Space and astronomy news
Various forms of hopping robots have crept into development for us[e in different space exploration missions. We’ve reported on their use on asteroids and even our own Moon. But a study funded by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) in 2018 planned a mission to a type of world where hopping may not be as noticeable an advantage—Europa.
Continue reading “A Hopping Robot Could Explore Europa Using Locally Harvested Water”
Moving large amounts of regolith is a requirement for any long-term mission to the Moon or Mars. But so far, humanity has only sent systems capable of moving small amounts of soil at a time – primarily for sample collection. Sending a large, dedicated excavator to perform such work might be cost-prohibitive due to its weight, so why not send a bulldozer attachment to a mobility unit already planned for use on the surface? That was the thought process of an interdisciplinary team of engineers from NASA and the Colorado School of Mines. They came up with the Lunar Attachment Node for Construction and Excavation – or LANCE.
Continue reading “A Handy Attachment Could Make Lunar Construction a Breeze”
CubeSats are becoming ever more popular, with around 2,400 total launched so far. However, the small size limits their options for fundamental space exploration technologies, including propulsion. They become even more critical when mission planners design missions that require them to travel to other planets or even asteroids. A team from Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi recently released a review of the different Cubesat propulsion technologies currently available – let’s look at their advantages and disadvantages.
Continue reading “CubeSat Propulsion Technologies are Taking Off”
It seems like every month, a new story appears announcing the discovery of thousands of new asteroids. Tracking these small body objects from ground and even space-based telescopes helps follow their overall trajectory. But understanding what they’re made of is much more difficult using such “remote sensing” techniques. To do so, plenty of projects get more up close and personal with the asteroid itself, including one from Dr. Sigrid Elschot and her colleagues from Stanford, which was supported by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts back in 2018. It uses an advanced suite of plasma sensors to detect an asteroid’s surface composition by utilizing a unique phenomenon – meteoroid impacts.
Continue reading “Swarms of Orbiting Sensors Could Map An Asteroid’s Surface”
Getting to Proxima Centauri b will take a lot of new technologies, but there are increasingly exciting reasons to do so. Both public and private efforts have started seriously looking at ways to make it happen, but so far, there has been one significant roadblock to the journey – propulsion. To solve that problem, Christopher Limbach, now a professor at the University of Michigan, received a grant from NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) to work on a novel type of beamed propulsion that utilizes both a particle beam and a laser to overcome that technology’s biggest weakness.
Continue reading “A Concentrated Beam of Particles and Photons Could Push Us to Proxima Centauri”
Over the years we have often seen astronauts gently and deftly moving structures into place with their bare hands. Thinks are easy to move in space but getting them there is slightly more tricky and costly. A new piece of research has explored the possibility of growing structures in space based on food substrates. NASA has now awarded a grant to a proposal to investigate further growing structures using fungal mycelial composites, that’s mushrooms to you and I.
Continue reading “Growing Habitats and Furniture in Space Out of Mushrooms”
NASA is very interested in developing a propulsion method to allow spacecraft to go faster. We’ve reported several times on different ideas to support that goal, and most of the more successful have utilized the Sun’s gravity well, typically by slingshotting around it, as is commonly done with Jupiter currently. But, there are still significant hurdles when doing so, not the least of which is the energy radiating from the Sun simply vaporizing anything that gets close enough to utilize a gravity assist. That’s the problem a project supported by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) and run by Jason Benkoski, now of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is trying to solve.
Continue reading “Slingshotting Around the Sun Would Make a Spacecraft the Faster Ever”
The Moon is a tough place to survive, and not just for humans. The wild temperature extremes between day and night make it extremely difficult to build reliable machinery that will continue to operate. But an engineering team from Nagoya University in Japan have developed an energy-efficient new way to control Loop Heat Pipes (LHP) to safely cool lunar rovers. This will extend their lifespan, keeping them running for extended lunar exploration missions.
Continue reading “A New Way to Survive the Harsh Lunar Night”
Will future humans use warp drives to explore the cosmos? We’re in no position to eliminate the possibility. But if our distant descendants ever do, it won’t involve dilithium crystals, and Scottish accents will have evaporated into history by then.
Continue reading “Warp Drives Could Generate Gravitational Waves”
There are plenty of problems that spacecraft designers have to consider. Getting smacked in the sensitive parts by a rock is just one of them, but it is a very important one. A micrometeoroid hitting the wrong part of the spacecraft could jeopardize an entire mission, and the years of work it took to get to the point where the mission was actually in space in the first place. But even if the engineers who design spacecraft know about this risk, how is it best to avoid them? A new programming library from research at NASA could help.
Continue reading “NASA has a New Database to Predict Meteoroid Hazards for Spaceflight”