NASA

What a year it has been for JWST! The cosmology books are already being rewritten.

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The Space Shuttle is going to look launch ready once again, although this time the retired spacecraft won’t be firing its engines.

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The California Science Center is ready to kick off a six-month-long process to stack the components of the Space Shuttle into a vertical launchpad position such that it can go on display at the future Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, which is currently under construction, the science center announced on Thursday. The museum’s Go for Stack process is set to begin on July 20, which marks Space Exploration Day.

The display will include the Endeavor orbiter, which embarked on its first mission with the Space Shuttle program in 1992, the rocket’s solid boosters, and external tank. Once fully stacked, the 20-story-tall vertical display will be the only “ready-for-launch” Space Shuttle system in the world in terms of its staging and appearance.

“Endeavor will be the star attraction of the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, a launchpad for creativity and innovation that will inspire future generations of scientists, engineers and explorers,” Jeff Rudolph, president and CEO of the California Science Center, said in a statement.

Getting the Space Shuttle pieces stacked on top of one another is not going to be an easy feat, and it’s going to be the first time it’s ever been done outside of a NASA facility, according to the California Science Center. The first part of the process involves installing the rocket’s aft skirts—a pair of skirt-shaped bottom segments that form the base of the solid rocket boosters. The solid rocket motors will be stacked on top of the aft skirts to form the solid rocket boosters. The Shuttle’s external tank, ET-94, will then be lifted into place, followed by the Endeavor orbiter, which will be lifted by a large crane and connected to the rest of the rocket stack.

When it’s all done, the full stack of the Space Shuttle launch system will stand 200 feet (61 meters) tall, becoming the main attraction around which the Air and Space Center building will be constructed.

Endeavor has been on display at the California Science Center for the past 11 years, albeit laying horizontally rather than standing straight as though it’s ready to soar through the skies once more.

Related: The Space Shuttle Was a Beautiful—but Terrible—Idea

NASA’s space shuttle Endeavour landed for the final time on June 1, 2011, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida following a 16-day mission to the International Space Station. Following that landing, only one other Shuttle mission took place, the Atlantis STS-135 mission, marking the end of NASA’s 30-year-long shuttle era, which began in 1981.

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After 63 days of agonizing silence, NASA’s Martian chopper finally phoned home.

The Ingenuity helicopter reestablished communication with mission control on June 28, officially logging its 52nd flight as a success, NASA recently announced. The space agency lost contact with Ingenuity as the helicopter was descending towards the surface of the Red Planet following its most recent flight on April 26.

The reason behind the communication drop was that a hill was inconveniently positioned between Ingenuity and its rover pal Perseverance, preventing the Martian pair from communicating with one another. Ingenuity relies on Perseverance to deliver its messages to Earth, using shiny antennas to exchange data at about 100 kilobits per second. The data is routed from the Ingenuity-facing antenna to the rover’s main computer before being transferred to Earth by way of an orbiting spacecraft.

“The portion of Jezero Crater the rover and helicopter are currently exploring has a lot of rugged terrain, which makes communications dropouts more likely,” Josh Anderson, the Ingenuity team lead, said in the NASA statement. The helicopter is often ahead of Perseverance to help the rover survey the Martian terrain, causing Ingenuity to sometimes go out of communications range.

Since the downlink was disrupted over two months ago, NASA mission control has been waiting on the results of Ingenuity’s flight. The goal of the 52nd flight was to reposition the helicopter and capture images of Mars’ surface for the rover’s science team, according to NASA. During its flight, Ingenuity reached an altitude of 1,191 feet (363 meters) above the surface for a total of 139 seconds.

Ingenuity’s team is currently running through the helicopter’s health checks to make sure it’s fit for another flight within the next couple of weeks, the space agency stated. Flight 53 will be used as an interim airfield to the west of where the rover and its helicopter are located. From there, the team wants to perform another westward flight to a new location near a rocky outcrop that the rover is looking to explore.

NASA has had communication issues with Ingenuity before, but the helicopter is still doing pretty well considering it was designed to last for a 30-day technology demonstration. Ingenuity landed on Mars in February 2021, tucked inside the Perseverance rover. On April 19, 2021, the 19-inch tall (48 cm), 4-pound (1.8 kg) helicopter became the first powered aircraft to lift off from the surface of another planet. More than two years later, the Mars helicopter has fully outgrown its testing phase, becoming a handy sidekick to its rover companion.

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Links: JPL.NASA.gov

[[Gizmoto](https://gizmodo.com/nasa-ingenuity-helicopter-communications-failure-1848900525)](https://gizmodo.com/ingenuity-helicopter-mars-silent-nasa-perseverance-1850492079)

NASA is creating a ChatGPT-like assistant for astronauts Deployment of an early version is planned for the Lunar Gateway space station. NASA is creating a ChatGPT-style assistant for astronauts Steve Dent

Despite our intrinsic distrust of AI in space taught to us by movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey ("I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave"), it offers large advantages to both manned and unmanned missions. To that end, NASA is developing a system that will allow astronauts to perform maneuvers, conduct experiments and more using a natural-language ChatGPT-like interface, The Guardian reported.

"The idea is to get to a point where we have conversational interactions with space vehicles and they [are] also talking back to us on alerts, interesting findings they see in the solar system and beyond," said Dr. Larissa Suzuki, speaking at an IEEE meeting on next-gen space communication. "It's really not like science fiction anymore."

NASA aims to deploy the system on its Lunar Gateway, a space station that will orbit the Moon and provide support for NASA's Artemis mission. It would use a natural language interface that allows astronauts to seek advice on experiments or conduct maneuvers without diving into complex manuals.

On a dedicated page soliciting small business support for Lunar Gateway, NASA wrote that it would require AI and machine learning technologies to manage various systems when it's unoccupied as well. Those include autonomous operations of science payloads, data transmission prioritization, autonomous operations, health management of Gateway and more.

For instance, Suzuki outlined a scenario in which the system would automatically fix data transmission glitches and inefficiencies, along with other types of digital outages. "We cannot send an engineer up in space whenever a space vehicle goes offline or its software breaks somehow," she said.

NASA has achieved a technological milestone that could one day play an important role in missions to the Moon and beyond. This week, the space agency revealed (via Space.com) that the International Space Station’s Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) is recycling 98 percent of all water astronauts bring onboard the station. Functionally, you can imagine the system operating in a way similar to the Stillsuits described in Frank Herbert’s Dune. One part of the ECLSS uses “advanced dehumidifiers” to capture moisture the station’s crew breaths and sweat out as they go about their daily tasks.

Another subsystem, the imaginatively named “Urine Processor Assembly,” recovers what astronauts pee with the help of vacuum distillation. According to NASA, the distillation process produces water and a urine brine that still contains reclaimable H20. The agency recently began testing a new device that can extract what water remains in the brine, and it’s thanks to that system that NASA observed a 98 percent water recovery rate on the ISS, where previously the station was recycling about 93 to 94 percent of the water astronauts were bringing aboard.

“This is a very important step forward in the evolution of life support systems,” said NASA’s Christopher Brown, who is part of the team that manages the International Space Station’s life support systems. “Let’s say you collect 100 pounds of water on the station. You lose two pounds of that and the other 98 percent just keeps going around and around. Keeping that running is a pretty awesome achievement.”

If the thought of someone else drinking their urine is causing you to gag, fret not. “The processing is fundamentally similar to some terrestrial water distribution systems, just done in microgravity,” said Jill Williamson, NASA’s ECLSS water subsystems manager. “The crew is not drinking urine; they are drinking water that has been reclaimed, filtered, and cleaned such that it is cleaner than what we drink here on Earth.”

According to Williamson, systems like the ECLSS will be critical as NASA conducts more missions beyond Earth's orbit. “The less water and oxygen we have to ship up, the more science that can be added to the launch vehicle,” Williamson said. “Reliable, robust regenerative systems mean the crew doesn’t have to worry about it and can focus on the true intent of their mission.” NASA is recycling 98 percent of astronaut pee and sweat on the ISS into drinkable water

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/300429

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/06/parker-solar-probe-images-the-launch-of-the-solar-wind/