Russia's NORD device may travel to Mars 2020

NORD will help Mars 2020 rover figure out how humans can best use the red planet's resources and which parts of Mars are the most suitable habitats for humans in terms of minerals.

A device created by Russian scientists is bidding for a chance to travel to Mars aboard NASA's Mars 2020 rover.

In about five months or so, it will be clear whether NORD, the brainchild of the Moscow-based Space Research Institute, will participate in the mission.

NASA launched a competition for Mars 2020 research proposals in September. By now, the application submission is already over.

Mars 2020 is due to succeed its elder brother, Curiosity MSL, which has been exploring the red planet since August 2012. The new rover will be based heavily on the design of Curiosity.

The landing system and the chassis will be recreated without any additional engineering. This, NASA says, will reduce technical risks and make the project cheaper.

The main aim of the Curiosity mission was to find traces of past life-supporting environments on Mars. The goal has been achieved. Mars 2020 will look for traces of past life in those once-habitable environments.

Curiosity is equipped with DAN, a Russian-made neutron detector. DAN, or Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons, measures the energy of neutrons leaking from the ground.

It can detect water content as low as one-tenth of one percent as deep as 20 inches.

If water is present, liquid or frozen, hydrogen atoms slow the neutrons down.

These slower neutrons are measured by DAN.

"NORD has no generator. We replaced it with a gamma spectrometer designed to measure natural radiation on Mar's surface and analyze the chemical composition of Martian soil in areas explored by the rover," Igor Mitrofanov, an IKI laboratory chief, told reporters.

NORD will help Mars 2020 rover figure out how humans can best use the red planet's resources and which parts of Mars are the most suitable habitats for humans in terms of minerals.

The rock and soil samples collected by Nord will be stored inside Mars 2020 for several years until a new spacecraft arrives and takes them over.

It will then have to blast off to Earth - a complicated task, much more difficult than even blasting off from Moon, as it requires a rocket powerful enough to escape Mars' gravity.

Golden Spike: Private Moon Travel Startup Launches Crowdfunding Campaign

An artist's illustration of a Golden Spike Company moon lander on the lunar surface.

CREDIT: Golden Spike Company

A private startup aiming to launch manned lunar expeditions has started a crowdfunding campaign to get the public involved.

The company, Golden Spike, aims to get its first mission off the ground by 2020.

To help achieve that goal, the startup's leaders are reaching out via the crowdfunding site Indiegogo in hopes of raising $240,000 ­— "a dollar for every mile on the way to the moon," said Golden Spike's president and CEO, planetary scientist Alan Stern.

"Ever since we launched the company, we've been getting emails and tweets and Facebook posts about, 'How can I help?'" Stern reported.

"It just seems like there's a hunger out there to participate in grand exploration."

Contributors during the 10-week campaign can secure rewards ranging from printed "thank you's" and subscriptions to Golden Spike's mailing list (for a $25 donation), to VIP trips to see the company's first moon launch (for a contribution of $50,000).

Other options include nominating names for the lunar test vehicles, and having your name flown to the moon during Golden Spike's first lunar landing mission.

Stern said the money raised would be used to help Golden Spike get off the ground. But moreover, he added, it's a way for people excited about the idea of private moon travel to get involved, and a way to raise awareness about the venture.

"We hope that this campaign and all the projects it enables will generate a degree of participation in space exploration that has never existed before," Gerry Griffin, former Apollo flight director and the chairman of Golden Spike's board of directors, said in a statement.



Golden Spike plans to use existing or already-in-development rockets and space capsules to transport crews to and from the moon.

The firm plans to build its own lunar lander, though, and has hired veteran aerospace firm Northrop Grumman, which built NASA's Apollo moon landers, to work on the design.

The missions will sell for around $1.5 billion and will be aimed at corporations, countries without their own space programs and even some wealthy individuals.

"I think people are really excited about the idea of sending human expeditions to the moon from countries all over the world," Stern said.

"It could be all different kinds of people, for all different kinds of purposes. It's a very different, forward concept."

To help keep costs down, Golden Spike plans to sell branding opportunities and advertising time during live broadcasts of missions.

"We plan to make these lunar expeditions television extravaganzas, like the Olympics," Stern said. "We'll sell the advertising time like they do with the Super Bowl."

To learn more about the company, visit Golden Spike's Indiegogo campaign page.

Triple-engine trick, fuels return to supersonic travel

Eight years after shelving Concorde, European firm EADS now thinks supersonic passenger aircraft could make a comeback - but not until 2050.

The Airbus owner believes that a novel combination of propulsion technologies might make supersonic travel both cost-effective and environmentally acceptable. The firm estimates speeds of Mach 4 are attainable - that's nearly 5000 kilometres per hour.

"Concorde was 1950s and 1960s technology. We think the three different propulsion types we're considering - one of which we have perfected for the Ariane rocket - could make this achievable by 2050," says EADS spokesman Gregor von Kursell.

(Image: EADS)

The firm revealed its hypersonic plane design at this week's Paris Air Show. Called the Zero Emission Hypersonic Transport (ZEHST) it would take off conventionally - using two-rear-mounted jet engines burning an algae-derived biofuel - but at an altitude of 6 kilometres would then turn to an Ariane-style liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen-fuelled rocket engine.

The rocket engine lofts the delta-wing plane - which looks like a scaled-up Lockheed SR71 Blackbird spyplane - to the stratosphere at an altitude of 32 kilometres. Once in that ultra thin air, a "ramjet" slung beneath each of the delta wings handles the flight's Mach 4 cruise phase.

Unlike a regular jet engine, a ramjet has no compressor turbine and uses its sheer speed (they work up to Mach 5) to scoop enough high-pressure air in for efficient combustion. What's critical is that air does not enter a ramjet too fast: front-mounted "shock-cones" slow the airflow to subsonic levels.

If this three-way (jet/rocket/ramjet) propulsion choreography can be made to work, EADS expects Tokyo to London flights to take just 2 hours and 20 minutes.

How Far Can a Human Travel in the Universe

HOW far could an astronaut travel in a lifetime? Billions of light years, it turns out. But they ought to be careful when to apply the brakes on the return trip.

Ever since cosmologists discovered that the universe's expansion is accelerating, many have wondered just how much this will constrain what we could see with telescopes in the future. Distant regions of the universe will eventually be expanding so fast that light from any objects there can never reach us.

Likewise, dark energy - the mysterious force behind the acceleration - places a limit on human exploration of the universe, says Juliana Kwan at the University of Sydney in New South Wales, Australia, who has now refined this limit on our travels. Even with rockets that could take us to within a whisker of light speed, expansion would still eventually leave us behind.

The furthest that light emitted from our sun today could reach, as it races in vain to outdo the accelerating expansion, currently lies around 15 billion light years away. According to previous calculations by Jeremy Heyl of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, a super-advanced rocket could get most of this way in a human lifetime.

Accelerating at around 9 metres per second per second - which would feel roughly like a comfortable 1 g - a craft could get 99 per cent of the way to the expansion "horizon". Despite the vast distance, this would take only about 50 years in the astronaut's reference frame, because time would pass slower than on Earth due to relativity (Physical Review D, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.72.107302).