by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Technology, World
Washington : Indian-origin astronaut Sunita Williams is among the nine astronauts named by NASA on Friday for its first human spaceflight programme from the US soil since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011.
The astronauts will fly on the spacecraft developed by Elon Musk-owned SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and global aviation firm Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, as part of the US space agency’s Commercial Crew programme to send humans to the ISS on private US spacecraft.
Williams has been named for the Boeing programme to the ISS — the first test flight scheduled to take place in the middle of 2019.
“For the first time since 2011, we are on the brink of launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.
Born in Euclid (Ohio), Williams came to NASA from the Navy where she was a test pilot and rose to the rank of captain before retiring.
Since her selection as an astronaut in 1998, she has spent 322 days aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for Expeditions 14/15 and Expeditions 32/33, commanded the space station and performed seven spacewalks, the US space agency said in a statement.
“The men and women we assign to these first flights are at the forefront of this exciting new time for human spaceflight,” said Mark Geyer, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“It will be thrilling to see our astronauts lift off from American soil, and we can’t wait to see them aboard the ISS,” he added.
In 2014, Boeing and SpaceX were awarded a combined $6.8 billion in contracts from NASA to develop spacecraft capable of flying crews to the space station.
SpaceX is targeting November 2018 for Crew Dragon’s first uncrewed demonstration mission (Demo-1), three months later than the previous schedule released by NASA early this year.
The crewed demonstration flight, with two astronauts on board, will follow in April 2019, four months later than previously announced.
Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, on the other hand, will likely perform two crucial test flights next year, instead of this year as planned.
Each test flight will provide data on the performance of the rockets, spacecraft, ground systems, and operations to ensure the systems are safe to fly astronauts.
The crew for Boeing’s Crew Flight Test and SpaceX’s Demo-2 flights will each include at least a flight commander and pilot aboard to test out the systems.
After successful completion of the flight tests with crew, NASA will review flight data to verify that the systems meet the agency’s safety and performance certification requirements and are ready to begin regular servicing missions to the space station, the US space agency said.
Additional crew members will be assigned by NASA’s international partners at a later date.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Washington : NASA’s will get $20.7 billion — $1.1 billion more than 2017 funding and $1.6 billion above the White House request — under a spending bill that cleared Congress this week and was signed by President Trump on Friday.
A big beneficiary will be the planned rocket to take astronauts into deep space and onto Mars, the Space Launch System (SLS), which will get $2.15 billion, and the Orion crew capsule, which will launch on top of the SLS, will get $1.35 billion, AL.com reported.
According to a report spaceflightnow.com, the NASA funding was part of a $1.3 trillion federal spending package that keeps the government running through the end of fiscal year 2018 — September 30 — after multiple stopgap budgets in recent months.
The budget provides $350 million for construction of a second SLS mobile launch platform, a project which, NASA believes, could shorten the gap between the first and second Space Launch System flights.
Funding for a second SLS launch platform was not included in the White House’s fiscal year 2019 budget proposal.
Robert Lightfoot, NASA’s outgoing acting administrator set to retire at the end of April, told a House subcommittee on March 7 that there was insufficient money in the agency’s budget to build a second SLS platform without delaying or canceling other projects.
While responding to a question during the hearing, Lightfoot said that a second SLS mobile launch platform would be better for the program in an “ideal world.”
“I could fly humans quicker, probably in the 2022 timeframe,” with a second mobile launch platform, Lightfoot said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Technology
Washington : The Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) approach from Google researchers helped NASA discover two exoplanets, including an eighth planet around the star Kepler-90.
With an eighth planet circling Kepler-90, our solar system now is tied for most number of planets around a single star, NASA and Google said in a statement late on Thursday.
Kepler-90 is a Sun-like star which is 2,545 light-years from Earth.
The Google AI found exoplanets using data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope.
In this case, computers learned to identify planets by finding in Kepler data instances where the telescope recorded signals from planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets.
The discovery came after researchers Christopher Shallue and Andrew Vanderburg trained a computer to learn how to identify exoplanets in the light readings recorded by Kepler — the minuscule change in brightness captured when a planet passed in front of, or transited, a star.
Inspired by the way neurons connect in the human brain, this artificial “neural network” sifted through Kepler data and found weak transit signals from a previously-missed eighth planet orbiting Kepler-90, in the constellation Draco.
While machine learning has previously been used in searches of the Kepler database, this research demonstrates that neural networks are a promising tool in finding some of the weakest signals of distant worlds.
Shallue, a senior software engineer with Google AI research team, came up with the idea to apply a neural network to Kepler data.
“In my spare time, I started googling for ‘finding exoplanets with large data sets’ and found out about the Kepler mission and the huge data set available,” said Shallue.
First, the researchers trained the neural network to identify transiting exoplanets using a set of 15,000 previously-vetted signals from the Kepler exoplanet catalogue.
In the test set, the neural network correctly identified true planets and false positives 96 per cent of the time.
Then, with the neural network having “learned” to detect the pattern of a transiting exoplanet, the researchers directed their model to search for weaker signals in 670 star systems that already had multiple known planets.
Their assumption was that multiple-planet systems would be the best places to look for more exoplanets.
“We got lots of false positives of planets, but also potentially more real planets,” said Vanderburg.
“It’s like sifting through rocks to find jewels. If you have a finer sieve then you will catch more rocks but you might catch more jewels, as well.”
Kepler-90i wasn’t the only jewel this neural network sifted out. In the Kepler-80 system, they also found a sixth planet.
This one, the Earth-sized Kepler-80g, and four of its neighbouring planets form what is called a resonant chain – where planets are locked by their mutual gravity in a rhythmic orbital dance.
The result is an extremely stable system, similar to the seven planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Washington : (IANS) The US space agency and tech giant Microsoft have teamed up to create “Destination: Mars”, a guided tour of Mars using the same Hololens headset technology that helps scientists plan the Curiosity rover’s activities on Red Planet.
It will offer people a guided tour of an area of Mars with astronaut Buzz Aldrin this summer in an interactive exhibit using the Microsoft HoloLens mixed reality headset.
“Mixed reality” means that virtual elements are merged with the user’s actual environment, creating a world in which real and virtual objects can interact.
The “Destination: Mars” exhibit will open at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center’s visitor complex in Florida this summer, the US space agency said in a statement.
Guests will “visit” several sites on Mars, reconstructed using real imagery from NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover, which has been exploring the Red Planet since August 2012.
Aldrin, an Apollo 11 astronaut who walked on the moon in 1969, will serve as “holographic tour guide” on the journey.
Curiosity Mars rover driver Erisa Hines of JPL will also appear holographically, leading participants to places on Mars where scientists have made exciting discoveries and explaining what we have learned about the planet.
“This experience lets the public explore Mars in an entirely new way. To walk through the exact landscape that Curiosity is roving across puts its achievements and discoveries into beautiful context,” said Doug Ellison, visualisation producer at JPL.
“Destination: Mars” is an adaptation of OnSight, a Mars rover mission operations tool co-developed by Microsoft and JPL.
A pilot group of scientists uses OnSight in their work supporting the Curiosity Mars rover’s operations.
“We’re excited to give the public a chance to see Mars using cutting-edge technologies that help scientists plan Curiosity’s activities on Mars today,” added Jeff Norris, project manager for OnSight and “Destination: Mars”.
“While freely exploring the terrain, participants learn about processes that have shaped this alien world,” he added.
Abigail Fraeman, a Curiosity science team member at JPL, uses OnSight to make recommendations about where the rover should drive and which features to study in more detail.
Recently OnSight helped her and a colleague identify the transition point between two Martian rock formations which they would like to study in further detail.
By utilising the same technologies and datasets as OnSight, “Destination: Mars” offers participants a glimpse of Mars as seen by mission scientists.
“By connecting astronauts to experts on the ground, mixed reality could be transformational for scientific and engineering efforts in space,” Norris said.
As NASA prepares to send humans to Mars in the 2030s, the public will now be able to preview the experience the astronauts will have as they walk and study the Martian surface.
