- 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: Spacecraft
Chandrayaan-3 Attains Intended Orbit! Lander Vikram to Separate From Spacecraft Tomorrow | Weather.com – The Weather Channel
- Chandrayaan-3 Attains Intended Orbit! Lander Vikram to Separate From Spacecraft Tomorrow | Weather.com The Weather Channel
- Chandrayaan-3 successfully undergoes final lunar orbit manoeuvre; lander to separate on Aug 17 The Economic Times
- What is the current status of Chandrayaan-3? Latest updates explored as spacecraft prepares for separation PINKVILLA
- ‘High five from Chandrayaan-3’: Spacecraft completes fifth and final lunar bound manoeuvre The Tribune
- India’s Chandrayaan-3 moves closer to moon, lander to separate tomorrow Gulf News
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Chandrayaan-3 Spacecraft Achieves ‘Near-Circular Orbit’ Around Moon After Performing Another Manoeuvre – Gadgets 360
- Chandrayaan-3 Spacecraft Achieves ‘Near-Circular Orbit’ Around Moon After Performing Another Manoeuvre Gadgets 360
- Chandrayaan-3 is just 150km above the Lunar surface, what does that mean? | Trending on WION WION
- Chandrayaan-3 Completes Another Lunar Manoeuvre; Aditya L1 Mission Readying For Launch | Weather.com The Weather Channel
- Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft undergoes another maneuver, achieves near-circular orbit around moon: ISRO The Economic Times
- Chandrayaan-3 gets closer to 100km circular orbit; 1 move away before Vikram separation IndiaTimes
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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.
NASA Announces Successful Test of New Propulsion Technology
As NASA gears up for a return to the Moon with the Artemis missions, the administration has announced that its researchers have successfully developed and tested a new type of supersonic rocket engine called a rotating detonation rocket engine.
The rotating detonation rocket engine, or RDRE, generates thrust with detonation, in which a supersonic exothermic front accelerates to produce thrust, much the same way a shockwave travels through the atmosphere after something like TNT explodes. NASA says that this design uses less fuel and provides more thrust than current propulsion systems and that the RDRE could be used to power human landers, as well as crewed missions to the Moon, Mars, and deep space.
NASA’s test of the RDRE featured 3D-printed parts made with a copper-alloy called GRCop-42, which the agency developed. During the test, the rocket withstood the high temperatures and pressures generated by the detonation, producing over 4,000 pounds (1,814 kilograms) of thrust for almost a minute.
NASA argues that the new rocket design can move more mass into deep space with less fuel, potentially making space travel more sustainable. With the successful tests, NASA engineers are now working on a fully reusable 10,000-pound (4,536 kilogram) RDRE to compare its performance to traditional liquid rocket engines.
NASA’s development of the RDRE signals the space administration’s interest in developing more efficient rocket technology for space travel. Earlier this week, NASA announced a joint collaboration with DARPA to develop DRACO, short for Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operation. DRACO would utilize a nuclear thermal engine for interplanetary travel, reducing travel time with a more efficient propulsion technology.
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Shooting Tiny, High Speed Bullets at a Spacecraft Could Speed Up Travel to The Stars : ScienceAlert
Today, multiple space agencies are investigating cutting-edge propulsion ideas that will allow for rapid transits to other bodies in the Solar System.
These include NASA’s Nuclear-Thermal or Nuclear-Electric Propulsion (NTP/NEP) concepts that could enable transit times to Mars in 100 days (or even 45) and a nuclear-powered Chinese spacecraft that could explore Neptune and its largest moon, Triton.
While these and other ideas could allow for interplanetary exploration, getting beyond the Solar System presents some major challenges.
As we explored in a previous article, it would take spacecraft using conventional propulsion anywhere from 19,000 to 81,000 years to reach even the nearest star, Proxima Centauri (4.25 light-years from Earth). To this end, engineers have been researching proposals for uncrewed spacecraft that rely on beams of directed energy (lasers) to accelerate light sails to a fraction of the speed of light.
A new idea proposed by researchers from UCLA envisions a twist on the beam-sail idea: a pellet-beam concept that could accelerate a 1-ton spacecraft to the edge of the Solar System in less than 20 years.
The concept, titled “Pellet-Beam Propulsion for Breakthrough Space Exploration,” was proposed by Artur Davoyan, an Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
The proposal was one of fourteen proposals chosen by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program as part of their 2023 selections, which awarded a total of US$175,000 in grants to develop the technologies further. Davoyan’s proposal builds on recent work with directed-energy propulsion (DEP) and light sail technology to realize a Solar Gravitational Lens.
As Prof. Davoyan told Universe Today via email, the problem with spacecraft is that they are still beholden to the Rocket Equation:
“All current spacecraft and rockets fly by expanding fuel. The faster the fuel is thrown away, the more efficient is the rocket. However, there is a limited amount of fuel that we can carry on board. As a result, the velocity a spacecraft can be accelerated to is limited. This fundamental limit is dictated by the Rocket Equation. The limitations of Rocket Equation translate into a relatively slow and costly space exploration. Such missions as Solar Gravitational Lens are not feasible with current spacecraft.”
The Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) is a revolutionary proposal that would be the most powerful telescope ever conceived. Examples include the Solar Gravity Lens, which was selected in 2020 for NIAC Phase III development.
The concept relies on a phenomenon predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity known as Gravitational Lensing, where massive objects alter the curvature of spacetime, amplifying the light from objects in the background. This technique allows astronomers to study distant objects with greater resolution and precision.
By positioning a spacecraft at the heliopause (~500 AU from the Sun), astronomers could study exoplanets and distant objects with the resolution of a primary mirror measuring around 100 km (62 miles) in diameter. The challenge is developing a propulsion system that could get the spacecraft to this distance in a reasonable amount of time.
To date, the only spacecraft to reach interstellar space have been the Voyager 1 and 2 probes, which launched in 1977 and are currently about 159 and 132 AUs from the Sun (respectively).
When it left the Solar System, the Voyager 1 probe was traveling at a record-breaking velocity of about 17 km/s (38,028 mph), or 3.6 AU a year. Nevertheless, this probe still took 35 years to reach the boundary between the Sun’s solar wind and the interstellar medium (the heliopause).
At its current speed, it will take over 40,000 years for Voyager 1 to fly past another star system – AC+79 3888, an obscure star in the constellation Ursa Minor. For this reason, scientists are investigating directed energy (DE) propulsion to accelerate light sails, which could reach another star system in a matter of decades.
As Prof. Davoyan explained, this method offers some distinct advantages but also has its share of drawbacks:
“Laser sailing, unlike conventional spacecraft and rockets, does not require fuel on board to accelerate. Here acceleration comes from a laser pushing the spacecraft by radiation pressure. In principle, near-speed-of-light velocities can be reached with this method. However, laser beams diverge at long distances, meaning that there is only a limited distance range over which a spacecraft can be accelerated. This limitation of laser sailing leads to a need of having exorbitantly high laser powers, gigawatts, and in some proposals, terawatts, or puts a constraint on spacecraft mass.”
Examples of the laser-beam concept include Project Dragonfly, a feasibility study by the Institute for Interstellar Studies (i4is) for a mission that could reach a nearby star system within a century.
Then there’s Breakthrough Starshot, which proposes a 100-gigawatt (Gw) laser array that would accelerate gram-scale nanocraft (Starchip).
At a maximum velocity of 161 million km (100 million miles) or 20 percent of the speed of light, Starshot will be able to reach Alpha Centauri in about 20 years. Inspired by these concepts, Prof. Davoyan and his colleagues propose a novel twist on the idea: a pellet-beam concept.
This mission concept could serve as a fast-transit interstellar precursor mission, like Starshot and Dragonfly.
But for their purposes, Davoyan and his team examined a pellet-beam system that would propel a ~900 kg (1 U.S. ton) payload to a distance of 500 AU in less than 20 years. Said Davoyan:
“In our case, the beam pushing the spacecraft is made of tiny pellets, hence [we call it] the pellet beam. Each pellet is accelerated to very high velocities by laser ablation, and then the pellets carry their momentum to push the spacecraft.
Unlike a laser beam, pellets do not diverge as quickly, allowing us to accelerate a heavier spacecraft. The pellets, being much heavier than photons, carry more momentum and can transfer a higher force to a spacecraft.”
In addition, the small size and low mass of the pellets mean that they can be propelled by relatively low-power laser beams. Overall, Davoyan and his colleagues estimate that a 1-ton spacecraft could be accelerated to velocities of up to ~30 AU a year using a 10-megawatt (Mw) laser beam.
For the Phase I effort, they will demonstrate the feasibility of the pellet-beam concept through detailed modeling of the different subsystems and proof-of-concept experiments. They will also explore the utility of the pellet-beam system for interstellar missions that could explore neighboring stars in our lifetimes.
“The pellet beam aims to transform the way deep space is explored by enabling fast transit missions to far-away destinations,” said Davoyan. “With the pellet beam, outer planets can be reached in less than a year, 100 AU in about three years, and solar gravity lens at 500 AU in about 15 years. Importantly, unlike other concepts, the pellet-beam can propel heavy spacecraft (~1 ton), which substantially increases the scope of possible missions.”
If realized, an SGL spacecraft would allow astronomers to directly image neighboring exoplanets (like Proxima b) with multi pixel resolution and obtain spectra from their atmospheres. These observations would offer direct evidence of atmospheres, biosignatures, and possibly even technosignatures.
In this way, the same technology that lets astronomers directly image exoplanets and study them in extensive detail would also enable interstellar missions to explore them directly.
This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.
U.S. to test nuclear-powered spacecraft by 2027
WASHINGTON, Jan 24 (Reuters) – The United States plans to test a spacecraft engine powered by nuclear fission by 2027 as part of a long-term NASA effort to demonstrate more efficient methods of propelling astronauts to Mars in the future, the space agency’s chief said on Tuesday.
NASA will partner with the U.S. military’s research and development agency, DARPA, to develop a nuclear thermal propulsion engine and launch it to space “as soon as 2027,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said during a conference in National Harbor, Maryland.
The U.S. space agency has studied for decades the concept of nuclear thermal propulsion, which introduces heat from a nuclear fission reactor to a hydrogen propellant in order to provide a thrust believed to be far more efficient than traditional chemical-based rocket engines.
NASA officials view nuclear thermal propulsion as crucial for sending humans beyond the moon and deeper into space. A trip to Mars from Earth using the technology could take roughly four months instead of some nine months with a conventional, chemically powered engine, engineers say.
That would substantially reduce the time astronauts would be exposed to deep-space radiation and would also require fewer supplies, such as food and other cargo, during a trip to Mars.
“If we have swifter trips for humans, they are safer trips,” NASA deputy administrator and former astronaut Pam Melroy said Tuesday.
The planned 2027 demonstration, part of an existing DARPA research program that NASA is now joining, could also inform the ambitions of the U.S. Space Force, which has envisioned deploying nuclear reactor-powered spacecraft capable of moving other satellites orbiting near the moon, DARPA and NASA officials said.
DARPA in 2021 awarded funds to General Atomics, Lockheed Martin and Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin to study designs of nuclear reactors and spacecraft. By around March, the agency will pick a company to build the nuclear spacecraft for the 2027 demonstration, the program’s manager Tabitha Dodson said in an interview.
The joint NASA-DARPA effort’s budget is $110 million for fiscal year 2023 and is expected to be hundreds of millions of dollars more through 2027.
Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and David Gregorio
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
NASA Pauses Attempts to Fix Lucy’s Pesky Solar Array
NASA is taking a break from attempts to unfurl a finicky solar array on the Lucy spacecraft, claiming that the probe is too cold and that efforts at deploying the array could be more fruitful when Lucy is closer to the Sun in December 2024.
After launching in October 2021, one of the spacecraft’s two 24-foot-wide (7-meter-wide) solar arrays, which supplies power to Lucy, failed to fully unfurl, remaining stuck in an unlatched position. While NASA has made previous attempts to fully deploy the array, the agency announced in a blog post that the Lucy team will be suspending attempts to completely unfurl the array, saying the spacecraft is too cold.
That said, NASA’s not sweating the issue, and estimated in a blog post that the array is 98% deployed and will be able to withstand the remainder of Lucy’s 12-year mission to visit Jupiter’s mysterious Trojan asteroids, which orbit both ahead and behind the gas giant.
More on this story: 7 Things to Know About NASA’s First Mission to the Jupiter Trojan Asteroids
“Ground-based testing indicated that the deployment attempts were most productive while the spacecraft was warmer, closer to the Sun,” NASA communication officer Erin Morton wrote in the post last week. “As the spacecraft is currently 123 million miles (197 million kilometers) from the Sun (1.3 times farther from the Sun than the Earth) and moving away at 20,000 mph (35,000 km/hr), the team does not expect further deployment attempts to be beneficial under present conditions.”
NASA noticed issues with the solar array shortly after the mission’s launch, and deduced that it was a loss in tension in a lanyard used to unfurl the circular array. Lucy is now hurtling away from the Sun, getting colder and colder, but will return to Earth for a gravity assist in December 2024. At this time, the Lucy team hopes that spacecraft will be warm enough to try again.
In the meantime, the team behind Lucy will be collecting data on the misbehaving solar array to see how it operates at its slightly incapacitated state as Lucy continues its mission to visit Jupiter’s Trojan asteroid clusters.
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Freaky Spiral Over Hawaii Likely Caused by SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket
Last week, astronomers at a Hawaiian observatory spotted a spiral-like structure over Maunakea. A SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage is the likely source of the strange atmospheric feature, as this sort of thing has happened before.
The spiral was seen during the early morning hours of January 18, the same day that a Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. A tweet from Subaru Telescope astronomers provided a glimpse of the spectacle, which the scientists linked to SpaceX’s launch of a new satellite.
The observatory also provided a time lapse video of the spiral, showing its evolution over time, along with an unsettling number of satellites zipping by. “Earlier that day, SpaceX launched a satellite to medium-Earth orbit,” Subaru Telescope said in the video. “We believe this phenomenon is related [to] its orbital deployment operation.” SpaceX’s GPS III Space Vehicle 06 mission did in fact launch earlier in the day, delivering a GPS satellite for the U.S. Space Force.
The Subaru Telescope is a 26.9-foot (8.2-meter) optical-infrared telescope located on the summit of Maunakea and operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. The team used the facility’s Subaru-Asahi Star Camera to spot and chronicle the spiral.
That a rocket could cause such an atmospheric formation seems surprising, but this isn’t the first time that a SpaceX rocket has caused such a structure to form; a similar “smoke ring” seen over Illinois on June 19, 2022 was linked to the launch of a Falcon 9 and the delivery of the Globalstar FM15 satellite.
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“This spiral was caused by the Falcon 9’s upper stage venting leftover fuel just before deorbiting into the Pacific Ocean,” Spaceweather reported at the time. “The upper stage was probably spinning on its longest axis to stabilize flight orientation—hence the spiral shape,” and similar spirals “have been seen after previous Falcon 9 launches.”
Falcon 9 launches are known for producing strange atmospheric effects, including bow shocks (as seen in the new video) and rocket “jellyfishes.” Sights like this are set to be a common occurrence, with SpaceX planning more than 100 Falcon 9 launches in the coming year.
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NASA Reveals Details About Habitable Worlds Observatory
NASA officials disclosed information about a planned next-generation space telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, during a recent session of the American Astronomical Society,
In the session, Mark Clampin, the Astrophysics Division Director NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, offered a few details about the telescope, which could be operational in the early 2040s.
The need for such an observatory is outlined in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s decadal survey on astronomy and astrophysics, a report assembled by hundreds of industry experts that serves as a reference document for the fields’ future goals.
One of the key findings of the most recent decadal survey was the necessity of finding habitable worlds beyond our own, using a telescope tailored specifically for such a purpose. The report suggested an $11 billion observatory—one with a 6-meter telescope that would take in light at optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared wavelengths. (Hubble Space Telescope sees mostly in optical and ultraviolet light, while the more recently launched Webb Space Telescope images at mid-infrared and near-infrared wavelengths.)
The authors of the decadal survey suggested the Habitable Worlds Observatory as the first in a new Great Observatories program; basically, the linchpin in the next generation of 21st-century space telescopes. As Science reported, the decadal report’s suggestion of an exoplanet-focused space telescope falls somewhere between two older NASA proposals, telescope concepts named HabEx and LUVOIR.
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Exoplanets are found with regularity; it’s finding worlds with conditions that can host life as we know it that’s tricky. Webb has spotted exoplanets and deduced aspects of their atmospheric chemistry, and other telescopes (even planned ones, like the Roman Space Telescope) are turning their gaze toward these alien worlds.
Unlike other telescopes—both operational and those still on the drawing board—the planned Habitable Worlds Observatory would look specifically for so-called Goldilocks planets, worlds with conditions that could foster life.
The search for extraterrestrial life is a relentless goal of NASA. The Perseverance rover on Mars is collecting rock samples on Mars to learn, among other things, whether there’s any evidence for ancient microbial life in a region of the planet that once was a flowing river delta. (An environment, it’s important to note, that scientists believe was similar to that where Earth’s first known life materialized.)
Beyond Mars, scientists harbor hope that future probes can poke around for signs of life in the subsurface ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa or the methane sea on Saturn’s moon Titan.
But those are just venues—and hostile ones, compared to Earth—within our solar system. Missions like TESS and the Kepler Space Telescope have detected thousands of exoplanets, but the fraction that are Earth-like is vanishingly small.
Like the Webb telescope, the future observatory will be located at L2, a region of space one million miles from Earth that allows objects to remain in position with relatively little fuel burn. (By saving fuel, the missions’ lifespans are prolonged.)
As reported by Science, Clampin said that the Habitable Worlds Observatory would be designed for maintenance and upgrades, which Webb is not. That could make the next observatory a more permanent presence in NASA’s menagerie of space telescopes.
Hubble was famously serviced by humans in low-Earth orbit multiple times, due to a number of mechanical snafus and issues that have arisen over the telescope’s 32-year tenure in space.
The Habitable Worlds Observatory repairs and upgrades (which would take place a million miles from Earth—a little far for human repairs) would be done robotically, more in the style of a Star Wars droid than a hand from the IT department.
Space News reported that NASA will imminently begin seeking out nominations for people to join the Science, Technology, Architecture Review Team (START) for the new observatory. The first phase of the observatory’s development is slated for 2029.
In November, Clampin told a House subcommittee that the Webb telescope had suffered 14 strikes from micrometeoroids—very small bits of fast-traveling space rock that can damage the telescope’s mirrors. Clampin said the NASA team was “making some operational changes to make sure we avoid any future impacts,” and the telescope was slightly repositioned to reduce the risk of future strikes.
One of the telescope’s mirror segments was damaged by a micrometeoroid strike, but an analysis by the team found the telescope “should meet its optical performance requirements for many years.”
Of paramount importance to the astronomical community is that the budget and timeline of the new observatory stay on track. The Webb project was years late and way over budget. Space News reports that some scientists are calling for an expedited timeline that could see the Habitable Worlds Observatory launch by 2035.
The ball is well and truly rolling on the telescopes of the future. The question is how Sisyphean the roll of the ball will be.
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