Virgin Galactic and DK publishing are collaborating on a set of activity books, with models and stickers, based around the theme of the SpaceShipTwo rocket vehicle and aimed at young people:
The first three of seven books total will be available in October: Virgin Galactic – DK.com
A simulation of : Approach to Island One – PROJECT ION
Another great animation from Steve Gunn, here we see an approach to an Island One space habitat. This is part of the British Interplanetary Society‘s Project SPACE on space settlement.
Island One is a space colony with a population of 10000 people, located at L5.
Google is teaming with the ISEE-3 Reboot Project:
Google’s paired up with the team behind the first ever crowd-funded citizen space mission to launch SpacecraftForAll.com an interactive, multimedia resource for citizen scientists and space fanatics to access all the data collected by the ISEE-3 spacecraft.
The SpacecraftForAll site, tuned for the Google Chrome browser, is a
Chrome Experiment from Google – huge fans of open-source technology – weaving vivid storytelling with the latest web technologies (like WebGL interactive graphics) to create a hub for the data via the web.
For the upcoming fly-by of the Moon:
Tune in on Sunday, August 10 at 10:30am PT/1:30pm ET for the ISEE-3 Reboot Team’s livecast of the satellite’s lunar flyby, live from McMoon’s at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
Here’s a screen capture from – SpacecraftForAll :
Telerobotics, i.e. controlling a robot from a distance, could be useful in space for, say, asteroid sampling in which an astronaut in a nearby spacecraft controls a robot on the surface of the object. A mission to Mars might initially involve astronauts remaining in orbit while controlling robots on the surface. A demonstration of a telerobotic operation was carried out this week using the Int. Space Station:
Gerst drives car-sized rover from space
8 August 2014: Looking down from orbit, ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst steered ESA’s Eurobot rover through a series of intricate manoeuvres on the ground yesterday, demonstrating a new space network that could connect astronauts to vehicles on alien worlds.
During an intense 90-minute live link on 7 August, Alex used a dedicated controller laptop on the International Space Station to operate Eurobot, relying on video and data feedback to feed commands from 400 km up, orbiting at 28 000 km/h.
The link was provided by a new network that stores commands when signals are interrupted if direct line of sight with Earth or the surface unit is lost, forwarding them once contact is re-established.
In the future, controlling robots on Mars or the Moon will require a sort of ‘space Internet’ to send telecommands and receive data. Such networks must also accommodate signal delays across vast distances, considering that astronauts and rovers on Mars will have to be linked with mission controllers on Earth.
Yesterday’s demonstration was the second in a series of experiments under the Meteron project, following the 2012 test by NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, who used an initial version of the network by steering a model rover at ESA’s ESOC operations centre in Darmstadt, Germany.
“This was the first time Eurobot was controlled from space as part of an experiment to validate communication and operations technologies that will ultimately be used for future human exploration missions,” noted Kim Nergaard, head of Advanced Mission Concepts at ESOC.
Rover driving license
During the session, which started at 16:35 GMT (18:35 CEST), Alexander Gerst commanded Eurobot to move and take pictures based on telemetry and pictures streaming to the Station from the rover.
Eurobot was inching around a test facility at ESA’s ESTEC technology centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, while ‘ground control’ was at ESOC and the disruption-tolerant network was routed via Belgium’s Station User Support and Operations Centre in Brussels, and NASA.
Ready to Rove
Simulations to prepare for yesterday’s link included live connections between Darmstadt, Noordwijk and Brussels to the Space Station throughout July.
“Today’s result is even better than the simulations we conducted,” said Daniela Taubert, Meteron’s operations coordinator. “The whole experiment ran extremely smoothly. Alex was faster and more efficient that we had expected.”
William Carey, ESA’s Meteron project engineer, agreed: “It is great to have a hands-on test of part of ESA’s long-term strategy to send humans and robots to explore our Solar System.”
Future space exploration will most likely involve sending robotic explorers to check out alien surfaces before landing humans. To prepare for this, ESA is running the Meteron human–robot exploration programme: Multi-Purpose End-To-End Robotic Operations Network.
More images of the team and activities at ESOC via Flickr.
Here’s the latest episode of NASA’s Space to Ground weekly report on activities aboard the Int. Space Station: