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Mars : Curiosity arrive dans la zone de vérité après trois ans de voyage
news.movim.eu / JournalDuGeek · 2 days ago - 09:30
Mieux vaut tard que jamais pour Curiosity, qui a eu toutes les peines du monde à atteindre la fameuse crête de Gediz Vallis.
Mars : Curiosity arrive dans la zone de vérité après trois ans de voyage
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How scientists are mitigating space travel’s risks to the human body
news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · 5 days ago - 14:44
Enlarge / With NASA planning more missions to space in the future, scientists are studying how to mitigate health hazards that come with space flight (credit: SpaceX)
When 17 people were in orbit around the Earth all at the same time on May 30, 2023, it set a record. With NASA and other federal space agencies planning more manned missions and commercial companies bringing people to space, opportunities for human space travel are rapidly expanding.
However, traveling to space poses risks to the human body. Since NASA wants to send a manned mission to Mars in the 2030s, scientists need to find solutions for these hazards sooner rather than later.
As a kinesiologist who works with astronauts, I’ve spent years studying the effects space can have on the body and brain. I’m also involved in a NASA project that aims to mitigate the health hazards that participants of a future mission to Mars might face.
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Here’s what the latest Mars rover has learned so far
news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · 6 days ago - 11:30
Enlarge / Planetary vampire Perseverance takes a selfie with two sample drill holes. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS )
It’s easy to take it for granted, but we’re driving around on freakin’ Mars right now.
We’ve done this a few times before, sure, but it remains one of humankind’s most impressive technological feats. The latest rover to continue our presence on the Red Planet is Perseverance, the star of the Mars 2020 mission that launched in July of that year and landed in February of 2021.
It’s now been busy roving for over two years. News of what we’re discovering—beyond the stream of photos —tends to come in discrete bits that can be hard to connect into a bigger picture if you aren’t following closely . Consider this your wide-angle recap.
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Perseverance : 10 questions pour comprendre la mission Mars 2020
news.movim.eu / Numerama · Wednesday, 6 September - 12:23
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Pourquoi on envoie des robots sur Mars, expliqué avec des Lego
news.movim.eu / Numerama · Tuesday, 5 September - 15:32
Abonnez-vous aux newsletters Numerama pour recevoir l’essentiel de l’actualité https://www.numerama.com/newsletter/
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Lune, planètes, lumière zodiacale : que voir dans le ciel en septembre 2023 ?
news.movim.eu / Numerama · Saturday, 2 September - 14:26
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India’s accomplishments in space are getting more impressive
news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 1 September - 00:32
Enlarge / A view of India's Vikram lander taken Wednesday from the Pragyan rover. (credit: ISRO )
It's been more than a week since India's Chandrayaan 3 mission landed on the Moon, and it's a good time to assess where the world's most populous nation stands relative to other global other space powers.
The successful arrival of the Chandrayaan 3 mission's Vikram lander on the Moon made India the first country besides China to achieve a soft landing on the lunar surface since 1976, following a series of failed landings by private organizations and India itself four years ago. And it made India just the fourth nation overall to achieve this feat.
Since the landing of Chandrayaan 3 on August 23, India has released some early findings from the lander and its mobile rover, named Pragyan, along with photos of the vehicles exploring the Moon's alien charcoal-color landscape.
The big idea: should we colonise other planets?
news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 21 August - 11:30 · 1 minute
Is Elon Musk’s vision for the future a libertarian fantasy or scientific imperative?
The question of human settlement on Mars is, for many people, not “if” but “when”. Elon Musk ’s SpaceX company began speaking of the Mars Colonial Transporter around 2012. Its latest incarnation, the prototype for a massive spaceship called Starship that can house up to 100 passengers and crew, took off from Texas in April but exploded before reaching Earth’s orbit . Whether that counts as a success or not depends on who you ask, but it testifies to Musk’s determination to see a human presence on Mars in the next decade.
His view that colonising the cosmos is humankind’s ultimate and inevitable destiny is widely shared. The moon, lacking an atmosphere, short on water, and with weak gravity, is not a very attractive stepping stone, but Mars has none of those drawbacks and is considered a much more viable place to build the first off-world settlement. “Once the exclusive province of science fiction stories and films,” according to Nasa , “the subject of space colonisation has rapidly moved several steps closer to becoming a reality thanks to major advances in rocket propulsion and design, astronautics and astrophysics, robotics and medicine.”
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Mars keeps spinning faster every year, NASA InSight data says
news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 17 August - 20:03 · 1 minute
Enlarge / A self portrait of InSight's hardware on the red planet. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
To say Mars is a bizarre planet might be something of an understatement. It has nearly no atmosphere, has an unstable liquid metal core that causes it to wobble on its axis constantly, and as a frozen desert, is an oxymoron in itself. As if Mars wasn’t strange enough, data from NASA’s InSight Lander (RIP) has now revealed that the red planet is spinning faster and faster every year.
The increasing spin went unknown until a research team found evidence of acceleration through InSight’s RISE (Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment) instrument. That same team, led by radio scientist Sebastien Le Maistre of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, who is also the principal investigator of RISE, had previously found that the core of Mars is most likely a glob of molten metal. Looking further into RISE data from InSight’s first 900 days on Mars, they saw that the planet’s spin was accelerating by a fraction of a millisecond per (Earth) year, or about 0.76 milliseconds. Martian days are gradually growing shorter. But why?
RISE’s main objective was to see how much Mars wobbled as its orbit was pushed and pulled by the gravity of the Sun. This would determine whether the core was more likely to be solid or liquid. However, RISE also had another task, which was measuring the length of a Martian day. Days on Mars, known as sols, are about a half-hour longer than Earth days at 24 hours and 37 minutes. RISE measured both the rotation rate and wobbling of Mars with reflected radio waves. When it received a radio signal from NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), it would reflect those waves right back at Earth. The difference between the frequency of the signal sent out by the DSN and the signal that bounced back to Earth told the InSight team how the lander was moving along with Mars.
