Space Stories: New Lunar Water Estimates, Coronal Mass Ejection, and Oxygen on Mars

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Shadows on the Moon’s south pole. (NASA)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—Southwest Research Institute: “New Findings Suggest Moon May Have Less Water Than Previously Thought“

A team recently calculated that most of the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) are at most around 3.4 billion years old and can contain relatively young deposits of water ice. Water resources are considered key for sustainable exploration of the Moon and beyond, but these findings suggest that current estimates for cold-trapped ices are too high.

—Scientific American: “Massive Sun Outburst Smacks NASA Spacecraft“

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe was built to withstand the ravages of the environment near our sun—and with good reason. The car-size spacecraft has now flown through a giant solar outburst of charged particles called a coronal mass ejection (CME). If that CME had it hit Earth instead, it may have caused vast, continent-wide blackouts, scientists say. Some of those searing particles whipped through space at about three million miles per hour.

—BGR: “NASA Successfully Generated Oxygen on Mars“

NASA’s Perseverance rover has done the unthinkable. Or, at least, a small device on the rover has. According to a tweet and article shared by NASA’s Perseverance team on Twitter, a device known only as MOXIE has proven that we can generate oxygen on Mars using the planet’s CO2-concentrated atmosphere. This tech is a huge boon, and the success of this story could help pave the way for future oxygen generation on the Red Planet, something that would make long-term exploration of the planet far more feasible.

Audit Results: SLS Program is Unaffordable

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of the SLS. (NASA)

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently completed a review of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), which is the cornerstone of the Artemis program. GAO assessed the extent to which (1) NASA has established plans to measure the SLS program costs post-Artemis I, and (2) the program has made progress with its plans to reduce projected SLS costs.

The GAO report, Space Launch System: Cost Transparency Needed to Monitor Program Affordability, highlights a number of continuing issues related to project costs and budgeting.

So what is the bottom line? This quote is most concerning: “Senior NASA officials told GAO that at current cost levels, the SLS program is unaffordable.”

The SLS is the vehicle that is supposed to demonstrate our ability to return to the Moon as well as our readiness for a Mars mission. But all of this is contingent on continued funding from Congress, and the congressional auditors have raised a red flag.

I expect you could find similar audit issues with the earlier Apollo missions as well as other space missions, yet NASA does not need to give Congress a reason to put money elsewhere. Let’s hope NASA’s leaders take the audit seriously and show some progress to keep all of the parties happy and the funding alive.

Good Article: Looking Ahead in Astronomy

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): An imagined Martian settlement. (NASA)

Astronomy magazine has a good article titled “Predictions for the Next 50 Years of Astronomy.” Five astronomers provide their ideas about what we might experience in the field of astronomy in the 2070s.

For instance, S. Alan Stern, a planetary scientist and member of the U.S. National Science Board, had this prediction:

By the ’70s, I expect we’ll have human exploration taking place on multiple worlds in the solar system, with Antarctic-like, semipermanent bases scattered around the globes of at least Luna and Mars. I also expect we may by then have much larger and more powerful launch vehicles, even fusion-based or high-power electric propulsion, making trip times an order of magnitude shorter than today. Just think: Mars in a few weeks, Pluto and the Kuiper Belt in a year!

I just want to see the Moon landing get underway before any predictions about the Kuiper Belt, but it is all exciting and in many ways unknowable given what has happened in the last 50 years. For instance, how many people 50 years ago believed that we would have a catalog of thousands of exoplanets, many similar to Earth?

Of course, predictions are tough. Here is what some scientists were saying in the 1970s about the fate of our little planet, as reported by the American Enterprise Institute:

  •  {Paul] Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
  • Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

We have our issues today, but I am very happy that these earlier scientists did not have the gift of prophesy.

Space Stories: Fast-Spinning Martians, Artemis 3 Mission Issues, and an Ancient Star Cluster

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Image of Mars taken by the United Arab Emirates’ “Amal,” or “Hope,” probe. (Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center/UAE Space Agency, via AP)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—Space.com : “Mars is Spinning Faster and its Days are Getting Shorter. Scientists Aren’t Sure Why“

The length of Mars’ day is shortening by three-quarters of a millisecond each year as the planet’s rotation spins up, according to new results from NASA’s InSight lander…Planetary scientists are not entirely sure why this is happening, but it is likely related to the redistribution of Mars’ mass, which can have an effect on the planet’s rotation like an ice skater pulling in their arms to spin faster. This redistribution might be caused by the accumulation of ice on Mars’ polar caps, experts believe, or by the surface itself slowly rebounding from residing under the weight of immense glaciers that existed at equatorial latitudes during the world’s most recent ice ages, which ended about 400,000 years ago.

—SpaceNews.com : “NASA Weighs Changes to Artemis 3 if Key Elements are Delayed“

NASA has left the door open for changing the scope of Artemis 3, currently set to be the first crewed lunar landing of the program, if key elements suffer major delays. Speaking at an Aug. 8 briefing at the Kennedy Space Center, Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said the Artemis 3 mission still has a formal launch date of December 2025 but that he was monitoring potential delays in hardware needed for the mission. “We may end up flying a different mission if that’s the case,” he said. “If we have these big slips out, we’ve looked at if can we do other missions.” Artemis 3 could also change based on the outcome of Artemis 2, he added.

—ScienceNews.com : “A Star Cluster in the Milky Way Appears to be as Old as the Universe“

One of the oldest known objects in the universe is wandering around the Milky Way. Star cluster M92, a densely packed ball of stars roughly 27,000 light-years from Earth, is about 13.8 billion years old, researchers report in a paper submitted June 3 to arXiv.org. The newly refined age estimate makes this clump of stars nearly the same age as the universe. Refining the ages of clusters like M92 can help put limits on the age of the universe itself. It can also help solve cosmic conundrums about how the universe evolved.

A Day in Astronomy: Launch of the Phoenix Mars Lander

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of the Phoenix Mars Lander on the surface of Mars. (NASA/JPL-Calech/University of Arizona)

On this day in 2007, NASA launched the Phoenix Mars Lander from Cape Canaveral towards the Red Planet. The lander had two key objectives: (1) to study the history of water in the Martian arctic and (2) to search for evidence of a habitable zone and assess the biological potential of the ice-soil boundary.

The lander set down on Mars on May 25, 2008 and continued with its mission until November of that same year. The lander performed numerous tests on the Martian surface, confirmed the presence of water, and even discovered water ice right below where it landed. The lander also found perchlorate in the soil, which could be a source of oxygen for future missions.

The mission ended when the Martian winter diminished the sunlight needed to run the solar panels. The Phoenix Mars Lander did not survive the winter, but it successfully accomplished its mission.

Image (Credit): Phoenix Mars Lander mission patch. (NASA)