Hackaday Links: September 14, 2025

September 14, 2025 by Dan Maloney 1 Comment

Is it finally time to cue up the Bowie? Or was the NASA presser on Wednesday announcing new findings of potential Martian biosignatures from Perseverance just another in a long line of “We are not alone” teases that turn out to be false alarms? Time will tell, but from the peer-reviewed paper released simultaneously with the news conference, it appears that biological activity is now the simplest explanation for the geochemistry observed in some rock samples analyzed by the rover last year. There’s a lot in the paper to unpack, most of which is naturally directed at planetary scientists and therefore somewhat dense reading. But the gist is that Perseverance sampled some sedimentary rocks in Jezero crater back in July of 2024 with the SHERLOC and PIXL instruments, extensive analysis of which suggests the presence of “reaction fronts” within the rock that produced iron phosphate and iron sulfide minerals in characteristic shapes, such as the ring-like formations they dubbed “leopard spots,” and the pinpoint “poppy seed” formations.

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Figure 7-8, caption: Example thrust sheet rotation using tether control. Credit: NASA/James Bickford.

TFINER Is An Atompunk Solar Sail Lookalike

September 4, 2025 by Tyler August 16 Comments

It’s not every day we hear of a new space propulsion method. Even rarer to hear of one that actually seems halfway practical. Yet that’s what we have in the case of TFINER, a proposal by [James A. Bickford] we found summarized on Centauri Dreams by [Paul Gilster] .

TFINER stands for Thin-Film Nuclear Engine Rocket Engine, and it’s a hoot. The word “rocket” is in the name, so you know there’s got to be some reaction mass, but this thing looks more like a solar sail. The secret is that the “sail” is the rocket: as the name implies, it hosts a thin film of nuclear materialwhose decay products provide the reaction mass. (In the Phase I study for NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts office (NIAC), it’s alpha particles from Thorium-228 or Radium-228.) Alpha particles go pretty quick (about 5% c for these isotopes), so the ISP on this thing is amazing. (1.81 million seconds!) Continue reading “TFINER Is An Atompunk Solar Sail Lookalike” →

NASA Seeks Volunteers To Track Artemis II Mission

September 1, 2025 by Maya Posch 27 Comments

As NASA’s Artemis program trundles onwards at the blazing pace of a disused and very rusty crawler-transporter, the next mission on the list is gradually coming into focus. This will be the first crewed mission — a flyby of the Moon following in the footsteps of 1968’s Apollo 8 mission. As part of this effort, NASA is looking for volunteers who will passively track the Orion capsule and its crew of four as it makes its way around the Moon during its 10-day mission before returning to Earth. Details can be found here.

This follows on a similar initiative during the Artemis I mission, when participants passively tracked the radio signals from the capsule. For this upcoming mission NASA is looking for Doppler shift measurements on the Orion S-band (2200-2290 MHz) return link carrier signals, with the objective being to achieve and maintain a carrier lock.

Currently penciled in for a highly tentative April 2026, the Artemis II mission would fly on the same SLS Block 1 rocket configuration that launched the first mission, targeting a multi-trans-lunar injection (MTLI) profile to get to the Moon using a free return trajectory. The crew will check out the new life support system prior to starting the MTLI burns.

Because Artemis II will be on a free return trajectory it will not be orbiting the Moon, unlike Apollo 8’s crew who made ten lunar orbits. Incidentally, Apollo 8’s crew included James Lovell, who’d go on to fly the world-famous Apollo 13 mission. Hopefully the Artemis astronauts will be spared that level of in-space excitement.

NASA Is Taking Suggestions For Raising Swift’s Orbit

August 31, 2025 by Maya Posch 43 Comments

Launched in 2004, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory – formerly the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer – has been dutifully studying gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) during its two-year mission, before moving on to a more general space observation role during its ongoing mission. Unfortunately, the observatory is in LEO, at an altitude of around 370 km. The natural orbital decay combined with increased solar activity now threatens to end Swift’s mission, unless NASA can find someone who can boost its orbit.

Using Swift as a testbed for commercial orbit-boosting technologies, NASA is working with a number of companies to investigate options. One of these is the SSPICY demonstration of in-orbit inspection technology by Starfish Space that’s part of an existing Phase III program.

Although currently no option has been selected and Swift is still at risk of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere within the near future, there seems to be at least a glimmer of hope that this process can be reverted, and a perfectly fine triple-telescope space observatory can keep doing science for many years to come. Along the way it may also provide a blueprint for how to do the same with other LEO assets that are at risk of meeting a fiery demise.

Illustration of a Gemini B reentry vehicle separating from the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL). (Source: US Air Force)

The Advanced Project Gemini Concepts That Could Have Been

August 29, 2025 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

Looking back on the trajectory leading to Project Apollo and the resulting Moon missions, one can be forgiven for thinking that this was a strict and well-defined plan that was being executed, especially considering the absolute time crunch. The reality is that much of this trajectory was in flux, with the earlier Project Gemini seeing developments towards supplying manned space stations and even its own Moon missions. [Spaceflight Histories] recently examined some of these Advanced Gemini concepts that never came to pass.

In retrospect, some of these seem like an obvious evolution of the program. Given both NASA and the US Air Force’s interest in space stations at the time, the fact that a up-sized “Big Gemini” was proposed as a resupply craft makes sense. Not to be confused with the Gemini B, which was a version of the spacecraft that featured an attached laboratory module. Other concepts, like the paraglider landing feature, were found to be too complex and failure prone.

The circumlunar, lunar landing and Apollo rescue concepts were decidedly more ambitious and included a range of alternatives to the Project Apollo missions, which were anything but certain especially after the Apollo 1 disaster. Although little of Advanced Gemini made it even into a prototype stage, it’s still a fascinating glimpse at an alternate reality.

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Where There Is No Down: Measuring Liquid Levels In Space

August 26, 2025 by Dan Maloney 39 Comments

As you can probably imagine, we get tips on a lot of really interesting projects here at Hackaday. Most are pretty serious, at least insofar as they aim to solve a specific problem in some new and clever way. Some, though, are a little more lighthearted, such as a fun project that came across the tips line back in May. Charmingly dubbed “pISSStream,” the project taps into NASA’s official public telemetry stream for the International Space Station to display the current level of the urine tank on the Space Station.

Now, there are a couple of reactions to a project like this when it comes across your desk. First and foremost is bemusement that someone would spend time and effort on a project like this — not that we don’t appreciate it; the icons alone are worth the price of admission. Next is sheer amazement that NASA provides access to a parameter like this in its public API, with a close second being the temptation to look at what other cool endpoints they expose.

But for my part, the first thing I thought of when I saw that project was, “How do they even measure liquid levels in space?” In a place where up and down don’t really have any practical meaning, the engineering challenges of liquid measurement must be pretty interesting. That led me down the rabbit hole of low-gravity process engineering, a field that takes everything you know about how fluids behave and flushes it into the space toilet.

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Ask Hackaday: Where Are All The Fuel Cells?

August 21, 2025 by Tom Nardi 60 Comments

Given all the incredible technology developed or improved during the Apollo program, it’s impossible to pick out just one piece of hardware that made humanity’s first crewed landing on another celestial body possible. But if you had to make a list of the top ten most important pieces of gear stacked on top of the Saturn V back in 1969, the fuel cell would have to place pretty high up there.

Apollo fuel cell. Credit: James Humphreys

Smaller and lighter than batteries of the era, each of the three alkaline fuel cells (AFCs) used in the Apollo Service Module could produce up to 2,300 watts of power when fed liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, the latter of which the spacecraft needed to bring along anyway for its life support system. The best part was, as a byproduct of the reaction, the fuel cells produced drinkable water.

The AFC was about as perfectly suited to human spaceflight as you could get, so when NASA was designing the Space Shuttle a few years later, it’s no surprise that they decided to make them the vehicle’s primary electrical power source. While each Orbiter did have backup batteries for emergency purposes, the fuel cells were responsible for powering the vehicle from a few minutes before launch all the way to landing. There was no Plan B. If an issue came up with the fuel cells, the mission would be cut short and the crew would head back home — an event that actually did happen a few times during the Shuttle’s 30 year career.

This might seem like an incredible amount of faith for NASA to put into such a new technology, but in reality, fuel cells weren’t really all that new even then. The space agency first tested their suitability for crewed spacecraft during the later Gemini missions in 1965, and Francis Thomas Bacon developed the core technology all the way back in 1932.

So one has to ask…if fuel cell technology is nearly 100 years old, and was reliable and capable enough to send astronauts to the Moon back in 1960s, why don’t we see them used more today?

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