The MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) Mars probe was launched successfully from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 1.28 pm EST (6.28 pm GMT) on Monday 18 November 2013. The NASA probe has now deployed its solar panels and is orientating itself for its 10 month journey to Mars, which it should reach around 22 September 2014. The probe will follow a simple ballistic trajectory, reaching the Red Planet when it is in alignment with (at its closest to) Earth.
The path of the MAVEN probe to Mars. NASA/LASP/JPL.
Once in orbit around Mars, MAVEN will perform a number of dips into the planet's upper atmosphere, enabling it to examine it's composition (it has previously only been possible to study the composition of the lower atmosphere, using landers) as well as levels of solar radiation and loss of atmospheric gasses into space. This is of particular interest, as evidence gathered by recent Mars missions heavily implies that there was once liquid water on the planet, something which would be impossible at today's atmospheric density.
NASA's Juno Spacecraft will flyby the Earth on Wednesday 9 October 2013, gaining a gravitational boost from the encounter which will accelerate it on its way towards its eventual destination in a polar orbit around Jupiter. The probe will be at its closest at about 7.20 pm GMT, when it will be approximately 559 km above a point in the South Atlantic roughly 200 km off the South African coastline, and potentially visible to amateur astronomers in Cape Province.
The path of the Juno Spacecraft past the Earth on 9 October 2013. Heavens Above.
Juno was launched on 5 August 2011, and should reach Jupiter on 4 July 2016. It is following a somewhat complex path to the giant planet, which involves passing outside the orbit of Mars before falling back inwards in order to gain more thrust from a slingshot maneuver past the Earth, using the Earth's gravity to propel itself out to Jupiter at greater speed than could be imparted by the thrusters used to launch it. Once in orbit around Jupiter it will complete 33 orbits around the Planet, before crashing into the atmosphere in October 2017. Juno is designed to study the composition of the Jovian atmosphere.
Benzos Expeditions, a project set up and run by Amazon founder Jeff Benzos, announced this week that it had recovered two F1 engines from the Apollo Space Program 579 km off the coast of Cape Canaveral. Each of the Apollo Missions between 1967 and 1973 used five of these engines as during take-off, blasting it to a height of 67 km in 168 seconds, before being cut off and allowed to fall back into the Atlantic Ocean. Benzos Expeditions announced that it had discovered the engines using sonar in March 2012, and have spent a year organizing the salvage expedition. It is not possible to tell which mission the engines came from.
A heat exchanger from an F1 engine being inspected on the deck of the Seabed Worker. Benzos Expeditions.
The F1 was a liquid-fueled engine designed by Rocketdyne in the 1950s for the United States Airforce, but never used in conventional aviation due to its excessive size. The engine was later adopted by NASA for the Apollo Missions. A total of 65 F1 engines were used between 1967 and 1973.
The F1 engines in their original position at the base of a Saturn V Rocket. NASA.
The engines were brought to the surface using remotely operated vehicles which partially excavated the engines at a depth of over 4 km, before attaching cables which allowed them to be raised to the surface. The engines will now be returned to Cape Canaveral for preservation treatment, before being sent on to the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum and the Museum of Flight in Seattle.
NASA scientists have released an image of a 400 km long river on Saturn's moon Titan, imaged by the Cassini Space Probe during a flyby on 26 September 2012. The river meanders for some distance across a flat plane before entering the Kraken Mare, a sea of hydrocarbons (probably methane and ethane) near to the moon's north pole described as being intermediate in size between the Caspian and the Mediterranean on Earth.
Titan is the only place in the Solar System, other than the Earth, where a cycle of liquid evaporation and precipitation is known to form a system of rivers and sea, though ancient sedementological structures suggest that Mars once had rivers of running water, and rivers of what appear to be sulphurous lava have been sighted on Jupiter's moon Io, though these last are thought to be fed by volcanic eruptions rather than rain.
Left: Cassini image of the new river on Titan. NASA/JPL.
On Monday 6 August 2012, at 5.31 am GMT, NASA's Curiosity Rover is due to touch down in Gale Crater, on the surface of Mars. It will do this using a unique descent method designed to cope with the difficulties caused by Mars's thin atmosphere, which is to thin for parachutes to work as effectively as they do on Earth, but thick enough to cause stability problems during a rocket-assisted descent like those used by the Apollo Lunar landers. Curiosity will aerobrake (slow by friction with the atmosphere) inside a carbon-impregnated ceramic heatshield to within 10 km of the surface, during which time it should decelerate from 5800 m/s to 470 m/s. It will then deploy a parachute to slow it further, hopefully reaching 100 m/s at an altitude of 1.8 km. For the final part of the descent Curiosity will be using an entirely new technology, the Sky Crane, which will slow the landing platform further using rocket thrusters, while the rover itself is lowered to the ground on a 7.6 m cable. Once the rover reaches the ground the rocket thrusters will accelerate, lifting the landing platform away from the rover to crash-land at a safe distance.
Graphic showing the planned curiosity landing. NASA/JPL.
Curiosity was launched from Cape Canaveral on 26 November 2011. It is designed to study the geology and climate of Mars, with a view to determining whether the planet could ever have supported life, and paving the way for a future manned mission. The Gale Crater landing site was chosen as it is one of the lowest points on Mars, so if Mars did once have oceans that have subsequently evaporated away due to the thin atmosphere and low gravity of the planet, they should have persisted longest here, and therefore, logically, any geological evidence of this is more likely to have survived here than on other parts of the planet, where the oceans would have disappeared longer ago.
On 23 July 2012 Professor Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, third woman in space, and youngest ever American in space, passed away after a 17 month battle with pancreatic cancer.
Sally Ride was born in Encino, Los Angeles in May 1951, the elder of two daughters of Dale Burdell Ride, Professor of Political Science at Santa Monica Community College, and Joyce Hoyce Ride, a counselor at a women's correctional institution. She attended Westlake School for Girls, Swarthmore College and UCLA before entering Stanford University where she achieved first a bachelor's, then a master's and finally a PhD in physics. She was also involved in sport, being at one point nearly becoming a professional tennis player.
In 1978 Sally Ride joined NASA after responding to a newspaper advertisement, and became one of the first six women to join the astronaut training program. Ride was part of the team that developed the Space Shuttle's robot arm. She served as CapCom (ground based communication officer) to the second and third Space Shuttle missions, before being selected for the crew of the seventh mission.
On 18 June 1983 Sally Ride was one of five crew members launched from the Kennedy Space Center aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, making her the first American woman in space, proceeded only by the Russians Valentina Tereshkova (16 June 1963) and Svetlana Savitskaya (19 August 1982). She was also the youngest American in Space, a record that remains unbroken. The mission was also noted as being the largest number of people to leave the Earth aboard a single craft to date.
The mission badge for the seventh shuttle mission. Wikipedia.
During the mission the crew launched two communications satellites and one experimental satellite, SPAS-l, which flew alongside the Shuttle for several hours before being recaptured by the Shuttle's robot arm, operated by Sally Ride, making Ride the first person to capture a satellite in this way.
In 1984 Ride returned to space aboard the thirteenth Shuttle mission, again on the Space Shuttle Challenger. This was the first mission to take a crew of seven into space, the first mission to carry two women (Ride plus Kathryn Sullivan), the first mission to carry a Canadian astronaut (Marc Garneau), and the first mission to include a space walk by a woman (Sullivan).
Ride was in training for a third mission aboard the Challenger when the Shuttle exploded during a takeoff in January 1986. Ride served on the investigative commission into the accident, before being reassigned to NASA headquarters in Washington DC, where she founded NASA's Office of Exploration, before resigning to take up a post at Stanford University in 1987.
In 1989 Ride became professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego and Director of the California Space Institute. In 2003 she served on the Space Shuttle ColumbiaAccident Investigation Board, the only person to serve on both Shuttle accident investigation boards. She wrote a number of books on science aimed at children, as well as being involved with a number of outreach programs by NASA and JPL aimed at school children. She also founded a company, Sally Ride Science, dedicated to promoting science to young students.
She is survived by her (female) partner of 27 years, co-author of several books, and Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President of Sally Ride Science, Tam O'Shaughnessy, as well as her mother, her sister, Bear Ride and former husband, fellow astronaut Steven Hawley. Ride and O'Shaughnessy had come out in 1985, while Ride was still married to Hawley, however Ride, who was intensely private, had never sought to publicize the fact widely.
On 24 November 1966 NASA's Lunar Orbiter 2 probe photographed the 93 km wide Copernicus Crater on the Moon from an altitude of 45 km and a horizontal distance of 207.7 km, effectively looking sideways at the surface of the Moon. This was the first time such a landscape view of the Moon had been seen, and was widely hailed as one of the most iconic images of the century at the time, though it was later overshadowed by images from the Apollo Moon Lander Program.
This image has now been digitally remastered and released by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, which aims to preserve the Lunar Orbiter images for posterity. The versions of the print have a considerably better resolution than the original, allowing details that were not previously visible to be seen.
The newly remastered view of the Copernicus Crater. NASA/LOIRP.
Enhanced details on the new image. NASA/LOIRP.
The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Program has rereleased a number of other iconic images of the Moon recently.
Earthrise, as imaged by Apollo 8 on 24 December 1968. Apollo 8 orbited the moon 10 times with a human crew of three, seven months before the Apollo 11 moon landing. NASA/LOIRP.
Image of the Moon from orbit, taken from the Gemini VII spacecraft on 23 March 1965. NASA/LOIRP.
In 28 January 1986 the Space Shuttle Challenger blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a mission to deploy a number of tracking and relay satellites and the SPARTAN 203 experiment, a deploy-and-recoverable experiment designed to study Halley's Comet. The mission was also carrying the Shuttle Program's first ever civilian passenger, school-teacher Christa McAuliffe, as part of the Shuttle Student Involvement Program, intended to let school-children design experiments for, and interact with, the space program.
73 seconds after launch the shuttle exploded catastrophically, killing all seven crew members on board. This was later found to be due to a faulty seal (O-ring) on one of the solid boosters.
26 years later new footage of the incident has emerged. This was filmed by amateur cameraman Jeffrey Ault, and has been released under license from Ault by the Huffington Post.
New footage of the Challenger Shuttle Disaster. Jeffrey Ault/Huffington Post.
After the Challenger Disaster the Shuttle Fleet was grounded for two years while the incident was investigated. The loss of Challenger shook NASA badly, as they had never before launched a manned mission which had failed to reach space. The Shuttle Program went on till 2011, with the final mission landing in July of that year. There is currently no clear replacement for the Space Shuttle, and it seems unlikely that the US Government will be willing to fund any similar program in the foreseeable future.
The Mission Badge for the final Challenger Mission: STS-51-L.
This week at the First Kepler Science Conference at the Ames Research ParkNASA scientists announced that the Kepler Space Telescope had potentially discovered an exoplanet smaller than the Earth. At the moment the team are reluctant to say that they are able to confirm this discovery, but a paper is being prepared for the journal Nature, which only publishes major discoveries that have not been documented elsewhere, which suggests that they have serious data to support their claim.
The new planet is in the Kepler-20 system, formerly known as KOI-70 (Kepler Object of Interest-70), which now has three confirmed planets, Kepler-20b, Kepler-20c and Kepler-20d and two unconfirmed planets, KOI-70.04 and KOI-70.05; the star is now referred to as Kepler-20A (letters are capitalized to indicate stars), but the unconfirmed objects retain the old designaton for the system until they are confirmed. All five orbit closer to their star than Mercury does to the sun. The three confirmed planets have been observed to cause a regular dimming of the star as they transit (pass in front of) it, and to cause perturbations in its rotation (wobbles) due to their mass. The two unconfirmed planets have been observed to transit the star, but are two small to cause any visible movement in the star, and will so need to be confirmed by another method. The smaller planets can be detected when they transit the star because they are so close to it; a small close planet causes as much dimming as a larger more distant one.
An artist's impression of the Kepler-20 system.
It is KOI-70.04 that is potentially smaller than the Earth, about 80-90% of the size of our planet. It is the second closest object to the star, at a orbiting every 6.1 days at a distance of about 9.6 million kilometers or 6.4% of the distance from Earth to the Sun. It is estimated that this would give the planet a surface temperature of 600°C.
The three larger planets have masses of 8.7 times that of the Earth (Kepler-20b), 16.1 times the mass of the Earth (Kepler-20c) and somewhere under 20.1 times the mass of the Earth (Kepler-20d). All three have radiuses between 1.9 and 3 times that of the Earth.
No further information is available at this time; no data on KOI-70.05 has been released, although it is presumably the closest object to the star.
On the first of February 2003, after a 16 day mission studying microgravity and atmospheric chemistry, the Space Shuttle Columbia re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, and began its decent towards Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. Unfortunately the shuttle had sustained damage to the leading edge of one of its wings during takeoff, something that was not apparent to the crew who had no way of inspecting this part of the shuttle during flight. As the shuttle entered the atmosphere gasses superheated by the shuttle's speed entered the wing through the damaged area, melting the interior supports of the wing and causing the shuttle to break apart and causing the deaths of all seven crew members. Debris was scattered over a large area of eastern Texas, with only about 40% of the shuttle ever being recovered.
Footage of the final re-entry of Columbia.
On the 2nd of August 2011 the Nacogdoches Police Department announced the discovery of a spherical reactant storage tank from the shuttle the week before in Lake Nacogdoches, 250 km southeast of Dallas. The announcement was not made immediately, as police in Texas have had a number of false reports of shuttle parts in the past, and wished to have the find confirmed by NASA before making the announcement.
The Reactant Storage Tank from Columbia, on the bed of Lake Nacogdoches.
The sphere was a double walled thermally insulated tank used to store liquid hydrogen used as part of the shuttle's propulsion system. The hydrogen was reacted with oxygen (also stored as a liquid in insulated spherical tanks) as a fuel to generate electricity. (This came as a bit of a surprise to me, but I checked my son's toy Space Shuttle and it does indeed have spherical fuel storage tanks).
Texas has been suffering from an extreme drought this year, part of a pattern of extreme weather that has affected much of the US, which many people are attributing to global warming. This has caused problems for agriculture, industry and everyday life. Lake Nacogdoches is currently 3 m bellow its usual level for the time of year, exposing much of the lake bed.
The final flight of NASA's Shuttle Program ended on the 21st July 2011, leaving the US incapable of putting a man into space. For the time being US scientists working on the International Space Station will be transported their by the Russian Federal Space Agency, although relations between the US and Russia can still be a little erratic. The Russian Space Agency plans to end the Space Station Mission in 2020 by plunging the station into the Pacific Ocean (deemed safer than leaving it in orbit to fall apart).
A week after NASA/JPL's Dawn Space Probe moved into orbit around the asteroid Vesta images of the hole of the surface have been released. Vesta is the second largest object in the Asteroid Belt and has a surface area of 883 000 km², twice that of California or 42 times that of Wales. It shows considerable variation over its surface.
Animation of the Surface of Vesta.
There is a higher resolution version on the Dawn website here.
Much of the south of the asteroid is smooth, while northern part of Vesta is heavily pitted, the result of many small impacts. This implies the northern surface is older than the southern; the most likely scenario is that both hemispheres were pitted heavily by impacts early in the solar system's history (though still over a very long period of time), and that the southern hemisphere was then resurfaced by a single large impact.
Overlapping craters nicknamed 'The Snowman'
in the Northern Hemisphere of Vesta.
The equatorial region of Vesta show heavy grooving, which is unexpected. Similar grooves are also seen on the Martian moon, Phobos, where they are attributed to repeated impacts by debris in the same orbit as the moon, repeatedly striking from the same direction. The Russian Phobos-Grunt mission is due to visit the moon and collect samples in 2013, which should vastly improve our understanding of Phobos' history.
Grooves on the surface of Phobos.
This is surprising on Vesta as it occupies a more sparse area of space; our current understanding implies the Asteroid Belt to be made up of scattered, remote objects. The grooving implies that early in the Solar System's history the Asteroid Belt may have been more densely packed.
The Dawn Probe should remain in orbit about Vesta for a year, during which time it should gather considerable information about the asteroid's structure and mineralogy. After this it will move on to Ceres, the largest object in the Asteroid Belt.
On the 22nd of July this year NASA announced that it's next Mars rover, the Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity, will target Gale Crater, just south of the Martian equator on the fringes of Elysium Planitia. The Mars Science Laboratory is a car-sized rover intended for launch in November or December this year; it will cary the most advanced set of tools for the analysis of geological samples yet sent to Mars.
An artist's impression of the Mars Science Laboratory in action.
Gale Crater was chosen from a list of thirty potential landing sights due to it's extremely low elevation; water runs downhill so, logically, if Mars once had any liquid water, then the last places it endured would have been the lowest points, and anything being carried in the water would have a good chance of being carried to the lowest points on the planet. Evaporites (minerals formed when salt-laden water evaporates) have already been found on Mars; what the Mars Science Laboratory will be looking for in particular will be any organic compounds that could indicate that life once existed on the Red Planet.
Like many craters on bodies with little or no atmosphere Gale Crater (named after the Australian amateur astronomer Walter Frederick Gale) has a central peak. These are caused by material compressed during the original impact rebounding. In Gale Crater this is surrounded by an enormous mound of unidentified debris; in the southern part of the crater this is thought to be 4.5 k think, and overtops the rim of the crater. It is this unidentified debris that is of interest to scientists. It appears to be layered in structure, and may have been laid down over a period of 2 billion years (the crater itself is between 3.5 and 3.8 billion years old). Some scientists believe it is the eroded remains of an ancient sea- or lake-bed that once competely covered the crater.
3D Animation of the Gale Crater Landing Site.
The Mars Science Laboratory will be launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida between the 25 November and the 18 December 2011, using an Atlas V 541 Launch Vehicle, with four solid propellent rocket motors.
The Cruise Stage, weighing about 400 kg, will separate from the launch vehicle and carry the lander to Mars. It will have a propulsion system made up of eight thrusters fueled by hydrozene rocket fuel from two titanium tanks, and derive power from a large solar array. As well as carrying the probe to Mars the cruise stage will have to carefully monitor and regulate its temperature during the journey. To this end it has a system of coolant pipes, radiators and insulation blankets, monitored by a system of thermostats which can activate the cooling and heating systems as needed.
When the vehicle reaches Mars the Lander Stage will separate from the Cruise Stage and descend into the atmosphere, using a parachute to slow itself. As it nears the surface it will activate a set of four rocket motors, then detach itself from the parachute, decelerating as it descends the remaining distance. When it gets close enough to the surface it will hover on the rocket motors and lower the lander stage to the surface on a cable. The descent stage will then disconnect from the lander and accelerate away.
The lander itself is a car sized robot exploration vehicle with six independently controlled wheels on extended legs, designed to be able to get over obstacles 50 cm high. It will be fueled by a small nuclear power system with a plutonium power source. It has an array of cameras for navigation, hazard avoidance and scientific imaging, as well as an extendable arm, with a variety of scientific instruments.
