What New Technologies Have Recently Been Developed In NASA Space Craft?

NASA's mission is to be the first institution working towards future in space Exploration and aeronautics research. To do this it has to stay ahead of all in scientific discoveries related to that field.

NASA has produced and validated the use of micro satellites in space recently during mid 2006. This mission was known as ST5 mission.  It launched three micro-satellites to test and validate new micro technologies for future science missions.

The sensitivity of miniature magnetometers was also established when the satellites collected data for supporting scientific measurements. Currently a team of scientists are processing the magnetometer data, finishing the assessments and will report initial findings.

An innovative communications technology has also been developed and tested in the above mission. Miniature spacecraft radio transponders were used by the satellites for communications and tracking from space to ground and this technology also worked well.

Also a miniature power system was developed which demonstrated superior performance. Solar arrays which were very high efficiency, were developed for the micro satellites and these produced more power than was expected.

The world of NASA has developed a software called 'Autonomous Sciencecraft' that captured images and made scientific observations without any human interaction. The software mans the Earth-Observing-1 spacecraft. It took images of Mount Erebus in Antarctica and identified volcanic activity. Conventionally it can take months to find out if a remote volcano is active, but this job was done in minutes with the help of the software. Not only did the software detect heat from the lava at the top of the volcano, it also took more pictures and detected the news to scientists all by itself! Autonomous science craft is a leap towards a new genre of thinking about spacecraft. It does not need commanding instructions from the scientists. It can make decisions on its own and get spot momentary scientific phenomena which can be missed by scientists. The software can be used to monitor volcanic activity, prevent the earth from disaster like fire and floods.

Another leap for NASA quite recently, is the success of New Horizons, the NASA spacecraft which completed its Jupiter flyby. This was a concept planned for many years and came into fruition quite recently, i.e. on 28th Feb'07. The spacecraft had to pass through dangerous regions and even bear the intense radiation from the huge planet's magnetosphere. It came within 1.4 million miles of Jupiter, profited from a 9000 mph gravity force from the biggest planet and now is seeking to explore Pluto, which it expects to arrive at by July 2015. The spacecraft does not have contact with the Earth, however data images are sent to Earth twice a week.  For more latest development in NASA go to www.nasa.govnews/highlights/index.html .