NASA's Space Launch System rejoice: Powering Forward

NASA is powering ahead toward a brand new destinations in the solar system. This week marks one year of development since the formation of the Space Launch System (SLS), the nation's next pace in human examination efforts.

On Sept. 14, 2011, NASA announced a new ability for America's space program: a heavy-lift rocket planned to take the Orion spacecraft and send astronauts beyond into space than still before.

And now, one year afterward, NASA has made swift development improving on existing hardware, testing and developing new mechanism, and paving the method for a new launch vehicle. The SLS will build human examination of deep space an actuality and make new possibilities for systematic detection.

The SLS is a national ability and will be the biggest rocket ever built, providing the authority we want to really explore beyond our present limits," said Todd May, Space Launch System program manager. "Not only will it take us beyond small Earth orbit, but it will get us there faster."

"Our aim was to become a leaner and more proficient program, based on lessons learned from earlier successes by the agency," May said. "But even more significant is to build a secure vehicle for our astronauts and one that can keep up exploration for years to come.

When Orion flies for the first time, SLS also will trial the spacecraft payload integration adapter ring. Engineers and machinists at Marshall are building this part of the rocket, which will mate the spacecraft to the Delta IV stand-in for SLS during Orion's trial flight in 2014 and the rest of the Space Launch System in 2017.

The adapter ring was future for both applications as a model of NASA's obligation to affordable solutions for the human examination of space.

read more

NASA's traveler 'dancing on edge' of outer space

In a lecture marking the approaching 35th centenary of the Voyager project, Ed Stone said it could be "days, months or years" before it lastly breaks into interstellar space.Earlier this year a surge in a key pointer fueled hopes that the craft was nearing the so-called heliopause, which inscription the limit between our solar system and external space.

Scientists were intrigued in May by an enlarge in cosmic waves hitting the spacecraft, which for decades has snapped images of the Earth and other planets in the solar system as it has made its long trip into external space.But measurements since then have fluctuated up and down, signifying that, while the ability is near to the edge, it may tranquil not get there for some time.

"Crossing into interstellar space -- that will be a significant instant when the first object launched from Earth finally leaves the fizz," he said. Before May's rush in space rays researchers had said they projected Voyager 1 would leave the solar system and enter interstellar space -- between the end of the Sun's pressure and the next star system -- within two years.

NASA has described Voyager 1 -- today 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) away from the Sun -- and its cohort Voyager 2 as "the two most far-away active representatives of civilization and its wish to discover."

The scientists scheming Voyager 1 -- whose 1970s technology means it has only a 100,000th of the computer recollection of an 8 gigabyte iPod Nano -- determined to turn off its cameras after it approved Neptune in 1989, to protect control.

read more