I’m excited to welcome Clive Neal, a professor of planetary geology at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, and an expert on lunar science and the Apollo Moon rock samples. A former Chair of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, Neal will talk about why the Moon is so crucial to our understanding of the inner solar system. Please stay tuned!
NASA has awarded Intuitive Machines of Houston approximately $47 million to deliver a drill combined with a mass spectrometer to the Moon by December 2022 under the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. The delivery of the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment known as PRIME-1 will help NASA search for ice at the Moon’s South Pole and, for the first time, harvest ice from below the surface.
“We continue to rapidly select vendors from our pool of CLPS vendors to land payloads on the lunar surface, which exemplifies our work to integrate the ingenuity of commercial industry into our efforts at the Moon,” said NASA’s Associate Administrator for Science Thomas Zurbuchen. “The information we’ll gain from PRIME-1 and other science instruments and technology demonstrations we’re sending to the lunar surface will inform our Artemis missions with astronauts and help us better understand how we can build a sustainable lunar presence.”
PRIME-1 will land on the Moon and drill up to 3 feet (approximately 1 meter) below the surface. It will measure with a mass spectrometer how much ice in the sample is lost to sublimation as the ice turns from a solid to a vapor in the vacuum of the lunar environment. Versions of PRIME-1’s drill and the Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations, or MSolo, will also fly on VIPER, a mobile robot that also will search for ice at the lunar South Pole in 2023. NASA will land the first woman and next man on the Moon’s South Pole the following year.
NASA’s record-breaking OSIRIS-REx mission goes in for the space agency’s first-attempted asteroid surface sample on Tuesday. If successful, a sample from asteroid Bennu’s surface will arrive back at Earth in late September of 2023.
State Broadband Office Director Russ Elliott introduced the Hoh Tribe’s Economic Development Director to SpaceX Starlink. Almost overnight, the Tribe went from almost no connectivity to high-speed internet. Creative partnerships like this can help the state reach its goal to bring connectivity to every home by 2024.
There’s rough terrain – then there are the craters and near-vertical cliffs on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. The DuAxel is a robot built for situations just like those. By creating two single-axle rovers that can combine into one with a central payload we could maximize versatility during future missions. See more details: go.nasa.gov/34QNo5T.
NASA has reached an agreement with 14 US companies to develop technologies that will enable future modes of exploration in space and on the surface of the Moon. NASA says the value of these awards for “Tipping Point” technologies is more than $370 million.
With these awards, the space agency is leaning heavily into technologies related to the collection, storage, and transfer of cryogenic propellants in space. Four of the awards, totaling more than $250 million, will go to companies specifically for “cryogenic fluid management” tech demonstrations:
Eta Space of Merritt Island, Florida, $27 million. Small-scale flight demonstration of a complete cryogenic oxygen fluid management system. System will be the primary payload on a Rocket Lab Photon satellite and collect critical cryogenic fluid management data in orbit for nine months. Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colorado, $89.7 million. In-space demonstration mission using liquid hydrogen to test more than a dozen cryogenic fluid management technologies, positioning them for infusion into future space systems. SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, $53.2 million. Large-scale flight demonstration to transfer 10 metric tons of cryogenic propellant, specifically liquid oxygen, between tanks on a Starship vehicle. United Launch Alliance (ULA) of Centennial, Colorado, $86.2 million. Demonstration of a smart propulsion cryogenic system, using liquid oxygen and hydrogen, on a Vulcan Centaur upper stage. The system will test precise tank-pressure control, tank-to-tank transfer, and multiweek propellant storage.
“We’re cutting the red tape that has held this industry to the launch pad for far too long,” Brianna Manzelli said.
This fall sky show has some really bright meteors this year.
Two full moons with a meteor shower sandwiched in between? October has been a fun month for sky watchers.
The annual Orionid meteor shower is already heating up. It generally lasts from early October through about Nov. 7. This year, it’s expected to reach its peak before dawn on Oct. 21.
But don’t wait until then to start watching for meteors streaking across the sky.
The comparison of distant atomic clocks is foundational to international timekeeping, global positioning and tests of fundamental physics. Optica l-fibre links allow the most precise optical clocks to be compared, without degradation, over intracontinental distances up to thousands of kilometres, but intercontinental comparisons remain limited by the performance of satellite transfer techniques. Here we show that very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), although originally developed for radio astronomy and geodesy, can overcome this limit and compare remote clocks through the observation of extragalactic radio sources. We developed dedicated transportable VLBI stations that use broadband detection and demonstrate the comparison of two optical clocks located in Italy and Japan separated by 9,000 km. This system demonstrates performance beyond satellite techniques and can pave the way for future long-term stable international clock comparisons.
New images taken by BepiColombo come at a time when interest in the second planet from the sun is at an all time high.
