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Red Star Racing Getting Ready for NASA Western Championship NASA Sonoma Raceway – Video

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Red Star Racing Getting Ready for NASA Western Championship NASA Sonoma Raceway
The toughest competition in NASA #39;s season this year will take place at two great racing venues Road Atlanta and Sonoma Raceway- that will host the Eastern and Western Championships respective.

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Red Star Racing Getting Ready for NASA Western Championship NASA Sonoma Raceway - Video

International Space Station Expedition 41 Astronaut Crew Lands Safely in Kazakhstan – Video

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International Space Station Expedition 41 Astronaut Crew Lands Safely in Kazakhstan
Expedition 41 Commander Max Suraev of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), NASA Flight Engineer Reid Wiseman and Flight Engineer Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency ...

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International Space Station Expedition 41 Astronaut Crew Lands Safely in Kazakhstan - Video

NASA's Plan to Visit an Asteroid Faces a Rocky Start

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America's keystone human spaceflight mission for the next decade may be over before it begins

In this artist's rendition, a spacewalking astronaut prepares to retrieve samples from a captured asteroid in high lunar orbit as part of NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission concept. Credit: NASA

NASAs next vehicle designed to carry astronauts to space is set to launch early next month atop a trusty Delta 4 rocket for a crewless test flight. Current plans call for a piloted flight in the new Orion spacecraft in the mid-2020s, when the vehicle will ride atop a new NASA heavy-lift rocket to take astronauts beyond Earth orbit for the first time in a half-century. Whats far less certain in the postspace shuttle era is where theyll go from there. If the Obama administration and NASA have their way, the astronauts will be visiting a small asteroid that will have been nudged by a solar-powered robotic probe into a high, stable lunar orbit. During the monthlong mission the astronauts will rendezvous with the asteroid, perform spacewalks to gather samples and then return to Earth. The target asteroid has yet to be announced and a robotic space tug has yet to be built but NASA hopes to have the space rock relocated to the moons vicinity as soon as 2021. NASA calls this complex concept the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) and bills it as the first crucial step toward human missions to Mars in the 2030s. Others arent so sure. In June of this past summer the National Research Council issued a report stating ARM could divert U.S. resources and attention from more worthy missions. A month later NASAs Advisory Council criticized ARM as a dead-end element on the path to Mars. The harshest criticisms of all surprisingly came from asteroid scientists who voiced their discontent via statements from NASAs Small Bodies Assessment Group, calling ARMs science not compelling. Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute, blasted ARM in September while testifying to a congressional committee, saying that NASAs cost estimate of less than $1.25 billion for the robotic component of the mission strains credulity. Im not a big fan of human space exploration as performance art, which is what ARM is, Sykes says. Because the problem with performance art is that your next trick has to be bigger than your last trickand that quickly gets unsustainable. ARM will never be funded. It will never happen. Its a waste of money. It doesnt advance anything and everything that could benefit from it could be benefited far more by other, cheaper, more efficient means. Michele Gates, NASAs program director for ARM, says that the mission concept is meeting its developmental milestones and that an independent cost assessment study is underway. She and other NASA officials note that the advanced propulsion required for ARM would be enabling technology for a broad range of future missions and that ARM would be a crucial test for many deep-space activities crucial for someday reaching Mars. And it would do all this while keeping astronauts sufficiently close to home so that if something goes wrong, they could attempt an emergency return to Earth. Last year, when the National Research Council released their report, we had very little detail on the ARM concept while their technical panel was doing their analysis, Gates says. Given the amount of work that has been done in the past year, and the positive reception weve received from so many communities to our most recent sharing of results, I would encourage everyone to look at the latest data. ARMs fortunes now appear more fragile than ever, and its fate may have already been sealed by this years midterm elections, in which Republicans opposed to the mission took control of Congress. Still, NASA plans to conduct a formal review of the ARM concept in February 2015, and the Obama administrations next budget proposal is expected to request more funding for ARM, its signature effort in human spaceflight. One basic concept helps explain how we got here, where ARM came from and why it has such a large and diverse set of critics: inertia, the tendency for things at rest to stay that way, and for things in motion to keep moving at a constant speed and heading. In rocketry the effort required to overcome inertia, to change velocity and trajectory, is called delta-V. Its usually measured in meters or kilometers per second and you usually get it by firing propellant out of your engines. More delta-V lets you move larger objects at higher speeds to a wider variety of places but getting enough to send astronauts to land on a planet or a moon typically requires big, budget-busting rockets. Visiting smaller bodies like nearby asteroids and comets can be easier, because such trips often require less delta-V. NASA and its rocket programs have inertia, too, but their trajectories are changed only through heavy expenditures of that most elusive propellant, political capital. One might call it delta-P. Pres. George W. Bush tried to change NASAs course with the Constellation Program, which promised to retire the space shuttles and build new rockets and spacecraft to take astronauts back to the moon and beyond. But his administration exhausted its delta-P with a costly war in Iraq. Plagued by budget problems, the program was seen as unsustainable by incoming Pres. Barack Obama, who expended some delta-P of his own by canceling Constellation in 2009. Instead of immediately returning to the moon or going directly to Mars, Obamas NASA would focus on pursuing advanced propulsion technologies that could provide more delta-V for less money, using missions to unspecified locations in deep space as their proving grounds. Inertia had other ideas. If Constellation disappeared, billions of dollars of contracts and thousands of jobs could vanish with it. Influential senators and representatives accused Obama of destroying NASA by canceling Constellation and providing no alternative destinations and deadlines. Faced with bipartisan congressional opposition the administration chose to preserve Constellations crew vehicle, Orion, and grudgingly accepted the development of the Space Launch System, a rocket program eerily similar to Constellations. But even so, senior Obama administration officials believed the president could still salvage his earlier proposals by announcing a new destination for NASAs astronauts and a timetable for reaching it. The announcement came during an April 2010 speech at the agencys Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral, Fla, where Obama pledged to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025. There was only one problemthe agency was short of delta-P and delta-V. A major, politically untenable increase to NASAs budget seemed to be the only way to accelerate the development of rockets and life-support systems capable of sending astronauts on a months-long journey to a far-off asteroid by Obamas deadline. Through a series of commissioned studies the agency began investigating whether instead of sending astronauts to an asteroid it could send an asteroid to the astronautsperhaps on the International Space Station, in high Earth orbit or even around the moon. The feat seemed possible, provided NASA could develop an advanced solar-electric engine. Although weaker than chemical rockets in terms of thrust, such an engine could sustain thrust for years, delivering a shift in delta-V great enough to retrieve a near-Earth asteroid. The crucial work supporting this approach appeared in 2012, in a report produced by Caltechs Keck Institute of Space Studies. According to that study, for some $2.6 billion a robotic tug could rendezvous with a seven-meter, 500,000-kilogram asteroid, capture it in a deployable bag and push it into high lunar orbit by 2025that is, in time for astronauts to visit it to meet the presidents deadline. One of the studys leads, Planetary Society co-founder Louis Friedman, presented the results to Lori Garver, then NASAs deputy administrator, who shared it with Bill Gerstenmaier, head of NASAs human spaceflight efforts. With support from NASAs top brass, the White House hesitantly gave its approval. From this awkward timeline, ARM was born, albeit in slightly altered form: NASA revised the estimated cost downward by more than half and established two competing scenarios for delivering an approximately five-meter-wide object to high lunar orbit: option Aa grab-and-bag mission similar to that studied by Friedman and colleagues; and option Buse a robotic arm to pluck a small boulder off a larger asteroid. NASA plans to choose between these options this December. The widespread criticism began after ARM was publicly disclosed in April 2013 and has continued unceasingly. Whether from hopeful astronauts wanting to return to the moon or go to Mars, space scientists opposed to all government-sponsored human spaceflight, government accountants concerned by possible cost growth or congressional Republicans steadfastly opposed to any proposal from Obama, almost every key space policy constituency has found a reason to oppose the mission. What the critics dont seem to understand is that if we dont send humans to an asteroid that is moved closer to Earth, we will send humans nowhere for the foreseeable future, which means the next decade or two, Friedman says. If we drop this mission, our planned rockets and crew modules can go out as far as the moon but we wont be able to land without investments that are frankly unrealistic right now. ARMs harshest critics, asteroid scientists such as Sykes of the Planetary Science Institute and M.I.T. professor Richard Binzel, remain unconvinced. Its an empty threat to say if you dont take this thing that came from nowhere youll get nothing and that will be the end of everything, Sykes says. Well, you know, okay, finepull the trigger, guys. Maybe some people dont get the toy that they want but there are other options our leaders can pursue. Sykes says he and many of his peers do want an asteroid mission; they just envision something far different and more transformative than NASAs deadline-driven ARM proposal. Some asteroids, Sykes notes, are rich with water ice that can be processed into rocket fuel, but he is skeptical that ARM will develop the technology required to use those valuable resources. He also believes astronauts need new, better technologies to perform tasks in outer space. His hopes for such an ambitious mission plunged, he says, when NASAs ARM team sent peacemaking envoys to a recent meeting of asteroid scientists in Washington, D.C. They were showing the jetpacks and spacesuits astronauts would wear to go to the bag that has the rock brought back to lunar orbit, and how they would interact with it, Sykes recalls. I felt like we were looking at a Neolithic cave painting. Do we really want to grab an asteroids surfaces with our fingers in gloves and examine them with eyeballs through a faceplate? They do surgery in Africa and mining in Brazil through telepresence. Lets do it on an asteroid. Youll have the sense youre there and you can perform delicate operations. Youll be able to observe across wavelength regimes and sensitivities far better than human. Binzels arguments stem more from simple statistics, which he highlighted in a recent op-ed in Nature (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group). The sheer number of near-Earth asteroids now thought to be in native orbits amenable to low delta-V visits from astronauts, he says, obviates the need for an expensive redirect mission. Its better and cheaper, he argues, for NASA to look harder before it leaps. Binzel proposes the agency forget about the 2025 deadline in favor of first building a space telescope to map the near-Earth asteroids. By the time we would tow a tiny rock into lunar orbit, well be discovering more attractive, larger objects passing through the Earthmoon system that are easy to reach, Binzel says. A retrieval mission gets you one asteroid, but a survey gets you thousands that you could potentially visit, at a much lower cost. At current rates of discovery, he adds, NASA will be breaking the law by 2020, when a congressionally mandated deadline expires for the agency to map 90 percent of potentially hazardous asteroids some 140 meters or larger in size. An asteroid-surveying telescope could solve that, too. Lindley Johnson, program executive for the NASA Near-Earth Object Program, acknowledges that the agency is currently in danger of slipping its 2020 deadline for mapping hazardous objects and that Binzel is correct in pointing out that an adequate survey has yet to be performed. Add it up and a grim conclusion seems inescapable: There is a very real possibility that by failing to first invest in finding ideal asteroids for human missions, NASAs prioritization of ARM could become a very expensive mistake. As has happened several times before, inertia and internecine conflict again seem set to send the agencys latest plans for human spaceflight tumbling into the void, boldly going nowhere.

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NASA's Plan to Visit an Asteroid Faces a Rocky Start

NASAs Next Exoplanet Hunter Moves Into Development

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A conceptual image of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Image Credit: MIT

NASAs ongoing hunt for exoplanets has entered a new phase as NASA officially confirmed that the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is moving into the development phase. This marks a significant step for the TESS mission, which will search the entire sky for planets outside our solar system (a.k.a. exoplanets). Designed as the first all-sky survey, TESS will spend two years of an overall three-year mission searching both hemispheres of the sky for nearby exoplanets.

Previous sky surveys with ground-based telescopes have mainly picked out giant exoplanets. In contrast, TESS will examine a large number of small planets around the very brightest stars in the sky. TESS will then record the nearest and brightest main sequence stars hosting transiting exoplanets, which will forever be the most favorable targets for detailed investigations. During the third year of the TESS mission, ground-based astronomical observatories will continue monitoring exoplanets identified by the TESS spacecraft.

This is an incredibly exciting time for the search of planets outside our solar system, said Mark Sistilli, the TESS program executive from NASA Headquarters, Washington. We got the green light to start building what is going to be a spacecraft that could change what we think we know about exoplanets.

During its first two years in orbit, the TESS spacecraft will concentrate its gaze on several hundred thousand specially chosen stars, looking for small dips in their light caused by orbiting planets passing between their host star and us, said TESS Principal Investigator George Ricker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology..

Artistic representations of known exoplanets with any possibility to support life. Image Credit: Planetary Habitability Laboratory, University of Puerto Rico, Arecibo.

All in all, TESS is expected to find more than 5,000 exoplanet candidates, including 50 Earth-sized planets. It will also find a wide array of exoplanet types, ranging from small, rocky planets to gas giants. Some of these planets could be the right sizes, and orbit at the correct distances from their stars, to potentially support life.

The most exciting part of the search for planets outside our solar system is the identification of earthlike planets with rocky surfaces and liquid water as well as temperatures and atmospheric constituents that appear hospitable to life, said TESS Project Manager Jeff Volosin at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Although these planets are small and harder to detect from so far away, this is exactly the type of world that the TESS mission will focus on identifying.

Now that NASA has confirmed the development of TESS, the next step is the Critical Design Review, which is scheduled to take place in 2015. This would clear the mission to build the necessary flight hardware for its proposed launch in 2017.

After spending the past year building the team and honing the design, it is incredibly exciting to be approved to move forward toward implementing NASAs newest exoplanet hunting mission, Volosin said.

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NASAs Next Exoplanet Hunter Moves Into Development

NASA confirms 'fireball' lights up Texas sky

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Scientists at NASA have confirmed that a ball of light seen streaking across the Texas skies Saturday was a meteor and one so bright they call it a "fireball."

Hundreds reported seeing the bright green ball of light crossing the night sky above San Antonio, the event was even captured on video by a Hewitt police dashboard camera.

The meteor is clearly visible in that and in another video posted by a YouTube user after the sighting just before 9 p.m. Saturday.

"This was definitely what we call a fireball, which by definition is a meteor brighter than the planet Venus," Dr. Bill Cooke, head of NASA's meteoroid environment office, told a news conference Sunday.

"This event was so bright that it was picked up on a NASA meteor camera in the mountains of New Mexico over 500 miles away, which makes it extremely unusual," he said, according to CNN reports of the news conference. "This was a very bright event."

The meteor appears for several seconds, one enormous ball of light followed by the streak of a tail.

It prompted hundreds of calls to local authorities including the National Weather Service.

"All of them received reports of seeing a meteor," said TrevorBoucher, meteorologist with the NWS. Officials at the weather service also shared a video of the event on their social media pages.

NASA officials studying the sighting have estimated the metoer was at least 4 feet wide and weighed more than 4,000 pounds, according to CNN. It burned five times brighter than a full moon.

Cooke told reporters it is possible that parts of the fireball hit the ground. Maverick County Sheriff's Department reported that NWS had confirmed the ground shook at around 8:45 p.m. Saturday.

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NASA confirms 'fireball' lights up Texas sky

NASA astronaut, Russian cosmonaut, and German engineer return to Earth

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Three crew members have safely landed in Kazakhstan after a three and a half hour journey from the ISS They departed the station in a Soyuz capsule on Sunday evening and returned early this morning Maxim Suraev, Reid Wiseman and Alexander Gerst were the three to depart the station They travelled in the same Soyuz that took them to the ISS on 28 May this year The ISS has been permanently staffed since the first crew arrived on 2 November 2000 Three crewmembers remain on the ISS, with another three set to join later this month

By Jonathan O'Callaghan for MailOnline

Published: 01:51 EST, 10 November 2014 | Updated: 08:29 EST, 10 November 2014

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A veteran Russian cosmonaut and two International Space Station crewmates, one from the United States and one from Germany, returned safely to Earth this morning at 3:58am GMT (10:58pm EST).

The parachute landing of their Soyuz capsule in Kazakhstan ended five and a half months in orbit aboard the International Space Station.

Maxim Suraev of the Russian space agency, who was commander of the station during the mission, climbed into the Soyuz craft with Nasa astronaut Reid Wiseman and German flight engineer Alexander Gerst from the European Space Agency and departed the orbital outpost last night.

Scroll down for video of landing

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NASA astronaut, Russian cosmonaut, and German engineer return to Earth

Voyager 2 Neptune Encounter 1989 NASA Briefing by Project Scientist Ed Stone – Video

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Voyager 2 Neptune Encounter 1989 NASA Briefing by Project Scientist Ed Stone
more at http://scitech.quickfound.net/astro/planet_news.html NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory press briefing by Voyager Project Scientist Edward Stone prior to the Voyager 2 Neptune Encounter...

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Voyager 2 Neptune Encounter 1989 NASA Briefing by Project Scientist Ed Stone - Video

Mystery ‘face’ on Mars: UFO blogger claims NASA head photo is a sign of past life – Video

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Mystery #39;face #39; on Mars: UFO blogger claims NASA head photo is a sign of past life
Mystery #39;face #39; on Mars: UFO blogger claims NASA head photo is a sign of past life For the the last few decades Nasa has spent billions of dollars on a variety of missions to Mars to find out...

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Mystery 'face' on Mars: UFO blogger claims NASA head photo is a sign of past life - Video

Onyx communicator system, NASA’s watery spaceballs, Star Wars VII gets named – DT Daily (Nov 7) – Video

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Onyx communicator system, NASA #39;s watery spaceballs, Star Wars VII gets named - DT Daily (Nov 7)
Smartphones, Bluetooth devices and even those corded things stuck to the wall are all pretty good for communicating with others, but what if you could just push one button and chat like Picard...

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Onyx communicator system, NASA's watery spaceballs, Star Wars VII gets named - DT Daily (Nov 7) - Video

Crazy! NASA Spots Mysterious Lights As Bright As All the Known Galaxies Combined! – Video

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Crazy! NASA Spots Mysterious Lights As Bright As All the Known Galaxies Combined!
http://www.undergroundworldnews.com The findings redefine what scientists think of as galaxies, Nasa said. Galaxies may not have a set boundary of stars, but instead stretch out to great distances,...

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Crazy! NASA Spots Mysterious Lights As Bright As All the Known Galaxies Combined! - Video


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