Apollo 14 landing site in 3-D. Image: LRO, Anaglyph by Nathanial Burton-Bradford. Click for larger version.
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Time to grab your 3-D glasses! Just got a note from Nathanial Burton-Bradford, one of the image editing wizards we have featured here at Universe Today. His latest handiwork is creating some 3-D analglyphs of images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and particularly of the Apollo landing sites. As Nathanial wrote me, “In a word, WOW!” Nathanial’s images make the lunar landers really stand out and stand *up* in the images, and other features such as tracks and experiments left by the Apollo astronauts become more visible as well. See more images below, and click on the images for larger versions, or see Nathanial’s flickr page for lots more!
Apollo 15 landing site in 3-D. Image by LRO, Analglyph by Nathanial Burton Bradford. Click for larger version.
Apollo 11 landing site in 3-D. Image: LRO, Anaglyph by Nathanial Burton-Bradford. Click for larger version.
Atlantis rolls to the VAB. Image credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe Today
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As NASA’s space shuttles head towards retirement, events are starting to happen now that are “lasts” for the program. On April 13, 2010 Atlantis was rolled over to the Vehicle Assembly Building for what is likely the last time. The workers at Kennedy Space Center are preparing Atlantis for its final flight, STS-132, currently scheduled for launch in mid-May 2010, and in the VAB the orbiter will be mated to the External Tank and solid rocket boosters. Thanks to photographer Alan Walters, Universe Today hopes to be able to chronicle these final events as the storied space shuttle program comes to an end. Of course, with NASA’s future seemingly in a state of flux, there’s a small possibility additional shuttle flights will be added, but enjoy this gallery of Alan’s wonderful pictures showing what is scheduled to be Atlantis’ final rollover.
Atlantis just leaving the Orbiter Processing Facility. Image credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe Today
Atlantis moving to the Vehicle Assembly Building. Image credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe TodayAtlantis, head on! Image credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe TodayAtlantis during the last rollover to the VAB. Image credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe TodayThe aft end of Atlantis, as seen during the rollover. Image credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe TodayAtlantis during its likely last rollover to the VAB. Image credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe TodayAtlantis entering the VAB for what is likely the last time. Image credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe Today
President Obama has proposed to completely cancel NASA’s Project Constellation to send humans to the Moon, Mars and Beyond, thus calling into question whether US Leadership in Space will continue. Artists concept of NASA’s cancelled Orion crew exploration vehicle shown here in on a science mission in lunar orbit. Credit: NASA
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In what could be considered a compromise in his proposed budget for NASA, President Obama is reviving the Orion crew capsule concept that he had canceled with the rest of the Constellation program earlier this year, according to an article by Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press. This should mean more jobs and less reliance on the Russians, officials said Tuesday. While Orion, still won’t go to the moon. It will go unmanned to the International Space Station to stand by as an emergency vehicle to return astronauts home, officials were quoted in the article.
Borenstein also reported that NASA will speed up development of a heavy lift rocket. It would have the power to blast crew and cargo far from Earth, although no destination has been chosen yet. The rocket supposedly would be ready to launch several years earlier than under the old moon plan.
The two moves are being announced before the “Space Summit” on Thursday, a visit to Kennedy Space Center by Obama. They are designed to counter criticism of the Obama administration’s space plans as being low on detail, physical hardware, and local jobs.
The President’s plan had been met with much criticism, including an open letter to Obama drafted by several former astronauts, flight directors and other former NASA officials.
A briefing at the White House Now said that the president is committed to choosing a single heavy-lift rocket design by 2015 and then starting its construction.
Reportedly, the new Obama program will mean 2,500 more Florida jobs than the old Bush program, a senior White House official told Borenstein. In addition, as we reported earlier, the commercial space industry on Tuesday released a study that said the president’s plan for private ships to fly astronauts to and from the space station would result in 11,800 jobs.
“We wanted to take the best of what was available from Constellation,” the NASA official told The Associated Press as part of a White House briefing.
Engineers and flight directors in Mission Control for the Apollo 13 mission. Credit: NASA
Note: To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 13 mission, for 13 days, Universe Today will feature “13 Things That Saved Apollo 13,” discussing different turning points of the mission with NASA engineer Jerry Woodfill.
After Flight Director Gene Kranz and his team in Mission Control had ascertained the true peril the Apollo 13 crew faced following the explosion of an oxygen tank in the Command and Service Module, they next faced a big decision. What was the best way to get the astronauts back to Earth? Do they get them home as fast as possible, or as safely as possible? The final decision they made likely saved Apollo 13.
“Immediately after the explosion, some recommended a faster return using the powerful service propulsion system (SPS), the engine designed for the retro burn into lunar orbit and the subsequent firing to propel the crew homeward to Earth,” said NASA Engineer Jerry Woodfill.
Using these engines to execute a direct abort burn would allow the crew to turn the spacecraft around, come around the front side of the Moon and be back to Earth within a day and a half. This was the quickest option, but it meant using the SPS, which were very near the area that had exploded on the CSM. No one knew if the engine had been damaged, too.
Vital stores of oxygen, water, propellant, and power were lost when the side of the service module blew off. The astronauts quickly moved into the lunar module which had been provided with independent supplies of these space necessities for the landing on the Moon. Years before, Apollo engineers had talked of using the lunar module as a lifeboat. Credit: NASA
The risk of using using the lunar module’s descent engine was an unknown. If it failed or blew, or if the burn wasn’t executed perfectly, the crew could impact the Moon.
The other option was to go completely around the Moon on a so called free-return trajectory, which would take between four to five days to get back to Earth. But would the crew have enough consumables to survive that long?
This flight plan, too, called for an engine burn to set the spacecraft on the correct path back to Earth. But should they use the SPS engine, which was designed for this maneuver but could be damaged, or use the use the descent engine on the Lunar Module, which had never been designed for this type of use?
In his book, “Failure is Not an Option,” Kranz said it was purely a gut feeling that made him choose to take the long way – to go around the Moon and use the descent engine on the lunar lander rather than the CSM.
“Later, Gene Kranz shared he felt a foreboding about using that engine,” said Woodfill. “Nevertheless, even the use of the lander’s descent engine had some risk. The system was not expected to be fired more than once on a lunar mission. It was designed for descent from lunar orbit to landing. To use it for both Apollo 13’s mid-course correction burn (to return to the free-return trajectory) and a subsequent firing to accelerate the journey home amounted to a second firing.”
With the first burn of the LM engines working as hoped, the crew swung around the far side of the Moon (some records indicate Apollo 13 traveled the farthest distance from the far side of the Moon, making them the crew that traveled the farthest away from Earth), Mission Control considered a second burn.
Without the second burn the ship’s trajectory likely would have successfully returned the crew to Earth approximately 153 hours after launch. This provided less than an hour of consumables to spare, a margin too close for comfort.
After a much discussion and calculating, the engineers in the Mission Evaluation Room (MER) and Mission Control determined the LM’s engines could handle the required burn. So, the descent engine was fired sufficiently to boost their speed up another 860 feet per second, cutting the flight time to 143 hours – which provided a better margin for survival.
Damage to the Apollo 13 spacecraft from the oxygen tank explosion. Woodfill noted the missing four Hi-Gain Antenna “horns” severed by the panel and shrapnel from the explosion. Credit: NASA
But what if the SPS engines had been fired? We will never know for sure, but Woodfill said the final photo taken of the damaged command ship after jettison from the reentry capsule appeared to show a slight deformation of the SPS engine nozzle. He believes the SPS panel adjacent to the exploding O2 tank severed the four horns from the mast of the hi-gain communication antenna system. Likely, the shrapnel from the devastating impact with those four dishes ricocheted into the SPS engine bell compromising its use. A hole in the engine’s thrust nozzle would have been catastrophic.
“The fiery bazooka-like blast of the explosion might have cracked the heat shield and damaged critical parts of that engine,” said Woodfill. “The engine’s systems were adjacent to the tunnel-like chimney located in the center of the service module. If the nozzle was deformed, surely, there would have been a potentially fatal consequence of its firing, akin to the loss of the Challenger resulting from the failed solid rocket (SRB) engine.”
Woodfill said that likely, the use of the SPS would have triggered the caution and warning combustion chamber high temperature alarm. “And its use might have made Apollo 13 a fiery meteor-like streak of light never to reach Earth,” he said. “Though a successful firing would have landed the crew days earlier in the Indian Ocean, the peril was too great.”
Tomorrow, Part 5: Unexplained Shutdown of the Saturn V engine
Other articles from the “13 Things That Saved Apollo 13” series:
Falcon 9/Dragon configured for cargo delivery to the ISS. Credit: SpaceX
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The Commercial Spaceflight Federations says that an independent study reveals the new NASA Commercial Crew and Cargo Program funding proposed in the space agency’s FY2011 Budget Request will result in an average of 11,800 direct jobs per year over the next five years, nationwide. “The Tauri Group’s analysis indicates a peak of 14,200 direct jobs in FY2012″ said Brett Alexander, Commercial Spaceflight Federation President, “will result from the design and development of capsules to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station, ‘human rating’ of rockets, upgrades to launch infrastructure at Cape Canaveral, launch vehicle manufacturing, and demonstration launches during the development phase.”
The Tauri Group estimates that from NASA’s proposed spending of $5.8 billion on Commercial Crew and an additional $312 million on Commercial Cargo from FY2011 to FY2015 will create the jobs .
The study used a government economic impact model developed by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and provides average job figures resulting from the assessment of over 50 possible program competition outcomes. The job figures considered only the proposed new NASA funding of $6.1 billion under the Commercial Crew and Commercial Cargo budget lines, so the job figures do not include additional private investment above the NASA funding.
Additionally, jobs created by operational flights of commercial crew vehicles following their development were not included in this study, nor were activities funded under the existing Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program funding of $500 million and the follow-on operational cargo flights to the International Space Station under the $3.5 billion Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program. Indirect and induced jobs in the communities surrounding these activities were also not included, with only direct jobs being counted.
The Tauri Group study results can be downloaded from the Tauri Group website.
The Global Hawk is a robotic plane that can fly autonomously to study Earth’s atmosphere, and can get to the area called the “Ignorosphere” that previously hasn’t been studied very well. The plane is carrying 11 instruments, and recently made its first science flight over the Pacific Ocean. “The Global Hawk is a fantastic platform because it gives us expanded access to the atmosphere beyond what we have with piloted aircraft,” said David Fahey, co-mission scientist and a research physicist at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. “We can go to regions we couldn’t reach or go to previously explored regions and study them for extended periods that are impossible with conventional planes.” Continue reading “Unmanned Robo-Plane Makes First Science Observations”
And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to [email protected], and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out, let Fraser know if you can be a host, and he’ll schedule you into the calendar.
Finally, if you run a space-related blog, please post a link to the Carnival of Space. Help us get the word out.
Comet McNaught viewed over the Pacific in 2007. Credit: Sebastian Deiries/ESO.
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There are different ways to measure a comet. The Hale Bopp Comet, for example has a nucleus of more than 60 miles in diameter, which is thought to be the biggest ever encountered, so far. And Comet Hyakutake’s tail stretched out at a distance of more than 500 million km from the nucleus, the largest known. But now a group of scientists have identified a new category of measuring a comet’s size: the region of space disturbed by the comet’s presence. And for this class, first prize goes to Comet C/2006 P1 McNaught, which graced our skies in Janauary and February 2007. Of course, McNaught might win the prize for most picturesque comet, too, as this stunning image from Sebastian Deiries of ESO shows.
Dr. Geraint Jones of University College, London and his team used 2007 data from the now-inoperable Ulysses spacecraft, which was able to gauge the size of the region of space disturbed by the comet’s presence.
Ulysses encountered McNaught’s tail of ionized gas at a distance downstream of the comet’s nucleus more than 225 million kilometers. This is far beyond the spectacular dust tail that was visible from Earth in 2007.
“It was very difficult to observe Comet McNaught’s plasma tail remotely in comparison with the bright dust tail,” said Jones, “so we can’t really estimate how long it might be. What we can say is that Ulysses took just 2.5 days to traverse the shocked solar wind surrounding Comet Hyakutake, compared to an incredible 18 days in shocked wind surrounding Comet McNaught. This shows that the comet was not only spectacular from the ground; it was a truly immense obstacle to the solar wind.”
A comparison with crossing times for other comet encounters demonstrates the huge scale of Comet McNaught. The Giotto spacecraft’s encounter with Comet Grigg-Skjellerup in 1992 took less than an hour from one shock crossing to another; to cross the shocked region at Comet Halley took a few hours.
“The scale of an active comet depends on the level of outgassing rather than the size of the nucleus,” said Jones. “Comet nuclei aren’t necessarily active over their entire surfaces; what we can say is that McNaught’s level of gas production was clearly much higher than that of Hyakutake.”
Jones presented his findings at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in Glasgow, Scotland.
This SOHO image shows a huge CME on 4/13/2010. Credit: NASA/ESA/SOHO
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The Sun erupted with one of the biggest prominences in years. This shot from the SOHO spacecraft on April 13, 2010 at 13:13 UT shows a Coronal Mass Ejection from the Sun’s northeastern limb. The massive plasma-filled structure rose up and burst during a ~2 hour period around 0900 UT. Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society blog pointed out that you can watch a movie of the event by going to the “SOHO movie theater” . Just select “LASCO C2” from the “Image Type” menu, then click “Search.” As Emily explained, the movie viewer will automatically grab all the LASCO C2 images from the previous 24 hours and animate them for you. So, if you want to watch the eruption from April 13, and it is a few days later, just put in “2010-04-13” as the start date.
Images of the eruption can also be found at SpaceWeather.com, and Richard Bailey at the Society for Popular Astronomy captured this shot of a detached prominence from the eruption, taken at 9:56 UT.
And there’s more!
The SOHO folks put together a “Pick of the Week” movie from the past week of solar activity, and the STEREO spacecraft captured a nice profile view of spiraling corona loops above an active region after it had just popped off a coronal mass ejection (CME) on April 3, 2010. According to the SOHO website, “Faint clouds of material from the CME can be seen billowing into space at more than a million miles per hour. Right afterwards, magnetic forces trying to reorganize themselves generate a series of white arcs visible in extreme UV light. We are observing not the magnetic fields themselves, but electrically charged atoms spiraling along the field lines. The video clip covers one day of activity.”
A gallery of six exoplanets that have retrograde orbits (artist concepts). ESO/A. C. Cameron
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Not all exoplanets are created equal, and new discoveries about the orbits of newly found extra solar planets could challenge the current theories of planet formation. The discoveries also suggest that systems with exoplanets of the type known as hot Jupiters are unlikely to contain Earth-like planets. “This is a real bomb we are dropping into the field of exoplanets,” said Amaury Triaud, a PhD student at the Geneva Observatory who led an observational campaign from several observatories.
Six exoplanets out of twenty-seven were found to be orbiting in the opposite direction to the rotation of their host star — the exact reverse of what is seen in our own Solar System. The team announced the discovery of nine new planets orbiting other stars, and combined their results with earlier observations. Besides the surprising abundance of retrograde orbits, the astronomers also found that more than half of all the so-called “hot Jupiters” in their survey have orbits that are misaligned with the rotation axis of their parent stars.
Hot Jupiters are planets orbiting other stars that have masses similar to or greater than Jupiter, but which orbit their parent stars much more closely.
Planets are thought to form in the disc of gas and dust encircling a young star, and since this proto-planetary disc rotates in the same direction as the star itself, it was expected that planets that form from the disc would all orbit in more or less the same plane, and that they would move along their orbits in the same direction as the star’s rotation.
“The new results really challenge the conventional wisdom that planets should always orbit in the same direction as their stars spin,” said Andrew Cameron of the University of St Andrews, who presented the new results at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM2010) in Glasgow, Scotland this week. Artist’s impression of an exoplanet in a retrograde orbit. Credit: ESO
At this writing, 454 planets have been found orbiting other stars, and in the 15 years since the first hot Jupiters were discovered, astronomers have been puzzled by their origin. The cores of giant planets are thought to form from a mix of rock and ice particles found only in the cold outer reaches of planetary systems. Hot Jupiters must therefore form far from their star and subsequently migrate inwards to orbits much closer to the parent star. Many astronomers believed this was due to gravitational interactions with the disc of dust from which they formed. This scenario takes place over a few million years and results in an orbit aligned with the rotation axis of the parent star. It would also allow Earth-like rocky planets to form subsequently, but unfortunately it cannot account for the new observations.
To account for the new retrograde exoplanets an alternative migration theory suggests that the proximity of hot Jupiters to their stars is not due to interactions with the dust disc at all, but to a slower evolution process involving a gravitational tug-of-war with more distant planetary or stellar companions over hundreds of millions of years. After these disturbances have bounced a giant exoplanet into a tilted and elongated orbit it would suffer tidal friction, losing energy every time it swung close to the star. It would eventually become parked in a near circular, but randomly tilted, orbit close to the star. “A dramatic side-effect of this process is that it would wipe out any other smaller Earth-like planet in these systems,” says Didier Queloz of Geneva Observatory.
The observatories for this survey included the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP), the HARPS spectrograph on the 3.6-metre ESO telescope at the La Silla observatory in Chile, and the Swiss Euler telescope, also at La Silla. Data from other telescopes to confirm the discoveries.
