NASA announced Tuesday the selection of four U.S. companies to collaborate with NASA through unfunded partnerships to develop new space capabilities available to the government and other customers. The partnerships build on the success of NASA’s commercial spaceflight initiatives to leverage NASA experience and expertise into new capabilities.
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NASA’s Commercial Crew Program and the agency’s industry partners completed 23 agreement and contract milestones in 2014 and participated in thousands of hours of technical review sessions. The sessions focused on creating a new generation of safe, reliable and cost-effective crew space transportation systems to low-Earth orbit destinations.
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New video recorded during the return of NASA’s Orion through Earth’s atmosphere this month provides a taste of the intense conditions the spacecraft and the astronauts it carries will endure when they return from deep space destinations on the journey to Mars.
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NASA has approved the completion of SpaceX’s first milestone in the company’s path toward launching crews to the International Space Station (ISS) from U.S. soil under a Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contract with the agency.
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As Yogi Berra famously quipped, 2014 was like “déjà vu all over again” for NASA’s Stennis Space Center, the nation’s largest rocket engine test complex.
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NASA and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) cut the ribbon at the E-2 Test Stand at Stennis Space Center on April 21, 2014, to mark the beginning of a new testing partnership. SpaceX tests components of its methane-fueled Raptor rocket engine on the stand. Participants in the ribbon-cutting ceremony included Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell, U.S. Rep. Steven Palazzo of Mississippi and Stennis Director Rick Gilbrech.
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The artistic impression shows NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft operating in a new mission profile called K2. In May the spacecraft began its new mission observing in the ecliptic plane, the orbital path of Earth around the sun, depicted by the grey-blue line marked by opaque cross-like shapes. Each shape represents the field-of-view of an observing campaign.
The K2 mission observes a specific portion of the distant sky for approximately 80 days, until it is necessary to rotate the spacecraft to prevent sunlight from entering the telescope. The spacecraft orbits the sun every 372 days as it trails Earth, allowing for four full campaigns per orbit or year. The arching band of stars is the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Using publicly available data collected by the spacecraft in February 2014 during the performance concept test to prove K2 would work, astronomers have confirmed the first exoplanet detected by the K2 mission. The newly confirmed planet, HIP 116454b, is 2.5 times the diameter of Earth, and closely orbits a star smaller and cooler than our sun once every nine days, making the planet too hot for life as we know it. The star and planet are 180 light-years from Earth toward the constellation Pisces.
In May 2013, data collection for Kepler’s extended prime mission came to an end when the second of four reaction wheels used to stabilize the spacecraft failed. Without at least three functioning reaction wheels, Kepler couldn’t be pointed at the original field with sufficient stability to precisely measure the dimming of starlight caused by a planet when it passes or transits in front of a distant star.
Rather than giving up on the stalwart spacecraft, a team of scientists and engineers crafted a resourceful strategy to use pressure from sunlight as a virtual reaction wheel to help control the spacecraft while observing the sky in the ecliptic plane. The resulting K2 mission promises to not only continue Kepler’s planet hunt, but to expand that search to bright nearby stars which harbor planets that allow scientists to study them in detail to better understand their composition. K2 will also introduce new opportunities to observe star clusters, active galaxies, and supernovae.
Link to full NASA press release: NASA’s Kepler Reborn, Makes First Exoplanet Find of New Mission
Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T Pyle
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NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft makes a comeback with the discovery of the first exoplanet found using its new mission — K2.
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NASA and an international team of planetary scientists have found evidence in meteorites on Earth that indicates Mars has a distinct and global reservoir of water or ice near its surface.
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NASA and SpaceX announced today the launch of SpaceX’s fifth commercial resupply services mission to the International Space Station now will occur no earlier than Tuesday, Jan. 6.
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