What it will take to colonize the #Moon and #Mars @NASA

What it will take for humans to colonize the Moon and Mars

Andrew TarantolaThu, March 25, 2021, 5:00 PM

NASA's Artemis program will mark a significant milestone in US space flight history when it lifts off in late 2024. Not only will it be the first time that American astronauts have travelled further than LEO since the 1970s, and not only will it be the first opportunity for a female astronaut to step foot on the moon. The Artemis mission will perform the crucial groundwork needed for humanity to further explore and potentially colonize our nearest celestial neighbor as well as eventually serve as a jumping-off point in our quest to reach Mars. Given how inhospitable space is to human physiology and psychology, however, NASA and its partners will face a significant challenge in keeping their lunar colonists alive and well.

Back in the Apollo mission era, the notion of constructing even a semi-permanent presence on the surface of the moon was laughable — largely because the numerous lunar regolith samples collected and returned to Earth during that period were "found to be dry as a bone," Rob Mueller, Senior Technologist in Advanced Projects Development at NASA said during a SXSW 2021 panel. "That was the common wisdom, there is no water on the moon, and so for many years that was the assumption held in the [aerospace] community."

It wasn't until the late '90s that a neutron spectrometer aboard NASA's Lunar Prospector mission found telltale evidence of hydrogen atoms located at the moon's poles, suggesting the potential presence of water ice. And it wasn't until last October that the SOPHIA mission detected water on the sunlit surface of the moon, rather than only squirrelled away in deep, dark lunar craters.

"We had indications that H2O – the familiar water we know – might be present on the sunlit side of the Moon," Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, said at the time. "Now we know it is there. This discovery challenges our understanding of the lunar surface and raises intriguing questions about resources relevant for deep space exploration."

Based on this new evidence, Mueller estimates that there should be enough water ice available to "launch a vehicle like the space shuttle every day for 2,000 years. So there's a lot of water on the moon. The trick is, is we have to find it, access it, and mine it, and then economically use it."

#Voyager2: the story of its mission so far – in pictures

Since launching in 1977, Nasa's Voyager 2 probe has captured never-before-seen images of the solar system

Restoring #Apollo11’s Lunar Module Guidance Computer

Restorers Try to Get Lunar Module Guidance Computer Up and Running 

In 1976 in a warehouse in Texas, Jimmie Loocke bought two tons of scrapped NASA equipment. Years later he realized it included a computer from an Apollo lunar module, like the one used to guide the lander to the surface of the moon during Apollo 11. Fifty years after that mission, computer restoration experts in Silicon Valley are trying to get his computer working again. https://on.wsj.com/2Seg3v2 
The MasterTech Blog

Billionaires Have Been Funding #Space Travel for Decades

Billionaires Have Been Funding Space Travel for Decades

Billionaires Have Been Funding Space Travel for Decades

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The biological exploration of space is just beginning. #Cassini Seeks Insights to Life in Plumes of Enceladus, Saturn’s Icy Moon - The New York Times

Cassini Seeks Insights to Life in Plumes of Enceladus, Saturn’s Icy Moon

After 11 years orbiting Saturn, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has changed our understanding of liquid water in the outer solar system.

By JASON DRAKEFORD, DENNIS OVERBYE and JONATHAN CORUM on October 28, 2015. Photo by NASA. Watch in Times Video »

Where there is water, is there life?

That’s the $64 billion question now facing NASA and the rest of lonely humanity. When the New Horizons spacecraft, cameras clicking, sped past Pluto in July, it represented an inflection point in the conquest of the solar system. Half a century after the first planetary probe sailed past Venus, all the planets and would-be planets we have known and loved, and all the marvelous rocks and snowballs circling them, have been detected and inspected, reconnoitered.

That part of human history, the astrophysical exploration of the solar system, is over. The next part, the biological exploration of space, is just beginning. We have finished counting the rocks in the neighborhood. It is time to find out if anything is living on them, a job that could easily take another half century.

NASA’s mantra for finding alien life has long been to “follow the water,” the one ingredient essential to our own biochemistry. On Wednesday, NASA sampled the most available water out there, as the Cassini spacecraft plunged through an icy spray erupting from the little Saturnian moon Enceladus.

Enceladus is only 300 miles across and whiter than a Bing Crosby Christmas, reflecting virtually all the sunlight that hits it, which should make it colder and deader than Scrooge’s heart.

But in 2005, shortly after starting an 11-year sojourn at Saturn, Cassini recorded jets of water squirting from cracks known as tiger stripes near the south pole of Enceladus — evidence, scientists say, of an underground ocean kept warm and liquid by tidal flexing of the little moon as it is stretched and squeezed by Saturn.

And with that, Enceladus leapfrogged to the top of astrobiologists’ list of promising places to look for life. If there is life in its ocean, alien microbes could be riding those geysers out into space where a passing spacecraft could grab them. No need to drill through miles of ice or dig up rocks.

As Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, said, it’s as if nature had hung up a sign at Enceladus saying “Free Samples.”

Discovering life was not on the agenda when Cassini was designed and launched two decades ago. Its instruments can’t capture microbes or detect life, but in a couple of dozen passes through the plumes of Enceladus, it has detected various molecules associated with life: water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, molecular nitrogen, propane, acetylene, formaldehyde and traces of ammonia.

Wednesday’s dive was the deepest Cassini will make through the plumes, only 30 miles above the icy surface. Scientists are especially interested in measuring the amount of hydrogen gas in the plume, which would tell them how much energy and heat are being generated by chemical reactions in hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the moon’s ocean.

It is in such ocean vents that some of the most primordial-looking life-forms have been found on our own planet. What the Cassini scientists find out could help set the stage for a return mission with a spacecraft designed to detect or even bring back samples of life.

These are optimistic, almost sci-fi times. The fact that life was present on Earth as early as 4.1 billion years ago — pretty much as soon as asteroids and leftover planet junk stopped bombarding the new Earth and let it cool down — has led astrobiologists to conclude that, given the right conditions, life will take hold quickly. Not just in our solar system, but in some of the thousands of planetary systems that Kepler and other missions squinting at distant stars have uncovered.

And if water is indeed the key, the solar system has had several chances to get lucky. Besides Enceladus, there is an ocean underneath the ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa, and the Hubble Space Telescope has hinted that it too is venting into space. NASA has begun planning for a mission next decade to fly by it.

And of course there’s Mars, with its dead oceans and intriguing streaks of damp sand, springboard of a thousand sci-fi invasions of Earth, but in recent decades the target of robot invasions going the other direction.

Some scientists even make the case that genesis happened not on Earth but on Mars. Our biochemical ancestors would then have made the passage on an asteroid, making us all Martians and perhaps explaining our curious attraction to the Red Planet.

NASA’s Next Horizon in Space 

Since New Horizons beamed back photos of Pluto, the question has loomed: What’s next? More than 1,600 Times readers shared their ideas. 

And then there is Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, the only moon in the solar system with a thick atmosphere and lakes on its surface, except that in this case the liquid in them is methane and the beaches and valleys are made of hydrocarbon slush.

NASA’s working definition of life, coined by a group of biologists in 1992, is “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”

Any liquid could serve as the medium of this thing, process, whatever it is. Life on Titan would expand our notions of what is biochemically possible out there in the rest of the universe.

Our history of exploration suggests that surprise is the nature of the game. That was the lesson of the Voyager missions: Every world or moon encountered on that twin-spacecraft odyssey was different, an example of the laws of physics sculpted by time and circumstance into unique and weird forms.

And so far that is the lesson of the new astronomy of exoplanets — thousands of planetary systems, but not a single one that looks like our own.

The detection of a single piece of pond slime, one alien microbe, on some other world would rank as one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. Why should we expect it to look anything like what we already know?

That microbe won’t come any cheaper than the Higgs boson, the keystone of modern particle physics, which cost more than $10 billion to hunt down over half a century.

Finding that microbe will involve launching big, complicated chunks of hardware to various corners of the solar system, and that means work for engineers, scientists, accountants, welders, machinists, electricians, programmers and practitioners of other crafts yet to be invented — astro-robot-paleontologists, say.

However many billions of dollars it takes to knock on doors and find out if anybody is at home, it will all be spent here on Earth, on people and things we all say we want: innovation, education, science, technology.

We’ve seen this have a happy ending before. It was the kids of the aerospace industry and the military-industrial complex, especially in California, who gave us Silicon Valley and general relativity in our pockets.

In this era, a happy ending could include the news that we are not alone, that the cosmos is more diverse, again, than we had imagined.

Or not.

In another 50 years the silence from out there could be deafening.

Correction: October 28, 2015 

An earlier version of this article misstated part of the name of the institution where Chris McKay is an astrobiologist. It is NASA’s Ames Research Center, not Laboratory.

Cassini Seeks Insights to Life in Plumes of Enceladus, Saturn’s Icy Moon - The New York Times

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Look up at the sky - Richard Branson on the picture taken by #Cassini of the #Earth and #Moon

the picture taken by #Cassini of the #Earth and #Moon

Look up at the sky

• By Richard Branson -
• Jul 24, 2013

Did you look up at the sky when all of us on Planet Earth had our photo taken from a billion miles away last week? Judging from the response online, it seems lots of you did.

Now Cassini have released the first images of Earth and its moon as tiny dots - Earth is the blue dot on the left; the moon is fainter on the right hand side.

Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist, said: "Cassini's picture reminds us how tiny our home planet is in the vastness of space, but also testifies to the ingenuity of the citizens of this tiny planet to be able to send a robotic spacecraft so far away from home to take a picture of Earth and study a distant world like Saturn."

After urging people to go outside and stare at the sky while the photo was being taken, I particularly liked Martijn Scheffers reply on Facebook. "So I walked out, looked up, started smiling. After 2 seconds random bypassers declared me crazy. Why would a man gaze into the sky they said..."

I'm glad you looked up anyway Martijn. The better question is: why wouldn't you gaze up at the stars?
By Richard Branson. Founder of Virgin Group

Look up at the sky - Richard's Blog - Virgin.com

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We're going back to Mars!!

Curiosity is his name, Martian Exploration is his game...

Did you know NASA is sending another Rover to Mars?

The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity


Mission: Study the habitability of Mars

Mars Science Laboratory - Curiosity Rover - Mission Animation

This artist's concept animation depicts key events of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, which will launch in late 2011 and land a rover, Curiosity, on Mars in August 2012

NASA - Multimedia - Video Gallery

See the video explaining the mission:

Space Shuttles on Offer

For Sale: NASA Space Shuttle
Condition: 27 years old, 150 million miles traveled, somewhat dinged but well maintained.

NASA/Getty Images

The space shuttle Discovery on its 39th and final flight.

Price: $0.

Dealer preparation and destination charges: $28.8 million.

So, does anyone want to buy a used space shuttle?

Yes, it turns out. This old vehicle — the space shuttle Discovery — is an object of fervent desire for museums around the country, which would love to add it or one of its mates, the Endeavour and the Atlantis, to their collections. (Financing terms can be arranged with NASA.)

The Discovery is to return from orbit on Wednesday, concluding its 39th flight and its space-faring career, but it will make at least one more ascent — piggyback on a 747 airplane — to its resting place for public display. NASA will announce the final destinations for the three soon-to-be-retired shuttles on April 12, the 30th anniversary of the first space shuttle launching.

Some of the competing institutions have been campaigning energetically.

The visitor center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston hired a marketing firm and set up a Web site, bringtheshuttlehome.com. Houston, the marketers argue, is the location of NASA’s Mission Control, which guides the shuttles during flight. For the Texans, owning a space shuttle would be “the modern-day equivalent of housing Columbus’ famed ships — the Nina, the Pinta or the Santa Maria,” the Web site states.

The Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in Manhattan has collected more than 150,000 names on a petition urging that one of the shuttles be placed there. “New York City would make an ideal home for one of these retiring shuttles,” the campaign asserts, noting that the spacecraft would be “prominently displayed” on Pier 86 in Manhattan.

The Museum of Flight in Seattle has perhaps gone the furthest: this week, it erected the first wall of a new $12 million wing to house the shuttle it may never get. The museum’s “shuttle boosters” Web site argues that Seattle has “the right stuff” because the Boeing 747 was built there and 27 shuttle astronauts have called Washington home. (Officials at the Seattle museum say they have planned for the possibility of not getting a shuttle and would fill the space with other space artifacts.)

No one knows if these efforts, or dueling letters from various members of Congress, are exerting any sway on the top decision-maker at NASA, Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., who has said that he alone will decide where the shuttles end up.

NASA says that 21 institutions have submitted proposals.

“We’re waiting,” said Susan Marenoff, president of the Intrepid Museum. “We’re hoping.”

Other hopefuls include the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the launching site of all of the shuttle missions; the California Science Center in Los Angeles; and the Museum of the United States Air Force, near Dayton, Ohio, which got a boost from President Obama’s budget request for 2012 seeking $14 million to send a shuttle there.

“There are more favorites than there are shuttles,” said Robert Pearlman, editor of CollectSpace.com, a Web site for space history enthusiasts.

One museum that has been mum is the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. But that is because NASA already offered it the Discovery three years ago, and most expect the Discovery will go there. After concerns last year that the Smithsonian could not afford $28.8 million, Congress, in a budget bill passed in December, included a clause that specifically excuses the Smithsonian from those costs. If NASA offered a shuttle to the Smithsonian, the bill decreed, it would be “at no or nominal cost.”

The Smithsonian, however, has been reticent about its intentions, and a spokeswoman offered only a short statement: “The museum is involved in discussions with NASA about transfer of the orbiter and other artifacts from the shuttle program. The final disposition of shuttle artifacts will be the decision of NASA.”

After the Discovery lands, only two shuttle flights remain. The Endeavour is scheduled to launch in April, and the Atlantis in June. Then the three will become museum pieces, with delivery expected next year. Each weighs about 170,000 pounds and is 122 feet long, with a wingspan of 78 feet.

There is also a fourth orbiter, the Enterprise, which was used for early glide tests but never went to space. The Air and Space Museum has the Enterprise on display at its spacious Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington-Dulles Airport. If the Discovery goes to the Smithsonian as expected, the Enterprise would likely get bumped to a new home, a consolation prize for one of the museums that did not receive a space-traveled shuttle.

A couple of years ago, NASA inquired if any museums or other institutions had an interest in acquiring one of the three flying space shuttles. Potential bidders were told that educational programs had to accompany the exhibits, and that the shuttles had to reside in an indoor, climate-controlled environment. (NASA does not want to repeat the mistake at the end of the Apollo era, when the remaining Saturn V rockets rusted and decayed outdoors.)

Since then, NASA has been mostly silent.

“We’ve not been contacted since we submitted,” said Richard E. Allen Jr., chief executive of Space Center Houston, the visitor center at Johnson.

After it lands, the Discovery will go through a month of postflight rituals, like the removal of payloads. But then, instead of beginning preparations for another flight, workers will start primping it for its life as a tourist attraction. That work — which accounts for most of the $28.8 million that NASA is charging — will include cleaning or removing parts that have been contaminated by toxic propellants, and will likely take nine months to a year.

The visitor complex at the Kennedy Space Center has proposed what would probably the most ambitious display: While most of the museums would have the orbiter sitting on the ground and build a fancy hangar around it, Kennedy would like to suspend it horizontally as if it were in Earth’s orbit, with the payload doors open and the robotic arm sticking out. It would the centerpiece of a $100 million, 64,000-square-foot exhibit that would open in the second half of 2013.

“We want to show it in flight,” said William Moore, the chief operating officer of the visitor center, which operates under contract with NASA without government funding, “and so the exhibit is really based around the shuttle working, because it’s a working vehicle and has done a lot of great things.”

Mr. Moore said he was confident that his institution would be one of the recipients. “You should be sure to call me back on April the 13th about how we feel when we get an orbiter,” he said.

However, for all his confidence, Mr. Moore admitted that he had no idea what General Bolden was thinking. “We read the newspaper a lot,” he said. “NASA has been very close-lipped about this. We really don’t have any inside scoop at all.”

Museums Compete for NASA’s Soon-to-be-Retired Space Shuttles - NYTimes.com

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