What role will NASA play in the future of US manned space flight after the shuttle is retired at the height of its capability ?
[/caption]A few details have finally emerged about Presidents Obama’s short visit to the Kennedy Space Center on April 15 to discuss his new plans for NASA as part of his 2011 NASA Budget Request to Congress. Obama’s visit to KSC will begin at 1:30 PM and end at 3:45 PM, when he departs for a longer visit to a political fundraiser. Check this story from the Miami Herald about the fundraiser.
In February 2010 President Obama announced the complete termination of Project Constellation including the Ares 1 and Ares 5 booster rockets and the Orion Manned Capsule. Project Constellation was proposed by President Bush in 2004 with a new vision to return humans to the moon by 2020 and then Mars thereafter.
Instead, Obama proposes to rely on commercial providers to develop ‘space taxis’ to ferry US astronauts to low earth orbit and the International Space Station. No one can say with any certainty when these vehicles will be available.
President Obama has not announced any specific plans, targets, destinations or timelines for NASA to replace those cancelled as part of Constellation. There are no current plans to develop a Heavy Lift booster. there are only funds for technology development.
There has been harsh criticism of the Presidents new plans for NASA from both Democrats and Republicans who see a loss of US Leadership in Space. Even Sen. Bill Nelson (D) of Florida says “President Obama made a mistake [cancelling Constellation]. Because that is the perception. That he killed the space program.”
This visit was initially dubbed a “Space Summit” by the White House, but will now span barely 2 hours in length (including travel time between KSC venues) and apparently not involve significant interaction with or questions from the many thousands of space workers who are about to lose their jobs.
The format of the visit has also been changed from a sort of town hall meeting to a formal address by President Obama to a selected audience of about 200. His remarks will be followed by brief breakout sessions on a few space topics to implement the new directives given to NASA by the White House.
Here is a portion of the Statement from the White House dealing with the President’s Remarks:
THE WHITE HOUSE April 12, 2010
Office of Media Affairs MEDIA ADVISORY: M10-054
PRESIDENT OBAMA TO DELIVER REMARKS AT KENNEDY SPACE CENTER
WASHINGTON – On the afternoon of Thursday, April 15 President Barack Obama will visit Cape Canaveral, Florida and deliver remarks on the bold new course the Administration is charting for NASA and the future of U.S. leadership in human space flight.
Both the arrival and departure of Air Force One at the Shuttle Landing Facility and his remarks at the NASA Operations and Checkout Building are open to the media.
Air Force One Scheduled Arrival: 1:30 PM
Air Force One Scheduled Departure: 3:45 PM
President Obama Remarks at Kennedy Space Center
NASA Operations and Checkout Building
The opening session, including the President’s remarks, and the closing session of the conference are open to pre-credentialed media. The breakout sessions in between will be closed press and streamed at http://www.nasa.gov/ntv.
The original prime crew for Apollo 13 was Jim Lovell, Ken Mattingly and Fred Haise. Credit: NASA
[/caption] 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.
Just 72 hours before the scheduled launch of Apollo 13, Ken Mattingly was removed from the mission and replaced by Jack Swigert from the back-up crew as Command Module Pilot. Charlie Duke, also from the back-up crew caught the measles from one of his children, and exposed Mattingly — the only other member of either the prime or back-up crews who were not immune to the disease. If Mattingly were to come down with the measles, he might contract it while alone in the Command Module while Jim Lovell and Fred Haise were walking on the Moon.
“I think Charlie Duke’s measles contributed to the rescue,” said NASA engineer Jerry Woodfill, who has come up with “13 Things That Saved Apollo 13.” “This is one that probably everyone disagrees with me, but it seems like the astronauts on board were perfect to deal with what happened on the Apollo 13 mission.”
Woodfill says his conviction in no way denigrates the abilities of Ken Mattingly. “Ken was a wonderful crew member,” Woodfill said, “and he is a very detailed guy who helped with the rescue of Apollo 13 in a magnificent way. In the movie, Apollo 13, they capture the essence of how he is an ‘engineer’s engineer’.”
Astronaut Charlie Duke. Credit: NASA
Although, ironically Mattingly and Duke flew together later on the Apollo 16 mission, were it not for Charlie Duke’s measles, Woodfill said that Swigert’s special talents for an Apollo 13-type mission would not have been present.
Jack Swigert. Credit: NASA
First of all, his physique was better suited to the harsh conditions he experienced in the inoperable Command Module, where he was positioned for most of the flight. Woodfill said that likely, Swigert’s brawn as a former University of Colorado varsity football player better served him to withstand the cold conditions and endure the small amounts of water that the astronauts had to ration among themselves.
Water was one of the main consumables – even more than oxygen – of which the crew barely had enough.
“Mattingly and Haise had about the same build,” said Woodfill, “which was not as robust a build as Swigert and Lovell. Haise ended up with a urinary tract infection because of not getting enough water.”
But more importantly were Swigert’s familiarity with the Command Module and his “precise” personality. Screenshot from Apollo footage of Jim Lovell and Jack Swigert. Credit: NASA
“Among the nearly thirty Apollo astronauts, Jack Swigert had the best knowledge of Command Module malfunction procedures,” said Woodfill. “Some have said that Jack had practically written the malfunction procedures for the Command Module. So, he was the most conversant astronaut for any malfunction that occurred in the CSM.”
Swigert had to quickly and accurately write down the procedure to transfer the guidance parameters from the CSM computers to the Lunar module computers. And the procedure for the reentry of the crew to Earth’s atmosphere had to be re-written, with Mission Control calling up to the crew with hundreds of changes to the original plan. “The team on the ground had to recreate a checklist and a procedural ‘cookbook’ that would normally take three months to create, and they had to do it in just days. Jack had to be accurate when he wrote down these procedures. And the communication system wasn’t always the best – it was sometimes garbled or couldn’t be heard very well. While all the astronauts had to have orderly minds, Jack Swigert was a man of extreme order.”
Woodfill said an account from Swigert’s sister bears out that fact. She at one time asked her brother Jack to put away cans of frozen orange juice and lemon juice in her freezer. When she looked in her freezer later, all the lemon juice cans were lined up in orderly fashion, with the orange juice cans neatly lined up in an adjacent row. Later, she asked her brother why he had neatly lined all the lemon cans in a row then a row of orange juice cans, and according to Woodfill, Swigert answered, “Because “L” comes before “O” in the alphabet.”
“The truth is, Swigert was gifted with a respect for extreme order and precision, and he was onboard for just that reason,” said Woodfill. “Every one of the steps in the rescue checklist had to be ‘in the right order’.” Fred Haise, in 1966. Credit: NASA
And, equally important, said Woodfill, was the talent Haise brought to recording and rewriting operational procedures. “Fred had been a newspaper stringer for a small newspaper in Mississippi in his youth, taking notes and editing them for his local Mississippi paper’s stories. Utmost among reporters is accuracy in quoting sources. Those transmitted words from mission control had to be flawlessly transcribed if the crew was to survive, and Fred and Jack did an amazing job.
Remarkably, said Woodfill, each man’s talents specifically served the unique need. “Each man exhibited exceptional accuracy in adverse surroundings,” he said. “The lander was noisy, the audio sometimes fuzzy, movement unpredictable, temperatures cold, sleep scarce, and fatigue always present.”
Of course, those familiar with the Apollo 13 story know that Ken Mattingly never got the measles. But the role he played in getting the astronauts back home safely can’t be overestimated.
“Call it luck, call it circumstance,” said Woodfill, “but because of Charlie Duke’s measles the men on board Apollo 13 — and back on the ground — were perfect for the situation they encountered.”
Other articles from the “13 Things That Saved Apollo 13” series:
Infrared image of the Rosette molecular cloud by the Herschel space observatory. Credits: ESA/PACS & SPIRE Consortium/HOBYS Key Programme Consortia
Wow, what a gorgeous new image from the Herschel telescope – and what makes this especially stunning is that we’ve never seen these stars before! And these stars in the Rosette Nebula are huge, as each one is up to ten times the mass of our Sun. “High-mass star-forming regions are rare and further away than low-mass ones,” said Frédérique Motte, from the Laboratoire AIM Paris-Saclay, France. “So astronomers have had to wait for a space telescope like Herschel to reveal them.” Continue reading “Herschel Spots Previously Unseen Stars in Rosette Nebula”
Today we tackle more thrilling mysteries of the Universe. And by tackle, we mean, acknowledge their puzzling existence. Some mysteries will be solved shortly, others will likely trouble astronomers for centuries to come. Join us for part 2.
Dark energy expansion of the Universe
The Astronomy Cast team has finished their podcasts on the mysteries of the Solar System and the Milky Way, it’s now time to move on to the biggest mysteries of all: The mysteries of the Universe. Let’s wonder about dark matter and dark energy, and the very nature of reality itself.
Well, this week’s one should be a tad easier, though you will still need to cudgel your brains a bit and do some lateral thinking (five minutes spent googling likely won’t be enough). But, as with all Universe Puzzles, this is a puzzle on a “Universal” topic – astronomy and astronomers; space, satellites, missions, and astronauts; planets, moons, telescopes, and so on.
Which is the odd one (or two!) out?
Crawford Hill, Dover Heights, Kootwijk, Richmond Park, Seeberg Hill, Wheaton.
UPDATE: Answer has been posted below.
Seeberg Hill is where the Gotha Observatory (Seeberg Observatory, Sternwarte Gotha or Seeberg-Sternwarte) was located; it was an optical observatory. All the others are, or were, sites of radio telescopes, or observatories: Crawford Hill, in New Jersey, is where the CMB (cosmic microwave background) was first detected; Dover Heights is the site of Australia’s first radio telescope/observatory; Kootwijk is the site of the Netherlands’ first radio observatory; Richmond Park, in London, is where Hey, Parsons, and Phillips, in 1946, detected the first discrete extra-galactic astronomical source (Cygnus A); and Wheaton, in Illinois, is the site of Grote Reber’s first radio telescope.
Wheaton would also be a good answer; Grote Reber built his first radio telescope on his own (all the others are the result of efforts by institutions).
For ‘two out’, several answers are possible. For example, Seeberg Hill and Crawford Hill (the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum is not, necessarily, the same as the radio).
[/caption] 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.
When the oxygen tank exploded on the Apollo 13 Command Module, the astronauts on board and everyone in Mission Control had no idea what the problem was. In his book, “Lost Moon,” Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell thought the “bang-whump-shudder” that shook the spacecraft could have been a rogue meteor hit on the lunar module, Aquarius. Quickly, he told Jack Swigert to “button up” or close the hatch between the Command Module Odyssey, and Aquarius, so that both spacecraft wouldn’t depressurize.
But the hatch wouldn’t close.
Apollo engineer Jerry Woodfill believes the balky hatch was one of the things that helped save the Apollo 13 crew. “They were trying to close off the only way they could save their lives,” he said.
In Mission Control and in the nearby Mission Evaluation Room, several engineers, including Woodfill, thought the only explanation for so many systems to go offline at once was an instrumentation problem. “Initially I thought there was something wrong with the alarm system or the instrumentation,” said Woodfill, who helped develop the alarm system for the Apollo spacecraft. “There was no way so many warning lights could illuminate at once. I was sure I would have some explaining to do about the system.”
Screenshot from Apollo 13 footage of Fred Haise floating through the hatch between Odyssey and Aquarius. Credit: NASA
At first, Lovell thought Fred Haise may have been playing a joke on the crew by actuating a relief valve that made a sort of popping noise – something he had done previously during the flight. But with the surprised look on Haise’s face, along with the noise and all the alarms going off, Lovell’s next thought was the hull had been compromised in Aquarius.
Like a submarine crew that closes hatches between compartments after being hit by a torpedo or depth charge, Lovell wanted to close the hatch into the Command Module so all the air didn’t rush out into the vacuum of space.
Swigert quickly tried three times to close the hatch, but couldn’t get it to lock down. Lovell tried twice, and again couldn’t get it to stay closed. But by that time, Lovell thought, if the hull had been compromised, both spacecraft surely would have already depressurized and no such thing was happening. So, the crew set the hatch aside and moved on to looking at the falling gauges on the oxygen tanks.
And shortly after that, Lovell looked out the window and saw a cloud of oxygen venting out into space.
Earlier in the flight, the Apollo 13 crew had opened the hatches between Odyssey and Aquarius, and actually was far ahead on their checklist of preparing to land on the Moon by turning on equipment in the lander.
Woodfill believes this was fortuitous, as was the hatch not closing, because saving time was of the essence in this situation.
“Some people say that doesn’t amount to much time,” Woodfill said, “but I say it did, because if they had closed and latched up the hatch, and then worked to find the real problem of what was wrong, then they would have to delay and quit working the problem to go remove the hatch, stow the hatch and go power up the lander.”
Why was time so important?
The fuel cells that created power for the Command Module were not working without the oxygen from the two tanks. “Tank 2, of course, was gone with the explosion,” said Woodfill,” and the plumbing on Tank 1 was severed, so the oxygen was bleeding off from that tank, as well. Without oxygen you can’t make the fuel cells work, and with both fuel cells gone they know they can’t land on the Moon. And then it became a question of whether they can live.”
But over in Aquarius, all the systems were working perfectly, and it didn’t take long for Mission Control and the crew to realize the lunar module could be used as a lifeboat.
Screenshot from Apollo 13 footage of Jim Lovell and Jack Swigert during the mission. Credit: NASA
However, all the guidance parameters which would help direct the ailing ship back to Earth were in Odyssey’s computers, and needed to be transferred over to Aquarius. Without power from the fuel cells, they needed to keep the Odyssey alive by using the reentry batteries as an emergency measure. These batteries were designed to be used during reentry when the crew returned to Earth, and were good for just a couple of hours during the time the crew would jettison the Service Module and reenter with only the tiny Command Module capsule.
“Those batteries are not ever supposed to be used until they got ready to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere,” said Woodfill. “If those batteries had been depleted, that would have been one of the worst things that could have happened. The crew worked as quickly as they could to transfer the guidance parameters, but any extra time or problem, and we could have been without those batteries. Those batteries were the only way the crew could have survived reentry. This is my take on it, but the time saved by not having to re-open the hatch helped those emergency batteries have just enough power in them so they could recharge them and reenter.”
It’s interesting when the hatch had to work correctly, when the lander was jettisoned for re-enty, it worked perfectly. But at the time of the explosion, it’s malfunctioning kept the pathway to survival into the LM open, saving time. Being able to get into the lunar lander quickly was what helped save the crew’s life.
Tommorow: Part 3: The measles
Additional articles from the “13 Things That Saved Apollo 13”
series: Introduction
Mitch's Star; full caption below (Credit: Keel/PSS/SARA)
[/caption]
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, ‘hmm… that’s funny…'” (Isaac Asimov)
A few short years ago, Zooite Hanny van Arkel discovered Hanny’s Voorwerp in an SDSS image of a galaxy (“What’s the blue stuff below? Anyone?”), and a new term entered astronomers’ lexicon (“voorwerpje”).
Very late last year, Zooite mitch too had a ‘that’s funny…’ moment, over a spectrum (yes, you read that right, a spectrum!).
Now neither Hanny nor mitch have PhDs in astronomy … Mitch's Mystery Star (SDSS, Galaxy Zoo)
But I digress; what, exactly, did mitch discover? Judge for yourself; here’s the spectrum of the star in question (it goes by the instantly recognizable name 587739406764540066): Spectrum of Mitch's Mysterious Star (SDSS)
“I asked a couple of white-dwarf aficionados, and neither recalls seeing any star with these features (nor does Jim Kaler, who wrote the book on stellar spectra),” Bill Keel, a Zooite Astronomer known as NGC3314 wrote, kicking off a flurry of forum posts, and a most interesting discussion!
“Can we rule out something along the line of sight, possibly a cold molecular cloud?” EigenState wrote; “If both stars are moving SE (towards the bottom left corner), could Mitch’s star (square) be affected by debris in the trail of the bright red star (triangle)? I am thinking of the trail left by Mira. So the spectrum would be white dwarf shining through cooled red star debris?” said Budgieye. NGC3314 continued “It can’t be like our current Oort Cloud since we don’t see local absorption from our own in front of lots of stars near the ecliptic plane. To show up this strongly, it would then have to be either much denser or physical much smaller. This just in – this may be the most extreme known example of a DZ white dwarf, which have surface metals. White dwarfs aren’t supposed to, because their intense surface gravity will generally sort atmospheric atoms by density, so this has been suggested (with some theoretical backing) to result from accretion either from circumstellar or interstellar material (so it could be at the star’s surface but representing material formerly in a surrounding disk). Watch this space…”
Then, two weeks after mitch’s discovery, Patrick Dufour, of the Université de Montréal, joined in “Hi everyone, I have known this objects for many years. I have done fits almost 5 years ago but just never took time to publish it. Will do it in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, enjoy this preliminary analysis… The abundances are very similar to G165-7, the magnetic DZ, but it’s a bit cooler (explaining the strength of the features).” Patrick, as you might have guessed from this, is an astronomer with specific expertise in white dwarfs; in fact the abstract to his PhD thesis begins with these words “The goal of this thesis is to accurately determine the atmospheric parameters of a large sample of cool helium-rich white dwarfs in order to improve our understanding of the spectral evolution of these objects. Specifically, we study stars showing traces of carbon (DQ spectral type) and metals (DZ spectral type) in their optical spectrum.”
Somehow yet another astronomer, Fergal Mullally heard about mitch’s mystery star and joined in too “Many other WDs with strong metal absorption lines are surrounded by a cloud of accretable material. This makes sense because the metals quickly sink below the surface (as mentioned by NGC3314). In some cases, metals are only visible for a few weeks before they are sink too deep to be seen. The disks are exciting, not only because they can be so young, but their composition suggests we might be looking at the remains of an asteroid belt (see http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.0198).” To which Patrick added “Mitch’s Mystery Star is a cool (~4000-5000 K) helium rich white dwarf with traces of metals (abundances similar to G165-7). The metals most probably originate from a tidally disrupted asteroid or minor planet that formed a disk around the star.”
So, mitch’s mystery star is just a rather weird kind of DZ star, and DZs are just unusual white dwarfs?
Yes … and no. “The asymmetrical line near 5000 is almost certainly MgH. As for the one at 6100, I am open to suggestion. I have never seen it anywhere else. For G165-7, the splitting is Zeeman. But the broadening is van der Waals by neutral helium. No splitting is observed in this star (and I took a really good spectra at MMT a few years ago to be sure).” Patrick again; so what is the mysterious asymmetrical line at 6100 Å?
Two more weeks passed, and a possible reason for Fergal’s interest emerges, in a post by NGC3314 “While we wait to see how Patrick’s new calculation shakes out, here’s an interesting new manuscript he was involved with, that points to likewise interesting things about the DZ stars. [] Wow. White-dwarf spectra as tombstones for planetary systems… wonder how the system stayed close enough to end up on the white-dwarf atmosphere all through the red-giant phases? The binary systems we can see look awfully far apart to have had helpful dynamical effects for this.” (in case you didn’t read up on Fergal, he’s very keen on exoplanets and ET). Curiouser and curiouser
Then, in February, a tweet: “At campus observatory, seeing whether we can measure orbital motion between Mitch’s star and its K-dwarf companion.” The tale is becoming curiouser and curiouser (exoplanets in binary star systems? If life had evolved on a planet in orbit around the star which later went red giant then white dwarf, could it have somehow survived and landed on a planet in orbit around the K-dwarf companion?)
I’ll let NGC3314 have the final word: “This furnishes one more example of how the wide interest in Galaxy Zoo allows things once unthinkable – during the SDSS, the whole analysis plan never conceived that every bright galaxy in the survey, and every one of the million or so spectra would actually be examined by a human being.”
Oh, and the Asimov quote seems to be an urban myth (if any reader knows when, and where, Asimov actually said, or wrote, those words …).
Source: Galaxy Zoo Forum thread Mitch’s Mystery Star
Full caption for image at the top of this article (Credit: Bill Keel): I had a look with the SARA 1m telescope in BVR filters last week, to check for obvious variability. Pending more exact measurements, it’s about as bright as it was in the SDSS images and the older Palomar plates. As SIMBAD shows, this is known as a star of fairly high proper motion (and that’s about all). You can see this when I register the original red-light Palomar photograph to the image from last week, a time span of almost 59 years. The attached picture compares red-light data from the original Palomar Schmidt sky survey in early 1951, the second-epoch Palomar survey around 1990, and SARA on Jan. 7, 2010. You can also see that the bright red star to the southeast has almost exactly the same (large) proper motion.
Artist concept of Methane-Ethane lakes on Titan (Credit: Copyright 2008 Karl Kofoed). Click for larger version.
[/caption]
Could there be life on Titan? If so, one astrobiologist says humans probably couldn’t be in the same room with a Titanian and live to tell about it. “Hollywood would have problems with these aliens” said Dr. William Bains. “Beam one onto the Starship Enterprise and it would boil and then burst into flames, and the fumes would kill everyone in range. Even a tiny whiff of its breath would smell unbelievably horrible. But I think it is all the more interesting for that reason. Wouldn’t it be sad if the most alien things we found in the galaxy were just like us, but blue and with tails?”
While giving an obvious nod to the recent movie “Avatar,” Bains’ research provides insight to the difficulties we might encounter – beyond cultural – if we ever meet up with alien life. There could be unintended harmful consequences for one species, or both.
Bains is working to find out just how extreme the chemistry of life can be. Life on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, represents one of the more bizarre scenarios being studied. While images sent back by the Cassini/Huygens mission might make Titan look Earth-like and maybe even inviting, it has a thick atmosphere of frozen, orange smog. At ten times our distance from the Sun, it is a frigid place, with a surface temperature of -180 degrees Celsius. Water is permanently frozen into ice and the only liquid available is liquid methane and ethane.
So instead of water based-life (like us), life on Titan would likely be based on methane.
“Life needs a liquid; even the driest desert plant on Earth needs water for its metabolism to work. So, if life were to exist on Titan, it must have blood based on liquid methane, not water. That means its whole chemistry is radically different. The molecules must be made of a wider variety of elements than we use, but put together in smaller molecules. It would also be much more chemically reactive,” said Bains.
Additionally, Bains said a metabolism running in liquid methane would have to be built of smaller molecules than terrestrial biochemistry.
“Terrestrial life uses about 700 molecules, but to find the right 700 there is reason to suppose that you need to be able to make 10 million or more,” Bains said. “The issue is not how many molecules you can make, but whether you can make the collection you need to assemble a metabolism.”
Bains said doing such assembling is like trying to find bits of wood in a lumber-yard to make a table.
“In theory you only need 5,” he said. “But you may have a lumber-yard full of offcuts and still not find exactly the right five that fit together. So you need the potential to make many more molecules than you actually need. Thus the 6-atom chemicals on Titan would have to include much more diverse bond types and probably more diverse elements, including sulphur and phosphorus in much more diverse and (to us) unstable forms, and other elements such as silicon.”
Energy is another factor that would affect the type of life that could evolve on Titan. With Sunlight a tenth of a percent as intense on Titan’s surface as on the surface of Earth, energy is likely to be in short supply.
“Rapid movement or growth needs a lot of energy, so slow-growing, lichen-like organisms are possible in theory, but velociraptors are pretty much ruled out,” said Bains.
Whatever life may be on Titan, at least we know there won’t be a Jurassic Park.
Bains, whose research is carried out through Rufus Scientific in Cambridge, UK, and MIT in the USA, is presenting his research at the National Astronomy Meeting in Glasgow, Scotland on April 13, 2010.
The PBS series “Nova” has produced a two-part special in honor of two remarkable anniversaries: the 20th anniversary of the launch of the most famous telescope in history, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the 400th anniversary of the publication of Galileo’s “Starry Messenger,” a book that started a revolution in our understanding of our place in the cosmos. Part 1 aired April 6, 2010 and if you’re like me and you missed it, you’ll be happy to know it is now available to watch online. Part 2 will air on April 13, 2010 and likely will be available online a few days later. You can watch a preview to whet your whistle above.
