[NEWS] Lockheed Wins the Contract to Build Six More Orion Capsules

READ THE FULL ARTICLE @https://www.universetoday.com/143528/lockheed-wins-the-contract-to-build-six-more-orion-capsules/

When NASA sends astronauts back to the Moon and to Mars, the Orion Multipurpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) will be what takes them there. To build these next-generation spacecraft, NASA contracted aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Combined with the massive Space Launch System (SLS), the Orion spacecraft will allow for long-duration missions beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) for the first time in over 50 years.

On Monday, Sept. 23rd, NASA and Lockheed Martin announced that they had finalized a contract for the production and operations of six missions using the Orion spacecraft, with the possibility of up to twelve being manufactured in total. This fulfills the requirements for NASA’s Project Artemis and opens the possibility for further missions to destinations like Mars and other locations in deep-space.

The Orion concept was unveiled on January 14th, 2004, shortly after the accident with the Space Shuttle Columbia. At the time, the Orion was known as the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV). It was intended to replace the aging Space Shuttle fleet and serve as a successor to the Apollo Command and Service Module (CSM) that took astronauts to the Moon between 1969 and 1972.

At present, NASA plans to use the Orion capsule to send the first woman and the next man to the Moon by 2024 (Artemis III). With the contract finalized for the delivery of the next six vehicles, this vision is one step closer to becoming a reality. Rick Ambrose, the executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Space, spoke glowingly about the contract and the partnership it represents in a recent company press release:

“This contract clearly shows NASA’s commitment not only to Orion, but also to Artemis and its bold goal of sending humans to the Moon in the next five years. We are equally committed to Orion and Artemis and producing these vehicles with a focus on cost, schedule and mission success.”

The contract NASA signed with Lockheed – the Orion Production and Operations Contract (OPOC) – is an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract specifying the delivery of 6 to 12 Orion spacecraft through to Sept. 30th, 2030. Initially, NASA ordered three Orion spacecraft to conduct Artemis missions III through V – crewed missions to the lunar surface occurring between 2024 and 2026 – for $2.7 billion.

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Further cost-reduction measures include advanced manufacturing technologies, material and component bulk buys, an accelerated mission cadence, and the fact that the Orion crew modules and systems are reusable. As Mike Hawes, Orion program manager for Lockheed Martin Space, attested:

“We have learned a lot about how to design and manufacture a better Orion – such as designing for reusability, using augmented reality and additive manufacturing – and we’re applying this to this next series of vehicles. Driving down cost and manufacturing them more efficiently and faster will be key to making the Artemis program a success. One must also appreciate how unique Orion is. It’s a spaceship like none other. We’ve designed it to do things no other spacecraft can do, go to places no astronaut has been and take us into a new era of human deep space exploration.”

Scientists live-tweet chilling faux asteroid impact scare

Will NASA and ESA be able to save Earth? Stay tuned to find out.

BY
AMANDA KOOSER
APRIL 26, 2019 9:53 AM PDT

Asteroid 2019PDC now has a 1 in 100 chance of hitting Earth in 2027. Good thing it's fictional.

The world's top asteroid experts are gathering on Monday, April 29 at the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference in Washington DC. They're taking part in what sounds like an epic RPG: a hypothetical asteroid impact exercise that will test how Earth responds to the threat of a potentially devastating space rock.

WHEN ASTEROIDS ATTACK
NASA will totally warn us if an asteroid apocalypse is coming
Asteroids harder to destroy than scientists originally thought
NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office developed the exercise along with the US Federal Emergency Management Agency. "The point is to investigate how NEO observers, space agency officials, emergency managers, decision makers, and citizens might respond to an actual impact prediction and evolving information," NASA said.

The ESA Operations Twitter account is now live-tweeting the entire scenario, from the discovery of the asteroid (named 2019PDC) to the increasingly grim odds it might hit Earth. The first tweet sounds innocuous. It's a casual mention of international news reports confirming the asteroid's discovery.

The tension increases as the probability of an impact in 2027 ramps up and we discover the asteroid is 15 times bigger than the 2013 Chelyabinsk asteroid that exploded over Russia, injuring over 1,200 people and damaging buildings.

The team is appending each tweet with the all-caps hashtag #FICTIONALEVENT so no one will freak out. It's still sobering to follow the events, which recently worsened from a 1 in 250 chance of impact to 1 in 100.

ESA Operations will continue to update the plot in the coming week. Participants will receive daily briefings and must role-play the responses from astronomers, space agencies and governments.

In reality, we know of no imminent threats from asteroids, but NASA is constantly tracking their movements through space.

What's most chilling about the fictional scenario is the real history of asteroid impacts on Earth. It's happened before, as the dinosaurs discovered to their detriment. It could happen again.

ESA's tweets are just as riveting as any sci-fi show. Follow along to find out if humanity survives.

AS SEEN @
https://www.cnet.com/news/scientists-live-tweet-chilling-faux-asteroid-impact-scare/


Tweets by esaoperations

NASA's Curiosity rover finds potential building blocks of life on Mars

NASA's Curiosity rover finds potential building blocks of life on Mars

NASA's Mars Curiosity rover, slowly making its way up the side of a towering mountain of sedimentary rock at the center of its Gale Crater landing site, has found fresh evidence for the red planet's past -- and possibly present -- habitability, scientists reported Thursday. NASA announced Thursday the nuclear-powered rover has detected a variety of organic compounds

These organic compounds, a requirement for life as it's known on Earth, were found in 3-billion-year-old rocks deposited on the floor of Gale Crater. While organics were discovered by the rover earlier, the age and variety of the newly analyzed samples strengthen the case for a habitable environment in the past.

"We found organic molecules in rocks from an ancient lakebed," said Jen Eigenbrode, a research scientist and astrobiologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Those organic molecules could have come from life."

In a second, potentially more significant finding announced Thursday, scientists reported detection of a seasonal variation in methane levels in the martian atmosphere. Background levels climb by a factor of three from winter to summer, indicating a repeating release of the gas.
Space Mars Rover Selfies


"Today, we're announcing the discovery of a repeatable, identifiable, seasonal pattern in the methane measurements," said Chris Webster, a senior research fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

"Not only have we got this wonderful repeatability, but the seasonal cycle changes by a factor of three. That's a huge change, completely unexpected. And what it does, it gives us a key to unlocking the mysteries associated with Mars methane because now we have something to test our models and our understanding against."

A seasonal change in methane levels is exciting, he said, because 95 percent of the methane observed on Earth is the result of biology. In addition, methane only lasts a few centuries before it is broken down or escapes the atmosphere "so if we see methane in the martian atmosphere, that means something is happening today, it's being released or it's being created."

Methane in the martian atmosphere has been detected before, but only in isolated patches or plumes of higher concentrations, not in any repeatable pattern. Rising levels in the summer months, when Mars is warmer, could be an indication of on-going biology or it could simply be the result of purely geological processes.
marsmethaneseasonal.png


In any case, Webster said the methane apparently works its way into the atmosphere from sub-surface reservoirs of some sort, places where non-biological geochemistry is going on or where microbial life might somehow flourish.

"The idea that best fits our data is the idea of sub-surface storage," he said. "So way under the ground this methane is trapped. ... We don't know if that methane is ancient, we don't know if it's modern. It could be either. We also don't know if that methane was created from rock chemistry or it was created by microbes."

But NASA managers say the new discoveries show the agency's Mars exploration plans are on the right track.

NASA currently operates three orbiters and two surface rovers at Mars with a new lander -- InSight -- on the way. The European Space Agency plans to launch its own rover in a few years and NASA is building a powerful follow-on to Curiosity, the Mars 2020 rover, that will be equipped with even more powerful instruments to advance the search for life.

"With these new findings, Mars is telling us to stay the course and keep searching for evidence of life," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA science director at agency headquarters, said in a statement. "I'm confident that our ongoing and planned missions will unlock even more breathtaking discoveries."


as seen @ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nasa-mars-announcement-organic-matter-curiosity-rover-building-blocks-possible-life/

NASA’s planetary defense system will be put to the test in October

An asteroid is set to speed by Earth this fall, which is exactly what NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office is equipped to handle.

The flyby isn’t putting anyone in danger. Rather, it’s an opportunity to test the agency’s planetary defense systems in the event of an actual asteroid threat.

Asteroid 2012 TC4’s brief swing by Earth on October 12 isn’t expected to get anywhere closer than 4,200 miles (6,800 kilometers) to Earth’s surface. The space rock is considered small by asteroid standards, at about 30 to 100 feet in size.

But while scientists know 2012 TC4 won’t impact Earth, they don’t know much else about the asteroid’s trajectory. NASA tracked the asteroid for seven days after discovering it in October 2012, but that was the last time they saw 2012 TC4. In the past five years, it’s been too far away.

That’s what makes this flyby ideal for giving NASA’s asteroid technology a test run.

“This is the perfect target for such an exercise because while we know the orbit of 2012 TC4 well enough to be absolutely certain it will not impact Earth, we haven’t established its exact path just yet,” Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, said in a news release. “It will be incumbent upon the observatories to get a fix on the asteroid as it approaches, and work together to obtain follow-up observations (that) make more refined asteroid orbit determinations possible.”

Michael Kelley, the lead scientist at NASA Headquarters for the TC4 observation campaign, said in the release that the flyby will test the worldwide asteroid detection and tracking network. That network includes more than a dozen observatories, universities and labs around the world.

NASA detects about 1,500 near-Earth objects a year. Small asteroids such as 2012 TC4 pass between us and the moon several times a month.

The NASA office finds and tracks these objects and figures out how to either deflect an object heading toward Earth or mitigate the effects of an unavoidable impact.

NASA is researching different techniques for keeping asteroids from reaching the planet, such as hitting asteroids with an object to slow them or changing the gravitational pull by putting another large mass nearby. It isn’t possible to shoot down an asteroid, so if worse comes to worst, NASA would work with FEMA to plan an emergency response similar to how the government handles hurricanes or earthquakes.

Luckily, Earth isn’t at significant risk of getting hit by any known asteroid for at least 100 years.

AS SEEN @

http://fox43.com/2017/08/02/nasas-planetary-defense-system-will-be-put-to-the-test-in-october/

Who's in charge of outer space?

Date: 23/05/2017
Source: foxnews.com

In space, no one can hear you scheme. But here on Earth, plans to go where few have gone before are getting louder by the minute.

In February, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo passed its third glide-flight test, putting it on pace to offer suborbital space tourism by the end of 2018. In March, Goldman Sachs announced to investors that a single asteroid containing $25 billion to $50 billion of platinum could be mined by a spacecraft costing only $2.6 billion—less than a third of what has been invested in Uber.

“While the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high,” the Goldman report concludes, “the actual financial and technological barriers are far lower.” In April, NASA selected Trans Astronautica Corp., an aerospace company based in Lake View Terrace, Calif., for $3.25 million in technology study grants. Among TransAstra’s NASA-approved projects: an asteroid-hunting telescope whose stated mission is “to start a gold rush in space.”

The final frontier is starting to look a lot like the Wild West. As more companies announce ambitious plans to do business beyond Earth, serious questions are emerging about the legality of off-planet activity.

This story originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

NASA's new Psyche mission will take us to a metal asteroid for the first time

It may be the naked core of an ancient plan

DATE: 04/01/2017
RETRIEVED: 23/01/2017
SOURCE: POPSCI


Asteroids are some of the last unexplored territories in the solar system. To help fill in some of the blanks, NASA just announced two upcoming missions that will visit new types of asteroids in the 2030s.

Launching in 2023, the Psyche spacecraft will fly into the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to explore an asteroid quite unlike the balls of mud, ice, and rock we've studied before; "16 Psyche" is a giant hunk of metal. Measuring 130 miles in diameter, it's thought to be made of iron and nickel.

16 Psyche may be the leftover core of a protoplanet—an infant world as large as Mars. Violent collisions are thought to have blasted away its rocky outer layers, leaving behind an asteroid very similar to Earth's own metallic core


READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE @

http://www.popsci.com/nasas-new-psyche-mission-will-explore-metal-asteroid-for-first-time