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Picture of the Day

The official portrait of the crew of Artemis II, the first humans set to visit the Moon in over 50 years.

In a historic move, NASA has announced its first crew of astronauts set to embark on a lunar mission in over fifty years.

Since the conclusion of the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, human space exploration has been limited to distances of only a few hundred miles from Earth. However, with the upcoming Artemis mission, NASA is poised to once again land humans on the moon, with hopes of eventually paving the way to a Mars mission.

The scientific community is eagerly anticipating the discoveries that may arise from this mission, as the moon’s surface is expected to offer valuable insights into the formation of our solar system.

They are Reid Wiseman, the mission’s commander; Victor Glover, the pilot; Christina Koch, mission specialist; and, Jeremy Hansen, also a mission specialist. The first three are NASA astronauts, while Mr. Hansen is a member of the Canadian Space Agency.

Picture of the Day

NASA’s innovative AX-3 spacesuit

NASA’s innovative AX-3 spacesuit, 1970s

The AX-3 was designed at NASA Ames Research Center in the middle 1970s. A prototype, it was created to prove that a highly mobile suit requiring little effort to operate could use an internal operating pressure of 8 pounds per square inch.

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Picture of the Day

ham chimpanzee

Ham, the chimp who was the first hominid in space, trained by NASA to operate a capsule in space. His trainer described the moment he was recovered from his capsule following the project – “I have never seen such terror on a chimp’s face”

Ham was born in 1957 in a rainforest in the Central African nation of Cameroon, then a French territory. He was captured and taken to an astronaut school for chimps at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

The astrochimps were trained to pull levers, with a banana pellet as a reward and an electric shock to the feet for failure. The chosen chimp would test life support systems and demonstrate that equipment could be operated during spaceflight. Ham showed great aptitude, and was selected the day before the flight.

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Picture of the Day

noaa 19 satellite

In 2003, a technician forgot to log that he had removed 24 bolts during the maintenance of the NOAA-19 satellite, causing the satellite to fall over and costing $135,000,000 in damages

On 6 September 2003 at 15:28 UTC, the satellite was badly damaged while being worked on at the Lockheed Martin Space Systems factory in Sunnyvale, California. The spacecraft fell to the floor as it reached 13° of tilt while being rotated. The satellite fell as a team was turning it from a vertical to a horizontal position.

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Picture of the Day

nasa perseverance

NASA’s Perseverance rover descends to touch down on Mars in a still image from a video camera aboard the descent stage taken February 18, 2021.

Perseverance will investigate the surface geological processes and history of the Red Planet. This will include an assessment of its past habitability, the possibility of past life on Mars, and the potential for preservation of biosignatures within accessible geological materials. It will cache sample containers along its route for retrieval by a potential future Mars sample-return mission. Perseverance is accompanied by the Ingenuity helicopter drone, which will attempt the first powered flight on any planet beyond Earth as a technological demonstration.

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Picture of the Day

james webb space telescope

NASA is about to launch a telescope that can witness the creation of stars and planets 13.8 billion years ago

The James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled for launch in 2021. The Webb telescope will be the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It will study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own Solar System.

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Picture of the Day

bruce mccandless spacewalk

In 1984, Bruce McCandless hovered 320 ft away, untethered from the Challenger and made it back safely using a nitrogen jetpack called Manned Maneuver Unit

Testing the MMU for the first time in space required a lot of focus and bravery, but McCandless and Stewart had faith in the hardware. Weighing 300 lbs. /136 kg, the MMU was powered by 24 small compressed nitrogen thrusters with two motion-controlled handles on either armrest for simple maneuvering. It was developed by engineer Charles Whitsett, and McCandless tested the MMU underwater and inside the Skylab space station prior to his famous spacewalk.