Science
NASA to send more tourists to International Space Station – Digital Trends
In this new era of space tourism, Russia’s Roscosmos space agency has already sent four amateur astronauts to the International Space Station in two missions since October. Now, NASA is gearing up for its first such flight, organized by private spaceflight company Axiom using SpaceX hardware, in February 2022.
This week NASA announced its second private mission to the ISS, again using Axiom. Axiom Mission 2 (Ax-2) is aiming to launch between fall 2022 and late spring 2023.
A rocket carrying the crew will lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and stay docked at the space station for up to 14 days.
There’s no word yet on who will be taking the flight, but speculation may focus on actor Tom Cruise after NASA confirmed last year that it was talking to the Hollywood legend about using the orbiting outpost to shoot scenes for a movie. But with Russian movie star Yulia Peresild recently beating Cruise to become the first actor to shoot a movie in space, it’s not clear if the trip still holds the same allure for the American entertainer.
“NASA and its international partners will review private astronauts selections proposed by Axiom for the Ax-2 mission, as is standard for any space station crew,” the space agency said on Monday. “The proposed crewmembers would undergo NASA medical qualification testing to be approved for flight.”
Commercializing low-Earth orbit
Spaceflights to the ISS involving private citizens are part of NASA’s goal to commercialize low-Earth orbit.
Axiom’s first mission early next year will take three civilians and a former astronaut to the space station for a stay lasting about a week. Each of the three civilians — an investor, an entrepreneur, and a former fighter pilot — has reportedly paid an eye-watering $55 million for the trip of a lifetime, with the cash split between Axiom, SpaceX, and NASA.
During their time aboard the station, the private astronauts will work on their own research and various philanthropic projects.
Besides the actor and filmmaker who visited the ISS in October courtesy of several Russian media companies, Roscosmos more recently took two Japanese space tourists to the ISS, including billionaire entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa. It’s not known how much he paid for the adventure.
While critics might say the space agencies are turning the ISS into a playground for the super-rich, some of the money handed over by the tourists will be used to finance ongoing scientific work aboard the orbiting laboratory, taking the burden off taxpayers and potentially leading to advancements in science and technology that benefit humans back on terra firma.
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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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