Exploration Of Mercury

The exploration of Mercury has a minor role in the space interests of the world. It is the least explored inner planet. As of 2015, the Mariner 10 and MESSENGER missions have been the only missions that have made close observations of Mercury. MESSENGER made three flybys before entering orbit around Mercury. A third mission to Mercury, BepiColombo, a joint mission between the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the European Space Agency, is to include two probes. MESSENGER and BepiColombo are intended to gather complementary data to help scientists understand many of the mysteries discovered by Mariner 10‘s flybys.

Compared to other planets, Mercury is difficult to explore. The speed required to reach it is relatively high, and its proximity to the Sun makes it difficult to maneuver a spacecraft into a stable orbit around it. MESSENGER was the first probe to orbit Mercury.

FAU-G: Indian rival to PUBG Mobile announced, release in October-end

Within two days of the PUBG Mobile app ban in the country, we have witnessed several Indian game developers introduce India’s alternative to PUBG or new battle royale games similar to the banned game. One of the many developers is nCore Games that on Friday announced a new Indian version of PUBG Mobile called FAU-G or Fearless And United: Guards. The game is said to release soon. nCore Games should reveal the release date and other details about the game in the days to come.

FAU-G was always in the pipeline; PUBG ban was coincidental: nCore Games’ Vishal Gondal

Vishal Gondal, CEO of GOQii said via an official tweet that FAU-G is developed in response to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Atmanirbhar App campaigner. The announcement comes just two days after the government of India banned 118 Chinese apps including PUBG Mobile and PUBG Mobile Lite. Gondal later told indianexpress.com that the team has been actively working on FAU-G since

nCore Games is yet to reveal more details about the action game. Talking about the game, Gondal said that FAU-G, as the name suggests, will lesson players about the sacrifices of Indian soldiers. He also said that 20 per cent of net revenue will be donated to BharatKeVeer trust.

Also Read | 5 PUBG Mobile alternative battle royale games you can try | PUBG Mobile ban in India: You can still play PUBG on PCs, game consoles |  10 PUBG Mobile facts we bet you didn’t know | Why PUBG Mobile ban could hit hard gaming phones segment

Several Indian game developers are using the PUBG Mobile ban as an opportunity to bring desi alternatives to the game. Similar happened to TikTok when the short video platform was banned in the country. There are apps like Chingari, Mitron, Roposo, Moj, and many more that have replaced TikTok in the country.

As Akshay Kumar announces FAU-G, Babu-G to Fauji memes flood social media timelines

The government of India banned 118 apps on Wednesday including the popular battle royale game PUBG Mobile and also its Lite version. The game has been removed from Google Play store and Apple App store. Users who have the game downloaded on their phones are still able to play the game.

WEEKS LATER, NASA STILL CAN’T FIND HOLE IN SPACE STATION

Plugging The Hole

There’s a hole on the International Space Station, allowing air to leak out — and NASA is still having trouble tracking it down.

The situation isn’t nearly as dire as it sounds. In fact, the leak was first spotted almost exactly a year ago, as Business Insider reports. But finding it has dragged on, and on, and on.

No Reason To Worry

A bit of air leaking out the space station is to be expected, NASA says, and requires occasional top ups from nitrogen tanks delivered on cargo resupply missions to the station.

On August 20, NASA released a statement about an ongoing investigation into the small air leak, taking pains to note that the three current crew members weren’t in immediate danger. Yet the three were asked to spend a weekend inside the Russian segment of the station as scientists back on Earth tried to track down the source of the leak.

By August 24, the situation hadn’t changed. The crew had to spend another night in the Russian segment, according to NASA.

Still Investigating

Now, September has rolled around and NASA still hasn’t located the source of the leak.

Data is still being collected about the leak, as NASA spokesman Daniel Huot told Business Insider on Tuesday, adding that teams on the ground should complete their review “in the coming days.”

“The leak rate is still stable and well below the design specifications for the station and presents no concern for crew or vehicle safety,” Huot added.

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.”

SETI TEAM INCREASES NUMBER OF STARS THAT MIGHT HOST LIFE BY 200X

Branching Out

The search for extraterrestrial life just got a whole lot more expansive — a team of scientists keeping an ear out for alien transmissions just ballooned their operation to examine 200 times the number of star systems it had previously.

The Breakthrough Listen Initiative, an effort to intercept radio transmissions sent out by extraterrestrial civilizations, is now listening to 288,315 star systems instead of its previous 1,327, according to preprint research shared online last week. In all, the change represents a major upgrade to one of the more prominent attempts to find intelligent life in the Milky Way.

Outside Voices

The University of Manchester scientists behind the project made the improvements after combing through existing European Space Agency data about the locations and distance from Earth of celestial bodies within 33,000 lightyears, which is the range of their radio telescope.

“Knowing the locations and distances to these additional sources,” Manchester researcher and team leader Michael Garrett said in a press release, “greatly improves our ability to constrain the prevalence of extraterrestrial intelligence in our own galaxy and beyond. We expect future SETI surveys to also make good use of this approach.”

Honing In

The idea is to identify extraterrestrial civilizations by picking up radio broadcasts, so figuring out how feasible it is for each star system to get a message to Earth helped them narrow down their search while adding the new candidates.

“Our results help to put meaningful limits on the prevalence of transmitters comparable to what we ourselves can build using twenty-first-century technology,” study coauthor Bart Wlodarczyk-Sroka said in the release.

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.

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..

AIR FORCE ONE’S SUCCESSOR COULD GO 5X THE SPEED OF SOUND

Nyoom!

A coming iteration of Air Force One, the high tech plane reserved for shuttling the President of the United States around the world, may be able to reach nauseatingly-fast speeds up to Mach 5.

The U.S. Air Force just awarded a contract to the aerospace startup Hermeus, Business Insider reports, which calls for the first hypersonic version of Air Force One. The company already has a prototype engine built and tested, and now it’s just a matter of building the rest of the plane.

Drawing Owls

Hermeus has been working on its hypersonic engine for over a year and completed tests in March, Business Insider reports. But now that it has this Air Force contract, it will need to make sure that its Mach 5 plane also meets certain rigorous standards.

Hermeus thinks it can all be done with existing technology.

“We want to do engineering, not science,” COO Skyler Shuford told Ars Technica last year.

Distant Vision

For better or worse, Hermeus’ hypersonic Air Force One is at least ten years down the road, Business Insider reports. Boeing is already set to deliver the next Air Force One in 2021, and Hermeus’ model would serve as that plane’s eventual replacement.

That means that unless American democracy utterly collapses, we’ll never get to see what Mach 5 would do to President Trump’s notoriously unusual hairstyle.

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.