NASA Update 8 December 2015
NASA is planning to launch a solar probe. The launch is scheduled for July 2018 and it is hoped this will allow us to learn a lot more about the sun, maybe more than we have since we’ve been observing it. The project is costing us 1.5 billion dollars. While I am a very big fan of space travel, I can’t help but think of all the homeless vets that this money could help, but back to the probe. The probe will travel closer to the sun than anything before. People at NASA have been talking about sending a probe into the sun for over 60 years and while this probe will not penetrate the sun, it is hoped it will be close enough for us to learn a lot more about it and its effect on the planets around it. The problems with a project like this is temperatures are estimated to reach 2,500 degrees F and the probe will have to survive hits from hyper- velocity dust particles. It is hoped the probe will be able to also answer two very important questions, the first is why is the sun’s corona so much hotter than its surface and the second is what is accelerating the solar wind.
NASA is accepting applications from people who want to become astronauts. The period to file will be between December 14, 2015 and mid-February 2016. Excuse me if I laugh, because if you want to fly on the Mars mission the earliest it is scheduled to fly is 2039 and who knows, by that time they may want a younger person. So far to date, about 300 astronauts have been selected and 47 are active astronauts. NASA says it wants the additional astronauts to be able to fly to the International Space Station and into deep space, whatever that means. If you are thinking about applying here is what you need:
- A bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution in engineering, biological science, physical science or mathematics.
- An advanced degree is desirable.
- Have at least three years of related, progressively responsible professional experience, or at least 1,000 hours of pilot-in-command time in jet aircraft.
- Candidates must pass the NASA long-duration spaceflight physical.
NASA is building deep space antennas. It is hoped that when we finally make it to Mars the antennas will be used to facilitate contact between Mars and earth. As we make these plans which are for a project which is still very distant, that is placing men on Mars, won’t we be red faced if we are beat there by the Russians or Chinese. The antennas are being built for use in Canberra, Australia and it is said this will put their network on a par with networks in California and Madrid. Yes I said Madrid, Spain. While the dishes will be okay for Mars missions they will not serve us very well as we get further out into space, because of the speed limit on radio waves. They only travel as fast as the speed of light and we are going to need another method of communication which is much faster in the future. Badri Younes who is the deputy administrator for space communications and navigation at NASA said, "Here, we heard the first words and saw the first images of humans in space… and I promise you, this antenna will give us the first steps on Mars."
NASA is starting up commercial supply rockets to the International Space Station again after a few problems. Let’s hope that this time all goes well.
NASA has a new device and some say it is straight out of Star Trek. It is designed to detect life on other worlds and is called the “chemical laptop.” It is a miniature portable laboratory but the reason people are saying it looks like something out of Star Trek is that it looks like a tricoder. The tricoder was the all-purpose instrument the crew usually took along with them when they went exploring on foreign worlds. It is said the device will be able to detect the building blocks of life. The device needs liquids to operate so it will be perfect for analyzing icy and wet worlds among others. What it will do is pick up a sample, it could be liquid, a lump of ice or something else and put it into a tube with water and heat it above 212 degrees Fahrenheit and then mixes the sample with a fluorescent dye that attaches to amino and fatty acids if they are there.
In 2018 the James Webb space telescope is scheduled to replace the Hubble space telescope. The James Webb space telescope will have an eighteen section mirror in it to peer into space with and NASA has just installed the first one. When all the mirrors are installed they will form a mirror which will be 21.3 feet in diameter. A telescope with a mirror this large and based in space should be extremely powerful and unhindered by the earth’s atmosphere. The Hubble space telescope has a mirror which is 2.4 meters or 7.9 feet in diameter. As you can see the new telescope has a mirror almost three times the size and we all know how good the Hubble is.
Interested people have tried to find out who made the flag that flew to the moon on Apollo 11, but no one is still sure. I wonder how many people know NASA was sued by three men who claimed they owned Mars because it was inherited by them from ancestors who lived 3,000 years ago and said NASA trespassed on their planet with the rovers. We are still sending messages back and forth to Voyager 1 but now it takes 32 hours for Voyager to receive one even though the signals are traveling at the speed of light.
One of the problems giving fits to NASA scientists is the gathering of too much data. Take the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter known as LRO as an example. It has sent back over four billion measurements so far and continues to send more back to earth. Combine this with all the data being returned from Mars and from our other probes and you can see the enormity of the problem. It could take years to examine the data they already have received.
