Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
-
Similar Topics
-
By European Space Agency
ESA’s Mars Express has captured an astonishing array of landforms emerging from a thick winter blanket of frost as spring arrives in the south polar region of Mars. Some of these features are surprisingly dark compared with their icy surroundings, earning their nickname of ‘cryptic terrain’.
View the full article
-
By NASA
4 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
A major component of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope just took a spin on the centrifuge at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Called the Outer Barrel Assembly, this piece of the observatory is designed to keep the telescope at a stable temperature and shield it from stray light.
This structure, called the Outer Barrel Assembly, will surround and protect NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from stray light that could interfere with its observations. In this photo, engineers prepare the assembly for testing.NASA/Chris Gunn The two-part spin test took place in a large, round test chamber. Stretching across the room, a 600,000-pound (272,000-kilogram) steel arm extends from a giant rotating bearing in the center of the floor.
The test itself is like a sophisticated version of a popular carnival attraction, designed to apply centrifugal force to the rider — in this case, the outer covering for Roman’s telescope. It spun up to 18.4 rotations per minute. That may not sound like much, but it generated force equivalent to just over seven times Earth’s gravity, or 7 g, and sent the assembly whipping around at 80 miles per hour.
“We couldn’t test the entire Outer Barrel Assembly in the centrifuge in one piece because it’s too large to fit in the room,” said Jay Parker, product design lead for the assembly at Goddard. The structure stands about 17 feet (5 meters) tall and is about 13.5 feet (4 meters) wide. “It’s designed a bit like a house on stilts, so we tested the ‘house’ and ‘stilts’ separately.”
The “stilts” went first. Technically referred to as the elephant stand because of its similarity to structures used in circuses, this part of the assembly is designed to surround Roman’s Wide Field Instrument and Coronagraph Instrument like scaffolding. It connects the upper portion of the Outer Barrel Assembly to the spacecraft bus, which will maneuver the observatory to its place in space and support it while there. The elephant stand was tested with weights attached to it to simulate the rest of the assembly’s mass.
This photo shows a view from inside the Outer Barrel Assembly for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The inner rings, called baffles, will help protect the observatory’s primary mirror from stray light.NASA/Chris Gunn Next, the team tested the “house” — the shell and a connecting ring that surround the telescope. These parts of the assembly will ultimately be fitted with heaters to help ensure the telescope’s mirrors won’t experience wide temperature swings, which make materials expand and contract.
To further protect against temperature fluctuations, the Outer Barrel Assembly is mainly made of two types of carbon fibers mixed with reinforced plastic and connected with titanium end fittings. These materials are both stiff (so they won’t warp or flex during temperature swings) and lightweight (reducing launch demands).
If you could peel back the side of the upper portion –– the house’s “siding” –– you’d see another weight-reducing measure. Between inner and outer panels, the material is structured like honeycomb. This pattern is very strong and lowers weight by hollowing out portions of the interior.
Designed at Goddard and built by Applied Composites in Los Alamitos, California, Roman’s Outer Barrel Assembly was delivered in pieces and then put together in a series of crane lifts in Goddard’s largest clean room. It was partially disassembled for centrifuge testing, but will now be put back together and integrated with Roman’s solar panels and Deployable Aperture Cover at the end of the year.
In 2025, these freshly integrated components will go through thermal vacuum testing together to ensure they will withstand the temperature and pressure environment of space. Then they’ll move to a shake test to make sure they will hold up against the vibrations they’ll experience during launch. Toward the end of next year, they will be integrated with rest of the observatory.
To virtually tour an interactive version of the telescope, visit:
https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/interactive
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems, Inc in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
301-286-1940
Share
Details
Last Updated Oct 08, 2024 EditorJamie AdkinsContactClaire Andreoli Related Terms
Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Goddard Space Flight Center Science-enabling Technology Technology Explore More
2 min read Tech Today: Spraying for Food Safety
Article 19 hours ago 5 min read NASA: New Insights into How Mars Became Uninhabitable
NASA’s Curiosity rover, currently exploring Gale crater on Mars, is providing new details about how…
Article 20 hours ago 2 min read Hubble Observes a Peculiar Galaxy Shape
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the galaxy, NGC 4694. Most galaxies fall into…
Article 4 days ago View the full article
-
By NASA
5 min read
NASA: New Insights into How Mars Became Uninhabitable
NASA’s Curiosity rover, currently exploring Gale crater on Mars, is providing new details about how the ancient Martian climate went from potentially suitable for life – with evidence for widespread liquid water on the surface – to a surface that is inhospitable to terrestrial life as we know it.
This is an artist’s concept of an early Mars with liquid water (blue areas) on its surface. Ancient regions on Mars bear signs of abundant water – such as features resembling valleys and deltas, and minerals that only form in the presence of liquid water. Scientists think that billions of years ago, the atmosphere of Mars was much denser and warm enough to form rivers, lakes, and perhaps even oceans of water. As the planet cooled and lost its global magnetic field, the solar wind and solar storms eroded away to space a significant amount of the planet’s atmosphere, turning Mars into the cold, arid desert we see today. NASA/MAVEN/The Lunar and Planetary Institute Although the surface of Mars is frigid and hostile to life today, NASA’s robotic explorers at Mars are searching for clues as to whether it could have supported life in the distant past. Researchers used instruments on board Curiosity to measure the isotopic composition of carbon-rich minerals (carbonates) found in Gale crater and discovered new insights into how the Red Planet’s ancient climate transformed.
“The isotope values of these carbonates point toward extreme amounts of evaporation, suggesting that these carbonates likely formed in a climate that could only support transient liquid water,” said David Burtt of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of a paper describing this research published October 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Our samples are not consistent with an ancient environment with life (biosphere) on the surface of Mars, although this does not rule out the possibility of an underground biosphere or a surface biosphere that began and ended before these carbonates formed.”
Isotopes are versions of an element with different masses. As water evaporated, light versions of carbon and oxygen were more likely to escape into the atmosphere, while the heavy versions were left behind more often, accumulating into higher abundances and, in this case, eventually being incorporated into the carbonate rocks. Scientists are interested in carbonates because of their proven ability to act as climate records. These minerals can retain signatures of the environments in which they formed, including the temperature and acidity of the water, and the composition of the water and the atmosphere.
The paper proposes two formation mechanisms for carbonates found at Gale. In the first scenario, carbonates are formed through a series of wet-dry cycles within Gale crater. In the second, carbonates are formed in very salty water under cold, ice-forming (cryogenic) conditions in Gale crater.
“These formation mechanisms represent two different climate regimes that may present different habitability scenarios,” said Jennifer Stern of NASA Goddard, a co-author of the paper. “Wet-dry cycling would indicate alternation between more-habitable and less-habitable environments, while cryogenic temperatures in the mid-latitudes of Mars would indicate a less-habitable environment where most water is locked up in ice and not available for chemistry or biology, and what is there is extremely salty and unpleasant for life.”
These climate scenarios for ancient Mars have been proposed before, based on the presence of certain minerals, global-scale modeling, and the identification of rock formations. This result is the first to add isotopic evidence from rock samples in support of the scenarios.
The heavy isotope values in the Martian carbonates are significantly higher than what’s seen on Earth for carbonate minerals and are the heaviest carbon and oxygen isotope values recorded for any Mars materials. In fact, according to the team, both the wet-dry and the cold-salty climates are required to form carbonates that are so enriched in heavy carbon and oxygen.
“The fact that these carbon and oxygen isotope values are higher than anything else measured on Earth or Mars points towards a process (or processes) being taken to an extreme,” said Burtt. “While evaporation can cause significant oxygen isotope changes on Earth, the changes measured in this study were two to three times larger. This means two things: 1) there was an extreme degree of evaporation driving these isotope values to be so heavy, and 2) these heavier values were preserved so any processes that would create lighter isotope values must have been significantly smaller in magnitude.”
This discovery was made using the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) and Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS) instruments aboard the Curiosity rover. SAM heats samples up to nearly 1,652 degrees Fahrenheit (almost 900°C) and then the TLS is used to analyze the gases that are produced during that heating phase.
Funding for this work came from NASA’s Mars Exploration Program through the Mars Science Laboratory project. Curiosity was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. NASA Goddard built the SAM instrument, which is a miniaturized scientific laboratory that includes three different instruments for analyzing chemistry, including the TLS, plus mechanisms for handling and processing samples.
By William Steigerwald
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
Media contacts:
Nancy Neal-Jones/Andrew Good
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md./Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
301-286-0039/818-393-2433
nancy.n.jones@nasa.gov / andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Share
Details
Last Updated Oct 07, 2024 Editor wasteigerwald Contact wasteigerwald william.a.steigerwald@nasa.gov Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Astrobiology Mars Uncategorized Explore More
3 min read 2024 ASGSR Art Competition!
Article
5 days ago
6 min read Celebrating 10 Years at Mars with NASA’s MAVEN Mission
A decade ago, on Sept. 21, 2014, NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmospheric and Volatile EvolutioN) spacecraft…
Article
2 weeks ago
6 min read NASA’s Hubble, MAVEN Help Solve the Mystery of Mars’ Escaping Water
Article
1 month ago
View the full article
-
By European Space Agency
In a final test before its shipping to its Indian launch site, ESA’s eclipse-making double-satellite Proba-3 mission has received commands from its science team and transmitted images back, exactly as it will operate in orbit.
View the full article
-
By NASA
1 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Gateway’s Habitation and Logistics Outpost stands vertically inside a Thales Alenia Space facility in Turin, Italy, after completing static load testing. Thales Alenia Space Major Gateway hardware recently crossed an important testing milestone on its path to launch to the Moon, where it will support new science and house astronauts in lunar orbit.
Gateway’s HALO (Habitation and Logistics Outpost) successfully completed static load testing, a rigorous stress test of how well the structure responds to the forces encountered in deep space. Thales Alenia Space, subcontractor to Northrop Grumman, conducted the testing in Turin, Italy. Static load testing is one of the major environmental stress tests HALO will undergo, and once all phases of testing are complete, the module will be ready to move from Italy to Gilbert, Arizona, where Northrop Grumman will complete final outfitting.
HALO is one of four pressurized Gateway modules where astronauts will live, conduct science, and prepare for missions to the lunar South Pole region. It will launch with Gateway’s Power and Propulsion Element on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket to lunar orbit.
Gateway is humanity’s first lunar space station supporting a new era of exploration and scientific discovery as part of NASA’s Artemis campaign that will establish a sustained presence on and around the Moon, paving the way for the first crewed mission to Mars.
Gateway’s Habitation and Logistics Outpost stands vertically inside a Thales Alenia Space facility in Turin, Italy, after completing static load testing. Thales Alenia Space Learn More About Gateway Share
Details
Last Updated Oct 03, 2024 ContactBriana R. Zamorabriana.r.zamora@nasa.govLocationJohnson Space Center Related Terms
Gateway Space Station Artemis Earth's Moon Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate Gateway Program Humans in Space Johnson Space Center Explore More
2 min read Artemis IV: Gateway Gadget Fuels Deep Space Dining
Learn about the handy device NASA is developing to help astronauts rehydrate their meals aboard…
Article 4 weeks ago 2 min read Gateway: Energizing Exploration
Discover the cutting-edge technology powering Gateway, humanity's first lunar space station.
Article 1 month ago 3 min read Gateway: Up Close in Stunning Detail
Witness Gateway in stunning detail with this video that brings the future of lunar exploration…
Article 3 months ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
Gateway
Built with international and commercial partners, Gateway will be humanity’s first space station around the Moon as a vital component…
Orion Spacecraft
Space Launch System (SLS)
Human Landing System
View the full article
-
-
Check out these Videos
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.