Heena Sharma Blog

  US space agency NASA is set to launch SpaceX Crew Dragon second flight to the International Space Station on April 22, it said. The Crew-2 with four astronauts on board, will lift-off at 6:11 a.m. EDT on April 22, from Launch Complex 39A at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Crew-2 flight will carry NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur -- whoa-will serve as the mission's spacecraft commander and pilot, respectively -- along with JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronauta-Akihikoa-Hoshidea-and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomasa-Pesquet, whoa-will serve as mission specialists to the space station, the space agency said in a statement. The mission is the second of the six certified, crew missions NASA, and SpaceX will fly as a part of the agency's Commercial Crew Programme. Crew-1 successfully docked into the ISS in November, last year. Read More

  NASA has completed a crucial hot fire test of the core stage of Space Launch System (SLS) rocket which is designed to power future Moon missions under the agency's Artemis programme. The successful test is a critical milestone ahead of the agency's Artemis I mission, which will send an uncrewed Orion spacecraft on a test flight around the Moon and back to Earth, paving the way for future Artemis missions with astronauts, NASA said on Thursday. The team will use data from the tests to validate the core stage design for flight. "The SLS is the most powerful rocket NASA has ever built, and during today's test the core stage of the rocket generated more than 1.6 million pounds of thrust within seven seconds," acting NASA Administrator Steve Jerzy said in a statement. "The SLS is an incredible feat of engineering and the only rocket capable of powering America's next-generation missions that will place the first woman and the next man on the Moon....

  After a fast paced race to Mars and plans to return to the moon, there is still something left for science and astronomy enthusiasts in 2020, a rare celestial phenomenon —the Great Conjunction— when Jupiter and Saturn will align to form one of the brightest stars in the night sky on Monday being seperated by just one-tenth of a degree. The planets regularly appear to pass each other in the solar system, with the positions of Jupiter and Saturn being aligned in the sky about once every 20 years. However, this year the conjunction is special as it’s been nearly 400 years since the planets passed this close to each other in the sky, and nearly 800 years since the alignment of Saturn and Jupiter occurred at night. The rare phenomenon can be visible globally including in India between 6:30-7:30 pm. The planets will be easy to see with naked eye by looking toward the southwest just after sunset. Jupiter bigger and closer to Earth will be vastly brighter. Read More  

  NASA has named the 18 astronauts half of them women who will train for its Artemis moon-landing programme. The first woman and next man on the moon will come from this elite group. Vice President Mike Pence introduced the astronauts on Wednesday at the close of his final meeting as chairman of the National Space Council. The announcement was made at Florida's Kennedy Space Centre, beneath one of only three remaining Saturn V moon rockets from the 1960s and 1970s Apollo programme. My fellow Americans, I give you the heroes of the future who will carry us back to the moon and beyond, the Artemis generation, Pence told the small crowd, seated several feet apart from one another. Five of the astronauts the only ones in attendance walked onto the stage, waving and wearing masks. Read More  

  Using data collected at NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) and orbit analysis from the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, scientists have confirmed that Near-Earth Object (NEO) 2020 SO is, in fact, a 1960's-Era Centaur rocket booster. The object, discovered in September by astronomers searching for near-Earth asteroids from the NASA-funded Pan-STARRS1 survey telescope on Maui, garnered interest in the planetary science community due to its size and unusual orbit and was studied by observatories around the world, according to an official release. Further analysis of 2020 SO's orbit revealed the object had come close to Earth a few times over the decades, with one approach in 1966 bringing it close enough to suggest it may have originated from Earth. Comparing this data with the history of previous NASA missions, Paul Chodas, CNEOS director, concluded 2020 SO could be the Centaur upper stage rocket booster fro...

  As you drive down the road leading to Jodrell Bank Observatory , a sign asks visitors to turn off their mobile phones, stating that the Lovell telescope is so powerful it could detect a phone signal on Mars. Radio telescopes are designed to be incredibly sensitive. To quote the legendary astronomer Carl Sagan, “The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.” The total energy now is probably a few snowflakes’ worth, but nevertheless it is still true that astronomical radio signals are typically magnitudes smaller than artificial ones. If Jodrell Bank could pick up interference from a phone signal on Mars, how would it fare with an entire 4G network on the Moon? That is the issue that is worrying astronomers like me, now that Nokia of America has been awarded US$14.1m (£10.8m) for the development of the first ever cellular network on the M...

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has said that the agency is planning its first round-trip voyage to Mars during which the crew could spend about a month on the planet's surface. The US space agency wants to send humans to Mars as early as the 2030s. NASA will use advanced propulsion systems to enable a faster journey to the Red Planet while limiting radiation exposure for its astronauts and other mission risks, Bridenstine said on Monday while participating in a discussion with the Space Foundation, a non-profit organisation. "Our preferred launch window will give the crew about 30 days on the Martian surface, which is ample time to search for life on another world," he said. Read More

India was among several countries in the world where greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide (CO2) emission from fossil fuels combustion reduced due to lockdowns imposed to contain the coronavirus pandemic, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said after observing satellite data. America’s NASA , the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) collaborated for the first time to document planet-wide changes in the environment and societies during the lockdowns. The agencies collated data from their Earth-observing satellites tracking changes in air and water quality, climate change, economic activity, and agriculture. Read More

Vestaspace Technology, a nano, cube, and small satellite-manufacturing company and space service provider, is launching a constellation of 35-plus satellites pan-India, to build 5G speed network connections and IoT functionalities across industries. With its AI-powered novel communication architecture, the company is set to release a beta version of next-generation satellite constellations this September. It plans to launch a fully operational constellation of satellites in early 2021 into Low-Earth-Orbit or Geosynchronous Equatorial Orbit. The company plans to replace traditional fiber networks with the satellite constellations and provide high-speed 5G network connections pan-India with its unmanned Software Data processing. Read More

NASA has found the crash site and debris of India's Chandrayaan-2 Vikram moon lander following a tip from an Indian space enthusiast who examined pictures of the area of the moon taken by a US orbiting camera. The site was located by Shanmuga Subramanian, who on his own scoured the pictures taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbital Camera (LROC), NASA and Arizona State University announced on Monday confirming the find. The first mosaic image of the likely crash site made from pictures taken by the LROC on September 17 was downloaded by several people to look for signs of the Vikram, NASA said. Arizona State University (ASU), where the LROC project is located, said, "After receiving this tip the LROC team confirmed the identification by comparing before and after images."One of them, Subramanian, contacted the LROC project with a positive identification of debris, it said. When the images for the first mosaic were acquired on September 17, the impact point...

NASA has found no evidence of Chandrayaan-2's Vikram lander in the images captured during a latest flyby of its Moon orbiter of the lunar region where India's ambitious mission attempted a soft landing, the US space agency said. On September 7, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) attempted a soft landing of Vikram on the uncharted lunar south pole, before losing communication with the lander. "The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged the area of the targeted Chandrayaan-2 Vikram landing site on October 14 but did not observe any evidence of the lander," Noah Edward Petro, the Project Scientist for the LRO mission, told PTI in an exclusive email interaction. Petro said that the camera team carefully examined the images and employed the change detection technique -- using a ratio of an image from prior to the landing attempt to the one acquired on October 14. This approach, he said, is used for finding new meteorite impacts on the Moon that also hel...

NASA launched a satellite on Thursday night to explore the mysterious, dynamic region where air meets space. The satellite called Icon, short for Ionospheric Connection Explorer rocketed into orbit following a two-year delay. It was dropped from a plane flying over the Atlantic off the Florida coast. Five seconds after the satellite's release, the attached Pegasus rocket ignited, sending Icon on its way. The ionosphere is the charged part of the upper atmosphere extending several hundred miles (kilometers) up. It's in constant flux as space weather bombards it from above and Earth weather from below, sometimes disrupting radio communications. "This protected layer, it's the top of our atmosphere. It's our frontier with space," said NASA's heliophysics division director, Nicola Fox. Fox said there's too much going on in this region to be caused by just the sun. Hurricanes, tornadoes and other extreme weather conditions on Earth are al...

I still remember a cartoon in a newspaper in July 1969, just before the first Apollo moon landing. It showed the ground crew reminding the astronauts as they boarded their rocket, “Don’t forget to bring back some rock!” This was a nod to an old holiday cliché – people who went to the seaside were often asked to bring back some “rock”, referring to rock candy. It wasn’t very funny, but it does demonstrate that, once the race against the Soviets was won, the point of it all was to find out about the moon’s geology. The scientific value of landing on the moon would have been diminished without studies to establish the context of the landing sites. The primary consideration was to touch down somewhere safe, but rocks collected from these places would have conveyed much less information had effort not gone into working out the nature of, and more importantly the relationships between, the rock units from which the samples were collected. This was done by making detailed geological...

NASA said Thursday that it's sending a drone called Dragonfly to explore Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Using propellers, the drone will fly and land on several spots on the icy moon to study whether it can support microbial life. The nuclear-powered mission is part of NASA's competitive New Frontiers program, which launched the New Horizons spacecraft that became the first to visit dwarf planet Pluto. Dragonfly beat out nearly a dozen proposed projects, including a mission to collect samples from a nearby comet. The drone is slated to launch in 2026 and arrive at Titan in 2034. The plan is to land on some of Titan's dunes and later on a crater. Development costs for the mission are capped at around USD 850 million. "What really excites me about this mission is that Titan has all the ingredients needed for life," said Lori Glaze, director of NASA's planetary science division. Titan is a haze-covered world with a thick atmosphere. The mo...

The first person to set foot on Mars is likely to be a woman, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has said. While Bridenstine did not identify a specific person, he said that women are at the forefront of the US space agency's upcoming plans. Asked if a woman will go to the Moon for the first time, Bridenstine said "The answer is absolutely. In fact, it is likely to be a woman, the first next person on the Moon." "It is also true that the first person on Mars is likely to be a woman," Bridenstine said during a recent interview on the science and technology radio talk show "Science Friday." NASA recently announced that it will have its first all-female spacewalk at the end of the month, when astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch will get to float around in space. "We have the first all-female spacewalk happening this month at the end of March, which is of course, National Women's Month. So NASA is committed to making sure t...

Nasa InSight will study the interior of Mars and will teach us valuable science as we prepare to send astronauts to the Moon and later to Mars. This accomplishment represents the ingenuity of America and our international partners, and it serves as a testament to the dedication and perseverance of our team. The best of NASA is yet to come, and it is coming soon," CNN quoted Bridenstine as saying. InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is the first outer space robotic explorer and will study the crust, mantle, and core of the fourth planet in our solar system. The lander, launched on May 5, 2018, from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and took a six-month cruise from Earth to Mars ever since, is NASA 's first spacecraft to land on Mars since Curiosity. "We've studied Mars from orbit and from the surface since 1965, learning about its weather, atmosphere, geology and surface chemistr...

NASA's historic Parker Solar Probe -- enroute to the Sun to unravel its mysteries -- has become the closest spacecraft to it. The spacecraft passed the current record of 26.55 million miles from the Sun's surface on October 29, as calculated by the Parker Solar Probe team, NASA said in a statement on Monday. The previous record for closest solar approach was set by the German-American Helios 2 spacecraft in April 1976. As the Parker Solar Probe mission progresses, the spacecraft will repeatedly break its own records, with a final close approach of 3.83 million miles from the Sun's surface expected in 2024. "It's been just 78 days since Parker Solar Probe launched, and we've now come closer to our star than any other spacecraft in history," said Project Manager Andy Driesman from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. Read Complete Article Business Standard

ICESat-2 will improve upon Nasa's 15-year record of monitoring the change in polar ice heights Technology News : Nasa is launching a laser-armed satellite next month that will measure -- in unprecedented detail -- changes in the heights of Earth's polar ice to understand what is causing ice sheets to melt fast. In recent years, contributions of melt from the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica alone have raised global sea level by more than a millimeter a year, accounting for approximately one-third of observed sea level rise, and the rate is increasing. Called the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), the mission is scheduled to be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on September 15, Nasa said in a statement late on Thursday. ICESat-2 will measure the average annual elevation change of land ice covering Greenland and Antarctica to within the width of a pencil, capturing 60,000 measurements every second. "The...

The Parker Solar Probe carries a lineup of instruments to study the Sun both remotely and in situ, or directly Current Affairs News : NASA 's Parker Solar Probe , mankind's first mission to 'touch' the Sun, has been moved to its launch pad and is on schedule take off next week, the US space agencies said. The car-sized spacecraft will travel directly into the Sun's atmosphere, about four million miles from its surface - and more than seven times closer than any spacecraft has come before, thanks to its innovative Thermal Protection System. The mission, targeted to launch on August 11, will perform the closest-ever observations of a star when it travels through the Sun's outer atmosphere, called the corona. It will rely on measurements and imaging to revolutionise our understanding of the corona and how processes there ultimately affect near-Earth space. The probe was moved on July 30 to Space the Launch Complex 37 on Cape Canaveral Ai...