NASA News 13 January 2015

Sometimes I have to wonder what is going on and this is one of those times. Just so you know what I am getting at, let me explain why I don’t understand a deal NASA is making. The United States put up billions of our hard earned dollars to bail out American automobile companies, I am sure most of you remember that. Would it seem to be true that if NASA wanted to team with an automobile company it would and should be an American one? This is not what is happening. NASA has decided to team up with Nissan a Japanese automobile manufacturer. I have nothing against Japan but this should have been done with one of our companies. NASA wants to get involved with creating autonomous vehicle systems. Off the top of my head I would have thought they could have even gotten together with Google who seems to be in the lead in this area. I also have to wonder why NASA wants to get into this area in the first place. They were the ones which developed the software used by the rovers on Mars and plenty of scientists of their own. "The partnership brings together the best and brightest of NASA and Nissan, and validates our investments in Silicon Valley," said a Nissan executive. What about NASA instead getting together with the best and brightest at Ford or General Motors?

A NASA scientist who had helped discover the fact that water once existed on Mars has been killed in a small plane crash. His name was Alberto Behar and he lived in Scottsdale, Arizona. His single engine plane was taking off when it instantly went into a nosedive. It had been taking off from the Van Nuys Airport at Los Angeles, California. He was not only a scientist for JPL, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but also a professor at the Arizona State University. He had worked on two Mars missions and spent years researching how robots work in harsh environments and underwater. He was part of the Mars Curiosity rover team.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is located in Pasadena, California. They have recently invented a robot which will be able to actually go inside volcanoes and explore its fissures. The name of the robot is “VolcanoBot 1”. A postdoctoral fellow named Carolyn Parcheta was watching a science television program in school and watched as a researched tool a lava sample and this gave her the inspiration for the robot. The first mission for the robot was inside Kilauea volcano in Hawaii. The volcano is inactive. It is hoped the scientists will not only be able to learn something more about volcanoes on earth but also those off world. Fissures are said to be the most common physical features which release magma erupts and it is thought that some of the other volcanoes in our solar system such as the ones on Europa, Mercury and the moon work the same way. Some of the photos of Mars show fissures and what look like volcanic vents.

With the new Republican majority in congress, changes on committees are being made and one of those changes involves Senator Ted Cruz being appointed to oversee NASA since he will chair the Senate subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness. We don’t know what to expect yet, but we know he is on record for government cutbacks. On the other hand he has said it’s, "critical that the United States ensure its continued leadership in space." Cruz denies climate change exists. His appointment must still be confirmed. In 2013 Cruz tried to amend a spending authorization bill which would have reduced NASA funding but it failed.Β 
Behrokh Khoshnevis is an Iranian scientist and teaches at South California University. He has developed a way of automatically building structures in space easily. NASA has picked his plan as the winner of the “Create the Future Design” contest in 2014. NASA intends to use his plans to support their plan for building bases on the moon and in space. The method is known as contour crafting and used 3D printers which will be used by robots to build the structures on the moon. The resources will come from the moon. The robots will be able to build more robots thus developing the labor force needed for the project.

NASA has been watching a volcanic eruption very closely. The eruption is taking place in Iceland and is known as the Holuhraun eruption. It has been going on since August of 2014 and lave has been gushing from fissures just north of VatnajΓ¶kull, Iceland’s largest glacier. Lava has spread over 32 square miles and is still coming out. The field is now larger than the island of Manhattan. In 1783-84 a large eruption named the Laki eruption killed 20 percent of Iceland’s population. The lava is now hitting the JΓ¶kulsΓ΅ Γ΅ FjΓ¶llum River on one side and causing large plumes of steam to rise into the air. The average thickness of the lava over the area has been estimated at about 33 feet so far. Some scientists are predicting the flow of lava could last another two years, but others think it is already slowing down considerably.

SpaceX launched its Dragon cargo spacecraft into a perfect orbit and then hit its target in the Atlantic Ocean on return. There was a hitch however and that was the fact SpaceX was trying for a soft landing on a landing pad. The problem was the booster rocket was descending too fast and the Falcon 9 rocket hit so hard on the landing pad it shattered into pieces. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX remarked, “Close, but no cigar this time.” The idea is to be able to land rockets safely so that they can be reused, thus cutting the cost of every launch. The rocket had been fitted with steerable fins to help guide it to the landing area. Darkness and fog prevented good video of the attempted landing to be taken, but SpaceX assures us it will try again.

The Orion Spacecraft is the next generation NASA space capsule and a small company in Bally, Pennsylvania is going to help make that craft a reality. Charles Bolden visited the Bally Ribbon Company and said "We cannot get to Mars without the types of material being developed here, without the compression pads that are going between Orion, which is the crew module, and the service module, which provides power and propulsion." Bolden said even though industry giants like Lockheed Martin Corporation are needed the project could not have been made possible without small innovators like Bally which played a key role in developing the pads needed to protect Orion’s passenger capsule during reentry