#NASA SPACE SHUTTLE MISSION SCHEDULE UPGRADE#

#NASA SPACE SHUTTLE MISSION SCHEDULE UPGRADE#

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft missions have already taken over much of the work that the space shuttle program used to carry out, including ferrying astronauts to and from the ISS.Ī Servicing Mission 4 crewmember took this photo of the Hubble telescope just after the space shuttle Atlantis captured it with its robotic arm on May 13, 2009, beginning the mission to upgrade and repair the telescope. But the space agency retired the space shuttle in 2011, and no spacecraft has been back since. Launched in 1990, the space observatory has had several servicing missions during NASA’s space shuttle era, with the last mission carried out in 2009. The Space Act Agreement itself will not involve any exchange of funds, according to the release. It could be done at “no cost to the government,” according to a NASA news release. SpaceX wants to use that knowledge as a foundation and find out whether it’s possible to carry out a similar docking maneuver with the Hubble telescope, Jensen said. Jessica Jensen, vice president of customer operations and integration at SpaceX, said the private aerospace company “has a lot of experience docking (spacecraft) with the International Space Station.” Zurbuchen added that it is not yet certain whether or not such a mission could be carried out, and the goal of the agreement is just to explore the technical feasibility of the idea. Webb, Hubble space telescopes share images of DART slamming into an asteroidīut SpaceX approached the space agency a few months ago with the idea, he said, and the team at NASA is now planning to assess how a private mission might help “boost” and maintain the telescope. NIRCam was built by a team at the University of Arizona and Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center.

The observations shown here were conducted in the filter F070W (0.7 microns) and assigned the color red. Spectroscopic data will also provide researchers with insight into the asteroid's chemical composition. In the coming months, scientists will use Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) to observe Dimorphos further. These observations, when combined with data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, will allow scientists to gain knowledge about the nature of the surface of Dimorphos, how much material was ejected by the collision, and how fast it was ejected. Those sharp points are Webb's distinctive eight diffraction spikes, an artifact of the telescope's structure. A tight, compact core and plumes of material appearing as wisps streaming away from the center of where the impact took place, are visible in the image. This image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument shows Dimorphos, the asteroid moonlet in the double-asteroid system of Didymos, about 4 hours after NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) made impact.

Nasa space shuttle mission schedule