Tag Archives: NASA

Debris from International Space Station destroyed a home in Naples, Florida

Space-Station-debris-Florida-House

Important Takeaways:

  • According to the owner, Alejandro Otero, the massive object ripped through the roof and both floors of his two-story house.
  • The debris included depleted batteries, attached to a cargo pallet that was initially intended for a controlled return to Earth.
  • However, due to a series of delays, the cargo pallet missed its scheduled return, prompting NASA to release the batteries from the space station in 2021 for an unguided reentry.
  • NASA didn’t expect anything to survive re-entry

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Asteroid “God of Chaos” or “Apophis” will come closest to earth than any in recorded history in April of 2029

God-of-Chaos-asteroid

Important Takeaways:

  • The Apophis asteroid, also called the “God of Chaos,” is expected to fly by Earth in April of 2029. But it is also projected to come closer than any asteroid in recorded history which has caused NASA to launch a mission studying the asteroid.
  • According to NASA, Apophis is expected to come as close as 20,000 miles to Earth on April 13, 2029. It noted this is “closer than some satellites, and close enough that it could be visible to the naked eye in the Eastern Hemisphere.”
  • It is approximately 367 yards, and coming so close to Earth it may change the asteroid’s surface, potentially causing landslides and quakes.
  • The newly named OSIRUS-APEX mission will utilize the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft… for this new mission due to the spacecraft’s good condition and the opportunity presented by the close encounter.
  • OSIRUS-REx finished a 4-billion-mile mission to collect samples of asteroid Bennu in September.
  • “OSIRIS-APEX will study Apophis immediately after such a pass, allowing us to see how its surface changes by interacting with Earth’s gravity.”
  • “We know that tidal forces and the accumulation of rubble pile material are foundational processes that could play a role in planet formation. They could inform how we got from debris in the early solar system to full-blown planets,” she added.
  • OSIRIS-APEX’s research will also involve planetary defense strategies to aid scientists in working toward effective methods of combating or preventing catastrophic asteroid collisions with Earth.

Read the original article by clicking here.

Satellite images show water level dropping in Lake Mead

2 Chronicles 7:13-14 When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command the locust to devour the land, or send pestilence among my people, if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

Important Takeaways:

  • Staggering NASA satellite images show how Lake Mead has receded over the last 22 years as it drops to lowest level since 1937 Dust Bowl: Area’s ‘worst drought in 12 CENTURIES’
  • New satellite images show a drastic drop in water levels at Nevada’s Lake Mead over the years – as the area grapples with what may be one of the worst droughts in US history
  • The startling images come as it’s been revealed the historic lake – a reservoir formed by the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River – has dropped to its lowest level in 85 years during the Dust Bowl in April 1937
  • The photos released by NASA Thursday show the lake’s shrinking shoreline over the past two decades – a result of a more than 20-yearlong megadrought in the southwestern US
  • The images are startling, chiefly due the body of water provides hydration to millions of residents of seven states in the region – California, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada and Wyoming

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NASA predicts a Solar Storm to hit Earth July 19

Mathew 24:29 “Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken

Important Takeaways:

  • Leading space science expert predicts a ‘direct hit’ on Earth from a solar storm
  • It has been a busy time for solar activity. Back in March of 2022, Earth was hit by separate geomagnetic storms, according to government weather agencies in the U.S. and the U.K.
  • Then earlier this month, a G1-class geomagnetic storm hit the Earth, causing bright auroras over Canada. The only problem is that nobody saw this storm coming until it was quite late.
  • Five days ago, a giant sunspot and filaments on the solar surface had astronomers worried about possible Earth-directed solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that could lead to blackouts.
  • Finally, on Friday, it was reported that a massive solar flare had erupted from the Sun, which could see radio blackouts in many parts of the world.
  • Now, on Saturday, Dr. Tamitha Skov, known as the “Space Weather Woman,” predicted a “direct hit” from a solar storm to take place on Tuesday. She took to social media to share the news along with a NASA prediction model video.
  • “Direct Hit!” she wrote on Twitter. “A snake-like filament launched as a big solar storm while in the Earth-strike zone.”
  • “NASA predicts impact early July 19

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Launch of NASA’s new space telescope delayed until Christmas Day

By Steve Gorman

(Reuters) -Liftoff of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, designed to peer farther than ever into the universe, has been delayed until Christmas Day at the earliest, due to poor weather at the launch site on South America’s northeastern coast, the space agency said on Tuesday.

The 24-hour weather delay at the Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana follows a two-day postponement from an earlier Dec. 22 targeted launch window caused by electronic communications difficulties between the launch vehicle and its payload, according to NASA.

Encapsulation of the powerful infrared telescope inside the cargo bay of an Ariane 5 rocket was completed on Dec. 17. The rocket is now poised for blastoff between 7:20 a.m. and 7:52 a.m. EST (1220-1253 GMT) on Saturday.

If all goes according to plan, the $9 billion instrument will be released from the rocket after a 26-minute ride into space. It will then take the Webb telescope a month to coast to its destination in solar orbit roughly 1 million miles from Earth – about four times the distance from the moon.

By comparison, Webb’s 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, orbits the Earth itself from 340 miles away.

Named for NASA’s chief during most of the 1960’s, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than Hubble and is expected to revolutionize astronomers’ understanding of the universe and our place in it.

Webb mainly will view the cosmos in the infrared spectrum, allowing it to gaze through clouds of gas and dust where stars are being born, while Hubble has operated primarily at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.

The new telescope’s primary mirror – consisting of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal – also has a much bigger light-collecting area, enabling it to observe objects at greater distances, thus farther back into time, than Hubble.

That advance, astronomers say, will bring into view a glimpse of the cosmos never previously seen – dating back to just 100 million years after the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that set in motion the expansion of the observable universe an estimated 13.8 billion years ago.

Webb’s instruments also make it ideal to search for potentially life-supporting atmospheres around scores of newly documented exoplanets – celestial bodies orbiting distant stars – and to observe worlds much closer to home, such as Mars and Saturn’s icy moon Titan.

The telescope is an international collaboration led by NASA in partnership with the European and Canadian space agencies. Northrop Grumman Corp was the primary contractor. The Ariane launch vehicle is part of the European contribution.

(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Leslie Adler)

NASA launches test mission of asteroid-deflecting spacecraft

By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -A spacecraft that must ultimately crash to succeed was launched late on Tuesday from California on a NASA mission to demonstrate the world’s first planetary defense system, designed to deflect an asteroid from a potential doomsday collision with Earth.

The DART spacecraft soared into the night sky at 10:21 p.m. Pacific time on Tuesday (1:21 a.m. Eastern/0621 GMT Wednesday) from Vandenberg U.S. Space Force Base, about 150 miles northwest of Los Angeles, carried aboard a SpaceX-owned Falcon 9 rocket.

The launch was shown live on NASA TV.

The DART payload, about the size of a vending machine, was released from the booster a few minutes after launch to begin a 10-month journey into space, some 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth.

Moments later the rocket’s reusable lower stage flew back to Earth and safely touched down on a landing vessel floating in the Pacific in what has become a routine part of the cost-cutting launch sequence pioneered by SpaceX.

DART will fly under the guidance of NASA’s flight directors until the last hours of its odyssey, when control will be handed over to an autonomous on-board navigation system.

The mission’s finale will test spacecraft’s ability to alter an asteroid’s trajectory with sheer kinetic force, plowing into it at high speed to nudge the space boulder off course just enough to keep our planet out of harm’s way.

Cameras mounted on the impactor and on a briefcase-sized mini-spacecraft to be released from DART about 10 days beforehand will record the collision and beam images of it back to Earth.

The asteroid that DART is aiming for poses no actual threat and is tiny compared with the cataclysmic Chicxulub asteroid that struck Earth some 66 million years ago, leading to extinction of the dinosaurs. But scientists say smaller asteroids are far more common and of greater theoretical concern in the near term.

DART’s target is an asteroid “moonlet” the size of a football stadium that orbits a chunk of rock five times larger in a binary asteroid system named Didymos, the Greek word for twin.

The team behind DART, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, chose the Didymos system because its relative proximity to Earth and dual-asteroid configuration make it ideal for observing the results of the impact.

BUMPING ASTEROID MOONLET

The plan is to fly the DART spacecraft directly into the moonlet, called Dimorphos, at 15,000 miles per hour (24,000 kph), bumping it hard enough to shift its orbital track around the larger asteroid.

Cameras on the impactor and on a briefcase-sized mini-spacecraft released from DART about 10 days beforehand will record the collision and beam images back to Earth. Ground-based telescopes will measure how much the moonlet’s orbit around Didymos changes.

The DART team expects to shorten Dimorphos’ orbital track by 10 minutes but would consider at least 73 seconds a success. A small nudge to an asteroid millions of miles away would be sufficient to safely reroute it.

DART is the latest of several NASA missions of recent years to explore and interact with asteroids, primordial rocky remnants from the solar system’s formation 4.6 billion years ago.

Last month, NASA launched a probe on a voyage to the Trojan asteroid clusters orbiting near Jupiter, while the grab-and-go spacecraft OSIRES-REx is on its way back to Earth with a sample collected last October from the asteroid Bennu.

The Dimorphos moonlet is one of the smallest astronomical objects to receive a permanent name and is one of 27,500 known near-Earth asteroids of all sizes tracked by NASA.

Although all none poses a foreseeable hazard to humankind, NASA estimates many more asteroids remain undetected in the near-Earth vicinity.

The DART spacecraft, cube-shaped with two rectangular solar arrays, is due to rendezvous with the Didymos-Dimorphos pair in late September 2022.

NASA put the entire cost of the DART project at $330 million, well below that of many of the space agency’s most ambitious science missions.

(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; editing by Gerry Doyle)

Partial lunar eclipse dubbed ‘Blood Moon’ dazzles night skies

(Reuters) – The longest partial lunar eclipse in a millennium dazzled night skies around the world on Friday, in an event dubbed the ‘Blood Moon’ due to its red haze.

The partial eclipse, which lasted 3 hours, 28 minutes and 23 seconds, is the longest since February 18, 1440, according to NASA.

Stunning views of the partial lunar eclipse could be seen in parts of the United States, Asia and South America.

During the eclipse, up to 99.1% of the Moon’s disk was within Earth’s darkest shadow, NASA said.

Missed it? You will have to wait until 2669 before you can see a partial lunar eclipse that is longer than this one. However, there will be a longer total lunar eclipse in November of next year.

(Reporting by Eduardo Munoz; editing by Diane Craft)

NASA’s astrobiology rover Perseverance makes historic Mars landing

By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – NASA’s science rover Perseverance, the most advanced astrobiology laboratory ever sent to another world, streaked through the Martian atmosphere on Thursday and landed safely on the floor of a vast crater, its first stop on a search for traces of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.

Mission managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles burst into applause and cheers as radio signals confirmed that the six-wheeled rover had survived its perilous descent and arrived within its target zone inside Jezero Crater, site of a long-vanished Martian lake bed.

The robotic vehicle sailed through space for nearly seven months, covering 293 million miles (472 million km) before piercing the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour (19,000 km per hour) to begin its approach to touchdown on the planet’s surface.

The spacecraft’s self-guided descent and landing during a complex series of maneuvers that NASA dubbed “the seven minutes of terror” stands as the most elaborate and challenging feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight.

“It really is the beginning of a new era,” NASA’s associate administrator for science, Thomas Zurbuchen, said earlier in the day during NASA’s webcast of the event.

The landing represented the riskiest part of two-year, $2.7 billion endeavor whose primary aim is to search for possible fossilized signs of microbes that may have flourished on Mars some 3 billion years ago, when the fourth planet from the sun was warmer, wetter and potentially hospitable to life.

Scientists hope to find biosignatures embedded in samples of ancient sediments that Perseverance is designed to extract from Martian rock for future analysis back on Earth – the first such specimens ever collected by humankind from another planet.

Two subsequent Mars missions are planned to retrieve the samples and return them to NASA in the next decade.

Thursday’s landing came as a triumph for a pandemic-weary United States in the grips of economic dislocation caused by the COVID-19 public health crisis.

SEARCH FOR ANCIENT LIFE

NASA scientists have described Perseverance as the most ambitious of nearly 20 U.S. missions to Mars dating back to the Mariner spacecraft’s 1965 fly-by.

Larger and packed with more instruments than the four Mars rovers preceding it, Perseverance is set to build on previous findings that liquid water once flowed on the Martian surface and that carbon and other minerals altered by water and considered precurors to the evolution of life were present.

Perseverance’s payload also includes demonstration projects that could help pave the way for eventual human exploration of Mars, including a device to convert the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into pure oxygen.

The box-shaped tool, the first built to extract a natural resource of direct use to humans from an extraterrestrial environment, could prove invaluable for future human life support on Mars and for producing rocket propellant to fly astronauts home.

Another experimental prototype carried by Perseverance is a miniature helicopter designed to test the first powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet. If successful, the 4-pound (1.8-kg) helicopter could lead to low-altitude aerial surveillance of distant worlds, officials said.

The daredevil nature of the rover’s descent to the Martian surface, at a site that NASA described as both tantalizing to scientists and especially hazardous for landing, was a momentous achievement in itself.

The multi-stage spacecraft carrying the rover soared into the top of Martian atmosphere at nearly 16 times the speed of sound on Earth, angled to produce aerodynamic lift while jet thrusters adjusted its trajectory.

A jarring, supersonic parachute inflation further slowed the descent, giving way to deployment of a rocket-powered “sky crane” vehicle that flew to a safe landing spot, lowered the rover on tethers, then flew off to crash a safe distance away.

Perseverance’s immediate predecessor, the rover Curiosity, landed in 2012 and remains in operation, as does the stationary lander InSight, which arrived in 2018 to study the deep interior of Mars.

Last week, separate probes launched by the United Arab Emirates and China reached Martian orbit. NASA has three Mars satellites still in orbit, along with two from the European Space Agency.

(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Will Dunham)

Branson’s Virgin Orbit reaches space with key mid-air rocket launch

By Joey Roulette

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit reached space for the first time on Sunday with a successful test of its air-launched rocket, delivering ten NASA satellites to orbit and achieving a key milestone after aborting the rocket’s first test launch last year.

The Long Beach, California-based company’s LauncherOne rocket was dropped mid-air from the underside of a modified Boeing 747 nicknamed Cosmic Girl some 35,000 feet over the Pacific at 11:39 a.m. PT before lighting its NewtonThree engine to boost itself out of Earth’s atmosphere, demonstrating its first successful trek to space.

“According to telemetry, LauncherOne has reached orbit!” the company announced on Twitter during the test mission, dubbed Launch Demo 2. “In both a literal and figurative sense, this is miles beyond how far we reached in our first Launch Demo.”

Roughly two hours after its Cosmic Girl carrier craft took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in southern California, the rocket, a 70-foot launcher tailored for carrying small satellites to space, successfully placed 10 tiny satellites in orbit for NASA, the company said on Twitter.

The rocket, a 70-foot launcher tailored for carrying small satellites to space, aimed to place 10 tiny satellites in orbit for NASA roughly two hours into the mission, though Virgin Orbit had not confirmed whether they were deployed as planned.

The successful test and clean payload deployment was a needed double-win for Virgin Orbit, which last year failed its attempt to reach space when LauncherOne’s main engine shut down prematurely moments after releasing from its carrier aircraft. The shortened mission generated key test data for the company, it said.

Sunday’s test also thrusts Virgin Orbit into an increasingly competitive commercial space race, offering a unique “air-launch” method of sending satellites to orbit alongside rivals such as Rocket Lab and Firefly Aerospace, which have designed small-launch systems to inject smaller satellites into orbit and meet growing demand.

Virgin executives say high-altitude launches allow satellites to be placed in their intended orbit more efficiently and also minimize weather-related cancellations compared to more traditional rockets launched vertically from a ground pad.

Virgin Orbit’s government services subsidiary VOX Space LLC is selling launches using the system to the U.S. military, with a first mission slated for October under a $35 million U.S. Space Force contract for three missions.

(Reporting by Joey Roulette in Washington; Editing by Eric M. Johnson and Daniel Wallis)

SpaceX to launch astronaut crew in first operational mission

By Joey Roulette

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Elon Musk’s SpaceX is poised to send a crew of four astronauts to the International Space Station on Saturday evening in NASA’s first operational mission using the Crew Dragon capsule.

The Crew Dragon capsule, named “Resilience” by its crew, is due to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 7:49 p.m. ET on Saturday (0049 GMT on Sunday) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida carrying three U.S. astronauts and one from Japan, Soichi Noguchi.

The roughly eight-hour flight to the station will be SpaceX’s first operational mission, as opposed to a test, after NASA officials this week signed off on Crew Dragon’s design, ending a nearly 10-year development phase for SpaceX under the agency’s public-private crew program.

“The history being made this time is we’re launching what we call an operational flight to the International Space Station,”  NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said during a press conference at Kennedy Space Center.

Musk, who usually attends high-profile SpaceX missions in person at Kennedy Space Center, said Thursday that he took four coronavirus tests on the same day, with two returning negative and two producing positive results.

Bridenstine, asked on Friday if Musk will be in the launch control room for liftoff on Saturday, said agency policy requires employees to quarantine and self-isolate after testing positive for the disease, “so we anticipate that that will be taking place.”

Whether Musk came into contact with the astronauts was unclear, but unlikely since the crew has been in routine quarantine for weeks prior to their flight on Saturday.

NASA contracted SpaceX and Boeing in 2014 to develop competing space capsules aimed at replacing its shuttle program that ended in 2011 and weaning off dependence on Russian rockets to send U.S. astronauts to space.

SpaceX’s final test of its capsule came in August, after the company launched and returned the first astronauts from U.S. soil on a trip to the ISS in nearly a decade. Boeing’s first crewed test mission with its Starliner capsule is planned for late next year.

(Reporting by Joey Roulette; editing by Bill Tarrant and Diane Craft)