Posted on by Fraser Cain

Time to Help Save Hubble

Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives relating to the extraordinary contributions resulting from the Hubble Space Telescope to scientific research and education, and to the need to reconsider future service missions to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Whereas discoveries from the Hubble Space Telescope have dominated space science news over the last 10 years;

Whereas the Hubble Space Telescope has provided proof of black holes, insights into the birth and death of stars, spectacular views of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9’s collision with Jupiter, the age of the Universe, and evidence that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating;

Whereas the inspiring scientific discoveries from the Hubble Space Telescope reach millions of students each year and have been important in encouraging students to study the sciences;

Whereas installation of new instruments in 1997 and 2002 improved Hubble’s observational capabilities by a factor of 10;

Whereas the 2000 National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey endorsed a plan to maintain the Hubble Space Telescope until 2010;

Whereas the Hubble Space Telescope has been the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s most scientifically productive mission, accounting for 35 percent of all National Aeronautics and Space Administration discoveries in the last 20 years;

Whereas the demand for research time on the Hubble Space Telescope in 2003 was approximately 8 times that available;

Whereas approximately $200,000,000 worth of instruments have largely been built, including scientific instruments that would provide significant improvements in Hubble’s scientific power and including replacement gyroscopes and batteries, which could keep the telescope in operation until 2011 or 2012 and make the Hubble Space Telescope’s final years its most scientifically capable and productive;

Whereas the distinguished panel that studied scientific priorities for ultraviolet and optical astronomy in 2003 considered the continued operation of the Hubble Space Telescope by means of the SM-4 servicing mission to be its highest priority; and

Whereas the American Astronomical Society, the largest professional scientific association for astronomers and astrophysicists, believes a panel of experts should review the decision to limit prematurely the lifespan of the Hubble Space Telescope: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the House of Representatives–

(1) recognizes the extraordinary contributions resulting from the Hubble Space Telescope to scientific research and education;

(2) strongly recommends that the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration appoint an independent panel of expert scientists and engineers inside and outside of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to examine all possible options for safely carrying out the planned servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope; and

(3) expresses its strong sentiment that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration should continue all planning, preparation, and astronaut training activities for the SM-4 servicing mission without interruption until the expert panel issues its report and until the National Aeronautics and Space Administration provides a timetable of compliance with recommendation R6.4-1 of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board report, which calls for `a fully autonomous capability for all missions to address the possibility that an International Space Station mission fails to achieve the correct orbit, fails to dock successfully, or is damaged during or after undocking’, since National Aeronautics and Space Administration compliance with the recommendation will allow both a Hubble servicing mission and missions to the International Space Station to be carried out safely.

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Learning How to Live Off the Land

Image credit: NASA
Sludge. That’s what most people think of when they envision the gray, powdery soil ? called regolith ? covering the airless surface of the Moon. Not Dr. Mike Duke. He sees gold.

Gold in the form of rocket propellant, power, and even breathable air ? all things that will be as valuable as gold to the first Moon-dwellers.

“As a young man, I wanted to go to the Moon,” says 68-year-old Duke, who was one of the first geologists to study samples from Moon rocks collected during the Apollo missions in the 1970s. I may be too old to make the trip when Americans return to the Moon, but the research I am leading will help the first lunar settlers take what’s there and make something practical.”

Duke is an expert in what space explorers call “in-situ resource utilization” or ISRU ? living off the land of an alien world. In 2003, he was named director of the Center for Commercial Applications of Combustion in Space Centers at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden ? one of NASA’s 15 Research Partnership. He joined the partnership center in 2000 and uses skills he honed during his 25-year career as a NASA geologist. In 1965, he was a candidate for NASA’s Scientist Astronaut Program, made the finals, but wasn’t selected to fly. He went on to help other space explorers, from 1976 until 1990 as the director of the Solar System Exploration Division and from 1990 to 1995 as the chief scientist for the Human Exploration Program ? both at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“We can’t take everything to the Moon or Mars with us,” Duke says. “Today, it would take about 100,000 dollars to get a couple pounds of material moved from Earth to the Moon. So making propellant on the Moon would make trips back to Earth or on to Mars less expensive.”

Before you can process the lunar soil and turn it into rocket propellant or other useful materials, you have to figure out a way to mine it. For four years, Duke and a team of graduate students have been working on a robotic excavator. They built a prototype that weighs around a hundred pounds and has a chassis similar to the NASA rovers ? Spirit and Opportunity ? on Mars now. An arm-like boom extends from the vehicle’s front end. It sports a wheel of buckets that scoop up soil. The dirt falls out of the buckets and into a conveyer system that takes it up the side of the boom. The arm moves from side to side and excavates a swath of dirt one and a half feet wide, the width of the excavator.

The current model can dig up several hundred pounds of dirt in an hour, but the team is working to increase the excavation rate. They also are designing a system to shoot the dirt from the excavator to a “lunar dump truck.” The truck would carry the soil to a processing facility to extract hydrogen ? a component of the fuel that powers the Space Shuttle and could fuel a lunar rocket.

Duke and his students also have completed a model that identifies lunar resources and their potential uses. The team even examined how a company could make money on the Moon, and came up with a scenario for a “space filling station” ? where in-space tugs would be loaded with lunar-made propellants and used to boost communications satellites to high orbits.

Why is Duke concerned with space business ventures? Collaborating with industry to explore the solar system is one of the goals of the Research Partnership Centers managed by the Space Partnership Development Program at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., for NASA’s Office of Biological and Physical Research, Washington.

“NASA’s Research Partnership Centers bring together industry, academia and government to advance exploration in space,” says Duke. “These collaborations are an effective way to create new technologies at lower costs.”

One of the aspects Duke most enjoys about his job is creating new opportunities for students to conduct original research that will help advance space exploration.

“I studied geology at Caltech because I loved California ‘s mountains and deserts,” recalls Duke, a Los Angeles native who earned his doctorate degree in 1963 from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “But the university was a hotbed for planetary science, and my professors inspired me to study the geology of meteorites and the Moon. I want my students to become the next generation of scientists and engineers who take America to the Moon and beyond.”

One recent project that students helped design was the water mist investigation, conducted in space to examine how to fight fire with a fog-like mist of water ? instead of large amounts of water that can damage computers and other equipment. The STS-107 Space Shuttle crew completed the experiment during their January 2003 flight.

Although the experiment equipment was lost in the Columbia accident, the team received data from video sent back to Earth during the mission. They are using the data to design a space fire extinguisher for contained environments such as spacecraft, space habitats and submarines.

For more information visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

Center for Commercial Applications of Combustion in Space

http://www.mines.edu/research/ccacs/

Office of Biological and Physical Research

http://spaceresearch.nasa.gov/

Space Partnership Development Program

http://www.spd.nasa.gov

Original Source: NASA News Release

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Chandra Sees Magnesium in an Exploded Star

Image credit: Chandra
The Chandra image of N49B, left, the remains of an exploded star, shows a cloud of multimillion-degree gas that has been expanding for about 10,000 years. A specially processed version of this image, right, reveals unexpectedly large concentrations of the element magnesium, shown in blue.

Magnesium, created deep inside the star and ejected in the supernova explosion, is usually associated with correspondingly high concentrations of oxygen. However, the Chandra data indicate that the amount of oxygen in N49B is not exceptional. This poses a puzzle as to how the excess magnesium was created, or, alternatively, how the excess oxygen has escaped detection.

The amount of magnesium in N49B is estimated to be about equal to the total mass of the Sun. Since the Sun contains only about 0.1 percent of magnesium by mass, the total mass of magnesium N49B is about a thousand times that in the Sun and its planets.

Magnesium, the eighth most abundant material in the Earth’s crust, is a mineral needed by every cell of our bodies. It helps maintain normal muscle and nerve function, keeps heart rhythm steady, and bones strong. It is also involved in energy metabolism and protein synthesis. Fortunately for us, and thanks to stars such as the one that produced N49B, there is an abundant supply of magnesium in the Universe.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program. ( NASA/CXC/Penn State/S. Park et al. )

Original Source: Chandra News Release

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Solving the Puzzle of Mars’ Spiral Icecaps

Image credit: UA
The spiral troughs of Mars’ polar ice caps have been called the most enigmatic landforms in the solar system. The deep canyons spiraling out from Red Planet?s North and South poles cover hundreds of miles. No other planet has such structures.

A new model of trough formation suggests that heating and cooling alone are sufficient to form the unusual patterns. Previous explanations had focused on alternate melting and refreezing cycles but also required wind or shifting ice caps.

“I applied specific parameters that were appropriate to Mars and out of that came spirals that were not just spirals, but spirals that had exactly the shape we see on Mars.” said Jon Pelletier, an assistant professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “They had the right spacing, they had the right curvature, they had the right relationship to one another.”

His report, “How do spiral troughs form on Mars?,” is published in the April issue of the journal Geology. One of his computer simulations of the troughs graces the cover.

How the icy canyons formed in a spiral has puzzled scientists since the pattern was first spotted by the Viking spacecraft in 1976.

Pelletier, a geomorphologist who studies landforms on Earth such as sand dunes and river channels, has a fondness for natural patterns that are regularly spaced.

Spirals fit the bill, and while perusing a book on mathematical patterns in biology, he was struck by the spiral shape formed by slime molds. He wondered whether the mathematical equation that described how the slime mold grew could also be applied to geological processes.

“There’s a recipe for getting spirals to form,” he said. So he tried it out, using information that described the situation on Mars.

Temperatures on Mars are below freezing most of the year. During very brief periods during the summer, temperatures on the polar ice caps get just high enough to let the ice melt a bit, Pelletier said.

He proposes that during that time, cracks or nicks in the ice’s surface that present a steep side toward the sun might melt a bit, deepening and widening the crack. Heat from the sun also diffuses through the ice.

Much as ice cubes evaporate inside a freezer, on Mars, the melting ice vaporizes rather than becoming liquid water.

The water vapor, when it hits the cold, shady side of the little canyon, condenses and refreezes. So the canyon expands and deepens because one side is heated occasionally while the other side always remains cold.

“The ambient temperatures on Mars are just right to create this form. And that’s not true anywhere else in the solar system,” he said. “The spirals are created because melting is focused in a particular place.”

Pelletier said the differential melting and refreezing is the key to the formation of Mars’ spiral troughs.

So he put mathematical descriptions of the heating and cooling cycles into the spiral-generating equation and ran computer simulations to predict what would occur over thousands of such cycles. He did not include wind or movement of polar ice caps in his model.

The computer made patterns that match what’s seen on Mars, even down to the imperfections in the spirals.

“The model I have predicts the spacing between these things, how they’re curved, and how they evolve over time to create spiral feature,” he said.

“A lot of planetary sciences is about making educated guesses about the imagery that we see. We can’t go there, we can’t do do field experiments,” he said. “The development of numerical models provides strong suggestions as to what’s essential to create the form that we see,” and allows scientists to test their assumptions, he said.

Original Source: UA News Release

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Greece and Luxembourg to Join the ESA

Image credit: ESA
In the course of its meeting in Kiruna (Sweden) on 24 and 25 March, the ESA Council approved the accession of Greece and Luxembourg to the ESA Convention.

The two countries are expected to become full members of the Agency by 1 December 2005, after their national approval procedures have been completed.

The Hellenic Republic officially applied to join ESA last October, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg in December. The ESA Council unanimously approved both applications.

Greece and Luxembourg were granted observer status to attend meetings of ESA?s Council and all its subordinate bodies, to enable them to familiarise themselves with the Agency?s procedures and working practices.

Original Source: ESA News Release

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Yangtze River From Space

Image credit: ESA
The coloured waters shown here in this 21 March Envisat Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) image have concluded a long journey across China.

They are surging into the East China Sea from the mouth of the Yangtze River, which at 6300 km long is the longest river in Asia and the third longest in the world.

Rising in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, the Yangtze River snakes through nine provinces and serves as a drain for 1.8 million square kilometres of territory. MERIS is designed to detect ocean colour, and clearly visible here is how the Yangtze’s heavy sediment plume discharges into and colours the waters along the Chinese coast. Its total sediment load is estimated at 680 million tonnes a year ? equivalent in weight to a hundred Great Pyramids.

Shanghai – China’s largest city – is located south of the Yangtze mouth and the 1000-km-long navigable stretch of the Yangtze west of it is a zone of major economic activity. The downside of recent growth has been a decrease in water quality that the Chinese government say it intends to combat. At the start of the month an accidental chemical spill into a tributary of the Yangtze temporarily deprived almost a million people of drinking water.

Original Source: ESA News Release

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Space Initiative Hearings Underway

If you’re interested in watching space history in the making, check out a live video stream of public hearings by the President’s Commission on Moon, Mars, and Beyond. The commission will be providing the President and NASA with recommendations about the new initiative to return to the Moon and eventually send humans to Mars. The hearings are happening over the course of Wednesday and Thursday from Georgia Tech, but you can watch a video feed through the Internet. Click here to visit the commission website, which has a link to the video feed. The committee is still taking suggestions from the public, so if you’ve got an opinion or suggestion, pass it along.

Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Opportunity Looks Back at its Crater

Image credit: NASA/JPL
This image is the first 360 degree view from the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity’s new position outside “Eagle Crater,” the small crater where the rover landed about two months ago. Scientists are busy analyzing Opportunity’s new view of the plains of Meridiani Planum. The plentiful ripples are a clear indication that wind is the primary geologic process currently in effect on the plains. The rover’s tracks can be seen leading away from Eagle Crater.

At the far left are two depressions – each about a meter (about 3.3 feet) across – that feature bright spots in their centers. One possibility is that the bright material is similar in composition to the rocks in Eagle Crater’s outcrop and the surrounding darker material is what’s referred to as “lag deposit,” or erosional remnants, which are much harder and more difficult to wear away. These twin dimples might be revealing pieces of a larger outcrop that lies beneath. The depression closest to Opportunity is whimsically referred to as “Homeplate” and the one behind it as “First Base.” The rover’s panoramic camera is set to take detailed images of the depressions today, on Opportunity’s 58th sol. The backshell and parachute that helped protect the rover and deliver it safely to the surface of Mars are also visible near the horizon, at the left of the image.

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Smart 1 Reaches its 250th Orbit

Image credit: ESA
ESA’s SMART-1 spacecraft has just made its 250th orbit, in good health and with all functions performing nominally.

Starting on 24 February 2004, operation of the electric propulsion system (‘ion engine’) was resumed. The engine is being turned on at the lowest point of every orbit for about 1.5 hours.

The spacecraft then entered a ‘season’ of long eclipses, due to the alignment of the Sun and Earth.

This was not necessarily a problem except that, due to a combination of factors (the position of the shadow of Earth, the inclination of spacecraft orbit and its orbital velocity), the spacecraft travelled at its slowest through a relatively large full shadow (umbra) region.

When the spacecraft is in the umbra it cannot receive light on its solar panels to produce power.

The eclipse season is now over, with the last eclipse on 21 March. The longest period of darkness was on 13 March, lasting for 2 hours and 15 minutes. This tested the power system and, in particular the batteries, to the limit but the spacecraft performed excellently.

ESA’s flight control team and the power specialists watched the spacecraft behaviour carefully during this period, but the power and the thermal control systems were able to cope with ‘long night’ without problem. Now SMART-1 can restart its journey to the Moon.

Original Source: ESA News Release

Posted on by Fraser Cain

X-43A is Ready for Testing

Image credit: NASA
NASA has set Saturday, March 27, for the flight of its experimental X-43A research vehicle. The unpiloted 12-foot-long vehicle, part aircraft and part spacecraft, will be dropped from the wing of a B-52 aircraft, boosted to nearly 100,000 feet by a booster rocket and released over the Pacific Ocean to briefly fly under its own power at seven times the speed of sound, almost 5,000 mph.

The flight is part of the Hyper-X program, a research effort designed to demonstrate alternate propulsion technologies for access to space and high-speed flight within the atmosphere. It will provide unique “first time” free flight data on hypersonic air-breathing engine technologies that have large potential pay-offs.

Hyper-X is inherently a high-risk program. No vehicle has ever flown at hypersonic speeds powered by an air-breathing scramjet engine. In addition, the rocket boost and subsequent separation from the rocket to get to the scramjet test condition have complex elements that must work properly for the mission to be successful.

The $250 million program began with conceptual design and scramjet engine wind tunnel work in 1996. In a scramjet (supersonic-combustion ramjet), the flow of air through the engine remains supersonic, or greater than the speed of sound, for optimum engine efficiency and vehicle speed. There are few or no moving parts, but achieving proper ignition and combustion in a matter of milliseconds proved to be an engineering challenge of the highest order. After a series of successful wind tunnel tests, however, NASA is ready to prove that air-breathing scramjets work in flight.

This will mark the first time a non-rocket, air-breathing scramjet engine has powered a vehicle in flight at hypersonic speeds, defined as speeds above Mach 5 or five times the speed of sound.

Researchers believe these technologies may someday offer more airplane-like operations and other benefits compared to traditional rocket systems. Rockets provide limited throttle control and must carry heavy tanks filled with liquid oxygen, necessary for combustion of fuel. An air-breathing engine, like that on the X-43A, scoops oxygen from the air as it flies. The weight savings could be used to increase payload capacity, increase range or reduce vehicle size for the same payload.

The X-43A will fly in the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division Sea Range over the Pacific Ocean off the coast of southern California.

After booster burnout, the 2,800-pound, wedge-shaped research vehicle will separate and fly on its own to perform a preprogrammed set of tasks. After an approximate ten second test firing of the engine, the X-43A will glide through the atmosphere conducting a series of aerodynamic maneuvers for up to six minutes on its way to splashdown.

This will be the second flight in the X-43A project. On June 2, 2001, the first X-43A vehicle was lost moments after release from the wing of the B-52. Following booster ignition, the combined booster and X-43A vehicle deviated from its flight path and was deliberately destroyed. Investigation into the mishap showed that there was no single contributing factor, but the root cause of the problem was identified as the control system of the booster.

For this flight, the B-52 will carry the booster with the attached X-43A to at least 40,000 feet before its release, versus the 24,000 feet of the first attempt. The booster will carry the X-43A research vehicle to approximately the same test conditions — altitude and speed — as planned for the first flight.

NASA’s Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va., and Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif., jointly conduct the Hyper-X program.

A video clip, images and additional information about the project are available on the Internet at:

http://www.nasa.gov/missions/research/x43-main.html

NASA Television will carry the flight and the post-flight news briefing live. NASA TV is available on AMC 9, TRANSPONDER 9C, 85 degrees west longitude, vertical polarization with a frequency of 3880 MHz and audio of 6.8 MHz.

Original Source: NASA News Release