Hasta La Gadget!

Static cling makes lunar dust stick to the instruments astronauts use to conduct experiments on the moon, according to a new survey of 40-year-old Apollo mission data. Brian O’Brien, a now-independent researcher in Floreat, Western Australia, and a former professor of space science at Rice University in Houston, determined that the angle of the sun in the lunar sky modulates the “clinginess” of lunar dust, Scientific American reports.

Since the moon has little atmosphere, solar radiation hits the lunar surface and gives it a clingy electrostatic charge, the report said. If O’Brien’s theory proves correct, this will be a larger problem for future manned missions than it was back in the Apollo days, when astronauts undertook them in the “morning” (roughly equivalent to a month here on earth, according to the article). The solution? You guessed it: a shed. “A sun-proof shed may provide dust-free working environments on the moon,” O’Brien said.

NASA originally projected that the Mars Exploration Rovers would last 90 days once on the surface of the red planet. Today, both rovers are still doing science five years after their arrival. Spirit is now driving on a plateau called Home Plate in the
Inner Basin valley, according to the Washington Post, while Opportunity has left
Victoria Crater on the other side of the planet, and is motoring toward
a much larger crater called
Endeavour.

Spirit, the less-healthy of the two, has a bunch of minor to moderate issues. They include a broken wheel, some flaky sensors and software, and enough dust on its solar panels to limit its power to 30 percent of normal, the report said. Each night, the two rovers sleep to conserve energy since there is little sunlight–but from April 9th to 11th, Spirit wouldn’t wake up. It’s working again, though scientists working on the program may never find out what happened.

That’s not necessarily a problem. When Spirit’s wheel broke three years ago, the other five wheels dragged the broken one across the surface, which gouged a trench along the way–revealing a silica that proved to be evidence of ancient hot springs, according to the article. “When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade,” said John Callas, project manager for the Mars rovers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in the report.

In an upset of astronomical proportions, the Super Pressure Balloon (SPB) project soared through a field of 64 entries to be voted NASA’s “Greatest Mission of All Time,” in the space program’s Mission Madness tournament, modeled on NCAA “March Madness.” In the final round, completed late Tuesday, SPB beat out the venerable and groundbreaking SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) by a 54-46% margin.

SPB employs new technology to add longevity and stability to balloon-borne scientific missions (see my description below, based on a discussion with SPB’s technical director). It provides important cost savings in lofting payloads to the edge of space that otherwise would have to be borne by orbiting satellites. But I’m flabbergasted that this development-stage project was voted NASA’s greatest mission ever, particularly as I have yet to meet anyone outside of NASA who had even heard of SPB before this contest.

People are honoring the daring spacebat all over the world. Now it’s your turn. Your turn to mock the whole thing using your Photoshop skills, sneaking someone onto the space shuttle—inside or out.

Who would you like to send to space to never hear about him/her again?

Send us your image at contests@gizmodo.com with “Space stowaway” in the subject line by this Wednesday at noon. Name your files with a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention and use JPG or PNG as your file types.

NASA commissioned a study on the feasibility of using little smallish tractor bots to prep a lunar outpost before the humans show up, and the research seems to show it as a good idea. The theoretical plan is for 330 pound mower-sized bots to show up on the moon and prep the surface for actual buildings, landing sites, roads and so forth. The robots are basically glorified tractors (or perhaps simplified tractors) so lunarnauts shouldn’t expect a palace by the time they show up — just a bunch of displaced dirt. Berms seem to be a big theme of construction, since a sort of “blast shield” is needed to make sure debris from takeoff and landing don’t damage the actual settlement.

[Via ComputerWorld; warning: PDF read link]

Filed under: Robots

NASA ruminating a robot-built lunar outpost to make way for manned missions originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 01 Mar 2009 03:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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