Core Dump

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The mystique of the rovers has even touched Native American culture. Tim McCoy, a geologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, has been on the rover team for the last four years. He’s also a citizen of the Miami tribe from the Midwest. In their Algonquian language, explains McCoy, the Miami confer “animacy” on certain beings, such as people, animals, some plants, and ome natural phenomena, such as thunder. “Anthropomorphizing is not the right word,” he says. “It’s hard to describe. Some things have a living force to them, a spirit of sorts.”The Miami elders decide what types of modern technology have animacy. Cars do. Trains don’t. “I had heard Janet Vertesi talk in a rover team meeting about the boundary in her mind between people and machines,” says McCoy. “She was sort of struggling with that. But from a Native American sense, there’s no struggle there, no apparent conflict.”

McCoy and a Miami tribesman colleague who is a linguist at Miami University of Ohio debated whether the rovers had animacy. They went to a tribal elder and described what a rover is and how it works with humans. The elder pondered the question, then proclaimed that the rovers have animacy. A group of about 20 undergraduates from theMiami tribe at the university then named the rovers “neehpikalaankwa keeyosia,” or “the red star wanderer.” “To the Miami,” says McCoy, “the wanderer performs an important task as he or she gathers useful information during wanderings and brings it back for the community.”

McCoy shared the story with the rover team.“They weren’t surprised. You really feel like this thing is an extension of you. When one of them dies, there’s going to be a tangible loss and a period of grieving.”

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"BS: What does it sound like, smell like, and taste like? "

NS: Sound: Not as noisy as I expected it to be. There is, however, a constant sound of fans running (because there are lots of fans running). I expect that when I get back on Earth I will appreciate places without fans running 24 hours a day—the whole sound of silence thing.

Smell: Pleasant across the station. Like clean, air-conditioned rooms. Different in the different modules, but pleasant everywhere. One thing about smell that was a complete surprise to me was something that’s referred to as the “smell of space.” This is not a smell that’s inside the space station. This is a smell that comes from things that have been exposed to the vacuum of space. For instance, you smell it when you open up the airlock to let astronauts back in after a space walk or you smell it on the hatch of a new module that’s docked to station. It’s a very distinct smell—best thing I can compare it to is a mild version of the smell of an overheating car engine. Don’t know what causes the smell—and it’s not often that we get to smell it—but it’s definitely there.

Taste: Guess when I think of the “taste” of station, I think again of the great meals and the camaraderie around the galley tables.

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he experiments were something unimaginable during the crew change. Medicine was my particular headache. A lot of people, a lot of experiments… Occasionally it so happened that several persons at once were running different experiments within the same segment, one filming, another chatting over ham radio, and so on.

Here I am, sitting with my “cap” on, while brain oscillography is in progress. I hear the Earth urging me, “Now, Max, do concentrate.” I declare I will! The test really requires concentration. Silence is a must, and no one should get in the way. Instead, someone catches you in the back of your head with his heel as he flies past, “Oh, sorry, Max!” The Earth is in a rage: “Maxim, it’s serious! Do pull yourself together!” But next to you a guy is booming something indistinguishable into his ham radio… A normal thing, that.

Labels: space

Zuppero's dream begins in 1968 with the scientist inspired by one of Freeman Dyson's well-traveled crackpot ideas - that of powering a spaceship to the nearest star at one per cent of the speed of light, using atomic bombs. (Sci-fi authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle famously employed one in their alien invasion novel, Footfall.)

Working for a government lab, Zuppero asks to view the classified plans, called Orion, for the Dyson space ship.

"I was scrutinizing the drawing [of the space ship]," he writes. "It showed a really dinky and clearly horribly inefficient atomic bomb propulsion device. Nothing like what Freeman Dyson drew... The design seemed to be really dumb, like something one of my fraternity brothers would draw up inbetween periods of getting drunk."

With the bloom only slightly off the rose, Zuppero visits a bunker full of thermonuclear bombs to see the basis for his dream's propulsion. But the bombs are way too big, he observes, and there's no way to get three million of them on a spaceship to the stars. Freeman Dyson should have seen the bomb room, Zuppero writes.

Labels: military, science, space, technology

This unique perspective of Earth was taken by the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera on board Rosetta, from 393,327 miles (633,000 kilometers) on 12 November 2009 at 13:28 CET. The image—which form by three exposures under orange, green, and blue filters—shows the South Pole at a resolution of 12 kilometer per pixel.

Rosetta is coming back home for the last time, to take the impulse necessary to reach the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. When it reaches it in 2014, Rosetta will first study the comment flying alongside, then it will attempt to set its mechanic feet on it. For that it will use the Philae lander that it carries along its decade-long trip around the Solar System.

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What kind of IT do you have up there?

"We have a significantly large network on board the Station, comprising 68 IBM ThinkPad A31 laptops and 32 Lenovo ThinkPad T61p devices. One of the T61ps is a server, making it a client/server network with a couple of routers and an Ethernet backbone. There are both cabled routers and a couple of Wi-Fi access points up there. There's also a dedicated IP phone for phone calls and some limited video-conferencing abilities if astronauts need to see their families."

How do you choose what technology to use?

"Whenever we go to select a laptop for flying, we have a certification process to determine the best ones. We'll test it for how well it withstands radiation. [The ISS is exposed to as much radiation in a day as computers down on Earth are in a year.] We also test for off-gassing, in case the computer emits chemicals that could create fumes on the Station.

"You'd be surprised at how many computers would survive on the ISS. I can't think of an occurrence when we've have a computer fail from the radiation itself. It may reduce the lifetime of how long we can keep the equipment in orbit, but most of the time the failures are just like the ones here on the ground -- we'll have a hard-drive failure or we'll have an application problem and end up reloading the machine."

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"The past decade has been spectacular in terms of achievements," says Sean Solomon, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and a leader of recent missions to Mercury and Mars.

Seven missions are currently keeping a wary eye on the Sun; they were launched by the United States, Japan and Europe, partly for pure science and partly for self-preservation. Solar flares, which can come from sunspots, are magnetic eruptions that sometimes hit Earth. A superflare like the one in 1859 that surged through telegraph lines and ignited fires would black out today's electrical grids, fry communication satellites and jam navigation signals. Missions to track solar flares may alert us to outsize magnetic storms in time to brace ourselves.

Last year, NASA's Messenger mission gave us the first up-close view of parts of Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun. The spacecraft has found extensive ridges along the planet's surface, made as it cooled and shrank over its four billion years. Messenger should nestle into orbit around Mercury in 2011 and continue to study the planet's geology and magnetic fields.

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If he sticks with NASA's current budget, which calls for a flat budget through 2014 and then allows for 1.4 percent increases, the panel provided him with two options:

1. Program of Record: Funds for the Shuttle into FY 2011 and including sufficient funds to de-orbit the ISS in 2016. When constrained to this budget profile, Ares I and Orion are not available until after the ISS has been de-orbited. The heavy-lift vehicle, Ares V, is not available until the late 2020s, and worse, there are insufficient funds to develop the lunar lander and lunar surface systems until well into the 2030s, if ever.

2. ISS and Lunar Exploration: This option extends the ISS
to 2020, and it begins a program of lunar exploration using Ares V (Lite). The option assumes Shuttle fly-out in FY 2011, and it includes a technology development program, a program to develop commercial crew services to low-Earth orbit, and funds for enhanced utilization of ISS. This option does not deliver heavy-lift capability until the late 2020s and does not have funds to develop the systems needed to land on or explore the Moon.

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Less than a month after the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's first lunar landing, the group will tell White House advisers today that the space agency simply does not have enough money to do it again.

Without a significant increase in funding – unlikely with the federal deficit approaching $1.3tn – Nasa will almost certainly have to scrap the next-generation Ares I rocket that has already cost more than $9bn to develop.

The longer-term part of the agency's $81bn Constellation project – to land humans on Mars by the middle of the century, touted by George Bush in his 2004 vision for space exploration – will remain in the realms of science fiction, at least for now.

"This is a big surprise," said Edward Ellegood, a space policy analyst at Florida's Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. "Up until this point Nasa, privately at least, was confident that Constellation was a little behind schedule but on track. Now this changes everything. That it no longer fits within the budget is disturbing."

Labels: politics, space

Instead of a 4.5-year gap in human spaceflight, we're probably looking at at least a 6-year gap. Moreover, through 2019, it will cost $15 billion more than the current budget to keep the station flying and to deliver Constellation two years late.

Perhaps even more importantly, you're not doing anything unique. If you're Obama, you're simply keeping the programs sustained (space station) and begun (Constellation) under President Bush afloat. Nothing in here will "wow" the public.

So if you're Obama, what do you do? If you abandon the space station to save money for exploration, you're going to do real harm to your international relations with both friends, such as Canada and Japan, but also countries with more problematic relationships, such as Russia.

That's probably just not a realistic option, then. In fact his only options are to spend considerably more money to boost exploration while maintaining the space station; or to radically overhaul the space program, perhaps by skipping the moon and going directly to Mars. But this would probably involve a gap in human spaceflight that's much longer than 6 years.

Labels: politics, space

The Langley team's success prompted some "What went right?" analysis. Erasmus Kloman, at the National Academy of Public Administration, was given the job of finding out. NASA published a redacted version of his report, Unmanned Space Project Management: Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter, which found that bureaucracy was kept to a minimum, while keeping sharply defined goals, and inter-agency turf wars were largely absent. Over on Apollo, 60 engineers reported directly to a senior manager.

As Wingo puts it: "The refugees from Apollo made up the middle management of every Silicon Valley hardware company - they gave it the management and technology backbone."

This was before the era of "corporate re-engineering" - where innovation came to mean reshuffling the administration, rebranding, and a high turnover of management fads. It's impossible to conceive how the EU or the US could achieve such results in a short space of time today. The modest space programs today take many years to complete.

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Serious problems require a serious tool: written reports. For nearly all engineering and scientific communication, instead of PowerPoint, the presentation and reporting software should be a word-processing program (emphasis his) capable of capturing, editing, and publishing text, tables, data graphics, images, and scientific notation. Replacing PowerPoint with Microsoft Word (or, better, a tool with non-proprietary, universal formats) will make presentations and their audiences smarter.

Labels: software, space, technical communication

During the Apollo 11 Lunar Module’s descent to the Moon 40 years ago today, Garman played a direct role in preventing a mission abort. Several warning lights and computer overload alarms came on as the craft descended just above the Moon’s surface, causing worry in Mission Control, but all of Garman’s pre-flight simulation experiences told him that the alarms were not critical and the landing could continue. Without hesitating, and without panicking, the 24-year-old NASA computer engineer confidently gave the “go” to continue the mission.

Granville Paules, was a 32-year-old guidance officer for one of the Apollo 11 mission teams and remembers that moment well.

“The alarms went off on during descent,” Paules said. “It was a conflict between the on-board systems and the computer was starting to get overloaded. Garman had a simulation where a similar thing had occurred about three weeks before that, so he knew what to do. It probably would have been a lot scarier, possibly even an abort for the landing, if we had not had that simulation. I can say that the odds of aborting that lunar landing were a lot higher than people want to believe. That simulation gave everybody the confidence to turn off the alarm and ignore it.”

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My entire life I have known that men landed on the moon. This was not a moment I held my breath for, or dreamed of, or imagined only in books or films or art. It happened long before I was born and has never been anything but a fact. It’s so distant that to me, it’s science fiction. Yet more than any single event in scientific history, a moment that I was not even alive for is still the most inspiring goddamn thing I’ve ever known. Every time I look at those images I am moved by the breadth of human ingenuity. All my cynicism is replaced by a belief that with passion, hard work, and perseverance, we can overcome any barrier—even the ones we didn’t know we had set for ourselves. We can achieve any measure of greatness. We can become our fiction and make our dreams something tangible, attainable.

We can touch the sky.

Nothing in my own lifetime has ever filled me with that kind of hope or inspiration—nothing but science fiction.

With that in mind, I’ve asked authors, artists, critics, and fans in the science fiction community to send me their stories of what they were doing when the LEM landed on the lunar surface, and to tell me how it informed their relationship with science fiction. What you’ll be seeing throughout today on Tor.com are personal glimpses of a moment in history.

Labels: history, SF, space

One of the best resources out there is the Bad Astronomy blog, written by Phil Plait. Mr. Plait works very hard at separating the truth from the various myths people take as the truth. In 2001, he wrote an extensive rebuttal to the Fox program “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?” It addresses, point-for-point, the inaccurate conspiracy theories, which Fox presented with an eye toward sensationalism rather than journalistic integrity. He continues to write to keep the public informed of the truth at Bad Astronomy.

Labels: space

Well, for starters: without the space program we'd probably be dead. Spy satellites are the very keystone of arms verification; without spysats the cold war would quite possibly have turned hot by the early 1960s, due to misinformation and fear permeating the chain of command on either side. Subsequently, gamma-ray detector satellites such as the American Vela constellation and its Soviet equivalents gave some reassurance to the superpowers by giving them the ability to know with a degree of confidence in whether or not nuclear explosions were taking place anywhere on the planet — a prerequisite for nuclear deterrence without a launch-on-warning policy.

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Captain Hank Brandli knew a terrible secret in the summer of 1969: the U.S. Air Force meteorologist had classified information indicating danger to the Apollo 11 crew returning to Earth from their historic mission. They had done it—the Eagle had landed. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had walked on the moon, raised the American flag, collected samples, and then blasted off for a perfectly executed lunar orbit rendezvous with Michael Collins in the command module Columbia. Now they were headed home on the final leg of the trip for a July 24 splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. However, from his highly classified weather forecasting work, Capt Brandli realized that instead of a heroes’ welcome, the astronauts could face a watery grave.

Labels: history, space

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“One weekend I didn’t have any flowers to paint, and I said I think I will paint this photo of Pete Conrad on the Moon,” he recalled. “So I just started painting it and after about two hours, I said, you know, I care about all this stuff. I love spacesuits. I like the lunar modules. And I didn’t really like plants that much.”

So he started to paint missions to the Moon, drawing from photographs, videotapes, the stories of other astronauts and his own experience in November 1969, when he and Mr. Conrad spent seven hours and 45 minutes on the Moon’s surface.

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With a White House-ordered review of its next-generation Constellation rocket program just weeks away, NASA faces some unwelcome news: Key milestones for the agency's Ares I rocket and Orion crew capsule are falling further behind schedule because of design flaws and technical challenges.

An important test of the Orion's emergency escape system that was supposed to happen last year will not come off before November and could slip further.

A review of the proposed fixes for the violent shaking at liftoff that has plagued development of the Ares I has been delayed from this summer to December.

Even the first test flight of the Ares design — a mock-up rocket called the Ares I-X — has been moved from April to July to August and now possibly September.

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What's the first thing you do in the morning on Earth? Well, it's not so different onboard a spacecraft. I will dedicate another entry to the issue of space toilets and leave it alone for now.

How about brushing your teeth? In zero gravity (or more accurately, microgravity, if you're a stickler for such things), some things are easier, like moving medium or large mass items around, but many things are more difficult. It is unbelievably easy to lose things. Get distracted for a moment, and that toothpaste cap is gone! Even if you are good about anchoring such things behind a rubber bungee, some rookie going by could knock it loose.

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The brothers went on to record the first living creat­ure in space the following month, when Laika the dog travelled aboard Sputnik 2, and then, in February 1958, the beeps from Explorer 1, America’s first satellite. Younger sister Maria Teresa recalled “being in their room was like being in the workshop of Dædalus, it was brimming with ideas… it was one big adventure.”

Then, on 28 November 1960, the Bochum space observatory in West Germany said it had intercepted radio signals which it thought might have been a satellite. No official announcement had been made of any launch.
“Our reaction was to immediately switch on the receivers and listen,” said Achille. After almost an hour of tuning in to static, the boys were about to give up when suddenly a tapping sound emerged from the hiss and crackle.

“It was a signal we recognised immediately as Morse code – SOS,” said Gian. But something about this signal was strange. It was moving slowly, as if the craft was not orbiting but was at a single point and slowly moving away from the Earth. The SOS faded into distant space.

The story was picked up by a Swiss-Italian radio station, and the brothers became the station’s space experts. By now, the Judica-Cordiglias were more than ready to capture the first human sounds from space. They came sooner than expected.

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Ultra-high voltage transformers become more finicky as energy demands are greater. Around 50 percent already can't handle the current they're designed for. A little extra current coming in at odd times can slip them over the edge.

The ultra-high voltage transformers, the 500,000- and 700,000-kilovolt transformers, are particularly vulnerable. The United States uses more of these than anyone else. China is trying to implement some million-kilovolt transformers, but I'm not sure they're online yet.

Kappenman also points out that when the transformers blow, they can't be fixed in the field. They often can't be fixed at all. Right now there's a one- to three-year lag time between placing an order and getting a new one.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, space

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Vourlidas has examined thousands of CMEs recorded by SOHO over the past 13 years, and he’s rarely seen such plodding explosions. In active times, CMEs can blast away from the sun faster than 1000 km/s. Even during the solar minimum of 1996, CMEs often revved up to 500 or 600 km/s. “Almost all the CMEs we’ve seen since the end of April 2008, however, are very slow, less than 300 km/s.”

Is this just another way of saying “the sun is very quiet?” Or do slow-motion CMEs represent a new and interesting phenomena? The jury is still out. One thing is clear: solar minimum is more interesting than we thought.

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There was no point, she realized, in preserving the tapes unless she also had an FR-900 Ampex tape drive to read them. But only a few dozen of the machines had been made for the military. The $330,000 tape drives were electronic behemoths, each 7 feet tall and weighing nearly a ton.

Evans scoured salvage lists for a castoff FR-900. As a member of the federal government's Trash Evaluation Board, she was privy to everything being thrown away from government institutions.

One day in the late 1980s, she got a call from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida: "We heard you're looking for FR-900s. We've got three of them. Where do you want us to send them?"

Having already stretched her bosses' goodwill at JPL by storing the tapes there, she reluctantly agreed to take the drives herself. Evans stored the three tape drives from Eglin and a fourth she got off a salvage list -- none of which worked -- in her own garage.

There they sat, for two decades.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, history, science, space, technology

The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: "two patches of intensely bright and white light" emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.

There were eyewitness accounts of stunning auroras, even at equatorial latitudes. The world's telegraph networks experienced severe disruptions, and Victorian magnetometers were driven off the scale.

Though a solar outburst could conceivably be more powerful, "we haven't found an example of anything worse than a Carrington event", says James Green, head of NASA's planetary division and an expert on the events of 1859. "From a scientific perspective, that would be the one that we'd want to survive." However, the prognosis from the NAS analysis is that, thanks to our technological prowess, many of us may not.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, space

"When we got out, we saw a bunch of engineers gathered under our wing. They were shaking their heads. The damage was massive. A whole tile was missing where the L-band antenna was mounted. There was a thicker skin panel there, and the metal had partly melted. If we'd lost a tile anywhere else, it would have burned through and we'd be dead.

"We should have developed an on-orbit patch kit right after STS-27, but NASA was playing Russian Roulette, hoping nothing critical would get hit, and it finally caught up with Columbia."

Labels: space

China is aggressively accelerating the pace of its manned space program by developing a 17,000 lb. man-tended military space laboratory planned for launch by late 2010. The mission will coincide with a halt in U.S. manned flight with phase-out of the shuttle.

The project is being led by the General Armaments Department of the People's Liberation Army, and gives the Chinese two separate station development programs.

Shenzhou 8, the first mission to the outpost in early 2011 will be flown unmanned to test robotic docking systems. Subsequent missions will be manned to utilize the new pressurized module capabilities of the Tiangong outpost.

Labels: space

Using the new method, astronomers can more precisely model the amount and distribution of scattered light produced by young nearby stars suspected of spawning planets, and then subtract the light from images of those stars. Once the glare of the light from the parent stars is removed, young Jupiter-mass planets that emit faint but detectable amounts of heat may show up in images already taken by Hubble’s near-infrared camera.

That’s just what David Lafrenière of the University of Toronto and his colleagues found after examining old Hubble images to look for a planet known to exist around the star HR 8799. Last year, a team led by Christian Marois of the National Research Council of Canada’s Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, which included Lafrenière, used ground-based telescopes to image three planets around that star (SN: 12/6/08, p. 5).

Alerted that another group of astronomers had used the Hubble camera in 1998 to image the same star but had come up empty-handed, Marois, Lafrenière and two collaborators reanalyzed the 11-year-old Hubble images of HR 8799. After subtracting the scattered starlight estimated from the new model, the astronomers recovered the outermost of the trio of planets recently imaged, the team reports online at arXiv.org (http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0902.3247) and in an upcoming Astrophysical Journal Letters. The other two planets, which lie closer to the star, still could not be seen in the Hubble images.

“The first thing it tells you is how valuable maintaining long-term archives can be. Here is a major discovery that’s been lurking in the data for about 10 years!” comments Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which operates Hubble “The second thing its tells you is having a well calibrated archive is necessary but not sufficient to make breakthroughs — it also takes a very innovative group of people to develop very smart extraction routines that can get rid of all the artifacts to reveal the planet hidden under all that telescope and detector structure.”

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Resonance: What was the most advanced computer used during Apollo? How does it compare with today's PCs?

Crenshaw: Most of our work was done on the IBM 70x series, from 702 through 7094. Later in the Apollo era, we had Univac 1108’s and 1110’s, and the CDC 6600. None of them, of course, could hold a candle to the modern PC with Pentium processor. I think their cycles times were all around a microsecond, which is equivalent to a 1 MHz clock speed; not even up to the smallest microprocessor of today. Memory was via magnetic cores, which were even slower. The IBM’s had a maximum of 32K RAM (but 36-bit words, not bytes). Nevertheless, the later processors, notably the Univacs and CDCs, were no slouch. Both had hardware floating point and long word lengths (CDC’s words were 60 bits long), so one could do some serious number crunching.

Despite their low performance, on paper, we got a lot of work out of those old machines. For those used to waiting 15 seconds for a Windows spreadsheet to even load, it’s difficult to imagine how much work a 1MHz computer can do when it’s running full tilt in machine language, not encumbered by bloated software, interpreted languages, and a GUI interface. I’m old enough to remember, and look back on those days wistfully.

Labels: SF, space, technology

To see Comet Lulin with your own eyes, set your alarm for 3 am. The comet rises a few hours before the sun and may be found about 1/3rd of the way up the southern sky before dawn. Here are some dates when it is especially easy to find.

Feb. 24th: Closest approach! On this special morning, Lulin will lie just a few degrees from Saturn in the constellation Leo. Saturn is obvious to the unaided eye, and Lulin could be as well. If this doesn't draw you out of bed, nothing will.

Labels: space

A faulty rocket command sequence aboard the international space station caused the 300-ton structure to shake back and forth vigorously for two minutes last month, during what was supposed to be a routine, gentle orbital adjustment. Space experts in Houston and Moscow have spent the last two weeks searching for the cause of the shaking and doing a damage assessment.

Under the worst-case scenario, such vibrations could rattle the station so much over the long term that the structure might begin to crack and leak. One of the solar arrays might bend out of position, affecting the station’s power-generating system. Experts cautioned that it was too early to determine how likely or unlikely these scenarios might be.

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The pdf document appears to be the same book that Elsevier published and that I gave a copy of to Heinlein; it has all the rules for creating a habitable planet as well as probabilities for finding them. The book that Asimov co authored sold better and is probably more readable, but when I found that the data and tables were largely missing I stopped reading it, and I don't know where my copy of that one is. In any event the RAND pdf is free and if you want to design a planet, it's a good book to have.

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On paper at least, the Jupiter Direct program appears cheaper. Using a smaller and less cool-sounding rocket than the Ares 1, called the Jupiter 120, the program would require the modified external tank from the space shuttle, which would be shot into space by two RS-68 liquid-fuel engines. Liftoff would occur thanks to the two four-segment solid rocket boosters engineers would bring over directly from the existing shuttle program (which is obvious once you see that image).

And better yet, the Jupiter Direct program has longevity built right in. Because its engine configuration is theoretically more powerful than Ares, the 120 rocket would have the extra oompf necessary for a lunar flyby. A larger Jupiter 232 rocket would allow man (and woman) to land on the moon after a hookup with NASA's Orion lander capsule, which the program leaves unchanged.

Ultimately, the plan is about saving money and keeping space flight missions ongoing after the shuttle program is retired, not usurping NASA. The Obama transition team provided no comment on the rogue meeting, or on the Ares program, for that matter.

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Today I want to talk about ejection seats. Gemini had ejection seats and so did the shuttle for the initial flights. I don't know much about the Gemini seats but the shuttle ejection system used on the first four flights was the best there was at the time. And it wouldn't have done much good.

The shuttle ejection seats were taken from those used on supersonic military aircraft. Ejection at supersonic speeds has always been dangerous, probably life threatening. It is best if the ship holds together to get to subsonic speeds where survival is much more likely. At supersonic speeds, hitting the airstream is like hitting a brick wall. Not good. It may be the best option if you are facing certain death by riding a disintegrating ship, but even then it is not a great choice. The shuttle ejection seats were really there for the late stages of landing. If that big glider of an orbiter couldn't make it to the runway, better to eject and bail out than try to crash land on rough territory. In that scenario having ejection seats actually made sense. In a later post I'll talk about the entire entry regime, but just note that from the altitude of about 100,000 ft or lower and speeds from Mach 3 on down, the seats would probably have worked as advertised. An ejection at, say, 10,000 feet and subsonic speed would have been a very good bet in a that situation.

How about using the shuttle ejection seats on ascent?

Not good.

Labels: space

The research team, led by astronomer Christian Marois of the National Research Council Canada/Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, used advanced instrumentation and image-processing techniques known as exoplanet imaging to detect the three faint planets against the bright glare of their host star.

The primary star, barely visible to the naked eye, lies 130 light years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. Its mass is about 1.5 times that of the sun and its age is about 60 million years, significantly less than the sun.

The images were captured by the Gemini North and Keck telescopes at the Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii.

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Originally slated for a mere 90 days near the Martian north pole, clever NASA power engineers kept the Lander doing science for nearly two months beyond that goal. But now mission officials are certain: The lander has run out of power for its internal heater and is presumed to be frozen on the arctic plane.

"At this time, we're pretty convinced that the vehicle is no longer available for us to use," said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We're ceasing operations and declaring an end to mission operations at this point."

As late as last week, the team was still trying to eke a few more experiments out of the robotic lander, even as the declining amount of solar energy in the pole area made their task more difficult.

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The issue is known as "liftoff drift." Ignition of the rocket's solid-fuel motor makes it "jump" sideways on the pad, and a southeast breeze stronger than 12.7 mph would be enough to push the 309-foot-tall ship into its launch tower.

Worst case, the impact would destroy the rocket. But even if that doesn't happen, flames from the rocket would scorch the tower, leading to huge repair costs.

"We were told by a person directly involved [in looking at the problem] that as they incorporate more variables into the liftoff-drift-curve model, the worse the curve becomes," said one NASA contractor, who asked not to be named because he wasn't authorized to discuss Ares.

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In space, above our atmosphere, stars do not twinkle; in space a telescope is also beyond day and night and can thus stare at the same star for weeks on end, gradually teasing from its light the barely perceptible but regular flickers caused by a small orbiting planet. A French satellite called Corot, the first space telescope devoted primarily to looking for rocky planets, is in orbit now. An even more capable American mission, Kepler, will be launched in April. It is expected to find hundreds of Earths, including the first ones orbiting stars like the sun at distances like that of our own Earth. Then, in 2013, NASA will launch a giant infrared telescope called the James Webb Space Telescope. An all-purpose observatory, the Webb was not designed to follow up on the discoveries of Corot and Kepler. But if pushed to the limit, it just might be able to provide the first indication of life—a telltale molecule, such as oxygen, in the planet’s atmosphere—on a super-Earth circling another star. By 2014 headlines could be announcing the first tentative evidence of life beyond our solar system.

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It would take time to test and qualify the old replacement part and train the astronauts to install it in the telescope, said NASA spokesman Michael Curie. NASA also would have to work out new mission details for the astronauts who have trained for two years to carry out five Hubble repair spacewalks.

“The teams are always looking at contingencies, and this is just something that has cropped up we have the ability to deal with. They're just trying to decide what direction we want to go,” Mr. Curie said.

There is a backup channel for the science instruments' command and data-handling system, and NASA may be able to activate it successfully so that data transmission resumes, Mr. Curie said. But if NASA relies solely on the backup channel, there would be no other options if it malfunctioned.

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But if continuing the shuttle means adding shuttle flights rather that trying to spread out the existing 10 flights during the next few years, then the costs could be enormous. At one point last year, Griffin estimated it would cost as much as $4 billion a year to fly the shuttle beyond 2010, a major bite for an agency that had a $17.3 billion budget this year.

To have enough money to build the new rockets and capsules of the Constellation program under its current plan, NASA must retire the shuttle or get more money from Congress.

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Labels: Mars, space

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Publicly, NASA has said it plans to launch Orion, an Apollo-like capsule that will replace the space shuttle and will also ferry astronauts to the Moon, by March 2015.

But officials in the agency have been aiming for a 2013 launch. That no longer seems likely.

An internal report released on Wednesday shows Orion is encountering a host of problems. The agency's 'watch list' boasts a number of technical concerns, including an excessive amount of shaking during launch and a hatch that may be hard to open (a troublesome reminder of the Apollo 1 launch pad fire).

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A key Ares project manager dismisses their design as little more than a sketch on a napkin that won't work.

A spokesman for the competing effort, Ross Tierney, said concerned engineers at NASA and some contractors want a review of the Ares plans but can't speak out for fear of being demoted, transferred or fired.

The Jupiter design is being reviewed by a team of 57 volunteer engineers, from line engineers up to NASA middle managers, Tierney said. Those numbers are dwarfed by NASA's Ares workforce, which has thousands of government workers and contractors.

The head of the Ares office at Marshall said he can't rule out the possibility that some of his people are involved with the underground program.

"I don't know what people do on their own time," Steve Cook said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

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In recent years the rocks have also helped researchers to answer practical questions that have emerged since President Bush’s 2004 proposal to return to the Moon by 2020 and set up a permanent outpost. Planners are using the rocks to study the pernicious effects of regolith on machinery and astronaut health. They are learning how to extract oxygen and other vital elements from lunar rocks and soil. And they need to understand how to shield living spaces from the deadly radiation that eternally pounds the lunar surface.

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Formal go-ahead for the Near Earth Orbit Surveillance Satellite was announced Thursday in Calgary by the two federal bodies that are picking up the $12-million cost, the Canadian Space Agency and Defence Research Development Canada.

About the size of a large suitcase, the spacecraft can spot asteroids just 10 metres across by taking photos through a 15-centimetre telescope, smaller than those used by some amateur stargazers.

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In a move to make the heavy-lift vehicle more robust (predicting an increased launch thrust requirement) to send four astronauts, a lunar lander plus supplies, NASA has announced the Ares V rocket will be "beefed up" to cater for our future needs to get man back to the Moon. This huge vehicle is now designed to carry payloads of over 156,600 lb (71,000 kg), some 15,600 lb (or 10%) more than the original concept. Ares V was originally designed to be approximately the same length as the original Saturn V lunar rocket (361 feet or 110 metres long), but to accommodate an extra booster engine and extra payload volume, Ares V will be 381 feet (116 metres) long. That's the height of a 38-story building. This increased capability will obviously be of huge benefit to the future lunar and Mars missions.

These design alterations were announced after a nine-month study to investigate whether NASA could succeed in its goal to be ready for a return mission to the Moon in 2020, and a manned mission to Mars afterwards. Constellation program manager Jeff Hanley is upbeat about the study's findings. "This extensive review proves we are ready for the next phase: taking these concepts and moving forward," he said.

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