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By NASA
NASA/Kim Shiflett In this image from Dec. 11, 2024, the 212-foot-tall SLS (Space Launch System) core stage is lowered into High Bay 2 at the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. With the move to High Bay 2, NASA and Boeing technicians now have 360-degree access to the core stage both internally and externally.
The Artemis II test flight, targeted for launch in 2026, will be NASA’s first mission with crew under the Artemis campaign. NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Reid Wiseman, as well as CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will go on a 10-day journey around the Moon and back.
Image credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett
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By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
A drone is shown flying during a test of Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management (UTM) technical capability Level 2 (TCL2) at Reno-Stead Airport, Nevada in 2016. During the test, five drones simultaneously crossed paths, separated by different altitudes. Two drones flew beyond visual line of sight and three flew within line-of-sight of their operators. More UTM research followed, and it continues today.NASA / Dominic Hart Package delivery drones are coming to our doorsteps in the future, and NASA wants to make sure that when medication or pizza deliveries take to the skies, they will be safe.
In July, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for the first time authorized multiple U.S. companies to fly commercial drones in the same airspace without their operators being able to see them the entire flight. Getting to this important step on the way to expanding U.S. commercial drone usage required considerable research into the concept known as flight that is Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) – and NASA helped lead the way.
For BVLOS flights to become routine, trusted automation technology needs to be built into drone and airspace systems, since pilots or air traffic controllers won’t be able to see all the drones operating at once. To address these challenges, NASA developed several key technologies, most notably Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM), which allows for digital sharing of each drone user’s planned flight details.
“NASA’s pioneering work on UTM, in collaboration with the FAA and industry, set the stage for safe and scalable small drone flights below 400 feet,” said Parimal Kopardekar, NASA’s Advanced Air Mobility mission integration manager. “This technology is now adopted globally as the key to enabling Beyond Visual Line of Sight drone operations.”
With UTM, each drone user can have the same situational awareness of the airspace where drones are flying. This foundation of technology development, led by NASA’s UTM project, allows drones to fly BVLOS today with special FAA approval.
Drones can fly BVLOS today at the FAA test site and at some other selected areas with pre-approval from the FAA based on the risks. However, the FAA is working on new regulation to allow BVLOS operations to occur without exemptions and waivers in the future.
The NASA UTM team invented a new way to handle the airspace — a style of air traffic management where multiple parties, from government to commercial industry, work together to provide services. These include flight planning, strategic deconfliction before flights take off, communication, surveillance and other focus areas needed for a safe flight.
This technology is now being used by the FAA in approved parts of the Dallas area, allowing commercial drone companies to deliver packages using the NASA- originated UTM research. UTM allows for strategic coordination among operators so each company can monitor their own drone flight to ensure that each drone is where it should be along the planned flight path. Test sites like Dallas help the FAA identify requirements needed to safely enable small drone operations nationwide.
NASA is also working to ensure that public safety drones have priority when operating in the same airspace with commercial drones. In another BVLOS effort, NASA is using drones to test technology that could be used on air taxis. Each of these efforts brings us one step closer to seeing supplies or packages routinely delivered by drone around the U.S.
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Learn more about how drone package delivery works in this FAA video.FAA Facebook logo @NASA@NASAaero@NASA_es @NASA@NASAaero@NASA_es Instagram logo @NASA@NASAaero@NASA_es Linkedin logo @NASA Explore More
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Last Updated Dec 10, 2024 EditorLillian GipsonContactJim Bankejim.banke@nasa.gov Related Terms
Drones & You Advanced Air Mobility Aeronautics Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate Air Traffic Management – Exploration Airspace Operations and Safety Program Ames Research Center Armstrong Flight Research Center Glenn Research Center Langley Research Center UAS Traffic Management View the full article
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By European Space Agency
A pair of spacecraft were launched together today from India with the potential to change the nature of future space missions. ESA’s twin Proba-3 platforms will perform precise formation flying down to a single millimetre, as if they were one single giant spacecraft. To demonstrate their degree of control, the pair will produce artificial solar eclipses in orbit, giving prolonged views of the Sun’s ghostly surrounding atmosphere, the corona.
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By European Space Agency
ESA’s eclipse-making precise formation-flying mission is nearly ready for liftoff! Proba-3 is scheduled for launch on a PSLV-XL rocket from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India, on Wednesday, 4 December, at 11:38 CET (10:38 GMT, 16:08 local time).
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By NASA
5 Min Read Making Mars’ Moons: Supercomputers Offer ‘Disruptive’ New Explanation
A NASA study using a series of supercomputer simulations reveals a potential new solution to a longstanding Martian mystery: How did Mars get its moons? The first step, the findings say, may have involved the destruction of an asteroid.
The research team, led by Jacob Kegerreis, a postdoctoral research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, found that an asteroid passing near Mars could have been disrupted – a nice way of saying “ripped apart” – by the Red Planet’s strong gravitational pull.
The team’s simulations show the resulting rocky fragments being strewn into a variety of orbits around Mars. More than half the fragments would have escaped the Mars system, but others would’ve stayed in orbit. Tugged by the gravity of both Mars and the Sun, in the simulations some of the remaining asteroid pieces are set on paths to collide with one another, every encounter further grinding them down and spreading more debris.
Many collisions later, smaller chunks and debris from the former asteroid could have settled into a disk encircling the planet. Over time, some of this material is likely to have clumped together, possibly forming Mars’ two small moons, Phobos and Deimos.
To assess whether this was a realistic chain of events, the research team explored hundreds of different close encounter simulations, varying the asteroid’s size, spin, speed, and distance at its closest approach to the planet. The team used their high-performance, open-source computing code, called SWIFT, and the advanced computing systems at Durham University in the United Kingdom to study in detail both the initial disruption and, using another code, the subsequent orbits of the debris.
In a paper published Nov. 20 in the journal Icarus, the researchers report that, in many of the scenarios, enough asteroid fragments survive and collide in orbit to serve as raw material to form the moons.
“It’s exciting to explore a new option for the making of Phobos and Deimos – the only moons in our solar system that orbit a rocky planet besides Earth’s,” said Kegerreis. “Furthermore, this new model makes different predictions about the moons’ properties that can be tested against the standard ideas for this key event in Mars’ history.”
Two hypotheses for the formation of the Martian moons have led the pack. One proposes that passing asteroids were captured whole by Mars’ gravity, which could explain the moons’ somewhat asteroid-like appearance. The other says that a giant impact on the planet blasted out enough material – a mix of Mars and impactor debris – to form a disk and, ultimately, the moons. Scientists believe a similar process formed Earth’s Moon.
The latter explanation better accounts for the paths the moons travel today – in near-circular orbits that closely align with Mars’ equator. However, a giant impact ejects material into a disk that, mostly, stays close to the planet. And Mars’ moons, especially Deimos, sit quite far away from the planet and probably formed out there, too.
“Our idea allows for a more efficient distribution of moon-making material to the outer regions of the disk,” said Jack Lissauer, a research scientist at Ames and co-author on the paper. “That means a much smaller ‘parent’ asteroid could still deliver enough material to send the moons’ building blocks to the right place.”
It’s exciting to explore a new option for the making of Phobos and Deimos – the only moons in our solar system that orbit a rocky planet besides Earth’s.
Jacob Kegerreis
Postdoctoral research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center
Testing different ideas for the formation of Mars’ moons is the primary goal of the upcoming Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) sample return mission led by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency). The spacecraft will survey both moons to determine their origin and collect samples of Phobos to bring to Earth for study. A NASA instrument on board, called MEGANE – short for Mars-moon Exploration with GAmma rays and Neutrons – will identify the chemical elements Phobos is made of and help select sites for the sample collection. Some of the samples will be collected by a pneumatic sampler also provided by NASA as a technology demonstration contribution to the mission. Understanding what the moons are made of is one clue that could help distinguish between the moons having an asteroid origin or a planet-plus-impactor source.
Before scientists can get their hands on a piece of Phobos to analyze, Kegerreis and his team will pick up where they left off demonstrating the formation of a disk that has enough material to make Phobos and Deimos.
“Next, we hope to build on this proof-of-concept project to simulate and study in greater detail the full timeline of formation,” said Vincent Eke, associate professor at the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University and a co-author on the paper. “This will allow us to examine the structure of the disk itself and make more detailed predictions for what the MMX mission could find.”
For Kegerreis, this work is exciting because it also expands our understanding of how moons might be born – even if it turns out that Mars’ own formed by a different route. The simulations offer a fascinating exploration, he says, of the possible outcomes of encounters between objects like asteroids and planets. These events were common in the early solar system, and simulations could help researchers reconstruct the story of how our cosmic backyard evolved.
This research is a collaborative effort between Ames and Durham University, supported by the Institute for Computational Cosmology’s Planetary Giant Impact Research group. The simulations used were run using the open-source SWIFT code, carried out on the DiRAC (Distributed Research Utilizing Advanced Computing) Memory Intensive service (“COSMA”), hosted by Durham University on behalf of the DiRAC High-Performance Computing facility.
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Last Updated Nov 20, 2024 Related Terms
Mars Ames Research Center Ames Research Center's Science Directorate General High-Tech Computing Mars Moons Martian Moon Exploration (MMX) Missions NASA Centers & Facilities Planets Technology The Solar System Explore More
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