The Mobile Giant Nokia is Finally Traveling to the Moon thanks to its long-standing Cooperation with NASA.
Nokia is Preparing to Start 4G Service on The Moon
The Finnish telecoms company intends to set up the first lunar 4G network there, enabling scientists to learn new things that might enable the construction of a human colony on the moon.
The additional capabilities that cellular networks provide will be required for future missions that call for HD video, robotics, sensing applications, telemetry, or biometrics, according to a statement on Nokia’s website regarding the NASA partnership.
According to NASA, those technologies will assist researchers in finding lunar ice, which might support human life on the planet by providing future settlements with fuel, water, and oxygen.
Nokia intends to launch the network aboard a SpaceX rocket later this year.
According to CNBC, the company’s network configuration includes a base station with an antenna and a solar-powered rover that will communicate with one another over an LTE connection.
This is not the first time NASA has collaborated with a telecommunications provider to further its extraordinary goals. According to the Guardian, the NSA teamed up with Verizon in 2015 to develop technologies that would “direct and monitor” commercial and civilian drones across the United States using Verizon’s extensive phone tower network.
NASA Mission to Study Jupiter’s icy Moons for Signs of Submerged Oceans
Originally scheduled to launch on Thursday, an Ariane 5 rocket will now lift off on Friday, carrying a $1.7 billion European Space Agency probe on a circuitous 8-year journey to Jupiter where it will study the giant planet in great detail while concentrating on three of its ice-covered moons where sub-surface, potentially habitable oceans are hidden from view.
According to European Space Agency project scientist Olivier Witasse, “We’ll explore Jupiter and its icy moons, which are Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto with a particular focus on Ganymede, which is a unique object, the only moon with magnetic field, and the biggest moon in the solar system.” The major objective is to determine whether any of the frozen moons around a large planet like Jupiter have habitable habitats.
The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or “JUICE” for short, will remotely scan the oceans that are thought to be heated by tidal forces beneath the ice-locked crusts of Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto using ground-penetrating radar and other equipment. The spacecraft will also offer a new perspective on Io, the fourth moon that Galileo found in the early 1600s and the solar system’s most volcanically active planet.
According to Witasse, “We will characterize in particular the liquid water oceans that are inside the icy moons.” The question then becomes, where are those oceans? How deep beneath the moons’ surfaces are we talking? What is the ocean’s depth? We have how much water? What elements make up this water?
We must investigate the Jupiter system broadly in order to comprehend this subject of habitability. In order to better understand Jupiter, its strong, rotating magnetic field, its atmosphere, its weather, its volcanic moon Io, the other moons in the system, and how these bodies are related to one another, JUICE will research these topics.
Weather allowing, JUICE will launch from Kourou, French Guiana, on Friday at 8:14 a.m. EDT on the Ariane 5 rocket, which will also launch the James Webb Space Telescope on Christmas Day 2021 after being delayed by bad weather.
The 6.5-ton JUICE cannot be directly launched to its target by the Ariane 5 due to insufficient power. Instead, it will launch the spacecraft on an interplanetary bank shot of 3.1 billion miles, which will take it past the Earth and moon in August 2024, Venus in August 2025, and then the planet twice more in 2026 and 2029. The gravity-assist flybys will increase the velocity to a point where it can ultimately approach Jupiter.
Payload system engineer Alessandro Atzei stated, “The gravity assistance have to be accurate, but we have highly capable personnel in mission control and they’re used to these movements. The first one will be particularly difficult since we have to travel by both the Earth and the moon at once. Consequently, this will be the most precise gravity assist maneuver performed to date.
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It will still be eight years until JUICE arrives at Jupiter in July 2031 despite all of this.
Thanks to the strength of its SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft, which will blast out in October 2024, will beat JUICE to Jupiter by almost a year, arriving in orbit in April 2030. However, there is no rivalry between the two tasks.
The NASA mission, named for the frozen moon of Europa, will fly past it roughly 50 times at altitudes as low as 16 miles. JUICE will conduct 12 flybys of Ganymede and 21 flybys of Callisto, with a primary focus on these two bodies.
The first spacecraft to orbit a moon of another planet, JUICE will spend the final nine months of its four-year exploration of Jupiter in orbit around Ganymede. It will be programmed to crash into the surface when its fuel runs out.
The fact that two spacecraft will be in the Jupiter system at once is great news for Clipper, according to Witasse. “So the results for science will be excellent and really exciting. We have a close relationship with the Clipper teams. The fact that the two tasks complement one another so well is fantastic.
The most frequented planet in the solar system, after Mars, is Jupiter.
All of the NASA spacecraft, including the Pioneers 10 and 11, Voyagers 1 and 2, the Cassini Saturn orbiter, the NASA-ESA Ulysses sun study probe, and the New Horizons mission to Pluto, sailed by Jupiter for a quick look. NASA’s Juno probe is now in orbit, conducting in-depth research of Jupiter’s atmosphere, interior, and strong magnetic fields, with sporadic flybys of large moons. NASA’s Galileo probe orbited the giant planet from 1995 to 2003.
Using a variety of deceptive methods, several of those missions were able to find indications of subsurface oceans on Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede. On such otherwise icy worlds, the heat required to maintain liquid water is theorized to originate from tidal pressures brought on by Jupiter’s gigantic gravity as the moons move around in slightly elliptical orbits.
JUICE and Clipper will provide fresh perspectives on those frigid worlds, perhaps providing evidence that the submerged seas are habitable. It’s unclear if life could exist under such hostile conditions.
Atzei explained that after initially concentrating on Europa, the team would go on to a high latitude phase that would essentially concentrate more on Jupiter’s polar regions. The mission will then move to Ganymede, where it will likely conclude in four years, depending on the amount of propellant we still have. We’ll have a safe crash on Ganymede when the propellant is finished, or almost finished.
JUICE is equipped with ten highly advanced sensors, including a radar and laser altimeter that can see approximately six miles below the surface of the target moons. While high-resolution cameras take images of the moons at various wavelengths to evaluate the chemical makeup of the surfaces below and to look for potential water plumes erupting into space, other sensors will research the charged particle environment in the Jupiter system.
In order to properly track the probe’s journey and learn more about the density and structure of the moons, the radio signals from the spacecraft will be closely monitored on Earth. The ten instruments, radio experiment, and radiation sensors, according to ESA, are “the most powerful remote sensing, geophysical, and in situ payloads ever flown to the outer solar system.”
We won’t be able to detect life with JUICE, Witasse warns. Nevertheless, we’re going to explore some fascinating features of life and habitation.
Other instruments will measure the vertical profile of the atmospheric constituents, densities, and temperatures, along with visible and infrared mass spectrometer readings of their composition. An ion mass spectrometer will be able to detect “many, many molecules, not only water vapor, but also other kinds of molecules” in the extremely tenuous atmospheres around the moons.
It’s extremely exciting to consider that there is a lot of liquid water underneath the surface of this frosty surface that we can see in photographs, Witasse said. “If I want an objective to highlight,” he said. Knowing the location of this water will be the mission’s most intriguing part. What percentage of salt is there? What does that have to do with whether those moons are habitable?
Unless you protect it, radiation is a killer for electronics, according to Justin Byrne, Airbus’ head of science projects. Basically, when the circuits degrade, memory corruptions occur, and eventually the computers collapse catastrophically.
The spacecraft is totally redundant, so there are two computers and two of everything, he stated, referring to the remaining probe equipment. “A large portion of the work on the JUICE mission was to demonstrate that the spacecraft could autonomously reconfigure itself in any scenario, any failure, and not put itself in any danger.”
Nokia is networking the Moon
Nokia is Preparing to Start 4G Service on The Moon FQA
Is Nokia putting 4G on the moon?
The moon will have 4G internet later this year, according to a Nokia executive. It will be utilized as part of NASA’s Artemis 1 project, which intends to establish a human presence on the moon. The objective is to demonstrate that terrestrial networks can accommodate the communication requirements of upcoming space missions.
Is NASA installing the Internet on the moon?
In order to create a 4G wireless network for the moon, NASA is also collaborating with Nokia. The company has already been awarded a more than $14 million contract by the space agency, and its first base station should be sent to the moon via a SpaceX rocket planned to fly sometime in 2019. It will also contain radio equipment.
Which company has been awarded the contract by NASA for deploying 4G network on moon?
Which company has been given the NASA contract to install a 4G network on the moon? Notes: NASA, the US space agency, has given Nokia a contract to set up a 4G network on the Moon.
Is NASA internet free?
Free downloads of “Exploring the Internet with NASA” are offered.