A side view of Cassini’s final 22 orbits at Saturn. They cross the ring plane at different locations in order for Cassini’s instruments to sample different parts of the innermost D ring.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is back in contact with Earth after its successful first-ever dive through the narrow gap between the planet Saturn and its rings on April 26, 2017. The spacecraft is in the process of beaming back science and engineering data collected during its passage, via NASA’s Deep Space Network Goldstone Complex in California’s Mojave Desert. The DSN acquired Cassini’s signal at 11:56 p.m. PDT on April 26, 2017 (2:56 a.m. EDT on April 27) and data began flowing at 12:01 a.m. PDT (3:01 a.m. EDT) on April 27.
“In the grandest tradition of exploration, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has once again blazed a trail, showing us new wonders and demonstrating where our curiosity can take us if we dare,” said Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
As it dove through the gap, Cassini came within about 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) of Saturn’s cloud tops (where the air pressure is 1 bar – comparable to the atmospheric pressure of Earth at sea level) and within about 200 miles (300 kilometers) of the innermost visible edge of the rings.
While mission managers were confident Cassini would pass through the gap successfully, they took extra precautions with this first dive, as the region had never been explored.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s spacewalking suits are in short supply, and a replacement is still years away despite the nearly $200 million spent on new technology, the space agency’s inspector general reported Wednesday.
A next-generation suit for spacewalking astronauts is needed for future space travel, including trips to Mars. But a lack of a formal plan and destinations has complicated suit development, according to the report . At the same time, NASA has reduced funding for suit development, putting more priority instead on space habitats.
According to the report, NASA is dealing with a variety of design and health risks associated with the spacewalking suits used by astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The suits were developed more than 40 years ago and intended for 15 years.
Of the original backpacks containing life-support equipment, only 11 of the 18 are still in use. That might not be enough to last until the station’s retirement in 2024, let alone a possible extension until 2028, the report stated.
Cygnus approaching below the station in the sunset
Backdropped by the blackness of space and Earth’s horizon, the Harmony node in Space Shuttle Discovery’s payload bay, vertical stabilizer and orbital maneuvering system pods are featured in this image photographed by a STS-120 crewmember on October 24, 2007. Earth’s moon is also visible at center.
On Thursday, a Chinese Long March 7 rocket successfully lifted off from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center, carrying the Tainzhou-1 spacecraft. This large, 10.6-meter-long cargo vehicle is the first of a new line of spacecraft that China intends to use to eventually service a large space station akin to the International Space Station.
During the next two months, the spacecraft will make three docking attempts with the Tiangong-2 space station, a smaller prototype for a larger station China intends to build during the coming decade. After these three proof-of-concept dockings, which will occur from different directions, the Tianzhou-1 will separate from the station and perform several months of experiments before burning up in Earth’s atmosphere.
Can we use a laser array to get a fast probe to another star? Breakthrough Starshot relies upon the notion, which was first advanced by Robert Forward all the way back in 1962, and subsequently considered by George Marx in 1966, along with hosts of researchers since. With beamed energy we leave the propellant behind, but as we’ve seen in our discussions of deceleration, there remains the problem of slowing down at the target. Breakthrough Starshot assumes a flyby, but the paper we looked at yesterday works out strategies for braking into orbit at the target star.
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René Heller, Michael Hippke and Pierre Kervella use multiple stars as ‘photon bumpers,’ depending upon steep deceleration at one or more in order to slow the craft and deflect it on to a final target. Alpha Centauri is the obvious case in point, for using these methods we can consider a probe that brakes into orbit around Proxima b after decelerating encounters with Centauri A and B.
The paper from researchers with the Cassini mission, published in the journal Science, indicates hydrogen gas, which could potentially provide a chemical energy source for life, is pouring into the subsurface ocean of Enceladus from hydrothermal activity on the seafloor.
The presence of ample hydrogen in the moon’s ocean means that microbes – if any exist there – could use it to obtain energy by combining the hydrogen with carbon dioxide dissolved in the water. This chemical reaction, known as “methanogenesis” because it produces methane as a byproduct, is at the root of the tree of life on Earth, and could even have been critical to the origin of life on our planet.
Life as we know it requires three primary ingredients: liquid water; a source of energy for metabolism; and the right chemical ingredients, primarily carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. With this finding, Cassini has shown that Enceladus – a small, icy moon a billion miles farther from the sun than Earth – has nearly all of these ingredients for habitability. Cassini has not yet shown phosphorus and sulfur are present in the ocean, but scientists suspect them to be, since the rocky core of Enceladus is thought to be chemically similar to meteorites that contain the two elements.
“Confirmation that the chemical energy for life exists within the ocean of a small moon of Saturn is an important milestone in our search for habitable worlds beyond Earth,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
“Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!”
—Yuri Gagarin
This image, taken by the JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft, highlights a feature on Jupiter where multiple atmospheric conditions appear to collide.
This publicly selected target is called “STB Spectre.” The ghostly bluish streak across the right half of the image is a long-lived storm, one of the few structures perceptible in these whitened latitudes where the south temperate belt of Jupiter would normally be. The egg-shaped spot on the lower left is where incoming small dark spots make a hairpin turn.
The image was taken on March 27, 2017, at 2:06 a.m. PDT (5:06 a.m. EDT), as the Juno spacecraft performed a close flyby of Jupiter. When the image was taken, the spacecraft was 7,900 miles (12,700 kilometers) from the planet.
The image was processed by Roman Tkachenko, and the description is from John Rogers, the citizen scientist who identified the point of interest.
.@Space_Station at night: pink lights = vegetable growth experiments, neon stickers = emergency egress path, green LEDs = electronic systems pic.twitter.com/6CnicMvGE2
— Thomas Pesquet (@Thom_astro)March 31, 2017
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