Kentucky Space

Moon a "graduate school for planetary exploration"

According to Science Blog, NASA wants to turn the Moon into a "graduate school for planetary exploration."

On the Moon, astronauts can develop and test techniques for building habitats, harvesting resources and operating machinery in low gravity, high vacuum, harsh radiation, pervasive dust and fantastic extremes of temperature—an environment whose prolonged combination is simply impossible to duplicate on Earth. What they learn will be useful not only on the Moon, but also essential for preparations in going to Mars.

Other subjects in the curriculum might range from finding the best mix of robots and humans, making "useful things from dirt" and learning how to extract oxygen from the lunar crust.

Wayne

Newton's Laws in Lego

Sciencebase presents a YouTube video explaining Newton's Laws of Motion with Legos.

Now that's original.

Wayne

ESA produces Mars "hiker maps"

European Space Agency scientists have produced the first "hiker maps" of Mars using data from the Mars Express craft. The maps superimpose contour lines similar to the ones found on topological maps over high resolution images.

Other Mars Express imagery can be found here.

Hat tip: MarsDaily

Wayne

Bigelow to announce new personal spacecraft?

Personal Spaceflight takes note of a Bigelow Aerospace information release promising big news on April 9 at the Space Symposium and speculates that it might be about the company's Sundancer spacecraft. Googling the spacecraft turns up a brief mention on Gunter's Space Pages - and not much else.

I recommend Personal spaceflight if you have an interest in private space initiatives. Take the feed.

[Update:] Alan Boyle at Cosmic Log has much, much more on Bigelow's vision and the performance of its Genesis module, already in orbit.

Wayne

News space telescope to be seven times size of Hubble

The James Webb Space Telescope, now under construction, will peer deeper into space.

If the mirror were assembled completely and fully opened on the ground, there would be no way to fit it into a rocket. The telescope's 18 mirror segments will be assembled when the telescope is in space.

At nearly twenty two feet in diameter, the assembled mirrors will be almost seven times the size of the primary mirror in Hubble. When launched in 2013, scientists hope to use the telescope to see the first stars following the Big Bang.

Wayne

Some changes for Lunar Landing Challenge

According to Moon Daily, registration dates and some rules changes have been announced for the X PRIZE Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, which NASA is funding through its Centennial Challenges program.

The Lunar Landing Challenge requires a vehicle to simulate trips between the moon's surface and lunar orbit. Ninety percent of the funding for entrants must be private money.

More information on the Lunar Landing Challenge is available directly from X PRIZE Foundation.

Wayne

"Exoplanetologists" find new ground

Sky Nightly has published an interview with Beth Biller, a young woman on a team of astronomers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile to render images of planets surrounding other stars, work that will help determine the requirements for NASA's Terrestrial Plant Finder mission. Currently finishing a Ph.D. at the University of Arizona, she describes her goal as "becoming one of the first comparative exoplanetologists - someone who classifies different types of planets beyond our solar system."

The shape of ten dimensions

Can the extra dimensions predicted in string theory be measured?

Wikipedia: string theory

Colonizing the Moon

William Burrows, a professor of Journalism at NYU, argues in the February 2, 2007 Wall Street Journal that colonizing the Moon and ultimately other celestial bodies is critical not only for the purposes of exploration and gaining new knowledge....but for the very survival of humanity itself.

Rehearsing Mercury orbit: "riding above the day-night line"

Space Daily: through a series of "Day-in-the-Life" (DitL) tests, scientists are rehearsing for the expected 2011 Messenger orbit of Mercury. The first DitL was fairly uneventful, but now preparation at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for the second rehearsal is underway and scientists are building in more complexity.

The team is now building command sequences for DitL 2, which tackles a dusk-to-dawn orbit in which the spacecraft always faces the Sun while riding above the line that separates day from night. 'This scenario, while still not particularly stressful, is very interesting for radio science purposes,' Holdridge [a member of the Messenger team] says. 'There are times during that orbit when the Sun is between Mercury and Earth, and we can't communicate with the spacecraft when that happens. The radio science team wants to trek through those periods.'

For astronomers in the Northern Hemisphere, the Space Daily article also points out that Mercury will be visible below Venus in the western skies shortly after sunset.