Less Than One Month to Go Before Rock Samples from Bennu Return to Earth...

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center / Conceptual Image Lab

NASA Completes Last OSIRIS-REx Test Before Asteroid Sample Delivery (Press Release - August 30)

A team led by NASA in Utah’s West Desert is in the final stages of preparing for the arrival of the first U.S. asteroid sample – slated to land on Earth in September.

A mockup of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security–Regolith Explorer) sample capsule was dropped Wednesday from an aircraft and landed at the drop zone at the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range in the desert outside Salt Lake City. This was part of the mission’s final major test prior to arrival of the actual capsule on September 24 with its sample of asteroid Bennu, collected in space almost three years ago.

“We are now mere weeks away from receiving a piece of solar system history on Earth, and this successful drop test ensures we’re ready,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “Pristine material from asteroid Bennu will help shed light on the formation of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago, and perhaps even on how life on Earth began.”

This drop test follows a series of earlier rehearsals – capsule recovery, spacecraft engineering operations and sample curation procedures – conducted earlier this spring and summer.

Now, with less than four weeks until the spacecraft’s arrival, the OSIRIS-REx team is nearing the end of rehearsals and ready for the actual delivery.

"I am immensely proud of the efforts our team has poured into this endeavor,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “Just as our meticulous planning and rehearsal prepared us to collect a sample from Bennu, we have honed our skills for sample recovery.”

The capsule is carrying an estimated 8.8 ounces of rocky material collected from the surface of asteroid Bennu in 2020. Researchers will study the sample in the coming years to learn about how our planet and solar system formed, as well as the origin of organics that may have led to life on Earth.

The capsule will enter Earth’s atmosphere at 10:42 a.m. EDT (8:42 a.m. MDT), traveling about 27,650 mph. NASA’s live coverage of the capsule landing starts at 10 a.m. EDT (8 a.m. MDT), and will air on NASA Television, the NASA app and the agency’s website.

“We are now in the final leg of this seven-year journey, and it feels very much like the last few miles of a marathon, with a confluence of emotions like pride and joy coexisting with a determined focus to complete the race well,” said Rich Burns, project manager for OSIRIS-REx at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Once located and packaged for travel, the capsule will be flown to a temporary clean room on the military range, where it will undergo initial processing and disassembly in preparation for its journey by aircraft to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the sample will be documented, cared for and distributed for analysis to scientists worldwide.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides overall mission management, systems engineering, and the safety and mission assurance for OSIRIS-REx. Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, Tucson, is the principal investigator.

The university leads the science team and the mission's science observation planning and data processing.

Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built the spacecraft and provides flight operations. Goddard and KinetX Aerospace are responsible for navigating the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.

Curation for OSIRIS-REx, including processing the sample when it arrives on Earth, will take place at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. International partnerships on this mission include the OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter instrument from CSA (the Canadian Space Agency) and asteroid sample science collaboration with JAXA’s (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Hayabusa2 mission.

OSIRIS-REx is the third mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

Source: NASA.Gov

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NASA / Keegan Barber

Photos of the Day: It's Now One Week into the Chandrayaan-3 Mission...

Just thought I'd share these cool images released by ISRO (the Indian Space Research Organisation) as its Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft have been on the Moon for seven days now!

The photo above shows the Vikram Lander that was taken by the Pragyan Rover earlier today...while the pictures below show Pragyan as it rolled down the ramp of Vikram on August 23, and images of the lunar surface taken by the rover at the Moon's South Polar Region a few days ago.

Chandrayaan-3 is now halfway into its 14-day mission—as the end of the lunar day (which last 2 Earth weeks) will cause the spacecraft to lose solar power once lunar night (which is also 14 Earth days-long) arrives.

However, there is a chance that Chandrayaan-3 could possibly be revived once lunar day arrives once more. We'll see!


ISRO


ISRO

Chandrayaan-3 Mission:

In-situ scientific experiments continue .....

Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) instrument onboard the Rover unambiguously confirms the presence of Sulphur (S) in the lunar surface near the south pole, through first-ever in-situ measurements.… pic.twitter.com/vDQmByWcSL

— ISRO (@isro) August 29, 2023

Why I'm a Big Fan of THE BIG BANG THEORY...

I can relate to the four main dudes on the hit CBS sitcom:

- Leonard: He's extremely infatuated with Penny and feels insecure whenever she talks to some random guy...

- Howard: Because he tries too hard with women (before he met Bernadette)...

- Raj: He's such a hopeless romantic that he tends to unwittingly come across as effeminate whenever he expresses feelings for a lady he cares about—and is unable to speak to certain (mostly gorgeous) women...

And

- Sheldon: He's extremely arrogant and narcissistic, and views sexual desire as an affliction that needs to be suppressed in the pursuit of new knowledge about the universe...before he met Amy.

And of course, all of them are huge comic book geeks and Star Wars fans. Happy Monday!

Flying at Light Speed for 168 Months Now...

Fourteen Light-Years... That’s how far the Hello From Earth message has traveled since being transmitted from a giant NASA antenna in Australia to the exoplanet Gliese 581d in the summer of 2009.

As of 7 PM California time tonight (12 PM Sydney time on Monday, August 28), the radio signal containing 25,878 goodwill text messages—including one by me—will have ventured across approximately 82 trillion miles (132 trillion kilometers) of deep space...which, as stated at the very start of this Blog entry, equals a distance of fourteen light-years.

The signal, despite traveling 186,000 miles per second (or 671 million miles per hour, or um, 1 billion kilometers per hour), will still take about 6 years to reach the Gliese 581 star system. Carry on!

Photo of the Day: The Criminal-in-Chief's Mug Shot...

It's sad that this guy—with 4 indictments and 91 criminal charges (and rising?) to his name—will most likely be the 2024 Republican presidential nominee...

The MAGA-infested GOP either needs to be disbanded or receive a major overhaul. But LOL at this X post Stormy Daniels made about Donald Trump reporting that he was 215 pounds in yesterday's booking documents at Fulton County, Georgia!

Mmmkay! And I'm 110lbs and a virgin 😂! I'm not a scale or a doctor but I have spent some time beneath 215lb men and Tiny was not one of them.

— Stormy Daniels (@StormyDaniels) August 25, 2023

The Mamba Will Be Immortalized Outside of The Crypt Early Next Year...

NBA.com

Lakers to Unveil Kobe Bryant Statue on 2.8.24 (Press Release)

On 2.8.24, fans can forever pay tribute to beloved Lakers Legend and five-time champion Kobe Bryant. The Los Angeles Lakers and Vanessa Bryant announced today that they will unveil Kobe Bryant's bronze statue at Star Plaza outside of Crypto.com Arena on February 8, 2024, prior to the Lakers' home game that evening.

"As you know, Kobe played his entire 20-year NBA career as a Los Angeles Laker," said Vanessa Bryant in a video to fans posted at 8:24 this morning. "Since arriving in this city and joining the Lakers organization, he felt at home here, playing in the City of Angels. On behalf of the Lakers, my daughters and me, I am so honored that, right in the center of Los Angeles, in front of the place known as the house that Kobe built, we are going to unveil his statue so that his legacy can be celebrated forever."

The February 8 ceremony will be outside the arena and details will be released in the coming months. Tickets to attend this special Lakers game on February 8, as well as the entire 2023-24 season, are available starting on August 25 at 12pm PT.

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Kobe’s legacy immortalized.

2•8•24 pic.twitter.com/WHQBXZJ2gD

— Los Angeles Lakers (@Lakers) August 24, 2023

The Lunar South Polar Region Has Received Its First Robotic Visitor...

India’s Chandrayaan-3 Successfully Lands on the Moon (News Release)

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has successfully landed its Chandrayaan-3 Lander Module on the surface of the Moon.

What happened?

Chandrayaan-3 launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota Range (SDSC SHAR), India, on 14 July 2023 on a mission to demonstrate new technologies and to achieve India’s first soft landing on another celestial body.

The spacecraft arrived in lunar orbit on 5 August. On 17 August, the lander module separated from the propulsion module and soon after began its descent to the surface.

On 23 August, after a nail-biting wait, ISRO confirmed that Chandrayaan-3’s lander had successfully touched down in the Moon’s southern polar region as planned.

“Congratulations ISRO on this historic landing. ESA is proud to support the Chandrayaan-3 mission. Our ground stations are a core element of ESA’s support to its international partners, and I am pleased that with this activity, we are further strengthening ESA’s relationship with ISRO and with India. I look forward to supporting further pioneering ISRO missions, such as Aditya-L1, in the future,” says Rolf Densing, Director of Operations at ESA’s ESOC mission operations centre in Darmstadt, Germany.

How was ESA involved?

ESA is providing deep space communications support to the Chandrayaan-3 mission.

Communication is an essential part of every space mission. Ground stations on Earth keep operators connected to spacecraft as they venture into the unknown.

Without ground station support, it’s impossible to get any data from a spacecraft, to know how it’s doing, to know if it is safe or even to know where it is.

For the Chandrayaan-3 mission, ESA is coordinating routine support from its Kourou station in French Guiana and from Goonhilly Earth Station Ltd in the UK. These stations compliment support from NASA’s Deep Space Network and ISRO’s own stations.

ESA’s 35-metre antenna in New Norcia, Australia, provided additional tracking support during the lunar landing, serving as a back-up for ISRO’s own ground station.

New Norcia received the stream of vital signs from the Chandrayaan-3 lander – information about its health, location and trajectory – in parallel with the ISRO station. This type of back-up support is common during key moments of a space mission such as a landing.

It was this stream of telemetry that was ultimately used to confirm the success of this landing.

ESA’s deep space support to international partners

Many national space agencies operate deep space tracking stations that enable them to locate, track, command and receive telemetry and scientific data from their distant spacecraft.

But sometimes, particularly for deep space missions, operators need to track or command a spacecraft when it is outside the field of view of their own antennas, or to have a second ‘pair of eyes’ on their spacecraft during crucial moments.

Thanks to its global ‘Estrack’ network of ground stations, ESA can help its partners track, command and receive data from spacecraft almost anywhere in the Solar System via its ESOC mission operations centre in Darmstadt, Germany.

The Estrack network consists of ESA’s own ground stations, located across the globe, and ESA-coordinated support from third-party stations such as Goonhilly Earth Station Ltd.

What happens next?

The lander will soon deploy its rover. During its mission on the surface, which will last for one lunar day (14 days on Earth), the rover will carry out a number of scientific experiments.

ESA stations will continue to relay telemetry and scientific data gathered by the mission’s rover and lander module until the end of the surface operations.

Source: European Space Agency

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ISRO

🚨 WE HAVE TOUCHDOWN!!! 🏁

40 days, 3 hrs & 29 mins after launch, CHANDRAYAAN-3 has successfully touched down on the Lunar surface!! 🌖

MASSIVE congrats to @isro & the global spaceflight community!

The south polar region of the Moon is no longer empty! 🛰️#Chandrayaan3 #ISRO pic.twitter.com/hHL58zJHhB

— ISRO Spaceflight (@ISROSpaceflight) August 23, 2023

Hubble's Successor Takes a Detailed Look at the Most Distant Star Currently Known in the Universe...

Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, D. Coe (STScI/AURA for ESA; Johns Hopkins University), B. Welch (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; University of Maryland, College Park). Image processing: Z. Levay.

Webb Reveals Colors of Earendel, Most Distant Star Ever Detected (News Release - August 8)

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has followed up on observations by the Hubble Space Telescope of the farthest star ever detected in the very distant universe, within the first billion years after the Big Bang. Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument reveals the star to be a massive B-type star more than twice as hot as our Sun, and about a million times more luminous.

The star, which the research team has dubbed Earendel, is located in the Sunrise Arc galaxy and is detectable only due to the combined power of human technology and nature via an effect called gravitational lensing. Both Hubble and Webb were able to detect Earendel due to its lucky alignment behind a wrinkle in space-time created by the massive galaxy cluster WHL0137-08.

The galaxy cluster, located between us and Earendel, is so massive that it warps the fabric of space itself, which produces a magnifying effect, allowing astronomers to look through the cluster like a magnifying glass.

While other features in the galaxy appear multiple times due to the gravitational lensing, Earendel only appears as a single point of light even in Webb’s high-resolution infrared imaging. Based on this, astronomers determine that the object is magnified by a factor of at least 4,000, and thus is extremely small – the most distant star ever detected, observed 1 billion years after the Big Bang.

The previous record-holder for the most distant star was detected by Hubble and observed around 4 billion years after the Big Bang. Another research team using Webb recently identified a gravitationally-lensed star that they nicknamed Quyllur, a red giant star observed 3 billion years after the Big Bang.

Stars as massive as Earendel often have companions. Astronomers did not expect Webb to reveal any companions of Earendel since they would be so close together and indistinguishable in the sky.

However, based solely on the colors of Earendel, astronomers think they see hints of a cooler, redder companion star. This light has been stretched by the expansion of the universe to wavelengths longer than Hubble’s instruments can detect, and so was only detectable with Webb.

Webb’s NIRCam also shows other notable details in the Sunrise Arc, which is the most highly-magnified galaxy yet detected in the universe’s first billion years. Features include both young star-forming regions and older established star clusters as small as 10 light-years across.

On either side of the wrinkle of maximum magnification, which runs right through Earendel, these features are mirrored by the distortion of the gravitational lens. The region-forming stars appear elongated, and is estimated to be less than 5 million years old.

Smaller dots on either side of Earendel are two images of one older, more established star cluster, estimated to be at least 10 million years old. Astronomers determined that this star cluster is gravitationally-bound and likely to persist until the present day.

This shows us how the globular clusters in our own Milky Way might have looked when they formed 13 billion years ago.

Astronomers are currently analyzing data from Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument observations of the Sunrise Arc galaxy and Earendel, which will provide precise composition and distance measurements for the galaxy.

Since Hubble’s discovery of Earendel, Webb has detected other very distant stars using this technique, though none quite as far as Earendel. The discoveries have opened a new realm of the universe to stellar physics, and new subject matter to scientists studying the early universe, where galaxies were once the smallest detectable cosmic objects.

The research team has cautious hope that this could be a step towards the eventual detection of one of the very first generation of stars, composed only of the raw ingredients of the universe created in the Big Bang – hydrogen and helium.

Source: NASA.Gov

America's Next Jupiter-bound Orbiter Has Received Its Communications Dish...

NASA / JPL - Caltech

NASA’s Europa Probe Gets a Hotline to Earth (News Release)

The addition of a high-gain antenna will enable the agency’s Europa Clipper spacecraft – set to launch in October 2024 – to communicate with mission controllers hundreds of millions of miles away.

NASA’s Europa Clipper is designed to seek out conditions suitable for life on an ice-covered moon of Jupiter. On August 14, the spacecraft received a piece of hardware central to that quest: the massive dish-shaped high-gain antenna.

Stretching 10 feet (3 meters) across the spacecraft’s body, the high-gain antenna is the largest and most prominent of a suite of antennas on Europa Clipper. The spacecraft will need it as it investigates the ice-cloaked moon that it’s named after, Europa, some 444 million miles (715 million kilometers) from Earth.

A major mission goal is to learn more about the moon’s subsurface ocean, which might harbor a habitable environment.

Once the spacecraft reaches Jupiter, the antenna’s radio beam will be narrowly directed toward Earth. Creating that narrow, concentrated beam is what high-gain antennas are all about.

The name refers to the antenna’s ability to focus power, allowing the spacecraft to transmit high-powered signals back to NASA’s Deep Space Network on Earth. That will mean a torrent of science data at a high rate of transmission.

The precision-engineered dish was attached to the spacecraft in carefully choreographed stages over the course of several hours inside a Spacecraft Assembly Facility bay at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “The antenna has successfully completed all of its stand-alone testing,” said Matthew Bray a few days before the antenna was installed. “As the spacecraft completes its final testing, radio signals will be looped back through the antenna via a special cap, verifying that the telecom signal paths are functional.”

Based at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, Bray is the designer and lead engineer for the high-gain antenna, which he began working on in 2014. It’s been quite a journey for Bray, and for the antenna.

Just over the past year, he’s seen the antenna crisscross the country in the lead-up to the installation. Its ability to beam data precisely was tested twice in 2022 at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

Between those two visits, the antenna made a stop at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for vibration and thermal vacuum testing to see if it could handle the shaking of launch and the extreme temperatures of outer space.

Then it was on to JPL in October 2022 for installation on the spacecraft in preparation for shipment next year to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The long journey to Jupiter begins with launch from Kennedy in October 2024.

Europa in Their Sights

“The high-gain antenna is a critical piece in the buildup of Europa Clipper,” said Jordan Evans, the Clipper project manager at JPL. “It represents a very visible piece of hardware that provides the capability that the spacecraft needs to send the science data back from Europa. Not only does it look like a spacecraft now that it has the big antenna, but it’s ready for its upcoming critical tests as we progress towards launch.”

The spacecraft will train nine science instruments on Europa, all producing large amounts of rich data: high-resolution color and stereo images to study its geology and surface; thermal images in infrared light to find warmer areas where water could be near the surface; reflected infrared light to map ices, salts and organics; and ultraviolet light readings to help determine the makeup of atmospheric gases and surface materials.

Clipper will bounce ice-penetrating radar beams off the subsurface ocean to determine its depth, as well as the thickness of the ice crust above it. A magnetometer will measure the moon’s magnetic field to confirm the deep ocean’s existence and thickness of the ice.

The high-gain antenna will stream most of that data back to Earth over the course of 33 to 52 minutes. The strength of the signal and amount of data it can send at one time will be far greater than that of NASA’s Galileo probe, which ended its eight-year Jupiter mission in 2003.

On site at JPL for the antenna installation was Simmie Berman, the radio frequency module manager at APL. Like Bray, she began her work on the antenna in 2014.

The radio frequency module includes the spacecraft’s entire telecommunications subsystem and a total of seven antennas, the high-gain among them. Berman's job during installation was to ensure the antenna was properly mounted to the spacecraft and that the components are correctly oriented and well integrated.

While the engineers at both APL and JPL have practiced the installation many times, virtually and with real-world mock-ups, August 14 was the first time the high-gain antenna was attached to the spacecraft.

“I’ve never worked on anything of this magnitude, in terms of physical size and also in terms of just general interest,” she said. “Little kids know where Jupiter is. They know what Europa looks like. It’s supercool to get to work on something that has the potential for such a big impact, in terms of knowledge, for humanity.”

After completing this major milestone, Europa Clipper still has a few more steps and a few more tests ahead as it’s prepared for its trip to the outer solar system.

Source: NASA.Gov

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Richard T. Par

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Nova-C Is Scheduled to Head to the Moon Before the Thanksgiving Holiday!

Intuitive Machines

Intuitive Machines' Nova-C spacecraft is targeted for launch to the Moon during a 6-day window...from November 15 to 20! The robotic lander is set to touch down at the lunar South Pole Region—in support of NASA's Artemis program.

Nova-C should be ready for shipment to Cape Canaveral in Florida by September 15. It will be attached to the DOGE-1 cubesat and mated to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for flight from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A.

Click here for more details!


Intuitive Machines

NASA's Artemis Moon Rover Is Cleared to Proceed Through Full Construction...

NASA

Let’s Get Building! (News Release)

I’m proud to share that the VIPER team successfully passed the agency’s gate review, permitting the team to fully proceed into building our flight rover! This mandatory review requires flight projects to demonstrate their readiness for integration activites, including having procedures, facilities and hardware on hand to start the assembly process.

This is an especially challenging and important review, given the risk potential to the flight hardware, and passing this review officially moves the VIPER mission from design and verification, into assembly and integration, leading up to launch in late 2024.

The VIPER team prepared for this moment for many months now, getting our new clean room up and running, and performance calibration tests in our key facilities, like thermovaccuum chambers, vibration stands and acoustic facilities – some of which have long histories supporting other NASA missions.

We continue to get every bit of prep-work completed, while we wait for delivery of some critical pieces of hardware. As a result, the VIPER team continues to be agile and responsive to changing conditions, daily.

Go VIPER!

- Dan Andrews, VIPER Project Manager

Source: NASA.Gov

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NASA Ames / Daniel Rutter

JPL Continues Developmental Testing for the Mars Sample Return Mission...

NASA / JPL - Caltech

Watch NASA Engineers Put a Mars Lander’s Legs to the Test (News Release)

Sturdy legs are needed to absorb the impact of the heaviest spacecraft to ever touch down on the Red Planet.

NASA’s Perseverance rover continues to rack up tubes filled with rock core samples for the planned Mars Sample Return campaign. The joint effort by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) seeks to bring scientifically-selected samples back from Mars to be studied on Earth with lab equipment far more complex than could be brought to the Red Planet.

Engineers are busy designing the Sample Retrieval Lander that would help bring those samples to Earth. As part of that effort, they’ve been testing prototypes of the lander’s legs and footpads at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

NASA is taking what it has learned over decades of successful Mars landings and applying those lessons to the Sample Retrieval Lander concept, which would be the largest spacecraft yet to land on Mars – as much as 5,016 pounds (2,275 kilograms). Along with relying on next-generation parachutes and 12 rocket engines to slow the spacecraft’s descent to Mars, the lander would need its legs to help absorb the impact of touchdown.

The spacecraft would carry a rocket that would launch Perseverance’s carefully-packaged samples to an awaiting orbiter. An 8-foot (2.5-meter) robotic arm, to be provided by ESA, would load those sample tubes into the rocket.

The lander could carry up to two mini-helicopters to serve as backups to retrieve tubes deposited in a sample depot. So the lander needs to be hefty.

To understand how energy would be absorbed during landing, JPL engineers conducted drop tests earlier this year that will inform the design and subsequent tests. One series of tests involved dropping a three-eighths scale early-concept lander model onto a hard floor, while the other centered on slamming a full-size footpad into simulated Martian soil.

The team can apply what they observe during testing as they refine the design.

Starting Small

“There’s already a night-and-day difference between this lander and the design we started with,” said Morgan Montalvo, a JPL engineer working on the tests.

The team has to think of every possible landing scenario, including what would happen if the spacecraft touched down at an angle and “stubbed a toe” on a rock. To try and create such a challenge during one series of tests, they dangled a prototype from a pendulum that sent the mini-lander to the ground at an angle.

Cameras on tripods ringed the landing surface, a large black metal plate on the floor. A low guardrail doubled as the rock.

Montalvo called out a 3-2-1 countdown, and the lander swooped down with a bang, slamming into the guardrail. When the team studied the high-speed video later, they were surprised to find a perceptible wobble in one of the leg’s main struts.

Increase the lander’s size, and this wobble would be even more noticeable. In response, stronger flight struts will be designed to handle those forces.

The team has also tested the lander’s “load limiters” – steel rods connecting its chassis to its legs. When the legs move during touchdown, the rods are forced to bend, absorbing some impact.

The limiters were used on past landers like InSight, but they’re bigger on this prototype and will be even bigger on the final design.

“You’d never be able to bend these steel rods with just your hands,” Montalvo said. “It’s pretty insane seeing just how much force goes into them, bending them nearly in half after a drop.”

Heavy-Footed Spacecraft

Testing of the lander’s full-size foot pads has been taking place in a box filled with 10,000 pounds (4,536 kilograms) of powdery, Mars-like soil. About 16 inches (41 centimeters) in diameter, the flat, round footpad attaches to an assembly with nearly a half-ton of iron weight plates.

Patrick DeGrosse, the test bed lead, kept watch during one test as the lander foot plunged into the soil, leaving a deep indentation while tossing a cloud of dust. The impact shook the walls of the building.

Afterward, high-speed cameras showed how energy radiated out from the pad.

“We don’t want the lander’s feet to sink so far that the bottom of the lander hits the surface,” DeGrosse said. “And we want to make sure the lander is very even on the surface. It needs to be sturdy, because the lander is also a platform for the rocket to lift off from.”

After each test, DeGrosse rebuilds the soil bed 4 inches at a time, tamping down the material to make sure it’s compressed the way scientists expect it to be on Mars. The conditions also need to be consistent for the team to understand how the footpad interacts with the soil.

So DeGrosse repeats this time-consuming process four times a month. “You have to rebuild Mars multiple times to do this test,” he said.

Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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The Psyche Spacecraft Will Test a Groundbreaking Transceiver Early On in Its Mission...

NASA / JPL - Caltech

NASA’s Deep Space Communications to Get a Laser Boost (News Release - August 7)

The agency is testing technologies in space and on the ground that could increase bandwidth to transmit more complex science data and even stream video from Mars.

Set to launch this fall, NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) project will test how lasers could speed up data transmission far beyond the capacity of current radio frequency systems used in space. What’s known as a technology demonstration, DSOC may pave the way for broadband communications that will help support humanity’s next giant leap: when NASA sends astronauts to Mars.

The DSOC near-infrared laser transceiver (a device that can send and receive data) will “piggyback” on NASA’s Psyche mission when it launches to a metal-rich asteroid of the same name in October. During the first two years of the journey, the transceiver will communicate with two ground stations in Southern California, testing highly-sensitive detectors, powerful laser transmitters and novel methods to decode signals the transceiver sends from deep space.

NASA is focused on laser, or optical, communication because of its potential to surpass the bandwidth of radio waves, which the space agency has relied on for more than half a century. Both radio and near-infrared laser communications use electromagnetic waves to transmit data, but near-infrared light packs the data into significantly tighter waves, enabling ground stations to receive more data at once.

“DSOC was designed to demonstrate 10 to 100 times the data-return capacity of state-of-the-art radio systems used in space today,” said Abi Biswas, DSOC’s project technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “High-bandwidth laser communications for near-Earth orbit and for Moon-orbiting satellites have been proven, but deep space presents new challenges.”

There are more missions than ever headed for deep space, and they promise to produce exponentially more data than past missions in the form of complex science measurements, high-definition images and video. So experiments like DSOC will play a crucial role in helping NASA advance technologies that can be used routinely by spacecraft and ground systems in the future.

“DSOC represents the next phase of NASA’s plans for developing revolutionary improved communications technologies that have the capability to increase data transmissions from space – which is critical for the agency’s future ambitions,” said Trudy Kortes, director of the Technology Demonstrations Missions (TDM) program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We are thrilled to have the opportunity to test this technology during Psyche’s flight.”

Groundbreaking Technologies

The transceiver riding on Psyche features several new technologies, including a never-before-flown photon-counting camera attached to an 8.6-inch (22-centimeter) aperture telescope that protrudes from the side of the spacecraft. The transceiver will autonomously scan for, and “lock” onto, the high-power near-infrared laser uplink transmitted by the Optical Communication Telescope Laboratory at JPL’s Table Mountain Facility near Wrightwood, California.

The laser uplink will also demonstrate sending commands to the transceiver.

“The powerful uplink laser is a critical part of this tech demo for higher rates to spacecraft, and upgrades to our ground systems will enable optical communications for future deep space missions,” said Jason Mitchell, program executive for NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program at NASA Headquarters.

Once locked onto the uplink laser, the transceiver will locate the 200-inch (5.1-meter) Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, about 100 miles (130 kilometers) south of Table Mountain. The transceiver will then use its near-infrared laser to transmit high-rate data down to Palomar.

Spacecraft vibrations that might otherwise nudge the laser off target will be dampened by state-of-the-art struts attaching the transceiver to Psyche.

To receive the high-rate downlink laser from the DSOC transceiver, the Hale Telescope has been fitted with a novel superconducting nanowire single photon detector assembly. The assembly is cryogenically cooled so that a single incident laser photon (a quantum particle of light) can be detected and its arrival time recorded.

Transmitted as a train of pulses, the laser light must travel more than 200 million miles (300 million kilometers) – the farthest the spacecraft will be during this tech demo – before the faint signals can be detected and processed to extract the information.

“Every component of DSOC exhibits new technology, from the high-power uplink lasers to the pointing system on the transceiver’s telescope and down to the exquisitely sensitive detectors that can count the single photons as they arrive,” said JPL’s Bill Klipstein, the DSOC project manager. “The team even needed to develop new signal-processing techniques to squeeze information out of such weak signals transmitted over vast distances.”

The distances involved pose another challenge for the tech demo: The farther Psyche journeys, the longer the photons will take to reach their destination, creating a lag of up to tens of minutes. The positions of Earth and the spacecraft will be constantly changing while the laser photons travel, so this lag will need to be compensated for.

“Pointing the laser and locking on over millions of miles while dealing with the relative motion of Earth and Psyche poses an exciting challenge for our project,” said Biswas.

Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Ginny Takes to the Martian Air for the 53rd and 54th Time Since April 2021...

NASA / JPL - Caltech / ASU / MSSS

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Flies Again After Unscheduled Landing (News Release - August 7)

The helicopter performed a short hop to help the team better understand why its previous flight was interrupted.

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter successfully completed its 54th flight on August 3, the first flight since the helicopter cut its July 22 flight short. The 25-second up-and-down hop provided data that could help the Ingenuity team determine why its 53rd flight ended early.

Flight 53 was planned as a 136-second scouting flight dedicated to collecting imagery of the planet’s surface for the Perseverance Mars rover science team. The complicated flight profile included flying north 666 feet (203 meters) at an altitude of 16 feet (5 meters) and a speed of 5.6 mph (2.5 meters per second), then descending vertically to 8 feet (2.5 meters), where it would hover and obtain imagery of a rocky outcrop.

Ingenuity would then climb straight up to 33 feet (10 meters) to allow its hazard divert system to initiate before descending vertically to touch down.

Instead, the helicopter executed the first half of its autonomous journey, flying north at an altitude of 16 feet (5 meters) for 466 feet (142 meters). Then a flight-contingency program was triggered, and Ingenuity automatically landed.

The total flight time was 74 seconds.

“Since the very first flight we have included a program called ‘LAND_NOW’ that was designed to put the helicopter on the surface as soon as possible if any one of a few dozen off-nominal scenarios was encountered,” said Teddy Tzanetos, team lead emeritus for Ingenuity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “During Flight 53, we encountered one of these, and the helicopter worked as planned and executed an immediate landing.”

The Ingenuity team is confident that the early landing was triggered when image frames from the helicopter’s navigation camera didn’t sync up as expected with data from the rotorcraft’s inertial measurement unit. The unit measures Ingenuity’s acceleration and rotational rates – data that makes it possible to estimate where the helicopter is, how fast it is moving, and how it is oriented in space.

This was not the first occasion on which image frames were dropped by the helicopter’s Navcam during a flight. Back on May 22, 2021, multiple image frames were dropped, resulting in excessive pitching and rolling near the end of Flight 6.

After Flight 6, the team updated the flight software to help mitigate the impact of dropped images, and the fix worked well for the subsequent 46 flights. However, on Flight 53 the quantity of dropped navigation images exceeded what the software patch allows.

“While we hoped to never trigger a LAND_NOW, this flight is a valuable case study that will benefit future aircraft operating on other worlds,” said Tzanetos. “The team is working to better understand what occurred in Flight 53, and with Flight 54’s success we’re confident that our baby is ready to keep soaring ahead on Mars.”

Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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NASA / JPL - Caltech

Even with Its Mission Ended, Phoenix's Successor Continues to Make New Discoveries About the Red Planet...

NASA / JPL - Caltech

NASA InSight Study Finds Mars Is Spinning Faster (News Release)

Data sent by the spacecraft before it retired last December has provided new details about how fast the planet rotates and how much it wobbles.

Scientists have made the most precise measurements ever of Mars’ rotation, for the first time detecting how the planet wobbles due to the “sloshing” of its molten metal core. The findings, detailed in a recent Nature paper, rely on data from NASA’s InSight Mars lander, which operated for four years before running out of power during its extended mission in December 2022.

To track the planet’s spin rate, the study’s authors relied on one of InSight’s instruments: a radio transponder and antennas collectively called the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment, or RISE. They found that the planet’s rotation is accelerating by about 4 milliarcseconds per year² – corresponding to a shortening of the length of the Martian day by a fraction of a millisecond per year.

It’s a subtle acceleration, and scientists aren’t entirely sure of the cause. But they have a few ideas, including ice accumulating on the polar caps or post-glacial rebound, where landmasses rise after being buried by ice.

The shift in a planet’s mass can cause it to accelerate a bit like an ice skater spinning with their arms stretched out, then pulling their arms in.

“It’s really cool to be able to get this latest measurement – and so precisely,” said InSight’s principal investigator, Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “I’ve been involved in efforts to get a geophysical station like InSight onto Mars for a long time, and results like this make all those decades of work worth it.”

How RISE Works

RISE is part of a long tradition of Mars landers using radio waves for science, including the twin Viking landers in the 1970s and the Pathfinder lander in the late ’90s. But none of those missions had the advantage of InSight’s advanced radio technology and upgrades to the antennas within NASA’s Deep Space Network on Earth.

Together, these enhancements provided data about five times more accurate than what was available for the Viking landers.

In the case of InSight, scientists would beam a radio signal to the lander using the Deep Space Network. RISE would then reflect the signal back.

When scientists received the reflected signal, they would look for tiny changes in frequency caused by the Doppler shift (the same effect that causes an ambulance siren to change pitch as it gets closer and farther away). Measuring the shift enabled researchers to determine how fast the planet rotates.

“What we’re looking for are variations that are just a few tens of centimeters over the course of a Martian year,” said the paper’s lead author and RISE’s principal investigator, Sebastien Le Maistre at the Royal Observatory of Belgium. “It takes a very long time and a lot of data to accumulate before we can even see these variations.”

The paper examined data from InSight’s first 900 Martian days – enough time to look for such variations.

Scientists had their work cut out for them to eliminate sources of noise: Water slows radio signals, so moisture in the Earth’s atmosphere can distort the signal coming back from Mars. So can the solar wind, the electrons and protons flung into deep space from the Sun.

“It’s a historic experiment,” said Le Maistre. “We have spent a lot of time and energy preparing for the experiment and anticipating these discoveries. But despite this, we were still surprised along the way – and it’s not over, since RISE still has a lot to reveal about Mars.”

Martian Core Measurements

RISE data was also used by the study authors to measure Mars’ wobble – called its nutation – due to sloshing in its liquid core. The measurement allows scientists to determine the size of the core: Based on RISE data, the core has a radius of roughly 1,140 miles (1,835 kilometers).

The authors then compared that figure with two previous measurements of the core derived from the spacecraft’s seismometer. Specifically, they looked at how seismic waves traveled through the planet’s interior – whether they reflected off the core or passed through it unimpeded.

Taking all three measurements into account, they estimate the core’s radius to be between 1,112 and 1,150 miles (1,790 and 1,850 kilometers). Mars as a whole has a radius of 2,106 miles (3,390 kilometers) – about half the size of Earth’s.

Measuring Mars wobble also provided details about the shape of the core.

“RISE’s data indicate the core’s shape cannot be explained by its rotation alone,” said the paper’s second author, Attilio Rivoldini of the Royal Observatory of Belgium. “That shape requires regions of slightly higher or lower density buried deep within the mantle.”

While scientists will be mining InSight data for years to come, this study marks the final chapter for Banerdt’s role as the mission’s principal investigator. After 46 years with JPL, he retired on August 1.

Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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America's Next Asteroid Explorer Spread Its Wings on the Ground One Last Time Before Launch...

NASA / Isaac Watson

Huge Solar Arrays Permanently Installed on NASA’s Psyche Spacecraft (News Release)

The Psyche mission is speeding towards its October 5 launch date, preparing for the last of its launch-preparation milestones.

Robotically unfurling in a clean room near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Psyche spacecraft’s jumbo solar arrays were tested and permanently installed on the orbiter in preparation for its 2.5 billion-mile (4 billion-kilometer) journey to study a metal-rich asteroid. The launch period opens on October 5.

After passing the deployment test, the twin wings were re-stowed and will remain tucked away on the sides of the orbiter until the spacecraft leaves Earth. Psyche is scheduled to reach its destination – a mysterious asteroid of the same name, in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter – in July 2029.

Then the spacecraft will orbit the asteroid from various altitudes for 26 months to gather images and other data.

Scientists hope that learning about the asteroid, which may be part of a core of a planetesimal (a building block of a planet), will tell us more about planetary cores and Earth’s own formation.

This final installation of the solar arrays took place at Astrotech Space Operations, near Kennedy. The arrays were deployed during testing last year at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

At 800 square feet (75 square meters), the five-panel, cross-shaped solar arrays are the largest ever deployed at JPL.

With the arrays unfurled in flight, the spacecraft will be about the size of a singles tennis court.

Although they will produce more than 20 kilowatts of power when the spacecraft is near Earth, the solar arrays are primarily designed to work in the low light of deep space. The asteroid Psyche is so far from the Sun that even these massive arrays will generate just over 2 kilowatts of power at that distance.

That’s only a little more power than a hair dryer uses but is ample energy to meet Psyche’s electrical needs, including running science instruments, telecommunications, equipment that controls the orbiter’s temperature, and the spacecraft’s superefficient solar electric propulsion engines. The system’s thrusters use electromagnetic fields to accelerate and push out charged atoms, or ions, of the neutral gas xenon.

The expelled ions create the thrust that pushes Psyche through space and emit a blue glow.

Source: NASA.Gov

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NASA / JPL - Caltech / ASU

Developmental Testing for the Next Flagship Mission to the Red Planet Proceeds Despite Budget Uncertainty...

NASA

NASA Mars Ascent Vehicle Continues Progress Toward Mars Sample Return (News Release - July 31)

The first rocket launch from the surface of another planet will be accomplished using two solid rocket motors.

NASA’s Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) recently reached some major milestones in support of the Mars Sample Return program. The Mars Ascent Vehicle would be the first launch of a rocket from the surface of another planet.

The team developing MAV conducted successful tests of the first and second stage solid rocket motors needed for the launch.

Mars Sample Return will bring scientifically-selected samples to Earth for study using the most sophisticated instrumentation around the world. This strategic partnership with ESA (European Space Agency) features the first mission to return samples from another planet.

The samples currently being collected by NASA’s Perseverance Rover during its exploration of an ancient river delta have the potential to reveal the early evolution of Mars, including the potential for ancient life.

Managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, MAV is currently set to launch in June 2028, with the samples set to arrive on Earth in the early 2030s. The Mars Sample Return Program is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

For the MAV to be successful, the team performs extensive testing, analysis and review of MAV’s design and components. The vehicle will travel aboard the Sample Retrieval Lander during launch from Earth, a two-year journey to Mars, and nearly a year of receiving samples collected by Perseverance.

After the Sample Transfer Arm on the lander loads the samples from Perseverance into a sample container in the nose of the rocket, the MAV will launch from Mars into orbit around the planet, releasing the sample container for the Earth Return Orbiter to capture.

The MAV launch will be accomplished using two solid rocket motors – SRM1 and SRM2. SRM1 will propel MAV away from the Red Planet’s surface, while SRM2 will spin MAV’s second stage to place the sample container in the correct Mars orbit, allowing the Earth Return Orbiter to find it.

To test the solid rocket motor designs, the MAV team prepared development motors. This allowed the team to see how the motors will perform and if any adjustments should be made before they are built for the mission.

The SRM2 development motor was tested on March 29, 2023, at the Northrop Grumman facility in Elkton, Maryland. Then, SRM1’s development motor was tested on April 7 at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

SRM1’s test was conducted in a vacuum chamber that was cooled to -20° Celsius (-4° Fahrenheit) and allowed the team to also test a supersonic splitline nozzle, part of SRM1’s thrust vector control system. Most gimballing solid rocket motor nozzles are designed in a way that can’t handle the extreme cold MAV will experience, so the Northrop Grumman team had to come up with something that could: a state-of-the-art trapped ball nozzle featuring a supersonic split line.

After testing and disassembling the SRM1 development motor, analysis showed that the team’s ingenuity proved successful.

“This test demonstrates our nation has the capacity to develop a launch vehicle that can successfully be lightweight enough to get to Mars and robust enough to put a set of samples into orbit to bring back to Earth,” said MAV Propulsion Manager Benjamin Davis at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. “The hardware is telling us that our technology is ready to proceed with development.”

In fact, the supersonic splitline nozzle has achieved the sixth of nine technology readiness levels – known as TRL-6 – developed by NASA. TRL-1 is the starting point at which there is just an idea for a new technology, while TRL-9 means the technology has been developed, tested and successfully used for an in-space mission.

Davis said the supersonic splitline nozzle achieved TRL-6 through vacuum bench testing and full-scale hot fire testing in April. Results are being independently evaluated and will be confirmed in August.

The supersonic splitline nozzle will also undergo qualification testing to make sure that it can handle the intense shaking and vibration of launch, the near vacuum of space, and the extreme heat and cold expected during MAV’s trip.

Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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