What's NASA Up To And Other Space Stuff

[EyeKhan]

Even if the temperatures are bearable there, it's still freezing on the other side limiting the habitable area, and you've still got the temperature differential that's going to cause some pretty awful weather conditions. Planets look like they're pretty abundant, so we can find better.

Also, if gravity's your chief concern, might I suggest Venus? It's probably not an easy terraform job, even as far as terraforming jobs go, but it is right there.

Venus' day lasts longer than it's year. That's probably a bigger problem than the ocean-like crushing atmospheric pressure/ lead-melting heat/ and sulfuric acid laced atmosphere. Maybe some of those conditions were caused and/or maintained by the fact the planet barely rotates. Interestingly, based on crater count, the surface of Venus is estimated at about 300 to 500 million years old, depending on who you ask.

[Steely Glint]

[Aimless]

Venus' day lasts longer than it's year. That's probably a bigger problem than the ocean-like crushing atmospheric pressure/ lead-melting heat/ and sulfuric acid laced atmosphere. Maybe some of those conditions were caused and/or maintained by the fact the planet barely rotates. Interestingly, based on crater count, the surface of Venus is estimated at about 300 to 500 million years old, depending on who you ask.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/...m_source=atlfb

[Steely Glint]

http://www.spacex.com/news/2017/02/2...moon-next-year

[EyeKhan]

http://www.spacex.com/news/2017/02/2...moon-next-year

And wow that's coming up fast.

Given that SpaceX hasn't sent anything beyond low earth orbit, and hasn't sent a crewed mission anywhere at all, I'm not so sure I'd sign up for that first trip. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a fine idea. But damn, that's coming up fast.

[wiggin]

And wow that's coming up fast.

Given that SpaceX hasn't sent anything beyond low earth orbit, and hasn't sent a crewed mission anywhere at all, I'm not so sure I'd sign up for that first trip. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a fine idea. But damn, that's coming up fast.

Actually I wouldn't be so concerned, provided their Falcon Heavy testing goes well. The mission itself is not really all that challenging provided the initial booster does its job. 2018 is an ambitious, but not infeasible, timeline.

[EyeKhan]

Would you take the trip? Cost aside, that is... and assuming you could be on trip #3 or #4 at no additional cost?

Edit: Is this the crewed Dragon maiden flight?

[wiggin]

Would you take the trip? Cost aside, that is... and assuming you could be on trip #3 or #4 at no additional cost?

Edit: Is this the crewed Dragon maiden flight?

I wouldn't for the same reason I wouldn't go on any space travel - it's a lot less sexy sounding in reality and even with 'safe' methods of transportation it's still one of the most dangerous things I could do. Once my family is provided for and my kids are grown and my wife agrees? Sure, why not? It's not like the Saturn V was known to be safe either.

[Flixy]

Actually I wouldn't be so concerned, provided their Falcon Heavy testing goes well. The mission itself is not really all that challenging provided the initial booster does its job. 2018 is an ambitious, but not infeasible, timeline.

Re entry is quite a bit trickier too, coming in faster right? And I don't know what the timeline is for testing the crewed capsule (plus the crew being tourists rather than astronauts with test flight experience makes improv repairs a la apollo 13 harder too).

[Steely Glint]

Via twitter, list of things SpaceX must do before doing this (to be read in context of the delays to Commercial Crew and the skepticism by the FAA about Orion and Dragon v2 flying at all by 2018):



This ain't happening in 2018, I'd put money on it. Probably will happen by 2020, though, I'd put money on that.

I think it's a good idea - a decent way to ease ourselves back into trans-LEO space flight with an exciting but not overly challenging mission.

[wiggin]

Re entry is quite a bit trickier too, coming in faster right? And I don't know what the timeline is for testing the crewed capsule (plus the crew being tourists rather than astronauts with test flight experience makes improv repairs a la apollo 13 harder too).

I think the assumption is that if something goes catastrophically wrong, the passengers are going to die. As for testing of the crew capsule and human rating the rest, that's probably the biggest hurdle. I think the Falcon Heavy could be ready in time - albeit not with a very strong track record.

Via twitter, list of things SpaceX must do before doing this (to be read in context of the delays to Commercial Crew and the skepticism by the FAA about Orion and Dragon v2 flying at all by 2018):



This ain't happening in 2018, I'd put money on it. Probably will happen by 2020, though, I'd put money on that.

I think it's a good idea - a decent way to ease ourselves back into trans-LEO space flight with an exciting but not overly challenging mission.

You probably would win your bet - Musk has a long history of over promising and underdelivering on schedule (even if he typically gets the results he wants, eventually). I think the biggest challenges would be their backlog of orders, especially given their contractual commitments. If they had those in order, getting the crew capsule and FH ready in just under two years is ambitious but not impossible.

[Cracky]

And wow that's coming up fast.

Given that SpaceX hasn't sent anything beyond low earth orbit, and hasn't sent a crewed mission anywhere at all, I'm not so sure I'd sign up for that first trip. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a fine idea. But damn, that's coming up fast.

SpaceX has put plenty of things into GTO.

I still think it's optimistic though, the Falcon Heavy has been 6 months away for years now.

[EyeKhan]

It's wonderful and exciting and I hope they pull it off in the timing Musk put out there. But damn, 2018 is coming fast.

[EyeKhan]

This is interesting. I wonder how big the magnet would have to be... I suppose a solar-powered electromagnet is feasible? The article suggests that Mars' atmosphere would begin to return simply by the existence of this magnetic shield. Is that an error? Seems that additional heat would be needed to melt the CO2 polar caps.

NASA Considers Magnetic Shield to Help Mars Grow Its Atmosphere

The Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop is happening right now at NASA headquarters in Washington DC. The workshop is meant to discuss ambitious space projects that could be realized, or at least started, by 2050.


One of the most enticing ideas came this morning from Jim Green, NASA's Planetary Science Division Director. In a talk titled, "A Future Mars Environment for Science and Exploration," Green discussed launching a "magnetic shield" to a stable orbit between Mars and the sun, called Mars L1, to shield the planet from high-energy solar particles. The shield structure would consist of a large dipole, or a pair of equal and oppositely charged magnets to generate an artificial magnetic field.


Such a shield could leave Mars in the relatively protected magnetotail of the magnetic field created by the object, allowing the Red Planet to slowly restore its atmosphere. About 90 percent of Mars's atmosphere was stripped away by solar particles in the lifetime of the planet, which was likely temperate and had surface water about 3.5 billion years ago.



According to simulation models, such a shield could help Mars achieve half the atmospheric pressure of Earth in a matter of years. With protection from solar winds, frozen CO2 at Mars's polar ice caps would start to sublimate, or turn directly into gas from a solid. The greenhouse effect would start to fill Mars's thin atmosphere and heat the planet, mainly at the equator, at which point the vast stores of ice under the poles would melt and flood the world with liquid water.


"Perhaps one-seventh of the ancient ocean could return to Mars," said Green.

This is some truly futuristic stuff, reminiscent of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy. But it is theoretically possible, and it just might, maybe, be a step toward terraforming Mars for human inhabitation in the next century.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/nasa-cons...201359524.html

[EyeKhan]

SciAm's take on SpaceX getting a moon mission done in 2018...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...-moon-in-2018/

[Aimless]

This is how humanity will survive the war:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2...liens-science/

[EyeKhan]

This is interesting. I wonder how big the magnet would have to be... I suppose a solar-powered electromagnet is feasible? The article suggests that Mars' atmosphere would begin to return simply by the existence of this magnetic shield. Is that an error? Seems that additional heat would be needed to melt the CO2 polar caps.

Here it is again, different article... How hard is it to generate a 20k Gauss magnetic field? Do you see the time frame for thickening Mars' atmosphere - by the 2040s??? Wow, that's fast. And with no other action taken. Huh.

2 tesla Magnetic Shield placed at Mars Lagrange point would shield Martian atmosphere for affordable partial terraforming

March 05, 2017

An inflatable structure(s) can generate a magnetic dipole field at a level of perhaps 1 or 2 Tesla (or 10,000 to 20,000 Gauss) as an active shield against the solar wind and allow the Martian atmosphere to thicken overtime.

Mars atmosphere would naturally thicken over time, which lead to many new possibilities for human exploration and colonization. According to Green and his colleagues, these would include an average increase of about 4 °C (~7 °F), which would be enough to melt the carbon dioxide ice in the northern polar ice cap. This would trigger a greenhouse effect, warming the atmosphere further and causing the water ice in the polar caps to melt.

By their calculations, Green and his colleagues estimated that this could lead to 1/7th of Mars' oceans – the ones that covered it billions of years again.

"A greatly enhanced Martian atmosphere, in both pressure and temperature, that would be enough to allow significant surface liquid water would also have a number of benefits for science and human exploration in the 2040s and beyond," said Green. "Much like Earth, an enhanced atmosphere would: allow larger landed mass of equipment to the surface, shield against most cosmic and solar particle radiation, extend the ability for oxygen extraction, and provide "open air" greenhouses to exist for plant production, just to name a few."

These new conditions on Mars would allow human explorers and researchers to study the planet in much greater detail and enable a truly profound understanding of the habitability of this planet. If this can be achieved in a lifetime, the colonization of Mars would not be far away.

The proposed Lagrange point system would not require massive amounts of superconducting cable with gigawatt generators. It would be a much smaller shield between the Sun and Mars. 2 Tesla magnets are easily produced.

http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/03...s.html?ref=yfp

[wiggin]

Creating a magnetic field of a few Tesla is relatively easy. MRIs routinely operate at 1.5 or 3 T, and there are some high powered ones for research that go as high at 7-9 T. Some very high end systems get up into the tens of Tesla. There are some engineering issues, of course - these magnets are supercooled, so effective cooling of them would be an important task. Power consumption is also an issue - these tend to be very power hungry. Maybe it's possible to make a 2-3 T magnet that doesn't require cooling or power, but I'm not really an expert.

The bigger issue I can imagine, though, is understanding exactly what geometry we're talking about here. Making a clinical grade scanner at 3 T isn't that hard - but making the same size magnet at 9 T would be prohibitively expensive/difficult. Generally, the stronger your magnetic field, the smaller bore your NMR/MRI machine will become. Whether this is a relevant consideration for this proposed shield is not clear to me - are there specific geometry/size/shape requirements for the magnetic field, or does it just need to be of a given strength? Etc.

[Flixy]

Getting to 3T isn't particularly hard if you can focus the field (i.e. in the middle of your coil). If you want that kind of field at a size big enough to cover a substantial amount of space, I'd have to see a design to believe it to be honest. And magnetic forces in a 3T field are also significant, I've had 3T magnets fly across a table and break from the impact. You don't want your space station tearing itself apart!

The proposed Lagrange point system would not require massive amounts of superconducting cable with gigawatt generators.

The whole point of superconducting magnets is that they require little to no power to maintain the field (the problem and energy intensive part is cooling).

[Aimless]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017...restrial-life/

Soon... soon...

[EyeKhan]

Yesterday Space X successfully launched and landed one of the boosters they launched and landed last year. Nice. Of course they'll need to improve that turn-around time, but it's a big milestone.

[Khendraja'aro]

Creating a magnetic field of a few Tesla is relatively easy. MRIs routinely operate at 1.5 or 3 T, and there are some high powered ones for research that go as high at 7-9 T. Some very high end systems get up into the tens of Tesla. There are some engineering issues, of course - these magnets are supercooled, so effective cooling of them would be an important task. Power consumption is also an issue - these tend to be very power hungry. Maybe it's possible to make a 2-3 T magnet that doesn't require cooling or power, but I'm not really an expert.

The bigger issue I can imagine, though, is understanding exactly what geometry we're talking about here. Making a clinical grade scanner at 3 T isn't that hard - but making the same size magnet at 9 T would be prohibitively expensive/difficult. Generally, the stronger your magnetic field, the smaller bore your NMR/MRI machine will become. Whether this is a relevant consideration for this proposed shield is not clear to me - are there specific geometry/size/shape requirements for the magnetic field, or does it just need to be of a given strength? Etc.

An even bigger issue: Keeping that thing at the Lagrange point. Because the magnetic field the device creates makes it essentially a huge solar sail.

[Steely Glint]

[wiggin]

An even bigger issue: Keeping that thing at the Lagrange point. Because the magnetic field the device creates makes it essentially a huge solar sail.

Good point.

[Steely Glint]

Does laughing at this make you a bad person? Asking for a friend.

[EyeKhan]

An even bigger issue: Keeping that thing at the Lagrange point. Because the magnetic field the device creates makes it essentially a huge solar sail.

That seems like a show stopper. So the force of the solar wind on the magnetic field would transfer to the the source of the magnetic field and push the device away from the sun? If so, as a side note, is a big magnetic field then a candidate to replace a physical solar sail as propulsion? I suppose, the benefit of the physical sail is it does not require an energy source to keep it running...

[EyeKhan]

Does laughing at this make you a bad person? Asking for a friend.

I don't understand the graphic. Is that poking fun at SpaceX's crash last year?

[Steely Glint]

I don't understand the graphic. Is that poking fun at SpaceX's crash last year?

It's supposed to be a mission patch for amos-6, which exploded on the pad last year during a static fire test.

[EyeKhan]

Wow. First, crowd-sourcing is clearly awesome. Second, 4 million objects classified? Holy shit, the Oort Cloud is really there! I wonder how big an object has to be for this kind of detection? Third, it should be Planet X, as it was referred to before Pluto's reclassification. Because it's cool. Because that's how sci-fi, good and bad, has referred to it for decades. Dammit.

Planet 9 Found? Astronomers Have Officially Found A Candidate

IN BRIEF

A 3 day search for an undiscovered planet in our solar system has produced 4 possible candidates. The hunt for Planet 9 was part of a Zooniverse citizen science project, and shows what we can achieve when we collaborate on scientific projects.


3 DAYS, 4 POSSIBILITIES

An intense three-day crowdsourced search for an undiscovered planet in our solar system has produced four possible candidates. The hunt for Planet 9 was part of a Zooniverse citizen science project, conducted in real-time, with the BBC’s Stargazing Live broadcast. The project was hosted at the Siding Spring Observatory at Australian National University.

About 60,000 people from all over the world participated in the search, which not only turned up four possible candidates for Planet 9 but also helped classify more than four million other objects. Participants worked using data from Siding Spring’s SkyMapper telescope. The project was led by ANU Researcher Brad Tucker, whose team agreed that regardless of whether one of the four possibles turns out to, in fact, be the mysterious Planet 9, the scientific value of the project was certainly verified.


GROUP EFFORTS ACHIEVE MORE

In 2016, Brown and his colleague Konstantin Batygin discovered that the orbits of a few different objects in the Kuiper Belt were being influenced by a massive body. This was indirect evidence that a large, Neptune-sized planet exists in our solar system far beyond Pluto. However, looking for the mystery planet poses significant challenges. For one, it is probably 1,000 times fainter than Pluto. The task for researchers, then, is to sift through old data and make new observations.

That’s where the crowdsourced project came in: “With the help of tens of thousands of dedicated volunteers sifting through hundreds of thousands of images taken by SkyMapper,” Tucker said, “we have achieved four years of scientific analysis in under three days. One of those volunteers, Toby Roberts, has made 12,000 classifications.”

The ANU team will continue their search and try to confirm whether or not one of the space objects is, in fact, Planet 9. In the meantime, they’re asking people to keep looking through the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 Zooniverse project. The entire experience proves what can be achieved when many scientists (and laypeople who love science) come together. New technologies like deep learning and tools like the James Webb Space Telescope could one day make this kind of research happen quickly and easily, but for now, it’s all hands on deck to make things happen faster.

https://futurism.com/planet-9-found-...d-a-candidate/

[RandBlade]

Planet 9 is Pluto