Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Help Move An Asteroid and Other Space-Related Opportunities

Asteroid Deflection Techniques. Image Credit: British National Space Center

If you’ve got some ideas about how to deflect an asteroid or comet heading towards Earth, there’s an opportunity out there to have your concept reviewed by some of the world’s top astronomers and physicists. The only restriction is that you must be a student or a young professional under the age of 33. This announcement comes on the heels of notices of other opportunities for young people to get involved with space missions. The space sector must be listening to recent complaints that the younger generation feels a disconnect to space-related activities. At any rate, these are great opportunities.

Here’s more on the asteroid competition, as well as more ways for students to get involved with space missions:

The “Move An Asteroid 2008” competition is sponsored by the Space Generation Advisory Council. It’s an international technical paper competition looking for unique and innovative concepts for how to deflect an asteroid or comet that may impact the Earth. The competition is open to individuals or teams, and they must write and submit a 3-10 page original technical paper on their innovative concept. The 1st place award is a trip to present the winning paper at this year’s Space Generation Congress (SGC) and International Astronautical Congress (IAC) which take place in Glasgow, Scotland from late September until early October 2008. The 2nd place award is a trip to present at the SGC. Entries are due on June 9, 2008 and winners will be announced on June 30, 2008, the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska Event, the largest asteroid/comet impact event in Earth’s recent history.

Another opportunity is the Cassini Scientist for a Day contest. The contest is open to all students in the U.S. between grades 5 and 12, working alone or in groups of up to four students. This is a competition for the privilege of deciding where to point the cameras onboard the Cassini spacecraft on June 10, 2008. There will be 55 minutes of time where the winners will control of spacecraft, plenty of time to turn it as needed and point the cameras at pretty much any target you’d like. In case you’re not sure what targets would be best, the Cassini team has narrowed the field of possible targets. Deadline for submission is Noon, Pacific Daylight Time on May 8, 2008 (3:00 p.m. Eastern time).

Next, there’s the NASA Quest LIMA Challenge for Students in Grades 4-8. In this challenge, students become scientists and propose Antarctic research. The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica is the first true-color high-resolution satellite view of the Antarctic continent. Using this view of Antarctica, students must develop a research question and debate the value of studying the chosen feature. Registration is currently open and educational resources are available online. This is going on right now, with the deadline for preliminary proposals due on April 20, 2008, so check this one out soon.

Also, there’s a chance for U.S. students to involved working with the mission operations associated with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and specificially the CRISM (Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars) on board MRO, currently orbiting Mars. The project is called Mars Exploration Student Data Teams. This is an ongoing program for high school students, and one adult facilitator is required. This program is facilitated through a cooperative effort by NASA and Arizona State University. Another similar program is the Mars Student Imaging Project that works with the Mars Odyssey orbiter. You can find more info on that program here.

Also ongoing is the ISS EarthKAM (Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students)program, a NASA education program which gives students teachers the chance to choose targets on Earth for pictures to be taken from the International Space Station. Learn more about that program here.

Original News Source: Space Generation Advisory Council

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Soyuz Launches With South Korea’s First Astronaut

Soyuz TMA- 12 launch. Image credit: NASA TV

South Korea’s first astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan today and are on their way to the International Space Station. So-Yeon Yi, a 29-year-old female engineer joined incoming Expedition 17 commander Sergei Volkov and flight engineer Oleg Kononenko in the three-seat Soyuz TMA-12 spacecraft, which lifted off at 7:16:39 a.m. EDT. Besides conducting some scientific research Yi has said she will sing to her crewmates and prepare some Korean cuisine for them as well.

Yi, the youngest woman to ever launch into space, is flying under a commercial agreement between the Russian space agency and South Korea’s ministry of science and technology. The Soyuz will catch up with the ISS in two days, and dock at the Pirs airlock module around 9:00 a.m. on Thursday, April 10.

Yi will spend nine days aboard the space station and return to Earth on April 19 with outgoing Expedition 16 commander Peggy Whitson and flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko, currently on board the ISS. The other astronaut on the space station, and the third member of the Expedition 16 crew, NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman, will remain aboard the lab complex with Volkov and Kononenko and become a member of Expedition 17. Reisman came to the station aboard the shuttle Endeavour in March. He will be relieved in early June by astronaut Gregory Chamitoff, scheduled to launch May 31 aboard the shuttle Discovery.

Volkov, 35, is the son of cosmonaut Alexander Volkov and is the first second-generation cosmonaut or astronaut to fly in space. The elder Volkov spent one expedition on board the Soviet Salyut space station (Salyut 7 in 1985, for 65 days) and two stay on board the Mir space station (Mir 4 in 1988 for 152 days and Mir 10 in 1991 for 175 days.)

In video shown during the Soyuz’ climb to space, Yi, seated to Volkov’s right, could be seen enthusiastically waving a thumbs up at the camera and smiling.

Original News Sources: NASA, NASA TV

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

A Case of MOND Over Dark Matter

According to Newton’s Second Law of Dynamics, objects on the farthest edges of galaxies should have lower velocities than objects near the center. But observations confirm that galaxies rotate with a uniform velocity. Some astronomers believe the orbital behavior of galaxies can be explained more accurately with Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) — a modified version of Newton’s Second Law — than by the rival, but more widely accepted, theory of dark matter. The dark matter theory assumes that a halo of dark matter surrounds each galaxy, providing enough matter (and gravity) that all the stars in a galaxy disc orbit with the same velocity. MOND, however uses a different explanation, and a recent study of eight dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way seems to favor the MOND approach over the dark matter theory.

“MOND was first suggested to account for things that we see in the distant universe,” said Garry Angus, of the University of St Andrews. “This is the first detailed study in which we’ve been able to test out the theory on something close to home. The MOND calculations and the observations appear to agree amazingly well.”

Usually the equation F=ma (force = mass X acceleration) solves your basic acceleration problems. But it doesn’t explain the observed rotation of galaxies. MOND suggests that at low values of acceleration, the acceleration of a particle is not linearly proportional to the force. According to Angus, MOND adds a new constant of nature (a0) to physics, besides the speed of light and Planck’s constant. Above the constant, accelerations are exactly as predicted by Newton’s second law (F=ma). Below it, gravity decays with distance from a mass, rather than distance squared. This constant is so small that it goes unnoticed with the large accelerations that we experience in everyday life. For instance, when we drop a ball the gravity is 100 billion times stronger than a0 and the accelerated motion of the Earth round the Sun is 50 million times stronger. However, when objects are accelerating extremely slowly, as we observe in galaxies or clusters of galaxies, then the constant makes a significant difference to the resulting gravitational forces.

When MOND is applied to nearby dwarf galaxies, one effect is that tidal forces from the Milky Way, which have a negligible effect in classical Newtonian Mechanics, can actually make a big difference. This is particularly significant for the dwarfs orbiting close to our Galaxy.

“In these dwarf galaxies, the internal gravity is very weak compared to the gravity of the Milky Way,” said Angus. “MOND suggests that the Milky Way is a bit like a bank that loans out gravity to nearby dwarf galaxies to make them more stable. However, there are conditions on the loan: if the dwarf galaxies start to approach the bank, the loan is gradually reduced or even cancelled and the dwarfs must pay it back. In two galaxies, we’ve seen what could be signs that they’ve come too close too quickly and are unable to repay the loan fast enough. This appears to have caused disruption to their equilibrium.”

Angus used MOND to calculate the ratio of mass to amount of light emitted by the stars in the dwarf galaxies from the observed random velocities of the stars collected independently. He also calculated the orbital paths of the stars in the dwarf galaxies. In all eight cases, the MOND calculations for the orbits were within predictions. For six of the eight galaxies, the calculations were also a good match to expected values for mass-to-light ratios; however for two galaxies, Sextans and Draco, the ratios were very high, which could well suggest tidal effects. The value for Sextans could also be due to poor quality measurements of the galaxy’s luminosity, which Angus said are improving all the time for these ultra dim objects.

“These tidal effects can be tested by updating the 13 year old luminosity of Sextans and making accurate observations of the orbits of Draco and Sextans around the Milky Way. We also need to carry out some detailed simulations to understand the exact mechanisms of the tidal heating,” said Angus.

If Newton’s gravity holds true, the dark matter needed in the dwarf galaxies has constant density in the center which is contrary to theoretical predictions, which suggest density should rise to the center.

“Even without direct detection, the dark matter theory is difficult to prove or refute and although we may not be able to prove whether MOND is correct, by carrying out these kind of tests we can see if it continues to hold up or if it is definitely ruled out,” said Angus.

Original News Source: Royal Astronomy Society’s National Astronomy Meeting

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

If ET Calls, Would We Be Told?

SETI's Alien Telescope Array (ATA) listens day and night for a signal from space. Credit: SETI

If a verified message from aliens is ever received, would the public be told about it? SETI — the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence – does have an international protocol that if an alien signal is ever received, it would be disseminated among the astronomical community and made public. And of course, says Mac Tonnies at the SETI Blog, “international cooperation might be necessary in order to distinguish a legitimate alien signal from any number of phenomena capable of generating false alarms.” But what if the signal is more than just extra-terrestrials saying hello? Tonnies believes SETI’s plans for full disclosure only makes sense if the message is fairly benign. If the signal was a notice of impending doom from a black hole, supernova, or alien invasion –something we on Earth had little power to do anything about — Tonnies questions whether governments would choose to make such information public. But could something of this magnitude really be kept under wraps?

Frankly, I hadn’t really considered this scenario. When I think about SETI and the possibility of communication with an alien species, I envision, perhaps naively, what Tonnies calls the “lofty, abstract dialogue immortalized by Carl Sagan.” But of course, we have no idea of what any alien intelligence would like to say to us. If it was bad news, would governments of the world elect to withhold the information from the public?

Intrigued by Tonnies’ blog post, I contacted him to ask that question.

“I think it’s a very real possibility that generally goes unspoken,” said Tonnies, an author, essayist and blogger. “In the event of a bona fide signal, the public may only be made privy to part of it. It depends on the content and context of the message.”

Tonnies questions whether governments would elect to gamble with their respective economies and socio-political agendas for the sake of imparting knowledge that might only cause mayhem.

But wouldn’t governments want the people of the world to know so that intellectual resources could be pooled to try to find a solution to the problem? And what about the concept of an alien message bringing the world together?

“I think uniting the people of the world is the last thing governments want,” said Tonnies. “A rush to counter some cosmic threat is likely to have a war-time character, at least among scientists. And this is assuming that the threat we’re being warned about is something that can be acted upon with the technology available to us. If we happen across a generic warning, there’s no promise we’ll have the savvy to do anything about it given our level of development. If that’s the case, why would we expect prompt disclosure?”

Logically, however, it seems unlikely that aliens would call just to tell us we’re doomed. “It’s pretty foolish to expect aliens to conform to our definition of altruism — although I’m drawn to the idea of a ‘Galactic Emergency Broadcast System,'” said Tonnies. “Maybe ETs feel compelled to give less advanced civilizations a “heads up” in the event on some interstellar crisis because we might make for meaningful companionship a few million years from now.”

Maybe I’ve watched too many movies, but I’m still doubtful that an alien message, whether good news or bad, could be withheld from public knowledge. It would be too big, too transformational, too altering an experience not to be shared.

Original News Source: SETI BLog

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Slowing to Mars Speed

When the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) goes streaking through the Martian atmosphere at more than twice the speed of sound, it’s going to need one of the largest parachutes ever used in a space mission to successfully land a car-sized rover on the Red Planet. The parachute, built by Pioneer Aerospace, has 80 suspension lines, measures more than 50 meters (165 feet) in length, and opens to a diameter of nearly 17 meters (55 feet). It is the largest so called “disk-gap-band” parachute (more on that in a minute) ever built. To get ready for the scheduled 2009 launch of MSL, engineers have begun testing different parts of the parachute in preparation for the ultimate test of the entire parachute system.

Recent successful trials of two parachute packing techniques were performed in the world’s largest wind tunnel at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Engineers loaded chutes into a cannon and fired them out at 85 mph to simulate events during the real landing, looking for damage to line attachments and other parts. All four tests were successful, and high-speed video data is now being analyzed to select a final parachute design for the mission. But the large parachute is just the beginning of the unique landing technique MSL will use.

MSL will be the first planetary mission to use precision landing techniques, using a rocket-guided entry with a heat shield to steer itself toward the Martian surface similar to the way the space shuttle controls its entry through the Earth’s upper atmosphere. In this way, the spacecraft will fly to a desired location above the surface of Mars before deploying its parachute for the final landing. MSL will use a scaled-up version of parachutes used for the Viking and Mars Exploration Rovers mission. Called a Disk-Gap-Band parachute, the name describes the construction of the parachute: a disk forms the canopy, then a small gap, followed by a cylindrical band.

The parachute is deployed using a mortar that is triggered when the vehicle reaches a fixed planet-relative velocity. The parachute is designed to survive loads in excess of 36,000 kilograms (80,000 pounds).

Twice as long and three times as heavy as the Mars Exploration Rovers, MSL is too massive to use airbags like MER. MSL’s large parachute will only be deployed 3 minutes before touchdown which should slow the incoming vehicle enough for retro rockets to fire for the final 500 meters (1,640 feet) of the descent. But after that is where it gets interesting: In the final seconds, the hovering upper stage would act as a crane, lowering the upright rover on a tether to the surface. This is first the “Sky Crane” system will be used in a space mission.

MSL, a roving analytical laboratory, will collect Martian soil and rock samples and analyze them for organic compounds and environmental conditions that could have supported microbial life now or in the past.

Original News Source: JPL Press Release

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Hansen: Earth at Crisis Point

NASA’s lead climate scientist says Earth has reached a “tipping point” in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 385 parts per million. But James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies believes there are ways to solve the problems of excess greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. Hansen submitted a paper to Science magazine today, which outlines a plan for phasing out all coal-fired plants by 2030 and taxing their emissions, as well as banning the building of any new plants unless they are designed to trap and segregate the carbon dioxide they emit. This plan would need the support of policy makers around the world. But Hansen believes policy makers in the US are ignorant about the significance and gravity of climate change because oil companies influence the executive and legislative branches of the US government. Oil interests are also trying to sway the public’s perception of global warming, Hansen said. “The industry is misleading the public and policy makers about the cause of climate change,” he said in an article published by the AFP news agency. “And that is analogous to what the cigarette manufacturers did. They knew smoking caused cancer, but they hired scientists who said that was not the case.”
Continue reading “Hansen: Earth at Crisis Point”

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Report: Constellation Program Has Serious Issues

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NASA is facing some serious problems, and whether these problems are perception or truth remains to be seen. A government report presented at a congressional hearing on April 3 says NASA’s Constellation Program faces severe problems and the new spacecraft might never work as intended. The Government Accountability Office, (they call themselves the “the investigative arm of Congress”) issued the report which lists several critical issues, especially with the Ares I rocket, which is prone to violent shaking on liftoff and might not have enough power to reach orbit. NASA has requested an additional $2 billion over the next two years to boost development of the new spacecraft, but the GAO doubts whether that will be enough to overcome the design flaws and for the space agency to achieve timely success with the program.

The GAO identified several areas that could delay Constellation:
• Both vehicles have a history of weight issues;
• Excessive vibration during launch threatens system design;
• Uncertainty about how flight characteristics will be impacted by a fifth segment added to the Ares I launch vehicle;
• Ares I upper stage essentially requires development of a new engine;
• No industry capability currently exists for producing the kind of heat shields that the Orion will need for protecting the crew exploration vehicle when it reenters Earth’s atmosphere; and
• Existing test facilities are insufficient for testing Ares I’s new engine, for replicating the engine’s vibration and acoustic environment, and for testing the thermal protection system for the Orion vehicle.

In effect, the report says, NASA has a design for the Constellation project — but as yet there is no assurance that all the components will work as planned.

NASA has claimed that Constellation is on schedule, and the problems are manageable. “I’ve rarely seen more of a mountain made out of less of a molehill,” NASA Administrator Mike Griffin told the Space Transportation Association in Washington, D.C., last month.

NASA is expected to announce they have developed a strategy for dealing with Ares’ shaking problem. The Orlando Sentinel quoted special assistant to the administrator Chris Shank: “We have a mitigation strategy.”

The Sentinel also quoted a former NASA official who asked not to be named as saying the Ares rocket faces the perception problems that have dogged NASA throughout its history. Politicians and the public are skeptical the agency can complete its program on time and on budget. Without political and public support, NASA could face troubling times.

Here’s NASA’s video about the Constellation Program:

Original News Sources: Orlando Sentinel and the GAO Report

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Jules Verne Pulls Into Port at the ISS

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Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle “Jules Verne” pulled into port today, docking successfully with the International Space Station, bringing 7.5 tons of cargo to re-supply the station. The ATV’s maiden docking took place in slow, incremental steps, and included several docking run-throughs and planned aborts to test vehicle’s capability of being monitored and stopped in case of any problems. But under the watchful eye of three control centers on Earth and the three astronauts on board the ISS, the Jules Verne approached and docked smoothly to the docking ring on the Zvezda module at 9:45 am CDT.

Jules Verne is about the same size as the Apollo crew capsule at 10.3 meters long and 4.5 meters in diameter. The 20 ton vehicle can ferry about three times the amount of cargo as the Russian Progress re-supply vehicle. This big cargo capacity will prove especially important when the shuttles quit flying in 2010. The crew on board the ISS will open the hatches later today and begin unloading supplies, including fresh food, water, rocket propellant and new equipment. Also, handwritten manuscripts by 19th century science fiction writer Jules Verne, after whom the ATV is named, are on board the spacecraft.

The ATV used GPS and an onboard laser guidance system to hook up precisely with the station. With triple redundancy, the software employed by the ATV has been heavily tested by the ESA. Flight controllers in the ATV Center in Kourou, France, the Russian control center in Kouriloff, and Mission Control in Houston worked together to choreograph the flawless docking.
Image from ATV docking cameras
Today’s docking ends a 26 day journey for the ATV. It launched on March 9 on board a Arianne 5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, and remained in a holding orbit while the recent shuttle mission, STS-123, had shuttle Endeavour docked to the station. The ATV then began a series of demonstration tests to make sure all systems were working correctly. Jules Verne was the largest cargo ever carried into orbit by the Arianne 5 rocket.

The AVT’s exterior is covered with an insulating foil layer on top of anti-meteorite Whipple Shields. The X-shaped extended solar arrays look like a metallic blue wings.

Every 12 months or so future ATVs will bring more cargo to the ISS, in orbit about 400 km (230 miles) above the Earth. The Jules Verne will remain docked to the station as a pressurized “waste basket” for up to six months until its final mission: a fiery one-way trip into the Earth’s atmosphere to dispose of up to 6.5 tons of station waste.

Ian O’Neill also contributed to this article.

Original News Source: NASA TV

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Using Laser Combs to Find Exoplanets

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We’ve run a couple of articles recently about new techniques to find Earth-like extra-solar planets. Here’s one more, but this new technique is really quite exciting. A new device, called a laser comb, uses femto-second (one millionth of one billionth of a second) pulses of laser light coupled with an atomic clock to provide a precise standard for measuring wavelengths of light. Also known as an “astro-comb,” these devices should give astronomers the ability to use the Doppler shift method with incredible precision to measure spectral lines of starlight up to 60 times greater than any current high-tech method, according to a new paper in the journal Nature.

Astronomers have been using the Doppler shift method to find exoplanets for the past 10 years. Current technology can measure spectral lines with a precision of 60 centimeters per second, which works good enough to find a planet 5 times the mass of Earth in a Mercury-like orbit around a Sun-like star. To find an Earth-mass planet in an Earth-like orbit, a precision of less than 5 cm per second is necessary, and the researchers believe they ultimately can achieve 1 cm per second precision.

The combs work by creating regular spikes of laser light that are evenly spaced in wavelength ”like the teeth of a comb” and can be projected onto a spectrograph.

One of the authors of the paper, Ronald Walsworth from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said the group should begin testing its prototype system in June 2008 at the Multi-Mirror Telescope (MMT) Observatory on Mount Hopkins in Arizona. And in 2009 the researchers plan to set up a planet-spotting system at the 4.2-metre William Herschel Telescope on La Palma, in the Canary Islands, in collaboration with the Geneva Observatory.

The inventors of the laser comb, John L. Hall and Theodor W. Hansch shared half of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics. This technology has previously been used in chemical sensing and telecommunications. If used with larger telescopes, researchers believe the astro comb could possibly make direct measurements of dark energy.

Original News Sources: Nature, and Nature News

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Jobs Eliminated as Shuttle Program Transitions to Constellation

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As the space shuttle program winds down and NASA transitions to the new Constellation program, more than 8,000 NASA contractor jobs in the manned space program could be eliminated after 2010, the U.S. space agency said at a press briefing on April 1, 2008. A NASA report sent to Congress predicts that between 5,700 and 6,400 jobs will be lost at the Kennedy Space Center, where the shuttle processing takes place, before 2012. After that time, a few hundred jobs will be added yearly as the new moon-landing program gets started, with the first Constellation launch tentatively scheduled for 2015. Some NASA managers believe that an update to Tuesday’s report, which is due to Congress in six months, won’t be quite so bleak, but NASA said it could be more than a year before it has more dependable job forecasts.

The most dramatic job cuts will be among private contractors. Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator said that the estimates of job losses were preliminary and they do not take into account numerous factors of potential workload. “Don’t overreact to these numbers,” he said.

The report stated “Our (NASA’s) greatest challenge over the next several years will be managing this extremely talented, experienced and geographically dispersed workforce as we transition from operating the space shuttle to utilizing the International Space Station.”

Nationally, NASA said the number of full-time civil servants in its manned space program would fall to about 4,100 in 2011, a loss of about 600 jobs from this year. Including outside contractors, the number of jobs would fall to an estimated 12,500 to 13,800. About 21,000 are currently employed.

Rick Gilbrech, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems, said that many future contracts for the Constellation program to develop the new moon rockets and spacecraft to replace the shuttle fleet, could improve the local NASA jobs picture.

“There’s a lot of work that’s not folded into these numbers,” he said.

Gilbrech added that the next U.S. president and Congress might not support the Constellation program, which is President Bush’s vision for returning to the moon and going on to Mars.

“We do need stable support and long-term commitment,” he said.

KSC Director Bill Parsons said Tuesday he estimates the center’s 15,000 on payroll will drop to 10,000 people in the next few years before starting to climb slowly. He said, however, that there is hope that layoffs might be rare because up to one-third of KSC workers are eligible to retire before or around the time that the shuttle program ends in 2010. He does not expect workers to abandon their jobs for new careers before then.

“This is not a work force that panics,” he said, referring to the recovery from two shuttle accidents.

Retirement will provide a easier transition for some. However, younger workers may have to redirect their careers into the Constellation program. Those caught in the middle might have to learn new skills or relocate to avoid being laid off. There are also other ripple effects to other non-technical support jobs.

Original News Sources: Space.com, Florida Today