NASA’s Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project will conduct a second test on Thursday, a major demonstration of technology that is being baselined into NASA’s ambitions for landing payloads on Mars. The test will be carried out at the US Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF) on Kauai, Hawaii – beginning with a balloon ride to 120,000 feet.
NASA has selected nine out of 33 proposed instruments for inclusion in a proposed mission to the tantalizing Jovian moon known as Europa. With a primary goal of evaluating if the moon is habitable, the mission is now heading towards a Key Decision Point (KDP) to build towards “formalization”. Launching in the 2020s, the mission may be lofted by the Space Launch System (SLS).
For the past several months, the team has coped without auto-focusing. For each target, the instrument has taken multiple images or multiple laser analyses at different focal distances. The data were sent to Earth for selection of the in-focus image or laser analysis among the set.
The repair required sending new software to be installed on the instrument. It now takes multiple images and uses those to autonomously select the focus positions for the final images and laser analyses sent back to Earth.
“We think we will actually have better quality images and analyses with this new software than the original,” said Wiens.
On its 956th sol (day) on Mars, the rover Curiosity used its Mastcam to image a stunning sequence of the Sun (Sol) setting over the local horizon at Gale Crater, where it has been exploring since August 2012. The individual images taken by Curiosity covered a period of about 6 minutes. The sequence of images was too intermittent to make smooth movie of the sunset on its own. Using the foreground and horizon from one image and then recreating the sky and Sun in Photoshop, Glen Nagle used Adobe Premier to create a near real-time sunset sequence as if you could stand on Mars and see it for yourself.
Their steeply rising spectral energy distributions (SEDs) from rest frame 1-10μm and decreasing luminosity contribution at longer wavelengths imply that thebulk of the energy in these galaxies is radiated by hot dust (Wu et al. 2012). They meet the selection criteria for dust-obscured galaxies (DOGs; F24m>0:3 mJyandF24m=FR>1000; Dey et al. 2008), but have hotter dust temperatures (>60 K; Wu et al. 2012; Bridge et al.2013; Jones et al. 2014) than DOGs (30K{40K; Pope etal. 2008; Melbourne et al. 2012). Thus, we also refer to this population as “Hot DOGs" (Wu et al. 2012).
NASA has formally certified SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket to launch all but the space agency’s most costly robotic science missions, beginning with a a U.S.-French oceanography satellite set for liftoff from California in July.
NASA’s Launch Services Program, which manages the agency’s rocket procurements for research missions, concluded the multi-year certification effort Tuesday, according to George Diller, a NASA spokesperson.
The milestone clears the Falcon 9 rocket to launch NASA’s “medium-risk” science missions, a classification which includes most of the agency’s Earth observation satellites and many interplanetary probes.
Scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that the immense halo of gas enveloping the Andromeda galaxy, our nearest massive galactic neighbor, is about six times larger and 1,000 times more massive than previously measured. The dark, nearly invisible halo stretches about a million light-years from its host galaxy, halfway to our own Milky Way galaxy. This finding promises to tell astronomers more about the evolution and structure of majestic giant spirals, one of the most common types of galaxies in the universe.
NASA laboratory experiments suggest the dark material coating some geological features of Jupiter’s moon Europa is likely sea salt from a subsurface ocean, discolored by exposure to radiation. The presence of sea salt on Europa’s surface suggests the ocean is interacting with its rocky seafloor – an important consideration in determining whether the icy moon could support life.
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