Following a flight test readiness review, NASA has given the ‘all systems go’ for the Ares I-X maiden test flight on Tuesday, Oct. 27, at 8 a.m. EDT from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “I am proud of the work this team has done to ready this test rocket for launch,” said Doug Cooke, associate administrator for NASA Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. “This test will yield important data to support the nation’s next steps in exploration. There is no substitute for hard data – flight testing clarifies the distinction between imagined outcomes and real flight experience.”
This is the first time in more than 30 years that NASA has built a vehicle in a new configuration. The uncrewed test flight last two minutes, and go 45 kilometers (28 miles) in altitude. The stages will separate 69 km (43 miles) down range and end 236 km (147 miles) over the Atlantic Ocean, with the dummy upper stage landing in the ocean.
The flight will be broadcast on NASA TV. Watch it online here. In the meantime, here’s a pre-launch video to whet your appetite for a new rocket.
Need to know the answer to this week’s Where In The Universe Challenge? Find out back at the original post. And check back next week for another test of your visual knowledge of the cosmos!
[/caption]
We all have things that keep us up at night, as we try to solve the problems in our lives. But just think of the poor physicists: They are trying to solve the problems of the Universe! At a recent physics conference at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, a panel of scientists were asked what questions in physics kept them awake at night. Here are their answers:
Sean Carroll, Caltech
Why are the laws of physics the way they are?
Katherine Freese, University of Michigan
What is the universe made of?
Leo Kadanoff, University of Chicago
How does complexity develop in the universe?
Lawrence Krauss, Arizona State University
Have we come to the limits of our knowledge?
David Tong, Cambridge University
How will we ever know if string theory is correct?
Neil Turok, Director, Perimeter Institute
What happened at the singularity of the Big Bang?
Andrew White, University of Queensland
What is life?
Anton Zeilinger, University of Vienna
How far are we along the road of scientific discovery?
Gino Segrè from the University of Pennslyvania
He is concerned about the world not having enough young physicists to answer all those big questions that keep the rest of the panel awake.
Grimsby homeowner Yvonne Garchinski and Western Physics and Astronomy associate professor Peter Brown speak to national media where a 4.6-billion-year-old meterorite smashed the window of Garchinski's truck Sept. 25. The pair are wearing gloves to protect the meteorite.
Three golf ball-sized fragments have been found from a meteorite that created a brilliant fireball seen over Ontario, Canada on September 25, 2009. The first meteorite fragment recovered did some damage to the windshield of a Nissan Pathfinder, and now two other fragments have been found on nearby properties. The meteor made headlines initially because it was captured on video by Western’s Southern Ontario Meteor Network (SOMN) on seven of its ‘all-sky’ cameras. The brightness was estimated to be approximately 100 times brighter than a full moon.
Initially, the owners of the SUV didn’t realize the “unusual” rock they found on the hood of the vehicle was a meteorite and chalked up the shattered windshield to vandalism and filed a police report.
[/caption]
Tony Garchinski said heard a loud crash just after 9 p.m. the night of the meteor flyby he didn’t think much of it. That is, until he awoke the next morning to find the windshield of his mom’s truck with a huge crack in it.
It wasn’t until two weeks later that his mother, Yvonne Garchinski, heard media reports that researchers from Western were searching West Grimsby, Ontario for possible fragments of a freshly fallen meteorite. The Garchinskis realized who the real culprit was in the case of the broken windshield — or more specifically, what.
The ‘what’ was a 46-gram completely fusion-crusted (melted exterior) fragment of an ordinary chondrite meteorite. Chondrites are arguably the most important type of meteorite because they are the least processed of meteorites and provide a window into the material which formed the early solar system. The meteorite is estimated to be 4.6 billion years old.
Phil McCausland, a postdoctoral fellow at Western’s Centre for Planetary Science & Exploration said, “Having both the video and the sample is golden because we get the dynamic information and the orbital direction from the video, and by having recovered material on the ground, we can complete the picture. We can take a rock that we now have in hand and we can study it in the best laboratories in the world and we can put it back into its solar system context. We can put it back into where it came from.”
The Garchinski property is just 200 meters off the fall line of the meteorite the Western Meteor Physics Group calculated using data from its video, radar and sound detection systems and thanks in large part to this research – along with a lot of luck – two more meteorite fragments have been found.
The second meteorite was found by the Western team not far from the Garchinski home but the land owner wishes to remain anonymous. The third fragment was found Oct. 18 by professional meteorite hunter Mike Farmer (www.meteoriteguy.com) on the side of a road in West Grimsby.
The Western-led search continues and both Brown and McCausland believe more fragments will be found.
Potential destinations for the U.S. human spaceflight program. Source: Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee
[/caption]
The Augustine Commission released their final report today, and while they didn’t offer specific recommendations for NASA’s human space flight program, they laid out five possible options, highlighting a flexible plan that allows for several destinations out of low Earth orbit. The report also encouraged commercial space ventures to handle trips to the International Space Station. “The different options speak for themselves,” said head of the commission, Norman Augustine at a press briefing today following the release of the report. “We believe Mars is clear goal of the human spaceflight program, but for safety reason we ruled out going directly there. We’ve offered programs that are alternatives for building a heavy lift launch capability, as we believe that to be extremely important for the human space program, and we believe this is the time to create a commercial market to transport humans to Earth orbit.”
But the strongest point the committee made is that NASA needs additional funds of $3 billion a year in order to accomplish much of anything.
“The premier conclusion of the committee is that the human spaceflight program is on a unsustainable trajectory,” Augustine said. “We say that because of a mismatch of the scope of the program and the funds available.”
In the report, the committee said either additional funds need to be made available or a far more modest program involving little or no exploration needs to be adopted. NASA Appropriation History in Real Year and Constant Year 2009 Dollars. Source: OMB Historical Budget Tables
Meanwhile, the White House said today that President Obama is committed to human space explorations and wants the US to have a vigorous & sustainable program, but offered no specifics on how the administration might proceed following the release of the report. NASA administrator Charlie Bolden said he would be meeting with the president in November.
The consensus of the committee was that NASA should conduct a human space flight program somewhat different than the current path of returning to the Moon. The “flexible” plan would allow for reaching exciting and different destinations sooner than landing on the Moon.
“There are a lot of things we could do along the way to build up to a Mars program,” Augustine said, “such as a circumlunar program, circle Mars, land on an asteroid, land on Phobos or Deimos and do some exciting science from there. We could do those things rather than wait 15 years for the first major event.”
Another committee member Ed Crawley added, “What causes flexible path to make sense is that you can build some of the overall system, the booster and capsule and then you can start going places, like flying around the moon, then to a near Earth object. And it would be less energetically intensive to do a flyby of Mars than to land on the surface of the Moon. You could build the heavy booster and a capsule, and start exploring, and then later build the landers.”
Crawley compared the options to saving longer to buy a big camper or saving for a short period of time to buy a station wagon and then later purchasing a camper to hook onto the car.
When asked for a timetable, Crawley and Augustine said it was likely NASA could leave LEO in the early 2020’s. “Early- to mid- 2020’s without pinning down an exact year, which would be several years earlier than we would get to the moon,” Crawley said.
The report suggested extending the space shuttle program until 2011, instead of the current goal of retiring the program in 2010. “The flight rate to 2010 is roughly double that of what has been demonstrated since the loss of Columbia,” Augustine said. “We believe it would be prudent to put funds in 2011 to fly a better, realistic schedule. NASA has no money in the current budge to do that, we believe it should.”
As for the Ares program, the panel did not call it an engineering failure but rather a victim of smaller-than-expected budgets and changing circumstances. “With time and sufficient funds, NASA could develop, build and fly the Ares I successfully,” the report said. “The question is, should it?”
They said the Ares I-X test flight next week should go ahead as scheduled, because there still would be much to learn from the demonstration. But because of the slipping dates of when the spacecraft would be ready, it would likely be too late for one of its primary tasks, ferrying astronauts to and from the space station. The panel said a better option for low-Earth orbit transport would be private commercial space companies. Augustine said NASA should focus on going beyond low Earth orbit rather than having a trucking service to LEO.
The panel also discussed heavy-lift rocket based on rockets currently used by the Air Force to lift satellites or one based more closely on the space shuttle design. (See our previous article on that subject.)
The committee also urged extending the life of the ISS to 2020. “The Committee finds that the return on investment from the ISS to both the United States and the international partners would be significantly enhanced by an extension of its life to 2020. It seems unwise to de-orbit the Station after 25 years of planning and assembly and only five years of operational life. A decision not to extend its operation would significantly impair the U.S. ability to develop and lead future international spaceflight partnerships. Further, the return on investment from the ISS would be significantly increased if it were funded at a level allowing it to achieve its full potential.”
In a nutshell, here are the 5 alternatives the committee came up with
1. Maintain all programs as is, but extend the space shuttle program to 2011 and ISS to 2020. Without extra funding, the Ares rockets wouldn’t be ready until 2020 and there would never be enough money to go to the Moon.
2. Maintain current funding, scrap Ares I, develop an Ares V lite version (about 2/3 of Ares V heavy) and divert extra funds to ISS for extension to 2020. Buy commercial LEO human space flight. The Ares might be ready by 2025, and perhaps get to the Moon after 2030.
3. Add $3 billion per year and proceed with the Constellation program to return to the Moon. The ISS would have to be de-orbited in 2016 to allow a return to the Moon by about 2025.
4. Add $3 billion per year. Extend the ISS to 2020 and get to the Moon by about 2025. Use either Ares V Lite, or Shuttle-C for heavy lift.
5. Add $3 billion per year. Extend the shuttle program to 2011 and extend ISS to 2020. Instead of heading to land on the Moon, orbit the Moon, or go to Near Earth Objects and prepare to go to Mars. Use either Ares V Lite; a heavy Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles (EELV) or, a shuttle-derivative.
A summary of the Integrated Options evaluated by the Committee. Source: Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee
Watch Norman Augustine’s opening remarks from the press conference today:
Missions to Mars poster. Click for larger version.
If you enjoyed the zoomable poster of 50 year of space exploration, you’ll probably also like this new poster of Mars missions. It’s basically a bar graph, with missions to Mars as listed chronologically, and the mission result is coded by how close the corresponding bar reaches to Mars. The poster also lists a few of the upcoming missions as well. Cool!
JKC041 galaxy cluster. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF/S.Andreon et al Optical: DSS; ESO/VLT
[/caption]
A galaxy cluster located about 10.2 billion light years from Earth has been discovered by combining data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory with optical and infrared telescopes. The cluster, JKCS041, is the most distant galaxy cluster yet observed, and we see it as when the Universe was only about a quarter of its present age. The cluster’s distance beats the previous record holder by about a billion light years.
Galaxy clusters are the largest gravitationally bound objects in the Universe. Finding such a large structure at this very early epoch can reveal important information about how the Universe evolved at this crucial stage.
JKCS041 is at the brink of when scientists think galaxy clusters can exist in the early Universe based on how long it should take for them to assemble. Therefore, studying its characteristics – such as composition, mass, and temperature – will reveal more about how the Universe took shape.
“This object is close to the distance limit expected for a galaxy cluster,” said Stefano Andreon of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Milan, Italy. “We don’t think gravity can work fast enough to make galaxy clusters much earlier.”
JKCS041 was originally detected in 2006 in a survey from the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT). The distance to the cluster was then determined from optical and infrared observations from UKIRT, the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope in Hawaii and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Infrared observations are important because the optical light from the galaxies at large distances is shifted into infrared wavelengths because of the expansion of the universe.
The Chandra data were the final – but crucial – piece of evidence as they showed that JKCS041 was, indeed, a genuine galaxy cluster. The extended X-ray emission seen by Chandra shows that hot gas has been detected between the galaxies, as expected for a true galaxy cluster rather than one that has been caught in the act of forming.
Also, without the X-ray observations, the possibility remained that this object could have been a blend of different groups of galaxies along the line of sight, or a filament, a long stream of galaxies and gas, viewed front on. The mass and temperature of the hot gas detected estimated from the Chandra observations rule out both of those alternatives.
The extent and shape of the X-ray emission, along with the lack of a central radio source argue against the possibility that the X-ray emission is caused by scattering of cosmic microwave background light by particles emitting radio waves.
It is not yet possible, with the detection of just one extremely distant galaxy cluster, to test cosmological models, but searches are underway to find other galaxy clusters at extreme distances.
“This discovery is exciting because it is like finding a Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil that is much older than any other known,” said co-author Ben Maughan, from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. “One fossil might just fit in with our understanding of dinosaurs, but if you found many more, you would have to start rethinking how dinosaurs evolved. The same is true for galaxy clusters and our understanding of cosmology.”
The previous record holder for a galaxy cluster was 9.2 billion light years away, XMMXCS J2215.9-1738, discovered by ESA’s XMM-Newton in 2006. This broke the previous distance record by only about 0.1 billion light years, while JKCS041 surpasses XMMXCS J2215.9 by about ten times that.
“What’s exciting about this discovery is the astrophysics that can be done with detailed follow-up studies,” said Andreon.
Among the questions scientists hope to address by further studying JKCS041 are: What is the build-up of elements (such as iron) like in such a young object? Are there signs that the cluster is still forming? Do the temperature and X-ray brightness of such a distant cluster relate to its mass in the same simple way as they do for nearby clusters?
Starting tomorrow (Oct. 22) professional and amateur astronomers around the world will be out in force to encourage as many people as possible to look through a telescope. The International Year of Astronomy 2009 Cornerstone project, Galilean Nights, will be a global experience, with more than 1000 public observing events in over 70 countries. If you participated in 100 Hours of Astronomy that took place in April 2009, this event is similar, but this time astronomers will be focusing on the objects that Galileo observed, especially with the Moon and Jupiter well-positioned in the evening sky.
Check out if there is an event near you at the Galilean Nights website. You can relive the revolutionary telescopic discoveries made 400 years ago by Galileo. There’s also an astrophotography competition that’s going on right now. There are two categories, “Earth and Sky” and “Beyond Earth,” and the last day to enter is October 27th.
Additionally, observatories are making their facilities available for remote observing sessions. Anyone with access to the internet will be able to control telescopes around the world by taking part in these sessions will be able to take photographs of astronomical objects from their own personal computers.
Galilean Nights is a truly global event, with hundreds of thousands of people discovering our Universe from all sorts of locations and settings around the world. Get involved, and experience your own Galileo moment!
It’s time once again for another Where In The Universe Challenge. Test your visual knowledge of the cosmos by naming where in the Universe this image was taken and give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for this picture. Post your guesses in the comments section, and check back later at this same post to find the answer. To make this challenge fun for everyone, please don’t include links or extensive explanations with your answer. Good luck!
UPDATE: The answer has been posted below.
This is a radar image of Venus, taken by the Magellan spacecraft. The radar is able to peer through the murky clouds on Venus to show the surface, so as SteveZodiac said, Venus does look a little naked in this image!
Magellan plunged into Venus’ atmosphere in 1994, never to be heard from again, but for more images and information about the mission, check out the Magellan website.
[/caption]
NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden has asked for an evaluation of alternative heavy lift rockets, including DIRECT’s Jupiter launch vehicle. The evaluation is a “top priority,” according to NASASpaceflight.com, and a special team from the Marshall Space Flight Center has been commissioned to conduct the study, with the directive to have a report ready by the end of November. Looking at alternatives to the Constellation program is an apparent reaction to the final Augustine Commission report, which will be made public on Thursday.
Shuttle Derived Heavy lift concept. Credit: NASASpaceflight.com
The other heavy lift vehicle also to be looked at is the Shuttle Derived Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle, which is a shuttle-based concept with a cargo carrier side mounted to the current design of the external tank. The concept is capable of launching 80mt (metric tons) into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and around 54mt to the moon.
However sources at NASASpaceflight.com note that the DIRECT team’s Jupiter launch system has dominated early discussions at the Special Team meetings.
Bolden also recently hinted that commercial space companies could play a crucial role in NASA’s future. “Some of the most exciting companies in America today go by the names of SpaceX, Blue Origin, Armadillo Aerospace, Virgin Galactic, Xcor, Bigelow Aerospace, Masten, Flag Suit, and Ad Astra,” Bolden said in a speech at the National Association of Investment Companies. “Today, we at NASA are devising ways to work with these companies and others who will come. I urge you, and all other investors, to take notice. Space may someday soon become the new thing in investing.”
