Category Archives: Space Systems

Asteroids & Comets, Space Policy, Space Systems

Video: NASA asteroid initiative status report

June 20, 2014 TopSpacer

NASA posted two press releases yesterday about the developments in the agency’s Asteroid Initiative. This includes a program to look for and track near earth asteroids . The current long term goal is to send an unmanned system to rendezvous with, capture, and move a small asteroid into an orbit in the Earth-Moon system where it would be visited by NASA astronauts:

Here is a video of discussion on June 19th by several NASA managers and scientists about the asteroid program :

Living in Space, Space Systems

Video: Space to Ground report on ISS

June 20, 2014 TopSpacer

Here’s the latest episode of NASA’s Space to Ground report on activities aboard the Int. Space Station:

Astronomy, Space Systems

Video: A Webb Telescope overview

June 17, 2014 TopSpacer

Voice actor Peter Cullen gives a brief description of the James Webb Space Telescope project (but doesn’t explain how its price went from $1.6B to $8.8B):

Living in Space, Space Systems

Radiation shielding with low field mini-magnetospheres looks promisng

June 16, 2014 TopSpacer

Radiation shielding of space with magnetic fields may be easier than previously assumed by taking advantage of induced fields in plasmas:

From the Medium article:

Bamford and co say that previous studies of magnetic shields have neglected a crucial ingredient— the natural, low-density plasma that already exists in space.

This plasma is so weak that it consists of just a handful of positive and negative ions in each cubic centimetre of space. But a magnetic field moving through space would sweep these ions ahead of it, causing them to bunch up into a denser region of plasma in front of the spacecraft.

Because of the separation of charge within this plasma, it generates its own electric field. And this turns out to be crucial when it comes to deflecting high-energy particles from the Sun and beyond.