Invest in NASA's Artemis mission and hitch a ride to Moon, US announces at IAC 2019

The lunar space station US intends to build will have a lifetime of at least 15 years, the NASA chief said.

Several countries want their astronauts to hitch a ride with the United States on its next set of lunar missions, but the second nation to have Moon boots on the ground will depend on how much they contribute, NASA's chief said Thursday.

The United States plans to return to the Moon under the Artemis program in order to set up a long-term colony and test technologies for a crewed mission to Mars; it is inviting international partners to take part.

"You can imagine there are going to be a lot of countries to step up to the plate at a level that would say, 'OK, that warrants having an astronaut on the surface of the Moon," Jim Bridenstine said, speaking at the 70th International Astronautical Congress in Washington.

The European Space Agency (ESA) and Japan's space agency have publicly announced they'd like their astronauts to participate in Artemis. It foresees the next set of astronauts on the Moon by 2024 with further missions to follow.

"The goal is to have many different nations living and working on the Moon at the same time," said Bridenstine.

Fifteen countries (the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan, and several European states) collaborate on the International Space Station (ISS) and astronauts of 19 nationalities have stayed there. In the case of the European Space Agency, the partnership is based on barter and in-kind contributions.

Bridenstine said he was not sure if non-Americans would join from the second landing onward, and that it would depend on what they learned from the first.

"But certainly there's plenty of opportunities when this is sustainable," he said.

And he reaffirmed that the mini lunar space station that the Americans intend to build, called Gateway, will have a lifetime of at least 15 years, and an "open architecture," meaning the standards for docking ports, life support, and communications will be open source.

"Small countries, large countries private companies, they can build their own landers, and they can send people to the Moon," he said.

NASA's Artemis program aims to put first woman on moon

NASA's Artemis program to return astronauts to the moon is to include eight rocket launches to put a mini space station in lunar orbit by 2024. That's when it hopes to land its first female astronaut on lunar soil.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced late Wednesday that an Orion capsule named Artemis 3 would put astronauts back on the moon in 2024, including a woman crew member.

Artemis, named after a Greek goddess, is to be the follow-on to Apollo — the six-flight moonshot program that put 12 men on the Earth's satellite five decades ago. The last astronaut to walk on the moon's surface was Eugene Cernan in 1972.

Bridenstine's announcement included the naming of private firm Maxar Technologies to build the "power and propulsion element" for the lunar orbiting outpost that would be called "Gateway." It is to be powered by huge solar energy panels.

Still undecided, he said, was who would build the lander to transport crews from the outpost to the moon's surface and back to Gateway.

"We're not owning the hardware; we're buying the service, said Bridenstine, adding that time until 2024 was relatively short and that the ultimate goal was to reach Mars.

Contenders for the lander include Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Blue Origin, an offshoot of Amazon chief Jeff Bezos.

NASA executive resigns

Meanwhile, the NASA executive hired just six weeks ago to oversee the lunar program, Mark Sirangelo, resigned on Thursday. His plans to set up a separate directorate for the lunar campaign within NASA were rejected by the US Congress, prompting him to quit.

"So, we will move forward under our current organizational structure...," Bridenstine said in a statement.

Flights for assemble orbiting platform

To assemble Gateway, five building block launches using the Boeing-led Space Launch System (SLS) rocket — currently under development — were planned, said the NASA chief.

Artemis 1 would be an uncrewed mission around the moon in 2020. Artemis 2 would be crewed and orbit the moon in 2022. Artemis 3 would bring astronauts to the orbiting mini-station in 2024 prior to a lunar surface and return to Gateway.

Alarm over funding source

Last week, educators reacted with alarm over news that President Donald Trump's White House, including Vice President Mike Pence, wanted to source extra funds for space exploration from the so-called Pell Grant, which provides grants for college students.

NASA finds more Earth-sized planets that could support life

The planets are likely the right size and right temperature to support complex life. The Kepler planet-searching telescope has detected nearly 50 such planets in one small part of the observable universe.

NASA said Monday its Kepler Space Telescope mission discovered 10 new rocky, Earth-like planets outside of our solar system which

Are we alone?

 Maybe Kepler today has told us indirectly, although we need confirmation, that we are probably not alone," said Kepler scientist Mario Perez. Those 10 planets were orbiting suns at a similar distance to Earth's orbit around the sun.

This distance is considered the "Goldilocks Zone" - not too close, not too far away from the sun, just right to support life.

 Seven of these planets were circling stars similar to our sun. This does not mean life of any complexity has been found on these planets, but the chances that Earth is the only planet that supports life are dwindling.

  "It implies that Earth-size planets in the habitable zone around sun-like stars are not rare,

" Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb wrote in an email to the AP news agency. Loeb was not part of the Kepler research team. Kepler also discovered 209 other planets, scientists announced Monday.

 More planets than expected The Kepler telescope has detected nearly 50 planets in the Goldilocks Zone in four years of searching. The Kepler telescope only looked at a small part of the Milky Way galaxy.

The telescope studied about 150,000 stars, while the Milky Way contains hundreds of billions of stars.

Before Kepler was launched in 2009, astronomers hoped there would be Earth-like planets around about 1 percent of stars. Scientists involved with the Kepler telescope said that number is closer to 60 percent this weekend. "This number could have been very, very small," said Caltech astronomer Courtney Dressing. "I, for one, am ecstatic."

 The Kepler telescope will soon make way for its successor. The Transisting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will observe the brightest 200,000 nearby stars for two years starting next year. The James Webb Space telescope, which will replace the

Hubble telescope next year, will be able to detect the make-up of atmospheres of exoplanets. The James Webb telescope will also be able to determine the possibility of finding potential life forms. kbd/rc (AFP, AP, Reuters)

  

NASA SCIENTISTS GET UNPRECEDENTED VIEW AS BLACK HOLE RIPS APART A STAR

Nasa has managed to get an unprecedented view of a black holeripping apart a star.

 The new observations – which allowed scientists to see the cataclysmic phenomenon as it happened – mark the first ever time that scientists have been able to watch the intense event directly in such a way. Such events are called tidal disruptions and are incredibly rare, happening only once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a galaxy the size of our Milky Way

  It was spotted by Nasa's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. That was sent into space to look for other worlds, but allows researchers to look at other phenomena in the universe. “TESS data let us see exactly when this destructive event, named ASASSN-19bt, started to get brighter, which we’ve never been able to do

before,” said Thomas Holoien, a Carnegie Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California. “Because we identified the tidal disruption quickly with the ground-based All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), we were able to trigger multiwavelength follow-up observations in the first few days.

"The early data will be incredibly helpful for modelling the physics of these outbursts.” The event was first spotted by ASAS-SN, a worldwide network of 20 different telescopes at the beginning of the year.

As it did, it sent out an alert to international astronomers, so that they could track it themselves.
Holoien received that alert and pointed two telescopes towards the incident and asked for more to look that way too.
 
Nasa's TESS was already looking towards the right part of space. It spends its time watching vast parts of the sky known as sectors for 27 days each, with the aim of spotting moments where stars go dark that could indicate a planet has passed in front of them. 

Astronomers thought it might also be able to catch the earliest moments of flare-ups around stars, such as supernovae and tidal disruptions. And it did see this one:

first spotting a week before ASAS-SN saw it, but unable to tell Earth straight away because it sends back its data once every two weeks, and that must then be processed by Nasa.

  Researchers could then look back at that data and see the star as it was being torn up by the black hole.   “The early TESS data allow us to see light very close to the black hole, much closer than we’ve been able to see before,”

said Patrick Vallely, a co-author and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at OSU. “They also show us that ASASSN-19bt’s rise in brightness was very smooth, which helps us tell that the event was a tidal disruption and not another type of outburst, like from the center of a 

galaxy or a supernova.” Much about tidal disruptions is still mysterious to astronomers, but observations of this kind could shed more light on why they happen.

They are unclear about why they throw out so much UV emissions but so few X-rays, for instance. “People have suggested multiple theories — perhaps the light bounces through the newly created debris and loses energy, or maybe the disk forms further from

the black hole than we originally thought and the light isn’t so affected by the object’s extreme gravity,” said S. Bradley Cenko, Swift’s principal investigator at NASA’s
Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “More early-time observations of these events may help us answer some of these lingering questions.”


  

NASA LOOKING FOR SIGNS OF ALIEN LIFE ON PLANET AFTER SPACECRAFT MAKES BREAKTHROUGH DISCOVERY

Nasa will look for signs of life from a relative nearby planet after it was spotted by a brand new space telescope. The world – the first nearby super-earth spotted by the brand new Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (Tess) spacecraft – is one of three newly found exoplanets.

  The planet is known as GJ 357 d, and orbits a star around 31 light years away. It is close enough to that star to be in the “habitable zone”.

In this region, it is possible for liquid water to exist on the surface of a planet, although further research is needed to find out whether GJ 357 d’s atmosphere is dense and warm enough to host liquid water.

GJ 357 d is located within the outer edge of its star’s habitable zone, where it receives about the same amount of stellar energy from its star as Mars does from the sun,” said Diana Kossakowski, from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, who co-authored the paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

If the planet has a dense atmosphere, which will take future studies to determine, it could trap enough heat to warm the planet and allow liquid water on its surface.”

Lisa Kaltenegger, a professor of astronomy at Cornell University who published a separate paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggests the planet could harbour life. “This is exciting, as this is humanity’s first nearby super-earth that could harbour life – uncovered with help from Tess, our small, mighty mission with a huge reach,” she said. “With a thick atmosphere, the planet GJ 357 d could maintain liquid water on its surface like Earth and we could pick out signs of life with upcoming telescopes soon to be online.”

  GJ 357 d orbits its star every 55.7 days at a range of about 20 per cent of Earth’s distance from the sun, it is claimed. The three planets orbit a star known as GJ 357, an M-type dwarf, which is around 40 per cent cooler than our own sun and about a third of its mass and size.

Tess – Nasa technology used to discover exoplanets beyond our solar system – noticed the star dimming slightly every 3.9 days in February, a hint that planets were circulating around it. The nearest of the three planets, GJ 357 b, is around 22 per cent larger than Earth, orbiting its star 11 times closer than Mercury does to the sun. “We describe GJ 357 b as a ‘hot earth’,” said Enric Palle, an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands.

 Although it cannot host life, it is noteworthy as the third-nearest transiting exoplanet known to date and one of the best rocky planets we have for measuring the composition of any atmosphere it may possess.” The middle planet, GJ 357 c, has a mass at least 3.4 times Earth’s, and orbits around its star every 9.1 days.

NASA PLANS TO SEND ‘SHAPESHIFTER’ ROBOTS TO ALIEN WORLDS IN SEARCH OF LIFE

Nasa wants to send shapeshifting robots to the mysterious, alien moons around saturn.

 The space agency hopes that the visionary robots – which "turn ideas that sound like science fiction into science fact" – can finally help us learn more about the worlds' surface, as well as helping shed light on whether they could support alien life. The Shapeshifter robot is intended to head to Saturn's moon Titan, which is the only other place in our solar system known to have liquid in the form of methane lakes, rivers and seas that are on its surface, according to Ali Agha, principal investigator at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

  Nasa has already learnt about Titan through the flybys that were carried out by the Cassini mission, which journeyed past it more than a hundred times. As it did so, it mapped the surface, and found that it appeared strikingly similar to Earth, though its lakes and rain are made out of methane and ethane, which are gasses on Earth. But researchers still want to learn more about what is happening on that surface.

"We have very limited information about the composition of the surface," said Agha. "Rocky terrain, methane lakes, cryovolcanoes – we potentially have all of these, but we don't know for certain.

So we thought about how to create a system that is versatile and capable of traversing different types of terrain but also compact enough to launch on a rocket."

In order to examine that surface, Agha and the rest of the Shapeshifter team build a concept for a robot that is actually made out of a host of other smaller robots, called "cobots". Thoe cobots would include a small propeller and would be able to fly around the world independently, but also connect up to create long chains to dive deep under the surface, or group together into a ball to roll across and save energy.

The cobots are currently semi-autonomous, but Nasa will need to build cobots that can stick themselves together without being directed to do so from Earth. Agha imagines that the shapeshifters will drop out of a mothership, which would drop onto the surface by a parachute. That would serve as an energy source and also look afer the scientific instruments that can be used to analyse samples.

  The concept will be submitted to Nasa's Advanced Concepts​ Initiative in 2020, with the hope of having it approved for more work. But it may take many years until it arrives, with another of Nasa's spacecraft – known as Dragonfly – scheduled to launch in 2026.