Date | May 16, 2017:
On May 16, Mars rover Opportunity has reached its destination of a current two-year extended mission which is an ancient fluid-carved valley incised over the slope present inside of a vast crater rim, NASA said. Forty-five years have passed since humans had last stepped on an extraterrestrial body. The moon is back not only to explore space, but also to create a permanent, independent space-faring society.
“The science team is really jazzed at starting to see this area up close and looking for clues to help us distinguish among multiple hypotheses about how the valley formed,” Opportunity Project Scientist Matt Golombek of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena stated.
Planning expeditions to Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor are not just the effort of NASA, though the U.S. space agency has planned for a moon-orbiting space station which would be serving as a staging ground for the mission to Mars in the 2030s.
The United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which is planning a lunar fueling station for spacecraft which would be capable of supporting 1,000 people living in space in a time period of almost 30 years.
The rover approached the upper end of “Perseverance Valley” and the images from its cameras showed parts of the area that are in greater resolution than what could be observed through those images that were taken from the orbit of Mars in early May.
Billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Robert Bigelow all have companies which aim to deliver people or goods to the moon.
We along with 27 other students throughout the world recently participated in the 2017 Caltech Space Challenge which proposed designs of what a lunar launch and supply station used for deep space missions probably look like, and also it’s working.
All the space missions launched from Earth, although Earth’s gravitational pull is very strong. In order to get into the orbit, a rocket needs to traveling 11 kilometers per second which are nearly 25,000 miles per hour.
Every rocket that leaves the Earth is supposed to carry all the fuel it might ever use to reach its destination and if needed to return back again.
Every rocket that leaves the Earth is supposed to carry all the fuel it might ever use to reach its destination and if needed to return back again.
Every rocket that leaves the Earth is supposed to carry all the fuel it might ever use to reach its destination and if needed to return back again.
Rovers from Google’s Lunar X Prize competition and NASA’s Lunar Resource Prospector are set to launch in 2020.
Depending on the locations having best ice reserves, it might need to build several robotic moon bases smaller in size. Each one of which would mine ice and transfer it to passing spacecraft.
The plan of rovers require a few small robotic shuttles which would meet up with nearby deep-space mission vehicles in lunar orbit.
One rover, named Prospector is for exploring the moon and search for ice-bearing locations. The second rover, the Constructor, follows behind, building a launch pad and packing down roadways for easy movements of the third rover type, the Miners, that actually collect the ice to deliver it to the nearby storage tanks and an electrolysis processing plant.
The shuttles are expected to burn moon-made fuel and are composed of advanced guidance and navigation systems for traveling between lunar bases and the targetted spacecraft. If enough fuel is produced, and the shuttle delivery system is reliable, our plan is building a gas station in space. The shuttles would be delivering ice to the orbiting fuel depot directly.There it would be processed into fuel and the rockets heading to Mars could dock to top up.
The depot would be having large solar arrays which would power an electrolysis module which is used for melting the ice and turning the water into fuel and large fuel tanks for storing what is being made.
NASA is working on most of the technology that is needed for a depot like this, which includes docking and fuel transfer as well. A working depot would be ready in the early 2030s, time for the first human missions to Mars.
The depot should be located in a stable orbit which is relatively near both the Earth and the moon in order to be useful and efficient.
The Earth-moon Lagrangian Point 1 is regarded as a point in space having about 85 percent of the way from Earth to the moon. Here the force of Earth’s gravity exactly equals the force of the moon’s gravity pulling in the other direction. This is known as the perfect pit stop for a spacecraft while it is on its way to Mars or the outer planets.
The spacecraft will launch from Earth with an empty propellant tank into Low Earth Orbit.The spacecraft and its cargo could then be towed from Low Earth Orbit to the depot at L1 using a solar electric propulsion tug.This would allow us to triple the payload delivery to Mars.
In order to save billions of dollars and years of time, delivering more cargo from Earth to Mars with fewer rocket launches is the best idea.
Building a gas station between Earth and the moon might also help to reduce costs for missions.
“The science team is really jazzed at starting to see this area up close and looking for clues to help us distinguish among multiple hypotheses about how the valley formed,” said Opportunity Project Scientist Matt Golombek of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena.
In order to Help us in escaping Earth’s gravity as well as the dependence on its resources, a lunar gas station would probably be the first step toward the giant leap in order to make humanity an interplanetary civilization.
(Source: https://tecake.in/)