ucresearch:

In 1958, still a decade before the moon landing, Engineering made UCLA the first university with an astronautics program. This prototype of a space suit was designed in 1961.

(via itsfullofstars)

crookedindifference:

Teleoperator Retrieval System (TRS), 1979

This TRS spacecraft is illustrated being used to re-boost the Skylab space station to a higher orbit. An early Space Shuttle flight would have boosted Skylab to a higher orbit, adding five years of operational life. The TRS (which was on contract with Martin Marietta for $26 million) contained about three tons of propellant, remote-control capabilities with TV cameras and was designed for duties such as space construction and servicing and retrieving satellites the shuttle could not reach. After rescuing Skylab, the TRS would have remained in orbit for future use. Alternatively, it could have been used to de-orbit Skylab for a safe, controlled re-entry and destruction.

However, development of the Shuttle was delayed, and Skylab reentered Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrated in 1979, with debris striking portions of Western Australia.

(via itsfullofstars)

(Source: pushthemovement, via goldenncontagious)

spaceplasma:

Hidden deep in Obama’s Fiscal Year 2014 Budget is this item: “Begins work on a mission to rendezvous with—and then move—a small asteroid.”

See what else you can find that’s particularly noteworthy, and tell us.

(via itsfullofstars)

spaceplasma:

Leaping Lunar Dust

Electrically charged lunar dust near shadowed craters can get lofted above the surface and jump over the shadowed region, bouncing back and forth between sunlit areas on opposite sides, according to new calculations by NASA scientists.

The research is being led by Michael Collier at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., as part of the Dynamic Response of the Environment At the Moon (DREAM) team in partnership with the NASA Lunar Science Institute (NLSI), managed at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

“The motion of an individual dust particle is like a pendulum or a swing,” says Collier. “We predict dust can swarm like bees around a hive over partially shaded regions on the moon and other airless objects in the solar system, such as asteroids. We found that this is a new class of dust motion. It does not escape to space or bounce long distances as predicted by others, but instead stays locally trapped, executing oscillations over a shaded region of 1 to 10 meters (yards) in size. These other trajectories are possible, but we now show a third new motion that is possible.” Collier is lead author of a paper on this research published October 2012 in Advances in Space Research.

This effect should be especially prominent during dusk and dawn, according to the team, as regions become partially illuminated while features like mountains and crater rims cast long shadows.

“The dust is an indicator of unusual surface electric fields,” says William Farrell of NASA Goddard, a co-author on the paper and lead of the NLSI DREAM team. “In these shaded regions, the surface is negatively charged compared to the sunlit regions. This creates a locally complex, larger electric field with separate positively and negatively charged regions, called a dipole field, over the shaded region. The dust performed its swinging motion under the influence of this dipole. Such a surface process occurring on the moon at the line where night transitions to day, called the terminator, might also occur at small bodies like asteroids. It might be a fundamental process occurring at airless rocky bodies.”

There is evidence that dust actually moves this way over the lunar surface. “There are hints for this type of dust swarm in Surveyor images. A twilight was observed over the landed platforms during dusk and dawn. This was surprising at first because the moon does not have a dense enough atmosphere to scatter light when the sun is below the horizon. It was long considered to be light scattered from lifted dust. This model suggests the dust is really leaping or swarming overtop a large number of shaded regions that would exist along the lunar dusk/dawn line, called the lunar terminator. It’s a natural fit. Charged lunar dust transport is also believed responsible for the Apollo 17 Lunar Ejecta and Meteorites (LEAM) experiment’s observation of highly charged dust near the terminator,” adds Collier.

For more information about the leaping lunar dust, visit: http://lunarscience.nasa.gov

(via itsfullofstars)

spaceplasma:

The strangest asteroid that astronomers had ever seen

Sometimes the line separating “asteroid” from “comet” is a blurry one. For instance, there is the strange asteroid Chiron. Discovered in 1979 by astronomer Charles T. Kowal, it was cataloged as asteroid number 2060. But almost immediately, it was recognized as being a little weird.

First, because its orbit turned out to lie between Uranus and Saturn…much further from the sun than any other asteroid. It also had the strange habit of seeming to change its brightness. In 1988, astronomers William Hartmann, Dave Tholen and Dale Cruikshank noticed that Chiron was nearly twice as bright as it was supposed to be. The asteroid continued to brighten, eventually becoming three times brighter than usual. What was going on?

The answer was that Chiron contains a lot of ice and as its orbit carried it closer to the sun, some of this ice turned to gas. A huge cloud of gas and dust was forming around the asteroid. In effect, Chiron had turned into a comet.

Then, astronomers observed an event recently that was similar but even more spectacular…

It was discovered by the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR). This is an MIT project jointly funded by the United States Air Force and NASA. One of its goals is to detect and catalog near-earth asteroids that might potentially threaten the Earth.

On January 6 it found an object that was cataloged as P/2010 A2. This turned out to be something so unusual that last week the Hubble Space Telescope was focused on it. What Hubble revealed is an object that is almost completely unique. At first glance, it seemed to be comet. But the 460-foot nucleus was offset from the tail, which had a very unusual structure near the nucleus. And there was no discernable gas in the tail. Since P/2010 A was located in the asteroid belt, scientists are speculating that it may be the result of a collision between two asteroids. Such a collision would have occurred at over 9000 miles per hour—-five times the speed of a rifle bullet. This would have released energy equivalent to an atomic bomb, creating a cloud of dust and debris. This cloud was then blown by the pressure of sunlight into a long, trailing comet-like tail

P/2010 A gives scientists a glimpse into the early history of our solar system, when similar collisions between planetesimals eventually created the planets we know today—-including our own earth.

Credit: Ron Miller

(via itsfullofstars)

danelleisnice:

Homunculi by *NegativeFeedback

(Source: overidealism, via northwestgem)

nofaithtolose:

I’m dying.

(via you-had-me-at-bacon)