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Today’s CSExtra offers the latest reporting and commentary on space related activities from across the globe. The NASA/Lockheed Martin Orion Exploration Flight Test-1 capsule is delivered to port in San Diego on Monday by the U.S. Navy, following Friday’s successful two orbit test flight. With the success of Friday’s Orion test flight, NASA faces a new challenge: can it sustain the public interest and enthusiasm for human deep space exploration? Op-ed suggests the debate over whether humans or robots are best suited for deep space exploration will continue. Editorial urges careful NASA cost cutting. Scientists say NASA’s Curiosity rover landed in a former Martian lake, perhaps one of many lakes that persisted long enough for microbial life to emerge. Story of Mars may explain wider climate change dynamics.
Human Deep Space Exploration
Orion spaceship comes back to shore after making a splash
NBCNews.com (12/9): The U.S.S. Anchorage made port at the U.S. Navy base in San Diego, Calif., on Monday with the NASA/Lockheed Martin Orion capsule that orbited the Earth twice on Friday during the unpiloted Exploration Flight Test-1 mission. The spacecraft will be off loaded and transported over the highways to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for studies of its heat shield, structure and recorded performance data from the 4 1/2 hour flight. Orion landed in the Pacific Ocean 630 miles southwest of San Diego, where it was recovered by Navy personnel.
The beginning of a new era but which one?
The Space Review (12/8): The success of Exploration Flight Test-1, Friday’s two orbit unpiloted test flight of the NASA/Lockheed Martin Orion capsule, created an increase in public interest and enthusiasm for human deep space exploration. The team made the difficult look easy, just as it did when the Curiosity Rover famously endured “seven minutes of terror” to land successfully on Mars in August 2012, according to essayist Jeff Foust, the Space Review editor. He looks at the challenges facing NASA in sustaining the interest and support as Orion’s development activities continue.
Editorial | Give cost-cutting a chance
Space News (12/8): NASA sets out on an aggressive cost cutting initiative. “NASA must look for ways to reduce duplication while preserving, to the extent possible, the competitive edge of its centers, which admittedly won’t be easy,” Space News notes in an editorial. “Another big question is how NASA’s cost-cutting initiative will be received on Capitol Hill.”
Unmanned Deep Space Exploration
Giant crater on Mars was once a vast lake, Curiosity rover shows
Space.com (12/8): New findings from NASA’s Curiosity rover suggests Gale Crater, the spacecraft’s home on Mars since August 2012, was once a long lived lake that could have supported microbial life. The lake lasted for millions of years, say scientists. Run off from the vast crater’s rim settled in layers to establish a 3 mile high peak now called Mount Sharp. Martian winds contributed to the process as well.
Mars apparently had massive lake, NASA’s Curiosity rover finds
Los Angeles Times (12/8): Gale Crater may have been but one of many surface depressions on Mars that formed lakes, according to scientists involved in NASA’s Curiosity rover mission. If so, the Martian atmosphere must have been warmer and wetter than the current cold, dry conditions of today.
Looking to Mars to help understand changing climates
New York Times (12/8): Over the millennium, Mars appears to have transitioned from a hospitable realm — with warmer temperatures an atmosphere and apparently water that flowed on the surface — to a frigid, desert-like world where life would be challenged to establish a foot hold. “I think the short story is the atmosphere went away and the oceans froze but are still there, locked up in subsurface ice,” Chris McKay, an astrobiologist and Mars expert at NASA’s Ames Research Center, tells the Times. NASA’s newest Mars mission, Maven, arrived in September to study how the Martian atmosphere may have escaped.
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