Tag: Moon

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Blue Origin team hands NASA a lunar lander mock-up

Lunar lander mock-up
A mock-up of the lander designed by Blue Origin and its partners stands tall at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas. (Blue Origin Photo)

An all-star space industry team led by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has assembled a mock-up of its proposed lunar lander right where it’ll do the most good, in a training area at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas.

The full-scale engineering module showcases Blue Origin’s Blue Moon descent element, which Bezos unveiled last year; as well as the ascent element designed by Lockheed Martin. It stands more than 40 feet tall in Johnson Space Center’s Space Vehicle Mockup Facility, alongside mock-ups of the space shuttle, space station modules and next-generation space capsules.

Members of the industry team — from Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin as well as Northrop Grumman and Draper — will collaborate with NASA engineers and astronauts to test out the lander’s usability and make any necessary tweaks in preparation for crewed lunar landings that could begin as early as 2024. The tweaks could address such details as the size of the hatch, the placement of the windows and the arrangement of the controls.

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Cosmic Space

Hubble uses eclipse to practice hunt for alien life

Hubble and lunar eclipse
An illustration shows the Hubble Space Telescope against the background of a total lunar eclipse. (NASA / ESA / M. Kornmesser)

Astronomers made use of the Hubble Space Telescope — and a total lunar eclipse — to rehearse their routine for seeking signs of life in alien atmospheres.

You’ll be relieved to know that the experiment, conducted on Jan. 20-21, 2019, determined that there are indeed signs of life on Earth.

The evidence came in the form of a strong spectral fingerprint for ozone. To detect that ultraviolet fingerprint, Hubble didn’t look at Earth directly. Instead, it analyzed the dim reddish light that was first refracted by Earth’s atmosphere, and then reflected back by the moon during last year’s lunar eclipse.

“Finding ozone is significant because it is a photochemical byproduct of molecular oxygen, which is itself a byproduct of life,” said Allison Youngblood of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, Colo., lead researcher of Hubble’s observations.

Other ground-based telescopes made spectroscopic observations at other wavelengths during the eclipse. They were looking for the fingerprints of different atmospheric ingredients linked to life’s presence, such as oxygen and methane.

This wasn’t just an academic exercise. Astronomers hope future observatories, such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Roman Space Telescope, will be able to detect life’s fingerprints in the atmospheres of faraway exoplanets. But that takes practice.

“One of NASA’s major goals is to identify planets that could support life,” Youngblood said in a Hubble news release. “But how would we know a habitable or an uninhabited planet if we saw one? What would they look like with the techniques that astronomers have at their disposal for characterizing the atmospheres of exoplanets? That’s why it’s important to develop models of Earth’s spectrum as a template for categorizing atmospheres on extrasolar planets.”

Check out the news release for further details, or delve into the research paper published today in The Astronomical Journal. And to learn more about how lunar eclipses work, check out this “Inconstant Moon” interactive (after you enable Flash in your browser).

This report was published on Cosmic Log. Accept no substitutes.

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NASA’s new head of human spaceflight speaks out

Kathy Lueders
NASA’s Kathy Lueders beams with joy as the hatches are opened between SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule and the International Space Station on May 31. (NASA Photo / Joel Kowsky)

NASA’s newly named associate administrator for human exploration and operations, Kathy Lueders, says that SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule “has been doing great” at the International Space Station — and that the NASA astronauts who rode it to orbit are likely to come back down to Earth in early August.

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Astrobotic will deliver VIPER rover to the moon

NASA has awarded a $199.5 million contract to Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic to deliver its VIPER rover to the moon’s south pole in 2023, marking one more not-so-small step for the commercialization of lunar exploration.

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NASA’s head of human spaceflight bows out

Doug Loverro
Doug Loverro speaks at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in Louisiana shortly after taking his place as the space agency’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations in 2019. (NASA Photo via Twitter)

NASA’s top executive concentrating on human spaceflight, Doug Loverro, has resigned just a week before the scheduled start of a milestone space mission.

Loverro became NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations last December, and was playing a leading role in NASA’s Artemis moon program as well as preparations for next week’s launch of a SpaceX Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station.

That mission, set for liftoff on May 27 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is due to send NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the station for a stay that could last as long as four months. It’ll be the first launch of an orbital crewed mission from U.S. soil since the retirement of NASA’s space shuttles in 2011.

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NASA lays out Artemis Accords for moon trips

Artemis moon mission
An artist’s conception shows astronauts conducting a mission on the moon. (NASA Illustration)

NASA today unveiled a list of 10 principles for a set of bilateral international agreements for participation in the moon exploration program known as Artemis.

The Artemis Accords would apply to missions aimed at sending astronauts to the lunar surface beginning as early as 2024.

NASA has been discussing international participation in the Artemis moon program for months. During a conference last October, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said “we need all the international partners to go with us to the moon.”

The first moonwalkers are virtually certain to be Americans, but at October’s International Astronautical Congress, Bridenstine implied that astronauts from other countries would get their chance based on the “levels of contribution” to the effort.

Today, Bridenstine said in a tweet that bilateral agreements would “establish a shared vision and a set of principles for all international partners that join in humanity’s return to the moon.”

“It’s a new dawn for space exploration!” he tweeted.

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These landers made the list for lunar missions

Blue Moon lander
An artist’s conception shows Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander, equipped with an ascent module built by Lockheed Martin. (Blue Origin Illustration via NASA)

NASA has selected teams led by Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX to develop lunar landing systems capable of putting astronauts on the moon by as early as 2024.

“We want to be able to go to the moon, but we want to be a customer,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters today during a teleconference. “We want to drive down the costs, we want to increase the access, we want to have our partners have customers that are not just us, so they compete on cost and innovation, and just bring capabilities that we’ve never had before.”

Fixed-price contracts totaling $967 million will go to the three corporate teams over the next 10 months to flesh out their proposals for lunar landing systems that would carry astronauts to and from the lunar surface.

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Masten to deliver science to moon’s south pole

XL-1 lander
Artwork shows Masten Space Systems’ XL-1 lander on the moon. (Masten Space Systems Illustration)

NASA has selected California-based Masten Space Systems to deliver eight science payloads to the moon’s south pole in 2022 on its XL-1 lunar lander.

Seattle-based Olis Robotics has a role in getting one of those payloads, a robotic arm, ready to fly.

The $75.9 million contract was awarded to Masten under the terms of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, or CLPS — which provides opportunities for the space agency to order lunar delivery services from commercial providers, in a way that’s similar to ordering a rideshare trip on earthly streets. In 2018, Masten was one of the first delivery providers that NASA put on its CLPS list.

Masten hasn’t yet flown anything in space, but it’s been working on its lander technology for more than a decade in partnership with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force Research Laboratory, among others. Back in 2009, Masten won more than a million dollars in the NASA-funded Lunar Lander Challenge.

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Xplore to study navigation for cislunar missions

Xplore moon mission
An artisti’s conception shows Xplore’s Xcraft with the moon in the background. (Xplore Illustration)

Seattle-based Xplore has won a $50,000 award from the Air Force to develop an architecture for keeping track of missions between Earth and the moon.

The three-month study is being funded through the Air Force’s AFWERX technology innovation program, a partnership involving the Air Force Research Laboratory and the National Security Innovation Network. The Air Force wants to develop systems for position, navigation and timing, or PNT, that would extend a GPS-like tracking system to cislunar space — that is, the domain of space extending to the moon.

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SpaceX wins cargo contract for NASA’s Gateway

SpaceX Dragon XL
An artist’s conception shows SpaceX’s Dragon XL cargo ship as it is deployed from the Falcon Heavy’s second stage in high Earth orbit, on its way to the Gateway in lunar orbit. (SpaceX Illustration)

NASA has tapped a type of SpaceX cargo craft that hasn’t yet been built to deliver supplies to a moon-orbiting outpost that hasn’t yet been launched.

SpaceX’s robotic Dragon XL, a cylindrical, supersized version of its workhorse Dragon spacecraft, will handle shipments to the Gateway space platform as the first commercial provider to receive a Gateway Logistics Services contract from NASA.

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