Shuttle Engine Tested for Return to Flight

Engineers at NASA’s Stennis Space Center (SSC) in Mississippi have successfully tested one of the engines that will carry the next Space Shuttle into orbit.

The test today was the first on a complete Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) that will be used on the Return to Flight mission. The engine will be shipped to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center for installation on the Space Shuttle Discovery. The Return to Flight mission, designated STS-114, will launch no earlier than next March and will go to the International Space Station.

The test began at about 4:59 p.m. EDT. It ran for 520 seconds, the length of time it takes a Space Shuttle to reach orbit. Initial indications are all test objectives were successfully met.

“It’s good to see hardware processing for Discovery moving forward at Stennis and other NASA centers,” said Michael Kostelnik, deputy associate administrator for International Space Station and Space Shuttle Programs. “Clearly, we’re making real progress in safely returning the Shuttle to flight and enabling the Vision for Space Exploration.”

“This Return to Flight test is a testimony to the hard work of the NASA and contractor team that developed and continues to improve the SSME’s capability to take humans to low Earth orbit safely,” said Miguel Rodriguez, director of the Propulsion Test Directorate at SSC. “It is a huge source of pride to the NASA and Boeing team to be part of this great program.”

Developed in the 1970s, the Space Shuttle Main Engine is the world’s most sophisticated reusable rocket engine. A Space Shuttle has three main engines. Each is 14 feet long, weighs about 7,000 pounds and is seven-and-a-half feet in diameter at the end of its nozzle. It generates almost 400,000 pounds of thrust.

Engineers conduct rigorous testing to verify an engine is ready to fly. The most modern versions of the SSME include a new high-pressure fuel turbopump that was first used in July 2001.

“The Space Shuttle Main Engine that flies today has gone through major upgrades and is safer, stronger and more reliable than the one that flew on the first Shuttle flight in 1981,” said Michael Rudolphi, Space Shuttle Propulsion Manager.

The Rocketdyne Propulsion and Power division of The Boeing Co. of Canoga Park, Calif., manufactures the Space Shuttle Main Engines. Pratt and Whitney, a United Technologies Company of West Palm Beach, Fla., builds the high-pressure turbopumps. The Space Shuttle Main Engine project is managed by the Space Shuttle Propulsion Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. SSC conducts engine tests.

For more information about NASA’s Return to Flight efforts, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/returntoflight

Original Source: NASA News Release

First View of Rhea

As the first artificial satellite in the Saturn system, Cassini returned images of its native siblings following a successful insertion into orbit, including this unmagnified view of Rhea (1528 kilometers, 950 miles across). Rhea is Saturn?s second largest moon, and like Dione, the Voyager spacecraft found one of its hemispheres to covered with bright, wispy streaks which may be water frost.

This view shows a heavily cratered surface, and thus it is most likely an ancient one. Many of the craters visible here have central peaks. Cassini soon will look for clues to help unlock the moon?s geologic history. The spacecraft is slated to fly by Rhea at a distance of only 500 kilometers (311 miles) on November 26, 2005.

The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on July 2, 2004, from a distance of about 990,000 kilometers (615,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of about 109 degrees. The image scale is 6 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Original Source: CICLOPS News Release

All Moved In, Now I Need a New Telescope

Well, we survived the trip and have moved into our new house on Vancouver Island. It was pretty easy on me, since we hired movers for the first time in 11 moves. The place is great, with a massive backyard, and lots of space. One of my neighbors informed me that we were moving into the cleanest house in the city. Apparently the former owners had a reputation for being… meticulous.

As I’d hoped, the skies are much much darker, so I’m thinking of getting a new telescope, but I need your help. What do you think I should get? If you love your telescope, let me know what you’ve got and a few paragraphs of why you like it. Take a photo of you and your telescope, if you dare. I’ll publish an article with a bunch of your photos and reviews, so everyone can take advantage of your recommendations.

Send me an email at [email protected].

Thanks!

Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today

Hawking Revises Black Hole Theory

Stephen Hawking has reconsidered his long-held opinion that black holes destroy information that goes into them. Originally he believed that when matter was added to a black hole, all aspects of the particles are stripped away, leaving only their mass and spin. Hawking has been thinking about the problem for 30 years, and now believes that the information is maintained. He has cryptically said that black holes only appear to form, but later open up and release information about what fell inside. He’s expected to explain more fully at an astrophysics conference this week.

Spitzer Finds Starburst Galaxies

A major breakthrough in pinpointing some of the most primordial and violently star forming galaxies in the Universe has been made by a joint collaboration of UK and US astronomers using the Spitzer Space Telescope to resolve primordial galaxies initially detected by the James Clerk Maxwell telescope [JCMT]. UK astronomers from the University of Kent, The Royal Observatory Edinburgh and the University of Oxford teamed up with American cosmologists to finally identify these elusive galaxies. The work will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Spitzer Special Issue in September 2004.

Back in 1995, the UK’s SCUBA camera (Sub-millimetre Common User Bolometer Array) on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, which detects light with wavelengths just under a millimetre, began finding fuzzy traces of very distant, primordial galaxies. Some of these are either too distant or too dusty to be seen even by the Hubble Space Telescope. But SCUBA’s images on their own, and those of other similar cameras, are not fine enough: within the fuzzy SCUBA detections are sometimes many galaxies. So astronomers have spent enormous effort following up these SCUBA galaxies on other telescopes, particularly radio telescopes, to answer the question: which one is the primordial galaxy, and which ones are in the foreground? But even with the most sensitive radio telescope images ever made, only around half the SCUBA galaxies can be pinpointed unambiguously. Even worse, the radio telescopes miss all of the most distant and most primordial of SCUBA’s galaxies.

UK and US astronomers teamed up to combine Spitzer’s sharp images with SCUBA’s ability to find primordial galaxies. The team were stunned to find all the SCUBA galaxies in Spitzers field of view detected in only ten minutes with Spitzer. These breakthrough observations, described as a watershed by the team, finally give astronomers a way of unambiguously pinpointing even the most distant of SCUBA’s galaxies. This could only be done by combining SCUBA with the Spitzer Space Telescope: SCUBA shows there is a primordial, violent starburst somewhere in the vicinity, which is then pinpointed by Spitzer.

At the same time, Spitzer solved another mystery about SCUBA galaxies. When Galileo first trained a telescope at the Milky Way, he was astonished to find the fuzzy light resolved into many individual stars. This is, in essence, what the team of astronomers have done with the diffuse extragalactic background light seen from all directions at a wavelength of about half a millimetre. By comparing the distinct Spitzer galaxies with the SCUBA data, the team discovered that they had identified the sources of this cosmic background for the first time. This background is caused by an important population of galaxies: most of the stars in the early Universe are created in these galaxies, and star formation is where everything comes from – including the material that makes planets like our own. Finding where this star formation happens tells us, in a sense, where we came from. Identifying most of these galaxies is a second coup for the joint UK/US team.

Dr. Stephen Serjeant (University of Kent, UK) said, Our Spitzer Space Telescope images picked our galaxies out astonishingly quickly, in only ten minutes, when the community has been pouring effort into detecting them. This really is pioneering work and a great triumph for the Spitzer Space Telescope and the UKs SCUBA camera. To cap it all, at the same time weve found the galaxies that dominate the star formation in the early Universe. The Earth and everything on it is made from the dust created in stars like those people, trees, beef burgers, the lot.

Dr. Rob Ivison (Royal Observatory Edinburgh, UK) said, In 10 minutes, the Spitzer Space Telescope has managed to pinpoint the galaxies we have been chasing for 7 years. We can finally begin to sort the babies and teenagers of the galaxy world from the adults and senior citizens.

Dr. Herv Dole (University of Arizona USA and IAS, Orsay, France) said, These Spitzer observations were designed as the first joint survey using the MIPS and IRAC instruments on Spitzer, to assess the instrument sensitivities. As a matter of fact, it’s a great technological, operational and scientific success, overwhelming our wildest expectations. This demonstrates the amazing capabilities of Spitzer for studying galaxy evolution at high redshifts; no doubt that deeper and larger ongoing surveys will give even more exciting results!

Dr. Steve Willner (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA) said, We expected to detect one or a few of these galaxies, but I was stunned that we detected all of the ones we looked at. The new data finally tell us what these galaxies are all about. We’ve known all along that they had to be far away and rapidly turning all their gas into stars, but now we know their true distances and ages.

Original Source: PPARC News Release

New Frontiers Missions Shortlisted

NASA today announced the selection of two proposals for detailed study as candidates for the next mission in the agency’s New Frontiers Program.

The proposals are missions that would drop robotic landers into a crater at the south pole of the moon and return samples to Earth, and a mission that would orbit Jupiter from pole to pole for the first time to conduct an in-depth study of the giant planet.

“These two outstanding proposals were judged to be the best science value among the seven submitted to NASA in 2004,” said Dr. Ed Weiler, associate administrator for space science at NASA Headquarters, Washington. “It was a very tough decision, but we’re excited at the prospect of the discoveries either of them could make in continuing our mission of exploration of the solar system, and what they could tell us about our place in the universe,” he added.

Each proposal will now receive up to $1.2 million to conduct a seven-month implementation feasibility study focused on cost, management and technical plans, including educational outreach and small business involvement.

Following detailed mission concept studies, due for submission by March 2005, NASA intends to select one of the mission proposals for full development as the second New Frontiers mission by May 2005. The selected New Frontiers science mission must be ready for launch no later than June 30, 2010, within a mission cost cap of $700 million.

The selected full mission investigations, and the Principal Investigators, are:

– “Moonrise: Lunar South Pole-Aitken Basin Sample Return Mission,” Dr. Michael Duke Principal Investigator, Colorado School of Mines, Boulder. This investigation proposes to land two identical landers on the surface near the moon’s south pole and to return over two kilograms (about five pounds) of lunar materials from a region of the moon’s surface believed to harbor materials from the moon’s mantle.

– “Juno,” Dr Scott Bolton, Principal Investigator, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. This investigation proposes to use a highly instrumented spacecraft placed in a polar orbit about the planet Jupiter to investigate the existence of an ice-rock core, determine the global water and ammonia abundances in Jupiter’s atmosphere, study convection and deep wind profiles in the atmosphere, investigate the origin of the jovian magnetic field, and explore the polar magnetosphere.

The two selected proposals were submitted to NASA in February 2004, in response to the New Frontiers Program 2003 and Missions of Opportunity Announcement of Opportunity.

The New Frontiers Program is designed to provide opportunities to conduct several of the medium-class missions identified as the top priority objectives in the Decadal Solar System Exploration Survey, conducted by the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council.

NASA’s New Horizons mission, which will fly by the Pluto-Charon system in 2014 and then target another Kuiper belt object, was designated the first New Frontiers mission.

Original Source: NASA News Release

Hotspot Found on Geminga

Astronomers using ESA?s X-ray observatory XMM-Newton have detected a small, bright ?hot spot? on the surface of the neutron star called Geminga, 500 light-years away. The hot spot is the size of a football field and is caused by the same mechanism producing Geminga?s X-ray tails. This discovery identifies the missing link between the X-ray and gamma-ray emission from Geminga.

Neutron stars are the smallest kind of stars known. They are the super-dense remnants of massive stars that died in cataclysmic explosions called supernovae. They have been thrown through space like cannonballs and set spinning at a furious rate, with magnetic fields hundreds of billions of times stronger than Earth?s.

In the case of Geminga, this cannonball contains one and a half times the mass of the Sun, squeezed into a sphere just 20 kilometres across and spinning four times every second.

A cloud bustling with electrically charged particles surrounds Geminga. These particles are shepherded by its magnetic and electric fields. ESA?s XMM-Newton observatory had already discovered that some of these particles are ejected into space, forming tails that stream behind the neutron star as it hurtles along.

Scientists did not know whether Geminga?s tails are formed by electrons or by their twin particles with an opposite electrical charge, called positrons. Nevertheless, they expected that, if for instance electrons are kicked into space, then the positrons should be funnelled down towards the neutron star itself, like in an ?own goal?. Where these particles strike the surface of the star, they ought to create a hot spot, a region considerably hotter than the surroundings.

An international team of astronomers, lead by Patrizia Caraveo, IASF-CNR, Italy, has now reported the detection of such a hot spot on Geminga using ESA?s XMM-Newton observatory.

With a temperature of about two million degrees, this hot spot is considerably hotter than the one half million degrees of the surrounding surface. According to this new work, Geminga?s hot spot is just 60 metres in radius.

“This hot spot is the size of a football field,” said Caraveo, “and is the smallest object ever detected outside of our Solar System.” Details of this size can presently be measured only on the Moon and Mars and, even then, only from a spacecraft in orbit around them.

The presence of a hot spot was suspected in the late 1990s but only now can we see it ?live?, emitting X-rays as Geminga rotates, thanks to the superior sensitivity of ESA?s X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton.

The team used the European Photon Imaging Cameras (EPIC) to conduct a study of Geminga, lasting about 28 consecutive hours and recording the arrival time and energy of every X-ray photon that Geminga emitted within XMM-Newton?s grasp.

“In total, this amounted to 76 850 X-ray counts ? twice as many as have been collected by all previous observations of Geminga, since the time of the Roman Empire,” said Caraveo.

Knowing the rotation rate of Geminga and the time of each photon?s arrival meant that astronomers could identify which photons were coming from each region of the neutron star as it rotates.

When they compared photons coming from different regions of the star, they found that the ?colour? of the X-rays, which corresponds to their energy, changed as Geminga rotated. In particular, they could clearly see a distinct colour change when the hot spot came into view and then disappeared behind the star.

This research closes the gap between the X-ray and gamma-ray emission from neutron stars. XMM-Newton has shown that they both can originate through the same physical mechanism, namely the acceleration of charged particles in the magnetosphere of these degenerate stars.

“XMM-Newton?s Geminga observation has been particularly fruitful,” said Norbert Schartel, ESA?s Project Scientist for XMM-Newton. “Last year, it yielded the discovery of the source tails and now it has found its rotating hot spot.”

Caraveo is already applying this new technique to other pulsating neutron stars observed by XMM-Newton looking for hot spots. This research represents an important new tool for understanding the physics of neutron stars.

Original Source: ESA News Release

Aura Finally Launches

Aura, a mission dedicated to the health of the Earth’s atmosphere, successfully launched today at 6:01:59 a.m. EDT (3:01:59 a.m. PDT) from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., aboard a Boeing Delta II rocket. Spacecraft separation occurred at 7:06 a.m. EDT (4:06 a.m. PDT), inserting Aura into a 438-mile (705-kilometer) orbit.

NASA’s latest Earth-observing satellite, Aura will help us understand and protect the air we breathe.

“This moment marks a tremendous achievement for the NASA family and our international partners. We look forward to the Aura satellite offering us historic insight into the tough issues of global air quality, ozone recovery and climate change,” said NASA Associate Administrator for Earth Science Dr. Ghassem Asrar. “This mission advances NASA’s exploration of Earth and will also better our understanding of our neighbors in the planetary system. Aura joins its siblings, Terra, Aqua and 10 more research satellites developed and launched by NASA during the past decade, to study our home planet,” he added.

Aura will help answer three key scientific questions: Is the Earth’s protective ozone layer recovering? What are the processes controlling air quality? How is the Earth’s climate changing? NASA expects early scientific data from Aura within 30-90 days.

Aura also will help scientists understand how the composition of the atmosphere affects and responds to Earth’s changing climate. The results from this mission will help scientists better understand the processes that connect local and global air quality.

Each of Aura’s four instruments is designed to survey different aspects of Earth’s atmosphere. Aura will survey the atmosphere from the troposphere, where mankind lives, through the stratosphere, where the ozone layer resides and protects life on Earth.

With the launch of Aura, the first series of NASA’s Earth Observing System satellites is complete. The other satellites are Terra, which monitors land, and Aqua, which observes Earth’s water cycle.

Aura’s four instruments are: the High Resolution Dynamics Limb Sounder (HIRDLS); the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS); the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI); and the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES). HIRDLS was built by the United Kingdom and the United States. OMI was built by the Netherlands and Finland in collaboration with NASA. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., constructed TES and MLS. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., manages the Aura mission.

“Many people have worked very hard to reach this point and the entire team is very excited,” said Aura Project Manager Rick Pickering of Goddard.

NASA’s Earth Science Enterprise is dedicated to understanding the Earth as an integrated system and applying Earth System Science to improve prediction of climate, weather and natural hazards using the unique vantage point of space.

For Aura information and images on the Internet, visit:

http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/2004/0517aura.html

and

http://www.nasa.gov/aura

Original Source: NASA News Release

Spirit’s Got a Bad Wheel

As winter approaches on Mars, NASA’s Opportunity rover continues to inch deeper into the stadium-sized crater dubbed “Endurance.” On the other side of the planet, the Spirit rover found an intriguing patch of rock outcrop while preparing to climb up the “Columbia Hills” backward. This unusual approach to driving is part of a creative plan to accommodate Spirit’s aging front wheel.

Spirit, with an odometer reading of over 3.5 kilometers (2.2 miles), has already traveled six times its designed capacity. Its right front wheel has been experiencing increased internal resistance, and recent efforts to mitigate the problem by redistributing the wheel’s lubricant through rest and heating have been only partially successful.

To cope with the condition, rover planners have devised a roundabout strategy. They will drive the rover backward on five wheels, rotating the sixth wheel only sparingly to ensure its availability for demanding terrain. “Driving may take us a little bit longer because it is like dragging an anchor,” said Joe Melko, a rover engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “However, this approach will allow us to continue doing science much longer than we ever thought possible.”

On Thursday, July 15, Spirit successfully drove 8 meters (26 feet) north along the base of the Columbia Hills backward, dragging its faulty wheel. The wheel was activated about 10 percent of the time to surmount obstacles and to pull the rover out of trenches dug by the immobile wheel.

Along the way, Spirit drove over what scientists had been hoping to find in the hills — a slab of rock outcrop that may represent some of the oldest rocks observed in the mission so far. Spirit will continue to drive north, where it likely will encounter more outcrop. Ultimately, the rover will drive east and hike up the hills backward using all six wheels.

“A few months ago, we weren’t sure if we’d make it to the hills, and now here we are preparing to drive up into them,” said Dr. Matt Golombek, a rover science-team member from JPL. “It’s very exciting.”

For the past month, the Spirit rover has been parked near several hematite-containing rocks, including “Pot of Gold,” conducting science studies and undergoing a long-distance “tuneup” for its right front wheel.

Driving with the wheel disabled means that corrections might have to be made to the rover’s steering if it veers off its planned path. This limits Spirit’s accuracy, but rover planners working at JPL’s rover test facility have come up with some creative commands that allow the rover to auto-correct itself to a limited degree.

As Spirit prepares to climb upward, Opportunity is rolling downward. Probing increasingly deep layers of bedrock lining the walls of Endurance Crater at Meridiani Planum, the rover has observed a puzzling increase in the amount of chlorine. Data from Opportunity’s alpha particle X-ray spectrometer show that chlorine is the only element that dramatically rises with deepening layers, leaving scientists to wonder how it got there. “We do not know yet which element is bound to the chlorine,” said Dr. Jutta Zipfel, a rover science-team member from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany.

Opportunity will roll down even farther into the crater in the next few days to see if this trend continues. It also will investigate a row of sharp, teeth-like features dubbed “Razorback,” which may have formed when fluid flowed through cracks, depositing hard minerals. Scientists hope the new data will help put together the pieces of Meridiani’s mysterious and watery past. “Razorback may tell us more about the history of water at Endurance Crater,” said Dr. Jack Farmer, a rover science-team member from Arizona State University, Tempe.

Rover planners are also preparing for the coming Martian winter, which peaks in mid-September. Dwindling daily sunshine means the rovers will have less solar power and take longer to recharge. Periods of rest and “deep sleep” will allow the rovers to keep working through the winter at lower activity levels. Orienting the rovers’ solar panels toward the north will also elevate power supplies. “The rovers might work a little bit more every day, or a little bit more every other day. We will see how things go and remain flexible,” said Jim Erickson, project manager for the Mars Exploration Rover mission at JPL.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington.

Images and additional information about the project are available on the Internet at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov and http://athena.cornell.edu

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release

Saturn’s Two-Faced Moon

The moon with the split personality, Iapetus, presents a puzzling appearance. One hemisphere of the moon is very dark, while the other is very bright. Whether the moon is being coated by foreign material, or being resurfaced by material from within is not yet known.

At 1436 kilometers (892 miles across), Iapetus is about 2.5 times smaller than our own Moon.

The brightness variations in this image are real. The face of Iapetus visible here was observed at a Sun-Iapetus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of about 10 degrees.

The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on July 3, 2004, from a distance of 3 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Iapetus. The image scale is 18 kilometers (11 miles) per pixel. The image was magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Original Source: CICLOPS News Release