The Cygnus system is a flight proven design incorporating elements drawn from Northrop Grumman and its partners’ existing, flight-proven spacecraft technologies. Cygnus consists of a service module and a pressurized cargo module. Cygnus is used to carry crew supplies, spare equipment and scientific experiments to the space station. The service module incorporates advanced avionics developed by Northrop Grumman and guidance and navigation components that allow for fully autonomous rendezvous with the space station. The avionics design fully meets all of the demanding NASA safety requirements imposed on human-rated vehicles. The pressurized cargo module is manufactured by Thales Alenia Space specifically for Cygnus.
Northrop Grumman’s vision for the next step toward human space missions to Mars employs our flight-proven Cygnus advanced maneuvering spacecraft as a human habitat in cislunar space, the region between the Moon and Earth. In the early 2020s we would launch the initial habitat on NASA’s SLS rocket. Featuring a modular design, the habitat would serve both as a destination for crewed missions and as an unmanned testbed to prove-out the technologies needed for long-duration human space missions. The habitat is also envisioned as a base for lunar missions by international partners or commercial ventures. With additional habitation and propulsion modules, the habitat could be outfitted for a Mars pathfinder mission.
Venus is the second planet from the Sun. It is named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. As the second-brightest natural object in the night sky after the Moon, Venus can cast shadows and, rarely, is visible to the naked eye in broad daylight. Venus lies within Earth’s orbit, and so never appears to venture far from the Sun, setting in the west just after dusk and rising in the east a bit before dawn. Venus orbits the Sun every 224.7 Earth days. With a rotation period of 243 Earth days, it takes longer to rotate about its axis than any planet in the Solar System and goes in the opposite direction to all but Uranus (meaning the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east). Venus does not have any natural satellites, a distinction it shares only with Mercury among planets in the Solar System.
Venus is a terrestrial planet and is sometimes called Earth’s “sister planet” because of their similar size, mass, proximity to the Sun, and bulk composition. It is radically different from Earth in other respects. It has the densest atmosphere of the four terrestrial planets, consisting of more than 96% carbon dioxide. The atmospheric pressure at the planet’s surface is 92 times that of Earth, or roughly the pressure found 900 m (3,000 ft) underwater on Earth. Venus is by far the hottest planet in the Solar System, with a mean surface temperature of 735 K (462 °C; 863 °F), even though Mercury is closer to the Sun. Venus is shrouded by an opaque layer of highly reflective clouds of sulfuric acid, preventing its surface from being seen from space in visible light. It may have had water oceans in the past, but these would have vaporized as the temperature rose due to a runaway greenhouse effect. The water has probably photodissociated, and the free hydrogen has been swept into interplanetary space by the solar wind because of the lack of a planetary magnetic field. Venus’s surface is a dry desertscape interspersed with slab-like rocks and is periodically resurfaced by volcanism.
Lucy is a planned NASA space probe that will tour five Jupiter trojans, asteroids which share Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun, orbiting either ahead of or behind the planet and one main belt asteroid. All target encounters will be fly-by encounters.
On 4 January 2017, Lucy was chosen, along with the Psyche mission, as NASA’s Discovery Program missions 13 and 14 respectively. The mission is named after the ‘Lucy’ hominid skeleton, because the study of Trojans could reveal the “fossils of planet formation”: materials that clumped together in the early history of the Solar System to form planets and other bodies.
Lucy is planned to launch in 2021. In 2025 it will fly by the inner main-belt asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson, which was named for the discoverer of the Lucy hominid fossil. In 2027 it will arrive at the L4 Trojan cloud (a group of asteroids that orbits about 60° ahead of Jupiter), where it will fly by four Trojans, 3548 Eurybates, 15094 Polymele, 11351 Leucus, and 21900 Orus. After these flybys, Lucy will return to the vicinity of the Earth whereupon it will receive a gravity assist to take it to the L5 Trojan cloud (which trails about 60° behind Jupiter), where it will visit the binary Trojan 617 Patroclus with its satellite Menoetius in 2033.
Three instruments comprise the payload: a high-resolution visible imager, an optical and near-infrared imaging spectrometer and a thermal infrared spectrometer. Exploration of Jupiter Trojans is one of the high priority goals outlined in the Planetary Science Decadal Survey. Jupiter Trojans have been observed by ground-based telescopes and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer to be “dark with … surfaces that reflect little sunlight”. Jupiter is 5.2 AU (780 million km; 480 million mi) from the Sun, or about five times the Earth-Sun distance. The Jupiter Trojans are at a similar distance but can be somewhat farther or closer to the Sun depending on where they are in their orbits. There may be as many Trojans as there are asteroids in the asteroid belt.
The SpaceX Starship is a fully reusable second stage and space vehicle being privately developed by SpaceX. It is being designed to be a long-duration cargo- and passenger-carrying spacecraft. While currently it is tested on its own, it will be used on orbital launches with an additional booster stage, the Super Heavy, where Starship would serve as the second stage on a two-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle. The combination of spacecraft and booster is called Starship as well. Beginning in mid-2019, prototype versions are being flown with Starship as an independent rocket in its own right—without any launch vehicle booster stage at all—as part of an extensive suborbital flight testing program to get launch and landing working and iterate on a variety of design details, particularly with respect to atmospheric reentry of the vehicle.
Integrated system testing of Starship began in March 2019 with the addition of a single Raptor rocket engine to the first flight-capable propellant structure, Starhopper. Starhopper was used through August 2019 for static testing and low-altitude, low-velocity flight testing of vertical launches and landings in July/August. Two additional test articles, Starship orbital prototypes, are being built by competing teams in Texas and in Florida. They are planned to be used for high-altitude, high-velocity testing beginning in late 2019. All test articles have a 9-meter (30 ft)-diameter stainless steel hull.
The Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (Orion MPCV) is a US-European spacecraft intended to carry a crew of four astronauts to destinations at or beyond low Earth orbit (LEO). As of August 2019, it is under development by NASA and the ESA for launch on the Space Launch System (SLS), Orion is intended to be the main crew vehicle of the Artemis lunar exploration program and other missions not far beyond lunar space. Artemis 1 is planned to be the first flight of Orion on SLS, Artemis 2 the first crewed flight, and Artemis 3 the first lunar landing via the Lunar Gateway.
The Orion MPCV uses the same basic configuration as the Apollo command and service module (CSM) that first took astronauts to the Moon, but with an increased diameter, updated thermal protection system, and a host of other modern technologies. Orion will support long-duration deep space missions with up to 21 days active crew time plus 6 months quiescent spacecraft life. During the quiescent period crew life support would be provided by another module, such as the proposed Deep Space Habitat. The spacecraft’s life support, propulsion, thermal protection, and avionics systems can be upgraded as new technologies become available. The Orion spacecraft includes both crew and service modules, and a spacecraft adapter. The Orion’s crew module is larger than Apollo’s and can support more crew members for short or long-duration missions. The European service module propels and powers the spacecraft as well as storing oxygen and water for astronauts.
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