If there’s life on the red planet, our best hope of finding it may be this rock-hungry rover, currently in its final stages of construction (really!) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Next summer, the Mars 2020 rover will be deployed to the Jezero Crater, where it will land in 2021 and spend more than a year prowling the planet’s surface.
3D printer manufacturer Electronic Alchemy has developed a system capable of additive manufacturing fully functional electronics. Named eForge, NASA intends to use the system during planetary space missions to 3D print chemical sensors on demand. Following the launch of eForge, the company is also now designing a device to recycle 3D printed electronics, further reducing NASA’s need for resupply missions.
An update on the development of a system that will land NASA Astronauts on the Moon as a part of our #Artemis program, the final four sites selected for our first asteroid sample return mission and our Parker Solar Probe spacecraft prepares for another close encounter with the Sun … a few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA!
Before scientists discovered the new state of matter last week, we were basically all used to just three states of matter. After all, during our daily lives we encounter some variety of solids, liquids and gases. Solids hold a definite shape without a container, liquids conform to the shape of their container, and gases not only conform to a container, but also expand to fill it.
And there’s variety amidst these three: A crystalline solid, for example, has all its atoms lined up in exactly the precise order in perfect symmetry, while a quasicrystal solid fills all its space without the tightly regulated structure. Liquid crystals, which make up the visual components of most electronic displays, have elements of both liquids and crystal structures, as anyone who has ever pushed the screen of their calculator can confirm.
Under standard conditions on Earth, solids, liquids and gasses are the vast majority of what a person will experience in life. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a whole lot more beneath the surface.
The McKay-Zubrin plan for terraforming Mars in 50 years was cited by Elon Musk.
Orbital mirrors with 100 km radius are required to vaporize the CO2 in the south polar cap. If manufactured of solar sail-like material, such mirrors would have a mass on the order of 200,000 tonnes. If manufactured in space out of asteroidal or Martian moon material, about 120 MWe-years of energy would be needed to produce the required aluminum.
The use of orbiting mirrors is another way for hydrosphere activation. For example, if the 125 km radius reflector discussed earlier for use in vaporizing the pole were to concentrate its power on a smaller region, 27 TW would be available to melt lakes or volatilize nitrate beds. This is triple the power available from the impact of a 10 billion tonne asteroid per year, and in all probability would be far more controllable. A single such mirror could drive vast amounts of water out of the permafrost and into the nascent Martian ecosystem very quickly. Thus while the engineering of such mirrors may be somewhat grandiose, the benefits to terraforming of being able to wield tens of TW of power in a controllable way would be huge.
Thanks to the Kepler telescope, scientists have enough data to estimate how many sun-like stars have Earth-like planets that could hold liquid water.
Robots are about to go underground — for a competition anyways.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the U.S. Department of Defense dedicated to developing new emerging technologies, is holding a challenge intended to develop technology for first responders and the military to map, navigate, and search underground. But the technology developed for the competition could also be used in future NASA missions to caves and lava tubes on other planets.
The DARPA Subterranean Challenge Systems Competition will be held August 15 – 22 in mining tunnels under Pittsburgh, and among the robots competing will be an entry from a team led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that features wheeled rovers, drones, and climbing robots that can rise on pinball-flipper-shaped treads to scale obstacles.
NASA and the Space Center Houston are seeking designs for autonomous robots that can explore the surface of the moon—and the leading one will win up to $1 million to continue research and discovery.
On Monday, the organizations announced Phase 2 of the NASA Space Robotics Challenge, focused on virtually designing autonomous robotic operations that allow the US to expand its ability to explore space and maintain its technological leadership.
SEE: Artificial intelligence: A business leader’s guide (free PDF) (TechRepublic)
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Finding exoplanets marks just the beginning of what we can learn from these distant worlds, researchers said.
This week we have the first episode in this years Summer Series podcast where we feature three compelling talks from other creators.
In this weeks Summer Series podcast episode we hear from George Sowers who talked about “Mining the Moon for Fun and Profit.” Dr. Sowers is a Professor of Practice at the Colorado School of Mines who works on the world’s first and only graduate program in Space Resources.
This talk was featured in the mid-June Future In-Space Operations weekly teleconference. The slides are available below.
