Universe Today

January 8, 2013December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Curiosity Tidies Up a Bit on Mars

This image from the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows the patch of rock cleaned by the first use of the rover's Dust Removal Tool (DRT). Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

It’s a bit dusty on Mars, and so the Curiosity rover has now cleaned up a little spot. For the first time ever, the newest Mars rover has used its Dust Removal Tool.

“The underlying rock and the windblown dust on top of it are made of different material,” the @Mars_Curiosity Twitter feed explained. “Analysis to come.”

It will be interesting to find out what the dark circular features are in the rock. The target areas that was cleaned is named “Ekwir_1,” and it is on a rock in the “Yellowknife Bay” area of Mars’ Gale Crater. The rover team is also evaluating rocks in that area as potential targets for first use of the rover’s hammering drill in coming weeks.

The Dust Removal Tool is a motorized, wire-bristle brush designed to prepare selected rock surfaces for enhanced inspection by the rover’s science instruments. It is built into the turret at the end of the rover’s arm, visible in the image below.

Camera and brushes on Curiosity's Arm as Seen by Camera on Mast. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

The science team said that choosing an appropriate target was crucial for the first-time use of the Dust Removal Tool.

“We wanted to be sure we had an optimal target for the first use,” said Diana Trujillo of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., the mission’s activity lead for the Dust Removal Tool. “We need to place the instrument within less than half an inch of the target without putting the hardware at risk. We needed a flat target, one that wasn’t rough, one that was covered with dust. The results certainly look good.”

The Dust Removal Tool was built by Honeybee Robotics, which also built the Rock Abrasion Tool for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers.

Larger images and more info about the brushed area on Ekwir are online here and here.

Source: JPL

January 7, 2013December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Exciting Potential for Habitable ExoMoons

Artistic rendition of a sunset view from the perspective of an imagined Earth-like moon orbiting the giant planet, PH2 b. Image Credit: H. Giguere, M. Giguere/Yale University

Imagine moons like Europa or Enceladus that are orbiting distant gas giant exoplanets located in the habitable zone of their star. What would be the potential for life on those moons? Hopefully one day we’ll find out, as that could be the scenario at an exoplanet that has been found by the Planet Hunter citizen science project. This is the second confirmed planet found by Planet Hunters, and the newest planet, PH2 b, is a Jupiter-size world in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star.

“There’s an obsession with finding Earth-like planets but what we are discovering, with planets such as PH2 b, is far stranger,” said Chris Lintott of Oxford University and Zooniverse. “Jupiter has several large water-rich moons – imagine dragging that system into the comfortably warm region where the Earth is. If such a planet had Earth size moons, we”d see not Europa and Callisto but worlds with rivers,lakes and all sorts of habitats – a surprising scenario that might just be common.”

Astronomers with Planet Hunters estimate the surface temperature PH2 b is 46 degrees Celsius. That’s a “just right” temperature for there to be liquid water, but it is extremely unlikely that life exists on PH2 b because it is a gas planet, and might be similar to Jupiter, so there is no solid surface or liquid environment for life to thrive. But if this planet is anything like the gas giant planets in our solar sytem, there could be a plethora of moons orbiting them.

“We can speculate that PH2 b might have a rocky moon that would be suitable for life, said lead author of the paper that has been published in arXiv, Dr Ji Wang, from Yale University. I can’t wait for the day when astronomers report detecting signs of life on other worlds instead of just locating potentially habitable environments. That could happen any day now.”

Additionally, the Zooniverse’s Planet Hunters team announced today that their citizen science volunteers have discovered 31 long-period planet candidates, with 15 of these new planet candidates orbiting in the habitable zones of other stars.

The team said that with 19 similar planets already discovered in habitable zones, where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water, the new finds suggest that there may be a “traffic jam” of all kinds of strange worlds in regions that could potentially support life.

Although most of these planets are large, like Neptune or Jupiter, these discoveries increase the sample size of long-period planet candidates by more than 30% and almost double the number of known gas giant planet candidates in the habitable zone, Wang said. “In the future, we may find moons around these planet candidates (just like Pandora around Polyphemus in the movie Avatar) that allows life to survive and evolve under a habitable temperature.”

They also have a “watch list” for 9 further planet candidates which have only 2 transits observed.

To study the PH2 b system, the astronomy team from Planet Hunters used the HIRES spectrograph and NIRC2 adaptive optics system on the Keck telescopes in Hawaii to obtain both high resolution spectrum and high spatial-resolution images.

“The observations help us to rule out possible scenarios for false positive detections and give us a measured confidence level of more than 99.9% that PH2 b is a bona-fide planet rather than just an illusion,” Wang wrote on the Planet Hunter’s blog.

More than 40 volunteers were listed as co-authors on the paper, acknowledging the contributions of hundreds of volunteers to the effort. Among them is Roy Jackson, a 71-year-old retired police officer who lives in Birtley, near Gateshead. He said:
“It is difficult to put into words, the pleasure, wonderment and perhaps even pride that I have in some small way been able to assist in the discovery of a planet. But I would like to say that the discovery makes the time spent on the search well worth the effort.”

Mark Hadley, an electronics engineer from Faversham, another of the Planet Hunters credited on the paper, said: “Now, when people ask me what I achieved last year I can say I have helped discover a possible new planet around a distant star! How cool is that?”

“These are planet candidates that slipped through the net, being missed by professional astronomers and rescued by volunteers in front of their web browsers,” said Lintott. It’s remarkable to think that absolutely anyone can discover a planet.”

Sources: Yale University, Planet Hunters blog.

January 7, 2013December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

Kepler Finds Hundreds of New Exoplanet Candidates

Artist’s depiction of the Kepler 10 system, which contains planets 2.2 and 1.4 times the size of Earth. (NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech)

Kepler mission scientists announced today the discovery of literally hundreds of new exoplanet candidates — 461, to be exact — orbiting distant stars within a relatively small cross-section of our galaxy, bringing the total number of potential planets awaiting confirmation to 2,740. What’s more, at least 4 of these new candidates appear to be fairly Earth-sized worlds located within their stars’ habitable zone, the orbital “sweet spot” where surface water could exist as a liquid.

Impressive results, considering that NASA’s planet-hunting spacecraft was launched a little under 4 years ago (and watching 150,000 stars to spot the shadows of planets is no easy task!)

“… the ways by which men arrive at knowledge of the celestial things are hardly less wonderful than the nature of these things themselves.”

— Johannes Kepler

Since the last official announcement of Kepler candidates in Feb. 2012 the number of smaller Earth- and super-Earth-sized worlds observed has risen considerably, as well as the identification of multi-planet systems that are organized more-or-less along a flat plane… just like ours.

“There is no better way to kickoff the start of the Kepler extended mission,” said Kepler scientist Christopher Burke, “than to discover more possible outposts on the frontier of potentially life bearing worlds.”

From the NASA press release:

Since the last Kepler catalog was released in February 2012, the number of candidates discovered in the Kepler data has increased by 20 percent and now totals 2,740 potential planets orbiting 2,036 stars. The most dramatic increases are seen in the number of Earth-size and super Earth-size candidates discovered, which grew by 43 and 21 percent respectively.

The new data increases the number of stars discovered to have more than one planet candidate from 365 to 467. Today, 43 percent of Kepler’s planet candidates are observed to have neighbor planets.

The most dramatic increases are seen in the number of Earth-size and super Earth-size candidates discovered, which grew by 43 and 21 percent respectively. (NASA)

Although some of the new candidates announced today are large Neptune-sized planets, more than half are Earth- to super-Earth sized worlds less than twice the radius of our own planet.

In order for Kepler candidates to be “officially” called exoplanets, they must be observed 3 times on a regular orbit — that is, their signature dimming of the light from their home star must occur as predicted once their presence and then orbital period is calculated. Only then is an exoplanet confirmed.

To date Kepler has confirmed 105 exoplanets.

The longer the mission continues, the better the chance that Kepler will be able to confirm smaller Earth-sized worlds in longer-period orbits.

“The analysis of increasingly longer time periods of Kepler data uncovers smaller planets in longer period orbits — orbital periods similar to Earth’s,” said Steve Howell, Kepler mission scientist. “It is no longer a question of will we find a true Earth analogue, but a question of when.”

Scientists analyzed more than 13,000 transit-like signals called ‘threshold crossing events’ to eliminate known spacecraft instrumentation and astrophysical false positives, phenomena that masquerade as planetary candidates, to identify the potential new planets. Watch the video below to see how Kepler observes the light-curve of transit events.

Read more on the NASA press release, and learn more about the Kepler mission here.

January 7, 2013December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Nearly All Sun-Like Stars Have Planetary Systems

A new analysis examined the frequencies of planets of different sizes based on findings from NASA's Kepler spacecraft, correcting for both incompleteness and false positives. The results show that one in six stars has an Earth-sized planet in a tight orbit. Credit: F. Fressin (CfA)

The latest analysis of data from the Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft reveals that almost all stars have planets, and about 17 percent of stars have an Earth-sized planet in an orbit closer than Mercury. Since the Milky Way has about 100 billion stars, there are at least 17 billion Earth-sized worlds out there, according to Francois Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), who presented new findings today in a press conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, California. Moreover, he said, almost all Sun-like stars have planetary systems.

The holy grail of planet-hunting is finding a twin of Earth – a planet of about the same size and in the habitable zone around similar star. The odds of finding such a planet is becoming more likely Fressin said, as the latest analysis shows that small planets are equally common around small and large stars.

While the list of Kepler planetary candidates contains majority of the knowledge we have about exoplanets, Fressin said the catalog is not yet complete, and the catalog is not pure. “There are false positives from events such as eclipsing binaries and other astrophysical configurations that can mimic planet signals,” Fressin said.

By doing a simulation of the Kepler survey and focusing on the false positives, they can only account for 9.5% of the huge number of Kepler candidates. The rest are bona-fide planets.

This artist's illustration represents the variety of planets being detected by NASA's Kepler spacecraft. Credit: C. Pulliam & D. Aguilar (CfA)

Altogether, the researchers found that 50 percent of stars have a planet of Earth-size or larger in a close orbit. By adding larger planets, which have been detected in wider orbits up to the orbital distance of the Earth, this number reaches 70 percent.

Extrapolating from Kepler’s currently ongoing observations and results from other detection techniques, it looks like practically all Sun-like stars have planets.

The team then grouped planets into five different sizes. They found that 17 percent of stars have a planet 0.8 – 1.25 times the size of Earth in an orbit of 85 days or less. About one-fourth of stars have a super-Earth (1.25 – 2 times the size of Earth) in an orbit of 150 days or less. (Larger planets can be detected at greater distances more easily.) The same fraction of stars has a mini-Neptune (2 – 4 times Earth) in orbits up to 250 days long.

Larger planets are much less common. Only about 3 percent of stars have a large Neptune (4 – 6 times Earth), and only 5 percent of stars have a gas giant (6 – 22 times Earth) in an orbit of 400 days or less.

The researchers also asked whether certain sizes of planets are more or less common around certain types of stars. They found that for every planet size except gas giants, the type of star doesn’t matter. Neptunes are found just as frequently around red dwarfs as they are around sun-like stars. The same is true for smaller worlds. This contradicts previous findings.

“Earths and super-Earths aren’t picky. We’re finding them in all kinds of neighborhoods,” says co-author Guillermo Torres of the CfA.

Planets closer to their stars are easier to find because they transit more frequently. As more data are gathered, planets in larger orbits will come to light. In particular, Kepler’s extended mission should allow it to spot Earth-sized planets at greater distances, including Earth-like orbits in the habitable zone.

Kepler detects planetary candidates using the transit method, watching for a planet to cross its star and create a mini-eclipse that dims the star slightly.

Sources: Harvard Smithsonian CfA, AAS Press Conference

January 7, 2013December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

Catching Sunlight: A TEDx Talk by DIY Solar Photographer Alan Friedman

Video poster frame shows Alan Friedman’s 90mm hydrogen alpha telescope setup — nicknamed “Little Big Man” — on an Astro-Physics 900 equatorial mount.

We’ve featured several beautiful images of the Sun here on Universe Today, captured by the talented Alan Friedman from his backyard telescope in Buffalo, NY. While photos of the Sun in and of themselves are nothing new in astronomy, Alan’s images always seem to bring out the best in our home star. Maybe it’s the magical nature of hydrogen alpha photography, maybe it’s Alan’s fancy new Grasshopper CCD camera, maybe the Sun’s photosphere was looking particularly nice on those days… but most likely Alan just has an innate skill for solar photography (as well as one for picking out great hats!)

In the video above, Alan talks to an audience at a TEDx event in Buffalo on October 9, sharing some of his photos and explaining why he does what he does, and why he feels do-it-yourself astrophotography is such a valuable thing to share with others. It’s a great bit of insight from a talented artist (and you just might recognize the names he drops at 13:55!)

I was happy to share one of Alan’s images on my own website back in 2010, which Phil Plait (the “Bad Astronomer,” who was then with Discover Magazine) picked up on and soon enough the whole thing got Alan quite a bit of attention. Which, when you’re an astrophotographer and graphic artist (he also sells art prints of his work as well as runs a greeting card studio) is never a bad thing.

Image of the Sun in hydrogen alpha. ©2010 Alan Friedman. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

You can see more of Alan’s work on his Averted Imagination blog and website and, on occasion, here on Universe Today!

January 7, 2013December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Stunning View from Orbit: Dramatic Volcanoes at Dawn

Volcanoes of Kamchatka, Russia at dawn, as seen from the International Space Station. Credit: NASA/CSA/Chris Hadfield

A stunning view from orbit! Astronaut Chris Hadfield captured this shot of the volcanoes of Kamchatka in Russia. “Volcanoes look dramatic at dawn,” Hadfield said via Twitter. “They startled me when I spotted them through the lens.”

Note the huge shadows created by the Sun, which is low on the horizon at dawn.

These are just a few of the 160 volcanoes on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the far eastern part of Russia. 29 of the 160 are active. Thanks to Peter Caltner on Twitter who identified the volcanoes seen here: Tolbachik (at left, in clouds and smoke plume, active presently); Ushkovsky (in the back, right); Kliuchevskoi (right edge, the peak in front). Little ones in the foreground: Udina (left) and Zimina (right).

These jagged peaks are obviously an eye-catching landmark from orbit, as they have been a target of observations before — by Yuri Malenchenko in November of 2012 and by Clay Anderson in December of 2011.

January 6, 2013April 26, 2016 by Jason Major

Flying, Rolling Robot Might Make a Great Titan Explorer

The HyTAQ (Hybrid Terrestrial and Aerial Quadrotor) robot developed at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)

Ever since the Huygens probe landed on Titan back in January 2005, sending us our first tantalizing and oh-so-brief glimpses of the moon’s murky, pebbly surface, researchers have been dreaming up ways to explore further… after all, what’s more intriguing than a world in our own Solar System that’s basically a miniature version of an early Earth (even if it’s quite a few orders of magnitude chillier?)

Many concepts have been suggested as to the best way to explore Titan, from Mars-style rovers to boats that would sail its methane seas to powered gliders… and even hot-air balloons have been put on the table. Each of these have their own specific benefits, specially suited to the many environments that are found on Titan, but what if you could have two-in-one; what if you could, say, rove and fly?

That’s what this little robot can do.

Designed by Arash Kalantari and Matthew Spenko at the Robotics Lab at Illinois Institute of Technology, this rolling birdcage is actually a quadrotor flying craft that’s wrapped in a protective framework, allowing it to move freely along the ground and then take off when needed, maneuvering around obstacles easily.

A design like this, fitted with scientific instruments and given adequate power supply, might make a fantastic robotic explorer for Titan, where the atmosphere is thick and the terrain may range from rough and rocky to sandy and slushy. (And what safer way to ford a freezing-cold Titanic stream than fly over it?)

Also, the robot’s cage design may make it better suited to travel across the frozen crust of Titan’s flood plains, which have been found to have a consistency like damp sand with a layer of frozen snow on top. Where wheels could break through and get permanently stuck (a la Spirit) a rolling cage might remain on top. And if it does break through… well, fire up the engines and take off.

The robot (as it’s designed now) is also very energy-efficient, compared to quadrotors that only fly.

“During terrestrial locomotion, the robot only needs to overcome rolling resistance and consumes much less energy compared to the aerial mode,” the IIT website notes. “This solves one of the most vexing problems of quadrotors and rotorcraft in general — their short operation time. Experimental results show that the hybrid robot can travel a distance 4 times greater and operate almost 6 times longer than an aerial only system.”

Of course this is all just excited speculation at this point. No NASA or ESA contracts have been awarded to IIT to build the next Titan explorer, and who knows if the idea is on anyone else’s plate. But innovations like this, from schools and the private sector, are just the sorts of exciting things that set imaginations rolling (and flying!)

Color view of Titan’s surface, captured by the Huygens probe after landing in January 2005. (NASA/JPL/ESA/University of Arizona)

Video by RoboticsIIT

January 6, 2013April 13, 2022 by Ken Kremer

Curiosity Touches Mars at Yellowknife Bay and Drives to Snake River for Drilling

Image Caption: Photo mosaic shows NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover in action reaching out to investigate rocks at a location called Yellowknife Bay on Sol 132, Dec 19, 2012 in search of first drilling target. The view is reminiscent of a dried up shoreline. Curiosity’s navigation camera captured the scene surrounding the rover with the arm deployed and the APXS and MAHLI science instruments on tool turret collecting microscopic imaging and X-ray spectroscopic data. The mosaic is colorized. See the full 360 degree panoramic and black & white versions below. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo

Following the Christmas season break for panoramic imaging of her surroundings, NASA’s Curiosity robot has resumed roving around the shallow depression she reached before the holidays called ‘Yellowknife Bay’ and just arrived at a slithery rock called ‘Snake River’.

The top priority is to locate a target rock to drill into – and that momentous event could at last take place in the next week or so. The drill is the last of Curiosity’s suite of ten science instruments to be fully checked out and commissioned for use.

The drilling scene will look a lot like our photo mosaics, above and below, showing the robotic arm deployed for action. The drill is located on the tool turret at the end of the 7 foot (2.1 meter) long mechanical marvel.

The Curiosity research team is using the newly collected cache of high resolution color images to scan her surroundings in search of scientifically interesting rocks for the historic inaugural use of the high powered hammering drill.

Image Caption: Photo mosaic shows NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover in action reaching out to investigate rocks at a location called Yellowknife Bay on Sol 132, Dec 19, 2012. In search of first drilling target the rover drove to a spot at the right edge of this mosaic called Snake River rock. Curiosity’s navigation camera captured the scene surrounding the rover with the arm deployed and the APXS and MAHLI science instruments on tool turret collecting imaging and X-ray spectroscopic data. Base of Mount Sharp visible at right.The mosaic is colorized with patches of sky added to fill in gaps. Click to enlarge. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo

The percussive drill will collect the first ever powdered samples from the interior of Martian rocks for analysis by a pair of state-of-the-art analytical chemistry instruments located inside the rover named SAM and CheMin.

“We are firing on all cylinders now and our last thing to do is drilling, and we really hope to start on that process beginning next week,” said John Grotzinger, the mission’s chief scientist of the California Institute of Technology, in an interview with Jonathan Amos of the BBC.

The rover is also using the APXS X-ray mineral spectrometer, ChemCam rock blasting laser and MAHLI hand lens imager to gather science characterization data helpful in choosing the drill target.

Today (Jan. 5) marks exactly 5 months since Curiosity’s hair-raisingly successfully touchdown on Aug. 5, 2012 on the gravelly plains of Gale Crater beside the towering foothills of Mount Sharp, a 3 mi (5 km) high layered mountain holding deposits of hydrated minerals. Mount Sharp is the main destination of Curiosity’s mission.

On Jan. 3 (Sol 147), Curiosity drove another 10 feet (3 meters) northwestward and pulled up to a sinuous rock feature called “Snake River” as part of a campaign to survey a variety of rocks from which to select the drilling site.

“It’s one piece of the puzzle,” says John Grotzinger. “It has a crosscutting relationship to the surrounding rock and appears to have formed after the deposition of the layer that it transects.”

‘Snake River’ sinuous Rock Feature Viewed by Curiosity Mars Rover on Sol 133. On Sol 147 (Jan 3. 2013), the rover drove to within arm’s reach of Snake river for up close examination as possible drill target. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Snake River is a thin curving line of darker rock cutting through flatter rocks and jutting above sand, says NASA. It’s located at the right side edge of our Sol 132 photo mosaic stitched together from raw images by the image processing team of Ken Kremer & Marco Di Lorenzo to provide a context view of the scenery – and were also featured at NBC News by Alan Boyle, BBC News, NASA Watch and the NY Daily News.

So far the robot has driven a total of 2,303 feet (702 meters) and snapped nearly 36,000 pictures.

Yellowknife Bay is a basin inside an area dubbed ‘Glenelg’ that features a flatter and lighter-toned type of terrain from what the mission crossed during its first four months inside Gale Crater. The rover descended about 2 feet (0.5 m) down a slight incline to reach the inside of the depression in December 2012.

“We’re down at the very lowest layer – what would be the oldest layer that we would see in this succession that might be five to eight meters thick, and that is very likely where we are going to choose our first drilling target, because suddenly we’ve come into an area that represents a very high diversity of things we haven’t seen before,” said Grotzinger to the BBC.

“The place where Curiosity is right now is a small stack of layers – very impressive – and they could be 3-3.5 billion years old, and so we’re very excited about this because unlike the soil which we were analyzing before the holiday season – a loose, windswept patch of dirt on the surface of Mars – we’re now going to start digging down into the very ancient bedrock which we really built the rover to look at,” explained Grotzinger.

Image caption: Curiosity peaks around Yellowknife Bay on Sol 125, Dec 12, 2012. The rover has continued driving inside the basin in search of 1st rock drill target in Jan 2013. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo

The mission goal is to search for habitats and determine if Mars ever could have supported microbial life in the past or present during the 2 year primary mission phase.

“We use these layers as a sort of recording device of past events and conditions, and the rover has the same kind of analytical capability that we would use here on Earth to tell us about the early environmental conditions; and, if life had ever evolved, [whether it would] be the kind of environment that would have been conducive towards sustaining that life,” Grotzinger elaborated to the BBC.

Stay tuned.

Ken Kremer

Image Caption: Photo mosaic shows NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover in action reaching out to investigate rocks at a location called Yellowknife Bay on Sol 132, Dec 19, 2012. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo

January 4, 2013December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Neil Armstrong Didn’t Lie About First Words on the Moon, Historian Says

Neil Armstrong on the moon. Credit: NASA

A small controversy has erupted over Neil Armstrong’s first words as he stepped on the Moon’s surface and how he came to say them.

Armstrong had always admitted that while he had been thinking about what to say during his first steps for quite some time before the Apollo 11 mission, he didn’t actually decide on his words until just after landing on the Moon, while waiting to exit the lunar module. In a new BBC documentary, the astronaut’s brother Dean Armstrong says the two discussed the statement months earlier, and that Neil gave Dean a handwritten note showing him the famous quote, “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.”

But apparently some people (and writers) have gotten a bit confused, thinking that Armstrong said he thought up the words on the spot, and recent headlines have screamed that “Armstrong Lied” about the quote.

Not so, says says space historian and author Andrew Chaikin, who wrote the book, “A Man on the Moon,” and interviewed Armstrong several times.

“I was distressed to see recent news stories claiming that Neil Armstrong lied to the world about when he made up his famous quote,” Chaikin said via email, and asked Universe Today to share the op-ed he wrote for Space.com.

In the op-ed piece, Chaikin cut to the chase, saying, “Let’s get one thing straight right now: Neil Armstrong was not a liar.” … “The problem, in some people’s minds, is that this seems to conflict with Neil’s own statements over the last 40 years about when and where he composed what became an immortal sentence when he took his first step onto the Moon,”

But it does not contradict history at all.

Chaikin notes that in Neil Armstrong’s first public statement about the famous quote at a post-flight press conference on Aug. 12, 1969, he said, “I did think about it. It was not extemporaneous, neither was it planned. It evolved during the conduct of the flight and I decided what the words would be while we were on the lunar surface just prior to leaving the LM.”

And when Chaikin interviewed Armstrong in 1988 for the book “A Man on the Moon,” Armstrong said the same thing, and he also told that to his biographer James Hansen in 2003.

“It is simply not true, as several recent news articles have claimed, that Armstrong always said he composed the quote ‘spontaneously,’” Chaikin wrote in the op-ed. “It would have been completely out of character for Armstrong, who was thoughtful about nearly everything he said and did, to have offered such an important quote without thinking it through beforehand.”

Chaikin says that Dean Armstrong’s story just adds a little ambiguity. “Maybe Neil had more than one quote in mind at that point, and only shared one of them with his brother. Or maybe the quote he showed his brother was an early draft, but after all these years, Dean remembers seeing the final version. We’ll probably never know the answer.”

But in no way does it mean that Armstrong “fibbed” or “lied” to the public for 40 years.

This isn’t the first time the famous first words have been a bit controversial. While the “a” in “one small step for a man” wasn’t audible in the broadcast to the world, Armstrong always said he did speak that word. A 2006 audio analysis of the broadcast supported Armstrong.

Neil Armstrong passed away in August 2012.

You can read Chaikin’s op-ed on Space.com here.

January 4, 2013December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

For Sale or Rent: Used Launchpad, Well-Loved

Apollo 11 Saturn V on launch pad 39A, July 1, 1969. Credit: NASA

Athough NASA hasn’t put out an official “for sale” list, news reports indicate that several facilities at Kennedy Space Center are available to the highest bidder, including one of the launch pad where the Apollo missions and many space shuttles started their journeys, as well as space in the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building.

After 2013, federal money will no longer be available to maintain facilities at KSC that are left over from the space shuttle era and are no longer being used. Currently, nothing is up for public auction, but NASA has been in discussion commercial space companies and other interested parties who could buy or rent.

The Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC. Credit: Nancy Atkinson

“We have a lot of things in discussion, realizing that these major facilities have been funded by the space-shuttle program,” said Joyce Riquelme, NASA’s director of KSC planning and development, speaking with WESH TV in Florida. “And the facilities out here can’t be in an abandoned state for long before they become unusable. So we’re in a big push over the next few months to either have agreements for these facilities or not.”

Among the facilities up for bid are Launch Pad 39A; space in the gigantic Vehicle Assembly Building, which was first used to assemble Saturn V-Apollo rockets; the Orbiter Processing Facilities, which are huge garages where the shuttles were maintained; Hangar N and its high-tech test equipment; the launch-control center; and various other buildings and pieces of undeveloped property.

Launch Pad 39B is being retooled for NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS).

Reportedly, NASCAR is renting the 3-mile-long space shuttle runway for race car tests.

Launcpad 39A in March, 2010, with Discovery on deck for the STS-131 mission. Credit: Nancy Atkinson

NASA already has partnered with Space Florida and Boeing, which is leasing one of the shuttle hangers. Boeing, under a Space Florida contract, intends to assemble and refurbish its planned CST-100 capsules that might be used to take up to seven astronauts to the International Space Station. Boeing also has a partnership with Bigelow Aerospace, which is seeking to build and launch its own space stations.

While this means NASA is moving forward with the next generation of vehicles and missions, it has to be hard for the people who worked on the space shuttle program to see this happening.

Sources: WESH, Orlando Sentinel