Posted on 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.

Posted on 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!)

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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

Posted on 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.

Curiosity touches Yellowknife Bay Sol 132_4c_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. 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.”

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‘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.

Curiosity & Yellowknife Bay Sol 125_2c_Ken Kremer

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

Curiosity touches Yellowknife Bay Sol 132_3c_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

Posted on 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.

Posted on 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
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
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

Posted on by Jason Major

Ancient Impacts Stained Vesta with Carbon-Rich Material

Composite-color 3D image of Cornelia crater on Vesta (NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

Ever since arriving at Vesta in July 2011, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has been capturing high-resolution images of the protoplanet’s surface, revealing a surprisingly varied and complex terrain covered in ridges, hills, grooves and, of course, craters of many different sizes and ages. Many of Vesta’s largest craters exhibit strange dark stains and splotches within and around them, some literally darker than coal. These stains were a puzzle to scientists when they were first seen, but the latest research now confirms that they may actually be the remains of the ancient impacts that caused them: dark deposits left by the myriad of carbon-rich objects that struck Vesta over the past four-and-a-half billion years.

Even though Vesta had a completely molten surface 4.5 billion years ago it’s believed that its crust likely solidified within a few million years, making the 530-km (329-mile) -wide world a literal time capsule for events taking place in the inner Solar System since then… one reason why Vesta was chosen as a target for the Dawn mission.

714973main_pia16632-43_946-710Using data acquired by Dawn during its year in orbit around Vesta, a team led by researchers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and the University of North Dakota investigated the dark material seen lining the edges of large impact basins located on the protoplanet’s southern hemisphere. What they determined was that much of the material was delivered during an initial large, low-velocity impact event 2–3 billion years ago that created the largest basin — Veneneia — and was then partially covered by a later impact that created the smaller basin that’s nearly centered on Vesta’s southern pole — Rheasilva.

“The evidence suggests that the dark material on Vesta is rich in carbonaceous material and was brought there by collisions with smaller asteroids.”

– Vishnu Reddy, lead author, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and the University of North Dakota

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Dawn framing camera images of dark material on Vesta. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

Subsequent smaller asteroid impacts over the millennia likely brought more carbonaceous material to Vesta’s surface, both delivering it as well as revealing any that may have existed beneath brighter surfaces.

Read more: Asteroid’s Unusual Light and Dark Crater

 

The dark, carbon-rich material observed on Vesta by Dawn also seems to match up with similarly dark clasts found in meteorites that have landed on Earth which are thought to have originated from Vesta.

“Our analysis of the dark material on Vesta and comparisons with laboratory studies of HED meteorites for the first time proves directly that these meteorites are fragments from Vesta,” said Lucille Le Corre from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, another lead author of the study.

If evidence of such collisions between worlds can be found on Vesta, it’s likely that similar events were occurring all across the inner solar system during its early days, providing a clue as to how carbon-rich organic material was delivered to Earth — and possibly Mars as well. Such material — the dark stains we see today lining Vesta’s craters — would have helped form the very building blocks of life on our planet.

The team’s findings were published in the November/December issue of the journal Icarus.

Read more on the Max Planck Institute’s news page here, and on the NASA release here. Learn more about the Dawn mission in the video below, narrated by Leonard Nimoy.

Posted on by Jason Major

Captain Kirk Tweets the Space Station

 Chris Hadfield’s response to William Shatner got quite a bit of attention on Twitter

You know that you’re living in a very special point in time when you can watch a man who became famous playing a starship captain on television send a tweet to a man who’s actually working in a spaceship orbiting the Earth — and get an amusing response back.

Which is exactly what happened earlier today when William Shatner got a reply from Chris Hadfield, currently part of the Expedition 34 crew aboard the ISS. For many people Shatner was the first starship captain remembered from TV in the late ’60s, and in a couple of months Chris Hadfield will become the first Canadian astronaut to assume command of the International Space Station.

(Shatner, by the way, is also from Canada. Hmm…maybe there’s something more going on here…)

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Meteorite From Mars is Water-Rich

Meteorites from Mars, like NWA 7034 (shown here), contain evidence of Mars' watery past. Credit: NASA

Martian meteorite NWA 7034 weighs approximately 320 grams (11 ounces). Credit: NASA

A 2-billion-year-old rock found in the Sahara desert has been identified as a meteorite from Mars’ crust, and it contains ten times more water than any other Martian meteorite found on Earth. It also contains organic carbon. The age of the rock, called NWA 7034, would put its origins in the early era of the most recent geologic epoch on Mars, the Amazonian epoch. While its composition is different from any previously studied Martian meteorite, NASA says it matches surface rocks and outcrops that have been studied by Mars rovers and Mars-orbiting satellites.

“The contents of this meteorite may challenge many long held notions about Martian geology,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “These findings also present an important reference frame for the Curiosity rover as it searches for reduced organics in the minerals exposed in the bedrock of Gale Crater.”

This new class of meteorite was found in 2011 in the Sahara Desert. Designated Northwest Africa (NWA) 7034, and nicknamed “Black Beauty,” it weighs approximately 320 grams (11 ounces). Research teams from the University of New Mexico, the University of California at San Diego and the Carnegie Institution in Washington analyzed mineral and chemical composition, age, and water content.

NWA 7034 is made of cemented fragments of basalt, rock that forms from rapidly cooled lava. The fragments are primarily feldspar and pyroxene, most likely from volcanic activity.

“This Martian meteorite has everything in its composition that you’d want in order to further our understanding of the Red Planet,” said Carl Agee, leader of the analysis team and director and curator at the University of New Mexico’s Institute of Meteoritics in Albuquerque. “This unique meteorite tells us what volcanism was like on Mars 2 billion years ago. It also gives us a glimpse of ancient surface and environmental conditions on Mars that no other meteorite has ever offered.”

There are about one hundred Martian meteorites that have been collected on Earth. They were all likely blasted off the Red Planet by either an asteroid or comet impact, and then spent millions of years traveling through space before falling to Earth.

Researchers theorize the large amount of water contained in NWA 7034 may have originated from interaction of the rocks with water present in Mars’ crust. The meteorite also has a different mixture of oxygen isotopes than has been found in other Martian meteorites, which could have resulted from interaction with the Martian atmosphere.

Scientists say the age of NWA 7034 is important because it is much older than most other Martian meteorites.

“We now have insight into a piece of Mars’ history at a critical time in its evolution,” said Mitch Schulte, program scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters.

Most Martian meteorites are divided into three rock types, named after three meteorites; Shergotty, Nakhla, and Chassigny. These “SNC” meteorites currently number about 110. Their point of origin on Mars is not known and recent data from lander and orbiter missions suggest they are a mismatch for the Martian crust. Although NWA 7034 has similarities to the SNC meteorites, including the presence of macromolecular organic carbon, this new meteorite has many unique characteristics.

“The texture of the NWA meteorite is not like any of the SNC meteorites,” said co-author Andrew Steele, who led the carbon analysis at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory. “This is an exciting measurement in Mars and planetary science. We now have more context than ever before to understanding where they may come from.”

Sources: NASA, Carnegie Institution for Science

This article was updated on 1/4/13.

Posted on by Jason Major

The Face of Creation

The latest autotuned installment in John D. Boswell’s Symphony of Science series waxes melodic about the particle-smashing science being done with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in particular its search for the Higgs boson, a.k.a. the… ok, ok, I won’t say it…

“We can recreate the conditions that were present just after the beginning of the Universe.”
– Prof. Brian Cox, “The Face of Creation”


John has been entertaining science fans with his Symphony mixes since 2009, when his first video in the series — “A Glorious Dawn” featuring Carl Sagan — was released. Now John’s videos are eagerly anticipated by fans, who follow him on YouTube and on Twitter as @melodysheep.

I’d have to say my all-time favorite is “Onward to the Edge”, featuring astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Professor Brian Cox and Carolyn Porco from the Cassini imaging team.

Terra LuminaThanks to some help from Kickstarter, John has recently released an original album, Terra Lumina, a “collection of folk/rock songs with themes including gravity, geology, photons, and the Doppler effect.” It’s a unique musical take on some of science’s most amazing discoveries, from John D. Boswell and vocalist William Crowley. Check out the video trailer here.

The album can be found on Amazon and on iTunes.

Videos via melodysheep