NASA Unveils Major Plans for 2020 Mars Rover

In what may be NASA's biggest mission of the decade, the agency's next rover will head to Mars in 2020 to collect samples that may one day travel back to Earth.

After five months of research and more than 6,000 emails among a team of 19 scientists, NASA released a 154-page report Wednesday outlining its plans for the 2020 rover. The robot will search for signs of past life on Mars and obtain material that will be used in planning future human exploration missions.

"[NASA] should only be seeking to answer the biggest questions, and the biggest question of humankind is 'are we alone?'" said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, director of the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, in a press conference.

For the most part, NASA will work off the framework of Curiosity, a highly successful rover that determined Mars was once suitable for life. Like Curiosity, the 2020 rover will be about the size of a car — 10 feet long (not including the arm), 9 feet wide and 7 feet tall.

Unlike Curiosity rover, however, the 2020 rover will be able to identify a rock's mineralogy and chemistry on a finer scale using high-resolution imaging instruments. Instead of planning shot-in-the-dark drills on rocks that may seem interesting on the surface, scientists will be able to determine the best rocks for experimentation based on their chemical makeup.

"The context is everything. Making sure you have the right sample is everything," said John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science.

The 2020 rover will extract samples from the rocks' cores, transfer them into sealed sample tubes and store them in a cache that NASA will retrieve at a later date. That storage unit will have room for 31 samples. (See image below.)

At this stage, the agency's most important objective is constructing a system that can obtain the best sample without contamination.

"Putting the samples into a returnable cache is a small step forward, but it doesn't address the sample return," Grunsfeld said.

The team doesn't yet know how they will transport the samples back to Earth, which would open doors for more in-depth experiments. The most obvious mode of transport is via humans. While NASA has studied manned trips to Mars for years, the agency doesn't have an official roadmap for that type of mission. That said, don't count out human retrieval.

"I wouldn't rule out that human explorers will go and retrieve the cache 20 years from now," said Grunsfeld, a former astronaut. "I would like to see it be some kind of race because I would like to see scientists on Mars."

Planning for NASA's 2020 Mars rover envisions a basic structure that capitalizes on re-using the design and engineering work done for the NASA rover Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, but with new science instruments selected through competition for accomplishing different science objectives with the 2020 mission.

Images courtesy of NASA

NASA Marks Fourth of July With Double Rocket Launch

BY TARIQ MALIK, MANAGING EDITOR for Space.com   14 hours ago

NASA launched two small rockets from Virgina's Eastern Shore on Thursday in an early Fourth of July fireworks display aimed to probe the electrical eddies of the Earth's upper atmosphere.

The two small rockets blasted off within 15 seconds of each other from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va. The mission: to probe the global electrical current in the winds of Earth's ionosphere with instruments mounted to a Black Brant V booster and a Terrier-Improved Orion sounding rocket.

"We have liftoff of the Black Brant V & Terrier-Improved Orion, for an Independence Day fireworks show," NASA Wallops officials wrote in a Twitter post marking launch success.

The Black Brant V rocket launched at 10:31:25 a.m. EDT (1431:25 GMT), with the Terrior-Improved Orion rocket following at 10:31:40 a.m. EDT (1431:40 GMT).

NASA's Fourth of July rocket launches were part of the Daytime Dynamo mission, a joint project with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to study how electrical currents move in Earth's ionosphere between 30 and 600 miles (48 and 965 kilometers) above the surface. People on Earth rely on this current in the ionosphere, called the dynamo, every day.

Radio signals are bounced off the ionosphere during broadcasts and satellite communication and navigation signals must travel through the ionosphere in order to reach the Earth. Then the ionosphere is disturbed, these signals can be distorted, NASA officials said.

The larger Black Brant V rocket carried instruments to measure the neutral and charged particles in Earth's ionosphere, while the smaller Terrier-Improved Orion released a lithium gas compound designed to allow scientists on the ground track the electrical current wind patterns. The two rockets were expected to reach an altitude of about 100 miles (160 kilometers), but not fly high and fast enough to orbit the Earth.

The rocket launch came after days of delays due to unfavorable weather at the Wallops launch range. Cloudy weather and high winds prevented several launch attempts, which began June 24. It was only by coincidence that the rocket launch coincided with the annual U.S. Independence Day holiday.

"Happy Fourth of July everyone," a launch controller told the mission team shortly after liftoff. "We beat everyone by putting some rockets into the air."

Image courtesy of Jared Tarbell

This article originally published at Space.com here

Why NASA Redesigned Its Website

The new NASA.gov has a light blue color palette, one you may not immediately associate with deep space. The agency rolled out a website redesign over the weekend, which included tossing out the black background that shadowed NASA's website for years.

"The common complaint about our design was that there was too much going on," NASA Internet Services Manager Brian Dunbar told Mashable via email. "The lighter color palette seemed to open things up without us having to remove too much content. So far the reaction has been mixed, as is often the case."

Heavy text and a column of navigational buttons made NASA.gov — which had not been updated since 2007 — feel cluttered. Dunbar fixed this by grouping all those icons into one drop-down menu.

Before

NASA.gov homepage on May 13, 2012.

After

NASA.gov homepage on July 1, 2013.

NASA also asked the public what they wanted in a redesign, and one of the top responses was a dedicated area on the homepage for live events.

"We were able to increase the emphasis on live events on the homepage. We did an Ideascale implementation late last year to solicit input on changes to the site, and people told us more than anything they wanted to know more about what's happening 'right now' at NASA," Dunbar said. "We had it on the site, but apparently it wasn't that visible to a lot of users."

While the aesthetic switches may be the most obvious change to NASA's website, the design team completely overhauled NASA.gov's infrastructure. According to Dunbar, NASA switched from an old proprietary CMS to a customized Drupal implementation and replaced NASA's commercial on-demand video service with a YouTube-based approach.

The most impressive figure of the redesign, however, is hidden from the eye. The redesign only took 13 weeks to complete — a highly efficient timeline for a government agency.

"We started that whole effort in earnest in late March," Dunbar said. "We had been experimenting with the graphical changes for a few weeks before that."

The short timeline had a catch-22, though. The team wasn't able to optimize the website for discovering and sharing content on social media, which took a backseat in this initial rollout.

"Those considerations will be part of the upcoming redesign," Dunbar said. "We want to be able to share our content across platforms, but we've also got user data that clearly shows we have a web audience that doesn't really use social media and is distinct from our social media audience."

As with most trickle-down redesigns, NASA.gov — which logs about 12 million visits per month — still has a long way to go. Expect to see a few 404 errors while browsing around as the team makes piecemeal changes through September.

Dunbar noted that this first transition is only a small part the massive changes to NASA.gov coming early next year. "When we're done, we expect to have a vastly improved site, both for users and editors," he said.

NASA.gov in 1997

NASA.gov homepage on Jan. 5, 1997.

In 1999

NASA.gov homepage on April 17, 1999.

In 2007

NASA.gov homepage on Jan. 3, 2007.

Mashable composite; images courtesy of NASA/JPL

NASA to Launch Planet-Hunting Probe in 2017

NASA has picked two new low-cost missions for launch in 2017: a planet-hunting satellite and an International Space Station experiment designed to probe the nature of exotic, super-dense neutron stars.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) are the latest missions chosen under NASA's Astrophysics Explorer Program, which caps costs at $200 million for satellites and $55 million for space station experiments, officials announced Friday (April 5).

The TESS spacecraft will use an array of wide-field cameras to scan nearby stars forexoplanets, with a focus on Earth-size worlds in their stars' habitable zones — that just-right range of distances where liquid water could exist.

"TESS will carry out the first space-borne all-sky transit survey, covering 400 times as much sky as any previous mission," principal investigator George Ricker of MIT said in a statement. "It will identify thousands of new planets in the solar neighborhood, with a special focus on planets comparable in size to the Earth."

As its full name suggests, TESS will detect alien planets by noting when they transit, or cross of the face of, their host stars from the instrument's perspective. NASA's Kepler spacecraft has used this strategy with great success, flagging more than 2,700 potential exoplanets since its March 2009 launch.

Unlike the free-flying TESS, NICER will be mounted to the space station. From this perch, it will measure the variability of cosmic X-ray sources, potentially allowing scientists to better understand neutron stars, which are the ultradense collapsed remnants of exploded stars.

NICER's principal investigator is Keith Gendreau of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Both missions should advance scientists' understanding of the universe, NASA officials said.

"With these missions we will learn about the most extreme states of matter by studying neutron stars, and we will identify many nearby star systems with rocky planets in the habitable zone for further study by telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope," John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science in Washington, said in a statement.

NASA's Explorer program aims to provide frequent, low-cost access to space for investigations relevant to the agency's astrophysics and heliophysics programs. More than 90 missions have launched under the Explorer program since the first one, Explorer 1, blasted off in 1958 and discovered Earth's radiation belts.