NASA’s next mission to the Red Planet will be a special one, and not just for the space agency, as they announced today that boarding passes will display names submitted by internet users etched onto microchips and carried aboard the Mars 2020 rover. It’s scheduled to launch as early as July 2020, with the spacecraft expected to touch down on Mars in February 2021. This 1,000-kg rover is designed to search for signs of past microbial life, characterize the planet’s climate as well as geology, collect samples, and pave the way for human exploration. Read more for another video and additional information.
Photo credit: Sebastian Errazuriz
New York-based designer Sebastian Errazuriz has seen numerous Notre-Dame Cathedral proposals and wanted to come up with one a bit more lighthearted as an “act of creative one-upmanship”. What did he come up with? Turning the cathedral into a rocket launch pad. “This is not a serious a proposal for the reconstruction of Notre-Dame. This is an act of creative one-upmanship designed to ridicule every remaining, rapacious architectural firm still circling the carcass of Notre-Dame with an ‘idea’ for a new roof proposal,” said Errazuriz. Read more for additional pictures and information.
Ever wonder what the kitchen and / or cooking is like aboard the ISS? Well, according to retired NASA astronaut Clayton C. Anderson, the International Space Station doesn’t have a traditional “kitchen” as many of on Earth might relate to, but rather an area called the “galley” which serves the purpose of allowing for food preparation and consumption. It basically consists of a table for three, a water system used to hydrate food packages with warm or hot water, and lastly, a food warmer. Read more for another video and additional information.
Opening a jar of honey is nothing new or special, especially here on Earth where a small tilt would mean a big cleanup, but in space, it’s an entirely different story. Canadian Space Agency astronaut David Saint-Jacques decided to conduct a honey experiment on the International Space Station, and as you’re about to see, honey clings from the jar to the lid and tries to curl back on itself in micro-gravity. Read more to watch the video and for additional information.
NASA has just released a new video showing a fly-over of Mount Sharp, where Curiosity rover is currently exploring and the path that it will take over the next few years as it wends its way up the mountain to learn more about the planet’s geology as well as history. This 3D model was made using data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which carries a host of instruments, like the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), and the Context Camera (CTX). Read more to watch the video and for additional information.
NASA has just completed its first hardware test for Bumble, one of three Astrobee robots designed to research automated caretaking aboard the International Space Station. It arrived on April 17th, and will perform automated tasks in the spring, including recharging at its docking station, Kibo. Read more for a video and additional information.
The Trump administration has requested an additional $1.6 billion for NASA’s $21 billion 2020 budget request to kick start plans to return American astronauts to the moon by 2024, four years earlier than previously planned. The space agency is developing plans for the lunar “Gateway” space station that will be assembled in orbit around the moon to serve as a staging base for eventual piloted flights down to the surface using commercially landers and ascent vehicles. “Our charge is to go quickly and to stay, to press our collective efforts forward with a fervor that will see us return to the Moon in a manner that is wholly different than 50 years ago. We turn towards the Moon now not as a conclusion but as preparation, as a check point toward all that lies beyond,” he adds. “Our greatest adventures remain ahead of us. We are going,” said William Shatner in the newly released video. Read more for a selection of fascinating images from around the web.
New York-based AI SpaceFactory has taken home the top prize in NASA’s “Centennial Challenge,” defeating 60 other teams during the course of the competition. Called “MARSHA,” this 15-foot-tall habitat was 3D-printed using an advanced robotic process that uses biodegradable basalt composite derived from Mars’ naturally-occurring sediment. Its vertical design focuses on letting in natural light, while sticking with renewable, plant-based bioplastics, and an ecosystem that thrives under the Red Planet’s sometimes unhospitable conditions. Read more for another video, additional pictures and information.
Photo credit: Daily Mail
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos not only unveiled Blue Origin’s lunar lander last week, but also his plan for space colonization. His idea is based on the concept by physicist Gerard O’Neill, or ring worlds that large enough for entire cities, agricultural areas, attractions, and national parks in outer space. Each one of these self-sustaining habitats could house ‘a million people or more’ and would have the ‘ideal climate’ at all times, ‘like Maui on its best day, all year long,’ said Bezos. Read more for another video, additional pictures and information.
Astronomers have stitched together the most detailed image yet of our evolving universe. The mosaic you see above consists of thousands of individual photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, or more than a quarter of a million galaxies, which is 30 times more than previous “deep field” photos. “The galaxies are scattered across time, from 550 million years ago to 13 billion years ago. Their light is just arriving at Earth now, after crossing space for billions of years,” said Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the leader of the team that created the image, to NBC News MACH. Read more for another image and additional information.