If your childhood dream was to be an astronaut and you love nothing more than the thought of zero gravity, you’ll probably be pretty happy to hear that human space flight company Space Perspective has just scheduled its first test flight for early next year. According to CNN Travel, the firm – based in Florida – is setting plans in place to fly people to the edge of space, with a pilot and up to eight intrepid explorers in what has been described as a high-tech hot air balloon of sorts. The first test flight – being launched from the Shuttle Landing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center – will be uncrewed and carrying research payloads, but the hope is that space tourists will be able to go on six-hour trips to space in a few years’ time. These trips will involve a two-hour gentle ascent above 99 per cent of the earth’s atmosphere to reach 100,000 ft – something that only 20 people in human history have actually done. Passengers will then enjoy another two hours looking at the view before the spaceship heads back to splash down safely in the sea, with the amateur astronauts catching a boat back to shore. Space Perspective founder Jane Poynter said: “We’re committed to fundamentally changing the way people have access to space – both to perform much-needed research to benefit life on earth and to affect how we view and connect with our planet.” So it seems as though it’s a few years yet before trips to space will become a typical weekend family outing… why not bridge the gap with an astronomical telescope so you can at least keep an eye on what’s going on up there for now? Source: https://www.jupiterfuture.com/blogs/space-1/test-flights-to-space-starting-in-2021 via Jupiter Future https://jupiterfuturespaceshop.wordpress.com/2020/08/06/test-flights-to-space-starting-in-2021/
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NASA’s latest mission to Mars launched early on Thursday 30 July, sending the Perseverance rover to continue the exploration of the Red Planet, much like its predecessors, Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity, and Curiosity. Perseverance is a one tonne, six-wheeled robot rover, equipped with the latest technology to try and find if life ever existed on Mars, reports the BBC. However, this time, Perseverance is taking a little friend along, the first autonomous helicopter drone to fly on Mars. The helicopter, known as Ingenuity, will be conducting its own experiment, can a drone fly on Mars. Ingenuity has been specially built for Mars, which while has less gravity than Earth, it also has a much thinner atmosphere, which could make flight quite a challenge. The helicopter blades of Ingenuity can make over 2,000 revolutions a minute, several times the speed of helicopter blades whipping around in Earth’s atmosphere, and the aircraft is incredibly light, weighing just over 1.8kg. The tiny drone is autonomous, deciding its own journey around the red planet, but the autonomy is not just for navigation, it’s also to help keep Ingenuity alive during the extremely cold nights on Mars. The on-board computer will help find ways for it to keep warm until the sun comes up again. If the Ingenuity’s mission is successful, it will help guide NASA make choices about how flying drones can help in future missions to the planet. Similar drones could survey the act as scouts and survey the terrain, in particular, to places where its wheeled siblings cannot easily get, or as NASA hopes, become “full standalone science craft carrying instrument payloads.” Perseverance and Ingenuity are due to reach Mars in February next year, and we can’t wait to see how it fares. Fun fact: Mars is the only known planet entirely populated by robots! If you want to explore your own planet from the air, buy quadcopter drones here in the UK in our store! Source: https://www.jupiterfuture.com/blogs/space-1/nasa-s-perseverance-mission-sends-drone-to-mars via Jupiter Future https://jupiterfuturespaceshop.wordpress.com/2020/08/06/nasas-perseverance-mission-sends-drone-to-mars/ Shirley Moore 04 August 2020 03:35 At first when I was watching SpaceX hit the water, I thought that all the boats were part of the crew, then I realize they are spectators. I stayed up all night making sure they were ok, coming home. Shirley Reply At first when I was watching SpaceX hit the water, I thought that all the boats were part of the crew, then I realize they are spectators. I stayed up all night making sure they were ok, coming home. Shirley Get breaking space news and the latest updates on rocket launches, sky watching events and more! Thank you for signing up to Space. You will receive a verification email shortly. There was a problem. Please refresh the page and try again. No spam, we promise. You can unsubscribe at any time and we’ll never share your details without your permission. “It was truly our honour and privilege,” Hurley radioed back. Just hours earlier, while still in space, Hurley said the experience is one he won’t soon forget. Boeing isn’t ready to fly its first crewed mission, by the way: The company must first refly an unscrewed test mission to the ISS with its CST-100 Starliner capsule. Starliner’s first attempt at this milestone, in December 2019, went awry when the capsule suffered a glitch with its onboard timing system and ended up stranded in the wrong orbit to rendezvous with the station. Crew Dragon had seven potential splashdown sites in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean to choose from. A spot off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, won the honor. The weather held out nicely, giving the astronauts calm waters to land in. Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, added: “Today is a great day. We should celebrate what we all accomplished here, bringing Bob and Doug back, but we should also think about this as a springboard to doing even harder things with the Artemis programme. And then, of course, moving on to Mars.” Once Dragon enters the atmosphere, it’ll deploy its parachutes, which will slow it until it’s traveling at a speed of just around 15 mph before it splashes down. The reason it requires such a long trip from time of departure to when it lands in the ocean is that it needs to slow down from a starting speed of around 17,500 mph when it departs the ISS. SpaceX notched this milestone with Demo-1, its uncrewed station test flight, in March 2019. So today’s parachute-aided splashdown was the second ever for a Crew Dragon capsule returning from space. (The cargo version of Dragon, which flies robotic resupply missions to the orbiting lab under a separate NASA contract, has 21 ocean landings of its own under its belt.) A SpaceX recovery ship named GO Navigator was on location to retrieve the capsule, crew and parachutes. In a news conference on Friday, Behnken and Hurley said they would have bags ready in case they experienced seasickness while waiting for pickup by the recovery crew. The astronauts reported they were doing well after splashdown and discussed some of the activities they’d undertaken while returning to Earth. The leisurely ride, they said, was broken up by a few prank calls back to Earth via satellite phone — and they asked Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO, to foot the bill. Be respectful, keep it civil and stay on topic. We delete comments that violate our policy, which we encourage you to read. Discussion threads can be closed at any time at our discretion. Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected]. A private American astronaut taxi has now broken that stranglehold, as NASA long intended. In 2010, the space agency began funding the development of a variety of homegrown commercial spacecraft. SpaceX and Boeing emerged as the winners of this competition in 2014, each scoring multibillion-dollar contracts to finish work on their spaceflight systems and fly at least six operational crewed missions to and from the ISS for NASA. “The mission’s looking beautiful; it’s very clean,” Benji Reed, director of crew mission management at SpaceX, said during a news conference on July 29. “The data is looking great, but we want to watch all of this data and learn from it as we come back.” The SpaceX recovery ship GO Navigator met Endeavour and hoisted the capsule aboard shortly after splashdown. After a series of checkouts, recovery teams opened Endeavour’s hatch at 3:59 p.m. EDT (1959 GMT) and extracted the two astronauts about 10 minutes later. Medical personnel can now begin assessing Behknen and Hurley, making sure the two spaceflyers are in good shape after their journey home from orbit. “It’s hard to put into words just what it was like to be a part of this expedition — Expedition 63,” Hurley said during a farewell ceremony aboard the space station on Saturday (Aug. 1), the day Endeavour undocked and began its journey home. “It’ll be kind of a memory that will last a lifetime for me.” “That’s really an equally challenging problem, from a laws-of-physics standpoint,” said Reisman, who worked for SpaceX from 2011 to 2018, serving as director of crew operations during the latter part of that run. He remains a consultant for Elon Musk’s company but stressed that his views are his own; he does not speak for SpaceX. Demo-2, an end-to-end demonstration of SpaceX’s system, is the last big box that the company needs to check before starting those contracted flights. And there’s still some work to do in this regard, even though Endeavour has returned safely to Earth. Bibliography Amanda Kooser 1970, SpaceX Crew Dragon splashdown: See NASA astronauts return to …, Viewed 6 August 2020, <https://www.cnet.com/news/spacex-crew-dragon-splashdown-see-nasa-astronauts-return-to-earth/>. Nasa SpaceX crew return: Dragon capsule splashes down 1970, Viewed 6 August 2020, <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53621102>. SpaceX Crew Dragon makes historic 1st splashdown to return … 1970, Viewed 6 August 2020, <https://www.space.com/spacex-crew-dragon-demo-2-splashdown.html>. Watch SpaceX’s Crew Dragon splash down in the Atlantic Ocean … 1970, Viewed 6 August 2020, <https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/02/watch-spacexs-crew-dragon-splash-down-in-the-atlantic-ocean-live-as-astronauts-return-to-earth/>. Source: https://www.jupiterfuture.com/blogs/space-1/space-x-splash-down-with-dragon-crew via Jupiter Future https://jupiterfuturespaceshop.wordpress.com/2020/08/05/space-x-splash-down-with-dragon-crew/ The current state of the global economy has led to a shortage of available physical Gold and Silver bullion.Hard rock minerals could be mined from an asteroid or a spent comet. Precious metals such as gold, silver, and platinum group metals could be transported back to Earth, while iron group metals and other common ones could be used for construction in space. Being the largest body in the asteroid belt, Ceres could become the main base and transport hub for future asteroid mining infrastructure,[54] allowing mineral resources to be transported to Mars, the Moon, and Earth. Because of its small escape velocity combined with large amounts of water ice, it also could serve as a source of water, fuel, and oxygen for ships going through and beyond the asteroid belt.[54] Transportation from Mars or the Moon to Ceres would be even more energy-efficient than transportation from Earth to the Moon.[55] Hobe explains that the Outer Space Treaty “explicitly and implicitly prohibits only the acquisition of territorial property rights” but extracting space resources is allowable. It is generally understood within the space law authorities that extracting space resources is allowable, even by private companies for profit. However, international space law prohibits property rights over territories and outer space land. Hobe further explains that there is no mention of “the question of the extraction of natural resources which means that such use is allowed under the Outer Space Treaty” (2007: 211). He also points out that there is an unsettled question regarding the division of benefits from outer space resources in accordance with Article, paragraph 1 of the Outer Space Treaty.[82] The Article 11 establishes that lunar resources are “not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”[85] However, exploitation of resources is suggested to be allowed if it is “governed by an international regime” (Article 11.5), but the rules of such regime have not yet been established.[86] S. Neil Hosenball, the NASA General Counsel and chief US negotiator for the Moon Treaty, cautioned in 2018 that negotiation of the rules of the international regime should be delayed until the feasibility of exploitation of lunar resources has been established.[87] The broader impacts of the control subchallenge help solve open problems in industrial production and metabolic engineering. These include, respectively, the sensing of and (optimal) response to complex environments such as those found in large bioreactors, and providing a means of flux regulation to facilitate unnatural chemical production. Similar to the versatile abiotic applications of control engineering, it is anticipated that the accomplishment of generic biological control that is independent of host system and that can compensate for certain off-pathway effects, recoverable mutations and environmental fluctuations will have many uses beyond space-related applications. Additionally, solutions to the artificial life subchallenge may constitute future Earth-based medical technologies, for instance, hybrid robot versions of tumour-killing bacteria . Synthetic biological control systems for use in space. (a) A traditional feedback control system consists of a controller, an actuator, a sensor and a system to be controlled, all arranged within a feedback loop. (b) ‘Biology-in-the-loop’ control refers to contemporary electromechanical (e.g. microfluidic or optical) techniques of externally controlling a biological system. (c) Challenge 5 moves towards a methodology that completely integrates biological controllers (perhaps based on gene regulatory networks), actuators (perhaps one or more proteins) and sensors (perhaps levels of chemicals of interest) with the biological system to be controlled (the control subchallenge). (d) Challenge 5 also includes the case where biological controllers and the systems to be controlled constitute separate biological subsystems that individually interact with abiotic sensors and actuators, all of which are part of a larger system, e.g. a hybrid robot (the artificial life subchallenge). Accordingly, there is a need to identify the potential near-term and longer-term goals that space synthetic biology can progress towards. There is also a need to outline the anticipated techniques that can achieve these objectives, and a need to document the impact that attaining these milestones can have on the space community and, more broadly, humankind. The associated challenges and opportunities deal with the biological extraction and utilization of limited space resources, the manufacture and construction of products useful in space, the support of human life, the treatment of human health, the development of biological devices that can emulate and interact with non-biological components and, ultimately, the large-scale transformation of worlds from harsh environments into more hospitable ones. These challenges and opportunities are illustrated in figure 1, summarized in box 1, and elucidated in the following sections. Development of an infrastructure for altering asteroid orbits could offer a large return on investment.[69] Private companies like Planetoid Mines has developed ISRU equipment to mine and process minerals in space, and piggybacked a process to extract water and helium-3. Producing Curiosity class rovers, launching a satellite to LEO producing ZBLAN optical fiber, and developing space “tugs”, they are building what NASA calls the “workhorse of the solar system” propulsion and are utilizing the mission parameters from NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission by using a gravitational assist maneuver to redirect an asteroid to cislunar orbit mining. ISRU raw materials will be fabricated on-site for the manufacturing of building materials, landing pads, spaceports and spacecraft, and a moon base. The framers of Outer Space Treaty initially focused on solidifying broad terms first, with the intent to create more specific legal provisions later (Griffin, 1981: 733–734). This is why the members of the COPUOS later expanded the Outer Space Treaty norms by articulating more specific understandings which are found in the “three supplemental agreements” – the Rescue and Return Agreement of 1968, the Liability Convention of 1973, and the Registration Convention of 1976 . It states when natural resources exploitation is “about to become feasible”, the state parties to that treaty will agree on an appropriate international regime. But the Moon Agreement has only 18 state parties, and was never agreed to by any major space power such as Russia, China or the US. Space weather forecasting NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) is the official source for space weather forecasts for our nation. They forecast solar storms, much like our National Weather Service offices forecast weather here on Earth. SWPC forecasters use ground-based instruments and satellites to monitor the active regions of the Sun for any changes and issue watches, warnings, and alerts for hazardous space weather events. Just like there are categories used to classify hurricanes, there are also Space Weather Scales for communicating the severity of solar storms. To predict these storms, forecasters watch the Sun for solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Solar flares are massive explosions on the Sun’s surface. They often arise near sunspots and release a wide spectrum of photons such as X-Rays, visible light, and ultra-violet light, as well as highly energized protons outward into space. The biggest solar storms arise from coronal mass ejections (CME). A CME is an enormous bubble of plasma expelled by the Sun; it contains billions of tons of fast-moving solar particles as well as the magnetic field that binds them. The velocity of a CME can even exceed 5 million miles per hour! In 2006, the Keck Observatory announced that the binary Jupiter trojan 617 Patroclus,[16] and possibly large numbers of other Jupiter trojans, are likely extinct comets and consist largely of water ice. Similarly, Jupiter-family comets, and possibly near-Earth asteroids that are extinct comets, might also provide water. The process of in-situ resource utilization—using materials native to space for propellant, thermal management, tankage, radiation shielding, and other high-mass components of space infrastructure—could lead to radical reductions in its cost.[17] Although whether these cost reductions could be achieved, and if achieved would offset the enormous infrastructure investment required, is unknown. The US executive order acknowledges space resource mining activities are subject to international law. But from the US perspective, the relevant law is centred around the Outer Space Treaty, with the Moon Agreement playing no part. These are all “guesstimate” figures. But they serve to demonstrate just how plentiful are the resources of the Solar System, in terms of minerals, metals and energy, once we decide to go out and get them. Bibliography Asteroid mining 1970, Viewed 5 August 2020, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining>. Grand challenges in space synthetic biology 1970, Viewed 5 August 2020, <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4707852/>. Sci/Tech | Gold rush in space? 1970, Viewed 5 August 2020, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/401227.stm>. Space weather | National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 1970, Viewed 5 August 2020, <https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/weather-atmosphere/space-weather>. Steven Freeland 1970, Giant leap for corporations? The Trump administration wants to mine …, Viewed 5 August 2020, <https://theconversation.com/giant-leap-for-corporations-the-trump-administration-wants-to-mine-resources-in-space-but-is-it-legal-136395 via Jupiter Future https://jupiterfuturespaceshop.wordpress.com/2020/08/05/gold-and-silver-shortage-lets-go-to-space-to-get-some-precious-metals/
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