tagged w/ Space Exploration
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A test of the spacecraft due to replace the shuttle and take humans back to the moon has crashed after its landing parachutes failed.A test of the spacecraft due to replace the shuttle and take humans back to the moon... more
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"Within the next 10 years, the US, China, Israel, and a host of private companies plan to set up camp on the moon. So if and when they plant a flag, does that give them property rights?
A NASA working group hosted a discussion this week to ask: who owns the moon? The answer, of course, is no one. The Outer Space Treaty, the international law signed by more than 100 countries, states that the moon and other celestial bodies are the province of all mankind. No doubt that would irk all of the people throughout the ages, like monks from the Middle Ages, who have tried to claim the moon was theirs.
But ownership is different from property rights. People who rent apartments, for example, don't own where they live, but they still hold rights. So with all of the upcoming missions to visit the moon and beyond, space industry thought leaders are seriously asking themselves how to deal with a potential land rush, cowboy-style ...""Within the next 10 years, the US, China, Israel, and a host of private companies... more
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"The Oort Cloud is a spherical cloud of comets believed to lie roughly 50,000 AU, or nearly a light-year from the Sun, which places the cloud at nearly a quarter of the distance to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun. The Kuiper belt and scattered disc, the other two known reservoirs of trans-Neptunian objects, are less than one thousandth the Oort cloud's distance. The outer extent of the Oort cloud defines the boundary of our Solar System..."
"The Oort Cloud is a spherical cloud of comets believed to lie roughly 50,000 AU,... more
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Have you ever wondered how the Universe started? How did we get here? And what other secrets are out in space?
On September 10, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will try to answer these and other questions by re-creating the conditions that existed just billionths of a second after the Big Bang.
The BBC will join scientists as they switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a giant subterranean machine that will probe the mysteries of the cosmos.
By smashing together tiny particles, it is hoped that the LHC will reveal the origins of mass, show us what all the invisible matter in the cosmos is made of, and perhaps even create mini black holes.
Professor Brian Cox is one of the LHC scientists and a physicist at CERN. He is on hand to answer your questions about the project and what could be found ...Have you ever wondered how the Universe started? How did we get here? And what other... more
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Engineers have unveiled the latest prototypes for a European rover that is due to land on Mars in 2015. More...
Engineers have unveiled the latest prototypes for a European rover that is due to land... more
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NASA has put off the planned launch of its next-generation Orion spacecraft for a year, a setback to efforts to fly a successor to its aging space shuttles, the space agency announced Monday.
The Orion space vehicle in this artist rendering from Lockheed Martin's web site, won't see space until 2014.
more photos »
"September 2014 is when we are saying we will launch the first crew on the Orion," program manager Jeff Hanley told reporters in a conference call Monday.
NASA officials plan to wrap up assembly of the International Space Station and retire the space shuttle fleet in 2010, freeing up money to build and fly the new spacecraft. Cost concerns are at the root of the delay, but NASA is also giving itself wiggle room to deal with the unforeseen technical problems that will inevitably crop up, Hanley said.
"It's the unknown unknowns that we have to hedge against," he said. "Having some number of months of schedule flexibility to meet our commitment, in addition to having some number of months of cost -- dollars -- flexibility, is key to keeping ourselves in a healthy posture."
Sometimes called "Apollo on steroids," Orion is designed to ferry astronauts to and from the space station and eventually back to the moon. Unlike the space shuttles, which land like an airplane, Orion is a capsule that will parachute to a landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California. See photos of the full-size mock-up »
The new goal of September 2014 is a year later than NASA had planned to launch the first Orion, but still six months short of the March 2015 commitment date set by Congress. Program managers were hoping to fly the new vehicle much sooner than that to keep the gap between the last shuttle flight and the first Orion flight to a minimum.
"As we looked at the plan we had for September 2013 against the available dollars, it became clear to us that we needed to adjust our schedules," said Hanley. NASA has put off the planned launch of its next-generation Orion spacecraft for a... more
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U.S. Sen. John Cornyn
"Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." Those famous words from Astronaut Neil Armstrong when Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969 captivated the world and stirred enormous pride in Texas, home of Mission Control. Only 17 years old at the time, I, like many Americans, watched in amazement as our nation accomplished the unimaginable.
This year America celebrates the 50th anniversary of NASA and our commitment to explore space. In 1958, a year after the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite, President Eisenhower signed legislation creating NASA. The "space race" had begun.
The Manned Spacecraft Center, now known as the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC), opened in Houston in 1963. It became home base for NASA's astronaut corps, training space explorers for the U.S. and its partner nations in the space program.
To this day, the JSC continues to serve as NASA's Mission Control Center, while also directing all space shuttle missions, including the international space station – described as "the largest, most powerful, complex human facility to ever operate in space."
More ...U.S. Sen. John Cornyn
"Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has... more
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Think it's hard counting the census here on Earth? Try it when you're keeping track of the population of the sky. There are more than 70 sextillion — or 70 thousand million million million stars in the cosmos, and that doesn't include uncountable moons and asteroids and comets and more. With all that, you wouldn't think you could generate much buzz by announcing that astronomers had spotted a few dozen more bodies whirling about out there. But a buzz is just what was created yesterday at a meeting in Nantes, France, when Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor of the Geneva Observatory reported that he and his team had discovered 45 previously unknown planets orbiting a handful of nearby stars. There's good reason for all the excitement.
There was never much doubt that planets other than the known nine (or the known eight, now that Pluto has been demoted) existed, but it wasn't until 1995 that the first of these so-called exoplanets was discovered. The vast distance between stars makes a comparatively small body like a planet invisible to even the sharpest-eyed telescopes. Instead, astronomers had to rely on a less-direct method, looking for tiny wobbles in the star itself. A star that couldn't stand still was almost certainly being tugged on by something, and that something was likely to be the gravity of an orbiting planet.
Mayor himself was the one who spotted that first exotic world, and in the years since, he and other investigators have counted about 270 more. But land in the cosmic exurbs is decidedly inhospitable. Almost all of the newly discovered planets were huge, hot and gassy, Jupiter-like bodies lying scaldingly close to their suns. There might have been smaller, pleasanter Earth-like planets out there, but the equipment just didn't exist to spot the tinier telltale wobbles they would cause. Now it does — and it's delivered the goods.
Thanks to the evocatively named High-Accuracy Radial-Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), a telescope mounted atop La Scilla Mountain in Chile, Mayor and his team were able to detect a litter of new planets, some as small as four times the mass of Earth — tiny by exoplanet standards. One star, just 42 light-years away, is home to a trio of such worlds — which Mayor is now calling "super-Earths." The largest of the three is just 9.5 times as big as Earth, the smallest just 4.2 times. It was not only the modest size of all the new worlds that got astronomers so excited; it was the sheer number of them too. Mayor found his planets by studying a group of just 200 stars — an infinitesimal sliver of the total number out there. That has led him to estimate that at least a third of all sun-like stars may be home to Earth-like worlds.
"Clearly these planets are only the tip of the iceberg," he told the conference. "Does every single star harbor planets? We may not know the answer, but we are making progress."
Even Mayor's newest, smallest planets are unlikely to be pastoral places. All of them lie so close to their suns that they complete one orbit in 50 days or less — compared to the lazy, 365-day journey Earth makes — meaning that any water or incipient life on their surfaces would simply sizzle away. But HARPS is already sensitive enough to spot planets that are 100,000 times smaller than their parent star. Refinements both in HARPS itself and in the next generation of planet-hunting telescopes should make them able to spot smaller and smaller stellar wobbles. Those little wiggles would be the signature of Earth-like worlds lying at a not-too-hot, not-too-cold distance from their suns. And it's on those planets that you just might find Earth-like life.Think it's hard counting the census here on Earth? Try it when you're... more
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A multimillionaire's privately-funded rocket was lost on its journey into space last night. The launch was PayPal creator Elon Musk's third attempt to create a market for affordable space travel.
Mr. Musk issued a statement admitting the "big disappointment" of failing to reach orbit. He said although the first stages of the launch were "picture perfect", it was unfortunate that "a problem occurred with stage separation, causing the stages to be held together".
"This is under investigation", he added.
More at the link.A multimillionaire's privately-funded rocket was lost on its journey into space... more
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Nasa's Phoenix lander spacecraft has confirmed the presence of water on Mars. The lander's onboard lab successfully identified the ice in Mars's; soil by breaking it into water vapors. However, scientists have to investigate more to find whether the planet is habitable or not. Nasa's Phoenix lander spacecraft has confirmed the presence of water on Mars. The... more
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THE Phoenix Mars mission has found water in a soil sample after spending the last two months examining the Red Planet for evidence that it could support life, NASA scientists said today.
"We have water," said William Boynton, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer instrument on Phoenix.
"We've seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted," he said.
The spacecraft's robotic arm has dug several trenches in the Martian soil near the planet's north pole and been heating soil samples in a series of small "ovens", the DPA news agency reported.
It had earlier spotted chunks outside the rover that scientists had identified as ice, but data sent back by the most recent soil sample for the first time showed water inside Mars' dirt, researchers said.
Phoenix had also earlier identified minerals necessary for life in soil samples.
NASA also said Phoenix's mission will be extended through September.THE Phoenix Mars mission has found water in a soil sample after spending the last two... more
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Nearly two weeks after its historic landing, the US Mars probe Phoenix has scooped up its first sample of Martian soil and begun analyzing it for water and organic compounds, a NASA official said.
The 200-milliliter (12 cubic inches) of Martian earth is topped by a white crust that has set NASA scientists debating whether it is ice or salt deposits from evaporated water.
"It looks like a good sample for us," Phoenix mission chief scientist Peter Smith told reporters in a telephone conference.
"This is really an important occasion for us, to be poised to make a measurement for the first time of the polar soil that will tell us how much water is in the soil, and secondly what the minerals are that make up the soil," said Smith.
Especially intriguing, he said, is to find out whether ice believed to be under the Martian soil has already melted and changed the composition of the soil.
A chunk of permafrost-like soil of the Martian arctic was scooped up Thursday by the probe's 2.35 meter (7.7 foot) titanium and aluminum backhoe-like extension.
It now lies inside the scoop, poised over an instrument called the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA, where it will be dumped and sealed in for several days of analysis, the scientist said.
"The first step is to dry water out of the sample and find out what percentage of water there is .. The test should tell very quickly," said Smith.
The TEGA will heat up the sample gradually to 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 Farenheit).
"I would guess by the end of next week we will be in a pretty good position to tell you our first assessment of this soil, and if we are lucky enough to get some white material in there, to figure out what it is too," Smith said.
He does not think the white crust material is ice.
"We suspect that actual ice is going to be very hard to dig a chunk. I can agree this probably is not ice, but I can't say that for certain."
Phoenix is scheduled to collect two more samples of Martian soil over the next few days. One will be analyzed by optical microscope, the other by chemical analysis, said Phoenix mission chief Mat Robinson, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California.
The scientists stressed that the Phoenix probe is not equipped to test Martian soil for fossils or living microbes.
Since landing on May 25, the spacecraft has already compiled photographs of the stark reddish Martian north pole terrain surrounding it.
Using a panoply of high-tech instrumentation, Phoenix will over the next three months examine the soil and take records of the climate in the Red Planet's arctic, with scientists seeking to understand the history of the presence of water in its three forms there, and hoping to dig up signs of life-supporting organic minerals.
Water was first detected on the Martian north pole by the US Odyssey probe in 2002. It sparked the Phoenix mission.
End QuoteNearly two weeks after its historic landing, the US Mars probe Phoenix has scooped up... more
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Gravitas: Portraits of a Universe is astrophysicist John Dubinski's self-published DVD containing his stunning supercomputer simulations of galactic evolution set to music. Gravitas: Portraits of a Universe is astrophysicist John Dubinski's... more
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The European Space Agency
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JPL has a nice site devoted to Cassini images.
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NASA has been busy planning for a new spacecraft, the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), to be able to rendezvous with the ISS and then to take a crew back to the moon in conjunction with the Lunar Surface Access Module (LSAM). A Crew Launch Vehicle, named Ares I, derived from the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) will deliver the CEV to low Earth Orbit (LEO) while a larger rocket, Ares 5, will deliver ISS cargo of the LSAM to LEO. Once in LEO, the CEV and LSAM will dock and a J-2X Earth Departure Stage (EDS) will deliver the CEV/LSAM to Low Lunar Orbit (LLO) at 100 km. The EDS is discarded and CEV/LSAM temporarily decouple. The LSAM then performs the Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI) to deliver the LSAM to the lunar surface will all 4 astronauts onboard. After some amount of time on the surface, an ascent stage from the LSAM boosts the crew back to LLO and the ascent stage docks with the unattended CEV. The ascent stage is discarded and the service module section of the CEV boosts the crew module (with crew) towards Earth reentry, and the service module is then discarded. The crew module reenters the upper atmosphere and an ablative heat shield slows the craft to a point where it is captured by the Earth. Parachutes then slow the crew module for a land (or sea in emergencies) landing. Whew, safe at last from solar storms! Ares V will be able to launch 130 metric tons LEO inclined at 28.5 degrees or it can deliver 55 metric tons to trans-lunar orbit. By comparison, the Saturn V was capable of 118 metric tons to LEO or 47 metric tons to lunar orbit.
See http://www.plasmaben.com/CEV.html for more info.NASA has been busy planning for a new spacecraft, the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV),... more
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The Vision for Space Exploration is the United States space policy announced on January 14, 2004 by U.S. President George W. Bush. It is seen as a response to the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, the state of human spaceflight at NASA, and a way to regain public enthusiasm for space exploration.
The Vision for Space Exploration is the United States space policy announced on... more
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NASA animation of the Ares I and V vehicles. Also known as the crew and cargo launch vehicles. These are the proposed vehicles to supersede the Space Shuttle program which ends in 2010. This animation depicts the proposed lunar exploration mission scenario.NASA animation of the Ares I and V vehicles. Also known as the crew and cargo launch... more
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Virgin Galactic is the world's first spaceline. Giving you the groundbreaking opportunity to become one of the first ever non-professional astronauts. Virgin Galactic will own and operate its privately built spaceships, modelled on the remarkable, history-making SpaceShipOne.
Virgin's vast experience in aviation, adventure, luxury travel and cutting-edge design combined with the unique technology developed by Burt Rutan will ensure an unforgettable experience unlike any other available to mankind.
With safety at the forefront, our unique spacecraft is being designed at Rutan's base in Mojave, California alongside a concerted research and development programme.
"The deal with Mojave Aerospace Ventures is just the start of what we believe will be a new era in the history of mankind, one day making the affordable exploration of space by human beings a real possibility." Richard Branson.
It is these spaceships that will allow affordable sub-orbital space tourism for the first time in the history of the universe.
http://www.virgingalactic.com/
Virgin Galactic is the world's first spaceline. Giving you the groundbreaking... more
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"Elated scientists probing the arctic surface of Mars with their newly landed Phoenix spacecraft said Saturday they are convinced they have found a bright and shiny layer of genuine ice only inches beneath the Martian soil and directly under the body of the lander itself.
"It's the consensus of all of us that we have found ice," said Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, as he talked to reporters in a conference call only six days after Phoenix landed safely from Earth. "It's shiny and smooth - it's absolutely astounding!"
But Smith did add a note of scientific caution: "It's not impossible that it's something else," he conceded, "but our leading interpretation is ice. We are looking at an extended table of ice."
And it turns out that Phoenix itself made the epochal discovery, for it was the exhaust from the lander's twelve retrorockets - firing during the last few seconds of the spacecraft's touchdown last Sunday - that blew a mere 3 to 6 inches of Martian topsoil away and uncovered the patch of ice near one of the lander's three legs. The camera on the lander's robotic arm snapped images of the flat, gleaming slab.
Spacecraft flying in orbit high above the planet carry sensitive radar instruments that can probe as much as a yard or so beneath the Martian surface, and their signals have already indicated a broad layer of what Earth-bound scientists believe is buried ice in the planet's frigid far northern region where Phoenix was sent to explore".
By David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor"Elated scientists probing the arctic surface of Mars with their newly landed... more
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