Which should it be? The moon, Venus, or a nearby asteroid?
(Credit: NASA)NASA has chosen three options it will consider as its next target for future scientific space exploration--Venus, the moon, or an asteroid.
The three areas of focus are finalists in a competition designed to help the space agency determine where it should spend its time and money to get the most scientific value out of research about our solar system. It's part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which already has two missions under way. The first is the New Horizons mission, a spacecraft that's currently on its way to Pluto and has already sent back images from a quick flyby of Jupiter. The second is called Juno, a large-scale survey of Jupiter that's planned for launch in 2011. This competition will determine the focus of New Frontiers' third mission.
The three final proposals being considered are:
- Venus: The Surface and Atmosphere Geochemical Explorer, or SAGE, mission designed by Larry Esposito of the University of Colorado at Boulder would send a probe to Venus. The probe's instruments would collect data as it descends through the planet's atmosphere, then collect and analyze geological and minerological content after landing on Venus' surface.
- An asteroid: The Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer spacecraft, called Osiris-Rex and designed by Michael Drake of the University of Arizona at Tucson, would instead set its sights on a nearby asteroid. Osiris-Rex would collect material from the surface of an asteroid and return the samples to Earth for NASA to analyze.
- Moon: The Lunar South Pole-Aitken Basin Sample Return Mission, devised by Bradley Jolliff of Washington University in St. Louis, would entail dropping a lander near the south pole of the moon. The lander would collect material from the lunar surface, believed to have come from the moon's mantle, and return it to Earth for further study.
NASA will give $3.3 million to each of the three teams so they can conduct year-long studies to devise their mission's feasibility, cost, and management and technical plans. A final selection will be made in 2011 after those studies are complete.
The future of U.S. involvement in space exploration was the subject of much debate in 2009 and remains up in the air. NASA's current shuttle program is due to be retired this year, and a replacement program is not likely to be put in place for at least another seven years, according to a presidential panel that recently analyzed several possible strategies for manned spaceflight. And NASA currently has no money in its projected budget to operate the International Space Station beyond 2015.
The first man on the moon took a moment Monday, on the 40th anniversary of his "giant leap," to remember the Apollo program and the engineering triumph that won the Cold War space race and opened the door to the manned exploration of the solar system.
Speaking at an Apollo celebration at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, Neil Armstrong enjoyed a standing ovation before sharing his view of the achievement that carried him to the moon, concluding with a simple, heartfelt "Apollo was a good thing to do."
Neil Armstrong's shadow on the moon.
(Credit: NASA)"Thank you so much," he said from the stage. "Whenever I come to this city, if I have 20 minutes to spare, I come to this building. Not necessarily to look at craft hanging from the ceiling and sitting on the floors. But to absorb, by osmosis or radiation or some unknown mechanism, some of the history that resides here. And it must have worked, because as one young man recently said to me, 'Pop, you're history!'
"So let me take one minute to recount some of those flights that we saw in the video earlier. Forty winters have passed since the first manned flights of the Apollo spacecraft. And so, let's kind of return to that remarkable time between October of 1968 and November of 1969.
"Those 13 months began with the first manned Apollo flight, which demonstrated the ability of its command module to fly longer than the duration of a round trip to the moon. Just two months later, the second flight, in a remarkably bold move, flew to, and orbited, the moon.
"The third flight, in Earth orbit, tested the lunar module in its inaugural flight. Two months later, the fourth flight took a lunar module to lunar orbit in a dress rehearsal that demonstrated the ability of mission control to communicate and track two vehicles in different orbits about the moon.
"The fifth flight completed the final step, demonstrating the ability to descend to, land on, and return from the moon to lunar orbit. The sixth flight, the last flight of 1969m, was nearly operational, landing on the lunar surface precisely alongside the Surveyor 3 spacecraft, which had arrived there two-and-a-half years earlier.
"No flight test program of any complex flying machine was ever conducted so efficiently and with such a small number of flights. Six more ever more complex and difficult flights would continue the Apollo exploration program over the following three years.
"Those successes were very impressive 40 years ago, but they were not miraculous. They were the result of the imagination and inventive minds of the people in the Apollo project since its inception eight years earlier. Those years engendered some of the most challenging, most difficult and most productive work in the history of modern engineering.
"Eight years, including a year and a half of redesign as a consequence of those deficiencies that were responsible for the tragic and fatal fire of the Apollo 1 spacecraft. Creating a strategy, a configuration and a craft to carry men to the moon was staggeringly complex. It required the very best in creativity, determination and perseverance that could be assembled in the American workplace.
"Seldom in recorded history have so many government employees so intensely and for such long hours worked at their chores. And seldom have so many aerospace engineers and craftsmen been so careful, so diligent and so determined.
"It was a superb national enterprise. Our knowledge of the moon increased a thousand-fold and more. Techniques were developed for interplanetary navigation and travel. Our home planet has been seen from afar and that perspective has caused us to think about its - and our - significance.
"Children, inspired by the excitement of space flight, have come to appreciate the wonder of science, the beauty of mathematics, and the precision of engineering. Young minds in our own country and around the world now believe they can do great things. And they can, if they apply themselves as intensely as the Apollo workforce did four decades ago.
"Tonight, we remember a special time. We remember a time, a passion for perfection, we remember a level of achievement, which really surprised us all. Human interest and media coverage this month confirmed that many others remember that time and remember Apollo with some warmth and even a little admiration.
"It left a lasting imprint on society and history. Tonight, we remember and congratulate all those who made it possible. Apollo was a good thing to do."
The six members of the Mars500 team spent 105 days in this chamber at Moscow's Institute of Biomedical Problems.
(Credit: European Space Agency)Sometime in the not-too-distant future, perhaps, we'll all be as excited about people landing on Mars as we were 40 years ago about the first moon landing. But don't hold your breath.
In the meantime, mission-to-Mars dreamers and wannabes will have to make do with Earth-bound exercises such as the European Space Agency's Mars500 program. Earlier this week, a group of six Mars500 participants emerged from a mission-to-Moscow mock-up meant to simulate part of what will eventually be a very long journey to the Red Planet.
The Euro-sextet ended their simulated Mars mission on Tuesday, after 105 days sealed into an isolation facility designed to replicate many features of a potential spacecraft built to fly to Mars and back. Since March 31, the participants (one from Germany, one from France, and four from Russia) have been engaged in science experiments, monitoring of their physiological state, and posting chirpy weekly updates.
"We had an outstanding team spirit throughout the entire 105 days," said Cyrille Fournier, the French airline pilot who posted many of the cheery log entries. "Living for that long in a confined environment can only work if the crew is really getting along with each other. The crew is the crucial key to mission success, which became very evident to me during the 105 days."
Spacecraft or dorm room? The Mars500 crew watches "Lord of the Rings."
(Credit: ESA)Team-building exercises included watching movies and playing music. The participants also grew their own veggies, including tomatoes, strawberries, radishes, and cabbage.
The other members of the Mars500 isolation ward were Oliver Knickel, a mechanical engineer in the German army; cosmonauts Sergei Ryazansky (commander) and Oleg Artemyev; Alexei Baranov, a medical doctor; and Alexei Shpakov, a sports physiologist.
In an entry from June 23, Fournier describes a typical day.
Along with the close quarters, the Mars500 crew had to endure modest hardships, including a 20-minute delay each way in communications with "Earth" and at least one incident that, in a real spacecraft, could have proved very bad indeed. Wrote Knickel in a May 19 account that had echoes of the Apollo 13 mission:
As Murphy's Law would have it, just after midnight on 12 May, we had an off-nominal situation when the air purification and conditioning system in the crew quarters failed. This could be seen from the operation center of our module, where you can watch and tune all parameters in all three modules--including temperature, atmospheric humidity, and the concentration of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide. We quickly noticed an increase in temperature up to 30 degrees Celsius, as well as an increase of the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide concentration in the air, which can quickly become life-threatening.
The in-house repairs turned out to be fairly simple, and the crew was able to press ahead with a celebration of Knickel's 29th birthday that included balloons, gifts, and karaoke in Russian.
Since there were apparently no "Silent Running"-style meltdowns, the European Space Agency and its Russian partner, the Institute of Biomedical Problems, plan to proceed with a longer simulation, a 520-day sojourn expected to start in early 2010.
Forty years after the Apollo 11 voyage to the moon, NASA released photographs from the new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft Friday showing five of the six Apollo landing sites. Shadows cast by the Apollo descent stages are clearly visible and in some cases, the moon walkers' paths can be seen in the disturbed dust.
The Apollo 11 landing site, photographed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The scene is 925 feet across.
(Credit: NASA)"We were very interested in getting our first peek at the lunar module descent stages just for the thrill - and to see how well the cameras had come into focus," Mark Robinson, principal investigator of the LRO's main camera, said in a statement. "Indeed, the images are fantastic and so is the focus."
The Apollo 11, 14, 15, 16, and 17 landing sites were photographed between July 11 and 15. The Apollo 12 landing site will be imaged during upcoming orbits.
The Apollo 14 landing site as seen by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
(Credit: NASA)Launched June 18, the Lunar Reconnaissance orbiter braked into an initially elliptical orbit around the moon on June 23. It eventually will be maneuvered into a circular 31-mile-high orbit, allowing it to photograph surface features - including the Apollo landing sites - with three times greater resolution than the pictures released Friday.
Equipped with seven state-of-the-art cameras and other instruments, LRO was built to look for suitable landing sites for future manned missions while creating the most detailed lunar atlas ever assembled.
The solar-powered spacecraft also will measure the solar and cosmic radiation that future lunar explorers will face and map out the surface topology, mineralogy, and chemical composition of Earth's nearest neighbor. One year will be spent scouting future landing sites followed by three years of purely scientific observations.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched June 18 from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, has beamed back its first pictures of the moon as engineers continue instrument checkout and calibration prior to the start of its primary mission.
The LRO spacecraft braked into a highly elliptical orbit around the moon June 23. A series of rocket firings have now placed the satellite in its so-called commissioning orbit, one with a low point of about 19 miles and a high point of 124 miles. Later this summer, it will be maneuvered into a circular 31-mile-high orbit around the moon's poles.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, was turned on June 30. The first test images showed cratered terrain in the lunar highlands south of the Sea of Clouds. Each picture represents a square measuring 0.87 miles wide.
A test image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showing cratered terrain near the southern lunar highlands south of the Sea of Clouds.
(Credit: NASA)
An Atlas 5 rocket thundered to life and streaked into space Thursday, hurling two NASA spacecraft toward the moon for a $583 million mission to scout out landing sites for future manned missions and to search for evidence of hidden ice near its frigid poles.
One spacecraft will map the cratered surface from a perilously low 31-mile-high orbit while the other will blast out 350 tons of pulverized rock and soil for chemical analysis, digging a shallow 66-foot-wide crater in a kamikaze crash visible from Earth.
"First, we want to identify safe landing sites," said project scientist Rich Vondrak. "Then, we want to search for resources on the moon. And finally, we want to get better insight into the space radiation environment and how it may be harmful to humans."
Delayed 20 minutes by nearby thunderstorms, the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket's RD-180 first stage engine ignited at 5:32 p.m., slowly pushing the towering rocket away from launch complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
An Atlas 5 rocket takes off on a NASA mission to scout out lunar landing sites and to search for hidden ice near the moon's poles.
(Credit: United Launch Alliance)Spectacular rocket cam views showed the Atlas 5's fiery exhaust plume against the cloud-draped limb of planet Earth and the deep black of space. Another camera showed the nose cone fairing falling away, exposing the satellite payload to view.
Two firings by the Atlas 5's hydrogen-fueled Centaur second stage successfully boosted the dual-spacecraft payload onto a four-day trajectory to the moon.
The $504 million Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, equipped with seven state-of-the-art cameras and other instruments, will look for suitable landing sites for future manned missions while creating the most detailed lunar atlas ever assembled.
The 4,200-pound solar-powered spacecraft also will measure the solar and cosmic radiation that future lunar explorers will face and map out the surface topology, mineralogy and chemical composition of Earth's nearest neighbor. One year will be spent scouting future landing sites followed by three years of purely scientific observations.
While its cameras will not be able to detect the footprints of the 12 Apollo astronauts who once walked on the moon, they will be able to see the landing stages, rovers and other equipment that were left behind.
LRO's companion, the $79 million Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or Lcross, faces a much shorter lifetime. With LRO on its own, Lcross will maneuver the spent Atlas 5's Centaur second stage into a looping four-month orbit back around the Earth.
If all goes well, Lcross will aim itself and the Centaur back at the moon, targeting a permanently shadowed crater near the south pole for a dramatic crash landing October 9. With LRO looking on from lunar orbit, the 5,000-pound Centaur will hit the dark surface at some 5,600 mph, blasting out a 66-foot-wide crater some 13 feet deep.
The debris excavated by the impact will be blown high above the lunar surface, some of it above the crater's rim and into sunlight for the first time in 2 billion years or more.
Lcross, following close behind the Centaur on a virtually identical course, will fly through the debris cloud, spending four precious minutes studying the composition of the material and looking for signs of water ice with a suite of nine instruments.
Then it, too, will crash to the moon less than 2 miles away after dutifully transmitting its data back to Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope will monitor the impact, as will amateur and professional astronomers in the Western hemisphere, looking for the flash that will signal the Centaur's demise.
The LRO/Lcross mission is NASA's first trip to the moon since the more modest Lunar Prospector was launched in 1998. The new missions are part of NASA's post-Columbia program to send astronauts back to the moon to establish a permanent Antarctica-style research station starting around 2020.
The Bush administration approved the new plan and President Obama endorsed the resumption of moon flights during his campaign.
But earlier this year, the White House Office of Management and Budget cut $3.1 billion from NASA's projected budgets through 2013--money needed to begin development of a heavy-life moon rocket--and the president ordered an independent re-assessment of NASA's long-range goals.
The review panel held its first public hearing Wednesday and its final report is expected by the end of the summer.
Regardless of the ultimate fate of NASA's manned moon program, the two spacecraft launched Thursday promise to greatly advance understanding of the moon's history and evolution, along with making the first serious attempt to identify favorable landing sites for future long-duration visits.
A 'rocket cam' view of the Atlas 5's first stage exhaust plume during the climb to space.
(Credit: NASA TV)Separating from the Lcross/Centaur shortly after launch, LRO will fly to the moon on its own. After a long rocket firing Tuesday morning to brake into an elliptical orbit, engineers will spend up to two months checking out and calibrating the spacecraft's instruments and maneuvering it into a circular 31-mile-high orbit.
For comparison, the orbits used by Apollo command modules were about 70 miles high.
"As its name says, LRO is all about doing reconnaissance at the moon," said Craig Tooley, the mission's project manager at Goddard. "Reconnaissance, specifically, to bring us back the data and the information we need to plan and execute the human return to the moon.
"An inevitable question I get is 'why do we need LRO? Haven't we done this?' And, indeed, of course, we've been to the moon. But when we went to the moon for Apollo, we went to the equatorial regions and we intentionally planned to not stay for very long.
And even at the onset of our renewed commitment to send human beings to the moon back in 2004, we knew then if we were going to go to the moon with the more ambitious goals we have now of staying longer and perhaps establishing outposts, we were going to go to a different place."
Scientists and engineers thinking about future outposts on the moon are focused on the polar regions, where areas in permanent sunlight offer unlimited solar power. Conversely, permanently shadowed craters nearby offer the prospect of ice deposits and along with them, a source of water, oxygen and hydrogen rocket fuel.
"We actually have much better maps of Mars than we have of our own moon's polar regions," Tooley said. "So the job of filling out that information set, making that atlas complete for planning safe and fruitful return to the moon, that job fell to LRO."
The Lcross mission is much more tightly focused.
Earlier lunar probes detected indirect evidence of water ice in dark polar regions. Scientists believe ice could indeed be trapped in polar craters that never see sunlight, brought in by comet impacts over the billions of years since the moon's formation.
The Centaur impact is designed to blast out material in the top few feet of a shadowed crater's floor where ice deposits are suspected.
"There's data out there which could show it's potentially ice rinks," said Lcross project manager Dan Andrews. "There's data out there that shows it's blocky. There's data out there that could support the fact that there might not be water ice there," said Dan Andrews, the Lcross project manager. "So that illustrates the importance of this mission. Let's go see what it is.
"The benefit of having water ice there is self-evident. The availability of water right there on the moon, availability of producing oxygen, oxidizer for rocket fuel for other missions, it's very, very interesting if water ice is indeed there."
NASA's Kepler satellite will scope out a section of the Milky Way in hopes of finding planets similar to Earth.
(Credit: NASA/JPL)In the vastness of the universe, there are likely to be nearly countless planets. The big question for humans, of course, is whether even a single one of them could support life.
NASA's Kepler satellite, which is scheduled to lift off at 10:49 p.m. EST tonight, is headed out to keep watch on a patch of the Milky Way for at least three and a half years. Unlike the Hubble space telescope, Kepler won't be taking brilliant pictures suitable for framing. Instead, it will look for minute changes in the brightness of stars--some 100,000 of them--that would indicate a planet passing in front.
Of all the planets Kepler eventually finds, what NASA is most interested in are planets like Earth. That is, it's looking for rocky orbs--from half as large to twice as large as our big blue marble--in the habitable zone around a given star where conditions might be amenable to folks like us, or at least some of our fellow earthly organisms.
"The habitable zone is where we think water will be," Bill Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at NASA Ames, says in a video on the space agency's Kepler site. "If you can find liquid water on the surface we think we may very well find life there. So that zone is not too close to the star, because it's too hot and water boils, and not too far away where the water is condensed...a planet covered with glaciers. It's the Goldilocks zone--not too hot, not too cold, just right for life."
To scope out the interstellar terrain, Kepler will use its photometer--essentially, an oversize light meter--equipped with 42 charged coupled devices, or CCDs. Your digital camera uses CCDs, too, though they're much smaller. And where your pocketable camera might be rated at 8 megapixels, Kepler's telescope weighs in at 95 megapixels.
Kepler's unblinking eye will scan a wider area than most astronomical telescopes, according to NASA. Where those devices see an area equivalent to a grain of salt held at arm's length, Kepler sees the whole hand at that distance.
According to a report issued this week by the Government Accountability Office, the Kepler project's total cost as of December was $595 million. Yes, that's more than was originally budgeted for it, and yes, it's launching about nine months behind schedule.
But for the moment, let bygones be bygones. Friday morning, NASA reported that the weather forecast in Florida is auspicious for tonight's launch: a 95 percent chance of favorable conditions, with a temperature of 64 degrees.
A privately developed rocket is now orbiting the Earth.
Space Exploration Technologies' Falcon 1 launched into orbit at 4:15 p.m. PDT Sunday from Omelek Island, which is in the Kwajalein Atoll, about 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii. Just over nine minutes later, the Falcon 1 reached orbit, the company said.
Falcon 1 lifts off on Sunday.
(Credit: SpaceX)The successful launch comes after the company, better known as SpaceX, had suffered three unsuccessful attempts over the past two years.
Elon Musk, the company's founder and CEO, called the launch a "great day for SpaceX."
"The data shows we achieved a super precise orbit insertion--middle of the bull's eye--and then went on to coast and restart the second stage, which was icing on the cake," Musk, who is also co-founder and former head of online payment company PayPal, said in a statement.
Musk said it is the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to orbit the Earth.
The rocket carries a payload mass simulator developed by SpaceX, which is aiming for private space transportation and deliveries.
Click here for SpaceX's video of the launch.
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