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An incredible panoramic view sent from the surface of the red planet has been created using images taken by the Mars Curiosity rover. It reveals the landscape of one of our closest galactic neighbours, which has been home to the exploratory vehicle since it landed in Gale Crater in 2012. One of the on-board cameras captured 16 separate scenic images that show various points on its journey, as seen from the top of the Vera Rubin Ridge, which were then stitched together to form the sweeping image. Thanks to some clever visual effects that give the scene a blue hue,...

May 2018 is the launch window for NASA’s next mission to Mars, the InSight Lander. InSight is the next member of what could be called a fleet of human vehicles destined for Mars. But rather than working on the question of Martian habitability or suitability for life, InSight will try to understand the deeper structure of Mars. InSight stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. InSight will be the first robotic explorer to visit Mars and study the red planet’s deep interior. The work InSight does should answer questions about the formation of Mars, and those...

NASA just tested the tiny nuclear reactor it could use for a Martian colony By Mark Austin — Posted on January 20, 2018 5:41 pm NASA and the Department of Energy have just tested a small fission nuclear reactor named KRUSTY (Kilowatt Reactor Using Stirling Technology) in the Nevada desert — a possible power source for future space exploration or even a manned mission to Mars. Reuters reports that initial testing of the system components in a vacuum environment, part of NASA’s Kilopower project, have led to plans for a full-power test in March. “The Kilopower test program will give...

01/18/2018 NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy successfully performed their initial tests on a miniature nuclear power system, and will try a more developed test in March. Reuters reports: Months-long testing began in November at the energy department’s Nevada National Security Site, with an eye toward providing energy for future astronaut and robotic missions in space and on the surface of Mars, the moon or other solar system destinations. You may remember that human astronauts walked on the moon only a handful of times back in the 1960s and 1970s, and never for longer than three consecutive days. Longer...

Buried glaciers have been spotted on Mars, offering new hints about how much water may be accessible on the Red Planet and where it is located, researchers said Thursday. Although ice has long been known to exist on Mars, a better understanding of its depth and location could be vital to future human explorers, said the report in the US journal Science. "Astronauts could essentially just go there with a bucket and a shovel and get all the water they need," said co-author Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson. A total of eight...

By modeling the reactions of water with the crusts of early Earth and Mars, they found that the Martian crust can hold more than twice the amount of water as Earth, effectively drying out the surface of Mars. The team’s findings suggest that almost 1,000 feet (300 m) of Martian surface water could have been absorbed into the planet’s crust and is now locked-up in microscopic mineral structures. “It would be very difficult to sustain life as we know it on Mars even if surface water existed on the planet for a couple million years,” the researchers said. .. “Our...

The modern search for the Star of Bethlehem began with Johannes Kepler (imperial astronomer for Rudolph II of Germany), who shortly before Christmas in 1603 observed a conjunction (pairing) of Jupiter with Saturn from his observatory in Prague. That this occurred in the constellation of Pisces he thought was important as well – perhaps recalling Rabbi Isaac Abarvanel's belief, noted in his 15th-century commentary on Daniel, that not only does a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn foretell important events, but in Pisces this holds a special significance for Israel; and such an event might even foretell the coming of the...

A study published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters posits that Mars formed in what today is the Asteroid Belt, roughly one and a half times as far from the Sun as its current position, before migrating to its present location. The assumption has generally been that Mars formed near Earth from the same building blocks, but that conjecture raises a big question: why are the two planets so different in composition? Mars contains different, lighter, silicates than Earth, more akin to those found in meteorites. In an attempt to explain why the elements and isotopes on Mars...

Summary - (Sep 21, 2004) NASA has chosen Northrop Grumman Space Technology to build its upcoming Prometheus Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) spacecraft, and awarded them a $400 million contract to cover costs up to 2008. JIMO will use a nuclear-powered ion engine to go into orbit around each of Jupiter's icy moons: Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa. Once in orbit, the spacecraft would be able to examine each of the moons in great detail with a suite of instruments to try and understand their composition, history, and if there could be conditions for life. Full Story - NASA's Jet Propulsion...

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - Northrop Grumman Space Technology has been selected to help NASA design a nuclear-powered spacecraft to orbit and explore three moons of Jupiter that may have oceans beneath their icy surfaces. The $400 million contract with the Redondo Beach, Calif.-based unit of Northrop Grumman covers work through mid-2008, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Monday. The Prometheus Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter spacecraft will be designed to explore Callisto, Ganymede and Europa sometime in the next decade, after launching in 2012 or later. Scientists want to know what the big moons are made of, their history and whether the...

ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico – A NASA project to Jupiter and several of its moons may depend on the U.S. Navy to provide the nuclear know-how in building a reactor for deep space exploration. The Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) program is a flagship mission under NASA’s Project Prometheus – a multi-pronged effort to develop near- and long-term nuclear electric power and propulsion technologies. JIMO would be powered by a compact nuclear reactor and propelled by a set of ion engines that expel electrically charged particles to generate thrust. NASA and the scientific community are considering adding a Europa lander to...

Project Prometheus, NASA’s multibillion-dollar nuclear power and propulsion initiative, has a new home inside the U.S. space agency. Begun as the Nuclear Systems Initiative in 2002, the program was given a new name in 2003, a bigger budget and its first mission: the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO). Now, with an ambitious new space exploration agenda handed down by the White House, NASA is making more changes to Project Prometheus. JIMO’s launch date is slipping and responsibility for developing the nuclear systems NASA says it needs to kick solar system exploration into high gear is being given to the newly...

PASADENA, California, (AFP) - Nuclear power may give NASA (news - web sites)'s long-range missions the speed and range that combustion engines cannot, but research is sputtering for lack of funds. NASA's head of the Prometheus program said the agency has three billion dollars for the next five years. "Beyond that, we know we need more money," Al Newhouse told AFP. "We are at a very early stage of this program. It has been in existence for slighty under a year." Nuclear propulsion first became a NASA budget line item in 2003, with 125 million dollars. NASA requested 279 million...

WASHINGTON -- NASA will fund 10 research proposals in the first series of contracts awarded under Project Prometheus, the agency’s effort to develop nuclear power and propulsion systems for spacecraft. The 10 proposals are intended to develop new methods and technologies for converting heat from radioisotope fuel into electrical power, NASA announced. Nuclear power has the potential to dramatically reduce interplanetary travel time while boosting the amount of power available for science instruments. "NASA is laying the foundation for several technology paths that could enable entirely new classes of missions, from networked science stations on Mars to small spacecraft capable...

NISKAYUNA -- The plan to send a manned space mission to Mars apparently doomed research on nuclear propulsion being carried out at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory. Advertisement KAPL employees were told late last week that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was ending the $65 million program to develop a nuclear-electric propulsion system as it reorders its priorities. The Prometheus project, as it is called, will undergo a "substantial reduction," KAPL officials said this week, in part so money can be spent on developing the Crew Exploration Vehicle that will be used to send humans back to the Moon and...

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has pulled the plug on a $65 million nuclear propulsion research program at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, leaving 150 employees in limbo. "NASA and Naval Reactors have mutually agreed to terminate their partnership to work on Prometheus," as the program was called, a Knolls spokeswoman said Friday afternoon. "NASA has been changing its priorities. I don't have many details on this," she added. Lockheed Martin Corp. operates Knolls under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy. Knolls employs 2,700 people, including 1,500 engineers, at its laboratory in Niskayuna and at another site in West...

WASHINGTON -- NASA sent Congress a revised spending plan for 2005 that would significantly cut the Project Prometheus nuclear power and propulsion program, cancel a host of international space station-based biological and physical research activities, and postpone some space science missions, including two advanced space telescopes and a Mars science lander slated to launch in 2009. The cuts were necessary, according to NASA, to pay the remaining $287 million tab for preparing the space shuttle for its return to flight, to make a substantial down payment on a potential Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission, to accommodate $400 million worth of...

NASA’s Prometheus program to employ nuclear reactors in space is a work in progress – viewed as a key building block of the space agency’s vision for space exploration.

This is an excerpt of a very lengthy explanation of what a nuclear SSTO (Single Stage To Orbit) fully reusable rocket would look like. The full article can be found at the link above. In this section I describe a huge nuclear powered rocket launcher. I will repeat and expand upon many of the points I made above, because I don't want to throw cryptic acronyms around. I want people to understand just how powerful we can make this rocket if we decide to do it. The most important difference between our new booster and the Saturn V is...

Nuclear power would allow missions to orbit - not merely fly by The US space agency (Nasa) is progressing with ambitious plans to explore the Solar System using nuclear power. Their hope, eventually, is to use electricity generated by nuclear power to propel a space probe and power its instruments on a voyage to the icy moons of Jupiter, satellites that just possibly might harbour life beneath their ice. Before then, nuclear technology could be proved with a less ambitious mission, perhaps a nuclear-powered probe to the Moon. As long ago as 1907, just two years after Einstein discovered his...