Hasta La Gadget!

The International Space Station has been a font of good news and scientific progress since it received its first human residents at the start of the millennium, but now it may be starting to show its age. The current crew reported seeing damage to the vessel’s truss structure yesterday and NASA has since confirmed there’s been a leak of ammonia from the station’s cooling system. The Agency says the problem isn’t dangerous and that regular ISS-style activities are continuing as normal while earth-bound helpers figure out a way of re-routing power channels before part of the cooling system shuts down. If you want to hear what unflustered voices sound like at an altitude of over 200 miles, check out the audio of Commander Hadfield’s initial report of the leak at the source link below.

Update: Commander Hadfield has also confirmed on Twitter that there’s been a “big change in plans,” and that astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn will perform a spacewalk today to fix the leak.

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Via: SlashGear, Spaceflight Now, CBC News

Source: NASA

Google has launched a new project called Timelapse that allows users to see the history of the Earth all the way back to 1984 and view how our planet has changed over the past 28 years. You can view any part of the world, just like in Google Earth, except that Timelapse automatically creates an animated timelapse GIF based on what you’re looking at.

The project was created in HTML5, and it’s a result of the efforts between Google partnerships with the US Geological Survey (USGS), NASA, and Time Magazine. The satellite images collected over the years are from Landsat, which is the longest-running satellite program ever when it comes to snapping photos of the Earth, with over two million images taken so far.

Of course, not every image was used. Google actually had to sift through those couple millions of images to find the best ones (909 TB of data to be exact). After that, they created a huge image of the Earth (one for each year), which rings in at 1.78 TB per image. With 28 years, that’s a total of 49.84 TB of imagery in this project.

Google was kind enough to offer up some animated GIFs ready to view right away of various hot spots on Earth, including Dubai, Las Vegas, and the Columbia glacier retreat. And yes, Timelapse will allow you to visit your hometown to see what it looked like from the sky back in 1984. It’s certainly surprising to see how much the Earth has changed over the last 28 years.

Google Timelapse shows a changing Earth in animated form is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

A manned mission to Mars could take place within the next two decades, NASA and the private sector have agreed, though the race is on to research and fund such the next ambitious step fo the space race. The feasibility of such a mission – and the political, financial, technological, and social problems that would need to be addressed first – is on the agenda of the Humans to Mars (H2M) summit this week, with NASA staffers, researchers, private space agencies, and more all coming together at George Washington University to explore the practicalities of sending astronauts to Mars by the 2030s.

“A human mission to Mars is a priority” NASA chief Charles Bolden has committed, Discovery reports, though right now the agency can’t afford to do it all itself. Budgetary limitations, Bolden argues, mean the private and government agencies involved in space travel will have to effectively pool resources in order to get the most bang for their buck.

His strategy is to leave escaping Earth’s gravity well to private contractors, while NASA looks to the bigger picture such as getting from outside the atmosphere to Mars. Modules like SpaceX’s Dragon could be used to go from Earth to low-orbit he suggests, the Washington Post reports, while NASA works on taking the eventual crew further.

Even with those delineated roles – which the private sector may not be entirely happy with anyway – the project isn’t going to blast off any time soon. ““I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready. I don’t have the capability to do it” Bolden conceded. “NASA doesn’t have the capability to do that right now. But we’re on a path to be able to do it in the 2030s.”

Firing a pod off to Mars isn’t quite as simple as, say, launching astronauts to the International Space Station. The 250-350m mile journey is not only long but puts humans at risk of high levels of radiation; once the crew reached Mars, if they wanted to land on it they’d need a safe way of decelerating since the planet’s thin atmosphere lacks the friction to brake a capsule.

One possibility is the same sort of sky-crane system as NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab used to deploy Curiosity, the robotic rover that has been drilling samples from the Martian surface. That effectively lowered the rover from beneath a hovering crane; however, the weights involved for a human crew and their kit would make it far more difficult.

In fact, the payload involved could be anywhere around 40x the weight of Curiosity, NASA associate administrator Michael Gazarik told the Post. Curiosity “was a metric ton” he highlights, “the size of a MINI Cooper.” Assuming the team wanted to escape from the Martian surface at some point, they would need to have a return rocket and fuel as well.

Back in 2010, the US government set out a goal to have a human mission “to orbit Mars” though not land on it. NASA’s ambitions go a little further, of course, though there’ll likely be robotic missions before humans even leave Earth in order to test the technology, not to mention private proposals.

H2M is run by a non-profit group, Explore Mars Inc., and co-sponsored by a number of aerospace companies including Lockheed Martin and Boeing. It will close on Wednesday with final speech by Buzz Aldrin, second man to walk on the moon.

Manned Mars missions in 20 years say space experts is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Ideally, Astronauts want to return to Earth in fully functional space capsules, but sometimes things can go awry. That’s why NASA is making a point of testing the Orion spacecraft’s parachute deployment system for failures. The team’s latest parachute test saw a test capsule falling from 25,000 feet with two of three drogue chutes rigged to fail and for one of two main parachutes to skip its inflation stage — despite the handicap, the empty craft landed safely. “Parachute deployment is inherently chaotic and not easily predictable,” Explains the Orion’s landing and recovery system manager, Stu McClung. “The end result can be very unforgiving. That’s why we test. If we have problems with the system, we want to know about them now.” NASA plans to perform additional parachute tests at higher altitudes in July to help balance and reduce risk for Orion’s crew. Check out NASA’s official press release and a brief video of the test after the break.

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An obsession with Earth-like conditions is blinding astronomers to other potential locations where alien life could flourish, one controversial theoretical physicist has argued, suggesting scientists are too inflexible to recognize all the possibilities. While the hunt for extraterrestrial life has so far focused on rocky planets that occupy roughly the same “sweet spot” in terms of where they orbit a star, MIT’s Sara Seager says that ignores the possibility of liquid water and other essentials on exo-planets with orbits ten times further out than Earth is from our sun, National Geographic reports.

Although planets at such orbits would not, traditionally, be considered strong candidates for showing evidence of alien life, that’s avoiding the core physics and chemistry, Seager points out. For instance, greater quantities of hydrogen gas in the atmosphere would have a more significant warming effect despite the cooler heat from a more distant star, she suggests in a paper in Science.

Conversely, planets generally thought of as too close to a star might be equally viable candidates, if they were dry enough to avoid the greenhouse effect from larger quantities of atmospheric moisture. Even a planet without a star altogether could still sustain life if it had its own source of heat, the physicist insists, such as if it had a radioactive core and enough of an insulating atmosphere to prevent undue loss of that warmth.

NASA has been using the Kepler space telescope to identify which planets might support life, using some fundamental guidelines including position in orbit and size. Last month, for instance, the space agency announced it had spotted three such examples, each within the so-called “habitable zone.”

If Seager’s arguments are accommodated within mission guidelines, however, Kepler’s hunt could become far more comprehensive, though it’s unclear whether the space telescope has the right combination of strengths to actually identify such planets. Currently, it is difficult to track the “biosignature gasses” – such as atmospheric oxygen in the case of Earth, or ozone and methane on exo-planets – of distant planets.

That could change within the decade, however, with NASA green-lighting 2017 plans for TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. It is expected to hunt for relatively nearby exo-planets, though it will take the combined efforts of TESS and the James Webb Space Telescope – itself set to launch in 2018 – before atmospheric analysis can take place.

Hunt for alien life is too Earth-fixated argues expert is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.