Nasa Moon Mission 2024

Nasa Manned Moon Mission 2024, First Black Hole Image, Asteroid Redirect Mission, Nasa Voyager Missions, Nasa Pioneer Missions, Moon is Shrinking

1.NASA Planning to Explore Moon's Icy South Pole by 2024 On the heels of President Trump's directive to put "American astronauts launched by American rockets from American soil" on the moon's surface by 2024, NASA has announced plans to explore the lunar terrain of the celestial body's south pole, which was confirmed to contain water ice last year. The announcement was made yesterday by NASA Science Mission Directorate deputy associate administrator Steven Clarke. 2.Event Horizon Telescope: An Earth-Size Black Hole Camera The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration is a multinational research project that images black holes. The collaboration released the first-ever high-resolution image of a black hole — the one at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 — on April 10, 2019. The image is significant as it is the first of its kind, but also because the size and shape of the black hole's "shadow" are consistent with predictions from Einstein's theory of general relativity. 3. A prototype of a Future Interstellar Probe Tested on a Balloon At the University of California, Santa Barbara, researchers with the UCSB Experimental Cosmology Group (ECG) are currently working on ways to achieve the dream of interstellar flight. Under the leadership of Professor Philip Lubin, the group has dedicated a considerable amount of effort towards the creation of an interstellar mission consisting of directed-energy light sail and a wafer-scale spacecraft (WSS) “wafercraft“. 4.NASA’s DART mission will try to deflect a near-Earth asteroid On May 1, the audience at the 6th International Academy of Astronautics Planetary Defense Conference heard more than a dozen presentations related to an upcoming test to nudge an asteroid and the potential follow-up mission that would view the results up close. The upcoming mission, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), will send a spacecraft to crash into an object type of the size of those asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth. According to NASA, almost one-sixth of the known near-Earth asteroids (NEA) are multiple-body or binary systems, and DART will travel to one such system to perform its mission. 5.The Interstellar Visitors, NASA's Voyager and Pioneer Probes Spacecraft that launched from Earth in the 1970s are still traveling on trajectories that led them out of our solar system and beyond. In a new study, scientists have predicted the future of these spacecraft, determining which stars the vehicles will pass, and how close they will get to these stars, within the next few million years. On March 2, 1972, NASA launched its Pioneer 10 spacecraft, which would become the first craft to travel through the asteroid belt. About a year later, Pioneer 11 took flight. And in 1977, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft launched, with Voyager 1 following behind a few weeks later. These spacecraft, in addition to NASA's New Horizons probe, are the only spacecraft ever launched that are capable of reaching interstellar space. 6. The Moon Is Shrinking and That's Causing Moonquakes The Moon is shrinking as its interior cools, getting more than about 150 feet (50 meters) skinnier over the last several hundred million years. Just as a grape wrinkles as it shrinks down to a raisin, the Moon gets wrinkles as it shrinks. Unlike the flexible skin on a grape, the Moon’s surface crust is brittle, so it breaks as the Moon shrinks, forming “thrust faults” where one section of the crust is pushed up over a neighboring part. The researchers discovered that around 25% of the moonquakes were likely generated by released energy from these faults, rather than by asteroid impacts or activity deep inside the moon, the scientists reported.