Cozy Dark emerging technology began work in 2010 as a skunkworks-style engineering firm and is registered with CCR and NSPIRES.
Our early engineering & design efforts have focused on orbital debris solutions and electrodynamic tether technology.
Zach Urbina founded Cozy Dark with the cooperation of technical, research, and academic colleagues in the Southern California AeroAstro community.
We also have a growing library of space science talks featuring Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, astrophysicist Sean Carroll and more.
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158 posts tagged NASA
Days of ‘Gizmo’ Launches Return: NASA Team to Test New Vehicle-Descent Technologies |
NASA technologists will get a chance next summer to relive the good old days when Agency engineers would affix space-age gizmos to rockets just to see if the contraptions worked.
In what will be the first of four high-altitude balloon flights to begin in the summer of 2013, technologists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., and Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., are preparing to test new deceleration devices that could replace current descent technologies for landing ever-larger payloads at higher elevations on Mars.
NASA hasn’t tested deceleration technologies supersonically since 1972 when it conducted four high-altitude tests of a supersonic parachute used during the Viking program. “We’ve been stuck with that design ever since,” said Mark Adler, NASA’s Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) program lead. NASA will use the same technology again this year when it delivers the Curiosity rover to Mars.
However, planetary landers of tomorrow will require much larger drag devices than any now in use. “What we need is new technology to slow larger, heavier landers from the supersonic speeds of atmospheric entry to subsonic ground-approach speeds,” Adler said. continue reading
NASA Spacecraft Detects Changes in Martian Sand Dunes |
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has revealed that movement in sand dune fields on the Red Planet occurs on a surprisingly large scale, about the same as in dune fields on Earth.
This is unexpected because Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, is only about one percent as dense, and its high-speed winds are less frequent and weaker than Earth’s.
For years, researchers debated whether sand dunes observed on Mars were mostly fossil features related to past climate, rather than currently active. In the past two years, researchers using images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera have detected and reported sand movement.
Now, scientists using HiRISE images have determined that entire dunes as thick as 200 feet (61 meters) are moving as coherent units across the Martian landscape. The study was published online May 9 by the journal Nature.
“This exciting discovery will inform scientists trying to better understand the changing surface conditions of Mars on a more global scale,” said Doug McCuistion, director, NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, Washington. “This improved understanding of surface dynamics will provide vital information in planning future robotic and human Mars exploration missions.” continue reading
NASA’s ER-2 Completes MABEL Validation Deployment |
NASA’s high-flying ER-2 Airborne Science aircraft has concluded its four-week deployment to validate data acquired by the Multiple Altimeter Beam Experiment Lidar (MABEL) laser altimeter over the Greenland ice cap and surrounding sea ice fields.
After an almost 10 and one-half hour transit flight from its deployment base in Keflavik, Iceland, NASA ER-2 pilot Stu Broce landed ER-2 806 April 27 at the Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, Calif. The lengthy flight from Iceland included data collection by the MABEL instrument over a portion of broadleaf deciduous forest in Wisconsin. The ground support and science crew that supported the flights returned several days later.
“We completed 100 percent of the science flights,” said Broce, noting that they were able to acquire data on several additional ad hoc targets that were not in the original plan. “The weather cooperated, the plane worked well as did the science instruments.”
The ER-2 flew more than 100 hours on 16 flights in the MABEL validation campaign, including 14 data collection flights over Greenland and surrounding sea ice areas and two transit flights between Keflavik and its home base in Palmdale. Several of the flights were conducted concurrently and on the same flight tracks as flights of other NASA environmental science aircraft involved in the Arctic IceBridge campaign in order to compare data being recorded by the MABEL with instruments on the other aircraft.
Saturn’s Giant Moon: How Long Has Titan’s Chemical Factory Been in Business? |
Saturn’s giant moon Titan hides within a thick, smoggy atmosphere that’s well-known to scientists as one of the most complex chemical environments in the solar system. It’s a productive “factory” cranking out hydrocarbons that rain down on Titan’s icy surface, cloaking it in soot and, with a brutally cold surface temperature of around minus 270 degrees Fahrenheit, forming lakes of liquid methane and ethane.
However the most important raw ingredient in this chemical factory — methane gas, a molecule made up of one carbon atom joined to four hydrogen atoms — should not last for long because it’s being continuously destroyed by sunlight and converted to more complex molecules and particles. New research from NASA-funded scientists attempts to estimate how long this factory has been operating. The results are presented as two papers appearing in the April 20 issue of theAstrophysical Journal.
These papers used data from two instruments onboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn and one instrument on the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe that landed on Titan’s surface in January, 2005. All three instruments were built at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. A paper led by Conor Nixon of the University of Maryland, College Park uses infrared signatures (spectra) of methane from Cassini’s composite infrared spectrometer to estimate how much “heavy” methane containing rare isotopes is present in Titan’s atmosphere. continue reading
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Brings ‘Earthrise’ to Everyone |
Imagine yourself in orbit, your spacecraft flying backward with its small window facing down toward the surface of the moon. You peer out, scouring the ash-colored contours of the cratered landscape for traces of ancient volcanic activity. Around you, the silent, velvety blackness of space stretches out in every direction.
The spacecraft rolls over, and you glimpse a sliver of intense light starting to climb over the rough horizon. It might be dawn, except that the bright sliver quickly morphs into an arc of dazzling white swirled with vivid blue and then rises far enough to be recognized as the brilliant, marbled Earth. Captured on film, this breathtaking view becomes the iconic photograph “Earthrise.”
On December 24, 1968, three people saw this happen firsthand: Apollo 8 Commander Frank Borman and crew members William A. Anders and James A. Lovell, Jr. Now, in honor of Earth Day 2012, the rest of us can see what that was like in a new NASA visualization, which draws on richly detailed maps of the moon’s surface made from data gathered by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).
“This visualization recreates for everyone the wondrous experience of seeing Earth from that privileged viewpoint,” says LRO Project Scientist Rich Vondrak of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. continue reading
Dawn reveals secrets of giant asteroid Vesta |
Findings from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft reveal new details about the giant asteroid Vesta, including its varied surface composition, sharp temperature changes and clues to its internal structure.
Images acquaried by Dawn from 680 km and 210 km above the surface of the asteroid, show a variety of surface mineral and rock patterns. Many of the materials seen by Dawn are composed of iron- and magnesium-rich minerals, which often are found in Earth’s volcanic rocks. Images also reveal smooth pond-like deposits, which might have formed as fine dust created during impacts settled into low regions.
Dawn revealed bands of minerals near the south pole that appear as brilliant layers on the crater’s steep slopes. The exposed layering allows scientists to see farther back into the geological history of the giant asteroid. The layers closer to the asteroid’s surface bear evidence of contamination from space rocks bombarding Vesta. Frequent landslides on the slopes of the craters also have revealed other hidden mineral patterns. These results from Dawn suggest Vesta’s ‘skin’ is constantly renewing.
Data reveal temperatures can vary from as warm as -23 °C in the sunniest spots to as cold as -100 °C in the shadows. This is the lowest temperature measurable by Dawn’s visible and infrared mapping spectrometer. These findings show the surface responds quickly to illumination with no mitigating effect of an atmosphere.
Images: 1. Topography of the southern hemisphere of Vesta (left) and a map of Vesta’s gravity variations. [Video] 2. Three views of a terrain with ridges and grooves near Aquilia crater in the southern hemisphere of Vesta. 3. Three views of the comparatively fresh crater named Vibidia on the surface of Vesta.
via unknownskywalker
1,000 Days of Infrared Wonders |
For the last 1000 days the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC), aboard NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, has been operating continuously to probe the universe from its most distant regions to our local solar neighborhood. The IRAC “warm” program began once Spitzer used up its liquid helium coolant, thus completing its “cold” mission. To commemorate 1000 days of infrared wonders, the program is releasing a gallery of the 10 best IRAC images.
“IRAC continues to be an amazing camera, still producing important discoveries and spectacular new images of the infrared universe,” said principal investigator Giovanni Fazio of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. continue reading
NASA to Fly Atomic Clock to Improve Space Navigation |
When people think of space technologies, many think of high-tech solar panels, complex and powerful propulsion systems or sophisticated, electronic guidance systems. Another critical piece of spaceflight technology, however, is an ultra stable, highly accurate device for timing — essential to NASA’s success on deep-space exploration missions.
NASA is preparing to fly a Deep Space Atomic Clock, or DSAC, demonstration that will revolutionize the way we conduct deep-space navigation by enabling a spacecraft to calculate its own timing and navigation data in real time. This one-way navigation technology would improve upon the current two-way system in which information is sent to Earth, requiring a ground team to calculate timing and navigation and then transmit it back to the spacecraft. A real-time, onboard navigation capability is key to improving NASA’s capabilities for executing time critical events, such as a planetary landing or planetary “flyby,” when signal delays are too great for the ground to interact with the spacecraft during the event. continue reading
