NASA's Morpheus Project -- a prototype for vertical landing and takeoff for other planets -- during a free flight test Dec. 10, 2013. Credit: NASA (@MorpheusLander Twitter feed)
What an otherworldly experience, without having to leave Earth! The Morpheus Project wrapped up a successful free-flight test yesterday. That picture above is just to whet your appetite for the actual video, which you can see (and definitely hear) after the jump below.
“WOOOOHOOOOO! How about them apples?!” the @MorpheusLander Twitter feed said shortly after the test wrapped up with a takeoff, hover and landing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. “Successful #FREEFLIGHT @NASAKennedy today!” the feed added later. “Get ready for us to #increasetheawesome as we progress through our tests!”
The team is of course analyzing the data to see how successful this free flight was for the planetary landing prototype that NASA is testing.
NASA’s goal with Morpheus is to demonstrate landing technologies at low cost, to possibly bring on to planetary missions in the future — and ultimately, human ones as well.
“The Morpheus project and the Autonomous Landing and Hazard Avoidance Technology (ALHAT) project provide technological foundations for key components of the greater exploration architecture necessary to move humans beyond low Earth orbit (LEO),” the project stated on its website.
A series of images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show how the appearance of dark markings on Martian slope changes with the seasons. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona.
Get ready, because here are some more findings about possible water on Mars. This picture above from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is a series showing changing dark lines on an equatorial hillside — which could be an indication of salty water, scientists said.
As MRO circled the planet and peered at the lines with its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, it tracked these changes at five locations in Valles Marineris, the biggest canyon our solar system has to offer. The lines were on slopes that faced the north and the south, and most intriguingly, they activated when the sun hit their respective sides.
“The equatorial surface region of Mars has been regarded as dry, free of liquid or frozen water, but we may need to rethink that,” stated Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona in Tucson.
“The explanation that fits best is salty water is flowing down the slopes when the temperature rises,” added McEwen, who is HiRISE principal investigator. “We still don’t have any definite identification of water at these sites, but there’s nothing that rules it out, either.”
A 2010 image of ice excavated on Mars after a recent meteorite impact. Image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
Scientists first spotted these types of features two years ago in the mid-latitudes of Mars, but in that case these were small features (usually less than 16 feet or five meters wide). The slopes observed here range as wide as 4,000 feet (1,200 meters).
Salt can keep water flowing even in temperatures where more pure water gets frozen, and also reduce the evaporation rate. NASA also noted it used data from two other MRO instruments (Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars and the Context Camera) and the Mars Oddysey’s Thermal Emission Imaging System.
That’s not all, however. Scientists also reported 15 fresh craters that excavated ice that used to be hidden underneath the soil of Mars.
A radar on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has detected widespread deposits of glacial ice in the mid-latitudes of Mars.NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/University of Rome/Southwest Research Institute
“The more we find, the more we can fill in a global map of where ice is buried,” stated Colin Dundas of the United States Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz.
“We’ve now seen icy craters down to 39 degrees north, more than halfway from the pole to the equator. They tell us that either the average climate over several thousand years is wetter than present or that water vapor in the current atmosphere is concentrated near the surface. Ice could have formed under wetter conditions, with remnants from that time persisting today, but slowly disappearing.”
Results were presented at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting this week.
Artist's conception of the European Space Agency's CryoSat mission. Credit: ESA – P. Carril
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing the equivalent of a Lake Tahoe in ice every single year, according to new measurements from the European Space Agency CryoSat satellite — quite a bit more than what was measured earlier. That’s 36 cubic miles or 150 cubic kilometers every single year.
The measured loss also affects sea levels around the world. Between 2005 and 2010, polar scientists previously calculated, oceans rose about 0.0110 inches (0.28 mm) a year due to West Antarctic melting. The new results suggest that the melting is about 15% higher. That would put the new sea-rise rate at 0.0115 inches (0.32 mm) a year.
“We find that ice thinning continues to be most pronounced along fast-flowing ice streams of this sector and their tributaries, with thinning rates of between 4–8 m [13 to 26 feet] per year near to the grounding lines – where the ice streams lift up off the land and begin to float out over the ocean – of the Pine Island, Thwaites and Smith Glaciers,” stated Malcolm McMillan, a research fellow at the United Kingdom’s University of Leeds.
West Antarctic thinning between 2010 and 2013, as measured by the European Space Agency’s CryoSat satellite. Credit: CPOM/ESA
What scientists don’t know is whether the ice is thinning faster due to melting glaciers or if CryoSat — the European Space Agency satellite that made these measurements by radar following its launch in 2010 — is simply mapping the same rate of loss but in higher resolution as what was seen before.
“Thanks to its novel instrument design and to its near-polar orbit, CryoSat allows us to survey coastal and high-latitude regions of Antarctica that were beyond the capability of previous altimeter missions, and it seems that these regions are crucial for determining the overall imbalance,” stated Andrew Shepherd, a University of Leeds researcher who led the study.
The research was presented at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting this week.
Mars One proposes Phoenix-like lander for first privately funded mission to the Red Planet slated to blastoff in 2018. This film solar array experiment would provide additional power. Credit: Mars One
The Mars One non-profit foundation that aims to establish a permanent human settlement on the Red Planet in the mid-2020’s – with colonists volunteering for a one-way trip – took a major step forward today, Dec. 10, when they announced plans to launch the first ever privately funded space missions to Mars in 2018; as forerunners to gather critical measurements.
Bas Lansdorp, Mars One Co-founder and CEO announced plans to launch two missions to the Red Planet in 2018 – consisting of a robotic lander and an orbiting communications satellite; essential for transmitting the data collected on the Red Planet’s surface.
And he has partnered with a pair of prestigious space companies to get started.
Lansdorp made the announcement at a news media briefing held today at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.
“This will be the first private mission to Mars and the lander’s successful arrival and operation will be a historic accomplishment,” said Lansdorp.
Lansdorp stated that Mars One has signed contracts with Lockheed Martin and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL) to develop mission concept studies – both are leading aerospace companies with vast experience in building spacecraft.
The 2018 Mars One lander would be a technology demonstrator and include a scoop, cameras and an exotic solar array to boost power and longevity.
The spacecraft structure would be based on NASA’s highly successful 2007 Phoenix Mars lander – built by Lockheed Martin – which discovered and dug into water ice buried just inches beneath the topsoil in the northern polar regions of the Red Planet.
3 Footpads of Phoenix Mars Lander atop Martian Ice
Phoenix thrusters blasted away Martian soil and exposed water ice. Proposed Mars One 2018 mission will build a new Phoenix-like lander from scratch to test technologies for extracting water into a useable form for future human colonists. NASA’s InSight 2016 mission will build a new Phoenix-like lander to peer deep into the Red Planet and investigate the nature and size of the mysterious Martian core. Credit: Ken Kremer, Marco Di Lorenzo, Phoenix Mission, NASA/JPL/UA/Max Planck Institute
“We are excited to have been selected by Mars One for this ambitious project and we’re already working on the mission concept study, starting with the proven design of Phoenix,” said Ed Sedivy, Civil Space chief engineer at Lockheed Martin Space Systems. “Having managed the Phoenix spacecraft development, I can tell you, landing on Mars is challenging and a thrill and this is going to be a very exciting mission.”
Lockheed Martin engineers will work for the next 3 to 4 months to study mission concepts as well as how to stack the orbiter and lander on the launcher,” Sedivy said at the briefing.
“The lander will provide proof of concept for some of the technologies that are important for a permanent human settlement on Mars,” said Lansdorp.
Two examples involve experiments to extract water into a usable form and construction of a thin film solar array to provide additional power to the spacecraft and eventual human colonists.
It would include a Phoenix like scoop to collect soils for the water extraction experiment and cameras for continuous video recording transmitted by the accompanying orbiter.
Lockheed Martin is already under contract to build another Phoenix type lander for NASA that is slated to blastoff in 2016 on the InSight mission.
“They have a distinct legacy of participating in nearly every NASA mission to Mars,” said Lansdorp.
So if sufficient funding is found it seems apparent that lander construction should be accomplished in time.
However, building the science instruments from scratch to meet the tight timeline could be quite challenging.
Given that the lander is planned to launch in barely over four years, I asked Sedivy if that was sufficient time to select, design and develop the new science instruments planned for the 2018 mission.
“A typical life cycle for the Mars program provides three and a half years from commitment to design to launch. So we have about 1 year to commit to preliminary design for the 2018 launch, so that’s favorable,” Sedivy told Universe Today.
“Now as for having enough time for selecting the suite of science experiments that’s a little trickier. It depends on what’s actually selected and the maturity of those elements selected.”
“So we will provide Mars One with input as to where we see the development risks. And we’ll help guide the instrument selections to have a high probability that they will be ready in time for the 2018 launch window,” Sedivy told me.
Video caption: Mars One Crowdfunding Campaign 2018 Mars Mission
For the 2018 lander, Mars One also plans to include an experiment from a worldwide university challenge and items from several Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) challenge winners.
Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL) was selected to studying orbiter concepts that will provide a high bandwidth communications system in a Mars synchronous orbit and will be used to relay data and a live video feed from the lander on the surface of Mars back to Earth, according to Sir Martin Sweeting, Executive Chairman of SSTL.
There are still many unknowns at this stage including the sources for all the significant funding required by Mars One to transform their concepts into actual flight hardware.
“Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing activities are important means to do that,” said Lansdorp.
At the briefing, Lansdorp stated that Mars One has started an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign. The goal is to raise $400,000 by Jan. 25, 2014.
Mars One is looking for sponsors and partners. They also plan a TV show to help select the winners of the first human crew to Mars from over 200,000 applicants from countries spread all across Earth.
The preliminary 2018 mission study contracts with Lockheed and Surrey are valued at $260,000 and $80,000 respectively.
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing Curiosity, Chang’e 3, LADEE, MAVEN and MOM news and his upcoming Antares launch reports from on site at NASA Wallops Flight Facility, VA.
Learn more about Mars, Curiosity, Orion, MAVEN, MOM, Mars rovers, Antares Launch, Chang’e 3, SpaceX and more at Ken’s upcoming presentations
Dec 11: “Curiosity, MAVEN and the Search for Life on Mars”, “LADEE & Antares ISS Launches from Virginia”, Rittenhouse Astronomical Society, Franklin Institute, Phila, PA, 8 PM
Dec 15-20: “Antares/Cygnus ISS Rocket Launch from Virginia”; Rodeway Inn, Chincoteague, VA, evening
Asteroid 2013 XY8 imaged on 2013, December 10, 2013 by E. Guido, N. Howes and M. Nicolini/Remanzacco Observatory.
A newly-discovered asteroid about the size of a space shuttle will fly past Earth on December 11, 2013 at a very safe distance of 760,000 kilometers (470,000 miles). The closest approach of Asteroid 2013 XY8 will be 11:14 UT, and its size is estimated between 31 – 68 meters. This asteroid is zipping along at about 14 kilometers per second, and of course at about 2 lunar distances away, there is no danger of this asteroid hitting Earth. The asteroid was discovered on Dec. 7 by the team at the Catalina Sky Survey, and our friends Ernesto Guido, Nick Howes and Martino Nicolini from the Remanzacco Observatory have provided a follow-up image of the asteroid, taken just this morning.
And as usual with close passing asteroids, the Virtual Telescope Project will is offering a live, online event sharing real-time images of 2013 XY8 with live commentary by their science staff. “It will be a nice opportunity to spy this 40 meter large asteroid moving across the stars,” said Gianluca Masi from the Virtual Telescope Project.
A mosaic of images of the Earth and Moon taken by the incoming Juno spacecraft as it flew past Earth in October 2013. Credit: NASA/JPL
When NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew past Earth in October of this year, it focused some of its cameras on the Earth-Moon system. Immediately after the flyby, images taken by the Junocam were released, but today, NASA released an amazing video taken by the Advanced Stellar Compass (ASC) camera, a low-light camera that is primarily used as a star tracking a navigation tool. Over the course of three days, it captured the orbital ballet-like dance between the Earth and Moon.
“This is profound, and I think our movie does the same thing as “Pale Blue Dot” image from Voyager, except it’s a movie instead of an image,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator, speaking during a press briefing from the American Geophysical Union conference today in San Fransisco. “Like Carl Sagan said, everything we know is on this dot. To me this says, ‘we’re all in this together.’”
The Oct. 9 flyby was a gravity assist, accelerating Juno out of the inner solar system and toward Jupiter’s orbit. The probe is expected to arrive at Jupiter on July 4, 2016.
The movie begins at 2:00 UTC on Oct. 6, more than four days before Juno’s closest approach, when the spacecraft was approximately 2.1 million miles (3.3 million kilometers) from Earth. Earth’s moon is seen transiting in front of our planet, and then moves out of frame toward the right as Juno enters the space inside the orbit of our natural satellite. As Juno gets closer to Earth, hints of clouds and continents are visible before the planet’s brightness overwhelms the cameras, which were not designed to image so bright an object. The sequence ends as Earth passes out of view, which corresponds to approximately 17:35 UTC Oct. 9 when Juno was at an altitude of about 47,000 miles (76,000 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.
“From a half-million kilometers out, the Moon is dark as charcoal and but Earth way brighter, as a shiny blue dot,” said John Joergensen, who lead the team that designed the star tracking cameras. “It’s amazing to think that all of humanity being scanned in this movie, and to see how small the Moon is relative to Earth.”
The cameras that took the images for the movie are located near the pointed tip of one of the spacecraft’s three solar-array arms. They are part of Juno’s Magnetic Field Investigation (MAG) and are normally used to determine the orientation of the magnetic sensors. These cameras look away from the sunlit side of the solar array, so as the spacecraft approached, the system’s four cameras pointed toward Earth. Earth and the moon came into view when Juno was about 600,000 miles (966,000 kilometers) away — about three times the Earth-moon separation.
During the flyby, timing was everything. Juno was traveling about twice as fast as a typical satellite, and the spacecraft itself was spinning at 2 rpm. To assemble a movie that wouldn’t make viewers dizzy, the star tracker had to capture a frame each time the camera was facing Earth at exactly the right instant. The frames were sent to Earth, where they were processed into video format.
As Juno is a spinning spacecraft, the images were aligned to remove their apparent rotation. The original ASC images are monochrome; faint coloration has been added by converting the measured grayscale values into false colors matching a true color image of Earth.
Artist's sketch of a supernova explosion (credit: Adam Burn / Deviant art).
New observations confirm that young Nathan Gray’s discovery is indeed a supernova explosion, albeit a rather peculiar one. Nathan Gray, age 10, discovered a new cosmic source on October 30th that emerged in the constellation of Draco, and it was subsequently classified as a supernova candidate. Evidence available at the time was sufficiently convincing that Nathan was promptly heralded as the youngest individual to discover a supernova.
The discovery garnered world-wide attention, however, confirmation via a spectrum from a large telescope was necessary to unambiguously identify the target as a supernova. In addition, that observation would enable astronomers to determine the supernova class and identify the progenitor of the exploding star. In other words, was the star initially comparable in mass to the Sun and a member of a binary system, or was the original star significantly more massive and a neutron star is potentially all that remains?
The new observations were acquired by Lina Tomasella and Leonardo Tartaglia of the Padova-Asiago Supernova Group, and imply that the supernova stems from a star significantly more massive than the Sun. Andrea Pastorello, a member of that group, noted that the target’s spectrum displays the presence of hydrogen (specifically H-alpha emission), which rules out the scenario of a lower-mass progenitor in a binary system (those are classified as type Ia).
Features present in the observations led the astronomers to issue a preliminary supernova classification of type II-pec (peculiar). The blue spectral continuum is typical of a type IIn supernova, but the expansion velocity inferred from the hydrogen line (3100 km/s) is an order of magnitude larger than expected, which motivated the team to issue the aforementioned classification. Pastorello further noted that the target is somewhat similar to SN 1998s, and in general type II supernovae exhibit heterogeneous observational properties.
Observations confirming that young Nathan Gray’s cosmic discovery is a supernova were obtained from the Asiago 1.82-m Copernico Telescope (image credit: L.C. / Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica).
Nathan had been scanning astronomical images sent by David J. Lane (Saint Mary’s University) for months, and identified some potential sources that proved to be false detections or previous discoveries. However, the Padova-Asiago Supernova Group has now confirmed that isn’t the case this time. Indeed, the discovery means that Nathan officially unseats his sister Kathryn as the youngest person to discover a supernova, yet she is elated for her bother (see Nancy Atkinson’s article regarding Kathryn’s discovery).
Nathan, his sister, and parents Paul and Susan, formed a supernova search team in partnership with Lane. The original discovery images were obtained from the Abbey Ridge Observatory, which is stationed in Lane’s backyard.
Those desiring additional information on supernovae will find the videos below pertinent.
Image of NGC 6872 (left) and companion galaxy IC 4970 (right) locked in a tango as the two galaxies gravitationally interact. The galaxies lie about 200 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Pavo (the Peacock). Image credit: Sydney Girls High School Astronomy Club, Travis Rector (University of Alaska, Anchorage), Ángel López-Sánchez (Australian Astronomical Observatory/Macquarie University), and the Australian Gemini Office.
Galaxy modelling is complicated, and even more so when different computer models don’t agree on how the factors come together. This makes it hard to understand the nature of our universe. One new project called AGORA (Assembling Galaxies of Resolved Anatomy) aims to resolve the discrepancies and make the results more consistent. Basically, the project aims to compare different codes against each other and also against observations.
“The physics of galaxy formation is extremely complicated, and the range of lengths, masses, and timescales that need to be simulated is immense,” stated Piero Madau, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and co-chair of the AGORA steering committee.
“You incorporate gravity, solve the equations of hydrodynamics, and include prescriptions for gas cooling, star formation, and energy injection from supernovae into the code. After months of number crunching on a powerful supercomputer, you look at the results and wonder if that is what nature is really doing or if some of the outcomes are actually artifacts of the particular numerical implementation you used.”
This is especially important when it comes to modelling the effect of dark matter on the universe. Since the entity is hard for us to see and therefore to identify, physicists rely on models to make predictions about its effect on galaxies and other forms of more ordinary matter.
Nine codes, nine galaxy formation scenarios: this is the sort of problem that AGORA is devoting itself to resolving by comparing different supercomputer simulations. Credit: Simulations performed by Samuel Leitner (ART-II), Ji-hoon Kim (ENZO), Oliver Hahn (GADGET-2- CFS), Keita Todoroki (GADGET-3), Alexander Hobbs (GADGET-3-CFS and GADGET-3-AFS), Sijing Shen (GASOLINE), Michael Kuhlen (PKDGRAV-2), and Romain Teyssier (RAMSES)
“One big challenge, however, has been numerically modeling astrophysical processes over the vast range of size scales in the Universe. Supercomputer simulations are designed with three different size scales relevant to three different phenomena: star formation, galaxy formation, and the large scale structure of the universe,” stated the University of California High-Performance Astrocomputing Center.
This means that models of stars coming to be inside of galaxies have one scale of resolution — enough to look at what the gas and dust is made of, for example — but when looking at the entire universe, the computer is more limited to looking at “simple gravitational interactions of dark matter”, the university added. Of course, the more resolution you can get in a computer model, the better — especially because star formation is affected by processes such as how galaxies interact with surrounding gas.
AGORA’s will first aim to “model a realistic isolated disk galaxy” UCSC states, and then compare the codes used to see what they come up with. You can read more about the project’s aims at this Arxiv pre-print paper (led by the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Ji-hoon Kim) or on the AGORA website.
This colorized composite shows more than half of Earth’s disk over the coast of Argentina and the South Atlantic Ocean as the Juno probe slingshotted by on Oct. 9, 2013 for a gravity assisted acceleration to Jupiter. The mosaic was assembled from raw images taken by the Junocam imager. Credit: NASA/JPL/SwRI/MSSS/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo
Um, something in my eye. This wonderful video details a what took place when the Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft swung past Earth on Oct. 9, 2013 for a gravity assist, and amateur radio operators around the world sent a Morse Code saying “HI” to the spacecraft.
“We wanted to know, if this were an interplanetary spacecraft, could they we tell there was intelligent life on Earth?” said Bill Kurth, co-investigator for the Juno Waves Investigation from the University of Iowa.
Watch the video to find out if it worked.
“We obviously haven’t heard anything like this from any other planet,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator, speaking during a press briefing from the American Geophysical Union conference today in San Fransisco.
NASA's Robonaut 2 with "climbing legs" intended to let the robot rove around in the microgravity environment aboard the International Space Station. This version is being tested on the ground for eventual use in space. Credit: NASA
There was much excitement two years ago when the astronauts on space station unpackaged Robonaut 2 (or R2), which is supposed to help with simple tasks. Trouble was, the robot was basically anchored in place and had to be moved around for different tasks. Well, that’s about to change. R2 is getting some “climbing” legs.
After the legs are brought to station and installed — likely sometime early in the new year — Robonaut will be capable of doing tasks both inside and outside (well, outside once a few more unspecified upgrades are finished). This reduces the human risks during spacewalks and frees up the astronauts to do more complicated tasks, NASA said.
“Once the legs are attached to the R2 torso, the robot will have a fully extended leg span of 9 feet, giving it great flexibility for movement around the space station,” NASA stated.
“Each leg has seven joints and a device on what would be the feet called an end effector, which allow the robot to take advantage of handrails and sockets inside and outside the station. A vision system for the end effectors also will be used to verify and eventually automate each limb’s approach and grasp.”
By the way, end effectors were famously used on the Canadarm series of robotic arms that were originally used for grappling satellites. Who knew back in the 1970s that this could be extended to humanoid robots?
