, the 687th day, or sol, of the mission. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
One of the first stops the rover will make during the new science campaign is at a location the science team calls the “Curvilinear Unit.” Essentially a Martian sandbar, the unit is made of sediment that eons ago was deposited in a bend in one of Jezero’s inflowing river channels. The science team believes the Curvilinear Unit will be an excellent location to hunt for intriguing outcrops of sandstone and perhaps mudstone, and to get a glimpse at the geological processes beyond the walls of Jezero Crater.
More About the Mission
One of the key objectives for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including caching samples that may contain signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will analyze the planet’s geology and past climate, lay the foundation for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to gather Martian rock and soil samples.
Later NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA, will send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet.
JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
NASA’s Record-Breaking Lucy Spacecraft Has a New Asteroid Target
Artist’s concept of NASA’s Lucy spacecraft at an asteroid. Credit: NASA
“There are millions of asteroids in the main asteroid belt,” said Raphael Marschall, Lucy collaborator at the Nice Observatory in France, who identified asteroid 1999 VD57 as an object of special interest for Lucy. “I selected 500,000 asteroids with well-defined orbits to see if Lucy might be traveling close enough to get a good look at any of them, even from a distance. This asteroid really stood out. Lucy’s trajectory as originally designed will take it within 40,000 miles of the asteroid, at least three times closer than the next closest asteroid.”
As the NASA Lucy spacecraft travels through the inner edge of the main asteroid belt in the Fall of 2023, the spacecraft will fly by the small, as-of-yet unnamed, asteroid (152830) 1999 VD57. This graphic shows a top-down view of the Solar System indicating the spacecraft’s trajectory shortly before the November 1 encounter. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
The Lucy team realized that, by adding a small maneuver, the spacecraft would be able to get an even closer look at this asteroid. So, on January 24, the team officially added it to Lucy’s tour as an engineering test of the spacecraft’s pioneering terminal tracking system. This new system solves a long-standing problem for flyby missions: during a spacecraft’s approach to an asteroid, it is quite difficult to determine exactly how far the spacecraft is from the asteroid, and exactly which way to point the cameras.
“In the past, most flyby missions have accounted for this uncertainty by taking a lot of images of the region where the asteroid might be, meaning low efficiency and lots of images of blank space,” said Hal Levison, Lucy principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute Boulder, Colorado office. “Lucy will be the first flyby mission to employ this innovative and complex system to automatically track the asteroid during the encounter. This novel system will allow the team to take many more images of the target.”
It turns out that 1999 VD57 provides an excellent opportunity to validate this never-before-flown procedure. The geometry of this encounter—particularly the angle that the spacecraft approaches the asteroid relative to the Sun—is very similar to the mission’s planned Trojan asteroid encounters. This allows the team to carry out a dress rehearsal under similar conditions well in advance of the spacecraft’s main scientific targets.
This asteroid was not identified as a target earlier because it is extremely small. In fact, 1999 VD57, estimated to be a mere 0.4 miles (700 m) in size, will be the smallest main belt asteroid ever visited by a spacecraft. It is much more similar in size to the near-Earth asteroids visited by recent NASA missions OSIRIS-REx and DART than to previously visited main belt asteroids.
The Lucy team will carry out a series of maneuvers starting in early May 2023 to place the spacecraft on a trajectory that will pass approximately 280 miles (450 km) from this small asteroid.
Lucy’s principal investigator is based out of the Boulder, Colorado branch of Southwest Research Institute, headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides overall mission management, systems engineering, and safety and mission assurance. Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built the spacecraft. Lucy is the 13th mission in NASA’s Discovery Program. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Discovery Program for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
CNN Exclusive: Secretive process to select astronauts for NASA’s next moon mission
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Sometime this spring, NASA will make one of the biggest announcements in its history when it names the initial four-person crew for its flagship Artemis program to return astronauts to the moon for the first time in 50 years.
Scheduled to launch in 2024, Artemis II will be the program’s first crewed mission to orbit the moon, flying farther into space than any humans since the Apollo program and paving the way for the Artemis III crew to walk on the moon in 2025 — all aboard the most powerful rocket ever built and at a price tag that by then will approach $100 billion.
Yet, as publicized as the Artemis II mission is, the process of how its crew will be chosen is so secretive that it remains a mystery even for many on the inside. Other than announcing the astronauts’ nationalities — three Americans, one Canadian — NASA has said almost nothing publicly about who will be selected or how that decision will be made.
CNN spoke with nearly a dozen current and former NASA officials and astronauts to pull back the curtain on the secretive selection process. Based on those interviews, CNN not only gained exclusive insights into how the crew will be selected — it has also whittled down the list of candidates those insiders say are generating the most buzz at NASA.
At the top of everyone’s list for the first Artemis crew is Reid Wiseman, a 47-year-old decorated naval aviator and test pilot who was first selected to be a NASA astronaut in 2009. Wiseman stepped down as chief of the astronaut office in November, a prestigious job historically responsible for selecting the initial crew assignment for each mission, but which also comes with a big catch — the chief isn’t eligible to fly in space.
“Being chief is a crummy, lousy job,” former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman told CNN. “No one wants it, especially now.”
While it may be a job that few astronauts want ahead of the Artemis crew assignments, it does come with one big advantage.
“Historically, the one benefit of being chief is that, when you did step down, you gave yourself the best flight assignment available at the time. That was kind of an acknowledged perk,” Reisman said. “You did this horrible job on our behalf. Thank you for doing that. Here’s your reward. You get to put yourself in the best seat around.”
Without question, the best open seat right now is on Artemis II — a high-pressure, high-visibility mission that will send four astronauts on a roughly 10-day mission around the moon and back.
INTERACTIVE: Trace the path Artemis I will take around the moon and back
Before stepping down as chief in November, just two days before the launch of Artemis I, the program’s first successful uncrewed test flight, Wiseman made another consequential move in August, when he reversed a previous NASA decision to select the Artemis crew from an initial core group of just 18 astronauts previously deemed the “Artemis Team.”
Instead, Wiseman expanded the group of candidates to all 41 active NASA astronauts.
“The way I look at it, any one of our active astronauts is eligible for an Artemis mission,” Wiseman said at the time. “We just want to assemble the right team for this mission.”
Determining the “right team” for a mission to space has always been a mysterious process, going all the way back to the 1950s. That’s when NASA was making its first flight assignments for its initial Mercury missions, made famous by Tom Wolfe’s book “The Right Stuff.”
Though the criteria may have changed, the process remains incredibly secretive. CNN has learned the decision for who gets to go to the moon will be made by three key people at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where every US astronaut has lived and trained since 1961.
The first person in the decision process is the chief astronaut, a role currently filled on an acting basis by Wiseman’s deputy, Drew Feustel. Sources told CNN that the chief, whether it’s Feustel or someone else, will take their initial recommendations to the head of the Flight Operations Directorate, Norm Knight, and then on to the director of Johnson Space Center, Vanessa Wyche, who is responsible for signing off on the final four selections.
Cracking the code on how that decision is made is as complex as spaceflight itself.
“To this day, it’s a dark area,” former NASA astronaut Mike Mullane told CNN. “It’s terra incognita (unknown territory). Nobody knows! At least not in our era they didn’t.”
What is known is that NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, a former Democratic senator from Florida, will have no role in the process, something he confirmed for the first time to CNN earlier in January when he said that the space agency’s Washington leadership will “stay out of the selection” of the Artemis II crew.
“That is done by the people at the Johnson Space Center. They will make the decision,” Nelson told CNN. “I do not know if they’ve decided who the crew is, nor should I.”
The only thing set in stone is that the Artemis II crew will consist of three American astronauts and one Canadian, terms that were cemented in a 2020 treaty between the two countries. From the beginning, NASA has also emphasized the need for a program named after Apollo’s twin sister in Greek mythology, Artemis, to have a crew with a heavy mix of gender, racial and professional diversity.
NASA has a far more diverse pool of astronauts to choose from now than during the Mercury program, when all seven astronauts were White, male, military test pilots. More than a third of the Artemis generation’s 41 astronauts are women and 12 are people of color.
The Artemis generation of astronauts is also professionally diverse, with only 16 pilots in its ranks. The rest are “mission specialists” with expertise in biology, geography, oceanography, engineering and medicine.
Nearly a dozen current and former NASA officials and astronauts told CNN they anticipated multiple test pilots being named to the crew of Artemis II, since the mission marks the first crewed test flight to the moon since the Apollo program.
“Just having the courage to go in there and be the first ones and be cool about it, that does take a certain amount of skill and experience and maturity,” said Reisman, the former astronaut. “We’re going beyond Low Earth Orbit for the first time in a very long time, on only the second flight of this vehicle.”
If Wiseman, a White man, is selected, that means the other spots will almost certainly need to go to at least one woman and at least one person of color.
People familiar with the process tell CNN that along with Wiseman, there are a handful of other candidates atop the list. Among them is Victor Glover, a 46-year-old naval aviator who returned to Earth from his first spaceflight in 2021 after piloting the second crewed flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and spending nearly six months aboard the International Space Station. The veteran of four spacewalks earned a master’s in engineering while moonlighting as a test pilot.
Randy Bresnik, 55, is also a decorated naval aviator and test pilot who flew combat missions in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He has flown two missions to the International Space Station: one on the Space Shuttle, another on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Bresnik is often mentioned as a top contender for Artemis because, since 2018, he has overseen the astronaut office’s development and testing of all rockets and spacecrafts that will be used in the Artemis missions.
There are four women who people familiar with the process tell CNN are atop the list of likely candidates. Among them are Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, both of whom made history in 2019 when together they performed the first all-female spacewalk.
The 43-year-old Koch, a veteran of six spacewalks, also holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, with a total of 328 days in space. Koch, an electrical engineer, and Meir, a 45-year-old biologist, were both selected as mission specialists in NASA’s 2013 astronaut class after stints at remote scientific bases in polar regions. That experience of surviving in hostile climates and uncomfortable environments is critical for a crew who will be cramped inside a 17-foot-wide (5-meter-wide), gumdrop-shaped capsule for roughly 10 days.
“We pride ourselves on expeditionary behavior: being a good teammate, emptying the trash can when it’s full, cleaning out the dishwasher when your parents ask you. Those sorts of things,” Wiseman said in August. “That’s really what we’re looking for in those first Artemis missions. Technical expertise. Team player.”
Anne McClain is a decorated army pilot and West Point graduate who flew more than 200 combat missions in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and went on to graduate from the US Naval Test Pilot School in 2013, the same year she was selected to be a NASA astronaut. After launching on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2018, the 43-year-old spent more than 200 days in space at the International Space Station and served as lead spacewalker on two spacewalks.
Stephanie Wilson is the most senior astronaut on this list. The 56-year-old was selected to be an astronaut more than a quarter century ago in the class of 1996. Wilson served as a mission specialist on three Space Shuttle flights, including the first flight after the 2003 Columbia disaster, which killed seven astronauts.
The final seat on the Artemis II crew will be filled by a Canadian, and Jeremy Hansen is the most buzzed about astronaut with the Canadian Space Agency. Hansen was selected to be an astronaut almost 14 years ago, but he’s still waiting for his first flight assignment. The 47-year-old fighter pilot recently became the first Canadian to be put in charge of training for a new class of NASA astronauts.
All eight astronauts on CNN’s list of top contenders are highly qualified overachievers in the prime of their careers. But sometimes the deciding factor can come down to something frustratingly small.
“The problem is it can be influenced by trivial things, like what size spacesuit you wear. If there is only a medium and a large and you need the extra-large, you’re screwed. You’re not going to get assigned to the mission,” said Reisman, the former astronaut and veteran of three spacewalks. “It can be crazy, little things that dictate how it all comes out and it’s not always the most equitable or transparent process.”
Typically, NASA also strives for a professionally diverse crew with a healthy blend of rookies and veterans, aiming for a mix of military pilots and citizen scientists — doctors, engineers, astrophysicists, biologists and geologists — with a range of strengths.
“Not all astronauts are created equal when it comes to how good they do the job. Not all astronauts are equally as good at doing spacewalks. Not all astronauts are equally as good at doing robotics,” Reisman said. “The standard line is, if you’re qualified, you’re qualified. If you pass the test, then it shouldn’t matter. But when you have really tricky missions, it does matter, and you do want to put your best team forward.”
That is especially true for the crew of Artemis II, which will be riding on a rocket that’s only had one successful test flight.
As secretive as the crew selection process is for Artemis, it used to be even more confusing. That was especially true during the early days of the Space Shuttle program when, for the first and only time in NASA’s history, a non-astronaut had near total control over who flied and who stayed behind on Earth: George Abbey.
“George didn’t operate by committee any more than Josef Stalin had. His was the only voice that counted,” wrote Mullane, the retired astronaut, in his memoir, “Riding Rockets,” about the former director of the Johnson Space Center. “Everything about the most important aspect of our career — flight assignments — was as unknown to us as the dark matter of space was to astrophysicists.”
By the time former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who famously spent a year in space, was selected in 1996, the power had shifted back to the chief astronaut. Kelly described the flight assignment process as still “shrouded in mystery,” though he did recall a push toward more transparency by then-Chief of the Astronaut Office Bob Cabana, the current associate administrator of NASA.
“Bob put a big board in his office. He had all the shuttle flights lined up and certain people’s names would be penciled in next to them,” Kelly said. “Reid (Wiseman) did something similar. He was more of an open book. He would tell people what he was thinking.”
Now, Wiseman is on the other side, waiting along with every other active astronaut for the announcement of a lifetime, which the NASA administrator said would come “later in the spring.”
For those who don’t make the cut, Artemis is far from the only game in town. NASA astronauts are currently training and flying to the International Space Station for long-duration spaceflights on the SpaceX Crew Dragon and Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft. A third option, Boeing’s Starliner, is slated to fly astronauts for the first time this spring. The expectation is that every active astronaut will eventually be assigned to a flight. But only eight will get to fly to the moon on either Artemis II or Artemis III.
“This is a special and unique opportunity and, frankly, I’m going to be super jealous of whoever they pick,” Reisman said.