NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission now celebrates its 10-year anniversary of being at the Moon. After launching on June 18, 2009, and entering lunar orbit on June 23rd, the spacecraft continues to collect vast amounts of data vital to our understanding of the lunar landscape and environment, our solar system, and to our future exploration goals for the Moon and Mars. This video highlights some notable facts and accomplishments of the LRO mission over the past decade, all of which are paving the way forward for reestablishing a human presence on the Moon with the newly announced Artemis program.
Helios-A and Helios-B (also known as Helios 1 and Helios 2) are a pair of probes launched into heliocentric orbit for the purpose of studying solar processes. A joint venture of West Germany’s space agency DFVLR (70 percent share) and NASA (30 percent), the probes were launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, on December 10, 1974, and January 15, 1976, respectively. Built by the main contractor Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm, they were the first spaceprobes built outside both the United States and the Soviet Union to leave Earth orbit.
The probes set a maximum speed record for spacecraft of 252,792 km/h (157,078 mph; 70,220 m/s). Helios-B flew 3,000,000 kilometres (1,900,000 mi) closer to the Sun than Helios-A, achieving perihelion on April 17, 1976, at a record distance of 43.432 million km (26,987,000 mi; 0.29032 AU), closer than the orbit of Mercury. Helios-B was sent into orbit 13 months after the launch of Helios-A. The Helios space probes completed their primary missions by the early 1980s, and continued to send data up to 1985. The probes are no longer functional but remain in their elliptical orbits around the Sun.
Tom Bridgman (GST): Lead Visualizer
Kathalina Tran (SGT): Lead Writer
Laurence Schuler (ADNET Systems Inc.): Technical Support
The Blue Origin Blue Moon is a robotic space cargo carrier and lander for making cargo deliveries to the Moon. Designed and operated by Blue Origin for use on the Blue Moon mission aimed for 2024, Blue Moon derives from the vertical landing technology used in Blue Origin’s New Shepard sub-orbital rocket.
The lander is planned to be capable of delivering 4,500 kg (9,900 lb) to the surface of the Moon. The cargo vehicle could also be used to support NASA activities in cis-lunar space, or transport payloads of ice from Shackleton Crater to support space activities. The first projected mission for the craft would be a 2024 lunar south pole landing. It is proposed that a series of landings could be used to deliver the infrastructure for a Moon base.
Blue Origin began development work on the lander in 2016, publicly disclosed the project in 2017, and unveiled a mock up of the Blue Moon lander in May 2019.
A marsquake is a quake which, much like an earthquake, would be a shaking of the surface or interior of the planet Mars as a result of the sudden release of energy in the planet’s interior, such as the result of plate tectonics, which most quakes on Earth originate from, or possibly from hotspots such as Olympus Mons or the Tharsis Montes. The detection and analysis of marsquakes could be informative to probing the interior structure of Mars, as well as identifying whether any of Mars’s many volcanoes continue to be volcanically active or not.
Quakes have been observed and well-documented on the Moon, and there is evidence of quakes on Venus, but very little is known about the current seismic activity of Mars, with some estimations suggesting that marsquakes occur as rarely as once every million years or more. Nevertheless, compelling evidence has been found that Mars has in the past been seismically active, with clear magnetic striping over a large region of southern Mars. Magnetic striping on Earth is often a sign of a region of particularly thin crust splitting and spreading, forming new land in the slowly separating rifts; a prime example of this being the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. However, no clear spreading ridge has been found in this region, suggesting that another, possibly non-seismic explanation may be needed.
The 4,000 kilometres (2,500 miles) long canyon system, Valles Marineris, has been suggested to be the remnant of an ancient Martian strike-slip fault. However, even if it was at some point an active fault, it is unknown whether the fault is still active, or if it has “frozen” into place.
Northrop Grumman has made significant progress in developing its new satellite life extension service. The innovative technology, a first in the industry, gives satellite operators the capability to extend the life of a healthy satellite. Northrop Grumman remains on track to introduce its in-orbit satellite servicing system with the Mission Extension Vehicle-1 (MEV-1).
“New research from the up-close Grand Finale orbits of NASA’s Cassini mission shows a surprisingly powerful interaction of plasma waves moving from Saturn to its moon Enceladus. Researchers converted the recording of plasma waves into a “whooshing” audio file that we can hear — in the same way a radio translates electromagnetic waves into music. Much like air or water, plasma (the fourth state of matter) generates waves to carry energy. The recording was captured by the Radio Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument September 2, 2017, two weeks before Cassini was deliberately plunged into the atmosphere of Saturn.”
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