NASA JPL’s video What’s Up for November 2013 gives a preview of what to see in the night sky in the coming month including Comet ISON. It starts with a a brief intro to the MAVEN spacecraft that is set to take off for Mars on Nov.18th :
Monthly Archives: October 2013
Space policy roundup – Oct.31.13
Rick Boozer writes about lower cost alternatives to the SLS/Orion system that would allow NASA to start exploring deep space soon rather than much, much later: It’s Time to Send Americans to the Inner Solar System – Space.com.
Rick is the author of the book The Plundering of NASA: an Exposé, which I’ve mentioned here several times. It’s available at Amazon. See also the post Alternatives to the Monster Rocket for beyond earth missions for more resources.
Other space policy/politics:
- Protecting NASA: Now is the time to get politics out of the space agency budget so NASA can soar – Houston Chronicle
- The space policy attraction of Gravity – Space Politics
- Space Solar Power: Could Crowdfunding Change The World? – Crowdfund Insider
- Litterbugs in Space: Why the Growing Cloud of Debris in Orbit needs to be Cleaned Up – AmericaSpace
- Big Space vs. People’s Space – Moonandback
- Guest column: Celebrating space successes – Florida Today.com
- A tiny step for a giant leap? – The Hindu
Chris Hadfield interview
Chris “Space Oddity” Hadfield gave an interesting interview on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air program today: Interview: Chris Hadfield, Author Of ‘An Astronaut’s Guide To Life On Earth’ – NPR.
JPL lets Curiosity drive on its own during trek towards Mount Sharp
Here’s an update on Curiosity‘s latest activities on Mars:
NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Approaches ‘Cooperstown’
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity completed its first two-day autonomous drive Monday, bringing the mobile laboratory to a good vantage point for pictures useful in selecting the next target the rover will reach out and touch.
When it drives autonomously, the rover chooses a safe route to designated waypoints by using its onboard computer to analyze stereo images that it takes during pauses in the drive. Prior to Monday, each day’s autonomous drive came after a segment earlier that day that was exactly charted by rover team members using images sent to Earth. The Sunday-Monday drive was the first time Curiosity ended an autonomous driving segment, then continued autonomously from that same point the next day.
The drives brought Curiosity to about 262 feet (about 80 meters) from “Cooperstown,” an outcrop bearing candidate targets for examination with instruments on the rover’s arm. The moniker, appropriate for baseball season, comes from a named rock deposit in New York. Curiosity has not used its arm-mounted instruments to examine a target since departing an outcrop called “Darwin” on Sept. 22. Researchers used the arm’s camera and spectrometer for four days at Darwin; they plan to use them on just one day at Cooperstown.
this scene is a Martian outcrop called “Cooperstown,” a possible site for
contact inspection with tools on the robotic arm of NASA’s Mars rover
Curiosity. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Starting to use two-day autonomous driving and the shorter duration planned for examining Cooperstown serve to accelerate Curiosity’s progress toward the mission’s main destination: Mount Sharp.
In July, Curiosity began a trek of about 5.3 miles (8.6 kilometers), starting from the area where it worked for the first half of 2013, headed to an entry point to Mount Sharp. Cooperstown is about one-third of the way along the route. The team used images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to plot the route and choose a few points of potential special interest along the way, including Darwin and Cooperstown.
“What interests us about this site is an intriguing outcrop of layered material visible in the orbital images,” said Kevin Lewis of Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., a participating scientist for the mission who has been a leader in planning the Cooperstown activities. “We want to see how the local layered outcrop at Cooperstown may help us relate the geology of Yellowknife Bay to the geology of Mount Sharp.”
The team is using images taken from the vantage point reached on Monday to decide what part of the Cooperstown outcrop to investigate with the arm-mounted instruments.
The first day of the two-day drive began Sunday with about 180 feet (55 meters) on a southwestward path that rover drivers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., evaluated ahead of time as safe. The autonomous-driving portion began where that left off, with Curiosity evaluating the best way to reach designated waypoints ahead. The vehicle drove about 125 feet (38 meters) autonomously on Sunday.
“We needed to store some key variables in the rover’s non-volatile memory for the next day,” said JPL rover driver John Wright. Curiosity’s volatile memory is cleared when the rover goes into energy-conserving sleep mode overnight.
The stored variables included what direction the rover was driving when it ended the first day’s drive, and whether it had classified the next 10 feet (3 meters) in that direction as safe for driving. When it began its second day of driving, Curiosity resumed evaluating the terrain ahead for safe driving and drove 105 feet (32 meters), all autonomously.
This new capability enables driving extra days during multi-day activity plans that the rover team develops on Fridays and before holidays.
A key activity planned for the week of Nov. 4 is uploading a new version of onboard software — the third such upgrade since landing. These upgrades allow continued advances in the rover’s capabilities. The version prepared for upload next week includes, for example, improvements in what information the rover can store overnight to resume autonomous driving the next day. It also expands capabilities for using the robotic arm while parked on slopes. The team expects that to be crucial for investigations on Mount Sharp.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the project’s Curiosity rover.
More information about Curiosity is online at http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ . You can follow the mission on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .
Int. Space Elevator Consortium newsletter + Mars One infographic
The latest newsletter of the International Space Elevator Consortium is now available on line: ISEC Newsletter – Oct.2013.
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Here’s a nice infographic for the Mars One project: Mission Mars One – Graph.net.