Curiosity Did This

Curiosity did this.

NASA announces $1.1 billion in support for a trio of spaceships

with the aim of having American astronauts flying once more on American spacecraft within five years. ..... The next phase of NASA's commercial spaceflight effort — known as Commercial Crew Integrated Capability, or CCiCap ..... NASA wants to have at least one commercial space taxi carrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station by 2017. ..... the space agency has had to depend on the Russians to fly American astronauts at a cost of roughly $60 milllion a seat ..... Sierra Nevada is testing its Dream Chaser space plane, which looks like a miniaturized version of the space shuttle. .... NASA is spending billions of dollars to develop the Orion multipurpose crew vehicle for deep-space exploration, as well as a heavy-lift rocket known as the Space Launch System. Those spacecraft are being designed to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, and to Mars and its moons in the 2030s

The public-private partnership in action is of great interest to me.

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Curiosity

Boldly Opening a New Window Onto Mars

one-ton, S.U.V.-sized Curiosity rover .... we’re looking for habitable environments ..... Imagine buying a $2.5 billion car with a 10,000-page owner’s manual; one that you don’t just have to read but you must also write, because it’s the first and only one that will ever be made. .... We may get glimpses of time that go back so far that they are equivalent to the time on Earth when microbial life was first evolving. The earliest history of Mars is better preserved than it is on Earth ..... The essential ingredients for a habitable environment are water, energy and carbon. ..... it is a laboratory complete with funnels, test tubes, magnifiers, mass spectrometers, gas analyzers, ovens, and a sampling system with a drill strong enough to chisel away concrete. Not to mention its 17 cameras, including several with color, video capture and HD resolution. Second, it is a plutonium-powered rover, allowing it to take its laboratory on the road for years on end. ..... the most beautifully resolved, highly detailed pictures ever taken on the surface of another planet. ..... travelling almost nine months and 566 million kilometers

Mars rover Curiosity will see red planet like never before

carrying 10 science instruments -- and a wealth of high-tech camera gear

Will NASA's $2.5 billion Mars rover crash on Sunday?

NASA’s mega-mission to Mars and delivery of the Curiosity rover could be a smashing success … or just smashing .... Mars Society, which is dedicated to the human exploration and settlement of Mars. .... a never-tried-before landing system — a Sky Crane on Mars — capable of delivering 1,980 pounds (900 kilograms) to the Martian surface, which would be enough to accomplish the Mars sample return and other extraordinary missions. ..... "I feel like I’m kind of a minor stockholder in a much larger enterprise," said Kim Stanley Robinson, an American science fiction writer acclaimed for his award-winning trilogy "Red Mars," "Green Mars" and "Blue Mars."

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Hit And Run

Moon Formed In Interplanetary Hit-and-Run Incident, Say Astronomers

It turns out that our interplanetary companion has a similar composition to Earth, including an iron core. The consensus is that this rules out the possibility that the Moon formed elsewhere and was later captured by the Earth's gravity. Instead, it must have formed from the debris created by giant collision between the Earth and a Mars-sized body..... a model consisting of about 500,000 particles in which the Moon ends up being made of some 10,000 particles ..... the conditions on Earth at the time of the impact, about 4.5 billion years ago .... the more energetic impact would have heated the Earth's mantle to temperatures of about 10,000 Kelvin and heated the debris that formed the Moon to higher temperatures too

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