Post Views: 41

A few of the stories to tell you about this week at nasa. The navigation has confirmed that the parachute has deployed and we are seeing significant deceleration on february 18th. Our mars 2020 perseverance rover mission safely touched down on mars touchdown on the confirmed of mars, ready to begin thinking. The sands of past life, the rover landed in jezreel crater, a region targeted for the excellent opportunity it presents to accomplish the rover’s primary goal of finding signs of past microbial life within minutes. The rover’s first images from mars reached earth confirming perseverance was a okay and even more images followed, including amazing views of the rover’s descent captured by our mars reconnaissance, orbiter and stunning views from onboard the lander showing how descent appeared. From the rover’s point of view. You have to somehow believe that you can do it or else you’d never try to put a car on the surface of mars right, it’s crazy, but there really is no good way to describe that moment when it’s over, and you hear those words touchdown confirmed. This is the most advanced nasa rover to make the nearly 300 million mile trip to mars it’s loaded with groundbreaking technology to help pave the way for future human exploration of the red planet. This includes the ability to collect and leave cast samples of martian, rock and regolith that a future mission being planned by nasa and the european space agency could retrieve and bring back to earth for study.

This mission is amazing on its own science, technology and caching samples to bring back to earth, but it’s also part of our bigger exploration plans right which involve preparing for eventually human missions to mars. While perseverance works to characterize the region’s geology and past climate, there are also plans for the ingenuity experimental helicopter to make the first controlled flight on another planet. Having a flying, robotic explorer could be a huge benefit for human mission. On mars. Being able to fly will enable us to get to places that we cannot get to with rovers and astronauts like slice of steep cliffs deep inside crevices areas of high scientific interest. It will be game. Changing perseverance will undergo several weeks of testing before it begins its two year. Science investigation of mars, the february 20th liftoff of northrop grumman’s antares rocket and cygnus spacecraft from our wallops flight facility marked the start of the company’s 15th resupply mission to the international space station. For nasa, the cygnus named after lake nasa mathematician catherine johnson is loaded with about 8 000 pounds of scientific research, crew supplies and hardware for the station crew. An uncrewed russian progress supply ship arrived at the space station early wednesday after launching from kazakhstan on february 14th. With just over a ton of nitrogen water and propellant, the progress will be used to detach a russian docking module later this year to prepare for the arrival of a new multipurpose laboratory module. Nasa and boeing are now targeting nor earlier than friday april, 2nd for the launch of orbital flight test 2 or oft2 the company’s second uncrewed flight test of the cst 100 starliner spacecraft to the international space station oft2 is an end to end test to prove the Starliner system is ready to begin flying, astronauts to and from the space station as part of nasa’s commercial crew program.

A lightweight, robotic, crane first, designed built and tested at our langley research center more than a decade ago, is being upgraded with a suite of quick interchange tools, giving it swiss army knife, like capabilities that could prove quite useful on future missions to the moon. It can be used as a hoist or forklift to lift payloads weighing as much as an elephant or for jobs requiring a bit more dexterity such as scooping, regolith or welding. The technology is also scalable to fit any size, lander vehicle or service application. That’S what’s up this week at nasa for more on these and other stories, follow us on the web at nasa.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyIKJlOghMw