OrbitalHub

Wikipedia dixit:

“Parker Solar Probe is a planned NASA robotic spacecraft to probe the outer corona of the Sun. It will approach to within 8.5 solar radii (5.9 million kilometers or 3.67 million miles) to the ‘surface’ (photosphere) of the Sun. The project was announced as a new mission start in the fiscal 2009 budget year. On May 1, 2008 Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory announced it will design and build the spacecraft, on a schedule to launch it in 2015. The launch date has since been pushed back to 2018, with the Delta IV Heavy as the launch vehicle. On May 31, 2017 the probe was renamed after solar astrophysicist Eugene Parker. According to NASA, this was the first time in history a space vessel was named after a living person.

The Parker Solar Probe mission design uses repeated gravity assists at Venus to incrementally decrease the orbital perihelion to achieve multiple passes of the Sun at approximately 8.5 solar radii, or about 6 million km (3.7 million mi; 0.040 AU). The mission is designed to survive the harsh environment near the Sun, where the incident solar intensity is approximately 520 times the intensity at Earth orbit, by the use of a solar shadow-shield. The solar shield, at the front of the spacecraft, is made of reinforced carbon-carbon composite. The spacecraft systems and scientific instruments are located in the shadow umbra of the shield, where direct light from the sun is fully blocked. The primary power for the mission will be by use of a dual system of photovoltaic arrays. A primary photovoltaic array, used for the portion of the mission outside 0.25 AU, is retracted behind the shadow shield during the close approach to the Sun, and a much smaller secondary array powers the spacecraft through closest approach. This secondary array uses pumped-fluid cooling to maintain operating temperature. As the probe passes around the Sun, it will achieve a velocity of up to 200 km/s (120 mi/s) making it by any measure, the fastest manmade object ever, almost three times faster than the current record holder, Helios 2.”

Video credit: NASA

NASA dixit:

“No one under 20 has experienced a day without NASA at Mars. The Pathfinder mission, carrying the Sojourner rover, landed on Mars on July 4, 1997. In the 20 years since Pathfinder’s touchdown, eight other NASA landers and orbiters have arrived successfully, and not a day has passed without the United States having at least one active robot on Mars or in orbit around Mars.”

Mars Pathfinder

Mars Global Surveyor

2001 Mars Odyssey

Mars Exploration Rover

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

Phoenix

Curiosity

MAVEN

Video credit: NASA

Wikipedia dixit:

“Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) is a NASA Earth observation satellite created to develop and validate a number of instrument and spacecraft bus breakthrough technologies. These will enable the development of future Earth imaging observatories that will have a significant increase in performance while also having reduced cost and mass. The spacecraft is part of the New Millennium Program.

Its Advanced Land Imager (ALI) measures nine different wavelengths simultaneously, instead of the seven measured by the imager in Landsat 7. This permits a greater flexibility in false-color imagery. Another improvement is that instead of having an imaging spectrometer that sweeps from side to side, the ALI has a linear array of spectrometers that each scan a strip of ground parallel to that of adjacent spectrometers. In order to compare the two imagers, EO-1 follows Landsat 7 in its orbit by exactly one minute. Other new technologies include: Hyperion imaging spectrometer recording more than 200 wavelengths; phased array communications antenna; optical fiber cables connect the data logger with the two IBM RAD6000s; teflon-fueled pulsed plasma thruster; lightweight, flexible solar panel; carbon-coated radiators for thermal control; Linear Etalon Imaging Spectrometer Array equipped with a new atmospheric correction device.

EO-1 has also been used to test new software, like the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment. This allows the spacecraft to decide for itself how best to create a desired image. It is only limited by a priority list of different types of images, and by forecasts of cloud cover provided by the NOAA.

It was expected to function for twelve months and was designed to function for eighteen months. Those expectations were greatly exceeded however the hydrazine fuel was mostly depleted in February 2011. Small maneuvers have been successful for debris avoidance but long duration burns for orbit maintenance are not being performed due to insufficient fuel. EO-1 was deactivated on 30 March 2017. At its current altitude, it is estimated that the satellite will remain in orbit until the 2050s, when it will burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.”

Video credit: NASA Goddard

NASA dixit:

“The SpaceX/Dragon cargo ship arrived at the International Space Station after a two-day journey to deliver about 7,600 pounds of supplies and science experiments to the Expedition 52 crew. Following its launch atop the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket June 3 from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, Dragon was captured by Expedition 52 Flight Engineer Jack Fischer of NASA using the station’s Canadian-built robotic arm. Ground controllers then took control of the robotic arm, maneuvering Dragon to the Earth-facing port of the Harmony module, where it was installed and bolted into place. Dragon is scheduled to remain at the station for a month before it is unberthed and deorbited for a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.”

Video credit: NASA

NASA dixit:

“Expedition 51 Flight Engineer and Soyuz Commander Oleg Novitskiy of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and Flight Engineer Thomas Pesquet of ESA (European Space Agency) landed safely near the town of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan June 2 after bidding farewell to their colleagues on the International Space Station and undocking their Soyuz MS-03 spacecraft from the Rassvet Module on the Russian segment of the complex. The two crew members spent 196 days in space overall and 194 days on the station conducting research and operational work.”

Video credit: NASA / Roscosmos

NASA dixit:

“On Mars, wind rules. Wind has been shaping the Red Planet’s landscapes for billions of years and continues to do so today. Studies using both a NASA orbiter and a rover reveal its effects on scales grand to tiny on the strangely structured landscapes within Gale Crater.

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, on the lower slope of Mount Sharp — a layered mountain inside the crater — has begun a second campaign of investigating active sand dunes on the mountain’s northwestern flank. The rover also has been observing whirlwinds carrying dust and checking how far the wind moves grains of sand in a single day’s time.

Gale Crater observations by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have confirmed long-term patterns and rates of wind erosion that help explain the oddity of having a layered mountain in the middle of an impact crater.

“The orbiter perspective gives us the bigger picture — on all sides of Mount Sharp and the regional context for Gale Crater. We combine that with the local detail and ground-truth we get from the rover,” said Mackenzie Day of the University of Texas, Austin, lead author of a research report in the journal Icarus about wind’s dominant role at Gale.

The combined observations show that wind patterns in the crater today differ from when winds from the north removed the material that once filled the space between Mount Sharp and the crater rim. Now, Mount Sharp itself has become a major factor in determining local wind directions. Wind shaped the mountain; now the mountain shapes the wind.

The Martian atmosphere is about a hundred times thinner than Earth’s, so winds on Mars exert much less force than winds on Earth. Time is the factor that makes Martian winds so dominant in shaping the landscape. Most forces that shape Earth’s landscapes — water that erodes and moves sediments, tectonic activity that builds mountains and recycles the planet’s crust, active volcanism — haven’t influenced Mars much for billions of years. Sand transported by wind, even if infrequent, can whittle away Martian landscapes over that much time.”

Video credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory