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Category: space – Page 380

How much fuel is left in this 20-year-old Mars orbiter?

Designing, building, and launching a spacecraft is hugely expensive. That’s why NASA missions to Mars are designed with the hope that they’ll last as long as possible — like the famous Opportunity rover which was supposed to last for 90 days and managed to keep going for 15 years. The longer a mission can keep running, the more data it can collect, and the more we can learn from it.

That’s true for the orbiters which travel around Mars as well as the rovers which explore its surface, like the Mars Odyssey spacecraft which was launched in 2001 and has been in orbit around Mars for more than 20 years. But the orbiter can’t keep going forever as it will eventually run out of fuel, so figuring out exactly how much fuel is left is important — but it also turned out to be more complicated than the NASA engineers were expecting.

Odyssey started out with nearly 500 pounds of hydrazine fuel, though last year it looked as if the spacecraft was running much lower on fuel than had been predicted.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe makes its 15th close flyby of the sun this St. Patrick’s Day

NASA’s sun-touching Parker Solar Probe spacecraft will celebrate St. Patrick’s Day (March 17) by making another close approach to our star. While people all over Earth enjoy a cold beer, the spacecraft will brave blisteringly hot temperatures as high as 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,400 degrees Celsius) as it makes its 15th close approach to the sun, or perihelion.

According to NASA’s Parker Solar Probe website, (opens in new tab) the exact time of the close approach will be 4:30 p.m. EDT (2030 GMT) when the spacecraft comes to within around 5.3 million miles (8.5 million km) of the sun’s surface, the photosphere.

3D holographic televisions are much closer than a galaxy far, far away

Year 2022 😗😁

For decades we have dreamed of true holographic displays for entertainment, communication, and education. Star Wars had 3D projections rendered in real-time — the definition wasn’t great, but they were communicating across interplanetary distances — and Avatar had holographic maps showcasing the terrain of Pandora. In reality, we mostly have 2D images which show dimension and depth when viewed from different angles. That might be on the verge of changing.

Pierre-Alexandre Blanche from the Wyant College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona recently published a paper in Light: Advanced Manufacturing which acts as a roadmap toward true 3D holographic displays.

“3D movies exist already, and the effects are amazing,” Blanche told SYFY WIRE. “But we’re working toward diffraction-based display that will produce all the human visual cues. That’s what’s missing today in the world of 3D display. They’re always missing one or more visual cues.”

Tracing 13 billion years of history by the light of ancient quasars

Astrophysicists in Australia have shed new light on the state of the universe 13 billion years ago by measuring the density of carbon in the gases surrounding ancient galaxies.

The study, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, adds another piece to the puzzle of the history of the universe.

“We found that the fraction of in warm gas increased rapidly about 13 billion years ago, which may be linked to large-scale heating of gas associated with the phenomenon known as the Epoch of Reionization,” says Dr. Rebecca Davies, ASTRO 3D Postdoctoral Research Associate at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia and lead author of the paper describing the discovery.

NASA Dragonfly Bound for Saturn’s Giant Moon Titan Could Reveal Chemistry Leading to Life

Saturn ’s giant moon, Titan, is due to launch in 2027. When it arrives in the mid-2030s, it will begin a journey of discovery that could bring about a new understanding of the development of life in the universe. This mission, called Dragonfly, will carry an instrument called the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS), designed to help scientists hone in on the chemistry at work on Titan. It may also shed light on the kinds of chemical steps that occurred on Earth that ultimately led to the formation of life, called prebiotic chemistry.

Titan’s abundant complex carbon-rich chemistry, interior ocean, and past presence of liquid water on the surface make it an ideal destination to study prebiotic chemical processes and the potential habitability of an extraterrestrial environment.

DraMS will allow scientists back on Earth to remotely study the chemical makeup of the Titanian surface. “We want to know if the type of chemistry that could be important for early pre-biochemical systems on Earth is taking place on Titan,” explains Dr. Melissa Trainer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.

New Horizons gives new insight about Pluto, finds bladed terrain

Scientists found large swaths of jagged landforms on Pluto’s surface.

In July 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft had its first close encounter with Pluto and its moons. It went on to explore the icy edge of the solar system, generating a wealth of data in the process.

The formation of Arrokoth.

NASA

The New Horizons team has been sifting through data to solve mysteries about Pluto and our solar system’s smaller bodies. The team presented their latest findings at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, on March 14. At the conference, they announced not one but three key findings.

NASA Reveals the Spacesuit Astronauts Will Wear on the Moon

The Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit is designed to enhance mobility and offer extra protection from hazards on the Moon. The prototype is dark gray in color, but NASA’s Johnson Space Center confirmed in a tweet (Opens in a new window) that the final design is probably going to be “all-white.”

Axiom Space, which last year snagged a $228.5 million contract to deliver a “moonwalking system,” will continue innovating the suit’s life support systems, pressure garments, and avionics ahead of NASA’s scheduled 2025 trip to the lunar South Pole.

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