Tag Archives: NASA

NASA finds “unprecedented” black hole cluster near Andromeda’s central bulge

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X-ray image of Andromed’s core with black hole candidates circled
Nasa

NASA has discovered an unprecedentedly large cluster of black holes in our nearest galactic neighbor, Andromeda.

The 26 black hole candidates were spotted with the Chandra X-ray Observatory from more than 150 observations spread over 13 years.

Each of the black holes is of the kind that forms after a star collapses in on itself. As they suck in material from other stars that orbit or pass nearby, they also suck in material that gives out X-rays as it is consumed. It’s this that Chandra spotted.

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NASA offers money to startups that can solve space-travel problems

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NASA has announced plans to fund startups that help the organization’s quest to develop new technology for healthcare and medical needs both in space and on Earth, according to an announcement Tuesday from the National Space Biomedical Research Institute Industry Forum. The funding program, named SMARTCAP ACCEL, will give no-strings-attached grants to companies that target a list of areas and fit a certain number of criteria.

NASA is focusing in particular on technologies that address the effects of radiation exposure, inadequate nutrition, bone fracture, or heart health. They’re also requesting ideas for routine surveillance. To be suitable for space, proposed solutions have to be operable in a remote setting without a doctor or lab around. They must rely on solar power only and cannot work off gas or use consumables that degrade, according to MedCityNews.

The pursuit of technologies suited for space seems incredibly specific. But the constraints and goals of the project would also create potential technologies to use in places that don’t have sophisticated healthcare systems in place, like remote areas or third-world countries. NASA has shown similar interest in other initiatives targeted at space travel with additional applications on Earth like 3D-printable food.

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NASA arranges a quick spacewalk to repair leaking space station

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Two astronauts completed an impromptu spacewalk on Saturday afternoon, per a press release from NASA. The crew of the International Space Station discovered a small leak in the cooling system, and the Earth crew stayed up overnight to plan an expedition to repair it.

The leak was first detected on Thursday when the crew saw small “snowflakes” of ammonia floating away from the station, per the Associated Press. The leak was present for some time and located in the pump or flow control subassembly. When this suddenly accelerated, the increasing issue prompted engineers on the ground to start plotting a spacewalk to fix it.

NASA emphasized that the leak was small to start, but the agency wanted to take advantage of “a spacewalking crew member who is about to return home” according to the AP. Thus, the astronauts replaced the 260-pound pump controller with a spare. The operation took about five and a half hours and, since the replacement, the leak appears to have stopped.

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Ammonia leak on space station causes concerns, power re-route

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The crew of the International Space Station might be taking an unscheduled space walk tomorrow to check out what appears to be a leak in one of the recirculating ammonia loops used to keep the station’s power-generating solar arrays within operating temperature.

The leak was first noticed on Thursday morning, when ISS commander Chris Hadfield (who tweets under the handle @Cmdr_Hadfield and has about 750,000 followers) radioed Mission Control in Houston to report what appeared to be some white flakes drifting away from the P6 segment of the station’s backbone truss. The truss hosts the station’s photovoltaic arrays and radiators; each solar array has its own independent ammonia-based cooling system.

Transverse view of ISS (with Endeavour docked). Integrated Truss Structure visible in foreground, with P6 segment closest to camera.
NASA

Mission Control confirmed on Thursday that the flakes were in fact from the truss’ coolant loop, and that the ammonia levels were indeed dropping. If unchecked, the leak is expected to deplete the P6 array’s supply of ammonia by tomorrow morning. The solar arrays generate and provide electricity to eight separate power channels, which feed into the ISS’s various systems. ISS ground controllers are switching load off of the affected power channel in anticipation of the array going offline. It is responsible for about 12.5 percent of the ISS’s total electricity generation.

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Saving Fermi: NASA’s system for avoiding collisions with space junk

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In late March last year, the people operating the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope got a bit of a scare. Their hardware was one week away from a close encounter with a defunct Russian spy satellite. A week might seem like short notice for one-of-a-kind hardware like Fermi, but in some ways the team was lucky to have any warning at all. Prior to 2007, NASA didn’t even have a policy in place to identify threats to unmanned hardware.

That has now changed. Thanks to cooperation between the military and the Goddard Space Flight Center, everything that can possibly get out of the way of space junk is regularly tracked for potential collision risks. That system is what alerted Fermi’s controllers to the danger and allowed them to use on-board thrusters for something they were never designed to do: move the satellite safely out of the way.

Tracking threats

The technical term for the risk identification process is “conjunction assessment,” or CA. This process involves taking the latest tracking information, calculating orbits, and figuring out whether two objects are likely to be in the same place at the same time. This may seem like an easy problem—after all, it’s just math—but there are a lot of potential complications. One is simply the ever-expanding catalog of junk in the relevant orbits (primarily low-Earth and geostationary), some of it caused by collisions between two existing pieces of junk. Another is the fact that these orbits aren’t stable. The atmosphere may be sparse at these altitudes, but it’s still there, and it creates varying amounts of drag on things in orbit.

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Chinese “spy” caught with NASA laptop full of porn, not secrets

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On March 16, in what appeared to be another case of Chinese espionage, FBI agents boarded a plane at Dulles International Airport to arrest Bo Jiang, a Chinese national with a doctorate in electrical engineering from Old Dominion University. Jiang, a former contractor at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, had recently been let go by his employer because of pressure from Republican congressman Frank Wolf of Virginia. Wolf had claimed Jiang and other Chinese engineers employed by NASA contractors were a security risk. And that day, it seemed so—Jiang had a NASA-owned laptop in his possession, and was on a plane back to China.

But it quickly became apparent that Jiang was at worst guilty of violating NASA policies. There was no evidence of any sensitive material on the laptop, and Jiang didn’t have clearance to such projects at Langley as an employee of the National Institute of Aerospace. Instead, investigators found, the laptop was loaded with pornography and pirated movies. Since he had lost his job and his work visa was expiring, Jiang simply was going home—with a little entertainment.

A press release issued by Wolf after the arrest and copy of Jiang’s arrest warrant have since disappeared off the congressman’s website. In the release (cached by Google here), Wolf had said, “I am particularly concerned that (the) information (on Jiang’s laptop) may pertain to the source code for high-tech imaging technology that Jiang has been working on with NASA. This information could have significant military applications for the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army.”

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Join Ars in watching the second attempted Antares rocket launch, 5pm EDT (Updated)

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As we mentioned yesterday this week, today will mark Orbital Science’s first second attempt to send its Antares rocket into space. Antares’ originally scheduled launch, set for April 17, was canceled just minutes before take off. But today (Saturday, April 20, 2013), Orbital Science will make a second attempt to get its rocket off the ground. Meant to provide an alternative route to deliver supplies to the International Space Station, the Antares is ready for liftoff at NASA’s Wallops facility on the east coast of Virginia.

You can watch the events live on NASA TV. To save you the hassle of finding NASA TV, we’ve embedded the livestream below—coverage will start at 4pm Eastern. Orbital Sciences has a lot of experience in the rocketry business, so we’re crossing our fingers that its first liftoff with the new hardware will go off without a hitch.

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NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility hosts test of new commercial rocket

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The new Antares rocket will be test-launched from NASA Wallops this week.
NASA/Brea Reeves

For decades, the Space Shuttles were the primary way the United States transported cargo and people into low-Earth orbit. Upon retirement of the aging fleet of Shuttles, NASA has promoted a public-private partnership with companies that are developing new rockets for transport into low-Earth orbit. One of these companies, Orbital Sciences Corporation, is test-launching a new rocket design at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia this week.

Orbital’s design, known as Antares, is a multi-purpose middleweight rocket built to carry non-human payloads into space. A major part of its intended purview is robotic delivery to the International Space Station (ISS), an important task for supplying long-duration stays. This week’s launch from Wallops is the first orbital test of Antares.

While NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program for Station resupply only dates to 2006, Orbital has been developing rockets since 1990, beginning with the airplane-launched Pegasus. (For comparison, SpaceX was founded in 2002 and Virgin Galactic began operations in 2004.) Antares is based on Orbital’s earlier designs, including the ground-launched Minotaur and Taurus rockets. However, the new design is much heftier, capable of carrying up to 6,120 kilograms (about 13,500 pounds), much higher than Minotaur’s 1,730 kg maximum. According to the Orbital website, Antares is also capable of launching payloads on interplanetary trajectories.

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