Robotske misije

[bigvlada]

Ovo više nije tačno, sledeća velika misija će ići na Evropu. 

 

 

Topli izvori? Alge ispod leda? Plankton? Ribe? Ambis? :D 

[bigvlada]

Nasa spacecraft that found water on Mercury prepares to crash into planet
Messenger’s 11-year voyage of discovery to end on 30 April
Mission has forced rethink about origin of planet closest to sun

 

This artist’s rendering provided by Nasa shows the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (Messenger) spacecraft orbiting around Mercury. Photograph: AP

Alan Yuhas

Thursday 16 April 2015 21.01 BST

Mercury's 'dynamic and complex world' revealed by Nasa's Messenger



Preparing for the Messenger probe’s final days before it smashes into Mercury, Nasa presented its accomplishments on Thursday, including the discovery of water on the planet closest to the sun.

Eleven years after it launched, Messenger will end its mission on 30 April by crashing down, more than 4,100 orbits and four years after it reached its perch above and around the planet.

Among the mission’s biggest discoveries was that both of Mercury’s polar regions contain water ice despite the planet’s close proximity to the sun and daytime temperatures that can reach 800F (430F) elsewhere.

Data from Messenger also revealed that “most of these deposits don’t consist of water ice directly at the surface, but rather water-ice covered by a dark layer”, said Sean Solomon, Nasa’s principal investigator for the mission. That dark layer, roughly 30cm thick, is “much colder than the average mercury material”.

Solomon added that some hypotheses hold that “this dark material is in fact organic, carbonaceous material delivered to Mercury” from the outer solar system – meaning that the “the building blocks for organic chemistry and life” may be resting on the planet closest to the sun.

“We don’t see anything in the geological features that indicate running water as we see on Mars,” said the planetary science director, James Green. “It’s not likely on a regular basis that there’s liquid water on Mercury.”

The mysterious dark material may have come to the planet by way of debris from space crashing on to Mercury’s surface, in parallel to the idea that a comet or meteorites may have brought basic organic material to Earth.

That is not to say life has ever existed or ever will exist on a planet with conditions as inhospitable as those on Mercury, Solomon and his colleagues assured reporters. Sunlight is so powerful on Mercury that sodium in the atmosphere glows, and radiation so strong that the glowing sodium atoms give the planet an orange, comet-like tail.

Temperatures also drop to -290F (-180C) , and volcanoes and hollows dot the landscape.

Another of Nasa’s surprising discoveries on Mercury was that the planet is as “volatile rich” with elements and minerals as Mars or Earth, which directly contradicts what scientists had predicted. Nasa in part analyzed such materials by studying deposits exposed by volcanic eruptions.

The discovery of the surprisingly diverse makeup of Mercury means that scientists will have to overhaul their ideas of how the planet formed, and by extension how the solar system became the way it is.

Messenger has sent data about the volcanoes of Mercury and the chemistry of its lava, which may help solve the mysteries of the planet’s origin and “phenomenally dense” core.

Another mystery of the planet is its “offset magnetic field”. Unlike Earth, which has a magnetic field located at the center of the planet, Mercury’s field is strangely off to the planet’s side and more than 20% closer to the north pole, creating an asymmetrical field.

Nasa will continue collecting data from Messenger until the probe succumbs to Mercury’s gravity. The probe survived using solar power and reached its target after an odyssey that forced it to “borrow gravity” from other planets. Nasa “solar sailed” the spacecraft into Mercury’s range.

Green and Solomon said they hope for an eventual lander mission to Mercury, to analyze the dark material and electrical field patterns of the planet.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/16/nasa-spacecraft-mercury-messenger-water-crash

[Skyhighatrist]

An Asteroid Mining Test Vehicle Just Launched From The Space Station

Robo space miners, deploy!

 

 

Planetary Resources, a company that wants to mine asteroids for precious materials, has just launched a demonstration vehicle to test out its asteroid mining technologies.

 

The vehicle’s mission is to test out components that the company later plans to send into deep space to visit resource-rich asteroids, with the goal of extracting water, which can be broken down in to hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, and valuable metals, including platinum.

 

Over the next 90 days or so, the little spacecraft will test out its avionics and control systems--it won't actually be doing any drilling anytime soon.

[Indy]

Hehe, treba da mu nacrtaju zube i oči radi potpunog efekta.

[bigvlada]

The space submarine hunting the solar system for aliens

 

Scientists are designing a submarine to explore the mysterious methane seas of Saturn's moon Titan.

 

By Marcus Woo 

6 April 2016 

 

Among all the spacecraft designed to explore the Solar System, this one may be the coolest yet. It's not a lander or a rover, but a submarine – a vehicle with an instantly recognisable torpedo shape. But unlike any other submarine, this one is designed to explore the depths of extraterrestrial seas.

 

The destination is Titan, Saturn’s largest moon and the only other place in the Solar System with lots of liquid pooling on its surface. While Earth’s seas are water, Titan’s are filled with a mixture of methane and ethane – stuff that’s normally a gas on a warmer Earth. Titan is so cold – about -180C (-292F) – that these compounds are in liquid form, creating wet environments that could maybe, just maybe, harbour life.

 

The prime candidates for alien abodes would be Titan’s several dozen lakes and seas, the biggest being Kraken Mare. No one is quite sure how deep it is, but it likely plunges for hundreds of metres and spans as much as 400,000 square km – five times larger than Lake Superior in North America. And it’s where scientists want to send the Titan sub.

 

It’s unlikely that we will find alien fish swimming in Kraken Mare. But there could be microorganisms. In its hunt for habitability, the submarine would be diving into uncharted waters (or, rather, methane), exploring an alien world in a completely different way.

 

The first and only spacecraft to land on Titan was the European Huygens probe (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho)

 

 

The first and only spacecraft to land on Titan was the European Huygens probe, which, during its descent in 2005, gathered data on the atmosphere and clouds. It snapped the first pictures of the surface. For more than a decade, Nasa’s Cassini spacecraft has been studying the Saturnian system and Titan, probing its seas with radar and collecting basic data about the liquid surface. But their depths remain unexplored.

 

“We don’t know what else is in there,” says Steve Oleson, an engineer at Nasa’s Glenn Research Center who’s leading the sub’s design effort. “We could send a boat, but think about when people first explored our oceans. They had no idea what’s beneath the surface.”

 

The submarine is still just a concept. Last year, researchers finished the first stage of designing what such a vehicle might look like. So far, they’ve come up with a six-metre-long vessel that would spend 90 days traversing 3,000 kilometres of Kraken Mare, cruising at an average speed of just 1km/h. But that ability to explore many locations and environments is a submarine’s big advantage. The Mars Opportunity rover, in contrast, has gone fewer than 45km – and it’s been operating for 12 years.

 

The sub would survey the sediments that settled on the sea floor, and sample how the chemistry of the sea may be changing with depth. It would study the weather and the shorelines, searching for signs of sea level change and clues about Titan’s climate history. It would probe the chemistry and geology of a world that, in certain ways, is more similar to Earth than any other place in the Solar System.

 

Titan and Earth are the only two Solar-System worlds where rain (albeit methane rain for Titan) falls onto the surface, filling lakes and seas that are connected by rivers and tributaries. Unlike, for example, Mars’s wispy atmosphere or Venus’s crushingly thick layers of gas, Titan’s atmospheric pressure is only about one-and-a-half times greater than Earth's at sea level.

 

“It’s basically the same as the bottom of a municipal swimming pool,” says Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the leading scientist of the project. “In principle, a human being could walk around on the surface of Titan with a very thick parka and an oxygen mask.”

 

For more than a decade, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has been studying the Saturnian system and Titan (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

 

 

But what lies beneath is especially tantalising. Life as we know it requires liquid water, and scientists think you need some sort of liquid – like liquid methane – to coax life into existence.

 

“As to whether this could work or not, this is one of those problems where no amount of thinking and doing theory is going to solve,” says Jason Barnes, a planetary scientist at the University of Idaho who isn’t involved with the Titan submarine project. “We need to go there and make the measurements and do the experiments to find out.”

 

One way is to search for life-affirming chemical patterns. For example, the molecular building blocks of proteins, called amino acids, have structures that can be mirror images of each other. An amino acid can be left- or right-handed, Lorenz explains, and those associated with life on Earth all happen to be right-handed. The hypothesis is that any organisms in Titan seas would’ve evolved one or the other, and finding a preponderance of right- or left-handed amino acids could suggest life, Lorenz says.

 

 

The plan is for the submarine to explore Titan alone. But researchers may consider sending an orbiter to relay data and communications back to Earth. The team also needs to flesh out how the sub will get there. For now, they envision putting the sub onboard a mini space shuttle like the Boeing X-37 space plane. Titan’s atmosphere is thick enough that the craft can glide down onto Kraken Mare. It’ll then submerge while releasing the floating sub. 

 

And there are still engineering challenges. For example, nitrogen is dissolved in the seas, like the carbon dioxide in a can of Coke. The concern is that the warmth from the submarine’s radioactive-isotope power supply will cause the nitrogen to fizz. “If it bubbles even a little bit, the bubbles can build up and interfere with our science,” Oleson says.

 

Oceans of the Solar System

 

The hunt for oceans in space marks the beginning of a new search for life in our solar system.

 

Horizon explored the possibility of life-supporting alien oceans in 'Oceans of the Solar System'. You can see clips of the programme here, and like Horizon on Facebook.

 

But there's plenty of time to figure it all out. If the sub comes to fruition, it won’t launch until around 2040, splashing down on Kraken Mare in the mid 2040s – during the Titan summer, when the sun is up all day and there’s a direct line of communication to Earth. Then, finally, it’s time to set sail.

 

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160405-the-space-submarine-hunting-the-solar-system-for-aliens

Edited August 9, 2016 by bigvlada

[bigvlada]

Philae found

 

PHILAE FOUND!

5 September 2016

Less than a month before the end of the mission, Rosetta’s high-resolution camera has revealed the Philae lander wedged into a dark crack on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.

The images were taken on 2 September by the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera as the orbiter came within 2.7 km of the surface and clearly show the main body of the lander, along with two of its three legs.

The images also provide proof of Philae’s orientation, making it clear why establishing communications was so difficult following its landing on 12 November 2014.

Philae close-up

“With only a month left of the Rosetta mission, we are so happy to have finally imaged Philae, and to see it in such amazing detail,” says Cecilia Tubiana of the OSIRIS camera team, the first person to see the images when they were downlinked from Rosetta yesterday.

“After months of work, with the focus and the evidence pointing more and more to this lander candidate, I’m very excited and thrilled that we finally have this all-important picture of Philae sitting in Abydos,” says ESA’s Laurence O’Rourke, who has been coordinating the search efforts over the last months at ESA, with the OSIRIS and Lander Science Operations and Navigation Center (SONC, CNES) teams.

Philae was last seen when it first touched down at Agilkia, bounced and then flew for another two hours before ending up at a location later named Abydos, on the comet’s smaller lobe.

After three days, Philae's primary battery was exhausted and the lander went into hibernation, only to wake up again and communicate briefly with Rosetta in June and July 2015 as the comet came closer to the Sun and more power was available.

OSIRIS narrow-angle camera image with Philae, 2 September

However, until today, the precise location was not known. Radio ranging data tied its location down to an area spanning a few tens of metres, but a number of potential candidate objects identified in relatively low-resolution images taken from larger distances could not be analysed in detail until recently.

While most candidates could be discarded from analysis of the imagery and other techniques, evidence continued to build towards one particular target, which is now confirmed in images taken unprecedentedly close to the surface of the comet.

At 2.7 km, the resolution of the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera is about 5 cm/pixel, sufficient to reveal characteristic features of Philae’s 1 m-sized body and its legs, as seen in these definitive pictures.

Philae close-up, labelled

“This remarkable discovery comes at the end of a long, painstaking search,” says Patrick Martin, ESA’s Rosetta Mission Manager. “We were beginning to think that Philae would remain lost forever. It is incredible we have captured this at the final hour.”

“This wonderful news means that we now have the missing ‘ground-truth’ information needed to put Philae’s three days of science into proper context, now that we know where that ground actually is!” says Matt Taylor, ESA’s Rosetta project scientist.

"Now that the lander search is finished we feel ready for Rosetta's landing, and look forward to capturing even closer images of Rosetta's touchdown site,” adds Holger Sierks, principal investigator of the OSIRIS camera.

The discovery comes less than a month before Rosetta descends to the comet’s surface. On 30 September, the orbiter will be sent on a final one-way mission to investigate the comet from close up, including the open pits in the Ma’at region, where it is hoped that critical observations will help to reveal secrets of the body’s interior structure.

Further information on the search that led to the discovery of Philae, along with additional images, will be made available soon.

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Philae_found

 

 

[bigvlada]

[bigvlada]

Studija za lender za Evropu. Elektronika treba da bude tako oklopljena da može da izdrži 1700 časova na površini. 

 

 

 

 

[Indy]

 

Uh... ko dočeka - dočeka!

 

[Indy]

Quote

How to watch the OSIRIS-REx landing

For space enthusiasts wanting to witness this historic event, the capsule is scheduled to penetrate Earth's atmosphere on September 24, 2023, at a blistering speed of around 27,650 mph. For those eager to catch the action live, NASA will be broadcasting the landing starting 10 a.m. EDT on NASA TV, the NASA app, and on their official website.

OSIRIS-REx is bringing first-ever asteroid sample back to Earth in two weeks (24/9/23)

 

[Ayatollah]

 

[JozoMujica]

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Edited May 26 by JozoMujica