NASA’s Perseverance rover captured new imagery on April 13, 2021 of the Red Planet and the Sun. On April 12, NASA announced that Ingenuity needs a software update and will not fly until at least next week. Full Story: https://www.space.com/nasa-delays-mars-helicopter-ingenuity-flight-again.
Credit: Space.com | imagery courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU | produced & edited by Steve Spaleta (http://www.twitter.com/stevespaleta)
Music:“northern lights” by saul guanipa via videohelper.com
NASA is considering an inflatable space habitat designed by Sierra Nevada Corporation as a potential space station of the future.
These musical videos illuminate different dynamics at play within iconic celestial objects.
Hearing sound blended with space data is artistically enjoyable. It also teaches listeners about different relationships throughout the universe.
Astronomers have painted their best picture yet of an RV Tauri variable, a rare type of stellar binary where two stars – one approaching the end of its life – orbit within a sprawling disk of dust. Their 130-year dataset spans the widest range of light yet collected for one of these systems, from radio to X-rays.
“There are only about 300 known RV Tauri variables in the Milky Way galaxy,” said Laura Vega, a recent doctoral recipient at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. “We focused our study on the second brightest, named U Monocerotis, which is now the first of these systems from which X-rays have been detected.”
A paper describing the findings, led by Vega, was published in The Astrophysical Journal.
On April 10, 2021 NASA announced Ingenuity Mars Helicopter failed high-speed spin test causing reschedule of the first flight to no earlier than April 14. NASA explained that during a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a “watchdog” timer expiration. This occurred as it was trying to transition the flight computer from ‘Pre-Flight’ to ‘Flight’ mode. The helicopter is safe and healthy and communicated its full telemetry set to Earth. The watchdog timer oversees the command sequence and alerts the system to any potential issues. It helps the system stay safe by not proceeding if an issue is observed and worked as planned. Ingenuity team is reviewing telemetry to diagnose and understand the issue. Following that, they will reschedule the full-speed test.
Credit: nasa.gov, NASA/JPL-Caltech, NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
Source for NASA’s Mars Helicopter Ingenuity page: https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/
Source for Ingenuity first fly reschedule: https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/status/291/mars-helicopter-flight-delayed-to-no-earlier-than-april-14/
#mars #helicopter #perseverance
NASA ’s Lucy spacecraft has successfully completed thermal vacuum testing of both solar panels, the final step in checking out these critical spacecraft components in preparation for launch this fall. Once the Lucy spacecraft’s solar panels are attached and fully extended, they could cover a five-story building.
Lucy, the 13th mission in NASA’s Discovery Program, requires these large solar panels as it will operate farther from the Sun than any previous solar-powered space mission. During its 12-year tour of the Trojan asteroids, the Lucy spacecraft will operate a record-breaking 530 million miles (853 million km) from the Sun, beyond the orbit of Jupiter.
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Choose among the following symposia tracks, all of them concurring to a coherent strategy for Space Settlement, kicking off the Civilian Space Development before 2025: * The immense social benefits of expanding Civilization into Outer Space * Civilization risk mitigation: space as the main Knight, defending humanity against the ‘Apocalypse’ multi-crisis * Global collaboration, working with Agencies, Companies, Space Advocacy Associations, United Nations and Governments of Planet Earth to promote Civilian Space Development and the 18th UN SDG * Space Safety: protecting human life and health in space, space debris recovering and reuse, space weather, defense from asteroids * Policies to Enable Communities Beyond Earth: technologies, financing, & Common Law * Earth orbit industrial development * The Moon and Cislunar development * Space Based Solar Power, feeding the Civilian Space Development * Greening the Solar System * Mars, the Asteroids Belt and beyond * A conceptual timetable for the founding steps of Space Settlement * Living, Sport, Art and Culture in Space, a Scifi futurologist–presentist narration * Congress Thesis 1 — Status of civilization and perspective of expansion into outer space * Congress Thesis 2 — A strategy to develop the Space Renaissance, towards 2025.
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NASA has delayed the first flight of its Ingenuity Mars helicopter after a crucial test-spin of the drone’s rotor blades abruptly stopped.
This was the last major test to make sure the helicopter would be ready for its first flight, which was originally scheduled for early Monday. Now NASA has delayed the historic liftoff — which would mark the first powered, controlled flight on another planet — to Wednesday.
For the test on Friday, Ingenuity was supposed to spin its blades at full speed while on the ground. The two pairs of blades should have spun in opposite directions at more than 2500 rotations per minute — about eight times faster than an Earth helicopter. On flight day, they’ll need that speed to lift the 4-pound drone into the thin Martian atmosphere. That air has just 1% the density of Earth’s atmosphere, making Ingenuity’s task the equivalent of flying three times higher than the peak of Mount Everest.
Humanity’s first helicopter on Mars has been cleared for a historic takeoff.
Ingenuity will take to the skies above Jezero Crater Sunday (April 11) on a 40-second flight — roughly four times longer than the Wright brothers’ first flight on Earth over 117 years ago. The first data, successful or not, should flow back to Earth on Monday (April 12) around 3:30 a.m. EDT (0830 GMT).
Although universal fault-tolerant quantum computers – with millions of physical quantum bits (or qubits) – may be a decade or two away, quantum computing research continues apace. It has been hypothesized that quantum computers will one day revolutionize information processing across a host of military and civilian applications from pharmaceuticals discovery, to advanced batteries, to machine learning, to cryptography. A key missing element in the race toward fault-tolerant quantum systems, however, is meaningful metrics to quantify how useful or transformative large quantum computers will actually be once they exist.
To provide standards against which to measure quantum computing progress and drive current research toward specific goals, DARPA announced its Quantum Benchmarking program. Its aim is to re-invent key quantum computing metrics, make those metrics testable, and estimate the required quantum and classical resources needed to reach critical performance thresholds.
“It’s really about developing quantum computing yardsticks that can accurately measure what’s important to focus on in the race toward large, fault-tolerant quantum computers,” said Joe Altepeter, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “Building a useful quantum computer is really hard, and it’s important to make sure we’re using the right metrics to guide our progress towards that goal. If building a useful quantum computer is like building the first rocket to the moon, we want to make sure we’re not quantifying progress toward that goal by measuring how high our planes can fly.”
