Monthly Archives: July 2017

WASHINGTON Vice President Mike Pence offered vague plans last week of sending Americans to the moon and Mars, while also announcing that the National Space Council, which will advise the president on U.S. space programs, will hold its first meeting in nearly 25 years later this summer.

Our nation will return to the moon, and we will put American boots on the face of Mars, Pence said Wednesday during a tour of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. The vice president did not offer any specific timeframe or exact details for either endeavor.

A week before Pences NASA visit, President Trump signed an executive order re-establishing the National Space Council, which was created in 1989 and dissolved in 1993. Pence will chair the council, which will include the secretaries of State, Defense, Commerce, Transportation and Homeland Security and the director of National Intelligence, among other officials.

Our National Space Council will reenergize the pioneering spirit of America and it will ensure that America never again loses our lead in space exploration and technology, Pence said.

President Trump in March signed the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017, a piece of legislation introduced by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and a handful of others that added human exploration of Mars as one of NASAs key objectives. The legislation envisions completing a crewed mission to Mars in the 2030s. Trump during a videoconference with astronauts aboard the International Space Station in April said, Well do it a lot sooner than were even thinking.

NASA has requested $19.1 billion for fiscal 2018. A House appropriations subcommittee in June approved a spending bill that provides NASA with $19.9 billion for 2018. Lawmakers in both the House and Senate during NASA budget hearings earlier this year criticized proposed cuts as outlined in the administrations budget. The fiscal 2018 figure is within range of budgets for fiscal 2017 ($19.5 billion) and 2016 ($19.3 billion). According to Office of Management and Budget figures, NASA funding was at its height in 1966 ($43.6 billion in 2014 dollars). In 1969, the year the U.S. landed men on the moon, NASA was funded $27.6 billion (2014 dollars).

NASAs 2018 budget request lists $4.7 billion for space operations, including $1.5 billion for the International Space Station and $3.9 billion for exploration. According to agency documents, NASAs James Webb Space Telescope, which will be used to identify oxygen products and life forms on exoplanets, is on pace to launch in 2018. The telescope is expected to build on discoveries made by the Hubble Space Telescope, with greater capability in tracking longer wavelengths. The telescopes first target will be Trapist 1, a star with seven habitable, Earth-sized planets orbiting. LHS 1140B, a massive planet with earthlike features, is the second target.

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Big Space Exploration Dreams from Administration with Few Details Yet - PJ Media

CAPE CANAVERAL, FL - JUNE 03: In this handout provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Dragon spacecraft onboard, launches from pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on June 3, 2017 in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Bill Ingalls/NASA

Lawmakers are taking the defense budget to new heights by adding a new proposal for a separate military service known as the "Space Corps" in this year's National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The Committee on Armed Services Subcommittee for Strategic Forces released their proposals for Fiscal Year 2018 on June 20th, which included authorization of space, nuclear and missile defense capabilities to further protect U.S. national security.

The Space Corps' creation comes amid what Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Alabama, and Ranking Member Jim Cooper, D-Tennessee, said they would "take the measures necessary" to address ongoing delays and cost-overruns by the Department of Defense in a statement released after the proposals announcement.

Under the Secretary of the Air Force, the Corps would act as a separate military service responsibility for national security space programs in a move that Rogers and Cooper called a "critical step to fixing the National Security Space enterprise."

The NDAA also proposed the establishment of a U.S. Space Command as a new "sub-unified command within U.S. Strategic Command" in order to elevate the space mission to a four-star command and improve the integration of space forces.

The formation of the new military branch would be the first since the creation of the Air Force in 1947. The Space Corps would report to the Air Force much like the Marines currently fall under the Navy's purview.

This is not the first venture to outer-space for the U.S. military, however -- the Air Force Space Command was established in September of 1982 with the mission to "provide resilient and affordable space and cyberspace capabilities for the Joint Force and the nation."

The Trump administration has also shown a great deal of attention to bolstering U.S. presence in space exploration. Vice President Mike Pence, the chairman of the re-formed National Space Council, recently visited NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, vowing to employees that under President trump, "America will lead in space once again."

The House Armed Services Committee voted 60 to 1 in favor of the bill, it is now headed to the full House for a formal vote.

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Congress aims to develop new military "Space Corps" branch - CBS News

James Carpenter just needed some fake Moon dirt. Carpenter, a lunar-exploration expert at the European Space Agency (ESA) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, works on a drill designed to hunt for buried ice on the Moon. His team recently ordered half a tonne of powdery materialto replicate the lunar surfacefrom a commercial supplier in the United States. But what showed up was not what the team was expecting. The physical properties were visibly different, says Carpenter.

His experience underscores a longstanding problem with artificial space soils, known as simulants: how to make them consistently and reliably. But now there is a fresh effort to bring the field into line. Last month, NASA established a team of scientists from eight of its research centres to analyse the physical properties and availability of existing simulants. And, for the first time, an asteroid-mining company in Florida is making scientifically accurate powders meant to represent the surfaces of four classes of asteroid. It delivered its second batch to NASA on June 28.

NASA is trying to conquer the Wild West of simulants, says Philip Metzger, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

Such materials are meant to mimic the mix of dust and broken rock that covers the surfaces of planets and asteroids. Engineers use the artificial soils to testspace-exploration technologies such as drills and rovers, and to determine whether astronauts could make structures by feeding space dirtinto 3D printersor by compressing it. Scientists use simulants to explore geological processes such as how rocks weather in space.

Over the years, space agencies and research groups have tended to make their own artificial soils as needed from mixtures of ash and grit, sand and crushed bricks, and even glass beads. This has led to a wild proliferation of soils; there are more than 30 lunar simulants alone. There are a lot of people out there creating their own simulant with no geology or materials-processing background, says Jennifer Edmunson, a geologist at NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

But no artificial soil can re-create all the physical and chemical properties of a planet's surface. A mixture that was developed for engineers to drive rovers in would probably be terrible for studying the geochemical properties of the Moon.

Researchers do not always pay attention to those limitations, says Clive Neal, a lunar scientist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. We have no accreditation in terms of what this can be used for and what it cant be used for, he says. If you use it for the wrong thing you end up with misleading results.

In 2010, a panel of lunar scientists recommended that NASA develop a database that researchers could use to compare the characteristics of different simulants and pick the best one for each use. But the agency had no money to support such a project. The new working group aims to outline how much it would cost to produce a database covering simulants for all types of planetary bodies. Hopefully, well be able to develop this repository, says Brad Bailey, associate director of NASAs Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, who is based in Washington DC.

The database would include the four new asteroid simulants being made by the Orlando office of Deep Space Industries, an asteroid-mining company. NASA has ordered five tonnes over the next two years. Each simulant is based on a different class of meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites, which are thought to be chunks of asteroids.

To make fake asteroid dirt, technicians mix various mineralsincluding bronzite, which is sourced from jewellery suppliers as polished stonescompress them into bricks and then pulverize them. We have to do something that is basically equivalent to hitting a solid rock with thousands of meteorites over a long period of time, says Stephen Covey, the companys director of research and development.

Deep Space Industries delivered 512 kilograms of the first simulant to NASA in March, and 532 kilograms of the second type in June. The agency plans to use it in work on missions such as OSIRIS-REx, a spacecraft that is making its way to an asteroidto collect a sample and bring it back to Earth.

In Europe, Carpenter and his colleagues are still hunting for their perfect lunar soilbut they have given up on ordering it commercially. The researchers, who need 700 tonnes for a planned lunar habitat at ESAs astronaut-training centre in Cologne, Germany, are looking much closer to home. They have decided to grind up rocks from the nearby basalt mines of the Eifel region.

This article is reproduced with permission and wasfirst publishedon July 7, 2017.

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Why Researchers Need Better Space Dirt - Scientific American