Daily Archives: February 22, 2021

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WIAT) Gov. Kay Ivey released a statement following the Inspector Generals decision to name the Redstone Region a preferred location for Space Command headquarters.

Alabama welcomes the Inspector Generals review of the decision to name the Redstone Region the preferred location for the permanent headquarters for Space Command, a decision made after a thorough review, and a selection process was conducted. Our state was chosen based on merit, and an independent review of a decision of this magnitude will confirm this. We remain confident that just as the Air Force discovered, Huntsvilles Redstone Region will provide our warfighters with the greatest space capability at the best value to the taxpayers.

Alabama has played an integral role throughout the history of our nations defense and civil space programs. Deep Space Exploration is part of our DNA in Alabama, from building the rockets to first take man to the moon, to producing the Atlas V rocket that took the Perseverance Rover to Mars just last week! Alabama is winning on every page when it comes to furthering our nations space exploration and defense and we are a natural fit for the permanent headquarters of U.S. Space Command.

This update comes after Huntsville was named among other cities as a possible location for its headquarters. Redstone Arsenal was chosen out of 60 sites across the U.S. as the best location for the space command headquarters.

Excerpt from:

Ivey: We are a natural fit for the permanent headquarters of U.S. Space Command - WKRG News 5

NASA's Perseverance Rover Lands Successfully on Mars: After a seven-month-long journey, NASAs Perseverance Rover successfully touched down on the Red Planet on Feb. 18, 2021. Mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California celebrate landing NASA's fifth -- and most ambitious -- rover on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Download video

The agencys latest and most complex mission to the Red Planet has touched down at Jezero Crater. Now its time to begin testing the health of the rover.

The largest, most advanced rover NASA has sent to another world touched down on Mars Thursday, after a 203-day journey traversing 293 million miles (472 million kilometers). Confirmation of the successful touchdown was announced in mission control at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California at 3:55 p.m. EST (12:55 p.m. PST).

Packed with groundbreaking technology, the Mars 2020 mission launched July 30, 2020, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The Perseverance rover mission marks an ambitious first step in the effort to collect Mars samples and return them to Earth.

This landing is one of those pivotal moments for NASA, the United States, and space exploration globally when we know we are on the cusp of discovery and sharpening our pencils, so to speak, to rewrite the textbooks, said acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk. The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission embodies our nations spirit of persevering even in the most challenging of situations, inspiring, and advancing science and exploration. The mission itself personifies the human ideal of persevering toward the future and will help us prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

About the size of a car, the 2,263-pound (1,026-kilogram) robotic geologist and astrobiologist will undergo several weeks of testing before it begins its two-year science investigation of Mars Jezero Crater. While the rover will investigate the rock and sediment of Jezeros ancient lakebed and river delta to characterize the regions geology and past climate, a fundamental part of its mission is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. To that end, the Mars Sample Return campaign, being planned by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency), will allow scientists on Earth to study samples collected by Perseverance to search for definitive signs of past life using instruments too large and complex to send to the Red Planet.

Because of todays exciting events, the first pristine samples from carefully documented locations on another planet are another step closer to being returned to Earth, said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA. Perseverance is the first step in bringing back rock and regolith from Mars. We dont know what these pristine samples from Mars will tell us. But what they could tell us is monumental including that life might have once existed beyond Earth.

Some 28 miles (45 kilometers) wide, Jezero Crater sits on the western edge of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator. Scientists have determined that 3.5 billion years ago the crater had its own river delta and was filled with water.

The power system that provides electricity and heat for Perseverance through its exploration of Jezero Crater is a Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, or MMRTG. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) provided it to NASA through an ongoing partnership to develop power systems for civil space applications.

Equipped with seven primary science instruments, the most cameras ever sent to Mars, and its exquisitely complex sample caching system the first of its kind sent into space Perseverance will scour the Jezero region for fossilized remains of ancient microscopic Martian life, taking samples along the way.

Perseverance is the most sophisticated robotic geologist ever made, but verifying that microscopic life once existed carries an enormous burden of proof, said Lori Glaze, director of NASAs Planetary Science Division. While well learn a lot with the great instruments we have aboard the rover, it may very well require the far more capable laboratories and instruments back here on Earth to tell us whether our samples carry evidence that Mars once harbored life.

Paving the Way for Human Missions

Landing on Mars is always an incredibly difficult task and we are proud to continue building on our past success, said JPL Director Michael Watkins. But, while Perseverance advances that success, this rover is also blazing its own path and daring new challenges in the surface mission. We built the rover not just to land but to find and collect the best scientific samples for return to Earth, and its incredibly complex sampling system and autonomy not only enable that mission, they set the stage for future robotic and crewed missions.

The Mars Entry, Descent, and Landing Instrumentation 2 (MEDLI2) sensor suite collected data about Mars atmosphere during entry, and the Terrain-Relative Navigation system autonomously guided the spacecraft during final descent. The data from both are expected to help future human missions land on other worlds more safely and with larger payloads.

On the surface of Mars, Perseverances science instruments will have an opportunity to scientifically shine. Mastcam-Z is a pair of zoomable science cameras on Perseverances remote sensing mast, or head, that creates high-resolution, color 3D panoramas of the Martian landscape. Also located on the mast, the SuperCam uses a pulsed laser to study the chemistry of rocks and sediment and has its own microphone to help scientists better understand the property of the rocks, including their hardness.

Located on a turret at the end of the rovers robotic arm, the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) and the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC) instruments will work together to collect data on Mars geology close-up. PIXL will use an X-ray beam and suite of sensors to delve into a rocks elemental chemistry. SHERLOCs ultraviolet laser and spectrometer, along with its Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering (WATSON) imager, will study rock surfaces, mapping out the presence of certain minerals and organic molecules, which are the carbon-based building blocks of life on Earth.

The rover chassis is home to three science instruments, as well. Radar Imager for Mars Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX) is the first ground-penetrating radar on the surface of Mars and will be used to determine how different layers of the Martian surface formed over time. The data could help pave the way for future sensors that hunt for subsurface water ice deposits.

Also with an eye on future Red Planet explorations, the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) technology demonstration will attempt to manufacture oxygen out of thin air the Red Planets tenuous and mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere. The rovers Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) instrument, which has sensors on the mast and chassis, will provide key information about present-day Mars weather, climate, and dust.

Currently attached to the belly of Perseverance, the diminutive Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is a technology demonstration that will attempt the first powered, controlled flight on another planet.

Project engineers and scientists will now put Perseverance through its paces, testing every instrument, subsystem, and subroutine over the next month or two. Only then will they deploy the helicopter to the surface for the flight test phase. If successful, Ingenuity could add an aerial dimension to exploration of the Red Planet in which such helicopters serve as a scouts or make deliveries for future astronauts away from their base.

Once Ingenuitys test flights are complete, the rovers search for evidence of ancient microbial life will begin in earnest.

Perseverance is more than a rover, and more than this amazing collection of men and women that built it and got us here, said John McNamee, project manager of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission at JPL. It is even more than the 10.9 million people who signed up to be part of our mission. This mission is about what humans can achieve when they persevere. We made it this far. Now, watch us go.

More About the Mission

A primary objective for Perseverances mission on Mars is astrobiology research, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planets geology and past climate and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith, paving the way for human exploration of the Red Planet.

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA, will send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASAs Moon to Mars approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission and the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter technology demonstration for NASA.

For more about Perseverance:

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

and

https://nasa.gov/perseverance

News Media ContactsAlana Johnson / Grey HautaluomaNASA Headquarters, Washington202-672-4780 / 202-358-0668alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov / grey.hautaluoma-1@nasa.gov

DC AgleJet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.818-393-9011agle@jpl.nasa.gov

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Touchdown! NASA's Mars Perseverance Rover Safely Lands on Red Planet NASA's Mars Exploration Program - NASA Mars Exploration

But some space leaders on Capitol Hill hope to change that and give the Mars Sample Return Mission a better shot at outliving any one congressional term.

Were not the president. We cant be John Kennedy and say at the end of the decade, Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), who chairs the House space subcommittee, said in reference to Kennedys moonshot speech that birthed the Apollo program. But we can do the congressional equivalent.

Beyer, who was elected head of the House space panel last week, said he is eager to talk to the full committee leaders right away about passing a congressional resolution to show bipartisan support for funding the remainder of the Mars Sample Return effort, a three-part mission thats expected to cost about $4 billion, in addition to the $2.7 billion already spent on the Perseverance rover.

No Congress can commit another Congress to [a] budget, Beyer said in an interview. But why not get a huge bipartisan vote in Congress committing to the idea that future appropriators can look back at and say, This was the intent of Congress.

Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), the ranking member of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, said he would enthusiastically support such a proposal, adding that he is concerned about support and funding for the mission decreasing because the payoff of bringing the samples home is so far away.

Lucas pointed to NASAs track record to show why he's worried, including the cancellation of the later Apollo missions because the nation lost focus and because of the gap in the agencys commitment to deep space exploration when the Constellation program was scrubbed under the Obama administration.

Other nations racing to the Red Planet should motivate hesitant lawmakers on board, Lucas argues. For example, China has launched an aggressive space program, including robotic exploration of the far side of the moon and plans for a space station orbiting Earth. Most recently, a Chinese spacecraft that arrived in Mars' orbit this month will send a rover to the surface in a few months.

Its easy to get distracted by challenges, Lucas said in an interview. There will always be those kinds of challenges but we have to keep our eye on the ball. We have competitors out there who are going to take advantage of the opportunities that exist on asteroids, the moon and Mars. Do we want to get left behind?

The Perseverance rover is the first in a proposed three-step effort to bring samples of the Red Planets dust back to Earth to study. Perseverance will place samples into small tubes that can sit on the surface for decades waiting for their return trip, Kenneth Farley, the project scientist for Perseverance, told POLITICO ahead of the mission launch.

NASA will partner with the European Space Agency for the second part of the mission. A rover named Fetch will pick up the tubes and load them into a spacecraft about the size of a soccer ball that will blast off from the surface. That small orb will rendezvous with a larger spacecraft orbiting Mars in the third leg of the program. The larger vehicle will drop the sample-holding ball somewhere in the Utah desert.

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), the top Republican on the appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, said its important to see the mission through now that the first chapter has begun.

This mission has been years in the making, and unless determined otherwise by the team, would be a waste of talent and resources to not see this mission through and ensure the return of scientific samples the rover obtains, Moran said in a statement.

Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), the top Republican appropriator for NASA in the House, agreed that Mars draws the attention of members in both parties.

"This really goes beyond Democrat and Republican, he said. When we have debt like we have, we don't have money to spend like water. But I think we have got to keep a robust exploration into space in our budget.

Studying the dust with high-tech equipment on Earth could answer big-picture questions, including whether life ever existed on Mars. But its also a crucial step toward sending people to the Red Planet, a long-term goal that was often raised by former President Donald Trump, but also has support from both parties.

President Joe Biden has so far not laid out a robust space policy, but White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration fully supports NASAs Artemis mission, which prioritizes returning American astronauts to the moon as a stepping stone to the ultimate goal of crewed Mars flights. Reaching Mars is also mentioned in the Democrats' 2020 platform, and has bipartisan support on Capitol Hill.

But its important to study dust from Mars before sending people there, said Briony Horgan, an associate professor at Purdue University and a member of the rovers science team. Dust on the moon is like tiny shards of glass, and can be harmful both to people breathing it in and to equipment on the lunar surface. While scientists dont expect Martian soil, or regolith, to have similar properties, theres also much about it thats unknown.

It would be helpful to design equipment to mitigate it and to understand if there are health hazards of it, Horgan said. We dont know a lot about its chemistry, or how reactive it is.

The sample return mission will also test whether engineers can launch something off the Red Planet, which will be an important capability if the astronauts on Mars missions ever want to come home, Horgan said.

The return mission also has the benefit of being named a top priority in NASAs most recent decadal survey, a report prepared every 10 years by the National Academy of Sciences that lays out the must-do missions and is closely followed by Congress.

Congress has a history of supporting these large scale missions. We see that with Mars rovers. We see that with the big space telescopes, said Jared Zambrano-Stout, director of congressional and regulatory policy at lobbying firm Meeks, Butera and Israel and former chief of staff at the White House National Space Council. I dont think theres a problem getting Congress bought in on flagship missions.

He pointed to the James Webb Space Telescope, a behind-schedule and over-budget project, as evidence that Congress will stand by a program if they see the scientific value. Its an obvious example of where folks have said, We should just cancel James Webb, and Congress has said, No, the science that will come from it is too important.

Even if politics isnt a barrier, a technology malfunction could still threaten NASAs Mars efforts for the next decade. If Perseverance has difficulty collecting dust on the surface, it would have wide implications. NASA is already planning for the two next phases to deliver more than a dozen vials of regolith back to Earth.

If something goes seriously wrong with Perseverance, theres no reason to fly those two additional missions, and NASA has no Mars missions in the pipeline, according to Casey Dreier, chief advocate at the Planetary Society.

With all the money going into sample return, this is it. All the eggs are in this basket, Dreier said.

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NASA's rover is on Mars. What happens next is up to Washington. - POLITICO

19 February 2021

NASA's Perseverance rover successfully touched down on Mars yesterday, 203 days after being launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The rover, which is powered by a Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG) developed and fuelled in partnership with the US Department of Energy (DOE), will explore the Jezero Crater and collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth.

The successful touchdown was announced in mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California at 3:55pm EST. The rover - described by NASA as a "robotic geologist and astrobiologist" - will undergo several weeks of testing before it begins its two-year science investigation of the crater, where it will investigate the rock and sediment of the ancient lakebed and river delta to characterise the region's geology and past climate. The Mars Sample Return campaign, which is being planned by NASA and ESA (the European Space Agency), aims to return samples collected by Perseverance to Earth where they will be studied for definitive signs of past life.

"This landing is one of those pivotal moments for NASA, the United States, and space exploration globally - when we know we are on the cusp of discovery and sharpening our pencils, so to speak, to rewrite the textbooks," acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk said. The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission "personifies the human ideal of persevering toward the future and will help us prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet," he added.

"Perseverance is the first step in bringing back rock and regolith from Mars. We don't know what these pristine samples from Mars will tell us. But what they could tell us is monumental - including that life might have once existed beyond Earth," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA.

"It is so exciting seeing Perseverance, powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator successfully land on Mars today! This is just one more example of the many ways in which nuclear science and technology contributes to the advancement of humankind," World Nuclear Association Director General Sama Bilbao y Lon said.

The MMRTG providing Persevance with electricity and heat was provided to NASA through an ongoing partnership with the DOE to develop power systems for civil space applications. The radioisotope power system was developed at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and converts heat from the decay of plutonium-238 (Pu-238) fuel - supplied by Oak Ridge National Laboratory - into electrical power. It has an operational lifespan of 14 years.

Pu-238 is made by irradiating neptunium-237, recovered from research reactor fuel or special targets, in research reactors but the USA lost its domestic capacity to produce the material in the late 1980s after the closure of reactors at Savannah River. The DOE, with NASA, in 2015 re-established production ORNL's High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR), which has now produced 1 kg of the heat-source material.

The DOE this week said it is working to scale up its production of Pu-238 to support NASA's goal of producing 1.5 kilograms per year by of the material by 2026. A second assembly of seven targets of neptunium oxide and an aluminium metal powder has now been loaded into INL's Advanced Test Reactor (ATR), where it will be irradiated for 55 to 58 days, the DOE said. The irradiated targets will then be sent to ORNL to extract the plutonium and confirm the quality and quantity of the heat source material produced. INL expects to generate around 30 grams of Pu-238 heat source material from its first two campaigns. Seven targets were initially loaded into ATR in July 2019.

"While the United States has enough fuel to support space missions through the next decade, this continued partnership between the DOE and NASA ensures that there will be an ample supply of domestic plutonium to support future missions," the DOE said.

Earlier this week, INL management and operating contractor Battelle Energy Alliance LLC announced it is partnering with NASA and the DOE to seek industry engagement to further the design of a new power system it says will be the "next step" for space exploration.

The Dynamic Radioisotope Power System (RPS) will use Pu-238 as a heat source and will be designed for a potential lunar demonstration mission by the late 2020s. The technology demonstration project aims to develop and demonstrate performance of a system that is three times more efficient than the current RPS technology. Dynamic power conversion is more efficient than thermoelectric conversion used in current systems such as that in the Perseverance rover, INL said. This will allow a Dynamic RPS to produce the same amount of electric power with less plutonium-238, and extend radioisotope power to larger systems.

Over the next seven years, the project will progress through additional phases to fabricate and qualify a Dynamic RPS for future science exploration missions, which could include small lunar experiments, rovers or small spacecraft, INL said.

Researched and written by World Nuclear News

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Perseverance starts exploration of Mars : New Nuclear - World Nuclear News

Ezzy PearsonWilliam Collins2020 | 288pp | 20ISBN 9780750990899

Buy this book on Amazon.co.ukBuy this book on Bookshop.org

I remember being pulled from my bed early one morning in 1986 so that I could see Halleys Comet flying past. I have watched the news eagerly in anticipation for the Mars rovers sending back their first images of the red planet. More recently, I sat in awe at the mind-boggling accomplishment of the Rosetta mission landing the small rover Philae on an asteroid travelling through space at 135,000km/hr. I find the discoveries and accomplishments of space exploration utterly brilliant.

Robots in Space by Ezzy Pearson is a wonderful read about the history of space exploration from a robotics point of view. It covers the space race to the moon, visits to the inner planets and our first steps into the outer solar system.

As well as having a PhD in astrophysics, Pearson is also a space journalist this really shows in her style of writing. As well as understanding the science behind the missions, she also knows how to tell a good story. Something that I find is not always the case with non-fiction authors.

The book itself is broken into sections based on destination: the moon, Venus, Mars and others (asteroids, comets and icy moons), and charts the various orbiters, landers and rovers that have been sent there. There is quite a lot of technical and scientific information on what each mission hoped to accomplish, but the book avoids being overly complicated.

One of the best bits is the section of glossy colour photos in the middle. It was great to see what these machines actually look like. It also contains some of the amazing photos sent back from these other worlds.

The book does not shy away from talking about failures as well as successes. I never realised how much can go wrong before a mission is finally successful nor quite how many robots we have sent to our nearest planets. It must be heartbreaking to work on a mission for years, only for something to go wrong in the last seven minutes, though this is exactly what happens sometimes. But we continue to explore. Nasa has just landed a new rover on Mars, aptly named Perseverance. Those that study the far reaches of space certainly need a lot of it.

I really enjoyed Robots in Space and found myself having trouble putting it down. I believe anyone with an interest in space will find this an enjoyable read.

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Robots in Space: The Secret Lives of Our Planetary Explorers - Chemistry World