Saturday, May 11, 2019
Friday, May 10, 2019
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Courtesy of NASA/JPLInSight Captures Stunning Martian Sunrise |
Sol 145, or on the Earth calendar, April 24th, the
NASA InSight Lander caught this striking image of a Martian sunrise! Taken around
5:30am local Martian time, this image is available as both “raw” and
color-corrected. While you can see more detain in the raw version, the
color-corrected more accurately shows how the human eye would see this stunning
view.
Because Mars is farther away than the Earth is, the Sun only
appears about two-thirds the size in the Martian sky compared to how we see it
from home.
But this is not the first time InSight has captured this
event. Its camera took practice shots of sunrise and sunset on March 2nd
and 10th. And InSight is not the first lander to take such photos,
either.
“It’s been a tradition for Mars missions to capture sunrises
and sunsets,” says Justin Maki, InSight Science Team Co-Investigator and Imaging
Lead at JPL. “With many of our primary imaging tasks complete, we decided to
capture the sunrise and sunset as seen from another world.”
Given the number of European partners involved in support and
instrumentation for the InSight Lander, we can expect to see much more exciting
science to come!
If
you want to learn more about the InSight mission and those involved, you can do
so by visiting their website.
Thursday, May 9, 2019
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Credit: NASA |
NASA Investigation Uncovers Cause of Two Mission Launch Failures
NASA’s Taurus XL was due to launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory
(OCO) in 2009 and the Glory Mission in 2011. Sadly, both launches met with
failures. The investigation into these failures has taken a few years to
complete. But on April 30, 2019, NASA finally publicized its findings.
NASA Launch Services Program (LSP) investigation ended up
involving NASA’s Office of the Inspector General, as well as the US Department
of Justice (DOJ). The cause of the failures was found to result from faulty
materials provided by aluminum manufacturer, Sapa Profiles, Inc (SPI). The DOJ’s
effort resulted in the resolution of criminal charges and civil claims against
SPI, which resulted in an agreement to pay $46million to the US Government and
other commercial customers. This stems from uncovering a scheme by SPI that
included falsifying thousands of certifications for aluminum extrusions to
hundreds of customers.
“NASA relies on the integrity of our industry throughout the
supply chain. While we do perform our own testing, NASA is not able to retest
every single component. That is why we require and pay for certain components to
be tested and certified by the supplier,” said Jim Norman, NASA’s Director for
Launch Services. “When testing results are altered and certifications are
provided falsely, missions fail. In our case, the Taurus XLs that failed for
the OCO and Glory missions resulted in the loss of more than $700million, and
years of people’s scientific work. It is critical that we are able to trust our
industry to produce, test, and certify materials in accordance with the
standards we require. In this case, our trust was severely violated.”
NASA suspended SPI from government contracting and further
proposed SPI for government-wide debarment. This exclusion from government
contracting has been in effect since September 2015 and was set up in order to
protect the government supply chain. NASA has further proposed debarment for
Hydro Extrusion Portland, a company formerly known as SPI.
“Due in large part to the hard work and dedication of many highly
motivated people in the NASA Launch Services program, we are able to close out
the cause of two extremely disappointing launch vehicle failures and protect
the government aerospace supply chain,” said Amanda Mitskevich, LSP Program
Manager. “It has taken a long time to get here, involving years of
investigation and testing, but as of today, it has been worth every minute, and
I am extremely pleased with the entire team’s efforts.”
Wednesday, May 8, 2019
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Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech |
Mars 2020 Will Be Able to Phone Home
The place: Spacecraft Assembly Facility High Bay 1 clean
room at JPL.
The date: April 19, 2019.
Mars 2020 engineers and technicians working to prepare the
high-gain antenna for installation on the rover’s equipment deck. This antenna
will be articulated so that it can point directly at Earth in order to uplink
or downlink data and instructions.
JPL is working hard to complete construction of the Mars
2020 rover for the NASA Science Mission Directorate. JPL will also manage the
operations of the rover once it lands on the Red Planet’s surface.
If you’d like to learn more about this mission, click here.
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