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By European Space Agency
At the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Milan this week, ESA signed a contract for Element #1, the first phase of the HydRON Demonstration System. HydRON, which stands for High thRoughput Optical Network, is set to transform the way data-collecting satellites communicate, using laser technology that will allow satellites to connect with each other and ground networks much faster.
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By NASA
NASA is preparing space at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for upcoming assembly activities of the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket core stage for future Artemis missions, beginning with Artemis III.
Teams are currently outfitting the assembly building’s High Bay 2 for future vertical assembly of the rocket stage that will help power NASA’s Artemis campaign to the Moon. During Apollo, High Bay 2, one of four high bays inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, was used to stack the Saturn V rocket. During the Space Shuttle Program, the high bay was used for external tank checkout and storage and as a contingency storage area for the shuttle.
Technicians are building tooling in High Bay 2 at NASA Kennedy that will allow NASA and Boeing, the SLS core stage lead contractor, to vertically integrate the core stage. NASA Michigan-based Futuramic is constructing the tooling that will hold the core stage in a vertical position, allowing NASA and Boeing, the SLS core stage lead contractor, to integrate the SLS rocket’s engine section and four RS-25 engines to finish assembly of the rocket stage. Vertical integration will streamline final production efforts, offering technicians 360-degree access to the stage both internally and externally.
“The High Bay 2 area at NASA Kennedy is critical for work as SLS transitions from a developmental to operational model,” said Chad Bryant, deputy manager of the SLS Stages Office. “While teams are stacking and preparing the SLS rocket for launch of one Artemis mission, the SLS core stage for another Artemis mission will be taking shape just across the aisleway.”
Under the new assembly model beginning with Artemis III, all the major structures for the SLS core stage will continue to be fully produced and manufactured at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. Upon completion of manufacturing and thermal protection system application, the engine section will be shipped to NASA Kennedy for final outfitting. Later, the top sections of the core stage – the forward skirt, intertank, liquid oxygen tank, and liquid hydrogen tank – will be outfitted and joined at NASA Michoud and shipped to NASA Kennedy for final assembly.
The fully assembled core stage for Artemis II arrived at Kennedy on July 23. NASA’s Pegasus barge delivered the SLS engine section for Artemis III to Kennedy in December 2022. Teams at NASA Michoud are outfitting the remaining core stage elements and preparing to horizontally join them. The four RS-25 engines for the Artemis III mission are complete at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and will be transported to NASA Kennedy in 2025. Major core stage and exploration upper stage structures are in work at NASA Michoud for Artemis IV and beyond.
NASA is working to land the first woman, first person of color, and its first international partner astronaut on the Moon under Artemis. SLS is part of NASA’s backbone for deep space exploration, along with the Orion spacecraft, supporting ground systems, advanced spacesuits and rovers, the Gateway in orbit around the Moon, and commercial human landing systems. SLS is the only rocket that can send Orion, astronauts, and supplies to the Moon in a single launch.
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Jonathan Deal
Marshall Space Flight Center
Huntsville, Ala.
256-544-0034
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By NASA
5 Min Read NASA Optical Navigation Tech Could Streamline Planetary Exploration
Optical navigation technology could help astronauts and robots find their ways using data from cameras and other sensors. Credits: NASA As astronauts and rovers explore uncharted worlds, finding new ways of navigating these bodies is essential in the absence of traditional navigation systems like GPS. Optical navigation relying on data from cameras and other sensors can help spacecraft — and in some cases, astronauts themselves — find their way in areas that would be difficult to navigate with the naked eye. Three NASA researchers are pushing optical navigation tech further, by making cutting edge advancements in 3D environment modeling, navigation using photography, and deep learning image analysis. In a dim, barren landscape like the surface of the Moon, it can be easy to get lost. With few discernable landmarks to navigate with the naked eye, astronauts and rovers must rely on other means to plot a course.
As NASA pursues its Moon to Mars missions, encompassing exploration of the lunar surface and the first steps on the Red Planet, finding novel and efficient ways of navigating these new terrains will be essential. That’s where optical navigation comes in — a technology that helps map out new areas using sensor data.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is a leading developer of optical navigation technology. For example, GIANT (the Goddard Image Analysis and Navigation Tool) helped guide the OSIRIS-REx mission to a safe sample collection at asteroid Bennu by generating 3D maps of the surface and calculating precise distances to targets.
Now, three research teams at Goddard are pushing optical navigation technology even further.
Virtual World Development
Chris Gnam, an intern at NASA Goddard, leads development on a modeling engine called Vira that already renders large, 3D environments about 100 times faster than GIANT. These digital environments can be used to evaluate potential landing areas, simulate solar radiation, and more.
While consumer-grade graphics engines, like those used for video game development, quickly render large environments, most cannot provide the detail necessary for scientific analysis. For scientists planning a planetary landing, every detail is critical.
Vira can quickly and efficiently render an environment in great detail.NASA “Vira combines the speed and efficiency of consumer graphics modelers with the scientific accuracy of GIANT,” Gnam said. “This tool will allow scientists to quickly model complex environments like planetary surfaces.”
The Vira modeling engine is being used to assist with the development of LuNaMaps (Lunar Navigation Maps). This project seeks to improve the quality of maps of the lunar South Pole region which are a key exploration target of NASA’s Artemis missions.
Vira also uses ray tracing to model how light will behave in a simulated environment. While ray tracing is often used in video game development, Vira utilizes it to model solar radiation pressure, which refers to changes in momentum to a spacecraft caused by sunlight.
Vira can accurately render indirect lighting, which is when an area is still lit up even though it is not directly facing a light source.NASA Find Your Way with a Photo
Another team at Goddard is developing a tool to enable navigation based on images of the horizon. Andrew Liounis, an optical navigation product design lead, leads the team, working alongside NASA Interns Andrew Tennenbaum and Will Driessen, as well as Alvin Yew, the gas processing lead for NASA’s DAVINCI mission.
An astronaut or rover using this algorithm could take one picture of the horizon, which the program would compare to a map of the explored area. The algorithm would then output the estimated location of where the photo was taken.
Using one photo, the algorithm can output with accuracy around hundreds of feet. Current work is attempting to prove that using two or more pictures, the algorithm can pinpoint the location with accuracy around tens of feet.
“We take the data points from the image and compare them to the data points on a map of the area,” Liounis explained. “It’s almost like how GPS uses triangulation, but instead of having multiple observers to triangulate one object, you have multiple observations from a single observer, so we’re figuring out where the lines of sight intersect.”
This type of technology could be useful for lunar exploration, where it is difficult to rely on GPS signals for location determination.
A Visual Perception Algorithm to Detect Craters
To automate optical navigation and visual perception processes, Goddard intern Timothy Chase is developing a programming tool called GAVIN (Goddard AI Verification and Integration) Tool Suit.
This tool helps build deep learning models, a type of machine learning algorithm that is trained to process inputs like a human brain. In addition to developing the tool itself, Chase and his team are building a deep learning algorithm using GAVIN that will identify craters in poorly lit areas, such as the Moon.
“As we’re developing GAVIN, we want to test it out,” Chase explained. “This model that will identify craters in low-light bodies will not only help us learn how to improve GAVIN, but it will also prove useful for missions like Artemis, which will see astronauts exploring the Moon’s south pole region — a dark area with large craters — for the first time.”
As NASA continues to explore previously uncharted areas of our solar system, technologies like these could help make planetary exploration at least a little bit simpler. Whether by developing detailed 3D maps of new worlds, navigating with photos, or building deep learning algorithms, the work of these teams could bring the ease of Earth navigation to new worlds.
By Matthew Kaufman
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Aug 07, 2024 EditorRob GarnerContactRob Garnerrob.garner@nasa.govLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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By NASA
Technological innovations make headlines every day, and NASA’s In Space Production Applications (InSPA) Portfolio of awards are driving these innovations into the future. InSPA awards help U.S. companies demonstrate in-space manufacturing of their products and move them to market, propelling U.S. industry toward the development of a sustainable, scalable, and profitable non-NASA demand for services and products manufactured in the microgravity environment of low Earth orbit for use on Earth.
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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This view of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa was captured by the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft during the mission’s close flyby on Sept. 29, 2022.Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Image processing: Kevin M. Gill CC BY 3.0 The ice-covered Jovian moon generates 1,000 tons of oxygen every 24 hours – enough to keep a million humans breathing for a day.
Scientists with NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter have calculated the rate of oxygen being produced at the Jovian moon Europa to be substantially less than most previous studies. Published on March 4 in Nature Astronomy, the findings were derived by measuring hydrogen outgassing from the icy moon’s surface using data collected by the spacecraft’s Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment (JADE) instrument.
The paper’s authors estimate the amount of oxygen produced to be around 26 pounds every second (12 kilograms per second). Previous estimates range from a few pounds to over 2,000 pounds per second (over 1,000 kilograms per second). Scientists believe that some of the oxygen produced in this manner could work its way into the moon’s subsurface ocean as a possible source of metabolic energy.
With an equatorial diameter of 1,940 miles (3,100 kilometers), Europa is the fourth largest of Jupiter’s 95 known moons and the smallest of the four Galilean satellites. Scientists believe a vast internal ocean of salty water lurks beneath its icy crust, and they are curious about the potential for life-supporting conditions to exist below the surface.
This illustration shows charged particles from Jupiter impacting Europa’s surface, splitting frozen water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen molecules. Scientists believe some of these newly created oxygen gases could migrate toward the moon’s subsurface ocean, as depicted in the inset image.NASA/JPL-Caltech/SWRI/PU It is not just the water that has astrobiologists’ attention: The Jovian moon’s location plays an important role in biological possibilities as well. Europa’s orbit places it right in the middle of the gas giant’s radiation belts. Charged, or ionized, particles from Jupiter bombard the icy surface, splitting water molecules in two to generate oxygen that might find its way into the moon’s ocean.
Click here for an interactive 3D visualization of Europa “Europa is like an ice ball slowly losing its water in a flowing stream. Except, in this case, the stream is a fluid of ionized particles swept around Jupiter by its extraordinary magnetic field,” said JADE scientist Jamey Szalay from Princeton University in New Jersey. “When these ionized particles impact Europa, they break up the water-ice molecule by molecule on the surface to produce hydrogen and oxygen. In a way, the entire ice shell is being continuously eroded by waves of charged particles washing up upon it.”
Capturing the Bombardment
As Juno flew within 220 miles (354 kilometers) of Europa at 2:36 p.m. PDT Sept. 29, 2022, JADE identified and measured hydrogen and oxygen ions that had been created by the bombarding charged particles and then “picked up” by Jupiter’s magnetic field as it swept past the moon.
“Back when NASA’S Galileo mission flew by Europa, it opened our eyes to the complex and dynamic interaction Europa has with its environment. Juno brought a new capability to directly measure the composition of charged particles shed from Europa’s atmosphere, and we couldn’t wait to further peek behind the curtain of this exciting water world,” said Szalay. “But what we didn’t realize is that Juno’s observations would give us such a tight constraint on the amount of oxygen produced in Europa’s icy surface.”
Juno carries 11 state-of-the-art science instruments designed to study the Jovian system, including nine charged-particle and electromagnetic-wave sensors for studying Jupiter’s magnetosphere.
“Our ability to fly close to the Galilean satellites during our extended mission allowed us to start tackling a breadth of science, including some unique opportunities to contribute to the investigation of Europa’s habitability,” said Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “And we’re not done yet. More moon flybys and the first exploration of Jupiter’s close ring and polar atmosphere are yet to come.”
Oxygen production is one of many facets that NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will investigate when it arrives at Jupiter in 2030. The mission has a sophisticated payload of nine science instruments to determine if Europa has conditions that could be suitable for life.
Now Bolton and the rest of the Juno mission team are setting their sights on another Jovian world, the volcano-festooned moon Io. On April 9, the spacecraft will come within about 10,250 miles (16,500 kilometers) of its surface. The data Juno gathers will add to findings from past Io flybys, including two extremely close approaches of about 932 miles (1,500 kilometers) on Dec. 30, 2023, and Feb. 3, 2024.
More About the Mission
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Italian Space Agency (ASI) funded the Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built and operates the spacecraft.
More information about Juno is available at:
https://www.nasa.gov/juno
News Media Contacts
DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
301-286-6284 / 202-358-1501
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov
Deb Schmid
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio
210-522-2254
dschmid@swri.org
2024-020
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Last Updated Mar 04, 2024 Related Terms
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