Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

See the Winners of the Earth & Sky Photo Contest

“Stars above Innsbruck” by Norbert Span, Austria. Winning photo from the 2012 Earth & Sky contest.

Enjoy this delightful video put together by Babak Tafreshi from The World At Night showing the winners of the third International Earth and Sky Photo Contest. With the theme of ‘Dark Skies Importance,’ these are lovely landscape astrophotos, “ in appreciation of the night sky beauty as an essential element of our nature, importance of preserving dark skies, and public awareness on the growing threat of light pollution,” Tafreshi said.

The organizers of the contest were the TWAN group along with the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, emphasizing Global Astronomy Month (April) and the contest was part of the Dark Skies Awareness project. The 2012 contest submission period was during the month of April, and submissions were to be in the “TWAN style” of landscape astrophotography — combining elements of the night sky set in the backdrop of the Earth horizon with a notable location or landmark.

Here’s the winning photograph by Norbert Span from Austria, “Stars Above Innsbruck:”

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You can all the images here.

The contest is open to anyone of any age, anywhere around the world. Interested in entering this contest next year? Check out the contest info page.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Opportunity Roving Mars Once Again

Opportunity's traverse map from Sol 2951 (May 13 on Earth) and shows the entirety of the rover's travels to that point. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell/University of Arizona

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After spending 19 weeks working in one place during the Martian winter in Meridian Planum, the Opportunity Mars rover is now roving once again. During the winter, available solar power was too low for driving, but on May 8th (here on Earth), Opportunity took its first drive since Dec. 26, 2011. She drove about 3.67 meters (12 feet) northwest and downhill.

“We’re off the Greeley Haven outcrop onto the sand just below it,” said rover driver Ashley Stroupe of JPL. “It feels good to be on the move again.”

During the period while the rover was stationary, she wasn’t just sleeping. Engineers sent commands for Oppy to use the spectrometers and microscopic imager on its robotic arm to inspect more than a dozen targets within reach on the outcrop. Radio Doppler signals from the stationary rover during the winter months served an investigation of the interior of Mars by providing precise information about the planet’s rotation, a study that scientists were hoping to do with the Spirit rover, but unfortunately she fell silent before they could do the experiment.

Opportunity drove about 12 feet (3.67 meters) on May 8, 2012, after spending 19 weeks working in one place while solar power was too low for driving during the Martian winter. The winter worksite was on the north slope of an outcrop called Greeley Haven. The rover used its rear hazard-avoidance camera after nearly completing the May 8 drive, capturing this view looking back at the Greeley Haven. The dark shape in the foreground is the shadow of Opportunity's solar array. The view is toward the southeast. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

So how is Opportunity’s power supply? As long as the rover stays tilted northward towards the Sun – about 8 degrees is all that’s needed – she will have sufficient power to take short drives.

But unless wind removes some dust from her solar arrays, allowing more sunlight to reach the solar cells, the rover will need to work during the next few weeks at locations with no southward slope. “We’ll head south as soon as power levels are adequate to handle the slopes where we’ll go,” said Mars Exploration Rover Deputy Project Scientist Diana Blaney of JPL.

“Our next goal is a few meters farther north on Cape York, at a bright-looking patch of what may be dust,” said Opportunity science-team member Matt Golombek of JPL. “We haven’t been able to see much dust in Meridiani. This could be a chance to learn more about it.”

Beyond the dust patch, the team intends to use Opportunity to study veins in bedrock around the northern edge of Cape York. A vein inspected before winter contained gypsum deposited long ago by mineral-laden water flowing through a crack in the rock.

As you remember, Opportunity has been going strong for over 9 years now, exploring the Meridiani region of Mars since landing in January 2004. It arrived at the Cape York section of the rim of Endeavour Crater in August 2011, and has been studying rock and soil targets on Cape York since then.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

The Most Profitable Asteroid Is…

Artist impression of the Arkyd Interceptor, a low cost asteroid mission that enables accelerated exploration. Credit: Planetary Resources.

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With the recent announcement of the asteroid mining company, Planetary Resources, some of the most-asked questions about this enticing but complex endeavor include, what asteroids do we mine? Which are the easiest asteroids to get to? Could it really be profitable?

While Planetary Resources officials said they hope to identify a few promising targets within a decade, the initial answers to those questions are available now on a new website that estimates the costs and rewards of mining rocks in space. Called Asterank, the website uses available data from multiple scientific sources on asteroid mass and composition to try and compute which asteroids would be the best targets for mining operations.

So, which asteroids are most profitable, valuable, easily accessible and cost effective?

The winners are, according to Asterank:

Most Profitable: 253 Mathilde, a 52.8 km-diameter C-type (carbonaceous) asteroid that has an estimated value of over $100 trillion and estimated profit of $9.53 trillion (USD)
Most Cost Effective: 2000 BM19, a very small O-type asteroid (less than 1 km wide) that makes several close approaches to Earth. Its estimated value is $18.50 trillion and an estimated profit of $3.55 trillion.
Most Valuable: 253 Mathilde
Most Accessible: 2009 WY7, another small asteroid with regular close approaches of less than 1 AU. This is an S-type asteroid, a silicaceous or “stony” object that has a high accessibility score on Asterank of 7.6577.

Asterank combines both the economic and scientific features of over 580,000 asteroids in our solar system, looking specifically for platinum-group metals and water. It was created by Ian Webster, a software engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“I’ve always had a strong interest in astronomy and especially space exploration,” Webster said via an email to Universe Today. “The commercialization of space through ventures like asteroid mining really excites me because I believe it’ll open space to the rest of us and improve human quality of life. My day job is at a startup unrelated to space, but my hobbies include building rockets and many side projects like this one. I have a lot of fun applying computer science in different ways and I hope that Asterank will educate and inspire people.”

Webster provides a caveat, however, to the rankings of the top 100 asteroids in each category.

“Scientists know shockingly little about the composition of asteroids,” he writes on the website. “Visit JPL’s Small Body Database and you will notice how sparse information is.”

So, this mean that there aren’t really ‘experts’ in this field, and even those most knowledgeable about asteroids likely don’t have the numbers needed to completely and accurately estimate the true value of an asteroid or the cost of mining it — “which is why Planetary Resources is going to spend years or even decades investing in LEO-telescopes and data-gathering flybys before they ever touch an asteroid,” Webster said.

Webster has used databases, websites, books and other publications to get as much accurate, up-to-date information as possible, but even then, he said everything on the website is a rough estimation.

“The primary purpose of this site is to broadly educate and inspire, rather than provide completely accurate data — which is currently impossible,” he said. “I created the site in response to the announcement of Planetary Resources. “I should point out that nearly all the measurements and hard data come from the scientists at NASA JPL, but I had a lot of fun putting the site together.”

And it is fun to peruse the various categories and see what asteroids make the top of each category.

The ranking takes into account the value of the materials on the asteroids such as metals, volatile compounds, and water; the costs of getting to an asteroid and moving the raw materials: and the comparative savings and potential profit, which at this point are very hypothetical, taking into account processing and moving raw material.

“We really don’t know yet how much it will cost to mine an object millions of miles away,” Webster said.

While this website is a first step, it offers an exciting and enjoyable initial look at the potential commercial viability of space mining.

Check out Asterank.

Posted on by Jason Major

Is Earth Alive? Scientists Seek Sulfur For An Answer

Image of Earth taken by ESA's Rosetta spacecraft in 2009

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Researchers at the University of Maryland have discovered a way to identify and track sulfuric compounds in Earth’s marine environment, opening a path to either refute or support a decades-old hypothesis that our planet can be compared to a singular, self-regulating, living organism — a.k.a. the Gaia theory.

Proposed by scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the 70s, the Gaia theory likens Earth to a self-supporting singular life form, similar to a cell. The theory claims that, rather than being merely a stage upon which life exists, life — in all forms — works to actively construct an Earthly environment in which it can thrive.

Although named after the Greek goddess of Earth, the Gaia theory is not so much about mythology or New Age mysticism as it is about biology, chemistry and geology — and how they all interact to make our world suitable for living things.

Once called the Gaia hypothesis, enough scientific cross-disciplinary support has since been discovered that it’s now commonly referred to as a theory.

Marine phytoplankton -- like these diatoms -- may produce sulfur compounds that can be transmitted into the air, affecting climate. (NOAA image)

One facet of the Gaia theory is that sulfur compounds would be created by microscopic marine organisms — such as phytoplankton and algae — and these compounds could be transmitted into the air, and eventually (in some form) to the land, thus helping to support a sulfur cycle.

Sulfur is a key element in both organic and inorganic compounds. The tenth most abundant element in the Universe, sulfur is crucial to climate regulation — as well as life as we know it.

In particular, two sulfur compounds — dimethylsulfoniopropionate and its atmospherically-oxidized version, dimethylsulfide — are considered to be likely candidates for the products created by marine life. It’s these two compounds that UMD researcher Harry Oduro, along with geochemist and professor James Farquhar and marine biologist Kathryn Van Alstyne (of Western Washington University) have discovered a way to track across multiple environments, from sea to air to land, allowing scientists to trace which isotopes are coming from what sources.

“What Harry did in this research was to devise a way to isolate and measure the sulfur isotopic composition of these two sulfur compounds,” said Farquhar. “This was a very difficult measurement to do right, and his measurements revealed an unexpected variability in an isotopic signal that appears to be related to the way the sulfur is metabolized.”

The team’s research can be used to measure how the organisms are producing the compounds, under which circumstances and how they are ultimately affecting their — and our — environment in the process.

“The ability to do this could help us answer important climate questions, and ultimately better predict climate changes,” said Farquhar. “And it may even help us to better trace connections between dimethylsulfide emissions and sulfate aerosols, ultimately testing a coupling in the Gaia hypothesis.”

Whether or not Earth can be called a singular — or possibly even sentient — living organism of which all organisms are contributing members thereof may still be up for debate, but it is fairly well-accepted that life can shape and alter its own environment (and in the case of humans, often for the worse.) Research like this can help science determine just how far-reaching those alterations may be.

The study appears in this week’s Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Read more on the University of Maryland’s news page here.

Image credit: ESA ©2009 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA. Edited by J. Major.

Posted on by Jason Major

Space Exploration By Robot Swarm

"Hopper" rover/spacecraft concept by Stanford University's Marco Pavone

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With all there’s yet to learn about our solar system from the many smaller worlds that reside within it — asteroids, protoplanets and small moons — one researcher from Stanford University is suggesting we unleash a swarm of rover/spacecraft hybrids that can explore en masse.

Marco Pavone, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University and research affiliate at JPL, has been developing a concept under NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program that would see small spherical robots deployed to small worlds, such as Mars’ moons Phobos and Deimos, where they would take advantage of low gravity to explore — literally —  in leaps and bounds.

Due to the proposed low costs of such a mission, multiple spacecraft could be scattered across a world, increasing the area that could be covered as well as allowing for varied surfaces to be explored. Also, were one spacecraft to fail the entire mission wouldn’t be compromised.

The concept is similar to what NASA has done in the past with the Mars rovers, except multiplied in the number of spacecraft (and reduced in cost.)

The robots would be deployed from a “mother” spacecraft and spring into action upon landing, tumbling, hopping and vaulting their way across low-mass worlds.

In addition to providing our first views from the surfaces of such worlds, Pavone’s hybrid rovers could also help prepare for future, more in-depth exploration.

“The systematic exploration of small bodies would help unravel the origin of the solar system and its early evolution, as well as assess their astrobiological relevance,” Pavone explains. “In addition, we can evaluate the resource potential of small bodies in view of future human missions beyond Earth.”

Read more from NASA’s Office of the Chief Technologist here.

Photo courtesy of Marco Pavone

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Rocket Man Elton John Sings Greetings to the ISS

Sir Elton John sent a special message to the ‘rocket men’ on board the International Space Station by singing his classic song “Rocket Man.” The video was recorded on April 17, 40 years to the day after his single Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going To Be A Long, Long Time) was released around the world.

Sir Elton also added this greeting:
Continue reading “Rocket Man Elton John Sings Greetings to the ISS”

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Crowdsourcing the Hunt for Potentially Dangerous Asteroids

Faulkes Telescope, Hawaii. Credit: ESA

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What’s the best way to look for potentially hazardous asteroids? Get as many eyes on the sky as you can. That’s the impetus behind a new partnership between the European Space Agency and the Faulkes Telescope Project, which will encourage amateur astronomers to look for asteroids, as well as providing educational opportunities that will allow students to discover potentially dangerous space rocks, too.

ESA’s Space Situational Awareness (SSA) program is part of an international effort to be on the lookout for space hazards – not only asteroids but disruptive space weather and space debris objects in Earth orbit.

But asteroids pose a problem. Often, they are hard to see because they can be very dark, they can approach rather too close before anyone sees them, and they’re often spotted only once and then disappear before the discovery can be confirmed.

That’s where crowdsourcing comes in, to get more eyes on the skies. ESA is turning to schools and amateur astronomers to help as part of Europe’s contribution to the global asteroid hunt.

This month, the UK’s Faulkes Telescope Project will become the latest team to formally support the SSA program. Spain’s La Sagra Sky Survey, operated by the Observatorio Astronomico de Mallorca, began helping SSA earlier this year.

“The wider astronomy community offers a wealth of expertise and enthusiasm, and they have the time and patience to verify new sightings; this helps tremendously,” says Detlef Koschny, Head of NEO activity at ESA’s SSA program office. “In return, we share observing time at ESA’s own Optical Ground Station in Tenerife and provide advice, support and professional validation. We’ll assist them in any way we can.”

The Faulkes Telescope Project runs both educational and research programs, based at the University of Glamorgan in the UK. The project has been active in public education and science outreach, and is a partner of the US-based Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope network, which owns and operates two telescopes. Faulkes supports hundreds of schools across Europe, offering free access to their online observing program to schools.

The Faulkes project has two telescopes where you can sign up for observing online: Haleakala, Hawaii (Latitude: N 20 42′ 27.35″ Longitude: W 156 15′ 21.72″) and Siding Spring, Australia (Latitude: S 31 16′ 23.5″ Longitude: E 149 04′ 13.0″)

“Our new cooperation with ESA is a great opportunity. Use of the 2 m-diameter telescopes in Hawaii and Siding Spring, Australia, will greatly enhance asteroid-spotting for the SSA programme, enabling fainter object detection and tracking from a global telescope network,” says Nick Howes, Pro-Am Program Manager at the Faulkes Telescope. “For European students, collaborating on exciting ESA activities and possibly detecting new NEOs is very appealing, as its engagement with one of the world’s great space agencies doing critical scientific work.”

While the Faulkes project focuses on schools, amateurs will be able to freely access the data archives. ESA’s archives are also open to all, and they work with amateur astronomers with the Teide Observatory Tenerife Asteroid Survey (TOTAS) team, who use a 1-meter telescope at the ESA’s Optical Ground Station on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Since starting their SSA-sponsored survey work in January 2010, the TOTAS amateur astronomers have identified hundreds of asteroid candidates, over 20 of which have been confirmed and named.

Find out more about how where students in schools across the UK/EIRE and some European locations can sign up.

ESA’s Space Situational Awareness program

Source: ESA

Posted on by Jason Major

Expedition 31 Blasts Off!

Launch of the Soyuz TMA-04M rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on May 15, 2012 (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

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After a six-week delay, the crew of Expedition 31 successfully launched aboard a Soyuz TMA-04M rocket on Tuesday, May 15 at 0301 GMT (11:01 p.m. EDT May 14) from Russia’s historic Baikonur Cosmodrome, located in the steppes of Kazakhstan.

The rocket will deliver NASA astronaut Joe Acaba and Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin to the International Space Station. After a two-day journey, their Soyuz capsule will dock with the ISS at 11:38 p.m. CDT on Wednesday.

The launch was aired live by NASA HD TV. The full launch can be viewed below:

The crew was originally slated to launch on March 30, but problems with a pressure test forced a delay until a new Soyuz rocket could be brought into service. In the meantime ISS crew members Don Pettit, ESA astronaut Andre Kuipers and cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko have had the station to themselves since April 27.

The three new crew members will remain on Space Station until mid-September, serving as flight engineers under Expedition 31 commander Oleg Kononenko until July 1, when the current crew will depart and Padalka will assume command, marking the beginning of Expedition 32.

For more news on Expedition 31, visit NASA’s ISS website here. Also, you can follow NASA astronaut Joe Acaba on Twitter @AstroAcaba.

Members of the media photograph the Soyuz TMA-04M rocket launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

Video credit: NASA TV. Images: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Posted on by Jason Major

Former Astronaut Criticizes NASA’s Current Course

Former NASA astronaut Story Musgrave railed against the administration's current direction -- or lack thereof.

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Former NASA astronaut Story Musgrave is neither happy nor excited about the current state of the space administration or about the commercial COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) program. He’s not happy, and he’s not afraid to say so.

“The whole thing is chaos and a cop out. The whole thing is a Washington failure,” Musgrave bluntly stated to Examiner.com’s Charles Atkeison in an interview this past weekend.

Story Musgrave in 1983 (NASA)

Musgrave was a NASA astronaut for over 30 years and was a crew member on six shuttle missions. He performed the first shuttle spacewalk on Challenger’s first flight, was a pilot on an astronomy mission, was the lead spacewalker on the Hubble repair mission and on his last flight he operated an electronic chip manufacturing satellite on Columbia.

He has 7 graduate degrees in math, computers, chemistry, medicine, physiology, literature and psychology. He has been awarded 20 honorary doctorates and was a part-time trauma surgeon during his 30 year astronaut career.

And, according to Atkeison, Musgrave “feels the space agency has no true goals or focus today.”

“We’re not going anywhere… there is no where, there is no what, and there is no when,” the former astronaut told Atkeison. “There is no Mars program, none. There is also no Moon program. There is no asteroid program… there’s no what we’re gonna do and no when we’re gonna do it.”

Neither does Musgrave put much faith in the value of the COTS program… which includes the upcoming launch of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.

This isn’t the first time Musgrave has spoken out against NASA’s direction, either; in June of 2011 Musgrave lambasted the administration for its failure to have a “next step” after phasing out the shuttle program.

“Why are we so poor in our vision and so poor in our project management that we come to a point where it’s reasonable to phase out the current program and we have no idea what the next one is?” Musgrave said in 2011. “Washington has to stop doing that.”

Story Musgrave, now 76, currently operates a palm farm in Orlando, FL, a production company in Sydney and a sculpture company in Burbank, CA. He is also a landscape architect, a design professor and  a concept artist with Disney Imagineering. It’s clear that Musgrave is a man who knows what vision is — and isn’t. Still, he’s always honored to have had the opportunity to be a part of NASA.

“I’m massively privileged to be part of the space program, and I never forget to say that,” said Musgrave last year.

Read the full story by Charles Atkeison on Examiner.com here.

First spacewalk of the space shuttle era (STS-6) by Story Musgrave and Don Peterson to test new spacesuits and life support systems. (NASA)
Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Vote for the Curiosity Rover to Become a LEGO Toy

A Lego Curiosity Rover on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia for their Space Day event to welcome the addition of the Discovery Space Shuttle. You can see the underside of the shuttle in the background. Credit: Stephen Pakbaz.

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I know a lot of our readers are — like me — huge LEGO fans, and of course, we have lots of fans of the Mars Science Laboratory, a.k.a the Curiosity rover. One of our readers, Allen Eyler, just sent me an email on how disappointed he and many other rover fans are about the fact that LEGO has no plans to create a Curiosity toy model. However, LEGO has a website where users can submit prototype designs for LEGO projects and if 10,000 people vote for the design, then LEGO will consider mass-producing and marketing that design. Bring in Stephen Pakbaz, an engineer at JPL who was involved in some of the design and testing of the real Curiosity rover. He has now designed and built an amazing Curiosity rover in LEGO, at 1:20 scale. It features the same ‘rocker-bogie’ wheel action just like the real Curiosity rover, along with an articulating arm and a deployable mast.

It looks awesome and I’m already wanting to play with it! And just think of the great outreach for NASA and space exploration it would be to have a Lego Curiosity rover for sale in stores. We now just need our readers to help boost the votes for Curiosity as a LEGO toy model.

All you need to do is visit LEGO’s CUUSOO page for the Curiosity rover and cast your vote. You can see more images of the rover there, or at Stephen Pakbaz’s Flickr page, where there is even a video that shows how the rocker-bogie system works.

Let’s do this!

Curiosity is now on its way to Mars and is set for an exciting landing on August 6. Watch below the incredible, nail-biting video of how it is going to happen: