tech581.blogspot.com

It may be that crewmembers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) will one day—while inhaling the luxurious, comforting scent of freshly baked bread—mark April 22, 2012, as a turning point in the effort to make life in space more like life at home. That Sunday, in Oxford, England, NASA project manager Nick Skytland bumped into a young man named Sam Wilkinson. “Do I have time to tackle another challenge?” Wilkinson asked. Skytland checked the time. It was the second and final day of the International Space Apps Challenge—a unique, globe-spanning collaboration bringing together teams of programmers, engineers, students and just about anyone else interested in joining with NASA for 48 hours to tackle some of the important problems in space exploration. At that moment, linked via the Internet and a shared belief in the power of small contributions to create big outcomes, citizen innovators in 25 locations scattered across all seven continents were toiling feverishly to de...

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and space research. NASA was established NASA is under presidential orders to land humans on Mars by 2033, and NASA-funded engineers are studying a way to build potential human habitats there by producing bricks from pressurized Martian soil. The European Space Agency has a long-term goal to send humans but has not yet built a crewed spacecraft NASA has made use of technologies such as the multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator (MMRTG), which is a type of radioisotope thermoelectric generator used to power spacecraft.[170] Shortages of the required plutonium-238 have curtailed deep space missions since the turn of the millennium.[171] An example of a spacecraft that was not developed because of a shortage of this material was New Horizons 2.[171] The Earth science research program was c...