NPR: NASA has announced a plan to extricate its rover Spirit, which has been stuck in a Martian sand trap since April.
The space agency will begin transmitting commands to the exploration robot today. Based on tests conducted on Earth this spring that simulated conditions at the Martian site, researchers do not expect the effort to be quick or easy.
Physics Today: The Moon is wetter than previously believed, say NASA scientists Friday, reporting the results of the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) impact probe, that slammed into lunar polar craters a month ago.
"There's water, and it is not just a little water, but significant amounts," says NASA's Anthony Colaprete, chief science investigator for the LCROSS in a press conference earlier today.
The LCROSS Centaur upper stage rocket was used to create a plume on the 9 October by smashing into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus crater near the moon's south pole.
The resulting impact created a two-part plume of material from the bottom of the crater. The first part was a high angle plume of vapor and fine dust and the second a lower angle ejecta curtain of heavier material. This material has not seen sunlight in billions of years.
Since the impacts, the LCROSS science team has been working almost nonstop analyzing the huge amount of data the spacecraft collected. The team concentrated on data from the satellite's spectrometers, which provide the most definitive information about the presence of about 26 gallons of water.
"We are ecstatic," said Colaprete, "multiple lines of evidence show water was present in both the high angle vapor plume and the ejecta curtain created by the impact. The concentration and distribution of water and other substances requires further analysis, but it is safe to say Cabeus holds water."
The team took the known near infrared spectral signatures of water and other materials and compared them to the spectra collected by the LCROSS near infrared spectrometer of the impact.
"We were only able to match the spectra from LCROSS data when we inserted the spectra for water," said Colaprete. "No other reasonable combination of other compounds that we tried matched the observations. The possibility of contamination from the Centaur also was ruled out."
Additional confirmation came from an emission in the ultraviolet spectrum that was attributed to hydroxyl, one product from the break-up of water by sunlight. When atoms and molecules are excited, they release energy at specific wavelengths that are detected by the spectrometers. A similar process is used in neon signs. When electrified, a specific gas will produce a distinct color. The ultraviolet visible spectrometer detected hydroxyl signatures just after impact that are consistent with a water vapor cloud in sunlight.
Data from the other LCROSS instruments are being analyzed for additional clues about the state and distribution of the material at the impact site. The LCROSS science team along with colleagues are poring over the data to understand the entire impact event, from flash to crater, with the final goal being the understanding of the distribution of materials, and in particular volatiles, within the soil at the impact site.
"The full understanding of the LCROSS data may take some time. The data is that rich," said Colaprete. "Along with the water in Cabeus, there are hints of other intriguing substances. The permanently shadowed regions of the moon are truly cold traps, collecting and preserving material over billions of years."
A short trip
LCROSS was launched on the 18 June as a companion mission to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. After separating from LRO, the LCROSS spacecraft held onto the spent Centaur upper stage rocket of the launch vehicle, executed a lunar swingby and entered into a series of long looping orbits around the Earth.
After traveling approximately 113 days and nearly 9 million kilometers, the Centaur and LCROSS separated on final approach to the moon.
Traveling as fast as a speeding bullet, the Centaur impacted the lunar surface shortly after 4:31 am PDT Oct. 9 with LCROSS watching with its onboard instruments. Approximately four minutes of data was collected before the LCROSS itself impacted the lunar surface.
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Science Progress: When Mary Ann Mason was graduate dean at the University of California, Berkeley, a frequent question she heard from women graduate students was "when is a good time to have a baby?"
For women in academic science careers, the conventional wisdom was that waiting until she had achieved tenure was the best approach.
In 1985, the national average age of scientists winning tenure was 36. But by 2003, it was over 39.
"So it's increasingly poor advice to wait until you get to tenure," she says.
Her belief is that women researchers should be able to have children whenever they want, and her new report, co-authored with colleagues Marc Goulden and Karie Frasch, explains the work-family policies that are driving women out of the academic pipeline.
Their data, taken from extensive surveys of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers within the University of California system, shows that work-life issues, and particularly decisions about when to get married and when to have children, account for the most significant loss of academic scientists in the pipeline between PhD and tenured positions.
"The leak is almost entirely, or least due primarily to family formation," said Mason, who is currently a professor and co-faculty director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic, and Family Security at the UC Berkeley.
Science Progress has a podcast discussing these issues with the authors of the study.
USA Today: Saturn's geyser-spewing moon, Enceladus—visited by the international Cassini spacecraft on its closest flyby this week—presents planetary scientists with a geophysical locked-room mystery.
How does something buried inside an ice ball only 500 kilometers wide provide the pop to propel a plume 965 kilometers out of the moon's south pole?
"The biggest puzzle with Enceladus is where is the heat source," says Cassini scientist Linda Spilker of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the mission. "This tiny moon 'should' be frozen over like the others orbiting Saturn."
Nature News: The rise and fall this year of the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM)—a satellite meant to pin down the repulsive force that is accelerating the universe's expansion—is partly due to strife between two US agencies, NASA and the Department of Energy, and a third potential partner, the European Space Agency.
In addition, scientists working on the JDEM designs have not presented a unified front, owing to disagreements over the best observational method to use at a time when an influential astrophysics panel is about to prioritize the next decade's best and most organized missions.
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Science: Many aerosols cool the atmosphere (a negative forcing), whereas ozone and black carbon aerosol have a warming effect (a positive forcing).
There is thus a strong motivation for treating air pollution control and climate change in common policy frameworks, argue Almut Arneth and colleagues in Science.
However, changes in pollutant and precursor emissions, atmospheric burden, and radiative forcing are not necessarily proportional.
Drew T. Shindell and colleagues at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, report that current models do not capture many of the complex atmospheric processes involving aerosols and reactive trace gases.
As Arneth and colleagues state:
Changing aerosol burdens may alter local and regional cloud cover and precipitation, change the intensity or timing of the monsoon circulation, and even shift precipitation across national borders. Changes in cloud cover and precipitation will also feed back on the photochemistry and rainout of short-lived species. These issues must be considered if aerosol emissions are to become part of climate policy.
Given the toxicity of pollutants, the question is not whether ever stricter air pollution controls will be implemented, but when and where. The jury is out on whether air pollution control will accelerate or mitigate climate change. Still, the studies available to date mostly suggest that air pollution control will accelerate warming in the coming decades.
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NPR: The NASA swift satellite has discovered the most distant γ-ray burst seen and the earliest astronomical object ever observed in cosmic history.
Two teams of scientists made the discovery, which they report in Nature.
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Science: The blogosphere has been having a field day with global warming's apparent decade-long stagnation. Negotiators are working toward an international global warming agreement to be signed in Copenhagen in December, yet there hasn't been any warming for a decade. What's the point, bloggers ask?
Climate researchers are beginning to answer back in their preferred venue, the peer-reviewed literature. The pause in warming is real enough, but it's just temporary, they argue from their analyses. A natural swing in climate to the cool side has been holding greenhouse warming back, and such swings don't last forever. "In the end, global warming will prevail," says climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City.
Various: The launch of NASA's first new rocket in 25 years earlier today has given NASA a welcome boost while the agency grapples with a revised strategy for returning to the Moon and onto Mars under tighter budget conditions.
Above is the Ares I-X test rocket taking off from Launch Complex 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Liftoff occurred at 11:30 am. EDT. Credit: NASA/Jim Grossman
The Ares I-X test flight saw the first stage solid rocket boosters taking the vehicle to an altitude of 40km. The booster stage then parachuted down into the Atlantic for recovery, while the dummy second stage crashes into the ocean.
"It is a chance for the agency to remind itself what it takes to build a vehicle," said Robert Less, Ares I-X mission manager to the BBC.
The first stage is a highly modified version of a space shuttle rocket booster.
The Ares I-X mission profile, Image credit: NASA.
The recent Augustine Panel that looked at manned spaceflight even questioned whether Ares I is the right vehicle for the job. NASA says Ares I will be ready in 2015, others told the panel it will be longer.
The Ares I-X was rolled to the launch pad early last week.
Space.com's Jeremy Hsu goes behind the scenes of Ares I-X booster and visits the group that built it.
It represents the culmination of years of work by the rocket-minded ATK Space Systems in Utah and almost 1,000 other NASA workers and private contractors across 17 states.To ensure that they see the fruits of their labor, technicians have installed more than 700 sensors on the $445 million Ares I-X test vehicle.
It may be the only visible success of the program says New York Times reporter Kenneth Chang.
"Critics of the Ares I, which is part of NASA’s Constellation program intended to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020, have described it as too expensive, underpowered and technically flawed."
Various: Updated 10/26/09: A lawyer for the Justice Department said in court on Tuesday that Stewart Nozette, a scientist who worked for NASA and the Defense Department before being arrested on 19 October 2009 on espionage charges, had been willing to sell some of America’s “most guarded secrets” to a man he believed to be an Israeli intelligence officer but was in fact an undercover FBI officer writes New York Times reporter Robert Mackey.
Stewart Nozette (Credit: NASA)Recently, Nozette, who had worked on the Clementine spacecraft in the 1990s, had been working on NASA instrument that was on board India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, which recently found evidence of water on the Moon.
The Washington Post reported on 26 October that Nozette had pleaded guilty in January to over-billing NASA and the Defense Department more than $265,000 for contracting work. The court documents were sealed because Nozette was cooperating with authorities in unrelated investigations into government corruption.
Nozette admitted that he used that money to help pay personal credit card bills, car loans and maintenance costs for his swimming pool. He faced at least two years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines, according to the plea papers.
The Justice Department in a statement announcing his arrest said that Nozette had worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from approximately 1990 to 1999. Nozette held a special security clearance equivalent to the Defense Department Top Secret and Critical Nuclear Weapon Design Information clearances. Department of Energy clearances apply to access to information specifically relating to atomic or nuclear-related materials
"Those who would put our nation’s defense secrets up for sale can expect to be vigorously prosecuted," said Channing D. Phillips, Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. "This case reflects our firm resolve to hold accountable any individual who betrays the public trust by compromising our national security for his or her own personal gain."
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Space.com: NASA scientists have finally seen in their data a debris plume created by the impact of a moon probe last week onto the Cabeus crater, at the lunar south pole.
A thermal image of the impact (credit: NASA)
The faint plume was seen in the data from the engineered crash one week after the impact of the LCROSS probe in the ultraviolet/visible and near infra-red wavelengths.
A image of a plume of debris. NASA estimates the dust went up about a mile. (credit: NASA)
"There is a clear indication of a plume of vapor and fine debris," said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS principal investigator and project scientist.
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Various: NASA launched the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft last year to investigate the edges of the heliosphere—the insulating bubble the sun creates around the solar system. IBEX principal investigator David McComas talks to NPR's Ira Flatow on the first surprising results that were published by Science on Friday.
What did IBEX discover?
At the boundary of our Solar System, the interactions between solar wind particles and interstellar medium particles create Energetic Neutral Atoms (ENAs), particles with no charge that move very fast.
Some of the ENAs happen to be travel inwards through the Solar System toward Earth where IBEX can collect them. This region emits no light and so cannot be observed by conventional telescopes.
The five maps released by the group on Friday show that ENA's are not uniformly spread across the sky, which was the opposite of what was expected with the existing theoretical models of the heliosphere's behavior.
Instead there is there is an arc-shaped region in the sky that is creating a large amount of ENAs, showing up as a bright, narrow ribbon on the maps.
IBEX is also observing many more ENAs from smaller regions in the sky than researchers thought they would.
The ribbon appears to be produced by the alignment of magnetic fields outside our heliosphere. "These observations suggest that the interstellar environment has far more influence on structuring the heliosphere than anyone previously believed," says McComas on the IBEX site.
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Science: The two great ice sheets—Greenland's and Antarctica's—are closely monitored for ice loss.
Surveys of ice-sheet volume made from planes and satellites have quantified these losses, but those assessments have been spotty in time, space, or both.
Now the latest analysis of the most comprehensive, essentially continuous monitoring of the ice sheets shows that the losses have not eased in the past few years. More ominously, losses from both Greenland and Antarctica appear to have accelerated during the past 7 years.
Various: The experiment to smash part of a rocket upper stage into the Moon at high speed (as reported earlier this week) went without a hitch but did not produce a visible plume 10 kilometers high as expected.
Vincent Eke, from the University of Durham, told the Independent that the lunar surface may not have reacted as expected and stressed it was still too early to know if the mission had been a success or failure.
"If it turns out to be as dull as it looked, I'd imagine the soil just didn't respond as was hoped to being hit," said Dr Eke. "It might mean we don't get sufficient data, which would be a shame."
Researchers are now analyzing the data gathered from the event, NASA told NPR, and expect to know for certain if the impact dislodged any water in about two weeks.
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London Times Online: The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) will blast two huge chunks out of the lunar surface on Friday in order to have a closer look at what the Moon is made of.
The plume will be created by dropping the Centaur upper stage of the rocket that fired LCROSS to lunar orbit onto the surface near one of the lunar poles.
When the 2.4-tonne Centaur hits the ground, it will be traveling at 2.5km per second, and throw up a plume of debris 10km high that can be analyzed by instruments on the LCROSS spacecraft.
New Scientist: The first of the asteroid-hunting Pan-STARRS telescopes will be taken apart today in an effort to solve problems with image quality.
The 1.8-metre PS1 telescope is the first of a suite of instruments—the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System - designed to find asteroids and comets with orbits that could bring them close to Earth. Sited atop a volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui, PS1 is the prototype for a planned four telescopes that will image the whole sky visible from Hawaii three times each month.
To scan so much sky, PS1 boasts a 1.4-billion-pixel digital camera and specially designed software to process the terabytes of data collected by the telescope each night.
But since the camera was installed in 2007, the telescope team has been struggling to get PS1's image quality to its targeted level. "There have been problems that we just didn't anticipate," says Pan-STARRS principal investigator Nick Kaiser of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Space.com: NASA has long planned to mine water on the Moon to supply human colonies and future space exploration. Now the discovery of small amounts of water across much of the lunar surface has shifted that vision into fast-forward, with the US space agency pursuing several promising technologies.
A hydrogen reduction plant and lunar rover prospectors have already passed field tests on Hawaii's volcanic soil, and more radical microwave technology is being evaluated.
"You can make back costs fairly quickly [within a year] compared to the launch costs of just throwing tanks of water and oxygen at the moon," said Gerald Sanders, manager of NASA's InSitu Resource Utilization Project.
Still, Sanders cautioned that there are big unknowns—how much water the Moon holds, where it is, and how deep will they have to excavate to get to it.
NPR: NASA is running out of the special kind of plutonium needed to power deep space probes, worrying planetary scientists who say the US urgently needs to restart production of plutonium-238.
But it's unclear whether Congress will provide the $30 million that the administration requested earlier this year for the Department of Energy to get a new program going.
Various: New data and images from flybys of the Moon by the Cassini, the US Deep Impact spacecraft, and a NASA instrument on India's Chandrayaan-1 orbiter provide compelling evidence of traces of water on the Moon. The results were published in Science magazine.
Tentative clues for the existence of water ice on the Moon have existed for sometime. Faith Vilas, director of the Multiple Mirror Telescope in Arizona saw phyllosilicates—minerals formed through heat and water—back in 1999 when the Galileo spacecraft flew by the Moon, but until recently could not get her research accepted for publication.
Both the Clementine and Lunar Prospector spacecrafts saw some hints of hydrogen molecules some years ago. But it was new data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, (LRO) which was discussed at a conference last week that gave hints that conditions would be ripe for water ice.
The LRO's Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment, which measured the temperature of the lunar surface, discovered that some of the polar craters contain some of the lowest temperatures in the solar system, even colder than the surface of Pluto. These measurement were proof that the Moon has permanently dark and extremely cold places said science team member Ashwin Vasavada from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California at the conference.
Data from the LRO's Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector didn't show many neutrons inside the craters but surprisingly showed evidence of ice outside of the craters says University of Arizona astronomer William Boynton. "It actually could be better (for exploration) because getting down inside those craters is very difficult," he adds.
According to the results published in Science, concentrations in sunlit soil might average about one liter per ton of lunar material. That water doesn’t remain on the Moon, but comes and goes each lunar day.
In contrast, water molecules bound to phosphate minerals within volcanic rocks—material that formed well beneath the lunar surface—date back several billion years, says Francis McCubbin of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC A fourth, unpublished study led by McCubbin finds a surprisingly high abundance of this interior water, which may shed new light on how the Moon formed.
"It’s so startling because it’s so pervasive," said Lawrence A. Taylor of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, a co-author of one of the papers that analyzed data from a NASA instrument aboard India’s Chandrayyaan-1 satellite. "It’s like somebody painted the globe," he told the New York Times.
Carle Pieters, of Brown University, who led the Chandrayaan-1 observation team, said: "When we say ‘water on the moon’, we are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles. Water on the moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimeters of the moon’s surface," she told the London Times.
The discovery of more evidence for water on the Moon is spurring excitement over its implications for future space exploration says space.com's Leonard David.
"If ice is found we have to further explore it with landers, rovers, coring drills to assess its distribution and composition," explained Bernard Foing, the European Space Agency (ESA) project scientist for the now defunct ESA SMART-1 lunar orbiter. He is also the director of the International Lunar Exploration Working Group (ILEWG).Following that appraisal, Foing said that the next task is to organize how ice could be partly exploited on the spot in some areas to ease the next steps of human exploration towards an international lunar base.
NASA help hold a press conference to announce the findings at 2:00pm EST earlier today.
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Space.com: Efforts to free the stuck Spirit rover on Mars have been dragging on since May. Last week a NASA official said the robot may never get free.
"We are proceeding very cautiously and exploring all reasonable options," said John Callas, NASA project manager for Spirit and its twin, Opportunity. "There is a very real possibility that Spirit may not be able to get out, and we want to give Spirit the very best chance."
BBC News: Less than two months before the scheduled launch of Russia's flagship planetary spacecraft, officials are set to recommend a delay until 2011.
The Phobos-Grunt mission aims to land on the Martian moon Phobos to collect soil samples and return them to Earth.
Sources within the Russian space industry gave RussianSpaceWeb.com details of the likely postponement.
The Russian space agency Roscosmos is expected to announce the mission's fate within a week.
The agency's decision will be based on results of testing which the spacecraft has been undergoing since July at its assembly facility at NPO Lavochkin in Khimki, near Moscow.
A delay for Phobos-Grunt would also affect China's first Mars probe Yinghuo 1, as the two craft are due to be launched together on the same Zenit rocket.
Science: The Moon isn't made of green cheese and almost certainly doesn't harbor hypothetical particles called "strangelets," an analysis of lunar soil has shown. The result undermines a possible strangelet sighting a decade ago and strengthens the case that the bizarre particles, which protesters once feared might emerge from an atom smasher and consume Earth, don't exist.
"I'm not surprised," says Frank Wilczek, a theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. "It would be a great discovery to find strangelets, but the theoretical case for them is pretty shaky." Still, he says, "it's not crazy" to look for them.
The Daily Telegraph: US scientists are trying to map the complex interplay of attractive forces between planets and moons in order to reduce the amount of fuel used by spacecraft. The Genesis spacecraft used this technique in 2004 to cut its fuel load by a factor of ten.
Depicted by computer graphics, the optimal journey pathways look like strands of spaghetti that wrap around planetary bodies and snake between them.
The pathways connect sites called Lagrange points where gravitational forces balance out.
Virginia Tech's Shane Ross said: "I like to think of [these tubes] as being similar to ocean currents, but they are gravitational currents."
"If you're in a parking orbit round the Earth, and one of them intersects your trajectory, you just need enough fuel to change your velocity and now you're on a new trajectory that is free."
"It's not the same as a [gravitational] slingshot," said Ross. "Slingshots don't put you in orbit round a moon, whereas this does."
The Times of India: Contrary to India's space agency ISRO's explanation that Chandrayaan-1's orbit around the Moon had been raised from 100 km to 200 km in May this year for a better view of the Moon's surface, it is now known that this was because of a miscalculation of the Moon's temperature that had led to faulty thermal protection. As stated in the Times of India:
Admitting this, T K Alex, director of the ISRO Satellite Centre in Bangalore, said, "We assumed that the temperature at 100 km above the Moon's surface would be around 75 degrees Celsius. However, it was more than 75 degrees and problems started to surface. We had to raise the orbit to 200km."
On May 19, however, ISRO said it had raised Chandrayaan's orbit to "enable further studies on orbit perturbations, gravitational field variation of the Moon and also enable imaging of the lunar surface with a wider swath."It now transpires that heating problems on the craft had begun as early as November 25, 2008, forcing ISRO to deactivate some of the payloads—there were 11 in all.
As a result, some of the experiments could not be carried out which raised questions on whether the pre-launch thermal vacuum test done on the spacecraft at the ISRO Satellite Centre in Bangalore was adequate.
Sources at NASA headquarters told Physics Today last year that they were concerned with the documentation and test results provided by ISRO for integrating two NASA-funded experiments onto the spacecraft: M3, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, and miniSAR, a Synthetic Aperture Radar system to search for lunar polar ice.
NPR: Today, NASA released the first collection of views from the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope. Thanks to new imagers installed in May 2009 during a visit from the space shuttle Atlantis, Hubble can now see farther, clearer, and across a wider spectrum than ever before.
NYTimes.com: Updated 9/14/09: Lawrence M. Krauss, the director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University asks in the New York Times:
The most challenging impediment to human travel to Mars does not seem to involve the complicated launching, propulsion, guidance or landing technologies but something far more mundane: the radiation emanating from the Sun's cosmic rays. The shielding necessary to ensure the astronauts do not get a lethal dose of solar radiation on a round trip to Mars may very well make the spacecraft so heavy that the amount of fuel needed becomes prohibitive.There is, however, a way to surmount this problem while reducing the cost and technical requirements, but it demands that we ask this vexing question: Why are we so interested in bringing the Mars astronauts home again?
Update: Krause also appeared on NPR's Science Friday to discuss some of the ideas in his editorial in more depth.
Inside Science News Service: Like a person walking across a carpet, the international space station (ISS) accumulates a charge as it orbits the Earth as the ionosphere—the upper atmosphere that the ISS passes through—contains charged particles.
The interaction of charges in Earth's upper atmosphere with spacecraft surfaces have been studied for many years, but predicting how they will behave in a specific situation—such as an accumulation of excess charge on an airlock—is very difficult.
Furthermore, large differences in charging between two adjacent surfaces can lead to an arc discharge that can physically harm surfaces of the ISS, especially the thermal control coating. If such an arc discharge were to strike an astronaut, it could be very dangerous.
A new voltage-sampling device for monitoring the local electrical environment of the ISS has been successfully tested. The device, called the floating potential measurement unit, was built by scientists from Utah State University in Logan, Utah. One of the instrument team members, Aroh Barjatya of the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, said that the peak measured voltage is about 35 volts which does not represent a significant threat for an arc-discharge. But as the space station increases in size as it achieves its final configuration, it could build up electrical current that could trigger an arc.
The ISS has a device called the plasma contactor unit that can mitigate and counter any charging hazard, and it can be used during spacewalks so that astronauts who touch an outer surface of the space station aren't in danger of arcing.
Barjatya said that a side benefit from the new voltage sampling device is that its measurements can be used to provide new "in situ" measurements for researchers who study the ionosphere.
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Disclaimer: Inside Science News Service is a service provided by the American Institute of Physics
Space.com: Officials are hurriedly looking for ways to save fuel on NASA's $79 million lunar impactor mission after a crisis Saturday caused the spacecraft to burn more than half of its remaining propellant.
The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite used about 140 kilograms of maneuvering fuel to maintain the probe's orientation in space Saturday, according to Dan Andrews, the mission's project manager at Ames Research Center.
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New Scientist: The US government is launching a competition, which will run until the end of 2010, to find the best way of tracking pieces of junk down to the size of a pool ball. Three aerospace companies—Northrop Grumman, Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon—have each been awarded $30 million by US Air Force Space Command to design a "space fence" that will constantly report the motion of all objects 5 centimetres wide and larger in medium and low-Earth orbits.
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BBC News: A Nasa space telescope has found evidence of a high-speed collision between two burgeoning planets orbiting a young star.
Astronomers say the cosmic smash-up is similar to the one that formed our Moon some four billion years ago, when a Mars-sized object crashed into Earth.
NPR: NASA is taking to the skies to encourage a new generation of scientists to study Earth.
The agency is hoping its new Student Airborne Research Program (SARP), a six-week session that includes research aboard a DC-8 flying laboratory, will get young people excited about solving problems like warming oceans, rising carbon dioxide levels, and new pollutants in the air.
Science News: Saturn’s moon Titan has an environment that resembles Earth’s at the time that life first got a foothold, suggest new findings from the Cassini spacecraft.
Two close flybys have gathered fresh evidence that ammonia, most likely mixed with water ice, has recently erupted onto the surface of the moon. The likely presence of ammonia on Titan’s icy surface, combined with the abundance of methane and nitrogen in the moon’s thick atmosphere, together suggest that Titan may host a prebiotic brew, says Cassini scientist Robert Nelson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The findings were reported by Nelson 5 August in Rio de Janeiro at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union
.Physics Today: NASA's Kepler space telescope, which was launched in March, has detected the atmosphere of a known giant gas planet, demonstrating that it is ready to look for new exoplanets.
The find is based on a relatively short 10 days of test data collected before the official start of science operations. Typically months or years of observations need to be made to detect exoplanets.
"As NASA's first exoplanets mission, Kepler has made a dramatic entrance on the planet-hunting scene," said Jon Morse, director of the Science Mission Directorate's Astrophysics Division at NASA headquarters in Washington.
The results were published in Science magazine.
Kepler team members say these new data indicate the mission is indeed capable of finding Earth-like planets, if they exist. Kepler will spend the next three and a half years searching for planets.
The telescope will do this by looking for periodic dips in the brightness of stars, which occur when orbiting planets transit, or cross in front of, the stars.
"When the light curves from tens of thousands of stars were shown to the Kepler science team, everyone was awed; no one had ever seen such exquisitely detailed measurements of the light variations of so many different types of stars," said William Borucki, the principal science investigator and lead author of the paper.
The observations were collected from a planet called HAT-P-7, known to transit a star located about 1,000 light-years from Earth. The planet orbits the star in just 2.2 days and is 26 times closer than Earth is to the Sun. Its orbit, combined with a mass somewhat larger than the planet Jupiter, classifies this planet as a "hot Jupiter." It is so close to its star, the planet is as hot as the glowing red heating element on a stove.
The Kepler measurements show the transit from the previously detected HAT-P-7. However, these new measurements are so precise, they also show a smooth rise and fall of the light between transits caused by the changing phases of the planet (see right image), similar to those of our Moon. This is a combination of both the light emitted from the planet and the light reflected off the planet. The smooth rise and fall of light is also punctuated by a small drop in light, called an occultation, exactly halfway between each transit. An occultation happens when a planet passes behind a star.
The new Kepler data can be used to study this hot Jupiter in unprecedented detail. The depth of the occultation and the shape and amplitude of the light curve show the planet has an atmosphere with a day-side temperature of about 2376 °Celsius. Little of this heat is carried to the cool night side. The occultation time compared to the main transit time shows the planet has a circular orbit. The discovery of light from this planet confirms the predictions by researchers and theoretical models that the emission would be detectable by Kepler.
The observed brightness variation is just one and a half times what is expected for a transit caused by an Earth-sized planet. Although this is already the highest precision ever obtained for an observation of this star, Kepler will be even more precise after analysis software being developed for the mission is completed.
"This early result shows the Kepler detection system is performing right on the mark," said David Koch, deputy principal investigator of NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California. "It bodes well for Kepler's prospects to be able to detect Earth-size planets."
Related Link
Kepler’s Optical Phase Curve of the Exoplanet HAT-P-7b
Physics Today: NASA's Opportunity rover has eyed an odd-shaped, dark rock on the surface of Mars—NASA scientists think it could be a meteorite.
Above is a close-up view of "Block Island," the odd-shaped, dark rock, which may be a meteorite. The rock was imaged with the navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity on sol 1959 (July 28, 2009). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The NASA team spotted the rock, which measures about 0.6 meters across, on July 18 in the opposite direction from which the rover was driving. Currently Opportunity has been directed to approach the rock for further analysis with the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer to get composition measurements and to confirm if indeed it is a meteorite.
SPACE.com: The Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment is the only moon investigation to continuously operate since the Apollo 11 mission.
The experiment studies the Earth-Moon system and beams the data to labs around the world, including NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.
Data from the ranging experiment has been used to learn—among other things—that the moon has a fluid core and is moving away from the Earth, and that Einstein's Theory of Relativity is accurate.
The instrument itself, called a lunar laser ranging reflector, was originally intended to accurately calculate the distance between the Earth and moon by measuring the round-trip time of a laser fired from Earth to a reflector on the instrument.
Washingtonpost.com: When it comes to space, we've outsourced the jobs to machines says Howard McCurdy in the Washington Post.
In his famous 1945 article anticipating communications satellites, Arthur C. Clarke opined that humans would need to operate the orbital switching stations. Wernher von Braun, who proposed a large space telescope, was sure that astronauts would be stationed nearby. For nearly every outpost in space, from spaceships and space stations to lunar colonies and Martian research bases, we thought humans would be there. We were wrong.We did not anticipate the incredible advances in machine technology that the second half of the 20th century would bring. Technologies such as remote sensing, digital imaging, solid-state electronics, electric power generation, space communication and computer capacity reduced the costs and improved the capabilities of robotic spacecraft dramatically. We don't need technicians to change the film in space telescopes—the telescopes don't use film—and we don't need astronauts to maintain communications satellites.
Various: The 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing has led to widespread coverage in the media. Some articles and websites that may be of interest to Physics Today readers include:
From the Physics Today archives:
Google Moon has a visual map of the landing site.
Above: The original video of the moment that the Apollo Eagle module landed on the Moon.
Space.com on how the Apollo program is influencing the design of the Orion capsule that will lead NASA's new efforts to return to the Moon. The main two differences says, NASA engineer Jiff Geffre, is the electronics—which allows for significant automation of the spacecraft's flight—and the endurance—Orion will be able to stay on the Moon for days instead of hours. This builds on work they have done for the space shuttle.
Nature interviews Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt—the first and last scientist to touch the lunar surface. Schmitt decrys the lack of geologists in the next batch of astronauts to go through training and expresses skepticism that the Moon was formed by the collsion of another body with the Earth. "The primary fact that makes me sceptical is that we know, from the group of samples brought back from the Moon called pyroclastic glasses, that there is a reservoir of volatile elements deep in the Moon that, under the hypothesis of a giant impact, should not be there," he says.
A series of opinion pieces on whether the US should return to the Moon, include commentary by former NASA administrator Michael Griffin:
What is most striking about this 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon is that we can no longer do what we're celebrating. Not "do not choose to," but "can't."
By the 40th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Oregon Trail was carrying settlers to the West. By the 40th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, a web of rail traffic crisscrossed the continent. By the 40th anniversary of Lindbergh's epic transatlantic flight, thousands of people in jetliners retraced his route in comfort and safety every day. And on the 40th anniversary of Sputnik, hundreds of satellites were orbiting the Earth.
Only in human spaceflight do we celebrate the anniversary of an achievement that seems more difficult to repeat than to accomplish the first time. Only in human spaceflight can we find in museums things that most of us in the space business wish we still had today.
...At this 40th anniversary of Apollo, we need to ask ourselves a simple question: Do we want to have a real space program, or do we just want to talk about what we used to be able to do?
And from Tom Wolfe who points out that while Armstong walked on the Moon, NASA was already laying off scientists as funding for the Apollo program tapered off.
The reason why you have to dig a little bit back into the space race, says Wolfe, who describes the atmosphere and fear that existed in the US at the time of the 1957 launch of Sputnik:
Physicists were quick to point out that nobody would choose space as a place from which to attack Earth. The spacecraft, the missile, the Earth itself, plus the Earth’s own rotation, would be traveling at wildly different speeds upon wildly different geometric planes. You would run into the notorious “three body problem” and then some. You’d have to be crazy. The target would be untouched and you would wind up on the floor in a fetal ball, twitching and gibbering. On the other hand, the rockets that had lifted the Soviets’ five-ton manned ships into orbit were worth thinking about. They were clearly powerful enough to reach any place on Earth with nuclear warheads....
...Every time you picked up a newspaper you saw headlines with the phrase, SPACE GAP ... SPACE GAP ... SPACE GAP ... The Soviets had produced a generation of scientific geniuses — while we slept, fat and self-satisfied! Educators began tearing curriculums apart as soon as Sputnik went up, introducing the New Math and stressing another latest thing, the Theory of Self-Esteem.
And apart from Wernher von Braun, there was no one who could successfully defend NASA against Congress on philosophical grounds, which was its undoing, says Wolfe.
Clara Moskowitz looks at why it is so hard to go back. This time NASA is aiming for a sustained human presence instead of short visits. Moreover, NASA's current rockets and space shuttles aren't capable of surpassing low-Earth orbit to reach the Moon with the amount of gear required for a manned expedition.
Speaking Sunday at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum (from the left in above image), NASA Mission Control creator Chris Kraft, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins. (Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls).
The International Geophysical Year helped heat up the space race, said Armstrong, and provided a mechanism for engendering cooperation between former adversaries through the first Apollo–Soyuz meeting in space in 1975, to the later joint missions to Mir and the International Space Station. "In that sense, among others, it was an exceptional national investment for both sides," he said.
Paul Guinnessy
NPR: An exhaustive, three-year search for some tapes that contained the original footage of the Apollo 11 moonwalk has concluded that they were probably destroyed during a period when NASA was erasing old magnetic tapes and reusing them to record satellite data.
"We're all saddened that they're not there. We all wish we had 20-20 hindsight," says Dick Nafzger, a TV specialist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, who helped lead the search team.
"I don't think anyone in the NASA organization did anything wrong," Nafzger says. "I think it slipped through the cracks, and nobody's happy about it."
NASA has, however, offered up a consolation prize for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission—the agency has taken the best available broadcast television footage and contracted with a digital restoration firm to enhance it, so that the public can see the first moonwalk in more detail than ever before.
Science: India's first moon probe, Chandrayaan-1, has suffered a critical malfunction that jeopardizes the remainder of the mission. The spacecraft, which entered lunar orbit last November, can no longer orient itself with high precision. "Its pointing accuracy has been compromised," says a mission engineer who asked for anonymity.
NYTimes.com: Spaceflight is now embedded in our culture, so much so that it is usually taken for granted—a far cry from the old days when the world held its breath for Alan B. Shepard Jr and John Glenn and watched, transfixed, the scene at Tranquility Base. That was then; no astronauts today are household names. Yet space traffic is thick and integral to the infrastructure of modern life.
John Noble Wilford looks back to the early days of spaceflight in which he wrote what he calls "the greatest story of my career 'Men Land on Moon."
Photos about the Moon can be found in their media blog, or track the history of the Apollo 11 mission in real time at WeChooseTheMoon.org, a web site that is re-creating the entire Apollo 11 trip as it happened.
SPACE.com: The inner workings of sunspots—those dark blotches that mark intense magnetic activity on the sun's surface—have long been a mystery, but a new computer simulation is providing a more realistic look inside them.
Understanding the complex dynamics that drive sunspots could help scientists better understand and predict the potential impacts on communications systems and climate patterns of the geomagnetic storms produced by these solar blights.
"This is the first time we have a model of an entire sunspot," said Matthias Rempel of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. "If you want to understand all the drivers of Earth's atmospheric system, you have to understand how sunspots emerge and evolve."
Caltech/JPL: In this spoof of old TV action shows, Sean Astin, Osa Wallander, and Betty White search for a way to help the Spitzer Space Telescope after it runs out of coolant. The video was produced with the assistance of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Spitzer ran out of coolant on May 15 and as the video suggests, some of the instruments on the observatory will still be able to operate normally.
SPACE.com: There have been raging debates over the years as to whether there is frozen water on the moon or not.
Earlier today two NASA spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the LCROSS impactor, blasted off on NASA's first mission to the moon in more than a decade.
Any ice they discover could not only answer some challenging questions about the geological history of the Moon, but also to support further space exploration.
OrlandoSentinel: With a White House–ordered review of its next-generation Constellation rocket program just weeks away, NASA faces some unwelcome news: Key milestones for the agency's Ares I rocket and Orion crew capsule are falling further behind schedule because of design flaws and technical challenges.
An important test of the Orion's emergency escape system that was supposed to happen last year will not come off before November and could slip further.
A review of the proposed fixes for the violent shaking at liftoff that has plagued development of the Ares I has been delayed from this summer to December.
Even the first test flight of the Ares design—a mock-up rocket called the Ares I-X—has been moved from April to July to August and now possibly September.
David Leckrone, the senior project scientist for the Hubble, said NASA's new strategy for the post–space shuttle era does not include servicing scientific instruments in space, and he fears that vast amounts of accumulated knowledge and technical expertise will quickly vanish.
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SPACE.com: The Hubble Space Telescope appears to be working well after NASA put the 19-year-old observatory through a battery of tests after its final service mission by an astronaut repair crew.
Ed Weiler, NASA's science missions chief, said to reporters at a press conference that Hubble is in the midst of meticulous systems and calibration checks following the successful upgrades and repairs by Atlantis shuttle astronauts.
"All of those have gone beautifully," said Weiler. "Everything is going well, as far as I can tell."
The calibrations and electronics tests should run their course by the end of summer, with a new and improved Hubble once more ready for science observations in late August, Weiler said.
Spirit has been roaming the red planet for more than five years, but its roving days could be over unless scientists and engineers back on Earth can figure out how to get the robot unstuck.
Spacewalkers Michael Massimino and Michael Good left the space shuttle at 9:45 a.m. EDT (1345 GMT) to resuscitate the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, which failed after a power failure in 2004.
Various: Europe's Herschel and Planck telescopes have blasted into space on an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou in French Guiana, reports the BBC. The far-infrared and submillimeter Herschel observatory is the largest telescope put into space. The Planck telescope will survey the cosmic microwave background.
Meanwhile the space shuttle Atlantis has captured the Hubble Space Telescope and started the first spacewalks to install the new Wide Field Camera 3 into the 19-year-old observatory. "It looks beautiful and in good shape," said astronaut John Grunsfeld to NASA ground control in Houston, Texas. However, a stubborn bolt attached to a grounding strap is causing the astronauts some difficulty, reports space.com.
The Washington Post: With all systems go for a 2:01 p.m. launch of the space shuttle Atlantis on the final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, a key fact keeps popping up: The Hubble is not a single instrument. It's an agglomeration of instruments. It's a big, cavernous spacecraft capable of housing an ensemble of devices.
MSNBC: Final telescope servicing mission brings veterans and rookies together
Information Week: The next-generation Orion shuttle is slated for 2015, leaving a five-year gap in which the United States will not operate its own space shuttles.
Wired: American spacecraft had to dodge space debris four times in 2008, NASA revealed Tuesday, a fact that highlights both the extent of the space junk problem and the primary mitigation option open to NASA.
Nature: A fresh look at the sticky problem of Moon dust may help the next generation of lunar explorers.
MSNBC : But the space agency still has no chief to make the $230 billion call.
The rover, one of two NASA vehicles operating on Mars, has a broken right wheel. It has dust on its solar panels. It's operating at about 30 percent of normal power. Various sensors and software programs have gone screwy.
Then, on April 9, Spirit refused to wake up. The rover is designed to sleep at night, when there is no sunlight hitting the solar panels. But Spirit snoozed right through its wake-up call. It happened three times in succession. Finally a backup timer got Spirit up and moving again after a 27-hour slumber.
CNET: On Thursday, NASA released an initial set of images from the Kepler mission, showing the "star-rich sky" where the telescope will soon begin searching for Earth-like planets.
Perhaps no discovery was more surprising than the detection of an odd type of salt that Phoenix scientists think could have an important impact on the Martian water cycle and the planet's ability to support life.
In a set of papers presented last week at the 40th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in The Woodlands, Texas, several Phoenix team members put forth their ideas on how the class of salts, called perchlorates, might affect Mars's water cycle; how it might boost or inhibit potential Martian life; how it might form a sludge underneath Mars' polar cap, lubricating them and allowing them to flow, as glaciers do on Earth; and how the salt even got there in the first place.
To say that he was excited would be an understatement. As an astronaut, Dr. Grunsfeld had twice journeyed to space to make repairs on humanity’s most vaunted eye on the cosmos, experiences he had described to a high-level panel pondering Hubble’s fate only a few months before as the most meaningful in his life. He was looking forward to leading the third and final servicing mission, which had been delayed by the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew the year before.
Thinking that the mission was now being scheduled, Dr. Grunsfeld raced to Washington, only to learn that Sean O’Keefe, NASA’s administrator, had canceled it on the ground that it was too risky. Wearing his other hat as NASA’s chief scientist, Dr. Grunsfeld now had the job of telling the world that the space agency was basically abandoning its greatest scientific instrument at the same time that it was laying plans for the even riskier and more expensive effort to return humans to the Moon.
He said he felt as if he had been hit by a two-by-four.
“Being an astronaut, there are not a lot of things that have really shocked me in my life,” Dr. Grunsfeld said in a recent interview. But, he added, “I don’t think anybody could ever prepare themselves for, you know, trying to bury something that they have said, ‘Hey, this is worth risking my life for.’ ”
He went home that January night and wondered whether he should resign.
On May 12, he and six other astronauts commanded by Scott Altman are scheduled to ride to the telescope’s rescue one last time aboard the shuttle Atlantis. This will be the fifth and last time astronauts visit Hubble. When the telescope’s batteries and gyros finally run out of juice sometime in the middle of the next decade, NASA plans to send a rocket and drop it into the ocean.
If all goes well in what Dr. Grunsfeld described as “brain surgery” in space, Hubble will be left at the apex of its scientific capability. As chief Hubble repairman for the past 18 years, he has been intertwined with the Hubble telescope physically, as well as intellectually and emotionally. “He might be the only person on Earth who has observed with Hubble and touched Hubble,” said Bruce Margon, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and former deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Education is one of the most important topics to Americans. As a nation we devote huge resources to educating our children, local school boards and state government last year spent over $800 billion on education. At the federal level, the Department of Education's budget last year was just over $57 billion. This represents substantially more money than the nation spent on national defense in all its aspects including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, national intelligence, and the department of homeland security.
In fact, the national average secondary schooling expenditure per child in the United States is third in the world, behind only Switzerland and Finland and well ahead of Germany, Japan, South Korea, and China.
Yet, by all objective measures, American students are significantly lagging in almost every area to their foreign counterparts. Math, Science, even language testing scores lag significantly behind other modern industrialized nations.
Equally troubling is the decline in college graduates in engineering, mathematics, and science.
During the 20th century, there were two significant periods of growth in the training of American engineers, mathematicians, and scientists. The first was World War II and its immediate aftermath. Certainly we would rather not expand our capability based on a war, and the circumstances of the GI bill may not be applicable. The other period of expansion was shortly after Sputnik and the decline started with the end of Apollo. Is there a lesson here?
If you really want students to learn, they must be interested; more than that students must be excited, they must be inspired.
We need inspiration, [and] what NASA has provided in the past, NASA can provide again: inspiration.
Los Angeles Times: A research team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore used the Spitzer infrared telescope to search for hydrogen cyanide in the dust and gas swirling around 61 young stars. Hydrogen cyanide is a component of a compound basic to DNA, which is found in every living creature on Earth.
After breaking down the light of these stars with a spectrograph, the researchers found hydrogen cyanide in 30% of the yellow, sun-like stars. They found none around cooler, smaller stars, such as M-dwarfs and brown dwarfs.
Assuming that life, if it forms, is based on DNA, "around cooler stars, there might not be enough hydrogen cyanide" to kick-start the complex chemical reactions necessary to form life, said Ilaria Pascucci of Johns Hopkins, lead author of the research, which is appearing this week in the Astrophysical Journal.
To avoid hanging separately, say scientists and managers in the United States and Europe, the two agencies must agree to hang together in an unprecedented partnership. This summer they intend to unveil a sweeping plan for a decade of collaboration that could kick off with a joint 2016 mission and culminate a decade later in the return of a martian sample to Earth. "This is a big change," says David Southwood, ESA science chief. "But we have to think about Mars differently." Adds his counterpart at NASA, Edward Weiler: "We've got to do this together."
The Washington Post: NASA has a space station, three space shuttles, two moon rockets under development, a fleet of robotic space probes, dozens of satellites, tens of thousands of employees and a budget that is creeping toward $20 billion a year. What it needs is a boss.
They eventually came to the attention of Nancy Evans, a no-nonsense archivist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Evans was at her desk in the 1970s when a clerk walked into her office, asking what he should do with a truck-sized heap of data tapes that had been released from storage.
"What do you usually do with things like that?" she asked.
"We usually destroy them," he replied.
"Do not destroy those tapes," Evans commanded.
She talked her bosses at JPL into storing them in a lab warehouse. "I could not morally get rid of this stuff," said Evans.
The full collection of Lunar Orbiter data, NASA's first mission to successfully visit the Moon, amounted to 2,500 tapes. Assembled on pallets, they constituted an imposing monolith 10 feet wide, 20 feet long and 6 feet high.
There was an additional problem, the rare machines that could read the tapes, were each 7 feet tall and weighing nearly a ton, and NASA didn't have one.
More than forty years later, a group of volunteers working at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA, have restored some of these early tape machines, and published the first of more than 2000 images from these early NASA missions (see above left).
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Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project
Examiner.com: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has selected United Launch Alliance of Littleton, Colo. to launch the agency's Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) space physics mission.
The New York Times: The space shuttle Discovery will remain on the ground until at least Sunday after a hydrogen leak scrubbed a launch attempt on Wednesday.
The indictment accuses Stadd of steering money from an earth science appropriation to Mississippi State University, which was paying him as a consultant. Stadd is also accused of lying to NASA ethics officials investigating the matter.
He faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted on all three charges. NASA officials on Friday declined to comment on the indictment.
Science: Harvard University hit the brakes last week as it was getting ready to build one of the country's largest new academic science centers--flagging another possible casualty of the economic downturn.
Space.com: NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has suffered an apparent glitch that has left the spacecraft in a protective safe mode and stalled science observations as it circles the red planet, the space agency announced
late Wednesday.
The malfunction occurred on Monday when the orbiter unexpectedly rebooted its main computer and entered safe mode, an automatic safeguard designed to protect the spacecraft from further damage when it detects a glitch.
NPR: NASA plans to launch a satellite on Tuesday that will help measure carbon dioxide on a global basis. Carbon dioxide is the single most important gas involved in global warming, so understanding where it comes from -- and where it goes -- is essential.
This is the Mars Science Laboratory, the space agency's next big mission to the most Earth-like planet in the solar system. But it's been a magnet for controversy, and a reminder that the robotic exploration of other worlds is never a snap, especially when engineers decide to get ambitious.
The launch has been delayed for two years because of technical glitches. Approved at $1.63 billion, the mission's price tag will be at least $2.2 billion, NASA now estimates. Critics say the cost has really quadrupled since the project was first dreamed up. What no one can doubt is that ambitious missions tend to become costly ones, which jangles the nerves of officials who know how easy it is for a Mars mission to go bust.
Wired: NASA researchers are on a quest to take the boom out of sonic booms, a development that could lead to a new generation of supersonic aircraft and perhaps even usher in a new era of supersonic passenger flight.
Related Links
How to avoid contaminating planetary neighbors NPR
"It's been a superb flight," says David Pierce, chief of NASA's balloon programm at Goddard Space Flight Center's Wallops facility in Virginia. "We're proving this is a viable platform." Balloon flights are a lot cheaper than satellites for conducting experiments, but the short time they remain aloft has been a drawback to long-term cosmic-ray and high- altitude atmospheric experiments.
This new balloon design suggests that a $50,000 balloon could replace a million-dollar spacecraft for short-to-medium-term research experiments.
Space.com: NASA's plans for the mammoth Ares V rocket could do more than just launch new lunar landers and cargo to the moon. It could also haul massive telescopes that dwarf the Hubble Space Telescope or fling deep space probes on faster missions to the outer planets.
USA Today: NASA and Northrop Grumman recently unveiled two unmanned drones that will be used for atmospheric research. One of the two Global Hawks, a version of the Air Force's top-of-the-line unmanned spy plane, will be outfitted with science instruments this spring and conduct its first earth science mission in June for NASA.
The planes, which are capable of staying aloft for more than 30 hours, will sample greenhouse gases responsible for ozone depletion and verify measurements by NASA's Aura atmosphere research satellite.
"It's a whole new ballgame for us," said project scientist Paul A. Newman of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
The balloon, which was launched on December 28, 2008, from McMurdo Station in Antarctica, is 7 million cubic feet and is said to be the largest single-cell, super-pressure, fully sealed balloon ever flown. When the project--which NASA is conducting in coordination with the National Science Foundation--is completed, the space agency should have a 22 million cubic foot balloon to work with.
NASA said that long-duration high-altitude balloon missions are far more cost-effective than satellites and that a chief benefit is that the instruments used can be easily retrieved and re-used.
NPR: On Christmas Eve in 1968, Americans turned on their TV sets to watch something unprecedented: a live broadcast from outer space.
BBC: NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has finally spotted rocks on the Red Planet that bear carbonate minerals.
BBC: The US space agency is set to launch a satellite that can map in detail where carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere.
The Associated Press: NASA is scrapping a controversial piece of hardware from its next-generation Mars rover that would have allowed the spacecraft to store rock fragments in a mini-basket for a future mission.
The Space Fellowship: An international team of scientists who analyzed data from the Gamma Ray Spectrometer onboard NASA’s Mars Odyssey reports new evidence for the controversial idea that oceans once covered about a third of ancient Mars.
MSNBC: NASA images reveal features which are unlike anything on Earth
Orlando Sentinel: In the latest blow to NASA's next-generation manned spacecraft, congressional investigators have concluded that the Constellation program is likely to cost $7 billion more than budgeted if it is to fly by its target date of March 2015. Without extra money, it could be delayed by 18 months or more.
Whitworthian: A NASA scientist shared the significance and relevance of future US space exploration plans in a lecture to Whitworth students October 30.
Orlando Sentinel: Bit by bit, the new rocket ship that is supposed to blast America into the second space age and return astronauts to the Moon appears to be coming undone.
MSNBC: Unfounded criticism of America's next-generation Moon rocket is hurting NASA morale but hasn't stopped progress on the craft, the space agency's administrator Michael Griffin said Tuesday.
BBC: NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (Ibex) spacecraft has been launched into Earth orbit to study the edge of our solar system.
The Register: NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (formerly known as GLAST) has spied the first "gamma-ray-only" pulsar - a 10 000-year-old stellar remnant, which uniquely doesn't appear to emit pulses at either radio, visible light, or x-ray wavelengths in common with the 1800 or so similar objects cataloged to date.
The New York Times: Satisfied that they know what caused the Hubble Space Telescope to shut down two weeks ago, NASA engineers will begin to reboot it Wednesday morning, the space agency said Tuesday.
MSNBC: Technical, schedule difficulties ARE certain to push mission cost past $2 billion.
The New York Times: This place was once no place, a secret military base northeast of Moscow that did not show up on maps. The Soviet Union trained its astronauts here to fight on the highest battlefield of the cold war: space.
MSNBC: Robots and humans come together for space agency’s next 50 years.
The Washington Post: After a half a century at work, look back at how NASA began and images of what its missions have brought back to Earth.
The Register: NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity is about to set off on what may be its final odyssey - a seven-mile (11.3 km) jaunt to a crater around 20 times larger than the Victoria Crater from which it extricated itself earlier this month.
Computerworld: New orbiter designed to study Red Planet's atmosphere and climate history
BBC: The US space agency (NASA) has approved its next orbiter mission to Mars.
Houston Chronicle: Damage assessments from Hurricane Ike at NASA's Johnson Space Center continued on Sunday, and a space agency spokesman said it could be late this week or sometime next week before the facility is ready to reopen for normal operations.
Reuters: The shuttle crew being dispatched to work on the Hubble Space Telescope faces a higher-than-usual chance of disaster due to orbital debris, the shuttle program manager said on Monday.
Daily Tech: An e-mail obtained by The Orlando Sentinel reveals NASA is looking into the plausibility of postponing the retirement of its current fleet of three space shuttles until 2015, when the Orion is scheduled to be completed.
United Press International: The US space agency says it has renamed its newest spacecraft -- the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST -- in honor of Enrico Fermi.
Released Thursday by the National Research Council, the 158-page report stemmed from a 10-month review of NASA's Exploration Technology Development Program (ETDP) which is charged with developing and providing the new technologies required for the agency's return to the moon and beyond.
A spring-and-damper ring will separate the first and second stages of Ares 1 rockets, which NASA is developing for missions to the International Space Station, the moon and later Mars.
Space.com: NASA mission managers decided Thursday not to push for earlier launch dates for two space shuttle missions set to blast off this fall.
The shuttle Atlantis will remain on track for a planned Oct. 8 launch to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope while its sister ship Endeavour will continue toward a Nov. 10 liftoff to the International Space Station, NASA spokesperson Kyle Herring told SPACE.com.
The Register: NASA has put back the planned launch of its Orion spacecraft for a year, meaning the first test launch won't be until 2014 at the earliest.
San Francisco Chronicle: It took Dwayne Brown, a leading NASA public affairs spokesman, to tell a news teleconference: "There have been reports over the weekend that NASA had made a major finding that it was withholding from the public and this speculation has fueled a host of rumors."
Neither the White House nor the president's science advisers have been briefed on the new findings by anyone, Brown said.
Flight Global: NASA expects to sign an agreement to test a new propulsion system on the International Space Station, according to the US space agency's administrator Michael Griffin.
Nature News: Representatives of nine national space agencies signed an agreement on 24 July to create an International Lunar Network, which aims to plant a system of six or more seismic stations on the Moon.
USA Today: Morten Bo Madsen spends his work day crunching data on a laptop seated in front of a clear plastic-covered box about the size of a widescreen computer monitor that emits a startlingly bright blue light.
Madsen is one of the 150 scientists and engineers working on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander mission. The bright light keeps Madsen's internal clock in check, because Madsen is living on Mars time.
Mars' day is 40 minutes longer than Earth's, and the start of the Martian day is always changing with respect to Earth time, as a result of their respective orbital motions.
Living on a schedule that shifts forward by 40 minutes everyday can wreak havoc on the human body, creating an effect that is essentially like perpetual jet lag.
NPR: NASA's Phoenix lander has been on Mars for more than two months. It has sampled the soil, measured the weather and snapped thousands of pictures. One of its missions is to determine whether the Martian arctic is able to support life.
Los Angeles Times: The $900-million effort, scheduled for launch Oct. 8, will be the fifth and last Hubble servicing mission, and engineers and scientists on the ground in Maryland have great hopes for the upgrade to one of the world's best-known scientific instruments.
"I think it will put Hubble at the apex of its capabilities," said David Leckrone, senior project scientist for the Hubble. Leckrone and other NASA scientists geared up for the launch at NASA Goddard, which manages Hubble's day-to-day operations. Scientific operations are based at the Space Telescope Science Institute on the John Hopkins University campus in Baltimore.
Scientists at Goddard tested sensitive scientific equipment in an acoustic chamber to make sure that what goes into space can withstand the violent shaking that characterizes every shuttle launch and the eight-minute ride into orbit.
SpaceRef : NASA, in partnership with the Exploratorium Science Center, San Francisco, Calif., and the University of California at Berkeley, will transmit live images of the Aug. 1, 2008, total eclipse of the sun.
Updated 01 August 2008: The Ellipse is now over, and Reuters reports that
thousands watched the ellipse in awe.
The Associated Press: At least one of many large, lake-like features on Saturn's moon Titan studied by the international Cassini spacecraft contains liquid hydrocarbons, making it the only body in the solar system besides Earth known to have liquid on its surface, NASA said Wednesday.
Government Computer News: A project funded by the National Science Foundation will use Iridium satellites to study weather patterns in space.
The Register: This week the first annual Lunar Science Conference is being held at the NASA/AMES Research Center in Mountain View, California. It's being run by the newly-formed NASA Lunar Science Institute — whose job it will be make dust vapor studies look sexy while doling out $2m grants to teams of lucky researchers. Reporter Austin Modine irreverently
summarizes some of the discussions held at the conference over why NASA should head back to the Moon.
Houston Chronicle: Two days after telling an online town hall meeting that NASA had "failed us miserably" and "wastes a vast amount of money," Houston Rep. John Culberson said Thursday he was weighing legislation to overhaul the structure of the space agency responsible for about 20,000 Houston-area jobs.
NPR: NASA is carefully tracking some 500 pieces of debris from a Russian intelligence satellite that may pose a hazard for the international space station. The satellite exploded in March; another piece of it broke apart in June.
Washington Post: NASA scientists, engineers and astronauts are finalizing plans to fly the space shuttle this fall on a mission to the Hubble Space Telescope to repair and upgrade the orbiting observatory that revolutionized astronomy. The long-delayed servicing mission will be the last for the Hubble, NASA says, but it will allow the telescope to perform at its highest level ever for the remaining five or six years of its operating life.
Houston Chronicle: Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, appears to have at least one source of water, even though the temperatures on the tiny planet soar to 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
The existence of the water source on the dry, cratered planet was just one of the findings gathered by the Messenger spaceship when the unmanned craft sped within 124 miles of the planet on Jan. 14. NASA scientists described the observations last week.
Aviation Week : NASA planners have tentatively added an engine to its planned Ares V moon rocket, and increased the length of its shuttle-derived solid-rocket boosters to accommodate a larger hydrogen tank, as early work on lunar surface operations gets under way.
As now conceived, the Ares V will use six Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne RS-68 engines to power its core stage, and twin five-and-a-half segment versions of the four-segment ATK shuttle solid boosters. Previous Ares V concepts had five RS-68s and twin five-segment boosters that basically matched the first stage of its Ares I crew launch vehicle.
University of Delaware: Faculty in the space physics group in the Bartol Research Institute and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UD have been awarded several multi-year grants by the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to conduct theoretical and observational research projects.
NPR: NASA has scheduled just 10 more space shuttle flights before retiring its fleet for good. But the space agency may have to add one more mission, to bring a seven-ton $1.5 billion physics experiment into space.
The Los Angeles Times In a series of maneuvers that sounds more like cooking class than research on Mars, scientists said Monday they would try one more time to shake bits of the clumpy Martian soil into a test oven on NASA's Phoenix lander before switching to a backup strategy that called for dribbling the soil into the oven.
Physics Today: The House committee on science and technology unanimously passed NASA's 2009 budget (H.R. 6063) which orders NASA to make one extra flight to the international space station to deliver the $1.5 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.
AMS was without a launch vehicle after the loss of space shuttle columbia cancelled its 2009 flight. NASA had been looking at alternative launch vehicles but the large cost involved made approval unlikely (see NASA Cancels Science Flight, Ditches International Partners May 2007).
"NASA has a key role to play in the nation's innovation agenda, ensuring the future health of our nation's aviation system, and advancing our efforts to better understand our climate and the changes facing the Earth system," said Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN). "In addition, a properly structured human space flight and exploration program can provide dividends technologically, scientifically, and geopolitically--and is worthy of the nation's investment in it."
H.R. 6063 adds more than $1.6 billion to the White House request. The bill emphasizes the importance of aeronautics R&D, strengthening the exploration program, and NASA leadership in Earth science research and applications. It increases funding for the climate-monitoring satellite Glory, the development of the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle and the Ares launcher, which is currently scheduled to enter service in 2015, nearly 5 years after the last shuttle flight.
Los Angeles Times: Ground operations began Monday at the Phoenix landing site at Mars' north pole, with the latest images from the robotic lander showing a bizarre, checkerboard landscape apparently shaped by the movement of ice lying only inches beneath the surface.
[From NASA's Phoenix spacecraft is ready to get its hands dirty on Mars - Los Angeles Times]
NPR: NASA researchers spent nearly 40 years on Gravity Probe B, a satellite designed to test some of Albert Einstein's theories. As the $700 million project winds down, NASA is rejecting a request for another 18 months of funding.
[From NASA 'Gravity Probe B' Project Winds Down : NPR]
Various: NASA's Mars Phoenix space probe has survived re-entry through the Martian atmosphere and landed close to the north martian pole. Yesterday, NPR's Joe Palca described what scientists hope to achieve with this mission, before updating NPR's audience this morning with news from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory where jubilant mission control staff has gathered to watch the landing yesterday evening.
Unlike the two previous rover missions to Mars, Spirit and Opportunity, which were cushioned when they hit the surface, Phoenix used parachutes and thrusters to control its descent. As Reuters Irene Klotz reports NASA's space sciences chief Ed Weiler said, "I kept thinking, 'I wish Phoenix had airbags.'"
New York Times reporter Kenneth Chang leads with Phoenix transmitting photos back to Earth of the surface. "I know it looks a little like a parking lot,” said the mission’s principal investigator Peter H. Smith of the University of Arizona, “but it’s a safe place to land.”
“There’s ice under this surface,” Smith said. “It doesn’t look like it. You don’t see ice, but it’s down there.”
As space.com's Andrea Thompson discovers, Phoenix is designed to test the Martian soil and ice for signs that the water was once liquid, to see if it could have created a habitable zone for microbial life at some point in the past. The instruments include a robotic arm that will scoop up dust and ice, as well as a wet chemistry lab and tiny ovens that will analyze the soil to see what compounds might be in it.
"The science team has been waiting patiently... and they are anxious to use their instruments," said Smith. Over the next three months the science teams will collect as much data as possible from the spacecraft says Los Angeles Times staff writer John Johnson Jr.
Mars has been a risky venture for many space agencies, with a high rate of failure. Of the 39 missions to the red planet only a few have reached the surface and sent data back to Earth reports NPR's Virginia Hughes and Alejandra Garcia. The Independent's Steve Curtis looks at the difficulties in designing a probe to land on Mars. Meanwhile, Washington Post writer Marc Kaufman is one of the few reporters to point out the reason for Phoenix's name, the fact the spacecraft was built out of the spare parts of two earlier Mars missions that were canceled. Kaufman's piece has a nice slide show of the spacecraft. The BBC has video of the press conference and touchdown.
Phoenix is also another first for NASA, in that it is the first time that a NASA mission will be run from an operations center at a university, the University of Arizona.
Related Links
NASA Space Probe Approaches the Red Planet NPR
Scientists Excited About Boring Mars Landing Site NPR
Mars Lander Transmits Photos of Arctic Terrain New York Times
Spacecraft Lands Safely at Mars North Pole Reuters
Touchdown! Phoenix Spacecraft Lands on Mars Space.com
Phoenix spacecraft lands on Mars Los Angeles Times
Strife on Mars: Designing a probe to survive the red planet The Independent
Mars Craft Succeeds in Soft Landing Washington Post
Historic pictures sent from Mars BBC
Past Blasts to Mars: A brief history of Mars missions NPR
Phoenix operations center, University of Arizona
Science: In July 1967, US surveillance satellites looking for signs of a Russian nuclear test in space recorded two flashes of gamma radiation. Scientists quickly determined that the high-energy bursts did not come from a nuclear explosion, which would have generated a more sustained stream of gamma rays and also produced lower energy radiation detectable by other satellite instruments. Only years later did they realize that the flashes--named gamma ray bursts (GRBs)--originated in violent events deep in space. In scanning the heavens for an enemy secret, they had stumbled upon a cosmic one.
Now, researchers are opening the window wider with a new telescope designed to record gamma radiation several orders of magnitude higher in energy than current instruments can detect. NASA's Gamma-ray Large Area Satellite Telescope (GLAST), scheduled for launch next month, will also be the first instrument of its kind to survey the entire sky several times a day, increasing the chances of finding and following extreme astronomical phenomena anywhere in the universe.
Physics Today: On Tuesday the House Science and Technology space and aeronautics subcommittee quickly cleared bill H.R. 6063 which orders NASA to make one extra flight to the international space station to deliver the $1.5 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.
AMS was without a launch vehicle after the loss of space shuttle columbia cancelled its 2009 flight. NASA had been looking at alternative launch vehicles but the large cost involved made approval unlikely (see NASA Cancels Science Flight, Ditches International Partners May 2007).
H.R. 6063, which also sets NASA's budget for 2009, adds more than $1.6 billion to the White House request. The bill increases funding for the development of the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle and Ares launcher, which are currently scheduled to enter service in 2015, nearly 5 years after the last shuttle flight.
Controls put in place to reduce cost over-runs on NASA's science programs were over ruled by the subcommittee, which authorized NASA to proceed with the climate-monitoring satellite Glory, which is over budget.
The bill also demands that the next generation of Landsat satellites continue collecting thermal infrared land imagery, the compliance of which may delay a 2011 Landsat satellite launch.
The bill will now be sent to the full committee for consideration.
