Four years after a spacecraft flew by Pluto, sending stunning images and data back to Earth, NASA has commissioned a study to explore spending even more time examining and exploring the dwarf planet.
The San Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute announced Wednesday it had received funding from NASA to study the feasibility and cost of a possible future Pluto orbiter mission.
The study will build on the success of the agency’s New Horizons mission, a space probe that launched in 2006. It was the first of its kind to get a close look at Pluto and its five moons, about 3 billion miles from Earth.
The Southwest Research Institute was part of the team that built that spacecraft, which is still exploring the farthest reaches of our solar system, having flown by Ultima Thule — a rock located a billion miles beyond Pluto that is found in the solar system’s Kuiper Belt — in January.
Many things are taking place:
Why Low-Earth Orbit Satellites Are the New Space Race - The Washington Post
In a world divided between digital haves and have-nots, billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are trying to close the gap. The three entrepreneurs separately aim to launch thousands of small satellites to zip around the globe in what's known as low-Earth orbit, or LEO. Their plan is to prosper by offering high-end data services to stock traders and others willing to pay richly to shave a few milliseconds off their transmission times! Videos for NASA Studying Future Mission Orbiting 1:24 NASA plans orbiter mission to Pluto Dailymotion!! The satellites should also deliver high-speed internet coverage for regions too poor or remote to attract it on the ground! 7:27 From Haptic Robots to a Plastic Recycler, Here's the Exciting Tech Heading up to Space YouTube!! Neither result is certain. Startup costs in the billions of dollars are.
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LEO satellites operate from 500 kilometers (310 miles) to 2,000 kilometers above the Earth's surface. Traditional communication satellites are stationed far higher, at roughly 36,000 kilometers: They travel in so-called geosynchronous orbits, moving at the speed of the Earth's rotation and appearing to float motionless above a fixed point.
Simulations explain giant exoplanets with eccentric, close-in orbits
"A giant planet is not as easily scattered into an eccentric orbit as a smaller planet, but if there are multiple giant planets close to the host star, their gravitational interactions are more likely scatter them into eccentric orbits," explained first author Renata Frelikh, a graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.
Frelikh performed hundreds of simulations of planetary systems, starting each one with 10 planets in circular orbits and varying the initial total mass of the system and the masses of individual planets! NASA: 60 Years and Counting - The Future www.nasa.gov /specials/60counting/ future .html NASA 's future will continue to be a story of human exploration, technology, and science. We will go back to the Moon to learn more about what it will take to support human exploration to Mars and beyond. We will continue to nurture the development of a vibrant low-Earth orbit economy that builds ...!! As the systems evolved for 20 million simulated years, dynamical instabilities led to collisions and mergers to form larger planets as well as gravitational interactions that ejected some planets and scattered others into eccentric orbits.
Analyzing the results of these simulations collectively, the researchers found that the planetary systems with the most initial total mass produced the biggest planets and the planets with the highest eccentricities.
UAE's KhalifaSat Marks One Year On Orbit: 7,250 Images Captured - SpaceWatch.Global
Within one year of its launch, KhalifaSat captured 7,250 high-quality images and was able to complete 5,431 low Earth orbits, and communicated with the ground station at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) 906 times to send information and images, and receive updates! Missions | Psyche - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) www.jpl.nasa.gov / missions / psyche The Psyche mission is a journey to a unique metal asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. What makes the asteroid Psyche unique is that it appears to be the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet, one of the building blocks of our solar system.!! KhalifaSat sent 355 terabytes of data to the MBRSC's ground station from across planet Earth.
KhalifaSat is the first satellite developed 100 percent in the UAE by a team of highly qualified Emirati engineers at the facilities of MBRSC. It was successfully launched into space from the Tanegashima Space Centre in Japan, aboard the H-IIA rocket, one year ago on 29 October 2018.
MBRSC highlighted that within one year of its launch, KhalifaSat captured images of Palm Jumeirah, Al Maktoum Stadium (Al Nasr Club), Kingdom Centre, Masjid al-Haram in Makkah, Al-Masjid al-Nabawi (the Prophet’s Mosque), the Federal Territory Mosque in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and the Baikonur Cosmodrome, where the first Emirati astronaut travelled to space.
Other things to check out:
NASA Space Station On-Orbit Status 30 October 2019 - Crop Harvest - SpaceRef
NASA astronaut Jessica Meir cuts Mizuna mustard green leaves grown aboard the International Space Station for the VEG-04B space agriculture study! The Coincidence Between Two Overachieving NASA Missions www.jpl.nasa.gov ...Two vastly different NASA spacecraft are about to run out of fuel: The Kepler spacecraft, which spent nine years in deep space collecting data that detected thousands of planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, and the Dawn spacecraft, which spent 11 years orbiting and studying the main asteroid belt's two largest objects, Vesta and Ceres.!! The botany research is helping scientists to learn how to provide fresh food to space crews on long-duration missions. The Expedition 61 crewmembers also tasted the leaves for edibility and stowed the leftovers in a science freezer for scientific analysis. Credit: NASA.
The Expedition 61 crew harvested a space-grown crop today aboard the International Space Station. The orbital lab residents also tested robotics systems before exploring blood pressure and time perception in microgravity.
Space agriculture aboard the orbiting laboratory has been ongoing for several years to learn how to provide fresh food to space crews. NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Andrew Morgan continued that research by cutting Mizuna leaves today for a taste test and stowing the leftovers in a science freezer for scientific analysis.
From rovers on Mars to an orbiting Tesla, this decade revolutionized how we see space - CNET
The decade didn't yield actual aliens anywhere -- UFOs, perhaps , but certainly no confirmed close encounters.
Reaching the nearest exoplanet would require inventing some sort of breakthrough propulsion technology to travel at or near the speed of light and then spending several years traversing the 24 trillion miles (39 trillion kilometers) to get there.
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Space has been more than just a canvas for a handful of super-rich dudes to project their childhood dreams upon. Over the past 19 years publicly funded robotic missions fanned out across the solar system, and beyond.
Remarkably, another place that might be hiding a liquid ocean is the frozen surface of Pluto. This supposition comes courtesy of New Horizons, a NASA probe that flew by the dwarf planet in 2015 and returned images of a world far more dynamic and diverse than the distant snowball many long assumed it to be. We're talking a world of methane snow, possible nuclear volcanoes and even hazy blue skies.
The Exp 61 crew is studying space agriculture 🌽 and preparing to repair a cosmic particle detector 📡 on the station… https://t.co/tw6RVLxPjL Space_Station (from Low Earth Orbit) Thu Oct 24 17:50:40 +0000 2019
At 15, NASA's Aura mission is still making important contributions to studying Earth's ozone layer, air quality and… https://t.co/6l6Xji7cdo NASAClimate (from Pasadena, California, USA) Wed Oct 23 17:07:28 +0000 2019
From studying amyloid fiber formation to preparing to service an important scientific instrument, the… https://t.co/5YgsABwnqS ISS_Research (from ISS Program Science Office) Fri Oct 25 16:57:56 +0000 2019
How do galaxies get fresh fuel for new stars? A new @NASA mission is studying the "circumgalactic medium" >>… https://t.co/ETP0IdQtmh NASA_Marshall (from Huntsville, Alabama USA) Tue Oct 29 21:45:08 +0000 2019
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