TechNewsGazette

Spacecraft

New Horizons halfway from Pluto to next target 2014 MU69

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New Horizons spacecraft is travelling towards its next flyby target – the Kuiper belt object 2014 MU69 – and is almost half way there, NASA has revealed.

If all goes well, New Horizons will be flying by 2014 MU69 on January 1, 2019. Currently the spacecraft is 782.45 million kms beyond Pluto and the same distance from MU69. The information was revealed by Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, who said that their spacecraft will be setting the record for the most distant world ever explored in the history of civilization.

New Horizons will be beginning a new period of hibernation later this week.

In addition to its historic Pluto encounter and 16 subsequent months of relaying the data from that encounter back to Earth, New Horizons has made breakthrough, distant observations of a dozen Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs).

It has collected unique data on the dust and charged-particle environment of the Kuiper Belt and studied the hydrogen gas that permeates the vast space surrounding the Sun, called the heliosphere.

Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist from APL said, “The January 2019 MU69 flyby is the next big event for us, but New Horizons is truly a mission to more broadly explore the Kuiper Belt.”

Weaver added, “In addition to MU69, we plan to study more than two-dozen other KBOs in the distance and measure the charged particle and dust environment all the way across the Kuiper Belt”.

New Horizons spacecraft is currently 5.7 billion kms from Earth. At that distance, a radio signal sent from the operations team – and travelling at light speed – needs about five hours and 20 minutes to reach the spacecraft.

Johns Hopkins APL to play key role in NASA’s Lucy and Psyche asteroid missions

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NASA has announced plans of launching its two new asteroid missions – Lucy and Psyche – in 2021 and 2023. A key role will be played by scientists and engineers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as they will be providing the instruments that will be used in the two spacecrafts.

The Lucy mission has been scheduled for a 2021 launch and it will be studying six of Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids during the mission lifetime. APL scientists will be building the “eagle eyes” for the Lucy by developing a high-resolution telescopic camera for the mission, which will perform the first reconnaissance of the Trojans, a population of primitive asteroids orbiting in tandem with Jupiter.

The APL instrument is the next-gen version of the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, or LORRI, currently flying on the New Horizons spacecraft, which provided the first detailed close-up views of Pluto and its moons in July 2015. Among other capabilities, the L’LORRI camera—the first “L” added to mark its role on the Lucy mission—will produce Lucy’s highest spatial resolution surface maps, which will allow scientists to chart the asteroids’ geology and estimate surface ages.

The reason behind NASA’s decision of selecting Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids for further study is that scientists believe that these Trojans could provide unique and critical knowledge of planetary origins, the source of volatiles and organics on the terrestrial planets, and the evolution of the planetary system as a whole.

The Psyche mission will be taking off in 2023 with the goal of studying 16 Psyche – an asteroid that appears to be the exposed nickel-iron core of a protoplanet, one of the building blocks of the sun’s planetary system. For Psyche, APL will provide the Psyche Gamma Ray and Neutron Spectrometer, called the GRNS, which will detect, measure, and map the elemental composition of 16 Psyche, a rare and primarily metal asteroid in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. GRNS will test this hypothesis by measuring 16 Psyche’s elemental composition, and if confirmed, these observations will be the first to directly characterize the composition of a planetary core and provide insights into the inaccessible cores of the terrestrial planets, including Earth and Mars.

Stephen Hawking’s search for new habitable planet supported by NASA

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Stephen Hawking has been quite vocal about what he believes is an urgent need for humans to start exploring interstellar space and other star systems like our Solar System to find a new habitable planet as soon as possible because he believes that humans do not have more than a 1000 years left on planet Earth.

The celebrity scientist has already announced a Breakthrough Starshot project wherein he and his supporters intend to send out a spacecraft capable of travelling at far greater speeds to explore interstellar space and in the process find habitable planets that humans can live on. The intention is to build a spacecraft capable of travelling at one-fifth the speed of light and reach some of the nearest stars and possible habitable planets at a fraction of the time compared to what spacecrafts powered by current technologies would take. However, that’s a dream that is great on paper, but has little technical feasibility based on what science already knows.

Hawking wants to change that and helping him are some of the best technological minds on planet including those from Korea Institute of Science and Technology and now NASA. NASA is helping Hawking and team to find out solution to one of the major problems to interstellar space travel – radiation. Just like humans, electronic devices are also incapable of withstanding long-term exposure to radiation. While electronic devices on spacecrafts will be able to handle the radiation for a much longer time if it comes to interstellar travel spanning tens of years they too won’t be able to complete their journey and die out well before they reach their destination.

This is particularly true if we want to travel to Alpha Centauri in search for a habitable planet. Alpha Centauri is located 4.37 light-years or over 25 trillion miles from us. To travel to the star system it would need Hawking’s “StarChip” spacecraft at least 20 years at a speed that is one-fifth the speed of light. Even for relatively such a short duration, the spacecraft’s electronics will not be able to survive and that’s where NASA’s expertise comes in.

NASA scientists have proposed a number of solutions including shielding the spacecraft with material that will be able to prevent the radiation from harming the electronics. But this solution increases the overall weight of the spacecraft making it a rather not-so-optimum solution. The next option is to adjust the route of spacecraft such that it doesn’t pass through regions known to be high-radiation areas. This option is not suitable considering that it will add to the overall flight time and will not be able to avoid all the high-radiation areas anyways.

The best solution as of now, thought theoretical, is to use silicon chip that would automatically repair itself. “On-chip healing has been around for many, many years,” NASA team member Jin-Woo Han said recently at a presentation at International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco. Han pointed out that there have been many advances in this field and one of the most important ones being ability to heal chips through heating.

Han pointed out a study by researchers at KAIST wherein they have developed an experimental “gate-all-around” nanowire transistor. The major different between gate-all-around nanowire transistors and today’s chips is that the former uses nanoscale wires as the transistor channel instead of today’s fin-shaped channels. The gate, the electrode that turns on or off the flow of charge through the channel, completely surrounds the nanowire. Adding an extra contact to the gate allows you to pass current through it. That current heats the gate and the channel it surrounds, fixing any radiation-induced defects.

Nanowire transistors are ideal for space, according to KAIST, because they have a relatively high degree of immunity to cosmic rays and because they are very small, with dimensions in the tens of nanometers. The technology has already been used to form three key building blocks for a single-chip spacecraft: a microprocessor, a DRAM memory for supporting this, and a flash memory that can serve as a hard disk and studies have shown that repairs to radiation-induced damage can be made many times, with experiments showing that flash memory can be recovered up to around 10,000 times and DRAM returned to its pristine state 1012 times.

With logic devices, an even higher figure is expected. These results indicate that a lengthy interstellar space mission could take place, with the chip powered down every few years, heated internally to recover its performance, and then brought back to life.

190 meters wide alien spacecraft allegedly crash landed on Mars [see NASA image]

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An alien and UFO enthusiast who is known as UFOvni2012 on YouTube has revealed an image of Mars taken in 2000 showing an alleged 190 meters wide alien spacecraft thought to have crash landed on the Red Planet.

The image was taken by Mars Global Surveyor captured in 2000 and according to UFOvni2012 the space agency got rid of quite a few images that could have revealed existence of extraterrestrials on the Red Planet, but somehow the image (MOC narrow angle image M11-01534) that was originally published on October 16, 2000 survived NASA’s deletion efforts and remained on the servers till date. [Find original image here]

The image in question is of Medusae Fossae formation, and it was NASA’s very own Steve Wingate, an image specialist, who discovered a very unusual object half-buried in the Martian soil. From the looks of it, the unusual object is thought of as a crashed alien craft. Taking a deeper look at the image, the YouTuber says, it is evident that it is an alien craft about 190 meters wide, that has crash landed on the surface of the planet at a low angle. This low angle caused the craft to swerve left and thereby pushing the soil over it and in the process got buried.

The YouTuber takes the liberty of enhancing the image – specifically that of what they claims is the crash landed craft. In the video the YouTuber tries to convince us that the object is a craft with a cockpit. The enhancements also include a complete drawing/model of what the author believes is a true representation of the alleged craft.

Further, the creator of the video also goes to the extent of claiming that this particular region – the Medusae Fossae formation – is dangerous for spacecrafts as another image taken by the NASA’s Mars Express spacecraft shows another possible crash site in the same region. Let us know you thoughts after checking out the video.

NASA eyes small spacecraft systems; says it will establish virtual institute

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NASA intends to promote development of small spacecraft systems and with those intentions the space agency has revealed that it will be establishing a virtual institute at its Ames Research Center early in 2017.

The institute has been named the Small Spacecraft Systems Virtual Institute (S3VI) and will leverage the growing small spacecraft community, promote innovation, identify emerging technology opportunities, and provide an efficient channel for communication about small spacecraft systems with industry, academia, and other government agencies, NASA said in a statement.

“The S3VI will provide the first one-stop shop for technical knowledge in the rapidly burgeoning small spacecraft technology fields,” said Jay Bookbinder, Director of Programmes and Projects at Ames.

Depending on the mission objective, a small spacecraft can range in size from a postage-stamp (under an ounce) up to the size of a refrigerator.

“NASA sees enormous benefits from investing in research and technology development in small spacecraft systems, such as propulsion, that will be essential in advancing the commercial space sector,” said Steve Jurczyk, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD).

“Over the past several years, NASA has increased the generation of new, innovative applications of small spacecraft, with several mission directorates using small spacecraft to meet their goals,” Jurczyk said.

Small spacecraft are being used for a range of activities such as for earth and space science measurements to help understand our environment and investigations of microgravity effects on organisms to enable the safe exploration of space.

“This (the institute) will result in more efficient development efforts, and enable smaller vendors to compete more effectively in this market,” Bookbinder added.