Tag: Mars

Categories
GeekWire

SpaceX propulsion guru looks ahead to Mars

Tom Mueller
Tom Mueller, SpaceX’s propulsion chief technology officer, meets his fans at the International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

LOS ANGELES — SpaceX’s success owes a lot to the tenacity of the company’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, but some of the credit has to go to the guy who designed the engines that make the rockets go.

That would be Tom Mueller, who was one of SpaceX’s first employees back in 2002 and now serves as its propulsion chief technology officer.

Today Mueller recounted the creation of SpaceX’s Merlin engines, and dropped some hints about the more powerful Raptor engines to come, while picking up a Space Pioneer Award here at the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Tiny probe snaps fresh picture of our Pale Blue Dot

Pale Blue Dot picture
The nanosatellite known as MarCO-B or Wall-E took this picture of Earth and the moon from a distance of more than 620,000 miles. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Photo)

You don’t have to fly beyond the orbit of Neptune to see our home planet as a Pale Blue Dot. One of the first nanosatellites to travel beyond Earth orbit has proven that in a new version of the view first made famous by “Cosmos” astronomer Carl Sagan.

This picture, showing Earth as a bluish speck and the moon as a faint blip, was captured by one of the two MarCO CubeSats that were launched toward Mars on May 5 as piggyback payloads for NASA’s Mars InSight mission.

Each of the MarCO (“Mars Cube One”) probes is roughly the size of a small briefcase, and stuffed with experimental equipment that will come into play during their Red Planet flyby in November.

Last week, the MarCO-B spacecraft (also known as Wall-E) snapped a picture with its wide-field color camera to check the deployment of its high-gain antenna.

The good news is that the pint-sized antenna has unfolded properly, as seen in the picture. The better news is that Earth and the moon showed up in the frame as well.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

NASA adds a drone to its 2020 Mars rover

Mars Helicopter
An artist’s conception shows the Mars Helicopter. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Illustration)

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has given the thumbs-up to putting a helicopter on Mars.

The Mars Helicopter, which is actually more of an autonomous drone, will be packed into the belly pan of a Red Planet rover that’s due for launch in 2020.

For months, mission planners and scientists have been debating whether it’d be worth flying the 4-pound rotorcraft for a 30-day test campaign.

Adding the drone to the rover potentially takes away from the space and time that can be devoted to other scientific experiments. But in today’s announcement, Bridenstine said the helicopter would build on NASA’s “proud history of firsts.”

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Mars InSight lander lifts off from California

Mars Insight launch
An Atlas 5 rocket rises from its fog-shrouded launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, sending NASA’s Mars InSight lander toward the Red Planet. (GeekWire Photo/Kevin Lisota)

NASA’s Mars InSight lander and two piggyback probes were lofted through California’s coastal fog into space before dawn today, beginning a six-month, 300 million-mile journey to study the Red Planet’s mysterious interior.

It marked the first interplanetary mission to be launched from the U.S. West Coast.

The launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base was shrouded in murk when the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket lifted off at 4:05 a.m. PT. Near the pad, the typically foggy weather blocked the view, but not the sound.

“We really heard it,” NASA chief scientist Jim Green said after liftoff. “Car alarms went off in the parking lot.”

Spectators across a wide swath of the Southern California coast got a good look at the rocket’s red glare as the Atlas ascended to orbit.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Basketball star Chris Bosh geeks out over Mars

Boshes and Atlas 5
Chris Bosh and his wife, Adrienne Bosh, pose for a selfie with an Atlas 5 rocket in advance of today’s Mars InSight launch. (Adrienne Bosh via Twitter)

While retired NBA All-Star basketball player Chris Bosh plans his next career moves, he and his wife Adrienne are taking a time out to witness the launch of NASA’s Mars InSight lander from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Based on their tweets, the Boshs are having a great time and firing up the space crowd as well. More importantly, they’re inspiring their children to reach even higher than a basketball rim.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

It’s showtime for launch of Mars InSight lander

Mars InSight lander
An artist’s impression shows the Mars InSight lander and a cutaway view of Mars’ subsurface, with the lander’s heat probe deployed underground. (NASA Illustration)

NASA’s Mars InSight lander is being prepped for a launch that will send some magical science and engineering toward the Red Planet, including two pint-sized piggyback probes and a seismometer that can measure distances less than the width of an atom.

Now, if only NASA could work its magic on the weather for May 5’s scheduled 4:05 a.m. PT liftoff from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Trace Gas Orbiter sends its first color view of Mars

Korolev Crater
An image from the CaSSIS camera on the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter shows the rim of Korolev Crater on Mars. Click on the image for a larger version. (ESA / Roscosmos / CaSSIS Image)

The first color image to come from a camera aboard the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter in its Mars-mapping orbit shows the ice-coated rim of Korolev Crater in sharply shadowed detail.

“We were really pleased to see how good this picture was, given the lighting conditions,” Antoine Pommerol, a member of the science team for the Color and Stereo Surface Imaging System, said today in a news release. “It shows that CaSSIS can make a major contribution to studies of the carbon dioxide and water cycles on Mars.”

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a mission jointly supported by the European and Russian space agencies, is built to measure the composition of Mars’ thin atmosphere with unprecedented accuracy. Its top task is to look for methane and other trace gases that could hint at biological or geological activity.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

The clock’s ticking for effort to identify Martian life

City on Mars
An artist’s conception shows a Martian city linked to launch pads. (SpaceX via YouTube)

STANFORD, Calif. — NASA has been looking for life on Mars for more than 40 years, but the quest could get a lot more complicated when earthly life arrives en masse, perhaps within the next decade.

“There is a ticking clock now,” Princeton astrobiologist Chris Chyba said at last week’s Breakthrough Discuss conference, conducted at Stanford University.

The issue has the potential to pit scientists like Chyba against rocketeers like SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk, who wants to start sending settlers to Mars by the mid-2020s. When humans and all the supplies they need start arriving by the tons, there’s a risk that their biological signature could overwhelm any faint traces of ancient or modern-day life on the Red Planet.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Boeing CEO: Humans could reach Mars in decade

Albritton and Muilenburg
Politico’s Robert Albritton (left) chats with Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg (right) during a space conference. (Politico Live via Facebook)

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg says it’s possible that humans will set foot on Mars in the next decade, and he’s convinced the first people will get there on a Boeing-built rocket.

Muilenburg’s comments, made today during a Q&A at the first Politico Space conference, could be interpreted as yet another challenge to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who also has plans to send people to Mars within a decade.

Politico’s founder and publisher, Robert Allbritton, gave Muilenburg ample opportunities to reflect on the SpaceX effect during the session.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Elon Musk Q&A: First Mars ship is being built

Kimbal and Elon Musk
Billionaire Elon Musk (in the black hat) and his brother, Kimbal Musk (in the white hat), join in a rendition of “My Little Buttercup” at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. (SXSW via YouTube)

SpaceX is building its first Mars transport vehicle, also known as the BFR, and “making good progress” toward short-hop test flights on Earth by the middle of next year, CEO Elon Musk said today.

“We’re actually building that ship right now,” Musk said at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, during a Q&A with “Westworld” co-creator Jonathan Nolan, a longtime friend.

Today’s conversation ranged over all things Musk — from SpaceX and Tesla, to The Boring Company, Neuralink and the billionaire’s concerns about artificial superintelligence.

Get the full story on GeekWire.