NASA TESTS ROCKET SO HUGE IT LIGHTS ENTIRE HILLSIDE ON FIRE

Massive Fireball

Northrop Grumman just ignited a booster for NASA’s long-awaited Space Launch System (SLS) — blasting so forcefully that it ignited brush on the surrounding hills at the company’s test facility in Promontory, Utah.

Space Launch System

The Flight Support Booster, or FSB-1, is meant to lay the groundwork for improving future rocket boosters that are meant to power NASA’s SLS, as Spaceflight Now reports.

The SLS is a heavy-lift launch system meant to one day carry astronauts to the Moon as part of the agency’s upcoming Artemis missions. A July test of the core stage rocket built by Boeing was a success.

According to Northrop Grumman, the 154-foot booster is the “largest solid rocket motor ever built for flight.” The booster is made out of five segments and weighs a whopping 1.6 million pounds, producing a maximum of 3.6 million pounds of thrust, according to official documentation.

The SLS core stage is even bigger, towering at 212 feet and designed to push out two million pounds of thrust from four RS-25 engines.

Big Rockets Are Hard

“From our view, it looks like everything went great,” NASA’s TV commentator said during the live stream of the event.

“Rockets, especially big ones, are rather hard,” Ars Technica senior space reporter Eric Berger wrote in a tweet, congratulating Northrop Grumman. “Good work by NASA and Northrop Grumman to pull off this test.”

NASA’s Mars Mole is Officially “Dug In”

Finally some good news for NASA's Mars mole

Credit-Nasa

After spending over a year of trying to bury itself into the surface of Mars to take the Red Planet’s temperature, the “mole” attached to NASA’s InSight Mars lander is finally officially “in” and buried in sand according to an update by the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

Back in June, the DLR team pulled the mole out of the Martian soil in to check up on it, and decided to get back to drilling down into the surface. After a lengthy “hammering session” of 150 strokes on June 20, as JPL put it in a July update, the mole caused “bits of soil jostling within the scoop — possible evidence that the mole had begun bouncing in place, knocking the bottom of the scoop.”

The team thought that soil fell in from the sides of the hole the mole dug. “Instead, we were pleasantly surprised to see that the Mole was largely covered with sand,” reads today’s DLR update. “Only the back cap and a few centimeters of the hull are sticking out.”

Having the mole completely covered in sand could provide enough friction for the mole to make more headway in its endeavor of reaching a maximum depth of ten feet. The success of burying the mole could also have big impacts on the scientific value of the Mars mole mission.

The mole’s mission objective is to take Mars’ temperature from below the surface — and after having it fully buried, “both the thermal and mechanical contact have improved,” the update reads. “So we’re feeling optimistic!”

The discovery came after a number of risky maneuvers trying to gage the state of the mole. “After intense discussion, the team decided to first do a push on the back cap, similar to the successful back cap pushes conducted in the past months,” today’s update reads. Unfortunately, the “scoop no longer fits in the pit,” making such a maneuver pretty risky.

After a lengthy back and forth, the team decided to scrape along the top of the buried mole to test if it was possible to push it using the scoop. “The scraping was a complete success!,” the team wrote. “The scrape was much more effective than expected and the sand filled the pit almost completely. The Mole is now covered, but there is only a thin layer of sand on the back cap.”

The team’s calculations may have gone awry due to the fact that the shovel went in much deeper than initially thought.

Eyes on the Storm: NASA Aids Disaster Response to Hurricane Laura

Credits: NASA's Earth Observatory

Early in the morning on Aug. 27, Hurricane Laura made landfall along the Louisiana and Texas coastline, bringing 150 m.p.h. winds, flash floods and heavy rainfall with it. On the ground, emergency personnel mobilized to respond to the Category 4 storm. But for NASA’s fleet of Earth-observing satellites, it was business as usual.

Those satellites – as well as several from NASA’s international partner space agencies – constantly orbit Earth, using sophisticated sensors to collect data about what’s going on down below. When Hurricane Laura hit, NASA already had eyes on the storm.

“We use that cutting-edge NASA science to address disasters,” said Lori Schultz, a remote-sensing scientist with the University of Alabama who is leading NASA’s efforts on this storm for the NASA Earth Applied Sciences Disasters Program. The program seeks to provide disaster response and management personnel with relevant, up-to-date information to help communities prepare for disasters and manage recovery efforts.

“Basically, we ask: can we answer a question that needs to be answered?” said Schultz. Because of NASA’s abundance of remote-sensing data and partnerships with other space agencies around the globe, NASA is in a unique position to get a broader view of the storm’s impacts than what first responders can see from the ground. “Sometimes we can answer questions that nobody else can,” Schultz said.

Schultz and the rest of the NASA Disasters team are busy processing and analyzing the data collected by satellites passing over Hurricane Laura before, during, and after it makes landfall. They’re using data collected by the NASA-U.S. Geological Survey Landsat satellites, the NASA-JAXA Global Precipitation Measurement satellite that peers through the clouds to observe rain rates, the European Space Agency’s Sentinel 1 and 2, and others to create flood maps, assess coastal erosion and pinpoint damaged areas.

If the clouds clear over the next few days, NASA’s team will also use data collected by the MODIS instrument aboard NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites to further assess flooding damage. They may also use data from the VIIRS instrument aboard the Suomi NPP satellite, a joint project with NASA and NOAA.

That data will be processed, packaged, and made widely available to those who need it most. To do so, NASA partners with response agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and regional agencies directly affected by the storm.

Credits: NASA's Earth Observatory

Data are posted on the NASA Disasters Mapping Portal, which makes it easy for partners to view and analyze the data, as well as download in a standardized Geographic Information Systems (GIS) format to use in their own analysis tools.

NASA’s Disasters Program creates easily accessible information and distributes it to those working to manage disasters – hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, severe storms and weather, fires, earthquakes, volcanoes and oil spills. That information helps disaster management personnel prepare for these events and plan recovery efforts. NASA also uses these events to study extreme storms and natural disasters and their impact on our planet – and prepare for events in the future.

INDIA’S SPACE CHIEF: WE FOUND OUR LANDER MONTHS BEFORE NASA

Taking Credit

Back in September, the Indian Space Research Organization announced that it had found its Vikram lander, which it had lost contact with days earlier as it prepared to land on the Moon — and said it was trying to reestablish contact with the lost lander.

Months later, NASA made a similar announcement: that it had spotted the wreckage of the lander, with the help of amateur space enthusiast Shanmuga “Shan” Subramanian, who analyzed images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Now, it seems as though ISRO’s leadership feels that NASA is getting too much credit for the discovery.

“After the landing date itself, our website had given that our own orbiter has located Vikram,” ISRO chief Kailasavadivoo Sivan told reporters on Wednesday, as quoted by India Today. “Our own orbiter had located Vikram lander. We had already declared that on our website, you can go back and see.”

Located Again

Is that a fair analysis? It’s open to interpretation.

NASA didn’t claim it was the first to spot the lander, and to be fair, India seemed pretty hazy in September about whether its lander had crashed or landed but lost contact.

The clearest takeaway: India’s crashed lander was a disappointment, so maybe its leadership is looking for distraction.

NASA STILL HASN’T FOUND THE DAMN LEAK ON THE SPACE STATION

Deflating

NASA is still struggling to find the leak in its segment of the International Space Station.

The good news is that the air is leaking out of the segment very slowly, and NASA is downplaying the risk. But the bad news is that they still haven’t found it yet — forcing the NASA crew to spend yet another night in the Russian segment of the station.

Fresh Air

The news comes after NASA evacuated its segment of the station late last week, directing its crew to spend the weekend in the Russian segment while the space agency tries to identify and patch the source of the leak.

A little bit of leakage is normal, as NASA has emphasized in both press releases it’s issued about the problem. In fact, it says that it first became suspicious that air was leaking at an elevated level back in September 2019, though it wasn’t able to confirm the issue until recently due to the slow rate of pressure loss.

HISSsssss

By sealing all the segment’s hatches, NASA’s mission control is hoping it can isolate the source of the leak so personnel on the station can patch it up..

NASA Astronaut Jeanette Epps Joins First Operational Boeing Crew Mission to Space Station

NASA has assigned astronaut Jeanette Epps to NASA’s Boeing Starliner-1 mission, the first operational crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft on a mission to the International Space Station.

Epps will join NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Josh Cassada for a six-month expedition planned for a launch in 2021 to the orbiting space laboratory. The flight will follow NASA certification after a successful uncrewed Orbital Flight Test-2 and Crew Flight Test with astronauts.

The spaceflight will be the first for Epps, who earned a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1992 from LeMoyne College in her hometown of Syracuse, New York. She completed a master’s degree in science in 1994 and a doctorate in aerospace engineering in 2000, both from the University of Maryland, College Park.

While earning her doctorate, Epps was a NASA Graduate Student Researchers Project fellow, authoring several journal and conference articles on her research. After completing graduate school, she worked in a research laboratory for more than two years, co-authoring several patents, before the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recruited her. She spent seven years as a CIA technical intelligence officer before her selection as a member of the 2009 astronaut class. 

NASA assigned Williams and Cassada to the Starliner-1 mission in August 2018. The spaceflight will be the first for Cassada and third for Williams, who spent long-duration stays aboard the space station on Expeditions 14/15 and 32/33.

NASA’s Commercial Crew Program is working with the American aerospace industry as companies develop and operate a new generation of spacecraft and launch systems capable of carrying crews to low-Earth orbit and to the space station. Commercial transportation to and from the station will provide expanded utility, additional research time and broader opportunities for discovery on the orbital outpost.

For nearly 20 years, the station has served as a critical testbed for NASA to understand and overcome the challenges of long-duration spaceflight. As commercial companies focus on providing human transportation services to and from low-Earth orbit, NASA will concentrate its focus on building spacecraft and rockets for deep-space missions

Follow Epps on social media at -

https://www.instagram.com/jeanette.epps/

NASA: A fridge-size asteroid is headed toward Earth one day before the November election

• 

  A photo of Earth taken by NASA's imaging camera

• An asteroid has a slim chance of the Earth's atmosphere November 2.

• That's one day before The Us Election.

• Because of it's small size,the asteroid,dubbed 2018VP1,would birn off while hurting toward the planet.

An asteroid has a slim chance of entering the Earth's atmosphere on November2,oneday before the US election,according to NASA.

Named 2018VP1,the aseroid is pretty tiny,according to ,according to NASA data .

Its has only a0.41% likelihood of entering Earth's atmosphere,but celestial object that size tend to burn up anyway before reching the ground;NASA told Business Insider.

"Asteriod 2018Vp1 Is very small, approximately 6.5feet, and poses no threat to Earth"a NASA representative told Business Insider.That's about 2 meters long,like a refrigerator."If it were to enter our planet's atmosphere, it would disintegrate due to it's extremely small size."

2018VP1 has had a few close encounters with Earth before,dating back to 1970.It most recently visited in November 2018,roughly when it was discovered at California's Palomar Observatory.

it would disintegrate due to its extremely small size," NASA said in a statement. "NASA has been directed by Congress to discover 90% of the near-Earth asteroids larger than 140 meters (459 feet) in size and reports on asteroids of any size."

NASA says that, "based on 21 observations spanning 12.968 days," the agency has determined the asteroid probably -- phew! -- won't have a deep impact, let alone bring Armageddon.

"It's quit an accomplishment to find these tiny close-in asteroids in the first place, because they pass by so fast,"said Paul Chodas, the director of the Center for Near-Earth Object studies at NASA's JET propulsion Labortory in southern California.

"There's typical only a short window of a couple of days before or after close approach when this small of an asteroid is close enough to Earth to be bright

enough but not so close that it moves too fast in the sky to be detected by a telescop,"he said.

Between the covid19 pandemic,a reckoning with racial justice,sky high depression and anxiety,election season and other recent events,people are joking about the asteroid's perceived embodiment of 2020.