Elizabeth Howell is the senior writer at Universe Today. She also works for Space.com, Space Exploration Network, the NASA Lunar Science Institute, NASA Astrobiology Magazine and LiveScience, among others. Career highlights include watching three shuttle launches, and going on a two-week simulated Mars expedition in rural Utah. You can follow her on Twitter @howellspace or contact her at her website.
This new space film called “Cinema Space Tribute” combines visions from several sci-fi franchises to show us what space exploration could look like. Will we gracefully explore the moons of Jupiter and far space? Or is it more a reality where we fear the death that lurks behind every action?
Max Shiskin pulls together an impressive list of franchises to show us some fictional versions of space exploration. Backdropped by the soundtrack for Interstellar, you see quick glimpses of ships from Star Trek and Battlestar: Galactica and Star Wars and many more. He even throws in some you might not think of right away, like Man of Steel and Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
There are some neat synergies between the franchises, including a seeming obsession with circles, that Shiskin also shows off in the video. It’s definitely worth four minutes of your time to watch.
But that didn’t come cheap. Four astronaut servicing missions (including one to fix a mirror that was launched with myopia) were required to keep the telescope going since 1990. Hubble has never been more scientifically productive, according to a recent NASA review, but a new article asks if Hubble is destined to die a fiery death when its orbit decays in the next eight to 10 years.
“NASA doesn’t have any official plans for upgrading the telescope, meaning its hardware will grow old and out-of-date in the coming years,” reads the article in Popular Science. “Without assistance, Hubble can’t maintain its orbit forever, and eventually Earth’s gravity will pull the telescope to a fiery death.”
That’s not to say NASA is going to abandon the cosmos — far from it. Besides NASA’s other space telescopes, the successor James Webb Space Telescope is planned to launch in 2018 to chart the universe in other wavelengths. But a review from April warns that ceasing operations of Hubble would not be prudent until James Webb is up, running, and doing its own work productively. That’s a narrow window of time considering Hubble is expected to work well until about 2020.
The Hubble Space Telescope senior review panel submitted a report on March that overall praised the observatory’s work, and which also talked about its potential longevity. As is, Hubble is expected to work until at least 2020, the review stated. The four science instruments are expected to be more than 85% reliable until 2021, and most “critical subsystems” should exceed 80% until that same year.
The report urges that experienced hands are kept around as the telescope degrades in the coming years, but points out that Hubble has backups that should keep the observatory as a whole going for a while.
There are no single-point failure modes on Hubble that could take down the entire observatory. It has ample redundancy. Planned mitigations for numerous possible sub-system failures or degraded performance have been developed in advance via the project’s Life-Extension Initiatives campaign. Hubble will likely degrade gracefully, with loss or degradation of individual science instrument modes and individual sub-system components.
In NASA’s response to the Senior Review for several missions (including Hubble), the agency said that the telescope has been approved (budgetarily speaking) until 2016, when an incremental review will take place. Further in the future, things get murky.
The just-tested Orion spacecraft won’t be ready to take crews until the mid-2020s, and so far (according to the Popular Science article) the commercial crew program isn’t expected to include a servicing mission.
According to STS-125 astronaut Michael Good, who currently serves in the Commercial Crew Program, the space agency isn’t looking into the possibility of using private companies to fix Hubble, but he says there’s always a chance that could happen. “One of the reasons we’re doing Commercial Crew is to enable this capability to get into lower Earth orbit,” says Good. “But it’s certainly in the realm of possibility.”
Much can happen in a decade — maybe a surge in robotic intelligence would make an automated mission more possible — but then there is the question of priorities. If NASA chooses to rescue Hubble, are there other science goals the agency would need to push aside to accomplish it? What is best? Feel free to leave your feedback in the comments.
The Opportunity Mars rover is busy on its wheels as it moves towards “Marathon Valley”, a location that could include clay minerals — a sign of past water in the region. After successfully passing 41 kilometers (25.47 miles) in total driving a few weeks ago, the rover is closing out its 11th year on Mars with guided and unguided drives towards that destination.
As of late November, the latest status update available from NASA, the rover is just about a half-mile (1 kilometer) from Marathon Valley and busy collecting measurements on an interesting geologic feature en route. This followed several hundred feet of driving that took place just before.
The rover is now racing to finish its work as the Martian winter approaches. Its science activities are still being disrupted by rover difficulties, according to the Planetary Society, which follows weeks of memory problems that have plagued Opportunity through the fall. But Opportunity is still trekking despite these aging issues and transmitting raw imagery from the surface of Mars, which you can see below.
Pluto, humanity is getting ready to change your image. The New Horizons spacecraft is awake once more after emerging from hibernation as planned yesterday (Dec. 6). And after a decade of sailing through space, there will be a historic first encounter with the dwarf planet in July.
The story may not end there, either. Mission managers are working hard to make the case that since New Horizons is way “out there” anyway, it would be a great idea to put the spacecraft past another object later in the mission. That hope rides heavily on the success of the Pluto encounter July 14.
“Technically, this was routine, since the wake-up was a procedure that we’d done many times before,” said Glen Fountain, New Horizons project manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in a statement. “Symbolically, however, this is a big deal. It means the start of our pre-encounter operations.”
It’s been a neat few years for the mighty machine, even before getting to the main event. New Horizons launched from the Kennedy Space Center in 2006 and made a close pass by Jupiter and its moons in 2007, doing some science en route — including catching a huge explosion from Io, a volcanic moon.
Since then, the spacecraft has dutifully been sending back pictures from across the Solar System, including a picture of Neptune’s moon Triton, and several of Pluto — the first time a spacecraft will venture that far. In between the science work and checking out systems, New Horizons spent two-thirds of the journey sleeping to conserve energy for the big show.
Up next for the spacecraft will be several weeks of checkouts and also putting together the commands to make sure New Horizons is successfully guided past Pluto and its moons (a process that got complicated over the years as more moons were discovered.) After that, if the spacecraft holds out and the budget is approved, managers want to swing it past a Kuiper Belt Object.
The Kuiper Belt is a collection of icy bodies past Neptune’s orbit. These small worlds are believed to be building blocks of the Solar System, showing off a time billions of years ago when there were no planets or moons — just chunks of rocks and ice, which slowly collided and coalesced over millions of years to form the familiar landscape we see today.
New Horizons team members plan to ask for more money for this mission in late 2016, as they gather information via the Hubble Space Telescope and other sources to make their case. (They already have some targets in mind.) But the focus will definitely be on Pluto in the coming months.
As a million people fled their homes in the Philippines, astronauts on the International Space Station could clearly see the cause of the disruption — Typhoon Hagupit, which struck the chain of Asian islands this weekend.
“This storm looks incredibly dangerous — praying for the people of the Philippines,” wrote Expedition 42 astronaut Terry Virts in one of a series of pictures he tweeted from space yesterday (Dec. 6). Three deaths have been reported in media so far in the Philippines due to the storm.
The Category 3 storm is called “Ruby” among the locals. As always, weather agencies around the world are providing forecasts as they can through satellite imagery. Virts sent several pictures from space, which you can see below.
After more than eight years orbiting a hellish planet, Venus Express is showing its age. The spacecraft made some risky maneuvers this summer, dipping down into the atmosphere as it nears the end of its mission. Now, the European Space Agency reports it has mostly lost contact with the probe. The reason could be lack of fuel.
The “anomaly” started Nov. 28 when the agency’s operations center lost touch with the spacecraft. Since then, ground stations at ESA and NASA have been trying to hail the probe. All they’ve received since then is a little bit of telemetry showing that the spacecraft has it solar panels pointing towards the Sun, and it’s slowly rotating.
“It is possible that the remaining fuel on board VEX was exhausted,” ESA wrote in a blog post, pointing out that in recent weeks it has been trying to raise the spacecraft’s altitude for more science observations. But with the spacecraft spinning, its high-gain antenna is likely out of contact with Earth and it’s hard to reach it.
“The operations team is currently attempting to downlink the table of critical events that is stored in protected memory on board, which may give details of the sequence of events which occurred over the past few days,” ESA added. “The root cause of the anomaly (fuel situation or otherwise) remains to be established.”
It’s hard to do many types of astronomy in the daylight, so that can be a good time to do a different kind of observing — enjoying the architecture of the telescope! This new video shot by a drone shows off Yerkes Observatory in snowy Williams Bay, Wisconsin. The video was uploaded by Adam Novak.
Yerkes, which is operated by the University of Chicago, calls itself the “birthplace of modern astrophysics” because it combined astronomical observations with experimentation in physics and chemistry. That’s something that’s normal in astronomy today, but certainly not in 1897.
Observations began with a 40-inch refractor (billed as the biggest such telescope ever finished) that weighs about 20 tons. While the telescope itself is from the turn of the century, the means of moving it is much more modern — from about 50 years ago, according to a National Park Service book on the observatory:
The telescope was modernized in 1969 permitting more accurate and rapid setting of the position of the telescope. The efficiency of the telescope was further increased by the addition of an automatically guiding camera. The driving clock, by which the telescope is made to follow the stars, consists of a synchronous motor controlled by an electronic oscillator, the frequency of which can he set so as to make the telescope follow the sun, the moon, or stars.
While space explorers often set their sights far out in the Solar System — or even beyond — we can’t forget the majesty of our next-door neighbor. The Moon, a mere three days’ flight away from Earth during the Apollo years, is an easy beacon in the darkness for anybody to observe. Even without a telescope.
Lately, several Universe Today readers have contributed awesome shots to our Flickr pool showing some close-ups of this barren world. Take the panorama above by Roger Hutchinson, for example, showing the view along the terminator (darkness-light line). And we’ve collected some more stunners below.
This spring, space fans had a virtual campfire to flock to: the new Cosmos series, which aired on Fox and National Geographic for 13 science-filled episodes.
The series attracted at least three million viewers a week, generated discussions (positive and negative) on social media, brought host Neil deGrasse Tyson to even higher heights of fame, and once again, showed the general public how neat space is.
Well, guess what. According to producer Seth MacFarlane, Cosmos could come back for a second run — which would supercede the predecessor series from the 1980s, narrated by Carl Sagan!
“Early, preliminary discussions for a 2nd season of #Cosmos– If you want to see more of the great @neiltyson, tweet him your love!” MacFarlane wrote on Twitter yesterday (Dec. 3).
His comments follow a posting on Reddit that surfaced in a couple of news reports yesterday, one from a reported viewer of a deGrasse Tyson talk in New York City:
“I just attended a presentation by Tyson at NJPAC in Newark, NJ,” the posting read. “During the Q&A portion, he told the audience that he’s meeting with producers tomorrow in NYC to discuss the next “season” (for lack of better term) of COSMOS. He didn’t go into further detail, but thought this was interesting since up until this point the updated show was just considered a one-off series (ie 13 episodes).”
It’s almost exactly 10 years ago that humanity parachuted a spacecraft into Titan, that moon of Saturn that could hold chemistry similar to what sat on Earth before life arose. Called Huygens, the probe survived for just about an hour on the surface on Jan. 14, 2005, transmitting information back about conditions there and on the way down.
Huygens is long dead, but its carrier craft is doing just fine. On Dec. 10, Cassini will make the 107th close pass by Titan to learn more about the moon’s atmosphere. Although Huygens made it to the surface fine, showing at least a basic understanding of how a parachute behaves on Titan, there’s still so much more we need to learn.
Specifically, Cassini’s different instruments have been coming up with different answers for Titan’s atmospheric density, so this flyby is hoping to resolve some of that. In part, they hope to get more accurate measurements by measuring how much drag the spacecraft experiences when it flies past the moon.
When Huygens probed the atmosphere on its way down, scientists figured that its measurements agreed in many ways with those taken by the flying-by Voyager 2 spacecraft previously. That said, the probe also discovered “a significant correspondence of wind shear and buoyant stability structures” in the stratosphere and lower tropopause of Titan, according to a 2006 presentation on Huygens results.