tech geek Space Exploration

[JamesSavik]

NASA Explores an Extreme Rover for Extreme Venus-- "No Spacecraft has survived its surface heat and sulfuric Acid for more than Two Hours"

27 AUG 2017

Daily Galaxy

 

By avoiding electronics, a NASA rover might be able to better explore Venus. The planet's hellish atmosphere creates pressures that would crush most submarines. Its average surface temperature is 864 degrees Fahrenheit (462 degrees Celsius), high enough to melt lead.

 

A good watch can take a beating and keep on ticking. With the right parts, can a rover do the same on a planet like Venus? A concept inspired by 'steampunk' clockwork computers and World War I tanks could one day help us find out. The design is being explored at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

 

"When you think of something as extreme as Venus, you want to think really out there," said Evan Hilgemann, a JPL engineer working on high temperature designs for AREE. "It's an environment we don't know much about beyond what we've seen in Soviet-era images."

 

The Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments (AREE) is funded for study by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program. The program offers small grants to develop early stage technology, allowing engineers to work out their ideas.

 

AREE was first proposed in 2015 by Jonathan Sauder, a mechatronics engineer at JPL. He was inspired by mechanical computers, which use levers and gears to make calculations rather than electronics.

 

Mechanical computers have been used throughout history, most often as mathematical tools like adding machines. The most famous might be Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, a 19th century invention for calculating algebraic equations. The oldest known is the Antikythera mechanism, a device used by ancient Greeks to predict astronomical phenomena like eclipses.

 

Mechanical computers were also developed as works of art. For hundreds of years, clockwork mechanisms were used to create automatons for wealthy patrons. In the 1770s, a Swiss watchmaker named Pierre Jaquet-Droz created "The Writer," an automaton that could be programmed to write any combination of letters.

 

Sauder said these analog technologies could help where electronics typically fail. In extreme environments like the surface of Venus, most electronics will melt in high temperatures or be corroded by sulfuric acid in the atmosphere.

 

"Venus is too inhospitable for kind of complex control systems you have on a Mars rover," Sauder said. "But with a fully mechanical rover, you might be able to survive as long as a year."

 

Wind turbines in the center of the rover would power these computers, allowing it to flip upside down and keep running. But the planet's environment would offer plenty of challenges. No spacecraft has survived the Venusian surface for more than a couple hours.

Venus' last visitors were the Soviet Venera and Vega landers. In the 1970s and 1980s, they sent back a handful of images that revealed a craggy, gas-choked world.

 

Sauder and Hilgemann are preparing to bake mechanical prototypes, allowing them to study how thermal expansion could affect their moving parts. Some components of the Soviet landers had actually been designed with this heat expansion in mind: their parts wouldn't work properly until they were heated to Venusian temperatures.

 

Mobility is one challenge, considering there are so many unknowns about the Venusian surface. Sauder's original idea was inspired by the "Strandbeests" created by Dutch artist Theo Jansen. These spider-like structures have spindly legs that can carry their bulk across beaches, powered solely by wind.

 

Ultimately, they seemed too unstable for rocky terrain. Sauder started looking at World War I tank treads as an alternative. These were built to roll over trenches and craters.

 

Another problem will be communications. Without electronics, how would you transmit science data? Current plans are inspired by another age-old technology: Morse code.

 

An orbiting spacecraft could ping the rover using radar. The rover would have a radar target, which if shaped correctly, would act like "stealth technology in reverse," Sauder said. Stealth planes have special shapes that disperse radar signals; Sauder is exploring how to shape these targets to brightly reflect signals instead. Adding a rotating shutter in front of the radar target would allow the rover to turn the bright, reflected spot on and off, communicating much like signal lamps on Navy ships.

 

Now in its second phase of NIAC development, the JPL team is selecting parts of the AREE concept to be refined and prototyped. Team members hope to flesh out a rover concept that will eventually be able to study the geology of Venus and perhaps drill a few samples.

 

The Daily Galaxy via NASA/JPL

[W_L]

I'm waiting for Warp Drives

 

They call this an EM drive, but let's be honest, it's Impulse in a nutshell Getting to the moon in hours and Mars in a few weeks will make colonization easier, along with commercial mining, but I wwant to achieve warp 1!

 

There's a lot of space to be explored, our own solar system is still vastly unknown and unconquered. Mars would be a great colonial world, perhaps Titan if we can achieve some kind of artificial light source or better yet force Jupiter into a fusion reaction aka Clarke's 2001.

[William King]

I put space exploration into my latest story - thinking outside the box, I decided there would never be either faster than light speed space craft or any sort of cryonics to freeze humans for long voyages, there would be no discovery of worm holes or that black holes would instantly move you trillions of light years across the universe. No, humans would conquere distant stars by sending spacecraft carrying their sperm and embryos. Manned by robots, these craft would land on habitable plants, the robots would build cities, and the humans would be born in test tubes, reared and educated by the robots.

 

Maybe we already did that!

 

 

[JamesSavik]

Voyager's 40 year trip

 

No space probe has gone as far. It's like the energizer bunny on plutonium- it just keeps going and going...

 

 

 

National Geographic

 

 

NPR

Edited September 5, 2017 by jamessavik

[Page Scrawler]

https://www.wired.com/2007/07/spacesuits-just/#previouspost

 

Found this article in Wired about a revolutionary spacesuit design.

It's about ten years old, but still of interest to space geeks.

Edited September 15, 2017 by Page Scrawler

[W_L]

On 9/3/2017 at 2:12 AM, William King said:

I put space exploration into my latest story - thinking outside the box, I decided there would never be either faster than light speed space craft or any sort of cryonics to freeze humans for long voyages, there would be no discovery of worm holes or that black holes would instantly move you trillions of light years across the universe. No, humans would conquere distant stars by sending spacecraft carrying their sperm and embryos. Manned by robots, these craft would land on habitable plants, the robots would build cities, and the humans would be born in test tubes, reared and educated by the robots.

 

Maybe we already did that!

 

 

 

That sounds like Battlestar Galactica's 2000's series premise, "It has happened before and will happen again"

 

I do agree with you, barring some new technological leaps in quantum physics and engineering, FTL is not likely. Robotic explorers are a good idea and a cool thing is that unlike humans, they don't need to worry about deceleration G forces under Solar Sail or Nuclear drive designs at 0.5-0.7c.

 

---------------------

 

With that said, we have stuff to be glad about, UK scientists have developed an early version of the "Force Field/Deflector Shield"

 

.

This is an important step forward to manned missions to Mars and beyond.

[Daddydavek]

Since James mentioned Voyager, I've decided to copy one of my posts in the Lounge about it here:

 

•  

Posted August 19 (edited)

The video is in the science news article and the article should be available to all.  The link is in my first post.

 

Another link that may work or may not is the PBS link.

 

http://www.pbs.org/the-farthest/home/

 

If you have flipboard on your phone they have a whole spread on it too.

 

Here is a web link for home computers and tablets:

 

https://flipboard.com/topic/voyager#!

 

 

Edited August 19 by Daddydavek

Edited October 15, 2017 by Daddydavek

[JamesSavik]

Alien Object from a Distant Star System Invades Our Solar System --"Like Nothing We've Ever Seen"

November 20, 2017

Source Link: Daily Galaxy

 

 

"What a fascinating discovery this is!" said Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's a strange visitor from a faraway star system, shaped like nothing we've ever seen in our own solar system neighborhood."

Astronomers recently scrambled to observe an intriguing asteroid that zipped through the solar system on a steep trajectory from interstellar space-the first confirmed object from another star.

 

Now, new data reveal the interstellar interloper to be a rocky, cigar-shaped object with a somewhat reddish hue. The asteroid, named 'Oumuamua by its discoverers, is up to one-quarter mile (400 meters) long and highly-elongated-perhaps 10 times as long as it is wide. That aspect ratio is greater than that of any asteroid or comet observed in our solar system to date. While its elongated shape is quite surprising, and unlike asteroids seen in our solar system, it may provide new clues into how other solar systems formed.

The observations and analyses were funded in part by NASA and appear in the Nov. 20 issue of the journal Nature. They suggest this unusual object had been wandering through the Milky Way, unattached to any star system, for hundreds of millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system.

"For decades we've theorized that such interstellar objects are out there, and now - for the first time - we have direct evidence they exist," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "This history-making discovery is opening a new window to study formation of solar systems beyond our own."

 

 

Immediately after its discovery, telescopes around the world, including ESO'sVery Large Telescopein Chile, were called into action to measure the object's orbit, brightness and color. Urgency for viewing from ground-based telescopes was vital to get the best data.

Combining the images from theFORS instrumenton the ESO telescope using four different filters with those of other large telescopes, a team of astronomers led by Karen Meech of the Institute for Astronomy in Hawaii found that 'Oumuamua varies in brightness by a factor of 10 as it spins on its axis every 7.3 hours. No known asteroid or comet from our solar system varies so widely in brightness, with such a large ratio between length and width. The most elongated objects we have seen to date are no more than three times longer than they are wide.

"This unusually big variation in brightness means that the object is highly elongated: about ten times as long as it is wide, with a complex, convoluted shape," said Meech. "We also found that it had a reddish color, similar to objects in the outer solar system, and confirmed that it is completely inert, without the faintest hint of dust around it."

These properties suggest that 'Oumuamua is dense, composed of rock and possibly metals, has no water or ice, and that its surface was reddened due to the effects of irradiation from cosmic rays over hundreds of millions of years.

A few large ground-based telescopes continue to track the asteroid, though it's rapidly fading as it recedes from our planet. Two of NASA's space telescopes (HubbleandSpitzer) are tracking the object the week of Nov. 20. As of Nov. 20, 'Oumuamua is travelling about 85,700 miles per hour (38.3 kilometers per second) relative to the Sun. Its location is approximately 124 million miles (200 million kilometers) from Earth -- the distance between Mars and Jupiter - though its outbound path is about 20 degrees above the plane of planets that orbit the Sun. The object passed Mars's orbit around Nov. 1 and will pass Jupiter's orbit in May of 2018. It will travel beyond Saturn's orbit in January 2019; as it leaves our solar system, 'Oumuamua will head for the constellation Pegasus.

Observations from large ground-based telescopes will continue until the object becomes too faint to be detected, sometime after mid-December. NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) continues to take all available tracking measurements to refine the trajectory of 1I/2017 U1 as it exits our solar system.

This remarkable object was discovered Oct. 19by the University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS1 telescope, funded by NASA'sNear-Earth Object Observations(NEOO) Program, which finds and tracks asteroids and comets in Earth's neighborhood. NASA Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson said, "We are fortunate that our sky survey telescope was looking in the right place at the right time to capture this historic moment. This serendipitous discovery is bonus science enabled by NASA's efforts to find, track and characterize near-Earth objects that could potentially pose a threat to our planet."

Preliminary orbital calculations suggest that the object came from the approximate direction of the bright star Vega, in the northern constellation of Lyra. However, it took so long for the interstellar object to make the journey - even at the speed of about 59,000 miles per hour (26.4 kilometers per second) -- that Vega was not near that position when the asteroid was there about 300,000 years ago.

While originally classified as a comet, observations from ESO and elsewhere revealed no signs of cometary activity after it slingshotted past the Sun on Sept. 9 at a blistering speed of 196,000 miles per hour (87.3 kilometers per second).

The object has since beenreclassified as interstellar asteroid1I/2017 U1 by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which is responsible for granting official names to bodies in the solar system and beyond. In addition to the technical name, the Pan-STARRS team dubbed it 'Oumuamua (pronounced oh MOO-uh MOO-uh), which is Hawaiian for "a messenger from afar arriving first."

Astronomers estimate that an interstellar asteroid similar to 'Oumuamua passes through the inner solar system about once per year, but they are faint and hard to spot and have been missed until now. It is only recently that survey telescopes, such as Pan-STARRS, are powerful enough to have a chance to discover them.

"What a fascinating discovery this is!" said Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "It's a strange visitor from a faraway star system, shaped like nothing we've ever seen in our own solar system neighborhood."

The image at the top of the page is an artist's concept of interstellar asteroid 1I/2017 U1 ('Oumuamua) as it passed through the solar system after its discovery in October 2017. The aspect ratio of up to 10:1 is unlike that of any object seen in our own solar system. (European Southern Observatory / M. Kornmesser)

The Daily Galaxy via NASA/JPL 

[Myr]

Did they ever figure out what that was?  I saw somewhere that they were investigating it for signals and such

[JamesSavik]

On 12/16/2017 at 10:46 AM, Myr said:

Did they ever figure out what that was?  I saw somewhere that they were investigating it for signals and such

 

 

It was just a rock.

[Myr]

On 2/7/2018 at 6:46 PM, jamessavik said:

It was just a rock.

I guess sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

[Daddydavek]

The Chinese first space station is falling and estimates are for it to hit the earth range from Sunday April first to Monday April 2.  

 

Here is a link to the tracker article:

 

https://www.space.com/40163-chinese-space-station-crash-april-1-or-april-2.html

 

An update at 7:49 Eastern Daylight Time was published:

 

https://www.space.com/40164-chinese-space-station-crash-last-day.html

Edited April 1, 2018 by Daddydavek

[JamesSavik]

 

The Flying Spaghetti Monster Nebula

[Daddydavek]

I came across an article listing some basic books about how far we have come in space exploration.   

 

17 books that will teach you everything you need to know about space

Think of them as rockets for your mind.

by Corey S. Powell / Aug.23.2018 / 9:22 AM ET

 

The link is below:

by Corey S. Powell / Aug.23.2018 / 9:22 AM ET

 

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/17-books-will-teach-you-everything-you-need-know-about-ncna902376