Now here’s an interesting alliance. Google and NASA Ames announced today that they’ll be forming a new partnership to work together on several space-related projects.
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NASA Announces Long Term Plans for the Moon
NASA announced new details about its lunar ambitions today, providing details about other nations will get involved in a return to the Moon, and the concept of a future lunar base. The Global Exploration Strategy involved 1,000 people from 14 space agencies, non-governmental agencies, and commercial companies. The Lunar Architecture Team decided that the best spot for a permanent lunar base would be at one of the Moon’s poles, which is bathed in eternal sunlight.
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NASA is Go for Hubble Repair
Finally some good news for the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA announced a new space shuttle mission to repair and upgrade the aging space telescope. This fifth and final visit to Hubble is tentatively scheduled for Fall 2008. Astronauts will install two new instruments: the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which will help probe large-scale structures in the Universe, and the Wide Field Camera 3, a very sensitive instrument capable of seeing from infrared to ultraviolet wavelengths.
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NASA’s Wise Satellite Moves Ahead
NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer team got the good news this week when their space telescope was approved for construction. Once in orbit, the “Wise” spacecraft will survey the entire sky in the infrared spectrum. This full-sky survey should turn up many previously unseen brown dwarf stars – objects too dim to be seen in previous surveys. It should also find some of the largest, most luminous galaxies in the Universe – some could be more than 11.5 billion light-years away. The $300 million spacecraft is expected to launch in 2009.
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New Crew Exploration Vehicle Named Orion
NASA officially announced today that the crew exploration vehicle will be named Orion. This is the new capsule that will first take astronauts to the International Space Station by 2014, and fly to the Moon by 2020. The agency also recently renamed the crew launch rocket Ares, and the larger cargo rocket Ares V. Orion will be capable of carrying 6 astronauts to the space station, or 4 astronauts to the Moon.
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NASA Invests in SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler
NASA has announced a $500 million investment in two aerospace companies: SpaceX and Rocketplane-Kistler to help develop vehicles capable of resupplying the International Space Station after the Space Shuttle is retired. The funding is split between the two companies, and requires them to meet a series of milestones as they develop their vehicles between now and the end of the decade. 20 companies originally submitted proposals to win the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) demonstration program contact.
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James Van Allen Dies
Renowned space scientist Dr. James A. Van Allen died this morning at the age of 91. Although he had a lifetime’s worth of contributions to astronomy, space science and space exploration, Dr. Allen was best known for his discovery of the radiation belts that surround the Earth. An experiment he designed for the spacecraft Explorer 1 gauged the Van Allen belts using tiny Geiger counters to measure radiation. He retired from full time teaching at the University of Iowa in 1985, but continued to write, oversee research, and monitor data sent back by spacecraft he was involved with.
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Genesis 1 Carrying a NASA Experiment
Bigelow Aerospace’s inflatable Genesis 1 habitat has a stowaway on board; an experiment for NASA called Genebox. This shoebox-sized experiment will allow NASA to measure the effects of near weightlessness on the genetic structure of microorganisms. Although this is the first Genebox, NASA is planning to launch several of them over the next few years as part of the Vision for Space Exploration.
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NASA Renames New Exploration Vehicles
NASA announced its new names for the next generation of its human space exploration program, which will return astronauts to the surface of the Moon. The crew vehicle is named Ares I, and the cargo launcher is now named Ares V. The Ares I will carry just the crew exploration vehicle and astronauts into orbit, while the much larger Ares V will carry the cargo and equipment. Once in orbit, the crew exploration vehicle will link up with the cargo to travel on to the Moon.
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$250,000 Prize for Semi-Autonomous Robots
As part of its Centennial Challenges, NASA has encouraged inventors from outside the agency to demonstrate out of the box thinking. So far they’ve created challenges to craft better gloves, dig lunar soil, and power climbing robots. The next challenge is called the Telerobotic Construction Challenge, and offers a $250,000 purse to the team that can get their remote-controlled robots to build structures… on Mars. Of course, the robots won’t actually be on Mars, but for the teams involved, it’ll sure feel like they’re a world away.
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