From Fox News: Extraterrestrial Hurricanes: The Most Monstrous Storms Happen in Space
By Earth standards, Hurricane Irene is a monster storm. But it's just a baby compared to the massive cyclones of Jupiter and Saturn.
Our planet is not the only one in the solar system that boasts huge, hurricane-like storms. The gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, for example, churn out spinning squalls that can be bigger than the entire Earth. While these storms aren't fed by warm ocean water the way terrestrial hurricanes are, they're similar in a lot of ways, scientists say.
"There certainly are storms that have thunder and lightning and rain that are bigger than terrestrial hurricanes," said atmospheric scientist Andrew Ingersoll of the California Institute of Technology, a researcher with NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn. "And more violent — the winds on those planets are stronger, too." [Photos: Most Powerful Storms of the Solar System]
Giant planets, giant storms
Hurricane Irene measured about 600 miles (966 kilometers) across as it bore down on the U.S. East Coast today (Aug. 26).
That's big and scary, but it pales next to storms on our solar system's gas giants. Jupiter's Great Red Spot — which has been raging continuously for at least 180 years — could fit two entire Earths within it, Ingersoll said.
And in December, a thunderstorm about 6,200 miles (10,000 km) wide erupted on Saturn. This one, known as the Great White Spot, is still going strong, and some of its clouds have wrapped all the way around the ringed planet. [Top 10 Extreme Planet Facts]
The Great White Spot also generates lots of lightning, just like thunderstorms here on Earth.
"We can see the lightning flashes on the night side, and we can hear the radio static from the lightning," Ingersoll told SPACE.com. "The energy in the lightning flashes is a lot stronger than terrestrial lightning."
Further, last year, astronomers spotted a cyclone at Neptune's south pole that was thousands of miles wide. The Neptune squall was similar to a spinning storm discovered a few years earlier at Saturn's south pole, which even had a well-developed eye, just like an Earth hurricane.
But the Saturn polar vortex was much bigger than any hurricane found on Earth. Its eye alone measured about 2,500 miles (4,000 km) in diameter; the eye of a typical terrestrial hurricane may be just 2 or 3 miles across.
Energy and moisture
Here on Earth, hurricanes gain their power from warm ocean water.
Warm, moist air over tropical or subtropical seas rises, causing a zone of lower air pressure beneath it. Higher-pressure air zips in to fill the void. But that air soon warms, becomes moist and rises, too. As this pattern repeats, a huge, swirling storm is born.
Jupiter and Saturn don't have oceans, so their spinning storms aren't "hurricanes" in the strict, terrestrial sense. But similar processes spawn them, according to Ingersoll. [Photos: Jupiter, Largest Planet in the Solar System]
"Heat makes buoyancy; hot air rises," Ingersoll said. "Heat also causes evaporation of moisture, and when the moisture condenses and forms rain, that releases the energy. So, energy and moisture."
Most of the energy driving Earth's hurricanes ultimately comes from the sun. But that may not be the case on Jupiter and Saturn, which orbit our star from much farther away than Earth does.
"They're so giant that they still have retained some of their heat of formation," Ingersoll said. "So they have their own internal heat that can generate these giant storms."
The moisture requirement explains why gigantic, hurricane-like storms don't seem to occur on Venus or Mars, he added.
"The giant planets have moisture down below the clouds," Ingersoll said. "But Venus doesn't. Venus is dry as a bone, hot and dry. It's not comparable. And Mars is cold and dry."
Saturn storm mysteries
Saturn's Great White Spot tends to erupt every few decades, shattering long periods of calm and quiescence. Scientists still aren't sure why some storms on the giant planets should be so big, and so infrequent.
"For some reason, they store up that energy for a long time, then let it loose in a violent, huge storm," Ingersoll said. "It didn't have to work out that way; they could let off a little popcorn now and then. But they don't do that."
He's hoping that Cassini will help resolve this question — just one of many that scientists are grappling with as they try to understand the weather systems on other planets.
"We're working right now on this giant Saturn storm, with that exact question in mind," Ingersoll said.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Upcoming flights to and from space station face delays
From The Space Shot.com: Upcoming flights to and from space station face delays
The failure of an unmanned Russian Soyuz booster during launch last week has thrown a wrench into International Space Station operations, with upcoming fights to and from the lab complex facing delays that likely will result in extended operations with a reduced crew of three, a senior NASA manager said today.
During the launch of an unmanned Progress supply capsule atop a Soyuz booster last Wednesday, a sudden loss of pressure downstream of a turbo-pump in the third-stage engine resulted in a computer-commanded shutdown 5 minutes and 20 seconds after liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The Progress capsule, loaded with 2.9 tons of supplies and equipment bound for the space station, never separated from the third stage and crashed in the remote Altai region near the Russian border with Mongolia and China. The spacecraft is believed to have broken up before impact, but as of this morning, Russian engineers had not yet located the wreckage, according to Mike Suffredini, the space station program manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
If the rocket problem is not resolved in time to resume crewed Soyuz launches by mid-November, station managers could be forced to temporarily unman the huge complex.
While the space station can be operated from the ground without a crew on board, engineers hope it won't come to that because of the threat of failures that might require hands-on human intervention.
"We prefer not to operate in that condition without crew on board for an extended period of time just to make sure we don't end up in that situation," said Suffredini. "But assuming the systems keep operating, we can command the vehicle from the ground and operate it fine and remain on orbit indefinitely."
The loss of supplies will not have a significant impact on station operations thanks to the July flight of the shuttle Atlantis and earlier unmanned resupply missions. The station has enough supplies on board to operate until next summer without any additional manned or unmanned launchings.
But the third stage of the Progress Soyuz is virtually identical to the upper stage of the Soyuz used to launch Russian manned missions, and until the problem is resolved and modifications are made, manned flights to the space station are on hold.
At the time of the failure, the Russian manifest called for three of the station's six crew members to return to Earth September 8. The Russians planned to launch three fresh crew members--Anton Shkaplerov, Anatoly Ivanishin, and NASA flight engineer Dan Burbank--aboard the Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft on September 22 to boost the lab crew back to six. Another unmanned Progress was scheduled for launch October 26.
But given the Progress failure, the three crew members who'd intended to return to Earth in early September likely will delay their departure and remain aboard the space station for an additional week or so. NASA managers favored keeping the crew aloft until late October to maximize science operations and to keep two U.S. astronauts on board as long as possible to protect against any failures of NASA components that might require a spacewalk. But daylight landing opportunities in Kazakhstan end around September 19 and do not become available again until around October 27. By that point, the crew's spacecraft will have been in orbit about 10 days beyond its certified 200-day limit.
Launch of Shkaplerov, Ivanishin, and Burbank will be delayed as well while Russian engineers evaluate the Progress failure. If possible, Russian planners would like to carry out two already-planned unmanned Soyuz fights before launching a crewed mission to make sure whatever fixes might be required will work properly.
"It's not a trivial thing," Suffredini said. "If you look at...risk assessments, some of the numbers are not insignificant. There is a greater risk of losing the ISS when it is unmanned than if it were manned. That's why, when we made our decision after the Columbia accident to keep the station manned, that is exactly why, because the risk increase is not insignificant."
But NASA managers say they are confident the Russians will resolve the Progress/Soyuz problem in time to prevent that worst-case scenario from playing out.
Asked if the Progress failure would heighten criticism of the Obama administration's post-shuttle space policy and the near-term lack of an operational U.S. manned rocket system, Suffredini said flight safety, not concern about public relations, was the team's only concern.
"If you think about it, (the Progress failure) was sort of a gift," he said. "We have the logistics on board to recover from it. It's going to tell us about an anomaly before we put humans on a similar vehicle. So really, this is a great opportunity for us to learn about an anomaly and resolve the anomaly without putting a crew at risk.
"Flying safely is much, much more important than anything else I can think about right this instant. I'm sure we'll have an opportunity to discuss any political implications if we spend a lot of time on the ground, but you know, we'll just have to deal with them because we're going to do what's the safest for the crew and the space station, which is a very big investment of our governments. Our job is to protect that investment, and that's exactly what we're going to do."
The failure of an unmanned Russian Soyuz booster during launch last week has thrown a wrench into International Space Station operations, with upcoming fights to and from the lab complex facing delays that likely will result in extended operations with a reduced crew of three, a senior NASA manager said today.
During the launch of an unmanned Progress supply capsule atop a Soyuz booster last Wednesday, a sudden loss of pressure downstream of a turbo-pump in the third-stage engine resulted in a computer-commanded shutdown 5 minutes and 20 seconds after liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The Progress capsule, loaded with 2.9 tons of supplies and equipment bound for the space station, never separated from the third stage and crashed in the remote Altai region near the Russian border with Mongolia and China. The spacecraft is believed to have broken up before impact, but as of this morning, Russian engineers had not yet located the wreckage, according to Mike Suffredini, the space station program manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
If the rocket problem is not resolved in time to resume crewed Soyuz launches by mid-November, station managers could be forced to temporarily unman the huge complex.
While the space station can be operated from the ground without a crew on board, engineers hope it won't come to that because of the threat of failures that might require hands-on human intervention.
"We prefer not to operate in that condition without crew on board for an extended period of time just to make sure we don't end up in that situation," said Suffredini. "But assuming the systems keep operating, we can command the vehicle from the ground and operate it fine and remain on orbit indefinitely."
The loss of supplies will not have a significant impact on station operations thanks to the July flight of the shuttle Atlantis and earlier unmanned resupply missions. The station has enough supplies on board to operate until next summer without any additional manned or unmanned launchings.
But the third stage of the Progress Soyuz is virtually identical to the upper stage of the Soyuz used to launch Russian manned missions, and until the problem is resolved and modifications are made, manned flights to the space station are on hold.
At the time of the failure, the Russian manifest called for three of the station's six crew members to return to Earth September 8. The Russians planned to launch three fresh crew members--Anton Shkaplerov, Anatoly Ivanishin, and NASA flight engineer Dan Burbank--aboard the Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft on September 22 to boost the lab crew back to six. Another unmanned Progress was scheduled for launch October 26.
But given the Progress failure, the three crew members who'd intended to return to Earth in early September likely will delay their departure and remain aboard the space station for an additional week or so. NASA managers favored keeping the crew aloft until late October to maximize science operations and to keep two U.S. astronauts on board as long as possible to protect against any failures of NASA components that might require a spacewalk. But daylight landing opportunities in Kazakhstan end around September 19 and do not become available again until around October 27. By that point, the crew's spacecraft will have been in orbit about 10 days beyond its certified 200-day limit.
Launch of Shkaplerov, Ivanishin, and Burbank will be delayed as well while Russian engineers evaluate the Progress failure. If possible, Russian planners would like to carry out two already-planned unmanned Soyuz fights before launching a crewed mission to make sure whatever fixes might be required will work properly.
"It's not a trivial thing," Suffredini said. "If you look at...risk assessments, some of the numbers are not insignificant. There is a greater risk of losing the ISS when it is unmanned than if it were manned. That's why, when we made our decision after the Columbia accident to keep the station manned, that is exactly why, because the risk increase is not insignificant."
But NASA managers say they are confident the Russians will resolve the Progress/Soyuz problem in time to prevent that worst-case scenario from playing out.
Asked if the Progress failure would heighten criticism of the Obama administration's post-shuttle space policy and the near-term lack of an operational U.S. manned rocket system, Suffredini said flight safety, not concern about public relations, was the team's only concern.
"If you think about it, (the Progress failure) was sort of a gift," he said. "We have the logistics on board to recover from it. It's going to tell us about an anomaly before we put humans on a similar vehicle. So really, this is a great opportunity for us to learn about an anomaly and resolve the anomaly without putting a crew at risk.
"Flying safely is much, much more important than anything else I can think about right this instant. I'm sure we'll have an opportunity to discuss any political implications if we spend a lot of time on the ground, but you know, we'll just have to deal with them because we're going to do what's the safest for the crew and the space station, which is a very big investment of our governments. Our job is to protect that investment, and that's exactly what we're going to do."
Monday, August 29, 2011
Space Station Crew Closely Watching Russian Rocket Crash Investigation
From Space.com: Space Station Crew Closely Watching Russian Rocket Crash Investigation
Astronauts on the International Space Station are keeping a close eye on the investigation into the recent crash of a Russian rocket in order to learn how it will impact their mission in orbit.
The Soyuz rocket was carrying Russia's Progress 44 supply ship for the International Space Station, which was expected to deliver 3 tons of supplies to the orbiting lab's six-man crew. Instead, the rocket and cargo ship crashed in eastern Russia after a malfunction in the booster's third stage forced an engine shutdown.
"It's a pity the launch of Progress resupply vehicle didn't go well. Experts have worked on the investigation of its various impacts," station astronaut Satoshi Furukawa of Japan wrote on Aug. 26, two days after the crash, on Twitter, where he posts updates about his mission as @Astro_Satoshi. "But, as there are plenty of supplies to support the crew, we'll be fine for a while."
Since Russia's Federal Space Agency uses similar versions of its Soyuz rocket design to launch unmanned Progress vehicles and its crewed space capsules, officials want to make sure that they are safe to carry astronauts and cosmonauts. The next Soyuz to ferry a crew to the station was slated to launch Sept. 22 to replace three astronauts who are due to return home on Sept. 8.
Those plans may now change, the astronauts said. It's possible that the launch of the new station crew will be delayed until the crash investigation is complete, and that may force the three returning crewmembers to stay in orbit longer than planned.
"We don't have a lot of decisions made yet because we want to make sure we have the right course of action," station astronaut Ron Garan, of NASA, told SPACE.com from orbit Thursday (Aug. 25). "So we're going to take a little bit of time to think about it and make sure we have all the facts together before we go on and have a game plan." [Video: Station Crew Discusses Rocket Crash with SPACE.com]
Garan is one of the three astronauts who would have to extend their stay on the space station. They were due to land next week to end a six-month spaceflight.
"Up here, we're in kind of a wait-and-see mindset," Garan said. "We're fully prepared to support whatever decisions are made."
NASA will hold a press conference today at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) with the latest on the crash's impacts on the space station crew.
Russian rocket inquiry
Before the Progress 44 crash, Russia was expected to launch four Soyuz rockets —two carrying new crews and two with unmanned Progress cargo ships — as part of the regular flight schedule.
If the investigation into last week's rocket crash isn't completed quickly, NASA and its space station partners may consider cutting the orbiting lab's crew size in half, from six people to three, or even leaving the space station unmanned for a time until flights can be resumed, station managers have said. Space station flight planners have until October to decide to shift down to a three-person crew, they added.
"If things extend too long, which we don't have any indication today that's the case but given the anomaly we have to be prepared, there is an ability to operate station with less than six crew if that becomes necessary," NASA's space station program manager Mike Suffering told reporters last week just after the rocket crash.
With NASA's space shuttle fleet retired (the final flight was in July), Russia's Soyuz space capsules are the only vehicle currently ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Robotic cargo ships built by Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency also make deliveries to the orbiting lab.
NASA currently has contracts with two private U.S. spaceflight companies, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, to provide unmanned cargo deliveries to the station in the next few years. Test flights for those vehicles are expected in the coming months. NASA also plans to eventually use commercial spacecraft for astronaut launches, too.
However, Russia's string of rocket and satellite failures in the last year that has caused some concern among U.S. lawmakers and experts since the country is also the sole avenue for American spaceflight until the new private spaceships become available.
Suffredini said he is confident NASA's Russian partners will find the cause of the Soyuz rocket malfunction and resume flights as soon as it is safe to do so.
"We're trying, right now, to give our Russian colleagues time to collect the data," Suffredini said. "Really, what you need right now is time."
Space station crew size cut ahead?
The space station currently has enough supplies to support a full, six-person for about 50 extra days beyond the scheduled Sept. 8 return of Garan and his crewmates, Suffredini added. There are enough supplies to support a smaller crew through at least March 2012, when the next European space freighter is due at the station, he said.
Suffredini also said that, barring an unforeseen major system or equipment failure, the space station could be even be flown without a crew for up to a year. Such a move, however, would be unprecedented.
The $100 billion space station has been continuously inhabited by crews of various sizes, from two-person skeleton crews to a full complement of six, since the first crew took up residence in 2001. The space station was completed earlier this year after more than a decade of orbital construction. It is larger than a football field and can be easily spotted by observers on Earth at night if they have clear skies and know where to look.
Space station officials are hopeful Russia's Soyuz rocket crash will be solved in time for the next scheduled launch of a Progress cargo ship, which is slated for late October.
On the space station, the astronauts said they, too, are confident that Russia's rocket issues will be solved, and that they are ready for any challenges, be it a decision to extend the current crew's mission or cut the station crew size in half temporarily.
"Obviously, I would have mixed feelings … I mean I've been away from home for a long time. But a lot of people are away from home doing things that they believe in," Garan said, adding that at the very least he'd have more time to share his spaceflight experience with people on Earth. "So there's an upside and a downside and whatever the decision is, I think it will be what's best for the program and we'll fully support it."
Astronauts on the International Space Station are keeping a close eye on the investigation into the recent crash of a Russian rocket in order to learn how it will impact their mission in orbit.
The Soyuz rocket was carrying Russia's Progress 44 supply ship for the International Space Station, which was expected to deliver 3 tons of supplies to the orbiting lab's six-man crew. Instead, the rocket and cargo ship crashed in eastern Russia after a malfunction in the booster's third stage forced an engine shutdown.
"It's a pity the launch of Progress resupply vehicle didn't go well. Experts have worked on the investigation of its various impacts," station astronaut Satoshi Furukawa of Japan wrote on Aug. 26, two days after the crash, on Twitter, where he posts updates about his mission as @Astro_Satoshi. "But, as there are plenty of supplies to support the crew, we'll be fine for a while."
Since Russia's Federal Space Agency uses similar versions of its Soyuz rocket design to launch unmanned Progress vehicles and its crewed space capsules, officials want to make sure that they are safe to carry astronauts and cosmonauts. The next Soyuz to ferry a crew to the station was slated to launch Sept. 22 to replace three astronauts who are due to return home on Sept. 8.
Those plans may now change, the astronauts said. It's possible that the launch of the new station crew will be delayed until the crash investigation is complete, and that may force the three returning crewmembers to stay in orbit longer than planned.
"We don't have a lot of decisions made yet because we want to make sure we have the right course of action," station astronaut Ron Garan, of NASA, told SPACE.com from orbit Thursday (Aug. 25). "So we're going to take a little bit of time to think about it and make sure we have all the facts together before we go on and have a game plan." [Video: Station Crew Discusses Rocket Crash with SPACE.com]
Garan is one of the three astronauts who would have to extend their stay on the space station. They were due to land next week to end a six-month spaceflight.
"Up here, we're in kind of a wait-and-see mindset," Garan said. "We're fully prepared to support whatever decisions are made."
NASA will hold a press conference today at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) with the latest on the crash's impacts on the space station crew.
Russian rocket inquiry
Before the Progress 44 crash, Russia was expected to launch four Soyuz rockets —two carrying new crews and two with unmanned Progress cargo ships — as part of the regular flight schedule.
If the investigation into last week's rocket crash isn't completed quickly, NASA and its space station partners may consider cutting the orbiting lab's crew size in half, from six people to three, or even leaving the space station unmanned for a time until flights can be resumed, station managers have said. Space station flight planners have until October to decide to shift down to a three-person crew, they added.
"If things extend too long, which we don't have any indication today that's the case but given the anomaly we have to be prepared, there is an ability to operate station with less than six crew if that becomes necessary," NASA's space station program manager Mike Suffering told reporters last week just after the rocket crash.
With NASA's space shuttle fleet retired (the final flight was in July), Russia's Soyuz space capsules are the only vehicle currently ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Robotic cargo ships built by Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency also make deliveries to the orbiting lab.
NASA currently has contracts with two private U.S. spaceflight companies, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, to provide unmanned cargo deliveries to the station in the next few years. Test flights for those vehicles are expected in the coming months. NASA also plans to eventually use commercial spacecraft for astronaut launches, too.
However, Russia's string of rocket and satellite failures in the last year that has caused some concern among U.S. lawmakers and experts since the country is also the sole avenue for American spaceflight until the new private spaceships become available.
Suffredini said he is confident NASA's Russian partners will find the cause of the Soyuz rocket malfunction and resume flights as soon as it is safe to do so.
"We're trying, right now, to give our Russian colleagues time to collect the data," Suffredini said. "Really, what you need right now is time."
Space station crew size cut ahead?
The space station currently has enough supplies to support a full, six-person for about 50 extra days beyond the scheduled Sept. 8 return of Garan and his crewmates, Suffredini added. There are enough supplies to support a smaller crew through at least March 2012, when the next European space freighter is due at the station, he said.
Suffredini also said that, barring an unforeseen major system or equipment failure, the space station could be even be flown without a crew for up to a year. Such a move, however, would be unprecedented.
The $100 billion space station has been continuously inhabited by crews of various sizes, from two-person skeleton crews to a full complement of six, since the first crew took up residence in 2001. The space station was completed earlier this year after more than a decade of orbital construction. It is larger than a football field and can be easily spotted by observers on Earth at night if they have clear skies and know where to look.
Space station officials are hopeful Russia's Soyuz rocket crash will be solved in time for the next scheduled launch of a Progress cargo ship, which is slated for late October.
On the space station, the astronauts said they, too, are confident that Russia's rocket issues will be solved, and that they are ready for any challenges, be it a decision to extend the current crew's mission or cut the station crew size in half temporarily.
"Obviously, I would have mixed feelings … I mean I've been away from home for a long time. But a lot of people are away from home doing things that they believe in," Garan said, adding that at the very least he'd have more time to share his spaceflight experience with people on Earth. "So there's an upside and a downside and whatever the decision is, I think it will be what's best for the program and we'll fully support it."
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Space station could be abandoned in November
From Spaceflight Now: Space station could be abandoned in November
HOUSTON -- Astronauts may need to temporarily withdraw from the International Space Station before the end of this year if Russia is unable to resume manned flights of its Soyuz rocket after a failed cargo launch last week, according to the NASA official in charge of the outpost.
Despite a delivery of important logistics by the final space shuttle mission in July, safety concerns with landing Soyuz capsules in the middle of winter could force the space station to fly unmanned beginning in November, according to Michael Suffredini, NASA's space station program manager.
"Logistically, we can support [operations] almost forever, but eventually if we don't see the Soyuz spacecraft, we'll probably going to unmanned ops before the end of the year," Suffredini said in an interview Thursday, one day after Russia lost a Soyuz rocket with an automated Progress resupply ship bound for the space station.
A Soyuz rocket rocket crashed Wednesday minutes after lifting off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The third stage of the Soyuz-U rocket was firing when something caused the vehicle's RD-0110 engine to turn off early, scattering debris in the Altai region of Siberia more than 1,000 miles east of the launch site, according to Russian media reports.
The Soyuz-U's third stage is almost identical to equipment used on the Soyuz-FG booster that propels human crews into orbit, according to Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.
The problem Wednesday occurred nearly five-and-a-half minutes after liftoff when the rocket detected a low fuel pressure reading, according to Suffredini.
"They have data showing that the engine was shut down due to what looks like low pressure on the fuel side. They saw data all the way down to when the vehicle broke up," Suffredini said. "In this case, they at least know where the potential anomaly area is, so they can focus their attention there."
The Russian space agency set up a board to investigate the cause and recommend corrective actions, while other groups were tasked with reviewing implementation plans for Russia's manned space program and checking the quality of manufacturing throughout the Russian space industry.
"We will understand, to our satisfaction, the anomaly, what is believed to be the cause and how they resolved it," Suffredini said. "If we're not happy, we won't put our astronauts on the Soyuz."
NASA astronaut Daniel Burbank and cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin were preparing to launch to the space station Sept. 22, but that flight is likely going to be delayed until at least October in the wake of Wednesday's rocket failure.
Wednesday's Soyuz launch mishap was the second rocket failure in a row for Russia. A communications satellite launched Aug. 17 by a Proton rocket was stranded in the wrong orbit due to an anomaly with the mission's Breeze M upper stage.
Engineers will present data to space station management Monday morning that could lead to a formal decision to extend the stay of three astronauts on the space station beyond their scheduled Sept. 8 landing date.
Space station commander Andrey Borisenko, Russian cosmonaut Alexander Samokutyaev and NASA flight engineer Ronald Garan launched to the complex April 4 and planned to depart the lab and return to Earth on Sept. 8.
Officials could decide this week to extend their mission, according to Suffredini.
The crew's Soyuz TMA-21 capsule can stay docked to the space station for up to 210 days. Its design life expires in late October, and Suffredini said he expects no problems continuing their mission until then.
The other half of the station's six-person crew -- NASA flight engineer Michael Fossum, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov and Japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawa -- are supposed to return home Nov. 16.
"The November crew has a little different issue," Suffredini said. "If we're not launching by then and we have to de-man space station, we pretty much have to do that probably by about the middle of November."
That crew's Soyuz capsule, named Soyuz TMA-02M, blasted off June 7 and would need to land in late December or early January.
"One of our requirements is to land in daylight, and it has to be an hour from sunset or sunrise," Suffredini said. "On Nov. 19, we reach that cutoff and we go dark."
The next daylight landing window opens in late December, but NASA and Russian officials worry about extreme winter weather conditions in the Soyuz landing zone on the steppes of Kazakhstan.
"The weather is severe out there in the winter time," Suffredini said. "So from a search and rescue standpoint, that's probably something we don't want to do. Even if it's within our requirements, we probably don't want to be landing two hours before sunset. If we had any problem at all, we would be searching for the crew in a blowing snow storm in the middle of night."
Space station control centers in Houston and Moscow are equipped to monitor and operate the $100 billion laboratory from the ground, but retreating from the outpost would halt promising medical research and break a string of almost 11 years of continuous manned operations.
"I suspect that if we get close to Nov. 16 and we haven't flown a Soyuz yet, and by then we will have stepped down to three crew, we'll probably de-man the ISS and go to unmanned operations," Suffredini said.
Russia is expected to present a recovery plan this week outlining tentative dates for launching the Soyuz rocket again. One scenario under consideration would see at least two Soyuz rockets with the RD-0110 third stage fly before the next manned launch.
A commercial launch of six U.S.-owned Globalstar communications satellites was scheduled for early October, and Russia could move forward the planned launch of the next Progress cargo freighter from late October to earlier in the month.
"That would be a philosophy that says let's go fix the problem and get a couple of test flights under our belt before we fly crew," Suffredini said. "You have to keep in mind we won't fly with this anomaly. We won't fly knowing we have this anomaly. I expect to determine root cause, repair root cause and fly these flights."
Russia quickly recovered from a deadly rocket crash in 2002 and launched a crew of three space fliers two weeks later.
"I fully expect our Russian colleagues will resolve this anomaly in a timely fashion, and I expect them to do it in a safe fashion. Having the data they have on the anomaly is just fantastic," Suffredini said. "I would expect you would hear us say something along the lines we'll fly this commercial flight, we'll fly the Progress with the hopes maybe of flying a Soyuz by the November timeframe if everything works out."
HOUSTON -- Astronauts may need to temporarily withdraw from the International Space Station before the end of this year if Russia is unable to resume manned flights of its Soyuz rocket after a failed cargo launch last week, according to the NASA official in charge of the outpost.
Despite a delivery of important logistics by the final space shuttle mission in July, safety concerns with landing Soyuz capsules in the middle of winter could force the space station to fly unmanned beginning in November, according to Michael Suffredini, NASA's space station program manager.
"Logistically, we can support [operations] almost forever, but eventually if we don't see the Soyuz spacecraft, we'll probably going to unmanned ops before the end of the year," Suffredini said in an interview Thursday, one day after Russia lost a Soyuz rocket with an automated Progress resupply ship bound for the space station.
A Soyuz rocket rocket crashed Wednesday minutes after lifting off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The third stage of the Soyuz-U rocket was firing when something caused the vehicle's RD-0110 engine to turn off early, scattering debris in the Altai region of Siberia more than 1,000 miles east of the launch site, according to Russian media reports.
The Soyuz-U's third stage is almost identical to equipment used on the Soyuz-FG booster that propels human crews into orbit, according to Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.
The problem Wednesday occurred nearly five-and-a-half minutes after liftoff when the rocket detected a low fuel pressure reading, according to Suffredini.
"They have data showing that the engine was shut down due to what looks like low pressure on the fuel side. They saw data all the way down to when the vehicle broke up," Suffredini said. "In this case, they at least know where the potential anomaly area is, so they can focus their attention there."
The Russian space agency set up a board to investigate the cause and recommend corrective actions, while other groups were tasked with reviewing implementation plans for Russia's manned space program and checking the quality of manufacturing throughout the Russian space industry.
"We will understand, to our satisfaction, the anomaly, what is believed to be the cause and how they resolved it," Suffredini said. "If we're not happy, we won't put our astronauts on the Soyuz."
NASA astronaut Daniel Burbank and cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin were preparing to launch to the space station Sept. 22, but that flight is likely going to be delayed until at least October in the wake of Wednesday's rocket failure.
Wednesday's Soyuz launch mishap was the second rocket failure in a row for Russia. A communications satellite launched Aug. 17 by a Proton rocket was stranded in the wrong orbit due to an anomaly with the mission's Breeze M upper stage.
Engineers will present data to space station management Monday morning that could lead to a formal decision to extend the stay of three astronauts on the space station beyond their scheduled Sept. 8 landing date.
Space station commander Andrey Borisenko, Russian cosmonaut Alexander Samokutyaev and NASA flight engineer Ronald Garan launched to the complex April 4 and planned to depart the lab and return to Earth on Sept. 8.
Officials could decide this week to extend their mission, according to Suffredini.
The crew's Soyuz TMA-21 capsule can stay docked to the space station for up to 210 days. Its design life expires in late October, and Suffredini said he expects no problems continuing their mission until then.
The other half of the station's six-person crew -- NASA flight engineer Michael Fossum, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov and Japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawa -- are supposed to return home Nov. 16.
"The November crew has a little different issue," Suffredini said. "If we're not launching by then and we have to de-man space station, we pretty much have to do that probably by about the middle of November."
That crew's Soyuz capsule, named Soyuz TMA-02M, blasted off June 7 and would need to land in late December or early January.
"One of our requirements is to land in daylight, and it has to be an hour from sunset or sunrise," Suffredini said. "On Nov. 19, we reach that cutoff and we go dark."
The next daylight landing window opens in late December, but NASA and Russian officials worry about extreme winter weather conditions in the Soyuz landing zone on the steppes of Kazakhstan.
"The weather is severe out there in the winter time," Suffredini said. "So from a search and rescue standpoint, that's probably something we don't want to do. Even if it's within our requirements, we probably don't want to be landing two hours before sunset. If we had any problem at all, we would be searching for the crew in a blowing snow storm in the middle of night."
Space station control centers in Houston and Moscow are equipped to monitor and operate the $100 billion laboratory from the ground, but retreating from the outpost would halt promising medical research and break a string of almost 11 years of continuous manned operations.
"I suspect that if we get close to Nov. 16 and we haven't flown a Soyuz yet, and by then we will have stepped down to three crew, we'll probably de-man the ISS and go to unmanned operations," Suffredini said.
Russia is expected to present a recovery plan this week outlining tentative dates for launching the Soyuz rocket again. One scenario under consideration would see at least two Soyuz rockets with the RD-0110 third stage fly before the next manned launch.
A commercial launch of six U.S.-owned Globalstar communications satellites was scheduled for early October, and Russia could move forward the planned launch of the next Progress cargo freighter from late October to earlier in the month.
"That would be a philosophy that says let's go fix the problem and get a couple of test flights under our belt before we fly crew," Suffredini said. "You have to keep in mind we won't fly with this anomaly. We won't fly knowing we have this anomaly. I expect to determine root cause, repair root cause and fly these flights."
Russia quickly recovered from a deadly rocket crash in 2002 and launched a crew of three space fliers two weeks later.
"I fully expect our Russian colleagues will resolve this anomaly in a timely fashion, and I expect them to do it in a safe fashion. Having the data they have on the anomaly is just fantastic," Suffredini said. "I would expect you would hear us say something along the lines we'll fly this commercial flight, we'll fly the Progress with the hopes maybe of flying a Soyuz by the November timeframe if everything works out."
Meteorite blasts across skies of Peru leaving forest fires in its wake
Daily Mail Online: Meteorite blasts across skies of Peru leaving forest fires in its wake
Blazing with the fury of a mini-sun this amazing video shows the moment a suspected meteor streaked across the sky over the city of Cusco in Peru.
It was captured blasting through the upper levels of the atmosphere at 2pm yesterday afternoon, leaving an irredescent trail in its wake.
Astonished residents watched as the impressive natural phenomena eventually disappeared over the horizon.
Experts believe it may have caused forest fires to the south of the city, which have been ravaged by drought.
Local officials and the National Police are currently trying to determine where the meteorite may have landed and are speaking to farmers south of the city.
The meteorite fell in the south of the Imperial City, between the districts of San Sebastian and San Geronimo.
Cusco is the gateway to the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu. The Inca trail attracts tens of thousands of tourists every year, with entry restricted to 200 new travelers each day.
Peru last saw a meteorite fall in September 2007 near the border with Bolivia.
The basketball-sized meteorite left an impressive crater that was 44ft in diameter. Fragments of rock tested positive for iron, nickel and cobalt with traces of iridium.
It was dated as about 4.5billion years old and formed around the same time as our Solar System.
Meteorites are fragments of rock and sometimes metal that survive the fall to Earth from space. Most are fragments left over from the collision of two asteroids.
Captured by Earth's gravitational force, they are accelerated to speeds of over 11.2 kilometres per second.
They can vary in size from a fraction of a millimetre to larger than a football pitch. It is believed a meteorite six miles across wiped out the dinosaurs 65million years ago.
Hundreds of meteorites fall to Earth each year but only a handful are recovered.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Report: NASA made proper pick for retired shuttles
The Wall Street Journal: Report: NASA made proper pick for retired shuttles
WASHINGTON — NASA acted properly when it picked new homes for the retired space shuttles, the space agency's watchdog said Thursday.
The shuttles were awarded in April to museums in suburban Washington, Los Angeles, Cape Canaveral, Fla., and New York, based on recommendations by a special NASA team and a decision by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, a former shuttle commander.
Congressional and local officials for two of the losing cities — Houston and Dayton — had asked for an investigation, alleging political influences in the bidding process.
"We found no evidence that the team's recommendation or the administrator's decision were tainted by political influence of any other improper consideration," Inspector General Paul Martin wrote in the report released Thursday. "Moreover, we found no attempt by White House officials to direct or influence Bolden's decision making."
The decision was based on attendance, population, funding and the facility. NASA said 13 of the bidders met their requirements and rated those on several categories, giving them a numerical score.
There was a scoring error for the Air Force Museum in Dayton and it should have tied with Cape Canaveral and New York, the inspector general found. But NASA chief Bolden told investigators that had he known about the tie, he still would have stuck with the cities he selected because they had bigger populations and more international visitors. Also Dayton museum officials told him they might not be able to raise enough money.
Space Center Houston next door to Johnson Space Center ranked near the bottom of the list. It scored low for attendance, international visitors, museum accreditation and difficulty transporting a shuttle there. Museums in Chicago, Seattle, Riverside, Calif., San Diego and McMinnville, Ore., all scored higher than Houston.
Bolden, who lived in Houston for many years as an astronaut and Marine and still has a home there, told investigators that personally, "I would have loved to have placed an Orbiter in Houston," but that it had lower attendance and fewer international visitors than the winners.
The 30-year space shuttle program ended with the last flight in July.
The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum had already been promised one shuttle for its hangar in Dulles, Va. It will get Discovery, and give up the Enterprise, a test vehicle that never flew in orbit. That will be shipped to the Intrepid Sea Air and Space Museum in New York City. Atlantis will stay in Cape Canaveral and go to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Endeavour will go to the California Science Center in Los Angeles.
The Florida and California museums, but not the Smithsonian, will have to pay at least $20 million to make the shuttles that flew in space safe for display — removing toxic materials and fuels — and transportation costs. NASA is picking up the tab for the Smithsonian. The shuttles are all still at Kennedy Space Center being decommissioned
WASHINGTON — NASA acted properly when it picked new homes for the retired space shuttles, the space agency's watchdog said Thursday.
The shuttles were awarded in April to museums in suburban Washington, Los Angeles, Cape Canaveral, Fla., and New York, based on recommendations by a special NASA team and a decision by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, a former shuttle commander.
Congressional and local officials for two of the losing cities — Houston and Dayton — had asked for an investigation, alleging political influences in the bidding process.
"We found no evidence that the team's recommendation or the administrator's decision were tainted by political influence of any other improper consideration," Inspector General Paul Martin wrote in the report released Thursday. "Moreover, we found no attempt by White House officials to direct or influence Bolden's decision making."
The decision was based on attendance, population, funding and the facility. NASA said 13 of the bidders met their requirements and rated those on several categories, giving them a numerical score.
There was a scoring error for the Air Force Museum in Dayton and it should have tied with Cape Canaveral and New York, the inspector general found. But NASA chief Bolden told investigators that had he known about the tie, he still would have stuck with the cities he selected because they had bigger populations and more international visitors. Also Dayton museum officials told him they might not be able to raise enough money.
Space Center Houston next door to Johnson Space Center ranked near the bottom of the list. It scored low for attendance, international visitors, museum accreditation and difficulty transporting a shuttle there. Museums in Chicago, Seattle, Riverside, Calif., San Diego and McMinnville, Ore., all scored higher than Houston.
Bolden, who lived in Houston for many years as an astronaut and Marine and still has a home there, told investigators that personally, "I would have loved to have placed an Orbiter in Houston," but that it had lower attendance and fewer international visitors than the winners.
The 30-year space shuttle program ended with the last flight in July.
The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum had already been promised one shuttle for its hangar in Dulles, Va. It will get Discovery, and give up the Enterprise, a test vehicle that never flew in orbit. That will be shipped to the Intrepid Sea Air and Space Museum in New York City. Atlantis will stay in Cape Canaveral and go to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Endeavour will go to the California Science Center in Los Angeles.
The Florida and California museums, but not the Smithsonian, will have to pay at least $20 million to make the shuttles that flew in space safe for display — removing toxic materials and fuels — and transportation costs. NASA is picking up the tab for the Smithsonian. The shuttles are all still at Kennedy Space Center being decommissioned
Russia Vows to Keep Space Station Supplied After Rocket Crash
From Bloomberg: Russia Vows to Keep Space Station Supplied After Rocket Crash
Russia promised to maintain transport to the International Space Station after a cargo spacecraft crashed yesterday, forcing a likely postponement to the next manned flight.
Russia will probably delay a manned flight planned for Sept. 22 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to October as the cause of the malfunction is investigated, Interfax reported, citing an unidentified person with knowledge of the matter. The Soyuz TMA-22 craft is due to bring replacements for some of the six astronauts currently on board the space station.
Roskosmos, the Russian space agency, said it had ordered launch officials to prepare “additional proposals to support the International Space Station and fulfill Russian obligations to maintain its functioning,” in a statement posted on its website today. Tougher controls will be in place, it said.
Russia provides the only way for U.S. astronauts to travel to the station following a decision to end the almost 30-year- old space shuttle program this year, with the last flight having taken place in June.
The spacecraft suffered a malfunction in its booster rocket, Roskosmos said. It crashed in the Altai Republic, north of Russia’s border with China, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the closest residential area, according to Interfax.
Garlic, Books
It was carrying around 2.6 tons of supplies, including green apples, lemons, garlic, books, presents, fuel, medicines, and personal hygiene items, according to state-run RIA Novosti news service.
Russia’s space industry suffered a blow last year when a Proton-M rocket failed to deliver three navigation satellites into orbit for Glonass, a rival to the U.S. Global Positioning System. In response, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev fired the head of the space agency earlier this year.
Last week, Russia lost its most powerful telecommunications satellite, Express-AM4, after a faulty launch, setting back the country’s efforts to promote wider availability of communications services.
“The problem is that Russia’s space industry hasn’t produced anything new and is continuing to use old technology, which leads to such consequences,” said Yury Karash, a member of the Russian Academy of Cosmonautics.
Still, yesterday’s crash is the first since Progress flights started in 1978, he said by telephone in Moscow.
Russia promised to maintain transport to the International Space Station after a cargo spacecraft crashed yesterday, forcing a likely postponement to the next manned flight.
Russia will probably delay a manned flight planned for Sept. 22 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to October as the cause of the malfunction is investigated, Interfax reported, citing an unidentified person with knowledge of the matter. The Soyuz TMA-22 craft is due to bring replacements for some of the six astronauts currently on board the space station.
Roskosmos, the Russian space agency, said it had ordered launch officials to prepare “additional proposals to support the International Space Station and fulfill Russian obligations to maintain its functioning,” in a statement posted on its website today. Tougher controls will be in place, it said.
Russia provides the only way for U.S. astronauts to travel to the station following a decision to end the almost 30-year- old space shuttle program this year, with the last flight having taken place in June.
The spacecraft suffered a malfunction in its booster rocket, Roskosmos said. It crashed in the Altai Republic, north of Russia’s border with China, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the closest residential area, according to Interfax.
Garlic, Books
It was carrying around 2.6 tons of supplies, including green apples, lemons, garlic, books, presents, fuel, medicines, and personal hygiene items, according to state-run RIA Novosti news service.
Russia’s space industry suffered a blow last year when a Proton-M rocket failed to deliver three navigation satellites into orbit for Glonass, a rival to the U.S. Global Positioning System. In response, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev fired the head of the space agency earlier this year.
Last week, Russia lost its most powerful telecommunications satellite, Express-AM4, after a faulty launch, setting back the country’s efforts to promote wider availability of communications services.
“The problem is that Russia’s space industry hasn’t produced anything new and is continuing to use old technology, which leads to such consequences,” said Yury Karash, a member of the Russian Academy of Cosmonautics.
Still, yesterday’s crash is the first since Progress flights started in 1978, he said by telephone in Moscow.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Russian spaceship crashes after failed launch
USA Today: Russian spaceship crashes after failed launch
A robotic Russian space freighter headed for the International Space Station crashed into the Altai Republic near the border with China on Wednesday after the third stage of its Soyuz launch vehicle failed about six minutes after launch.
NASA International Space Station Program Manager Mike Suffredini said the engine powering the stage inexplicably cut off five minutes and 50 seconds after blastoff from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The rocket failed to reach orbit and instead crashed into the remote, mountainous republic, which is located in central Asia at the juncture of Siberian forests, the steppes of Kazakhstan and the semi-deserts of Mongolia.
A thunderous blast from the crash broke windows in surrounding areas but there were no immediate reports of casualties. About 25% of the republic is covered with forests.
A Russian commission will investigate the accident.
Suffredini said the planned Sept. 8 return from the station of two Russian cosmonauts and American astronaut Ron Garan might be delayed to keep six people on the outpost. The planned Sept. 21 launch of a new expedition crew that includes U.S. astronaut Dan Burbank could be delayed as well. The Soyuz rocket that launches Progress space freighters has a third stage that is very similar to the third stage of the type of Soyuz rockets used to launch station crews.
The Progress space freighter was carrying about three tons of supplies and equipment to the International Space Station. Suffredini said the six people on the station now have reserves that are adequate enough to last well into 2012.
The launch was the first to the station since last month's final shuttle mission. That mission delivered more than 9,000 pounds of food and equipment.
The loss of the Progress was the first since the U.S. and Russia began assembly of the International Space Station in late 1998.
A robotic Russian space freighter headed for the International Space Station crashed into the Altai Republic near the border with China on Wednesday after the third stage of its Soyuz launch vehicle failed about six minutes after launch.
NASA International Space Station Program Manager Mike Suffredini said the engine powering the stage inexplicably cut off five minutes and 50 seconds after blastoff from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The rocket failed to reach orbit and instead crashed into the remote, mountainous republic, which is located in central Asia at the juncture of Siberian forests, the steppes of Kazakhstan and the semi-deserts of Mongolia.
A thunderous blast from the crash broke windows in surrounding areas but there were no immediate reports of casualties. About 25% of the republic is covered with forests.
A Russian commission will investigate the accident.
Suffredini said the planned Sept. 8 return from the station of two Russian cosmonauts and American astronaut Ron Garan might be delayed to keep six people on the outpost. The planned Sept. 21 launch of a new expedition crew that includes U.S. astronaut Dan Burbank could be delayed as well. The Soyuz rocket that launches Progress space freighters has a third stage that is very similar to the third stage of the type of Soyuz rockets used to launch station crews.
The Progress space freighter was carrying about three tons of supplies and equipment to the International Space Station. Suffredini said the six people on the station now have reserves that are adequate enough to last well into 2012.
The launch was the first to the station since last month's final shuttle mission. That mission delivered more than 9,000 pounds of food and equipment.
The loss of the Progress was the first since the U.S. and Russia began assembly of the International Space Station in late 1998.
Monday, August 22, 2011
Skolkovo to focus on space technologies
From The Voice of Russia: Skolkovo to focus on space technologies
Scientific Research Institute of Space Technologies is to be set up under cooperation between the Skolkovo fund and Rocket and Space Corporation Energia. The agreement to that effect has been signed at the international aviation and space salon MAKS-2011 in the town of Zhukovsky, Moscow region.
Rocket and Space Corporation Energia is a legendary Russian manufacturer of spacecraft and space station components. It was founded in 1946 as Special Design Bureau N 1 by the leading Soviet rocket engineer and spacecraft designer Sergey Korolev. The Corporation in particular developed the first artificial satellite Sputnik 1, unmanned stations launched to the Moon, Venus and Mars.
Today Energia is also a recognized leader in the application of science-based space technologies in non-space industries. The Skolkovo innovative center also wants to the achievements of the Russian space industry for the development of other sectors of the national economy, the president of the Skolkovo fund Viktor Vekselberg says:
"We have a constant discussion on the question “Does Russia need innovations?” Skeptics mainly say that it does not. But I think the fact that Energia has joined the Skolkovo project confirms that there is a great demand for new technologies."
The development of space technologies is one of the five priority sectors for modern Russia, marked by President Dmitry Medvedev. The head of the space cluster at the Skolkovo innovative center cosmonaut Sergey Zhukov is convinced that space technologies is one of the most advantageous hi-tech sectors for Russia. First of all this applies to telecommunication and navigation segments, he says:
"I mean the development and the use of wide range of services on the base of GLONASS, GPS and Galileo navigation systems as well as Compass system which is currently being developed by China."
Russia may become the provider of telecommunication and navigation services on a global scale. We can count on more than billion users. Another priority is the restoration of traditional segments of the national space industry, the development of new generation rocket carriers which will ensure low cost transportation of cargos to space. Russia can also provide research and development services in space industry to the whole world. We have good brains and excellent competence.
According to the head of the space cluster at the Skolkovo innovative center the function of the Skolkovo fund is to choose and finance interesting and breakthrough ideas in space industry. It can be a remote sensing of Earth, navigation and communication developments or design documentation of a super light rocket or a small size satellite.
No space like home
From The Sun.co.uk: No space like home
THE US military is preparing a Star Trek-style mission to colonise alien worlds - but it will not set off for 100 years.
Top brass are convinced they need to start work drawing up blueprints now because plans for the blast-off will take A CENTURY to complete.
And they are banking on breakthroughs in propulsion cutting the journey time to just 100 YEARS by then.
It would currently take the fastest object mankind has sent into space - the 38,000mph Voyager probe - 70,000 years to reach.
The project, called the 100-Year Starship study, will see key decisions taken within the next 12 weeks - such as where to head for.
Our own solar system's inhospitable planets have been ruled out. Alpha Centauri - among the stars closest to us - is a candidate.
America's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is offering a £300,000 prize to scientists who can begin overcoming hurdles such as whether to freeze humans for the mission - or to send embryos that can be "born" when near their new home.
Darpa's David Neyland said of whoever wins the grant: "We wish them luck."
THE US military is preparing a Star Trek-style mission to colonise alien worlds - but it will not set off for 100 years.
Top brass are convinced they need to start work drawing up blueprints now because plans for the blast-off will take A CENTURY to complete.
And they are banking on breakthroughs in propulsion cutting the journey time to just 100 YEARS by then.
It would currently take the fastest object mankind has sent into space - the 38,000mph Voyager probe - 70,000 years to reach.
The project, called the 100-Year Starship study, will see key decisions taken within the next 12 weeks - such as where to head for.
Our own solar system's inhospitable planets have been ruled out. Alpha Centauri - among the stars closest to us - is a candidate.
America's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is offering a £300,000 prize to scientists who can begin overcoming hurdles such as whether to freeze humans for the mission - or to send embryos that can be "born" when near their new home.
Darpa's David Neyland said of whoever wins the grant: "We wish them luck."
Friday, August 19, 2011
Out of this world at space camp
Bedford Journal: Out of this world at space camp
By AMY SOLOMON
Staff Writer
Last month, seven children got to participate in Bedford Parks and Recreation’s Mad Science’s Space Camp: Journey into Outer Space.
Mad Science is a world-wide science enrichment program providing hands-on experiences for children.
Designed with the help of NASA, Mad Science’s Space Camp aims to introduce kids to “all aspects of space exploration, including rocket science, the sun, stars, galaxies and living in space” said Christine from Mad Science.
Despite some hot temperatures, Mad Science camp instructor, Steven Rugoletti, a high school science teacher in Plaistow, engaged the children in numerous activities to learn about everything from comets and stars to satellites and the space shuttle Atlantis.
The kids got first-hand experience of how craters are formed when a meteorite strikes the Earth or another massive object in space. The activity taught them how the displaced sediment is scattered, which can then enter the atmosphere.
By the end of the week, the campers had great knowledge about comets, meteors, satellites, planets, the moon, and stars.
“A Space Nut,” as he calls himself, Rugoletti enjoyed “watching the wonder in (the campers’) eyes. These kids really make your day when there’s an ‘a-ha’ moment and they realize or discover new things. They just glow with excitement!”
Space camps seem to be more widespread. Kids and kids-at-heart are able to participate in space camps and other space-related programs at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord.
Named after astronaut Christa McAuliffe, the New Hampshire school teacher who passed away in the shuttle Challenger disaster, and Alan Shepard, a New Hampshire native and the first American in space, the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center offers a planetarium, observatory, interactive exhibits, a museum and summer camps for children and teenagers.
Throughout the year, there are weekly and monthly programs ranging from teacher workshops and a weeklong summer symposium for teachers to “Teen Night Club” for high school students, home-school workshops and “Rocketeers,” a monthly program where children have the opportunity to build and launch their own rocket. In addition, seven different summer camps for children are offered for children ages 5-14.
The McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center has seen almost double the participants in its camps compared to last year. Although spring and summer are the Discovery Center’s busier months, there is always a quiet place with many visitors watching a show in the planetarium.
Despite the end of the space shuttle program and the uncertainty of NASA’S future, the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center will “continue to honor McAuliffe and Shepard while maintaining (its) commitment to providing programs in the fields of mathematics, science, technology and engineering” said Jennifer Jones, of the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
China poised to launch its first space lab sooner than expected
From MSNBC.com: China poised to launch its first space lab sooner than expected
The buzz out of Beijing is that China's Tiangong 1 space lab may fly sooner than expected, perhaps soaring into space by this month's end.
That might be the case, according to China space watcher Gregory Kulacki, a senior analyst and China Project manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The Tiangong 1 module ("Heavenly Palace 1" in Chinese) is not China's actual space station — nor will it be a part of the planned Chinese space station, he said.
Rather, the 8-ton experimental prototype is designed as a test bed for the technologies China will need for its future space station program, including docking technology. [Photos: China's First Space Station]
Over the next two years, China is projected to launch three missions to the Tiangong 1 space lab. The third — and possibly second — mission is expected to carry Chinese astronauts to live and work on the Earth-orbiting facility.
Kulacki has observed that at 8 tons, China's Tiangong 1 is much smaller than the 80-ton U.S. Skylab launched in 1973, or even the 22-ton core module of Russia's Mir space station, which launched in 1986. Right now, the International Space Station has grown to tip the scales at 450 tons.
Looking ahead, China currently plans to complete its 70-ton space station in the early 2020s.
"Coincidentally, that is about the time that the ISS is scheduled to be decommissioned. If both those things happen, China's space station will become the de facto new international space station," Kulacki explained in a recent post on UCS's "All Things Nuclear" website.
China's space ambitions
Just what are the ripple effects stemming from China’s push forward in space station construction? Turns out it may be a bit of a Rorschach test.
There are observers that see China's playbook in space, as on the Earth, as a bid to become a world strategic power, not just a regional power.
Indeed, space for China is one piece — a significant piece, but just one — of the puzzle they are assembling, some observers say. Others contend that, when the puzzle is complete, it has China as No. 1 in the world when it comes to space, with no one else in second place.
Yet other analysts put forward the view that China’s Tiangong 1 is no big deal, a modest increment in space prowess. And there are those who wager that China’s foothold in Earth orbit has military meaning. That’s counteracted by specialists who see a new window for U.S.-China space cooperation.
“Some members of Congress may try to use China’s progress in human space flight as an excuse to criticize the Obama administration’s space policy. Some U.S. defense analysts are likely to claim the orbiting space lab has a military purpose,” said UCS’s Kulacki.
But in reality, Kulacki told Space.com, Tiangong 1 is just a small step forward along the same path the United States and the Soviet Union crossed decades ago.
"Neither country discovered any practical military advantage from putting people in space. There is no indication China's human spaceflight program is motivated by the pursuit of military objectives, but even if it is, space professionals in the United States and Russia already know it is a fool’s errand," Kulacki said.
China's steps in space
The launch of Tiangong 1 is another modest step forward in China’s slow-paced but forward-moving human space flight program. [How China's First Space Station Will Work (Infographic)]
That’s the outlook from John Logsdon, a leading space policy expert and professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at the Space Policy Institute within George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
Logsdon said that the Chinese space module will provide the target for gaining rendezvous and docking capabilities. Doing so somewhat mimics what NASA did during the two-seater Gemini program 45 years ago — making use of an Agena target to hone piloting skills, he said.
"But while all of Gemini's rendezvous attempts were controlled by the onboard astronauts, the Chinese are first attempting to do the linkup with no crew aboard the Shenzhou 8 spacecraft. If China is successful in demonstrating automated rendezvous and docking, that will be a significant achievement," Logsdon said.
Unlike Agena, Tiangong 1 is also a small pressurized module, akin to the Soviet Salyut space station of the 1970s and 1980s, and is scheduled to host at least two crews for stays of several weeks during the Shenzhou 9 and 10 missions.
"So it is also a first step toward the larger space station that China is planning 10 years from now," Logsdon said. "So while Tiangong 1 is a meaningful step for the Chinese in their plans to achieve comprehensive human spaceflight capability, it is not a threat to U.S. leadership in on-orbit capability."
The 'so what' factor
Given a new milestone in China’s space program, how best to gauge what this may mean for the United States? That’s a much harder question to answer, said Joan Johnson-Freese, professor of national security studies at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.
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.."Frankly, I don't think it will have much impact in the U.S. beyond the usual core of space enthusiasts and supporters," Johnson-Freese said. "With the U.S. economy in the state that it’s in, people worried about jobs and 401(k)s … and people feeling that Congress is focused more on politics than fixing things … I don't think what the Chinese are doing in space will register or have much impact among those who could make a difference to the U.S. space program."
Johnson-Freese added: "And another question is what difference would space supporters like it to make? Support for the James Webb Telescope? Start of a new exploration program? Expediting the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program? What are NASA’s priorities?"
Powerful political signal
There are several points to consider regarding the imminent lofting of China's Tiangong 1, suggested Dean Cheng, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center in Washington.
"The most important point is that this is developing docking techniques and technology which, in turn, means precision controls for thrusters and the like, which has obvious military/anti-satellite implications," Cheng said.
In political terms, hurling Tiangong 1 into Earth orbit, Cheng said, is another reminder that China intends to be a space player for the foreseeable future, including the realm of human spaceflight, Cheng said.
Just as China's naval aircraft carrier was launched soon after they criticized the U.S. for spending too much on defense, undertaking the Tiangong/Shenzhou 8 mission at about the same time as the U.S. space shuttle program ends "is a powerful political signal that China is ascendant, and the U.S. is descending," Cheng said.
Asian space race under way?
Yet another reflection is the extent to which China's space station initiative is going to spur intra-Asian space competition, Cheng continued. By launching a Skylab-type vehicle — even if significantly smaller — China is, nonetheless, going to set records for Asians in space, he said.
"In some ways, this will underscore the extent to which China is ahead of India and Japan. This will be layered atop ongoing tensions among them: Beijing-Tokyo (the Senkakus/Diaoyutai incident of last year) and Beijing-New Delhi (ongoing tensions about border demarcations),” Cheng said.
With New Delhi indicating an interest in anti-satellite capabilities, Cheng noted that Beijing's ability to sustain people in space, and associated military technology benefits — not to mention the expansion of their Tianlian data-relay satellite network nominally needed for piloted space telemetry — will be a sign of China’s edge over India in space.
Cheng’s forecast: “I think the next decade, depending on everyone’s economic development, may well see a heating up of the Asian space competition.”
There are those hungry for a walk down memory lane to a 1960s-like "space race" — this time between the U.S. and China — a state of affairs that could fuel America's space esprit de corps.
That idea appears to be a non-starter, suggested Roger Launius, senior curator in the Division of Space History at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum.
The Chinese have only flown three piloted missions since 2003 "and there are really no aggressive plans that I have seen, although there has been some reporting in the media about the possibility of a piloted Chinese moon mission. How real that is, I think, is an open question," Launius said.
Absent a serious effort by the Chinese, Launius doesn't think too many American leaders will be too concerned about increasing American funding for human spaceflight.
"Of course, having said that, if China landed on the moon, went to Tranquility Base, picked up our flag, brought it back and sold it on eBay, I think Americans would be very excited," Launius suggested.
A model of the Tiangong 1 module goes on display in an exhibition hall at the China Academy of Space Technology, complete with access door for public viewing. Personnel and facilities from all subsystems and payloads are reportedly gathering at China's Jiuquan Launch Center to prepare for the lab's launch. There seems to be "enormous opportunity," Launius said, and also some "real concern" in the emergence of China as a space power.
"The opportunity comes from an increasingly capable China that might be enjoined in the international effort to create a beachhead in Earth orbit and extend human presence beyond LEO. The cooperative possibilities are intoxicating as we consider a hopeful and peaceful future exploring and using space," Launius said.
"The other side of that coin, of course, is the national security aspects of space technology," he said. "The rising capability of China has made American national security leaders nervous."
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Private Space Taxis Race to the Launch Pad
From Wall Street Journal: Private Space Taxis Race to the Launch Pad
Private spacecraft will begin docking with the International Space Station before the end of the year, months sooner than planned, after NASA gave the green light for the first cargo delivery by such a capsule.
Space Exploration Technology Corp. said the U.S. space agency has given tentative approval for it to conduct the late November flight. The launch will accelerate the shift to private ventures for future manned missions.
The flight will feature the initial effort to dock the company's Dragon capsule—the pioneer commercial spacecraft— with the space station, orbiting more than 200 miles above the earth.
In accelerating by at least several months the timetable for linking up with the station, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will provide the company and other private space outfits a symbolic and potentially important financial boost. Closely held SpaceX, as it is known, is based in Hawthorne, Calif., and was founded by entrepreneur Elon Musk.
The technical sign-off by NASA is expected to be followed shortly by final agency approval. And it marks a transition for the U.S. manned-exploration program, which previously relied entirely on government-funded and federally operated boosters and space vehicles to take both astronauts and cargo into space.
The latest schedule shift, according to some industry officials, also appears intended to deflect criticism that commercial space-transportation providers may find it difficult to quickly replace NASA's recently retired space shuttles.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, slated to blast the capsule into orbit, is nearly three years behind the company's ambitious early projections. SpaceX originally envisioned as many as four test flights in 2010 to show that the booster and the capsule would be ready for service.
Until a few months ago, NASA officials were still expecting a pair of demonstration flights of the Dragon capsule in 2011 to ensure the safety and reliability of its systems. According to that scenario, SpaceX would have had to demonstrate rendezvous and berthing capabilities in separate flights.
Monday, SpaceX said the agency "has agreed in principle" to combine separate software and hardware tests into a single mission, slated to blast off at the end of November on a Falcon 9 rocket and dock with the station about a week later.
As a result, SpaceX expects to use the upcoming flight to deliver the first few hundred pounds of crew supplies to orbit. If all goes well, that will be at least several months faster than was projected under previous NASA schedules.
In its Monday release, SpaceX said that by combining government and private funding, it hopes to increase the reliability, safety and frequency of space travel. Depending on demand, the company said it has manufacturing plans that could turn out up to six Dragon capsules annually. A spokeswoman for the company, which signed more than a dozen launch contracts in the past year, said the late 2011 mission "kicks off what will be a rapid increase in the frequency" of operations.
Last December, SpaceX became the first company to successfully launch and recover a capsule from Earth orbit.
The pear-shaped Dragon capsules are slated to begin regular cargo-delivery missions for NASA in 2012, under a $1.6 billion commercial contract structured to pay the company based on the total amount of material shipped to the space station.Such performance-based payouts weren't part of traditional NASA contracts, which often relied on features that assured contractor profits regardless of delays or budget overruns.
Seeking to cut costs and revitalize NASA for deep-space exploration, President Barack Obama wants to use private space taxis to support the space station. NASA has provided seed money to SpaceX and a number of other companies to work on projects capable of transporting astronauts to and from the station by the second half of this decade.
Simultaneously, SpaceX and other commercial-space groups are vying to provide larger rockets and more-capable capsules, required for longer-term manned missions to venture deeper into the solar system.
NASA officials have said they are pleased with the progress made by SpaceX but also intend to continue to pursue other options, including a rival commercial rocket-capsule combination that has its own contracts to deliver cargo to orbit.
Between the fall of 2006 and spring of 2011, congressional auditors determined that NASA paid SpaceX more than $290 million for certain work to develop and test the company's cargo-transportation system. According to the same report, the company achieved more than three-quarters of 40 pre-determined milestones on schedule.
The accelerated cargo-delivery schedule comes as NASA and congressional leaders continue to spar over the cost and schedule of a proposed NASA heavy-lift rocket eventually intended to take astronauts to an asteroid and beyond.
NASA officials have said they are refining final cost estimates for a heavy-lift rocket able to blast 130 tons into space. It would emphasize space-shuttle designs and, at least initially, rely on solid rocket-motor technology. In later versions, NASA experts envision shifting more to liquid propellants and in-orbit refueling options.
View Full Image
Getty Images
Space Exploration Technology CEO Elon Musk
.NASA's proposed next-generation rocket would fly just twice in the next 10 years and, along with a manned capsule dubbed Orion, could carry a price tag as high as $38 billion, according to industry officials and lawmakers. Inside and outside NASA, critics of the heavy-lift alternative have said those cost and schedule projections compare unfavorably with projects being pursued by SpaceX and its peers.
NASA has also been hit by bipartisan criticism it hasn't adequately complied with congressional mandates to use shuttle-derived technologies for its proposed heavy-lift rocket. These critics fault its long-range exploration plans for improperly favoring commercially developed manned systems.
To try to resolve that dispute, some lawmakers have taken the extraordinary step of voting to issue congressional subpoenas to obtain internal NASA documents detailing agency decision-making. Such critics have accused agency officials of trying to sabotage the heavy-lift rocket concept, by giving Congress allegedly inflated cost figures and unrealistically long development timetables for that launcher system.
Private spacecraft will begin docking with the International Space Station before the end of the year, months sooner than planned, after NASA gave the green light for the first cargo delivery by such a capsule.
Space Exploration Technology Corp. said the U.S. space agency has given tentative approval for it to conduct the late November flight. The launch will accelerate the shift to private ventures for future manned missions.
The flight will feature the initial effort to dock the company's Dragon capsule—the pioneer commercial spacecraft— with the space station, orbiting more than 200 miles above the earth.
In accelerating by at least several months the timetable for linking up with the station, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will provide the company and other private space outfits a symbolic and potentially important financial boost. Closely held SpaceX, as it is known, is based in Hawthorne, Calif., and was founded by entrepreneur Elon Musk.
The technical sign-off by NASA is expected to be followed shortly by final agency approval. And it marks a transition for the U.S. manned-exploration program, which previously relied entirely on government-funded and federally operated boosters and space vehicles to take both astronauts and cargo into space.
The latest schedule shift, according to some industry officials, also appears intended to deflect criticism that commercial space-transportation providers may find it difficult to quickly replace NASA's recently retired space shuttles.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, slated to blast the capsule into orbit, is nearly three years behind the company's ambitious early projections. SpaceX originally envisioned as many as four test flights in 2010 to show that the booster and the capsule would be ready for service.
Until a few months ago, NASA officials were still expecting a pair of demonstration flights of the Dragon capsule in 2011 to ensure the safety and reliability of its systems. According to that scenario, SpaceX would have had to demonstrate rendezvous and berthing capabilities in separate flights.
Monday, SpaceX said the agency "has agreed in principle" to combine separate software and hardware tests into a single mission, slated to blast off at the end of November on a Falcon 9 rocket and dock with the station about a week later.
As a result, SpaceX expects to use the upcoming flight to deliver the first few hundred pounds of crew supplies to orbit. If all goes well, that will be at least several months faster than was projected under previous NASA schedules.
In its Monday release, SpaceX said that by combining government and private funding, it hopes to increase the reliability, safety and frequency of space travel. Depending on demand, the company said it has manufacturing plans that could turn out up to six Dragon capsules annually. A spokeswoman for the company, which signed more than a dozen launch contracts in the past year, said the late 2011 mission "kicks off what will be a rapid increase in the frequency" of operations.
Last December, SpaceX became the first company to successfully launch and recover a capsule from Earth orbit.
The pear-shaped Dragon capsules are slated to begin regular cargo-delivery missions for NASA in 2012, under a $1.6 billion commercial contract structured to pay the company based on the total amount of material shipped to the space station.Such performance-based payouts weren't part of traditional NASA contracts, which often relied on features that assured contractor profits regardless of delays or budget overruns.
Seeking to cut costs and revitalize NASA for deep-space exploration, President Barack Obama wants to use private space taxis to support the space station. NASA has provided seed money to SpaceX and a number of other companies to work on projects capable of transporting astronauts to and from the station by the second half of this decade.
Simultaneously, SpaceX and other commercial-space groups are vying to provide larger rockets and more-capable capsules, required for longer-term manned missions to venture deeper into the solar system.
NASA officials have said they are pleased with the progress made by SpaceX but also intend to continue to pursue other options, including a rival commercial rocket-capsule combination that has its own contracts to deliver cargo to orbit.
Between the fall of 2006 and spring of 2011, congressional auditors determined that NASA paid SpaceX more than $290 million for certain work to develop and test the company's cargo-transportation system. According to the same report, the company achieved more than three-quarters of 40 pre-determined milestones on schedule.
The accelerated cargo-delivery schedule comes as NASA and congressional leaders continue to spar over the cost and schedule of a proposed NASA heavy-lift rocket eventually intended to take astronauts to an asteroid and beyond.
NASA officials have said they are refining final cost estimates for a heavy-lift rocket able to blast 130 tons into space. It would emphasize space-shuttle designs and, at least initially, rely on solid rocket-motor technology. In later versions, NASA experts envision shifting more to liquid propellants and in-orbit refueling options.
View Full Image
Getty Images
Space Exploration Technology CEO Elon Musk
.NASA's proposed next-generation rocket would fly just twice in the next 10 years and, along with a manned capsule dubbed Orion, could carry a price tag as high as $38 billion, according to industry officials and lawmakers. Inside and outside NASA, critics of the heavy-lift alternative have said those cost and schedule projections compare unfavorably with projects being pursued by SpaceX and its peers.
NASA has also been hit by bipartisan criticism it hasn't adequately complied with congressional mandates to use shuttle-derived technologies for its proposed heavy-lift rocket. These critics fault its long-range exploration plans for improperly favoring commercially developed manned systems.
To try to resolve that dispute, some lawmakers have taken the extraordinary step of voting to issue congressional subpoenas to obtain internal NASA documents detailing agency decision-making. Such critics have accused agency officials of trying to sabotage the heavy-lift rocket concept, by giving Congress allegedly inflated cost figures and unrealistically long development timetables for that launcher system.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
From 2003: It is rocket science
From SF Gate, Feb 9, 2003: It is rocket science
A generation ago we beat stratospheric odds, shooting daring men to the moon.
Today, our attitude toward space is: "Been there, done that, got the T- shirt."
From miraculous to mundane in fewer than 40 years.
A nation once awestruck by astronaut heroes winning the "space race" has learned to seek its vicarious thrills elsewhere. Who tunes in to observe a group of scientists and payload specialists routinely climbing aboard for another shuttle cargo run? Not when you can see giggly young women in tube tops grab squirmy electric eels on "Fear Factor."
Today's space program gets attention only through NASA's frequent gimmicks and its occasional catastrophes. The disastrous fate of the space shuttle Columbia was a reminder of exactly what we had taken for granted as the shuttle flew under the radar of the public imagination. Then, last weekend, the space program again grabbed the world's attention -- briefly.
Most Americans could not name a single astronaut who's flown a successful shuttle mission in the past 10 years, although many can identify 'N Sync pop star Lance Bass as a wannabe "space tourist" scrounging for Russia's $25 million ticket price to hitch a Soyuz rocket ride to the international space station. A Washington Post piece a few months ago suggested that space had done the impossible -- become dull: "You know what they are doing in (the) space station right now? Growing soybeans. Even C-SPAN is taking a pass."
Most Americans didn't know there were seven astronauts in space until Columbia plummeted piecemeal across the Texas prairie. And many American youngsters, after enduring the harrowing shocks of school slayings and terrorist attacks, have achieved a sad cognitive dissonance: They regard the Columbia as a cosmic car crash that claimed the lives of a few noble strangers.
What a contrast to an earlier era, when magical moonbeams flickered through cathode tubes coast to coast as the country cheered Neil Armstrong's "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
The disconcerting truth is that most of us had grown blase, even glib, about space exploration.
Meanwhile, NASA is busy dispatching shuttles to and from the space station - - a football field-size, 400,000-pound structure orbiting more than 200 miles above Earth. At the program's inception, NASA envisioned the shuttle making 50 to 100 trips a year to the station, which was to become a floating science lab and a launching pad for missions to Mars and beyond.
Both the shuttle and the station have fallen far short of those lofty expectations -- and tallied huge cost overruns in the process. The station is just half completed, and the shuttle makes only a handful of journeys a year, slavishly schlepping tons of solar panels and trestles for the structure's many additions. A growing number of skeptics fret that the shuttle exists solely to service the space station, and that the space station exists solely to give the shuttle somewhere to go.
To keep the public intrigued -- crucial to retaining political support and funding -- NASA has increasingly relied on experiments that sometimes carry a whiff of gimmickry, and on keeping human beings aboard.
While most shuttle trips focus on outfitting the station, Columbia's last mission was primarily popular science. Experiments -- some designed by schoolkids and 4-H clubs -- tracked how microgravity alters ant socialization, moss growth and the spinning of spider webs. The earlier shuttle experiment "Fun With Urine" was followed by "More Fun With Urine" -- determining how that human byproduct might be used to water plants or make paint.
There were other, more sober topics, such as how bone growth in low gravity might have implications for the treatment of osteoporosis. The Columbia crew also created the weakest flame ever generated -- a feat impossible in Earth's gravity, and potentially significant as a way to reduce soot, which is linked to 60,000 premature deaths in the United States.
The NASA publication "Spinoff" lists new commercial applications from shuttle research. Some certainly sound noteworthy -- creation of a miniature heart pump, for example -- but cynics scoff that others are a stretch. Example:
the sports bra made from a material used in shuttle spacesuits that reduces "mammary bounce."
Twenty times in recent years, Congress has voted on scrapping the shuttle- space station program. The year after it survived by only one vote, NASA redeemed it as a vehicle of international cooperation, and a post-Cold War strategy to keep Russian specialists busy doing something besides peddling their expertise to rogue nations. International space station astronaut Col. Daniel Bursch recently touted such cooperation as the space program's significant benefit, adding the Russians wouldn't be so helpful in combating terrorism "had we not had the international space station and been working closely with that country for several years."
But what really gives the space program its cache is the human drama -- the more human, the better. Space flight isn't just for astronauts anymore. Former NASA moonwalker Buzz Aldrin has argued that NASA could make billions selling shuttle seats that otherwise would go empty -- borrowing a trick from the new ubercapitalists of space, the Russians, who put Pizza Hut logos on their rockets and are on the road to giving space travel the commercialized look of a NASCAR race. The Russians have already transported into space a rich entrepreneur from California and another from South Africa.
A 1999 survey by the Space Transportation Association found 64 percent of Americans would be interested in taking a space trip if the spaceships were safe and the cost akin to that of an African safari. By last year, more than 200 people had put down money, some $2 billion in all, to reserve a seat on a future space flight. It's become such a rich guy's perk that even cartoon character Homer Simpson, after making a crank call to NASA complaining about its "boring" launches, won the right to rocket into space in an episode spoofing NASA's "citizen astronaut" plans.
Meanwhile, our best information about space comes from unmanned probes and rover robots, which beamed back striking photos from the planet Uranus and a wealth of data about Mars. These unmanned missions have one other inherent advantage: They are expendable.
It's costly to send humans, and of course you have to be able to get them back down. The risk of catastrophe flying on a commercial airliner is 1 in 2 million. The record of the shuttle, conceived out of 1970s pre-Pentium technology, is 1 in 56. At that rate, a plane would crash every hour at San Francisco International Airport..
NASA critics such as Theodore Postol, professor of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Alex Roland, a former NASA historian now at Duke University, contend that NASA has needlessly jeopardized human life and perpetuated a public relations "circus" by using astronauts in missions when robots and unmanned probes could do the job.
NASA acknowledges that it needs real heroes to keep the public engaged. And sometimes humans have made a crucial difference. A Columbia crew fixed a computer hard drive, salvaging data on a pulmonary experiment -- repair work requiring a human touch. And, of course, robots aren't romantic symbols. They don't embody our frontier spirit, or our yearning for the vast unknown. Had Thomas Jefferson had the option, he might have dispatched robots to explore the West. Instead, Lewis and Clark risked their lives and became models of courageous adventure for all time.
Former shuttle program director Byran O'Connor bluntly acknowledged, "When people say safety is our No. 1 priority, I always say if that were true, we would not fly."
This seems an apt time to re-evaluate whether the shuttle program, given its astronomical costs and astronomical risks, is yielding astronomical benefits. It's time to stop being cavalier about the cosmos.
A generation ago we beat stratospheric odds, shooting daring men to the moon.
Today, our attitude toward space is: "Been there, done that, got the T- shirt."
From miraculous to mundane in fewer than 40 years.
A nation once awestruck by astronaut heroes winning the "space race" has learned to seek its vicarious thrills elsewhere. Who tunes in to observe a group of scientists and payload specialists routinely climbing aboard for another shuttle cargo run? Not when you can see giggly young women in tube tops grab squirmy electric eels on "Fear Factor."
Today's space program gets attention only through NASA's frequent gimmicks and its occasional catastrophes. The disastrous fate of the space shuttle Columbia was a reminder of exactly what we had taken for granted as the shuttle flew under the radar of the public imagination. Then, last weekend, the space program again grabbed the world's attention -- briefly.
Most Americans could not name a single astronaut who's flown a successful shuttle mission in the past 10 years, although many can identify 'N Sync pop star Lance Bass as a wannabe "space tourist" scrounging for Russia's $25 million ticket price to hitch a Soyuz rocket ride to the international space station. A Washington Post piece a few months ago suggested that space had done the impossible -- become dull: "You know what they are doing in (the) space station right now? Growing soybeans. Even C-SPAN is taking a pass."
Most Americans didn't know there were seven astronauts in space until Columbia plummeted piecemeal across the Texas prairie. And many American youngsters, after enduring the harrowing shocks of school slayings and terrorist attacks, have achieved a sad cognitive dissonance: They regard the Columbia as a cosmic car crash that claimed the lives of a few noble strangers.
What a contrast to an earlier era, when magical moonbeams flickered through cathode tubes coast to coast as the country cheered Neil Armstrong's "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
The disconcerting truth is that most of us had grown blase, even glib, about space exploration.
Meanwhile, NASA is busy dispatching shuttles to and from the space station - - a football field-size, 400,000-pound structure orbiting more than 200 miles above Earth. At the program's inception, NASA envisioned the shuttle making 50 to 100 trips a year to the station, which was to become a floating science lab and a launching pad for missions to Mars and beyond.
Both the shuttle and the station have fallen far short of those lofty expectations -- and tallied huge cost overruns in the process. The station is just half completed, and the shuttle makes only a handful of journeys a year, slavishly schlepping tons of solar panels and trestles for the structure's many additions. A growing number of skeptics fret that the shuttle exists solely to service the space station, and that the space station exists solely to give the shuttle somewhere to go.
To keep the public intrigued -- crucial to retaining political support and funding -- NASA has increasingly relied on experiments that sometimes carry a whiff of gimmickry, and on keeping human beings aboard.
While most shuttle trips focus on outfitting the station, Columbia's last mission was primarily popular science. Experiments -- some designed by schoolkids and 4-H clubs -- tracked how microgravity alters ant socialization, moss growth and the spinning of spider webs. The earlier shuttle experiment "Fun With Urine" was followed by "More Fun With Urine" -- determining how that human byproduct might be used to water plants or make paint.
There were other, more sober topics, such as how bone growth in low gravity might have implications for the treatment of osteoporosis. The Columbia crew also created the weakest flame ever generated -- a feat impossible in Earth's gravity, and potentially significant as a way to reduce soot, which is linked to 60,000 premature deaths in the United States.
The NASA publication "Spinoff" lists new commercial applications from shuttle research. Some certainly sound noteworthy -- creation of a miniature heart pump, for example -- but cynics scoff that others are a stretch. Example:
the sports bra made from a material used in shuttle spacesuits that reduces "mammary bounce."
Twenty times in recent years, Congress has voted on scrapping the shuttle- space station program. The year after it survived by only one vote, NASA redeemed it as a vehicle of international cooperation, and a post-Cold War strategy to keep Russian specialists busy doing something besides peddling their expertise to rogue nations. International space station astronaut Col. Daniel Bursch recently touted such cooperation as the space program's significant benefit, adding the Russians wouldn't be so helpful in combating terrorism "had we not had the international space station and been working closely with that country for several years."
But what really gives the space program its cache is the human drama -- the more human, the better. Space flight isn't just for astronauts anymore. Former NASA moonwalker Buzz Aldrin has argued that NASA could make billions selling shuttle seats that otherwise would go empty -- borrowing a trick from the new ubercapitalists of space, the Russians, who put Pizza Hut logos on their rockets and are on the road to giving space travel the commercialized look of a NASCAR race. The Russians have already transported into space a rich entrepreneur from California and another from South Africa.
A 1999 survey by the Space Transportation Association found 64 percent of Americans would be interested in taking a space trip if the spaceships were safe and the cost akin to that of an African safari. By last year, more than 200 people had put down money, some $2 billion in all, to reserve a seat on a future space flight. It's become such a rich guy's perk that even cartoon character Homer Simpson, after making a crank call to NASA complaining about its "boring" launches, won the right to rocket into space in an episode spoofing NASA's "citizen astronaut" plans.
Meanwhile, our best information about space comes from unmanned probes and rover robots, which beamed back striking photos from the planet Uranus and a wealth of data about Mars. These unmanned missions have one other inherent advantage: They are expendable.
It's costly to send humans, and of course you have to be able to get them back down. The risk of catastrophe flying on a commercial airliner is 1 in 2 million. The record of the shuttle, conceived out of 1970s pre-Pentium technology, is 1 in 56. At that rate, a plane would crash every hour at San Francisco International Airport..
NASA critics such as Theodore Postol, professor of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Alex Roland, a former NASA historian now at Duke University, contend that NASA has needlessly jeopardized human life and perpetuated a public relations "circus" by using astronauts in missions when robots and unmanned probes could do the job.
NASA acknowledges that it needs real heroes to keep the public engaged. And sometimes humans have made a crucial difference. A Columbia crew fixed a computer hard drive, salvaging data on a pulmonary experiment -- repair work requiring a human touch. And, of course, robots aren't romantic symbols. They don't embody our frontier spirit, or our yearning for the vast unknown. Had Thomas Jefferson had the option, he might have dispatched robots to explore the West. Instead, Lewis and Clark risked their lives and became models of courageous adventure for all time.
Former shuttle program director Byran O'Connor bluntly acknowledged, "When people say safety is our No. 1 priority, I always say if that were true, we would not fly."
This seems an apt time to re-evaluate whether the shuttle program, given its astronomical costs and astronomical risks, is yielding astronomical benefits. It's time to stop being cavalier about the cosmos.
Friday, August 12, 2011
From 1997: Abandon spaceship
From The Economist, April 10, 1997: Abandon spaceship
T HAS not been a good week for space flight. On April 8th the space shuttle Co lumbia returned to earth with a faulty fuel cell, having spent only four of its planned 16 days in orbit. As it was making its final approach, an unmanned launch was docking with Russia’s Mir space station. This was bearing the chemicals and equipment needed to keep Mir’s oxygen supply intact after the latest in a series of mishaps that would provide enough material for a full-length disaster movie. And, a day later, NASA, America’s space agency, announced that the first part of the International Space Station (ISS) will be launched in October 1998 instead of this November, because of Russia’s inability to keep to its part of the schedule.
When things go wrong, it is science—the alleged main purpose of manned space flight—that suffers first. Columbia was carrying more than 30 experiments; these will now have to compete with other strident claims on future shuttle time. On Mir, time for any science at all has to be snatched between attempts to keep the 11-year-old rust bucket going. And each time there are delays and cost overruns on the ISS, NASA, under its tight budgetary constraints, takes money out of the pot marked “on-board experiments”.
America invited Russia to join in building the ISS in 1993 (which was when it was redubbed “international”). It did so in the name of world peace, mutual friendship and a substantial cash discount for the American taxpayer. Russia was to undertake several of the 75 launches needed to put the bits of the station into orbit, and would build some of those bits, among them the service module, one of the habitable spaces at the station’s core.
Since then peace and friendship have abounded—between astronauts anyway—but savings have not. Even though the deal included $400m of American support for Mir, in return for letting the shuttle dock with it and American astronauts live in it, a question mark has hung over Russia’s ability to pay for its share of the ISS. Early last year the two countries tried to shore up their deal by signing another one: Russia promised to deliver on time, and America promised to bolster the Russian space programme still further with, among other things, extra flights to Mir.
But it all unravelled. Early in February, Russia’s space agency, RKA, having still had no money from the government, quietly allowed the launch date of the service module to slip from April to December of 1998. NASA advanced RKA $20m to keep work ticking over, aiming to deduct the money from its contributions to Mir next year. The Russian prime minister, Viktor Cherno myrdin, then promised that the first $100m of $450m earmarked for this year’s work would be released by February 28th. The deadline passed like a spaceship in the night.
A delay to the whole project was by now inevitable. The service module is third in the assembly sequence. Besides containing living quarters, it will carry the booster rocket needed to push the station back into place if it starts to fall out of orbit. If NASA had tried to stick to the old schedule, the first two parts of the station would have been floating in space, useless and at risk, for a year before this module joined them.
Not only is the delay a pity, it will also mean more budgetary squeezes and a longer wait before on-board science can begin—and hence more pressure to do some of it on Mir instead. And Mir, even with copious infusions of NASA cash, is not in the prime of health.
American spacefarers, accustomed to exacting safety standards (Columbia returned despite the fact that it could have functioned safely on its two remaining fuel cells), must find Mir a scary place. Its most recent glitch was a leak that disabled the apparatus for removing carbon dioxide from the air. This followed a leak in a cooling system that made the astronauts swelter, a fire that nearly forced an evacuation, and the failures of both the main and the back-up “Elektron” units, which produce the station’s life-giving oxygen from waste water. Currently its oxygen comes from “candles” of lithium perchlorate, a chemical that releases the gas when burned. This cannot be reassuring to NASA con trollers, still mindful of the fire, who will have to decide whether or not another American astronaut should board Mir when the present incumbent leaves in May.
For now, NASA is expressing confidence in Mir. But another emergency could cause its premature demise. Meanwhile, an American delegation that went to Russia at the end of March to discuss the ISS reported that the Russians are once again promising to pay up. But if they do not, America has little with which to put pressure on them. In the worst case, the station will have to be redesigned. NASA is already working on ways to modify its components so that they can be used as substitutes for the Russian ones. Either way, it looks increasingly possible that there will be a hiatus between the end of Mir and the beginning of the ISS. If, indeed, it begins at all.
T HAS not been a good week for space flight. On April 8th the space shuttle Co lumbia returned to earth with a faulty fuel cell, having spent only four of its planned 16 days in orbit. As it was making its final approach, an unmanned launch was docking with Russia’s Mir space station. This was bearing the chemicals and equipment needed to keep Mir’s oxygen supply intact after the latest in a series of mishaps that would provide enough material for a full-length disaster movie. And, a day later, NASA, America’s space agency, announced that the first part of the International Space Station (ISS) will be launched in October 1998 instead of this November, because of Russia’s inability to keep to its part of the schedule.
When things go wrong, it is science—the alleged main purpose of manned space flight—that suffers first. Columbia was carrying more than 30 experiments; these will now have to compete with other strident claims on future shuttle time. On Mir, time for any science at all has to be snatched between attempts to keep the 11-year-old rust bucket going. And each time there are delays and cost overruns on the ISS, NASA, under its tight budgetary constraints, takes money out of the pot marked “on-board experiments”.
America invited Russia to join in building the ISS in 1993 (which was when it was redubbed “international”). It did so in the name of world peace, mutual friendship and a substantial cash discount for the American taxpayer. Russia was to undertake several of the 75 launches needed to put the bits of the station into orbit, and would build some of those bits, among them the service module, one of the habitable spaces at the station’s core.
Since then peace and friendship have abounded—between astronauts anyway—but savings have not. Even though the deal included $400m of American support for Mir, in return for letting the shuttle dock with it and American astronauts live in it, a question mark has hung over Russia’s ability to pay for its share of the ISS. Early last year the two countries tried to shore up their deal by signing another one: Russia promised to deliver on time, and America promised to bolster the Russian space programme still further with, among other things, extra flights to Mir.
But it all unravelled. Early in February, Russia’s space agency, RKA, having still had no money from the government, quietly allowed the launch date of the service module to slip from April to December of 1998. NASA advanced RKA $20m to keep work ticking over, aiming to deduct the money from its contributions to Mir next year. The Russian prime minister, Viktor Cherno myrdin, then promised that the first $100m of $450m earmarked for this year’s work would be released by February 28th. The deadline passed like a spaceship in the night.
A delay to the whole project was by now inevitable. The service module is third in the assembly sequence. Besides containing living quarters, it will carry the booster rocket needed to push the station back into place if it starts to fall out of orbit. If NASA had tried to stick to the old schedule, the first two parts of the station would have been floating in space, useless and at risk, for a year before this module joined them.
Not only is the delay a pity, it will also mean more budgetary squeezes and a longer wait before on-board science can begin—and hence more pressure to do some of it on Mir instead. And Mir, even with copious infusions of NASA cash, is not in the prime of health.
American spacefarers, accustomed to exacting safety standards (Columbia returned despite the fact that it could have functioned safely on its two remaining fuel cells), must find Mir a scary place. Its most recent glitch was a leak that disabled the apparatus for removing carbon dioxide from the air. This followed a leak in a cooling system that made the astronauts swelter, a fire that nearly forced an evacuation, and the failures of both the main and the back-up “Elektron” units, which produce the station’s life-giving oxygen from waste water. Currently its oxygen comes from “candles” of lithium perchlorate, a chemical that releases the gas when burned. This cannot be reassuring to NASA con trollers, still mindful of the fire, who will have to decide whether or not another American astronaut should board Mir when the present incumbent leaves in May.
For now, NASA is expressing confidence in Mir. But another emergency could cause its premature demise. Meanwhile, an American delegation that went to Russia at the end of March to discuss the ISS reported that the Russians are once again promising to pay up. But if they do not, America has little with which to put pressure on them. In the worst case, the station will have to be redesigned. NASA is already working on ways to modify its components so that they can be used as substitutes for the Russian ones. Either way, it looks increasingly possible that there will be a hiatus between the end of Mir and the beginning of the ISS. If, indeed, it begins at all.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
NASA’S Juno Spacecraft Launches To Jupiter
From Advert.co.uk: NASA’S Juno Spacecraft Launches To Jupiter
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA’s solar-powered Juno spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 12:25 p.m. EDT Friday to begin a five-year journey to Jupiter.
Juno’s detailed study of the largest planet in our solar system will help reveal Jupiter’s origin and evolution. As the archetype of giant gas planets, Jupiter can help scientists understand the origin of our solar system and learn more about planetary systems around other stars.
“Today, with the launch of the Juno spacecraft, NASA began a journey to yet another new frontier,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. “The future of exploration includes cutting-edge science like this to help us better understand our solar system and an ever-increasing array of challenging destinations.”
After Juno’s launch aboard an Atlas V rocket, mission controllers now await telemetry from the spacecraft indicating it has achieved its proper orientation, and that its massive solar arrays, the biggest on any NASA deep-space probe, have deployed and are generating power.
“We are on our way, and early indications show we are on our planned trajectory,” said Jan Chodas, Juno project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. “We will know more about Juno’s status in a couple hours after its radios are energized and the signal is acquired by the Deep Space Network antennas at Canberra.”
Juno will cover the distance from Earth to the moon (about 250,000 miles or 402,236 kilometers) in less than one day’s time. It will take another five years and 1,740 million miles (2,800 million kilometers) to complete the journey to Jupiter. The spacecraft will orbit the planet’s poles 33 times and use its collection of eight science instruments to probe beneath the gas giant’s obscuring cloud cover to learn more about its origins, structure, atmosphere, and magnetosphere, and look for a potential solid planetary core.
With four large moons and many smaller moons, Jupiter forms its own miniature solar system. Its composition resembles a star’s, and if it had been about 80 times more massive, the planet could have become a star instead.
“Jupiter is the Rosetta Stone of our solar system,” said Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “It is by far the oldest planet, contains more material than all the other planets, asteroids and comets combined and carries deep inside it the story of not only the solar system but of us. Juno is going there as our emissary — to interpret what Jupiter has to say.”
Juno’s name comes from Greek and Roman mythology. The god Jupiter drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief, and his wife, the goddess Juno, was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter’s true nature.
The NASA Deep Space Network, or DSN, is an international network of antennas that supports interplanetary spacecraft missions and radio and radar astronomy observations for the exploration of the solar system and the universe. The network also supports selected Earth-orbiting missions.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The Juno mission is part of the New Frontiers Program managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. Launch management for the mission is the responsibility of NASA’s Launch Services Program at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
For more information about Juno, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/juno
and
http://missionjuno.swri.edu
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA’s solar-powered Juno spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 12:25 p.m. EDT Friday to begin a five-year journey to Jupiter.
Juno’s detailed study of the largest planet in our solar system will help reveal Jupiter’s origin and evolution. As the archetype of giant gas planets, Jupiter can help scientists understand the origin of our solar system and learn more about planetary systems around other stars.
“Today, with the launch of the Juno spacecraft, NASA began a journey to yet another new frontier,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. “The future of exploration includes cutting-edge science like this to help us better understand our solar system and an ever-increasing array of challenging destinations.”
After Juno’s launch aboard an Atlas V rocket, mission controllers now await telemetry from the spacecraft indicating it has achieved its proper orientation, and that its massive solar arrays, the biggest on any NASA deep-space probe, have deployed and are generating power.
“We are on our way, and early indications show we are on our planned trajectory,” said Jan Chodas, Juno project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. “We will know more about Juno’s status in a couple hours after its radios are energized and the signal is acquired by the Deep Space Network antennas at Canberra.”
Juno will cover the distance from Earth to the moon (about 250,000 miles or 402,236 kilometers) in less than one day’s time. It will take another five years and 1,740 million miles (2,800 million kilometers) to complete the journey to Jupiter. The spacecraft will orbit the planet’s poles 33 times and use its collection of eight science instruments to probe beneath the gas giant’s obscuring cloud cover to learn more about its origins, structure, atmosphere, and magnetosphere, and look for a potential solid planetary core.
With four large moons and many smaller moons, Jupiter forms its own miniature solar system. Its composition resembles a star’s, and if it had been about 80 times more massive, the planet could have become a star instead.
“Jupiter is the Rosetta Stone of our solar system,” said Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “It is by far the oldest planet, contains more material than all the other planets, asteroids and comets combined and carries deep inside it the story of not only the solar system but of us. Juno is going there as our emissary — to interpret what Jupiter has to say.”
Juno’s name comes from Greek and Roman mythology. The god Jupiter drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief, and his wife, the goddess Juno, was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter’s true nature.
The NASA Deep Space Network, or DSN, is an international network of antennas that supports interplanetary spacecraft missions and radio and radar astronomy observations for the exploration of the solar system and the universe. The network also supports selected Earth-orbiting missions.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The Juno mission is part of the New Frontiers Program managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. Launch management for the mission is the responsibility of NASA’s Launch Services Program at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
For more information about Juno, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/juno
and
http://missionjuno.swri.edu
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Cola cans falling from the sky isn't rocket science. Or is it?
From the age.com.au: Cola cans falling from the sky isn't rocket science. Or is it?
STUDENTS at the King David School never imagined studying motion laws in physics would lead to them watching soft drink cans fall out of the French sky, in a contest which simulates a space mission.
But this month the Armadale school and the Victorian Space Science Education Centre will represent Australia in the CanSat competition at a military base in France, a global challenge in which students compete to create the best model satellite in a soft drink can.
The satellite, which will be launched by a high-powered rocket or helium balloon, must relay data on humidity, air pressure and temperature.
Advertisement: Story continues below Students also need to design an inflatable airbag to cushion the impact of the landing, and deploy an antenna to transmit the data once the soft drink can has hit the ground.
The King David team, including current and former students, will be one of the few school groups , with most teams representing universities.
King David School's science co-ordinator, Milorad Cerovac, said he was always looking for ways to engage students in science.
''As a science teacher, I feel like I have a responsibility to encourage more students into science, engineering and technology,'' Mr Cerovac said.
''We certainly have noticed an increase in students' interest - some students who weren't really sure where they were going are now really focused on scientific disciplines.''
Year 12 student Josh Marlow said one of the challenges the team had faced was the difficulty of squeezing the satellite into a soft drink can: ''At one point we weren't sure everything would fit.''
He said the motion laws he learnt earlier in the year in physics had come in handy on the project and he had also swotted up on electricity, because the satellite contained telemetry chips, which transmitted the data using electrical signals.
Josh said while he had always considered a possible career in science, he had not thought about engineering until he became involved in the CanSat challenge.
''Now there is a very real possibility I might end up in engineering - (engineering degrees) are two of my top three university preferences.''
Naomi Mathers, the program developer at the Victorian Space Science Education Centre, said science should be fun, hands on and exciting.
''Just like you can compete in sporting competitions, you should be able to compete in science competitions,'' Dr Mathers said.
''We are trying to make science relevant so students can see career pathways in Australia.''
Dr Mathers said the federal government had recently invested $40 million in space research.
''Australia won't be launching people to the moon but there are niche areas we are seen to be strong in, such as the ability to analyse data from sensors and satellites. Having students with these skills will enable them to move into these industries.''
The CanSat competition will be held in Biscarrose, France, from August 21 to 25.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Spacewalkers ready space station for Russian upgrade
Reuters.com: Spacewalkers ready space station for Russian upgrade
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Aug 3 (Reuters) - A pair of spacewalking cosmonauts floated outside the International Space Station on Wednesday to prepare the orbital outpost for upcoming Russian renovations.
The work follows NASA's completion of the United States' part of the $100 billion complex, a project that also includes Europe, Japan and Canada.
The U.S. space agency retired its shuttle fleet last month after 37 flights to build and equip the station 220 miles (350 km) above Earth.
Cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Alexander Samokutyaev floated outside the station's Pirs airlock at 10:50 a.m. EDT (1450 GMT) to set up an antenna for a high-speed laser communications system, deploy a small educational satellite and carry out other tasks.
Their six-hour job list had included the relocation of a telescoping extension boom currently mounted on the Pirs module, which is scheduled to be detached from the station next year.
In place of the 10-year-old Pirs, Russia plans to install a new combination airlock-research laboratory module slated for launch in December 2012.
To free up the new module's docking port, the 3.5-ton Pirs will be removed and driven into the atmosphere for incineration by a Russian Progress spacecraft.
But a myriad of problems put the spacewalkers behind schedule and flight controllers decided to postpone the boom's relocation.
The trouble began with the cosmonauts' first task, which was to release a 57-pound (26 kg) amateur radio satellite called Arissat-1, a prototype for future educational programs.
The spacewalkers and ground control teams noticed one of the satellite's two antennas was missing, delaying its release.
"It appears the antenna was not attached or something may have happened to it," said NASA commentator Josh Byerly.
After a few hours of discussions, program managers decided to proceed with Arissat's deployment despite the impairment, which will cut in half the amount of available communications during the mission.
The other alternative was to try to fix the satellite on the station, delaying its release for at least six months when the next spacewalk is scheduled.
Arissat is a joint project of the Radio Amateur Satellite Corp., the Amateur Radio on ISS project, NASA and Russia's RSC Energia.
The spacewalkers also ran into problems with cables for Russia's laser communications system, intended to provide high-speed transmissions at up to 100 megabytes a second to Earth from Russian science experiments.
The antenna's cables turned out to be a bit short, causing some additional work for the cosmonauts to get them to attach properly.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
LEGO minifigs going to Jupiter on NASA’s Juno spacecraft
From the Brother's Brick: LEGO minifigs going to Jupiter on NASA’s Juno spacecraft
As part of Lego’s partnership with NASA, three aluminum minifigs will be placed aboard the Juno spacecraft! The minifigs will represent Jupiter, Juno and Galileo.
Lego Press release:
Three LEGO® Minifigures leave earth on the Juno deep-space probe today on a five-year mission to Jupiter to broaden awareness of the importance of planetary research.
The specially-constructed aluminium Minifigures are the Roman god Jupiter, his wife Juno and ‘father of science’ Galileo Galilei. The LEGO crew’s mission is part of the LEGO Bricks in Space project, the joint outreach and educational programme developed as part of the partnership between NASA and the LEGO Group to inspire children to explore science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
The LEGO Minifigures will help get attention for Juno’s mission to improve understanding of our solar system’s beginnings by revealing the origin and evolution of Jupiter.
Juno and the Minifgures’ journey will be featured on www.LEGOspace.com, the website that gathers together educational and fun material about space. The site also houses a number of downloads, videos, a LEGOnaut game, and various facts about space exploration. Later this year it will also have videos of experiments conducted with LEGO Education models on the International Space Station.
From the NASA website:
NASA’s Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft will carry the 1.5-inch likeness of Galileo Galilei, the Roman god Jupiter and his wife Juno to Jupiter when the spacecraft launches this Friday, Aug. 5. The inclusion of the three mini-statues, or figurines, is part of a joint outreach and educational program developed as part of the partnership between NASA and the LEGO Group to inspire children to explore science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
International Space Station Will Be Sunk Into the Ocean in 2020 [Update: Not Quite]
From PC World Geek Tech: International Space Station Will Be Sunk Into the Ocean in 2020 [Update: Not Quite]
Update: In a tweet, NASA states that "people will work aboard station at least through 2020," so 2020 is not a hard cut-off date for the International Space Station. In addition, MSNBC notes that the ISS stakeholders are looking into whether the space station can remain usable until 2028. The MSNBC story also provides an excerpt from a Russian TV transcript where Vitaly Davydov of the Russian Space Agency discusses de-orbiting the ISS. It's worth a read. Our original story follows below.
The Russian space agency and its partners have announced their plans to sink the International Space Station (ISS) into the ocean once it reaches the end of its lifespan in 2020.
The ISS would be perhaps the largest man-made thing to fall through our atmosphere, and that's exactly why the Russians and other space agencies involved will not just let it orbit above us indefinitely. If anything were to collide with the massive and complex ISS, it would leave a cloud of space debris.
This is not the first time a space station has been plunged into our oceans: In 2001, the Russians sank the Mir space station into the Pacific. The ISS has been active since it was first launched in 1998 for an initial 15-year mission. The mission was extended and has led to partnerships with United States, Europe, Japan, and Canada.
Russia is also ending the "Soyuz era", but they have plans for testing new ships with multi-use element after 2015. Similarly, NASA might have landed their last shuttle ever, but they are also looking forward into new space travel with the Mult-Purpose Crew Vehicle.
Space shuttle Columbia part found in east Texas
From CNN: Space shuttle Columbia part found in east Texas
(CNN) -- The recent drought has ruined millions of acres of farmland in Texas, turning lakes into mud puddles, but in the East Texas city of Nacogdoches, authorities say, the drought may have done something good: Unearthed a piece of the space shuttle Columbia.
The object, which is about 4 feet in diameter, was found in a local lake. NASA says it is a tank that provides power and water for shuttle missions.
"It's one of ours," said Lisa Malone, a spokeswoman for the agency.
Malone added that NASA is trying to develop a plan to recover the item, but it could take weeks to get it.
"We're looking into whether we'll send a team out or local authorities can," Malone said.
Authorities say the object was found after the drought caused the waters to recede in Lake Nacogdoches, and they notified representatives from NASA on Friday.
"The lower water level has exposed a larger than normal area on the northern side of the lake," said Sgt. Greg Sowell of the Nacogdoches Police Department.
The item is full of mud and is in a remote area near a private shoreline, Sowell said.
Nacogdoches made headlines in 2003 when debris from the shuttle Columbia disaster was found there.
The spacecraft broke up while re-entering Earth's atmosphere near the end of its mission on February 1, 2003.
"We want to remind everyone that the rules are the same as they were back in 2003. If this object is indeed a part of the shuttle, it is government property, and it is a criminal offense to tamper with it," Sowell said.
(CNN) -- The recent drought has ruined millions of acres of farmland in Texas, turning lakes into mud puddles, but in the East Texas city of Nacogdoches, authorities say, the drought may have done something good: Unearthed a piece of the space shuttle Columbia.
The object, which is about 4 feet in diameter, was found in a local lake. NASA says it is a tank that provides power and water for shuttle missions.
"It's one of ours," said Lisa Malone, a spokeswoman for the agency.
Malone added that NASA is trying to develop a plan to recover the item, but it could take weeks to get it.
"We're looking into whether we'll send a team out or local authorities can," Malone said.
Authorities say the object was found after the drought caused the waters to recede in Lake Nacogdoches, and they notified representatives from NASA on Friday.
"The lower water level has exposed a larger than normal area on the northern side of the lake," said Sgt. Greg Sowell of the Nacogdoches Police Department.
The item is full of mud and is in a remote area near a private shoreline, Sowell said.
Nacogdoches made headlines in 2003 when debris from the shuttle Columbia disaster was found there.
The spacecraft broke up while re-entering Earth's atmosphere near the end of its mission on February 1, 2003.
"We want to remind everyone that the rules are the same as they were back in 2003. If this object is indeed a part of the shuttle, it is government property, and it is a criminal offense to tamper with it," Sowell said.
Monday, August 1, 2011
Colony on Mars? SpaceX Preps for Red Planet Living
From PCMag.com: Colony on Mars? SpaceX Preps for Red Planet Living
At this point, the idea of a settlement on Mars is mainly limited to Hollywood movies like "Total Recall," but if Elon Musk, CEO of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) has his way, a trip to Mars will be as commonplace as a trip to Europe in just several decades.
At this point, SpaceX is focusing its efforts on commercial spaceflights to the International Space Station, the first of which will hopefully take place in December, Musk said today during an appearance at the AIAA propulsion conference. But in the coming years, Musk has high hopes for commercial journeys—and settlements—on places like the Moon and Mars.
"Ultimately, the thing that is super important in the grand scale of history is—are we on a path to becoming a multi-planet species or not? If we’re not, that’s not a very bright future. We’ll just be hanging out on Earth until some eventual calamity claims us," Musk said.
Challenges abound, of course, not the least of which is how to transport the supplies and people needed to make a new settlement workable. SpaceX thus far has a high-level idea of what is needed to make a journey to Mars possible, though "I wouldn't say it was fleshed out to a detailed level," Musk said.
First on the list would be a vehicle that's capable of delivering substantial mass to Mars and then returning to Earth. The company's planned Falcon Heavy rocket, the plans for which were unveiled in April, could conceivably carry 12 to 15 metric tons, but "I think you'll probably want a vehicle that can deliver something on the order of 50 metric tons ... in a fully reusable manner," Musk said.
The Falcon Heavy, which will be the world's largest rocket, will have its inaugural flight in late 2012.
When asked about using nuclear propulsion on Mars, Musk was skeptical that people would approve. "I think it's going to be tough to convince the public that we should launch large reactors into space" and possibly spread uranium on Earth, he said. It might be possible to build a reactor on Mars or the Moon, but people usually forget how heavy reactors are and that many of them usually have a source of water nearby to drive the steam turbine. If fusion were to become a reality, "that would be very cool," Musk said, but solar panels are also an option.
At this point, however, the main goal is to actually get to Mars. As soon as a base is established, there will be a bigger incentive to improve transportation, he said, pointing to ships that first traveled to the American colonies.
"Before the U.S. colonies were established, there was no forcing function for improving trips across the Atlantic. But when there was, there was a need to make those ships better and better," Musk said.
Cost, of course, is also a factor. At this point, the cost per pound for the Falcon Heavy is about $1,000, but to make this a sustainable effort, the cost per pound would probably need to be well under $100, probably closer to $50, he said. Making the Falcon Heavy totally reusable would help drive down costs.
Musk expects the effort to be a combination of private and government funding, though he said it's hard to predict what percentage would come from the government.
At this point, the idea of a settlement on Mars is mainly limited to Hollywood movies like "Total Recall," but if Elon Musk, CEO of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) has his way, a trip to Mars will be as commonplace as a trip to Europe in just several decades.
At this point, SpaceX is focusing its efforts on commercial spaceflights to the International Space Station, the first of which will hopefully take place in December, Musk said today during an appearance at the AIAA propulsion conference. But in the coming years, Musk has high hopes for commercial journeys—and settlements—on places like the Moon and Mars.
"Ultimately, the thing that is super important in the grand scale of history is—are we on a path to becoming a multi-planet species or not? If we’re not, that’s not a very bright future. We’ll just be hanging out on Earth until some eventual calamity claims us," Musk said.
Challenges abound, of course, not the least of which is how to transport the supplies and people needed to make a new settlement workable. SpaceX thus far has a high-level idea of what is needed to make a journey to Mars possible, though "I wouldn't say it was fleshed out to a detailed level," Musk said.
First on the list would be a vehicle that's capable of delivering substantial mass to Mars and then returning to Earth. The company's planned Falcon Heavy rocket, the plans for which were unveiled in April, could conceivably carry 12 to 15 metric tons, but "I think you'll probably want a vehicle that can deliver something on the order of 50 metric tons ... in a fully reusable manner," Musk said.
The Falcon Heavy, which will be the world's largest rocket, will have its inaugural flight in late 2012.
When asked about using nuclear propulsion on Mars, Musk was skeptical that people would approve. "I think it's going to be tough to convince the public that we should launch large reactors into space" and possibly spread uranium on Earth, he said. It might be possible to build a reactor on Mars or the Moon, but people usually forget how heavy reactors are and that many of them usually have a source of water nearby to drive the steam turbine. If fusion were to become a reality, "that would be very cool," Musk said, but solar panels are also an option.
At this point, however, the main goal is to actually get to Mars. As soon as a base is established, there will be a bigger incentive to improve transportation, he said, pointing to ships that first traveled to the American colonies.
"Before the U.S. colonies were established, there was no forcing function for improving trips across the Atlantic. But when there was, there was a need to make those ships better and better," Musk said.
Cost, of course, is also a factor. At this point, the cost per pound for the Falcon Heavy is about $1,000, but to make this a sustainable effort, the cost per pound would probably need to be well under $100, probably closer to $50, he said. Making the Falcon Heavy totally reusable would help drive down costs.
Musk expects the effort to be a combination of private and government funding, though he said it's hard to predict what percentage would come from the government.
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