25 items | 1 visits
John Lemke's List: New Space Race
-
-
May 12, 11
The newly deposit is about 3,000 cubic miles, or about the volume of Lake Superior, and holds enough carbon dioxide to nearly double the mass of the Martian atmosphere. Mars' atmosphere has a surface pressure less than 1 percent that at Earth's surface at the lowest altitudes. The air on Mars is 95 percent carbon dioxide, while that on Earth is less than 0.04 percent CO2.
-
-
California Governor Jerry Brown announced today that he has signed into law the Spaceflight Liability and Immunity Act, AB 2243. This law provides the necessary liability protections for compliant companies in the state, should any spaceflight participant who has acknowledged the risks sustain any bodily injury during spaceflight activities. Currently, Florida, Virginia, and Texas also provide spaceflight companies liability protection.
-
-
-
The rock has been dubbed "Jake Matijevic," named for the surface operations systems engineer for all the Mars rover missions so far. But unfortunately, Matijevic passed away at age 64 just days after Curiosity touched down on Mars last month. Matijevic was one of the original technology developers for rovers on Mars—figuring out how to link the mechanics, avionics and all the systems together. He led the surface operations for the Sojourner rover in 1996, worked for years with the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, and was instrumental in getting the Curiosity rover ready for its mission.
-
-
-
-
The researchers suspect they've reached a region of the solar-interstellar boundary that nobody had predicted. In this area, the magnetic field lines of the Sun link up with those of the interstellar field. Scientists are calling this linkage a "highway" for particles to travel along. It lets solar wind particles escape more readily, causing the drop in their intensity. And it opens the door for low-energy cosmic rays to slip in to our Solar System, which is why Voyager 1 is seeing so many of them.
According the researchers at the press conference that announced these results, most steady-state models of the Solar System failed to predict anything like this. A few models did have a feature like this, but it was only a transient one that appeared at certain times of the solar cycle.
-
-
-
The Mars Curiosity rover has done pretty well on the Red Planet to date, but experienced its first significant malfunction on Wednesday when one of its two onboard computers became corrupted and failed to turn off and enter "sleep mode" as planned.
-
-
Dec 09, 13
"A $30 million Google-backed competition to land a spacecraft on the moon may be about to be scooped. China’s Chang’e 3 probe successfully put itself into lunar orbit on Friday in preparation for an attempted touchdown around Dec. 14."
-
A $30 million Google-backed competition to land a spacecraft on the moon may be about to be scooped. China’s Chang’e 3 probe successfully put itself into lunar orbit on Friday in preparation for an attempted touchdown around Dec. 14.
-
-
-
Observers say the equipment failure may have disabled the electrical motors needed to close the rover's solar panels, which would have disastrous effects as the rover heads into the two-week "lunar night."
<!-- extended entry -->If the panels cannot be closed, the rover will almost certainly freeze during the two week span.
-
-
-
Mars almost definitely has water below its surface, and it’s possible that it might have life there too -- buried deep in the soil, where it’s protected from dryness, radiation and temperature extremes. Unfortunately, NASA doesn’t seem too interested in looking for it, preferring to look for "conditions" that might support life instead. But a group of aerospace and robotics engineers -- many of whom work for NASA, and one of whom even operates the Curiosity rover -- think NASA should be going with a more direct approach, and they're taking matters into their own hands.
-
List Comments
(0)
List Info