Thursday, September 26, 2013

Curiosity Finds Water On Mars



Water, Water everywhere and not a drop to drink.  NASA announced today that the Curiosity rover discovered water on Mars.

Curiosity landed in Gale Crater on the surface of Mars on Aug. 6, 2012, charged with answering the question: "Could Mars have once harbored life?" To do that, Curiosity is the first rover on Mars to carry equipment for gathering and processing samples of rock and soil. One of those instruments was employed in the current research: the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite, which includes a gas chromatograph, a mass spectrometer and a tunable laser spectrometer. These tools enable SAM to identify a wide range of chemical compounds and determine the ratios of different isotopes of key elements.

"One of the most exciting results from this very first solid sample ingested by Curiosity is the high percentage of water in the soil," said Laurie Leshin, lead author of one paper and dean of the School Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "About 2 percent of the soil on the surface of Mars is made up of water, which is a great resource, and interesting scientifically."

This find is significant in that future explorers to Mars will not have to carry large amounts of water with them. Astronaut pioneers could extract roughly 2 pints of water out of every cubic foot of Martian dirt they dig up. The average person needs to consume 2 liters of water per day to survive or 730 liters per year.  Given that 1 liter of water weighs about 2.2 pounds (On earth at least).  So that works out to about 1,606 lbs of water per person for a one year stay on the red planet.  Given the often cited cost of $10,000 per lb for launch costs, it will take about $16 million per astronaut just to launch one year's worth of drinking water.  And you thought that bottle of perrier was expensive.  If we then extrapolate that cost to a crew of 4 and add in additional water for bathing, cleaning and crops, the cost of water shipment probably approaches $0.5 Billion.

Finding relatively accessible water on Mars is a game changer.  Astronauts can now ship a water separator to Mars and mine all of the water that they need.  Cheers!

Thursday, September 19, 2013

SpaceX Static Fire at Vandenberg Air Force Base



SpaceX founder just posted on Twitter a link to the above YouTube video and the tweet:
Completed rocket static fire with all systems green this time. Launch window opens in 10 days.

Falcon 9 is a two-stage rocket designed and manufactured by SpaceX, the 11-year-old firm started by PayPal co-founder and CEO Elon Musk who has since added Tesla electric car company to his portfolio and more recently Hyperloop high-speed transportation system.

That would put the first launch of the upgraded Falcon 9 on September 29. Not from Cape Canaveral, but from Vandenberg Air Force Base.

The upcoming launch from Vandenberg will for the first time feature a reusability demonstration. SpaceX plans to re-ignite the Falcon 9's first-stage engine in an attempt to make a soft water landing of the booster in the Pacific Ocean.  The team at SpaceX tried to dampen expectations about this soft landing by stating that there would likely be several failures before the bugs are worked out of this new feature.  Eventually though, reusability could drastically reduce the cost of space flight.

Vandenberg Air Force Base is a United States Air Force Base, located approximately 9.2 miles (14.8 km) northwest of Lompoc, California. It is used to place satellites into polar orbit from the West Coast.

Space Launch Complex 4 (SLC-4) was a launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base, used by Atlas and Titan rockets between 1963 and 2005. Space Launch Complex 4E is currently being redeveloped and used by SpaceX as a launch site for the Falcon 9 rocket.




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Wednesday, September 18, 2013

A New Delivery Truck for the International Space Station


Congratulations to the NASA and the team at Orbital for the successful launch of a brand new cargo delivery system.  Orbital developed the Cygnus advanced maneuvering spacecraft to demonstrate cargo delivery services under a NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) Space Act Agreement. In addition to the COTS development and demonstration program, Orbital will utilize Cygnus to perform ISS resupply flights under the Commercial Resupply Service (CRS) contract.

Orbital will conduct eight missions to deliver approximately 20,000 kilograms of cargo to the ISS.
The Cygnus system is a low-risk design incorporating elements drawn from Orbital and its partners’
existing, flight-proven spacecraft technologies. Cygnus consists of a common service module and a
pressurized cargo module. Cygnus will carry crew supplies, spares and scientific experiments to the ISS.
The service module incorporates avionics systems from Orbital’s flight-proven LEOStar™ and
GEOStar™ satellite product lines plus propulsion and power systems from our GEOStar
communications satellites.

The pressurized cargo module is based on the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM), developed by
Thales Alenia Space for NASA.