All Things News

Ares 1-X Rocket Lifts Off (click for high-res)

Straight from Astronomy Picture of the Day: “Explanation: Last week, NASA test fired a new rocket. The Ares 1-X was the first non-shuttle rocket launched from Kennedy Space Center since the Saturn launched humans to Earth orbit and the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s. NASA is testing Ares as a prelude to replacing the aging space shuttle fleet. The tremendous thrust of the Ares 1-X can bring the massive rocket from a standing start to a vertical speed of over 100 kilometers per hour in under eight seconds. The test rocket launched last week was longer than a football field and covered with over 700 sensors to record data that will enable engineers to refine details of future Ares rockets. Pictured above, the Ares 1-X blasts into space while the top part of the rocket becomes engulfed in a shock collar of water droplets likely created by the sudden drop of air pressure.”

NASA's Curiosity Rover

Straight from NASA: “If you found your grandmother’s diary, tattered and dust covered, up in the attic, would you read it? Of course you would. Granny was a pistol! Brush off the dust, open up the little book, and foray into her lively and interesting past.

Dust cloaks some fascinating tales in other places, too. NASA scientists will soon brush the dust off some Martian rocks that are practically bursting their seams to give their lively account of the red planet’s past. The Mars Science Lab — aptly named “Curiosity” — is heading up there in 2011 to read the diary of Mars.

The small, car-sized rover will ramble about on the rocky surface, gizmos at full tilt, not only brushing dust off rocks but also vaporizing them with a laser beam, gathering samples to analyze on the spot, taking high resolution photographs, and more.

“Curiosity will be prospecting for organic molecules, the chemical building blocks of life,” says Joy Crisp of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We want to find out whether Mars’ environment was, or still is, capable of harboring life.”

“To answer the question ‘Is there life on Mars?’ the most reasonable and productive approach is to look for organic compounds, which could be from life past or present, or from meteorites,” explains Michael Meyer of NASA headquarters. “If you find anything, you know you’re in a region that could preserve evidence of life, if there was any. We have maps from our orbiters, but we don’t know which of the promising looking regions actually contains anything, much less the mother lode.”

“The rock record is of particular interest,” says Crisp. “It has a record from billions of years ago and can answer questions like ‘Where and for how long might Mars have been habitable?’ ‘Was it cold or warm there in the past?’ ‘Was the water there acidic or salty?’”

Curiosity will be the first red planet rover since Spirit and Opportunity. Though it would be hard to match the twins’ toughness, Curiosity will have a much greater range, more instruments, and a bigger, stronger robotic arm. It will be nuclear powered instead of solar, so there will be no worries about dust on solar panels causing energy supplies to plummet. It will have much more power, more consistently.

“Curiosity will even land in a new fashion,” says Crisp. “Spirit and Opportunity were sitting on top of a lander that hit on the surface and bounced, protected by airbags, before coming to rest and opening up. They then had to drive off the top of the lander. A descent stage called Sky Crane will gently lower Curiosity (no airbags needed) via cables, which will be cut once the rover’s wheels set down.

Meyer adds, “The most important difference is that Spirit and Opportunity aren’t analytical labs – they are more for observing. This newest rover will be performing a more comprehensive study of the Martian environment.”

Remote sensing instruments located on Curiosity’s mast will scout around for promising targets and perform some long-distance analysis before the vehicle moves in for a closer look.

“Curiosity will have a laser on its mast that can take aim at a rock and vaporize a small spot on it,” says Crisp. “This produces a plasma cloud that tells us about that rock’s chemistry. We’ll look at the light reflected off the cloud to characterize rocks and soils from up to 9 meters away. We’ll be able to classify minerals, ices, and organic molecules without having to drive as much.”

The mast also sports a high-resolution camera called, naturally, Mastcam. It will observe, photograph, and videotape geological structures and features, like craters, gullies, and dunes.

The rover’s robotic arm wields its own unique instruments. APXS, the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer, will measure the abundance of chemical elements in the dust, soils, rocks, and processed samples. MAHLI, the Mars Hand Lens Imager, will return color images like those of typical digital cameras and act like a geologist’s magnifying lens. Its images can be used to examine the structure and texture of rocks, dust, and frost at the micrometer to centimeter scale.

One laboratory instrument inside the rover’s body will explore the red planet by “sniffing” the air, bird-dog style. SAM, short for Sample Analysis at Mars, has vents that open to the atmosphere to determine where to take samples, for example if it detects methane in the area.

“That’s important because methane can be released by microbes,” explains Crisp, “or by liquid water reacting with rock at depths under the surface. Water ‘down under’ could be a niche for subterranean life. SAM can also be used to sniff the gases released after baking a rock or soil sample in its oven.”

In addition, Curiosity will carry instruments for observing Martian weather and measuring cosmic radiation bombarding the planet’s surface.

“This rover is intrinsically spectacular in terms of what the mission will do,” says Meyer. “It’s a keystone for the future. It sets the stage for understanding whether organics are preserved on Mars and will tell us what we need to use to find out.”

Now – where’s that diary?”

Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft

Straight from PhysOrg.com: “The Moon is a big sponge that absorbs electrically charged particles given out by the Sun. These particles interact with the oxygen present in some dust grains on the lunar surface, producing water. This discovery, made by the ESA-ISRO instrument SARA onboard the Indian Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, confirms how water is likely being created on the lunar surface.

It also gives scientists an ingenious new way to take images of the Moon and any other airless body in the Solar System.

The lunar surface is a loose collection of irregular dust grains, known as regolith. Incoming particles should be trapped in the spaces between the grains and absorbed. When this happens to protons they are expected to interact with the oxygen in the lunar regolith to produce hydroxyl and water. The signature for these molecules was recently found and reported by Chandrayaan-1’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument team.

The SARA results confirm that solar hydrogen nuclei are indeed being absorbed by the lunar regolith but also highlight a mystery: not every proton is absorbed. One out of every five rebounds into space. In the process, the proton joins with an electron to become an atom of hydrogen. “We didn’t expect to see this at all,” says Stas Barabash, Swedish Institute of Space Physics, who is the European Principal Investigator for the Sub-keV Atom Reflecting Analyzer (SARA) instrument, which made the discovery.

Although Barabash and his colleagues do not know what is causing the reflections, the discovery paves the way for a new type of image to be made. The hydrogen shoots off with speeds of around 200 km/s and escapes without being deflected by the Moon’s weak gravity. Hydrogen is also electrically neutral, and is not diverted by the magnetic fields in space. So the atoms fly in straight lines, just like photons of light. In principle, each atom can be traced back to its origin and an image of the surface can be made. The areas that emit most hydrogen will show up the brightest.

Whilst the Moon does not generate a global magnetic field, some lunar rocks are magnetised. Barabash and his team are currently making images, to look for such ‘magnetic anomalies’ in lunar rocks. These generate magnetic bubbles that deflect incoming protons away into surrounding regions making magnetic rocks appear dark in a hydrogen image.

The incoming protons are part of the solar wind, a constant stream of particles given off by the Sun. They collide with every celestial object in the Solar System but are usually stopped by the body’s atmosphere. On bodies without such a natural shield, for example asteroids or the planet Mercury, the solar wind reaches the ground. The SARA team expects that these objects too will reflect many of the incoming protons back into space as hydrogen atoms.

This knowledge provides timely advice for the scientists and engineers who are readying ESA’s BepiColombo mission to Mercury. The spacecraft will be carrying two similar instruments to SARA and may find that the inner-most planet is reflecting more hydrogen than the Moon because the solar wind is more concentrated closer to the Sun.”

Straight from Slashdot: “Previous estimates are now thought to skimp on the entropy of the observable universe. The researchers contend that super-massive black holes are the largest contributor of entropy. Since they contribute two orders of magnitude more than previously thought, the total of all the observable universe is correspondingly higher. The paper highlights (in gruesome detail) new issues that arise with these new calculations — like estimating us a little bit closer to heat death (moving entropy totals from 10^102 to 10^104 out of a maximum of 10^122).”

Former Astronaut Franklin Chang Diaz

Straight from Slashdot: “Former astronaut Franklin Chang Diaz believes that the private sector can revitalize NASA, and his company is developing a plasma rocket to back up that claim. Chang Diaz argues that private industry can be used to develop much of the basic technology needed for space exploration, allowing NASA to focus on more sophisticated and critical components. His company, Ad Astra, is developing a variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket (VASIMR) that will be used to reposition the International Space Station. Last week, the rocket passed an important milestone in testing — reaching 200 kilowatts (enough to move the ISS). A video of the rocket can be seen on Ad Astra’s site.”

This artist's rendering shows the biggest but never-before-seen ring around Saturn, spotted by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Straight from Fox News: “The Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered the biggest but never-before-seen ring around the planet Saturn, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced late Tuesday.

The thin array of ice and dust particles lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system and its orbit is tilted 27 degrees from the planet’s main ring plane, the laboratory said.

JPL spokeswoman Whitney Clavin said the ring is very diffuse and doesn’t reflect much visible light but the infrared Spitzer telescope was able to detect it.

Although the ring dust is very cold — minus 316 degrees Fahrenheit — it shines with thermal radiation.

No one had looked at its location with an infrared instrument until now, Clavin said.

The bulk of the ring material starts about 3.7 million miles from the planet and extends outward about another 7.4 million miles.

The newly found ring is so huge it would take 1 billion Earths to fill it, JPL said.

Before the discovery Saturn was known to have seven main rings named A through E and several faint unnamed rings.

A paper on the discovery was to be published online Wednesday by the journal Nature.

“This is one supersized ring,” said one of the authors, Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Her co-authors are Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland, College Park, and Michael Skrutskie, also of the University of Virginia.

Saturn’s moon Phoebe orbits within the ring and is believed to be the source of the material.

The ring also may answer the riddle of another moon, Iapetus, which has a bright side and a very dark side.

The ring circles in the same direction as Phoebe, while Iapetus, the other rings and most of Saturn’s other moons go the opposite way. Scientists think material from the outer ring moves inward and slams into Iapetus.

“Astronomers have long suspected that there is a connection between Saturn’s outer moon Phoebe and the dark material on Iapetus,” said Hamilton. “This new ring provides convincing evidence of that relationship.”

The Spitzer mission, launched in 2003, is managed by JPL in Pasadena. Spitzer is 66 million miles from Earth in orbit around the sun.”

Ares I-X

Straight from Fox News: “NASA’s first version of the rocket slated to replace the space shuttle and send astronauts back to the moon will make its debut test launch Oct. 27, four days early, the space agency announced Tuesday.

The rocket, a demonstration booster called Ares I-X, was previously scheduled to blast off Oct. 31, but engineers preparing the booster were able to complete work in time for the earlier liftoff, NASA officials said. Launch is set for 8:00 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT) on Tuesday, Oct. 27 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

“They are doing a launch countdown simulation today,” NASA spokesperson Amber Philman told SPACE.com from the spaceport. “That’s ongoing as we speak.”

Philman said the current launch target must still be finalized by mission managers during a series of review meetings in coming weeks. Engineers padded their work schedule by two full weeks to handle any unexpected glitches while priming Ares I-X for an Oct. 31 flight, but ultimately did not need some of that buffer, which allowed the earlier date, she added.

NASA’s new rocket

The Ares I rocket is a two-stage booster designed to launch the Orion spacecraft, which NASA plans to replace its three aging space shuttles once they retire in the next year or two. It stands about 327 feet (100 meters) tall – 14 stories higher than launch-ready shuttles – when fully assembled.

NASA has said that the rocket and its Orion vehicles will not be ready to ferry astronauts to orbit until at least 2015, but a White House-appointed committee that evaluated the agency’s exploration plans this summer has said that date could likely slip to 2017.

The committee has submitted a set of five options to overhaul NASA’s spaceflight plan for President Barack Obama’s review. Some of them do not include the Ares I rocket. NASA’s vision of returning astronauts to the moon by 2020 is critically underfunded and would require at least $3 billion a year in extra funding just to meet the lunar goal by the mid-2020s, the committee has said.

Earlier this year, NASA had hoped to launch the Ares I-X flight in July or August, but had to push the test back several times. Not so for the Oct. 27 target, Philman said.

“Everything is looking good with the hardware,” Philman said. “They’ve done the power up of the vehicle and that test went well.”

The Ares I’s first stage is a giant solid rocket similar to the four-segment boosters used to launch NASA space shuttles, but with an extra fifth segment for more power. The second stage is a liquid-fueled engine that would push Orion capsules to orbit.

NASA conducted the first successful test firing of the Ares I rocket’s first stage on Sept. 10.

For the Ares I-X test flight, NASA has built a four-segment first stage capped with a dummy fifth segment, as well as a dummy second stage. The launch is designed to demonstrate the rocket’s launch concept, ground processing and stage separation.

The test flight is expected to reach an altitude of about 25 miles (40 km) in about two minutes, with 700 onboard sensors recording its performance. After the first stage separates, the dummy upper stage and Orion simulator will crash into the Atlantic Ocean.

NASA plans to roll the Ares I-X rocket out to Launch Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center on Oct. 19. The pad has been refitted to host the Ares I-X rocket with the finishing touches to be completed by next week.

“They should be ready at the pad by the end of the month,” Philman said”

Ares I-X assembled in Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building

Straight from Popular Mechanics: “On Tuesday, an independent council of aerospace experts releases a summary review of NASA’s human spaceflight objectives. Led by Norman Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin, the so-called Augustine committee came forward with a number of conclusions that were probably no big surprise to industry insiders. Rand Simberg, a former aerospace engineer and the author of the blog Transterrestrial Musings, finds the report a little too innocuous. In this analysis, Simberg asks, what happens when we take the risk out of space travel?

We now know the options that the Augustine panel is going to present to the administration for the future of NASA human spaceflight, because the summary was released on Tuesday. While the full report is not yet available, the next release will just flesh out this outline with details. The verdict is grim for fans of NASA’s current implementation of the most recent President Bush’s plans to expand into the solar system starting with the moon, which, in the words of the previous NASA administrator Mike Griffin, is “Apollo on Steroids.”

Everyone has noted that the bottom line of the report is that NASA doesn’t have enough money to both go beyond low Earth orbit (LEO) and continue the other politically mandated missions. But it’s worth noting a couple other aspects of the summary: From the very beginning of the document, there are two disturbing statements.

First: “Human safety can never be absolutely assured, but throughout this report, it is treated as a sine qua non. It is not discussed in extensive detail because any concepts falling short in human safety have simply been eliminated from consideration.”

Second, in its list of fundamental questions: “On what should the next heavy-lift launch vehicle be based?”

Both of these statements (though more subtly in the case of the second) are about risk, and NASA’s costly and extreme aversion to it ever since Apollo. Recall the famous words of Gene Kranz (that he never actually said, despite the fact that he used it as a title for his autobiography) from the movie Apollo 13: “Failure is not an option.”

The problem with that is, as some have responded, that success gets very expensive. This is the cost of risk aversion.

The false mythology that arose from the Apollo 13 mission is that (a) astronauts are to be saved at all costs, and (b) if all possible costs are expended, we shouldn’t lose astronauts. It made a great movie, but it’s a dubious premise for policy. If we think about it for a bit, we must realize that both premises are absurd.

First, there is no such thing as safety on this side of the grave. NASA has spent untold billions in an attempt to make things “safe” over the decades—and seventeen astronauts have died in the process. So it is not at all clear that an institutional obsession with safety necessarily leads to a safer program. Maybe they could have spent a lot less money, and perhaps (but not necessarily) lost a few more astronauts—and made a lot more progress. Aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan said a few years ago that if we’re not killing people, we’re not pushing hard enough. That might sound harsh to people outside the aerospace community but, as Rutan knows, test pilots and astronauts are a breed of people that willingly accepts certain risk in order to be part of great endeavors. They’re volunteers and they know what they’re getting into.

If our attitude toward the space frontier is that we must strive to never, ever lose anyone, it will remain closed. If our ancestors who opened the west, or who came from Europe, had such an attitude, we would still be over there, and there would have been no California space industry to get us to the moon forty years ago. It has never been “safe” to open a frontier, and this frontier is the harshest one that we’ve ever faced. But, fortunately, we have sufficiently advanced technology to allow us to do it anyway, and probably with much less loss of life than any previous one. But people die every day doing a lot less worthwhile things than opening a frontier. I think that part of the angst of the nation over the loss of the Columbia astronauts was because they seemed to be dying in such a trivial pursuit—performing science experiments in low Earth orbit for children, rather than expanding our nation’s reach to the solar system.

A frequent commenter on my blog has suggested that to avoid future national sob parties, such as occurred after Challenger and Columbia, we should set aside a special cemetery like Arlington, in a well-publicized ceremony, and declare that this is where all those who lose their lives in our planned opening of the solar system will be laid to rest. There is in fact an astronaut memorial mirror at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center, with the names of those lost so far, and plenty of squares for more. A visionary president would point that out with the announcement of the new policy.

But there’s a broader risk-aversion issue, implied by the second point (“On what should the next heavy-lift launch vehicle be based?”). Note that the assumption is not whether to build a heavy-lift vehicle, but only how to do so. It takes as given that we must do so, despite the fact that there are ways to avoid such an expensive system, in both development and operations (because a large vehicle with a low flight rate will continue to cost billions per flight, as have all NASA human spaceflight missions for decades). This assumption is based on the false conclusion that the cost and schedule slips of the International Space Station arose solely from building it in orbit.

There is a relationship between risk and benefit. In general, higher-risk ventures will provide higher returns—else why would any intelligent person engage in them? Concepts such as propellant depots (which I wrote about a few years back) have vast potential for reducing costs and increasing our space capabilities, while potentially eliminating the need for an expensive (in both development and operational cost) heavy-lift vehicle. Yet, from aversion to risk, the panel ultimately recommends the development of an unspecified heavy lifter, with little rationale:

“No one knows the mass or dimensions of the largest piece that will be required for future exploration missions,” the report says, “but it will likely be significantly larger than 25 metric tons in launch mass to low Earth orbit, the capability of current launchers.” If “no one knows,” how do they know that it will “likely be significantly larger than 25 metric tons”? This is the multibillion dollar question.

High risk, high reward, and those who have seriously studied the problem don’t believe that the risk of orbital operations is as high as the risk averse state. This is a technology that will be required eventually, because someone will always come up with a mission that needs a launch system bigger than the one we have. Why not make “eventually” now, and save the taxpayers the tens of billions that next shiny new giant vehicle will cost?

Are we, finally, willing to risk taxpayers’ dollars and astronauts’ lives in a more fruitful direction, particularly given how the current approach has already cost hundreds of billions and dozens of lives, with little progress toward the supposed goals? Or is it just a jobs program?”

NASA's new lunar rover

Straight from Fox News: “About an hour north of Flagstaff….in the middle of nowhere is a spot NASA says looks a lot like the surface of the moon.   In fact NASA officials used this area to test equipment back in the 1960’s for the Apollo missions.  Now they’re at it again, gearing up for a possible return to the moon in 2020.

During the last two weeks the space agency has been conducting lunar field simulation tests inside the latest version of the lunar electric rover.  Two crew members, an astronaut and a geologist actually lived on the tiny rover for fourteen days.  They ate, slept, showered and used the facilities in close quarters all the while trying to simulate an actual moon mission.

What did they do to pass the time?  The same things they might do on the surface of the moon, gather rock and soil samples, and they even did a couple of space walks or EVA’s as they are known; extra vehicular activities.   During the EVA’s the crew donned unpressurized suits that look exactly like a real space suit, except at 70lbs, they weigh a lot less than the 215lb suits that would be used on the moon.

Mike Gernhardt, the veteran astronaut who lived aboard the LER told us for the most part it was very comfortable.  He was able to drink plenty of coffee which he brewed on board and remarked that he felt very clean after numerous sponge baths taken toward the back of the rover.

While the activities performed during the mission seemed routine, the goal was to carry them out while living aboard the small rover. One day NASA hopes to be able to use vehicles just like these to perform experiments and provide transportation on the moon.

The Bush Administration had set a goal of returning to the moon by the year 2020, but astronaut Mike Gernhardt believes the space agency works best under pressure, and believes it could realistically get there by 2018.  Gernhardt hopes to be behind the wheel of LER when the time comes.”

Straight from Slashdot: “Things don’t look good for NASA when the report outlining its future begins: ‘The US human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. [NASA] is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources. Space operations are among the most complex and unforgiving pursuits ever undertaken by humans. It really is rocket science. Space operations become all the more difficult when means do not match aspirations.’ Today the Augustine Commission handed to the White House the Review of US Human Space Flight Plans Committee summary report, after months of expert review and testimony. Many observers expected a bleak report, but ultimately the future of US manned space flight will hinge on how the report’s conclusions are interpreted. Keep in mind too that NASA has spent almost $8 billion of a planned $40 billion to develop systems for a return to the Moon.”

Straight from Slashdot: “Japan has announced plans to send a $21 billion solar power generator into space that will be capable of producing one gigawatt of energy, or enough to power 294,000 homes. The project recently received support from Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and IHI Corp, who are now teaming up in the race to develop new technology within four years that can beam electricity back to Earth without the use of cables. Japan hopes to test a small solar satellite decked out with solar panels by the year 2015.”

The mighty Saturn V on its way to the moon

Straight from the Guardian: “Is space travel a lost cause? I would hope not, but reading the articles about the failures of our efforts to return to the Moon by 2020 makes the future appear very grim. The New York Times reports:

Astronaut explores the Martian landscape

Straight from the New York Times: “NOW that the hype surrounding the 40th anniversary of the Moon landings has come and gone, we are faced with the grim reality that if we want to send humans back to the Moon the investment is likely to run in excess of $150 billion. The cost to get to Mars could easily be two to four times that, if it is possible at all.

This is the issue being wrestled with by a NASA panel, convened this year and led by Norman Augustine, a former chief executive of Lockheed Martin, that will in the coming weeks present President Obama with options for the near-term future of human spaceflight. It is quickly becoming clear that going to the Moon or Mars in the next decade or two will be impossible without a much bigger budget than has so far been allocated. Is it worth it?

The most challenging impediment to human travel to Mars does not seem to involve the complicated launching, propulsion, guidance or landing technologies but something far more mundane: the radiation emanating from the Sun’s cosmic rays. The shielding necessary to ensure the astronauts do not get a lethal dose of solar radiation on a round trip to Mars may very well make the spacecraft so heavy that the amount of fuel needed becomes prohibitive.

There is, however, a way to surmount this problem while reducing the cost and technical requirements, but it demands that we ask this vexing question: Why are we so interested in bringing the Mars astronauts home again?

While the idea of sending astronauts aloft never to return is jarring upon first hearing, the rationale for one-way trips into space has both historical and practical roots. Colonists and pilgrims seldom set off for the New World with the expectation of a return trip, usually because the places they were leaving were pretty intolerable anyway. Give us a century or two and we may turn the whole planet into a place from which many people might be happy to depart.

Moreover, one of the reasons that is sometimes given for sending humans into space is that we need to move beyond Earth if we are to improve our species’ chances of survival should something terrible happen back home. This requires people to leave, and stay away.

There are more immediate and pragmatic reasons to consider one-way human space exploration missions.

First, money. Much of the cost of a voyage to Mars will be spent on coming home again. If the fuel for the return is carried on the ship, this greatly increases the mass of the ship, which in turn requires even more fuel.

The president of the Mars Society, Robert Zubrin, has offered one possible solution: two ships, sent separately. The first would be sent unmanned and, once there, combine onboard hydrogen with carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere to generate the fuel for the return trip; the second would take the astronauts there, and then be left behind. But once arrival is decoupled from return, one should ask whether the return trip is really necessary.

Surely if the point of sending astronauts is to be able to carry out scientific experiments that robots cannot do (something I am highly skeptical of and one of the reasons I don’t believe we should use science to attempt to justify human space exploration), then the longer they spend on the planet the more experiments they can do.

Moreover, if the radiation problems cannot be adequately resolved then the longevity of astronauts signing up for a Mars round trip would be severely compromised in any case. As cruel as it may sound, the astronauts would probably best use their remaining time living and working on Mars rather than dying at home.

If it sounds unrealistic to suggest that astronauts would be willing to leave home never to return alive, then consider the results of several informal surveys I and several colleagues have conducted recently. One of my peers in Arizona recently accompanied a group of scientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a geological field trip. During the day, he asked how many would be willing to go on a one-way mission into space. Every member of the group raised his hand. The lure of space travel remains intoxicating for a generation brought up on “Star Trek” and “Star Wars.”

We might want to restrict the voyage to older astronauts, whose longevity is limited in any case. Here again, I have found a significant fraction of scientists older than 65 who would be willing to live out their remaining years on the red planet or elsewhere. With older scientists, there would be additional health complications, to be sure, but the necessary medical personnel and equipment would still probably be cheaper than designing a return mission.

Delivering food and supplies to these new pioneers — along with the tools to grow and build whatever they need, for however long they live on the red planet — is likewise more reasonable and may be less expensive than designing a ticket home. Certainly, as in the Zubrin proposal, unmanned spacecraft could provide the crucial supply lines.

The largest stumbling block to a consideration of one-way missions is probably political. NASA and Congress are unlikely to do something that could be perceived as signing the death warrants of astronauts.

Nevertheless, human space travel is so expensive and so dangerous that we are going to need novel, even extreme solutions if we really want to expand the range of human civilization beyond our own planet. To boldly go where no one has gone before does not require coming home again.”

Huygens on Titan (click for high-res)

Straight from the Daily Galaxy: “Saturn’s orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. Titan is a big laboratory where several of the world’s leading space scientists get to play with atmospheres on a planetary scale.

At an eye popping minus 179 degrees Celsius (minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit), Titan has a surface of liquid hydrocarbons in the form of methane and ethane with tholins believed to make up its dunes. The term “tholins,” coined by Carl Sagan in 1979, describe the complex organic molecules at the heart of prebiotic chemistry.

Before the first Cassini Mission flyby’s Robert Brown who led Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) team, said: “We know VIMS will see through the haze to Titan’s surface. At closest approach – 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) – we’ll have 600-meter-pixel resolution. We’ll be able to see very small geologic features. We’ll get very high resolution looks at atmospheric phenomena, too. But from my perspective, the really important thing about this encounter is really digging down below the atmosphere and getting our first real glimpse of Titan geology.

“We don’t know what we’re going to encounter there. I suppose you can assume we’ll see common geologic forms like mountains and craters and tectonic faults, maybe even volcanism.” Brown was spot on with his predictions.

VIMS will see Titan’s hydrocarbon pools, if they exist and aren’t hidden by some low-lying fog or other strange phenomenon, Brown said

Cassini’s Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) took a taste mysterious, subtle flavors in Titan’s atmosphere, team member and UA planetary sciences Professor Roger Yelle said, scooping up a breath of Titan’s puffy atmosphere during the flyby, The experiment measured how many molecules of different masses it got in the gulp of Titan’s mostly nitrogen, methane-laced atmosphere. Yelle and other Cassini scientists want to identify the big, complicated hydrogen-and-carbon-containing molecules because they are part of a planetary system that possibly rains methane and produces ethane ponds.

Learning more about how carbon-containing, or “organic,” molecules form doesn’t explain how DNA came to be, Yelle said. “A single strand of DNA contains about 3 billion nucleotides that if stretched out, would be something like 1.7 meters long. We’re trying to understand molecules with just 10 or 12 atoms.”

But Titan’s hydrocarbon chemistry holds clues that explain the very first steps of how nature assembled organic molecules, which are the precursors to amino acids, the building blocks of life, he said.

Cassini to date has mapped about 20 percent of Titan’s surface with radar. Several hundred lakes and seas have been observed, with each of several dozen estimated to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than Earth’s oil and gas reserves. Dark dunes that run along the equator contain a volume of organics several hundred times larger than Earth’s coal reserves.

Proven reserves of natural gas on Earth total 130 billion tons, enough to provide 300 times the amount of energy the entire United States uses annually for residential heating, cooling and lighting. Dozens of Titan’s lakes individually have the equivalent of at least this much energy in the form of methane and ethane.

“This global estimate is based mostly on views of the lakes in the northern polar regions. We have assumed the south might be similar, but we really don’t yet know how much liquid is there,” said Lorenz. Cassini’s radar has observed the south polar region only once, and only two small lakes were visible. Future observations of that area are planned during Cassini’s proposed extended mission.

“We also know that some lakes are more than 10 meters or so deep because they appear literally pitch-black to the radar. If they were shallow we’d see the bottom, and we don’t,” said Lorenz.

The question of how much liquid is on the surface is an important one because methane is a strong greenhouse gas on Titan as well as on Earth, but there is much more of it on Titan. If all the observed liquid on Titan is methane, it would only last a few million years, because as methane escapes into Titan’s atmosphere, it breaks down and escapes into space. If the methane were to run out, Titan could become much colder. Scientists believe that methane might be supplied to the atmosphere by venting from the interior in cryovolcanic eruptions. If so, the amount of methane, and the temperature on Titan, may have fluctuated dramatically in Titan’s past.

A giant, glassy lake larger than Earth’s Lake Ontario occupies Titan’s south pole according to research from the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. The lake which covers 20,000 square kilometers is filled mostly with methane and ethane, hydrocarbons that are gases on Earth but liquid on the bone-freezing surface of Titan -the only solar system moon known to support a planet-like atmosphere.

“We know the lake is liquid because it reflects essentially no light at 5-micron wavelengths,” Brown said. “It was hard for us to accept the fact that the feature was so black when we first saw it. More than 99.9 percent of the light that reaches the lake never gets out again. For it to be that dark, the surface has to be extremely quiescent, mirror smooth. No naturally produced solid could be that smooth.”

Before the Cassini mission, several scientists thought that Titan would be awash in global oceans of ethane and other light hydrocarbons, the byproducts of photolysis, or the action of ultraviolet light on methane over 4.5 billion years of solar system history. But 40 close flybys of Titan by the Cassini spacecraft show no such oceans exist.

Titan is also more squashed in its overall shape—like a rubber ball pressed down by a foot—than researchers had expected, said Howard Zebker, a Stanford geophysicist and electrical engineer involved in the work. The findings may help explain the presence of the large lakes of hydrocarbons at both of Titan’s poles, which have been puzzling researchers since being discovered in 2007.

“Since the poles are squished in with respect to the equator, if there is a hydrocarbon ‘water table’ that is more or less spherical in shape, then the poles would be closer down to that water table and depressions at the poles would fill up with liquid,” Zebker said. The shape of the water table would be controlled by the gravitational field of Titan, which is still not fully understood.

The next Cassini fly on August 25, 2009 in the spacecraft’s first close flyby of a moon since Saturn’s August 11 equinox. Highlights this time include a RADAR ’scrub’ to get more detailed views of the Shangri-La dunes, unique southern equatorial magnetosphere measurements, and an opportunity for high-resolution Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) observations of the southern hemisphere.”

Stardust Spacecraft

Straight from Physorg.com: “Glycine is an amino acid used by living organisms to make proteins, and this is the first time an amino acid has been found in a comet,” said Dr. Jamie Elsila of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Our discovery supports the theory that some of life’s ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts.”

Elsila is the lead author of a paper on this research accepted for publication in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science. The research will be presented during the meeting of the American Chemical Society at the Marriott Metro Center in Washington, August 16.

“The discovery of glycine in a comet supports the idea that the fundamental building blocks of life are prevalent in space, and strengthens the argument that life in the universe may be common rather than rare,” said Dr. Carl Pilcher, Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute which co-funded the research.

Proteins are the workhorse molecules of life, used in everything from structures like hair to enzymes, the catalysts that speed up or regulate chemical reactions. Just as the 26 letters of the alphabet are arranged in limitless combinations to make words, life uses 20 different amino acids in a huge variety of arrangements to build millions of different proteins.

Stardust passed through dense gas and dust surrounding the icy nucleus of Wild 2 (pronounced “Vilt-2″) on January 2, 2004. As the spacecraft flew through this material, a special collection grid filled with aerogel – a novel sponge-like material that’s more than 99 percent empty space – gently captured samples of the comet’s gas and dust. The grid was stowed in a capsule which detached from the spacecraft and parachuted to Earth on January 15, 2006. Since then, scientists around the world have been busy analyzing the samples to learn the secrets of comet formation and our solar system’s history.

“We actually analyzed aluminum foil from the sides of tiny chambers that hold the aerogel in the collection grid,” said Elsila. “As gas molecules passed through the aerogel, some stuck to the foil. We spent two years testing and developing our equipment to make it accurate and sensitive enough to analyze such incredibly tiny samples.”

Earlier, preliminary analysis in the Goddard labs detected glycine in both the foil and a sample of the aerogel. However, since glycine is used by terrestrial life, at first the team was unable to rule out contamination from sources on Earth. “It was possible that the glycine we found originated from handling or manufacture of the Stardust spacecraft itself,” said Elsila. The new research used isotopic analysis of the foil to rule out that possibility.

Isotopes are versions of an element with different weights or masses; for example, the most common carbon atom, Carbon 12, has six protons and six neutrons in its center (nucleus). However, the Carbon 13 isotope is heavier because it has an extra neutron in its nucleus. A glycine molecule from space will tend to have more of the heavier Carbon 13 atoms in it than glycine that’s from Earth. That is what the team found. “We discovered that the Stardust-returned glycine has an extraterrestrial carbon isotope signature, indicating that it originated on the comet,” said Elsila.

The team includes Dr. Daniel Glavin and Dr. Jason Dworkin of NASA Goddard. “Based on the foil and aerogel results it is highly probable that the entire comet-exposed side of the Stardust sample collection grid is coated with glycine that formed in space,” adds Glavin.

“The discovery of amino acids in the returned comet sample is very exciting and profound,” said Stardust Principal Investigator Professor Donald E. Brownlee of the University of Washington, Seattle, Wash. “It is also a remarkable triumph that highlights the advancing capabilities of laboratory studies of primitive extraterrestrial materials.”

Straight from Slashdot: “NASA recently finished testing a miniature nuclear reactor that would provide power for an astronaut base on the Moon or Mars. The reactor combines a small fission system with a Stirling engine to make a ’safe, reliable, and efficient’ way to produce electricity. The system being tested at NASA’s Glenn Research Center can produce 2.3 kilowatts and could be ready for launch by 2020, NASA officials say. The reactor ought to provide much more power than solar panels but could prove controversial with the public concerned about launching a nuclear power source and placing it on the Moon or another planet.”

Our Sun

Straight from Slashdot: “For decades, scientists have puzzled over the mystery of why temperatures in the solar corona, the sun’s outer atmosphere, soar to several million Kelvin (K) — much hotter than temperatures nearer the sun’s surface. New observations made with instruments aboard Japan’s Hinode satellite reveal the culprit to be nanoflares. Nanoflares are small, sudden bursts of heat and energy. ‘They occur within tiny strands that are bundled together to form a magnetic tube called a coronal loop,’ says astrophysicist James Klimchuk. Coronal loops are the fundamental building blocks of the thin, translucent gas known as the sun’s corona. The discovery that nanoflares play an important and perhaps dominant role in coronal heating paves the way to understanding how the sun affects Earth and its atmosphere.”