Posted on by Jason Rhian

NASA Avoids Accountant’s Axe

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden discusses the recently announced NASA budget. Photo Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

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With the US’s attention firmly focused on the budget with calls to cut spending in every possible non-essential programs, supporters of the U.S. human space flight program were concerned that NASA would be on the frontline to take a hit. But Congress spared the space agency from prospective cuts and announced that NASA’s budget would remain at current levels, and its budget be $18.5 billion for 2011. It took the body months of vitriolic back-and-forth arguing that culminated in last-minute negotiations, including language that includes the building of a Space Launch System heavy-lift vehicle.

NASA is at a historic crossroads as the agency has been directed to support smaller commercial space firms provide access to low-Earth-orbit (LEO) while the agency tries to send astronauts beyond LEO again.

The wording of the budget states that the Space Launch System heavy-lift vehicle “shall have a lift capability not less than 130 tons and which shall have an upper stage and other core elements developed simultaneously.” That’s different from the language in the 2010 authorization act, which calls for initial development of an SLS that can place 70-100 tons into LEO that would later be upgraded to a 130-ton capacity.

As it currently stands, NASA is dependent on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to send U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station. Russia has recently increased the cost of a single seat onboard the Soyuz to $63 million, making it even-more important that NASA maintains funding at least at current levels.

“We appreciate the work of Congress to pass a 2011 spending bill. NASA now has appropriated funds to implement the 2010 Authorization Act, which gives us a clear path forward to continue America’s leadership in human spaceflight, exploration and scientific discovery. Among other things, this bill lifts funding restrictions that limited our flexibility to carry out our shared vision for the future,” said NASA’s Administrator Charles Bolden. “With this funding, we will continue to aggressively develop a new heavy lift rocket, multipurpose crew vehicle and commercial capability to transport our astronauts and their supplies on American-made and launched spacecraft. We are committed to living within our means in these tough fiscal times – and we are committed to carrying out our ambitious new plans for exploration and discovery.”

Lifted, finally, was the so-called “Shelby provision” from the 2010 appropriations act that prevented NASA from terminating Constellation programs.

Posted on by Jason Rhian

NASA Space Shuttle Owner’s Workshop Manual Book Review

Zenith Press has re-released NASA Space Shuttle Owner's Workshop Manual just in time to mark the conclusiion of the shuttle program. Image Credit: Zenith Press

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The shuttle era is ending and when things end people have the tendency to look back and reflect on the trials and tribulations of that period. There are many news books that are being produced that seek to capitalize on this nostalgia – and a few old ones, are being re-released with current and updated information within. One of the more notable efforts is NASA SPACE SHUTTLE Owner’s Workshop Manual.

With modern imagery and text reflective of the program’s long history, the book encapsulates all of the accomplishments that the vehicle’s design allowed to become a reality. The book uses very current information, so much so that it mentions the shooting of U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords which took place this past January.

The book provides for a succinct review of the program’s history, its contributions, the setbacks of the Challenger and Columbia disasters as well as other aspects both known and unforeseen of the vehicle’s overall design. Although the book is relatively short, it covers the rationale behind why the space shuttle was designed the way that it was, how the spacecraft launches, flies and lands as well as numerous other facets that comprised the space shuttles’ history.

Written by Dr. David Baker and published by Zenith Press, the book retails for $28 and is well worth the price. With only two flights left before the shuttles are sent to their final resting places in museums and theme parks around the nation this book will make for a great memento of the vehicle that placed the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit, that helped build the International Space Station and that has been the focal point of U.S. human space efforts for the past thirty years.

With the shuttle program ending soon, the book; NASA Space Shuttle Owner's Workshop Manual provides a concise review of the various aspects and impacts that the thirty-year program has had. Photo Credit: Jason Rhian
Posted on by Jon Voisey

April 9th Fireball

In my time watching the skies, I’ve seen quite a few meteors, fireballs, and bolides. The truly notable ones are few and far between, but last Saturday, I caught one that was among the most interesting I’ve seen. It was a slow moving, bright green one with a nice smoke trail that was easily as bright as Venus from where I saw it in the suburbs of St. Louis. I tweeted about it briefly but didn’t think much more about it until I got a response from another person that saw it along with a link to a collection of observations. As nice as the observation was for me, it was nothing compared to the view some others got.

Heading over to the American Meteor Society page for a meteor around this time, it looks like a meteor matching the one I saw generated a pretty good number of reports from across the country. Several have reactions similar to my initial one: This must be a firework. Many reports confirm the smoke trail and fragmentation as well. But the reports that are really fantastic are the ones from Canada.

At the Lunar Meteorite Hunters blog, several reports have been collected. Several of these reports from various locations in Ontario report the meteor being as bright as a full moon and lighting up the entire sky! One even notes that they could hear a fizzling noise, a rare phenomenon thought to occur when the passage through the atmosphere creates an ionized path that interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field creating radio waves that could induce physical vibrations in the air around the observer. Another comment reports a sonic boom around the same time (although sonic booms would occur well after the meteor was visible due to the sluggish nature of sound waves, much like the delay between lightning and thunder).

It doesn’t look like NASA’s All Sky Fireball Network caught this fireball, but an amateur observatory equipped with an all sky camera for detecting fireballs did catch the event.

The green color for such meteors is uncommon but not unprecedented. The presence of magnesium ions is responsible for this color. Interestingly, another famous meteor, the Peekskill meteor, also had a green color and rivaled the full moon in brightness. This meteor became famous because it was independently captured in at least sixteen videos (here’s one showing the green tint) as well as for surviving intact to the ground and damaging a car.

Meteors of this intensity are quite rare but bright fireballs like this seem to peak around the vernal equinox. In the weeks surrounding that day, the rate of such events increases around 10-30%.

Posted on by Jason Major

Look Inside a Lunar Crater

Brightening the shadowed area reveals details of the crater floor...and even more boulders!

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The crater shown above is located in the lunar highlands and is filled with and surrounded by boulders of all sizes and shapes. It is approximately 550 meters (1800 feet) wide yet is still considered a small crater, and could have been caused by either a direct impact by a meteorite or by an ejected bit of material from another impact. Scientists studying the Moon attempt to figure out how small craters like this were formed by their shapes and the material seen around them…although sometimes the same results can be achieved by different events.

For example, when an object from space strikes the Moon, it is typically traveling around 20 km per second (12 miles/sec). If the impact site happens to have a very hard subsurface, it can make a crater with scattered bouldery chunks composed of the hard material around it. But, if a large piece of ejected material from another impact were to strike the lunar surface at a much slower speed, as ejecta typically do (since they travel slower than incoming space debris and the Moon’s escape velocity is fairly low, meaning any ejecta that does fall back to the surface must be traveling slower than 2.38 km/s,) then the ejected chunk could break apart on impact and scatter boulders of itself around the crater…regardless of subsurface composition.

Really the only way to tell for sure which scenario has taken place around a given crater – such as the one above – is to collect and return samples from the site so they can be tested. (Of course that’s much easier said than done!)

You can read more about this image on Arizona State University’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera site here.

And as an added treat, take a look deep into the shadows of the crater’s interior below…I tweaked the image curves in Photoshop to wrestle some of the details out of there!

 

Brightening the shadowed area reveals details of the crater floor...and even more boulders!

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University. (Edited by J. Major.)

P.S.: Want to see both image versions combined? Click here. (Thanks to Mike C. for the suggestion!)

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

No Joy for Dark Matter Detector’s First 100 Days

Bottom photomultiplier tube array on the XENON 100 detector. Credit: the XENON collaboration

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We’re still mostly in the dark about Dark Matter, and the highly anticipated results from the XENON100 detector has perhaps shed a tad more light on the subject – by not making a detection in the first 100 days of the experiment. Researchers from the project say they have now been able to place the most stringent limits yet on the properties of dark matter.

To look for any possible hints of Dark Matter interacting with ordinary matter, the project has been looking for WIMPS — or weakly interacting massive particles – but for now, there is no new evidence for the existence of WIMPS, or Dark Matter either.

The extremely sensitive XENON100 detector is buried beneath the Gran Sasso mountain in central Italy, shielding it from cosmic radiation so it hopefully can detect WIMPS, hypothetical particles that might be heavier than atomic nuclei, and the most popular candidate for what Dark Matter might be made of. The detector consists of 62 kg of liquid xenon contained within a heavily shielded tank. If a WIMP would enter the detector, it should interact with the xenon nuclei to generate light and electric signals – which would be a kind of “You Have Won!” indicator.

Dark Matter is thought to make up more than 80% of all mass in the universe, but the nature of it is still unknown. Scientists believe that it is made up of exotic particles unlike the normal (baryonic) matter, which we, the Earth, Sun and stars are made of, and it is invisible so it has only been inferred from its gravitational effects.

The XENON detector ran from January to June 2010 for its first run, and in their paper on arxiv, the team revealed they found three candidate events that might be due to Dark Matter. But two of these were expected to appear anyway because of background noise, the team said, so their results are effectively negative.

Does this rule out the existence of WIMPS? Not necessarily – the team will keep working on their search. Plus, results from a preliminary analysis from11.2 days worth of data, taken during the experiment’s commissioning phase in October and November 2009, already set new upper limits on the interaction rate of WIMPs – the world’s best for WIMP masses below about 80 times the mass of a proton.

And the XENON100 team was optimistic. “These new results reveal the highest sensitivity reported as yet by any dark matter experiment, while placing the strongest constraints on new physics models for particles of dark matter,” the team said in a statement.

Read the team’s paper.

More info on XENON100

Sources: EurekAlert, physicsworld

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Cast Your Vote for Student “Spirit of Innovation” Awards

The Spirit of Innovation Award honors the memory of Pete Conrad

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The Spirit of Innovation Awards is a wonderful competition that challenges teams of high school students to create innovative products using science, technology, and entrepreneurship to solve 21st century, real-world problems. Right now, the student teams are battling for top pick this week as public voting opens in the Conrad Foundation (named in memory of Apollo astronaut Pete Conrad)Spirit of Innovation People’s Choice Awards, so check out the various teams and cast your vote. But do it now: public voting is runs only through April 17.

“Science and technology studies improve life around the globe, and expand our reach off of it,” said Pete Worden, Director of NASA Ames Research Center. “The People’s Choice Awards is an opportunity for the public to engage with student innovators demonstrating fresh and exciting developments in these fields. It gives everybody the chance to participate in a program that benefits our future.”

Conrad was commander of Apollo 12 and the third man to walk on the Moon. He had a learning disability, but went on to earn a scholarship to Princeton and lead a mission to the Moon.

This year’s People’s Choice champion will be announced Sunday, May 1 during the closing ceremonies of the 2011 Innovation Summit at NASA’s Ames Research Center. The Summit, April 28 – May 1st, is the culmination of the Spirit of Innovation Awards as the student teams present their products to entrepreneurs, scientists, and industry professionals, and compete for $5,000 Next Step Grants. The People’s Choice votes will be incorporated as 10 percent of the final judging score for these scholarships.

Last year, Team AM Rocks and its Solar Flare Nutrition Bar took home the People’s Choice Award winning title. This year the teams that garner the most People’s Choice votes in each of the challenge
categories -aerospace exploration, clean energy and cyber security -will be awarded $250. Meet this year’s teams, explore the innovations, and cast your vote for favorite, at this link.

Find out more about the Conrad Foundation here.

Posted on by Jason Major

A Varying Venusian Vortex

Animation of Venus' southern polar vortex made from VIRTIS thermal infrared images; white is cooler clouds at higher altitudes.

Our neighboring planet Venus really is a world of extremes; searing surface temperatures, crushing air pressure, sulfuric acid clouds…Venus pretty much pushes the envelope on every aspect of rocky-planet existence. And now here’s one more thing that made scientists do a double-take: a shape-shifting vortex swirling around Venus’ south pole!

The presence of a cyclonic storm around Venus’ poles – both north and south –  has been known since Mariner 10’s pass in 1974 and then afterwards during the Pioneer Venus mission when a downwardly-spiraling formation of clouds over the planet’s north pole was imaged in infrared. It wasn’t until ESA’s Venus Express orbiter arrived in 2006 that the cyclone at the south pole was directly observed via the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) instrument…and it proved to be much stranger than anything previously expected. Continue reading “A Varying Venusian Vortex”

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

‘Sonic Booms’ in Space Linked to Star Formation

Dense filaments of gas in the IC5146 interstellar cloud. This image was taken by ESA’s Herschel space observatory at infrared wavelengths 70, 250 and 500 microns. Stars are forming along these filaments. Credits: ESA/Herschel/SPIRE/PACS/D. Arzoumanian (CEA Saclay) for the “Gould Belt survey” Key Programme Consortium.

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Its true there is no sound in empty interstellar space, but the Herschel space observatory has observed the cosmic equivalent of sonic booms. Networks of tangled and tremendously large gaseous filaments seen within clouds of gas and dust between stars are likely to be remnants of slow shockwaves from supernovae, Herschel scientists say. And surprisingly, no matter what the length or density of these filaments are, the width is always roughly the same, about 0.3 light years across, or about 20,000 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. This consistency of the widths demands an explanation, scientists say.

And it’s possible these shockwaves could generate sound within an interstellar cloud – if something were there to hear it.

“Although the density in an interstellar cloud is lower than in a very good vacuum on Earth there are molecules in the order of 10^8 per cm^3” said Goeran Pilbratt, ESA’s Herschel mission scientist. “That should be enough for sound to propagate, apart from the fact that we do not have the instruments to measure it.”

Filaments like this have been sighted before by other infrared satellites, but they have never been seen clearly enough to have their widths measured. Herschel is seeing that the width of these filaments is nearly uniform across three nearby clouds: IC5146, Aquila, and Polaris. The Herschel team, lead by Doris Arzoumanian, Laboratoire AIM Paris-Saclay, CEA/IRFU, made observations of 90 filaments, and found all had nearly identical widths. “This is a very big surprise,” Arzoumanian said.

The network of interstellar filaments in Polaris as seen by Herschel. Credits: ESA/Herschel/SPIRE/Ph. André (CEA Saclay) for the Gould Belt survey Key Programme Consortium and A. Abergel (IAS Orsay) for the Evolution of Interstellar Dust Key Programme Consortium.

Also, newborn stars are often found in the densest parts of these filaments. One filament imaged by Herschel in the Aquila region contains a cluster of about 100 infant stars.

The Herschel team said their observations provide strong evidence for a connection between interstellar turbulence, the filaments and star formation.

“The connection between these filaments and star formation used to be unclear, but now thanks to Herschel, we can actually see stars forming like beads on strings in some of these filaments,” said Pilbratt.

Comparing the observations with computer models, the astronomers suggest that filaments are probably formed when slow shockwaves dissipate in the interstellar clouds. These shockwaves are mildly supersonic and are a result of the huge amounts of turbulent energy injected into interstellar space by exploding stars.

They travel through the dilute sea of gas found in the galaxy, compressing and sweeping it up into dense filaments as they go. As these “sonic booms” travel through the clouds, they lose energy and, where they finally dissipate, they leave these filaments of compressed material.

Interstellar clouds are usually extremely cold, about 10 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero, and this makes the speed of sound in them relatively slow at just 0.2 km/s, as opposed to 0.34 km/s in Earth’s atmosphere at sea-level.

Sound travels in waves like light or heat does, but unlike them, sound travels by making molecules vibrate. So, in order for sound to travel, there has to be something with molecules for it to travel through. On Earth, sound travels to your ears by vibrating air molecules. In deep space, the large empty areas between stars and planets, there are no molecules to vibrate.

Read the team’s paper: Characterizing Interstellar Filaments with Herschel in IC5146

Sources: ESA email exchange with Pilbratt

Posted on by Jason Rhian

Iridium Next Prepares to Ride the Falcon

Iridium Next might have launched their last suite of satellites on Deltas, Protons and on the Long March - but the next wave will be all about the Falcon 9. Photo Credit: Alan Walters/awaltersphoto.com

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To date, Iridium NEXT is the largest commercial space launch contract with any single entity. All total, the contract is worth an estimated $3 billion. As part of that Iridium Communications Inc. signed into a deal with Space Explorations Technologies (SpaceX) as its major launch provider of its communications satellites on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. The manner in which the Iridium NEXT family of satellites is launched will be a dramatic departure from how Iridium launched its first suite of satellites back in the 90s.

Iridium launched this first constellation of communications satellites within the time span of a single year, from 1997 until 1998. Iridium sent this constellation into orbit on multiple different launch vehicles. The original deployment was a distinctly international affair, with the U.S. Delta II, the Russian Proton and the Chinese Long March rockets all playing a role in putting the entire fleet of satellites into orbit.

Iridium Communications plans to launch the 72 satellites of the Iridium Next constellation atop eight Falcon 9 rockets. Image Credit: Iridium Communications

This time, only a single launch provider, SpaceX, and their twice-flown Falcon 9 rocket have been given the nod to accomplish the job. They will also complete the planned 72 satellite fleet in only eight launches of nine satellites each. Sixty-six of these satellites will be fully operational; the remaining six will be on-orbit spares (in case there is a contingency with any of the operating satellites). Iridium will also have nine additional ground spares.

But Iridium has plans to further maximize the value of these satellites by selling space on them so that other firms can attach sensors or experiments.

“Every one of these satellites has a budget of about 110 pounds that can be used to fly extra payloads from different customers,” said Iridium’s CEO Matt Desch during a recent interview. “We will be hosting other people’s sensors on our satellites.”

The arrangement between Iridium and the NewSpace firm was just one in a string of successes as far as SpaceX is concerned. With the first two successful flights of the Falcon 9 rocket, the unspoken-but-obvious backing of the White House and the contract with Iridium, SpaceX is on a winning streak that shows little signs of abating. With the second launch of its Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX became the first company to do what only nations had done before – send a spacecraft into orbit and have it return safely to Earth (the Dragon spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean a few hours after launch).

Every Falcon 9 rocket with an Iridium Next payload would carry nine satellites each. Photo Credit: SpaceX

The contract with Iridium Communications is set to see its first launch during the first quarter of 2015. With the system fully financed (as of this past fall) the company now has to build it on orbit. When the constellation of satellites is on orbit it is expected to be functioning for many years to come.

“It was an innovative system that broke all the rules, and now we’re going to do it again,” said Desch. “A lot of people don’t realize what a powerful system we are today. They probably only remember us from 10-15 years ago. We’re going to remind them of who we are and what we are capable of, the replacement system will last until 2030 and what we will do today will last for years to come.”

SpaceX has had two successful launches of its Falcon 9 rocket, the third test flight is currently scheduled to take place this summer. Photo Credit: SpaceX