OrbitalHub

Wikipedia dicit:

VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) is a lunar rover developed by NASA (Ames Research Center), and currently planned to be delivered to the surface of the Moon in November 2024. The rover will be tasked with prospecting for lunar resources in permanently shadowed areas in the lunar south pole region, especially by mapping the distribution and concentration of water ice. The mission builds on a previous NASA rover concept called Resource Prospector, which was cancelled in 2018.

The VIPER rover, currently in development, will have a size similar to a golf cart (around 1.4 × 1.4 × 2 m), and will be tasked with prospecting for lunar resources, especially for water ice, mapping its distribution, and measuring its depth and purity. The water distribution and form must be better understood before it can be evaluated as a potential resource within any evolvable lunar or Mars campaign.

The VIPER rover is part of the Lunar Discovery and Exploration Program managed by the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, and it is meant to support the crewed Artemis program. NASA’s Ames Research Center is managing the rover project. The hardware for the rover is being designed by the Johnson Space Center, while the instruments are provided by Ames, Kennedy, and Honeybee Robotics. The project manager is Daniel Andrews, and the project scientist is Anthony Colaprete, who is implementing the technology developed for the now cancelled Resource Prospector rover. The estimated cost of the mission is US$250 million in October 2019. NASA said on 3 March 2021 that the new lifecycle cost for the mission is US$433.5 million.

The VIPER rover will operate on the western edge of Nobile crater on Mons Mouton in the Moon’s south pole region. It is planned to rove several kilometers, collecting data on different kinds of soil environments affected by light and temperature — those in complete darkness, occasional light and in constant sunlight. Once it enters a permanently shadowed location, it will operate on battery power alone and will not be able to recharge them until it drives to a sunlit area. Its total operation time will be 100 Earth days.

Both the launcher and the lander to be used are competitively provided through Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contractors, with Astrobotic delivering the Griffin lander and SpaceX providing the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle. NASA is aiming to land the rover in November 2024.

Video credit: NASA’s Ames Research Center

NASA dicit:

A new study using the now-retired Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) data has pieced together the first detailed, wide-area map of water distribution on the Moon. The new map covers about one-quarter of the Earth-facing side of the lunar surface below 60 degrees latitude and extends to the Moon’s South Pole. In this data visualization, SOFIA’s lunar water observations are indicated using color, with blue representing areas of higher water signal, and brown lower.

Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio/Ernie Wright

NASA dicit:

Under the agency’s Announcement of Collaborative Opportunity, engineers from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, partnered with Elementum 3D, in Erie, Colorado, to create a weldable type of aluminum that is heat resistant enough for use on rocket engines. Compared to other metals, aluminum is lower density and allows for high-strength, lightweight components. However, due to its low tolerance to extreme heat and its tendency to crack during welding, aluminum is not typically used for additive manufacturing of rocket engine parts – until now.

Meet NASA’s latest development under the Reactive Additive Manufacturing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or RAMFIRE, project. Funded under NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD), RAMFIRE focuses on advancing lightweight, additively manufactured aluminum rocket nozzles. The nozzles are designed with small internal channels that keep the nozzle cool enough to prevent melting.

Video credit: NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

NASA dicit:

A scale model of the Mars Ascent Vehicle is tested for in the trisonic wind tunnel at Marshall. The tunnel’s test sections are only 14 inches in height and width but can achieve wind speeds of up to Mach 5.

The Mars Ascent Vehicle team recently completed testing at NASA facility that has been a critical part of missions going all the way back to the Apollo program. The same facility is now helping the agency prepare to launch the first rocket from Mars.

The MAV is an important part of the joint plan between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) to bring scientifically selected Martian samples to Earth in the early 2030s.

Video credit: NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

Wikipedia dicit:

Lucy is a NASA space probe on a twelve-year journey to eight different asteroids, visiting two main belt asteroids as well as six Jupiter trojans, asteroids which share Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun, orbiting either ahead of or behind the planet. All target encounters will be flyby encounters. The Lucy spacecraft is the centerpiece of a US$981 million mission.

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 fossils, because study of the 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. The hominid was named after the 1967 Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”. The spacecraft carries a disc made of lab-grown diamonds for its L’TES instrument.

Video credit: NASA Goddard

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Wikipedia dicit:

Psyche is a NASA space mission launched on October 13, 2023 to explore the origin of planetary cores by orbiting and studying the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche beginning in 2029. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) manages the project.

16 Psyche is the heaviest known M-type asteroid, and may be an exposed iron core of a protoplanet, the remnant of a violent collision with another object that stripped off its mantle and crust. On January 4, 2017, the Psyche mission was selected for NASA’s Discovery #14 mission. It was launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

16 Psyche is the heaviest known M-type asteroid, and may be an exposed iron core of a protoplanet, the remnant of a violent collision with another object that stripped off its mantle and crust.

Recent studies show that it is “a mixed metal and silicate world”. Another study considers it to be either a metal core of a protoplanet or “a differentiated world with a regolith composition … peppered with localized regions of high metal concentrations”. Radar observations of the asteroid from Earth indicate an iron–nickel composition.

The Psyche spacecraft is designed with solar electric propulsion, and the scientific payload includes a multispectral imager, a magnetometer, and a gamma-ray spectrometer.

The mission is designed to perform 21 months of science. The spacecraft was built by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in collaboration with SSL (formerly Space Systems/Loral) and Arizona State University.

It was proposed that the rocket launch might be shared with a separate mission named Athena, that would perform a single flyby of asteroid 2 Pallas, the third-largest asteroid in the Solar System.

In May 2020, it was announced that the Falcon Heavy carrying Psyche would include two smallsat secondary payloads to study the Martian atmosphere and binary asteroids, named EscaPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) and Janus respectively, but in September 2020, the EscaPADE Mars atmosphere probe was removed from the plan.

Janus was later removed from the Psyche mission as well on November 18, 2022, after an assessment determined that it would not be on the required trajectory to meet its science requirements as a result of Psyche’s new launch period.

Video credit: NASA’s Kennedy Space Center