Science
Canada will be doing its bit for space exploration on ‘Lunar Gateway’ project – Laval News
Moon could soon be revealing its secrets, says Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen
Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen joined students from across Canada last week for ‘Let’s Talk Lunar: Exploring the Moon,’ a virtual event organized by Let’s Talk Science.
Canada’s space mission
Hansen was selected to join the CSA in the 2009 CSA selection of future Canadian astronauts. Let’s Talk Science, a non-profit educational venture, focuses on education and skills development for children and youth in Canada through science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) based programs.
During the 90-minute event on April 2, done in conjunction with the CSA, Hansen talked to more than 1,000 students from grades 9 to 12 about lunar exploration, including Canada’s role in the Artemis program, the Lunar Gateway and how astronauts are preparing for missions to the Moon.
Lunar Gateway project
Just as Canada has been participating for decades along with other countries in supporting the International Space Station (ISS) which is in low Earth orbit, Canada is also participating in the planned Lunar Gateway, another space station that will be placed in lunar orbit.
The current goal is to land humans on the Moon by 2024. The last time we were on the Moon was in December 1972, when the U.S.-sponsored National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) led the final mission of its Moon exploration program with Apollo 17.
Moon secrets revealed
“We learned a lot about the Moon in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, but we have a lot more to learn,” said Hansen, adding that when the Moon was explored that last time, it was only around the equatorial region. However, now because of improvements in technology, astronauts will be able to reach other locations, including shadowed craters and the Moon’s south pole because trapped water-ice is believed to be located there.
“We need to go back,” he said. “We want to learn more about the Moon to figure out where we can build bases in the future, where we can get resources to help us explore. We want to learn more about the geology of the Moon and how we can leverage that geology.”
We learned a lot about the Moon in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, but we have a lot more to learn
Tech advances in space
So, even though humans are returning to the Moon, Hansen said the technical advances made over the past 50 years are such that robotics will be playing an immensely more important role in the coming Moon mission.
“This human/robotic collaboration is super-important,” he said, noting the important contribution Canada made in the past to space exploration programs with development of the Canadarm1 robotic arm deployed on the Space Shuttle beginning in the early 1980s, followed by Canadarm2 in 2001 on the ISS, and Canadarm3 which will be fitted to the Lunar Gateway.
Goals important
Hansen said that if there was one thing he hoped the web conference’s participants would take away, it would be the importance of setting goals. “I don’t necessarily want you to desire being a space explorer, but I want you to set goals. Short-term goals, long-term goals, to understand that if you set goals and share those goals with others, people will enable you to accomplish amazing things.”
Hansen said that as a youth, he wanted to be a space explorer. “But I didn’t get here because I was special or better than others. I got here because I was surrounded by people who lifted me up. And that’s exactly what’s happening with our program today: we set big goals and the team is coming together and we are accomplishing incredible things.”
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April 23 (UPI) — SpaceX launched 23 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit Tuesday evening from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Liftoff occurred at 6:17 EDT with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sending the payload of 23 Starlink satellites into orbit.
The Falcon 9 rocket’s first-stage booster landed on an autonomous drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from the rocket’s second stage and its payload.
The entire mission was scheduled to take about an hour and 5 minutes to complete from launch to satellite deployment.
The mission was the ninth flight for the first-stage booster that previously completed five Starlink satellite-deployment missions and three other missions.
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Voyager 1 has finally returned usable data to NASA from outside the solar system after five months offline.
Launched in 1977 and now in its 46th year, the probe has been suffering from communication issues since November 14. The same thing also happened in 2022. However, this week, NASA said that engineers were finally able to get usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.
Slow Work
Fixing Voyager 1 has been slow work. It’s currently over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, which means a radio message takes about 22.5 hours to reach it—and the same again to receive an answer.
The problem appears to have been its flight data subsystem, one of one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. Its job is to package the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth. Since the computer chip that stores its memory and some of its code is broken, engineers had to re-insert that code into a new location.
Next up for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California is to adjust other parts of the FDS software so Voyager 1 can return to sending science data.
Beyond The ‘Heliopause’
The longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history, Voyager 1, was launched on September 5, 1977, while its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, was launched a little earlier on August 20, 1977. Voyager 2—now 12 billion miles away and traveling more slowly—continues to operate normally.
Both are now beyond what astronomers call the heliopause—a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun, which is thought to represent the sun’s farthest influence. Voyager 1 got to the heliopause in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018.
The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of … [+]
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Pale Blue Dot
Since their launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard Titan-Centaur rockets, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have had glittering careers. Both photographed Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980 before going their separate ways. Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but that was sacrificed so scientists could get images of Saturn’s moon, Titan, a maneuver that made it impossible for it to reach any other body in the solar system. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 took slingshots around the planets to also image Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989—the only spacecraft ever to image the two outer planets.
On February 14, 1990, when 3.7 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back towards the sun and took an image that included our planet as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” it’s one of the most famous photos ever taken. It was remastered in 2019.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA has finally heard back from Voyager 1 again in a way that makes sense.
The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data last November. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft’s coding to work around the trouble.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California declared success after receiving good engineering updates late last week. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data.
It takes 22 1/2 hours to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space. The signal travel time is double that for a round trip.
Contact was never lost, rather it was like making a phone call where you can’t hear the person on the other end, a JPL spokeswoman said Tuesday.
Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has been exploring interstellar space – the space between star systems – since 2012. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 12.6 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) away and still working fine.
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