NASA Plans to test making rocket fuel ingredient on Mars

NASA plans to make oxygen, a key ingredient of rocket fuel, on Mars early next decade.

Space agency officials Thursday unveiled seven instruments they plan to put on a Martian rover that would launch in 2020, including two devices aimed at bigger Mars missions in the future.

The $1.9 billion rover will include an experiment that will turn carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into oxygen.

It could then be used to make rocket fuel and for future astronauts to breathe, said NASA associate administrator for exploration Bill Gerstenmaier.

Taking fuel to Mars for return flights is heavy and expensive.

The device, named MOXIE, works like an engine but in reverse, said Michael Hecht, the scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is running the test project.

It will make about three-quarters of an ounce of oxygen an hour.

If it works, then a larger scale device, 100 times bigger than MOXIE, would be launched two years before astronauts go, currently slated for some time in the 2030s. NASA first plans to send astronauts to an asteroid.

The bigger device would start making enough oxygen for the return trip before astronauts ever launch to Mars, Hecht said.

The other part of rocket fuel, the propellant, can be made from light hydrogen that is brought from Earth or other chemicals mined from Martian dirt or atmosphere.

John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science, said the new rover, a clone of the chassis of the current Curiosity machine, "will lead to getting humans to Mars in the future."

Mars on average is about 140 million miles from Earth and opportunities to send spaceships to there come only every 26 months. The trip to Mars takes about 9 months, but can be as short as half a year.

The rover is scheduled to land on Mars in 2021.

NASA also plans to collect interesting rocks, put them in sealed vials for future flights to pick them up and return them to Earth for detailed study.

This would likely be another robotic mission or it could just wait for astronauts. NASA hasn't yet figured out how the rover will store the rocks.

ISRO: India unveils its astronaut crew capsule, plans test launch

India, hoping to become the fourth nation to send humans into space, has unveiled a key element in the effort, an indigenously manufactured astronaut capsule.

The country's space agency has displayed a prototype of its first crew capsule module designed to carry two people into low Earth orbit.

The Indian Space Research Organization announced plans to send the test prototype into orbit with the first experimental flight of the country's latest rocket, the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III.

Capable of putting 10 tons of payload into a low-Earth orbit, it could launch in May or June from Sriharikota spaceport on the coast of the Bay of Bengal, the agency said.

Currently only the United States, Russia and China have accomplished the feat of putting humans into Earth orbit.

The Indian space agency said it has decided on the test flight even though the government has yet to grant approval and funding for a human space-flight program.

"We thought it better to [go ahead to] gain some confidence in the design of our crew module," said Sundaram Ramakrishnan, director of ISRO's Vikram Sarabhai Space Center in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.

The capsule, manufactured by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, is intended to carry two or three astronauts into a low-Earth orbit on a weeklong mission.

ESA Planning new Instruments to measure Volcanic Ash

Iceland's ongoing eruption is likely to press the case for new satellite instruments to monitor volcanic ash thrown into the atmosphere.

Read the ESA Article on their website

Remote sensing expert Dr Fred Prata told a major Earth sciences meeting in Vienna that current monitoring from space was good but could be improved.

ESA's ENVISAT and MetopSat are a primary tool to monitor the Earth. Visit the ESA Metop satellite site click here.

"Of the present suite of satellite instruments, none were developed for the volcanic ash problem," he said.

"Therefore, they are sub-optimal for detecting and determining quantities of volcanic ash."

Dr Prata has been speaking here at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) conference in the Austrian capital.

He is a senior scientist with the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, and leads a group called Savaa - Support to Aviation for Volcanic Ash Avoidance.

This team is supported by the European Space Agency and aims to improve the way that satellite data is collected for use in the dispersion models that help airlines and the authorities decide whether it is safe to fly planes.

Dr Prata said several space instruments currently in operation had been critical to the present monitoring efforts.

He cited the Seviri instrument on Europe's Meteosat 8 and 9 spacecraft which sit in a geostationary orbit, returning images of the Earth every 15 minutes. Seviri has helped distinguish the volcanic ash from other clouds, determining its extent - mass loading - in two dimensions.

The lidar on the Calipso spacecraft had brought a unique and extremely valuable capability, he explained.

"Because it's an active instrument that fires pulses of light down to the Earth and gets the backscatter radiation, it gives us height-resolved information.

You can see the top of the cloud and its bottom, so that means you get the thickness.

"Once we get the thickness, combining that with our two-dimensional picture of the mass loading we can get the concentration; and that's the number that the airlines would like to have."

The airlines at this time are working to a safe limit of two micrograms of ash per cubic metre of air.

The third instrument noted by Dr Prata is Iasi, an infrared sounding interferometer on Europe's polar orbiting Metop platform which he said was sending back exceptional data on the presence ash, sulphur dioxide (SO2), ice, and even the conversion of SO2 to sulphuric acid.

Click Here to see ENVISAT Instruments in a Larger Image

The downside of Metop and Calipso is that they circle the Earth and do not have permanent vision over Iceland and the rest of Europe.

A version of Iasi is due to go on the next generation of Meteosats but the first of these platforms will not fly until 2018.

Dr Prata said there was a case now for fast-tracking the launch of this instrument.

"Everyone's looking at what the best solutions might be. Nobody wants to spend lots of money so fast-tracking an existing programme would be a good solution," he said.

"Another possibility is to have a scanning lidar in space. Calipso looks straight down. If it's scanning, you'd get a lot more information."

EGU has also heard some of the latest science being done by volcanologists and seismologists at Eyjafjoll.

Dr Thor Thordarson from Edinburgh University, UK, is working with a team that is now collecting large numbers of samples of the ash fall, both in Iceland and beyond.

The group is trying to explain why precisely the volcano ejected so much fine material in the sizes that could be transported great distances.

This far-flung dust ranged in size from about 30-40 microns (millionths of a metre) down to even the sub-micron scale.

Dr Thordarson said it was clear that melt waters getting into the vent from the glacier on the volcano had contributed to the explosive fragmentation of rock, but what exactly happened remained a mystery.

"Why this event disintegrated the magma so intensely, we don't know; and it's something we desperately want to find out," he said.

"If we get enough observations from a good number of sites then we can reconstruct the total grain-size distribution that was coming out of the vent. And when you have that information, then you can start looking at models to explain the fragmentation processes involved and why they were so intense."

Indian Space Agency: ISRO planning 36 launches

ISRO is planning 36 launches during the 11th plan with more than six a year, a top space official said here today.

The expanding horizon of the Indian Space Programme, with more number of launches annually and missions like reusable launch vehicle on the anvil, calls for increased productivity with consistent quality and at a competitive cost, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre Director P S Veeraraghavan said.

Partnership with aerospace Indian industries was likely to grow multifold with the expanding activities of Indian Space Programme and ISRO's foray into International Space market, Veeraghavan told a 'National Aerospace Manufacturing Seminar'.

Presently more than 500 small and medium industries partnered with ISRO, he said.

Stating that the aerospace industry faces tough challenges, he said it should adapt to advanced manufacturing methodologies to suit the design function flawlessly.