What's New In Space Reserch

Living on other planets

2008-03-28T00:48:00.000-07:00

Living on other planets

Question: Is there any possibilities for people to travel or live in other planets?

Answer:
Travel to other planets in our own solar system is routine but long and
pricey ($millions per months-long trip) for robots. It could be routine
for a small number of humans too but would cost right now a lot, maybe
5-10% of what the world spends on weaponry and loads more than it spends on
infectious disease prevention. Travel to planets outside the solar system
is limited by the very large distances involved (which light typically
takes decades to centuries to cross) and the lack of a roadmap. With
Apollo rocket technology it would take 40,000 years or so to reach the
nearest star, and we don't know if it has planets anyway. It's difficult
to imagine advances in propulsion technology sufficient to reach speeds
near light, or extensions in human longevity (not to mention patience) or
"hibernation" abilities to centuries, so interstellar travel within one
lifetime is hard to imagine (which does not, of course, mean it can't be
done anyway). Opinions vary, but I'd say the major hurdle to
large-distance space travel by human beings is achieving a consensus among
people and nations that it's something worth spending lots of money and
time on. Twenty-five years ago that consensus was partially achieved, for a
variety of reasons, whereas today it seems essentially absent.
Living by large numbers of people on other planets in our solar system
comfortably would be at present impossible, as none has enough breathable
air, comfortable gravity, and a temperature tolerable in ordinary clothes.
Nevertheless one can easily imagine small numbers of people living in
carefully enclosed spaces (domes, sealed buildings, underground tunnels)
on Mars, the Moon, or the largest asteroids and moons of the system. The
technology is no more demanding than living under the sea or in orbit and
only somewhat more demanding than living in Antarctica. The principle
problems would seem to be figuring out (1) how to control a small ecology
successfully, (2) how to acquire most materials you need from local
resources, and (3) how to build and maintain such communities at a price
people on Earth are willing to pay. (Alternatively you can phrase this
last as "finding jobs on Mars that are so valuable to us on Earth --- i.e.
have such a high wage --- that people can afford and are willing to move to
Mars to live.")
If Earth-like planets with native lower life exist in other systems, one
could live there perhaps by just bringing along an axe and a mule. But it
seems likely that if you could eat the life on the other planet it could
eat you, especially the microbial life, and so one might have to expect a
high initial death rate from coming in contact with brand-new diseases.
Christopher Grayce

NASA unveils new spaceship for travel to Moon and Mars

2008-03-22T12:19:00.000-07:00

NASA, unveiled the spacecraft that will succeed the Space Shuttle program: the Crew Exploration Vehicle, or CEV. The spacecraft will be designed to carry four astronauts to and from the moon, support up to six crewmembers on a future mission to Mars and deliver crew and supplies to the International Space Station.

The U.S. Space Agency Administrator Michael Griffin defended the $104 billion dollar lunar program, saying it is intended to make President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration a reality.

The Administrator said on Monday, "Unless the United States wants to get out of the manned space flight business completely, then this is the vehicle we need to be building. And I don't hear anyone saying that the United States would be better off being out of space when other nations are there," reports VOA.

Griffin says the mission could cost at least $104 billion. He says the agency would adopt a pay-as-you-go approach and would not need to drastically increase its budget, now at about $16 billion per year.

He insists that space science and aeronautics will not suffer with a new emphasis on a crewed Moon mission. "This is about a budget which keeps NASA in constant dollars approximately where it is today," he says. "It's not about taking money from the science program or the aeronautics program."

But critics are unconvinced. Currently, NASA's share of the federal budget is about 0.7%. During the Apollo era, NASA took up as much as 4% of the US budget.

"I don't think this plan will succeed," says Alex Roland, a history professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, US. "It's plausible in a certain way because they have taken things from Apollo and the shuttle that were reasonably successful and good. Who knows whether or not you can quickly and cheaply cobble those together into a workable system?"

But others defend the plan, arguing the agency needs to move beyond its current Earth-orbiting shuttle and space station programmes. "It's obvious there's a rocket scientist running NASA again," says Elliot Pulham, president and chief executive officer of the Space Foundation, a non-profit space advocacy group. "I wish I was still young enough to go," informs New Scientist.

Space Shuttle

2008-02-26T10:37:00.000-08:00

JUPITER

2008-02-26T10:36:00.001-08:00

VENUS

2008-02-26T10:34:00.000-08:00

Galaxy

2008-02-26T10:31:00.000-08:00

MARS

2008-02-26T10:29:00.000-08:00

Saturn

2008-02-26T10:28:00.000-08:00

Earth

2008-02-26T10:21:00.000-08:00

First Step on Moon

2008-02-26T10:15:00.000-08:00

Columbus Module Heads to Space

2008-02-26T10:07:00.000-08:00

The next shuttle launch will carry with it a European scientific research laboratory that will significantly expand experiments in space.

When the Shuttle Atlantis launches tomorrow, it will be carrying with it an important addition to the International Space Station (ISS): the Columbus laboratory. The module is a scientific research facility developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) that will significantly expand the station's experimental capabilities. It is also the first piece of real estate on the station that will be controlled by the Europeans, making ISS a truly international collaboration.

The new laboratory will allow scientists to do a wider variety of experiments that they otherwise would not be able to do, says Julie Robinson, the program scientist for ISS at NASA. "For instance," she says, "we need to understand how the human body works in space if we are going to travel beyond Earth orbit. With Columbus we can cluster together the human research facility racks that NASA has built with the European physiology module. What we start getting is an integrated international laboratory."

The Columbus laboratory is approximately seven meters in length and four and a half meters in diameter. It is going to launch with four research racks: a biology lab, for experiments on microorganisms and cells in plants, invertebrates, and even food for exploration; a fluid science lab, for fluid physics experiments; a physiology module, to study the human body; and a rack, to study materials for power, communication, and even aircraft engines.

The module will be able to hold a total of 10 racks, the same number currently available on the United States scientific laboratory on ISS, called Destiny. The two modules are similar in design so that their research racks can be interchangeable. Next year, the third and final research facility, called Kibo, developed by the Japanese for ISS, will launch.

Columbus will be operated by a control center located in Southern Germany that ties into the mission-control centers in Houston and Moscow. It will also have nine centers in different countries throughout Europe that will link to the main control center so that researchers who have experiments onboard can operate Columbus from as close to home as possible, says Alan Thirkettle, the ISS program manager for ESA.

The launch of Columbus is "very exciting for us and will be the first major international program we have done with Canada, Japan, Russia, and America, and I look forward to the discoveries we are going to make," says Thirkettle.

Tags: nasa, Columbus, ISS, ESA, space research

The space station: the best of times, the worst of times

2008-02-26T10:01:00.000-08:00

Last week’s spacewalks to finalize the installation of the Harmony module to the International Space Station (ISS) have set the stage for the long-awaited attachments of the European and Japanese modules Columbus and Kibo. Both items have been waiting a long time for their trip into orbit. The delays were inevitable after the Columbia disaster, but that did not make it any easier for the international partners.
The US should, as a matter of principle, commit to keeping the station operational until at least 2020 or, even better, until 2025.

NASA seems confident that it can repair the starboard Solar Array Rotary Joint (SARJ) in time to allow for the launch of the Kibo logistics module early next year. There are at least some spare parts already in orbit and the Atlantis STS-122 mission next month, or a Progress, might be able to bring up any small bits and pieces that would make the repair work easier. Fixing the SARJ is a good example of the kind of work that the ISS will require over the long term. Like any homeowner can tell you, any human habitation needs near constant repair and maintenance, the ISS is no different, except of course for its orbital altitude and 25,000 km/h speed.

The delicate set of relationships on which the ISS partnership is based presumes that, in the end, all parties will be able to get something they consider to be of value out of their investment. This means that the station should be operated for far longer than the current US budget guidance would seem to allow. In fact, NASA has been given clear guidance by the administration to do nothing that would jeopardize the use of the station beyond 2015.

This is not good enough. The US should, as a matter of principle, commit to keeping the station operational until at least 2020 or, even better, until 2025. This not only means that the US will have to pay its part to update basic elements of the ISS which are, after all, built around late-1980s or early-1990s technology, but that the US will have to negotiate with the international partners a utilization plan.

Any plan will have to be driven by more than just a desire to develop technologies for the Vision for Space Exploration. Commercial users such as SPACEHAB with its plans to manufacture protein crystals for the pharmaceutical industry will have to be accommodated, and experiments such as the proposed space solar power demonstration should be given a chance.

The biggest problem that NASA now faces is how to gain access to the ISS between the time the shuttle is retired in 2010 and the time the Orion capsule and Ares 1 rocket system is ready, which may be as late as 2015 or even later if NASA’s budget is further cut. Even if the space agency does get an extra $2 billion to accelerate work on the system it will still be at least 2013 at the earliest before NASA will have a way to send astronauts to the station on its own vehicles.

Will Russia maintain the agreement with the US to launch astronauts on the Soyuz system? The current (bad) state of relations between Washington and Moscow will make life difficult for any NASA official who wants to negotiate a deal for future Soyuz seats, and the fall in the value of the dollar does nothing to help matters. It was hard enough to get the US Congress to go along with a suspension of the Iran Nonproliferation Act (INA), which allowed the current deal to be concluded; a future deal may be held hostage to any number of extraneous events or policies.

The Europeans may, as expected, begin work on a program to turn their Automated Transport Vehicle (ATV), designed to carry cargo to the station and launched by the Ariane 5, into a human-rated capsule. Such a project, even if it were fully funded, would take many years to come to fruition and would certainly not be ready before 2015.

This leaves NASA with one realistic hope, Elon Musk and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launcher/ Dragon capsule combination. While they have won over $270 million in money from the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) project , that money was designed to develop a cargo-carrying system. To turn the cargo carrier into a fully certified human rated vehicle will probably take a lot more money than is currently available from NASA.
The biggest problem that NASA now faces is how to gain access to the ISS between the time the shuttle is retired in 2010 and the time the Orion capsule and Ares 1 rocket system is ready.

What make the situation even more precarious is the fact that SpaceX has not yet had a fully successful launch of its Falcon 1 rocket and, until that happens, NASA and others may be reluctant to commit to future SpaceX designs. If the next Falcon 1 flight test with a regeneratively cooled engine, now planned for early 2008, goes well, then the prospects for a second round of COTS funding for SpaceX will improve considerably.

In any case, NASA needs to begin looking at alternatives to Ares 1. The EELVs have established an excellent record and the successful Delta 4 Heavy launch this month shows that it has very nearly the 20-ton lift capability needed to get the Orion capsule into low Earth orbit.

Assuming NASA can solve the access problem, there are other challenges that NASA will have to overcome to keep the ISS running over the long haul. The next long-term problem is that the agency needs to find a way to ensure that the seals between the modules will remain safely intact for at least another decade or more. Beyond that, there will be a need to replace the current solar arrays with newer and more efficient ones.

The ISS is humanity’s one toehold in space. It can be used a real “world-class laboratory” or it can be allowed to spin around until, through lack of investment and high-level attention, it is deorbited like Russia’s Mir. That would be more than a tragedy; it would be a stupid waste.

Asteroid May Soon Slam into Mars

2008-02-26T09:55:00.000-08:00

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Mars could be in for an asteroid hit. A newly discovered hunk of space rock has a 1 in 75 chance of slamming into the Red Planet on Jan. 30, scientists said Thursday.

"These odds are extremely unusual. We frequently work with really long odds when we track ... threatening asteroids," said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near Earth Object Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The asteroid, known as 2007 WD5, was discovered in late November and is similar in size to an object that hit remote central Siberia in 1908, unleashing energy equivalent to a 15-megaton nuclear bomb and wiping out 60 million trees.

Scientists tracking the asteroid, currently halfway between Earth and Mars, initially put the odds of impact at 1 in 350 but increased the chances this week. Scientists expect the odds to diminish again early next month after getting new observations of the asteroid's orbit, Chesley said.

"We know that it's going to fly by Mars and most likely going to miss, but there's a possibility of an impact," he said.

If the asteroid does smash into Mars, it will probably hit near the equator close to where the rover Opportunity has been exploring the Martian plains since 2004. The robot is not in danger because it lies outside the impact zone. Speeding at 8 miles a second, a collision would carve a hole the size of the famed Meteor Crater in Arizona.

In 2004, fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smacked into Jupiter, creating a series of overlapping fireballs in space. Astronomers have yet to witness an asteroid impact with another planet.

"Unlike an Earth impact, we're not afraid, but we're excited," Chesley said.

A PEEK AT THE CELESTIAL WOMB

2008-02-14T08:17:00.000-08:00

Newborn stars peek out from beneath their natal blanket of dust in this dynamic image of the Rho ophiuchi dark cloud from Nasa's Spitzer space telescope. Called 'Rho Oph' by astronomers, it's one of the closetst star-forming regions to our own solar system, Located near the constellation Scorpius and Ophiuchus, the nebula is about 407 light years away from Earth.

SFU (Space Flyer Unit)

2008-02-08T11:25:00.000-08:00

The IRTS is onboard a multi-pupose space experment platform called SFU (Space Flyer Unit).

Various kinds of experiments were done on SFU.

SFU was lauched by a Japanese HII rocket on March 18, 1995, and was retrieved by the US Space Shuttle on January 13, 1996.

+ IRTS on SFU
+ Experiments on SFU
+ SFU on orbit
+ SFU recovered by Space Shuttle

GLOBE

2008-02-08T11:05:00.000-08:00

GLOBE

World Wind is capable of browsing through and displaying GLOBE data based on any time the user wants. For example, a user can download today's (or any previous day's) temperature across the world.

You can view rainfall, barometric pressure, cloud cover, or even the student GLOBE samples themselves. Each sample comes with a temperature scale

Space weather

2008-02-08T10:48:00.000-08:00

Space weather happens when a solar storm from the Sun travels through space and impacts the Earth’s magnetosphere. Studying space weather is important to our national economy because solar storms can affect the advanced technology we have become so dependent upon in our everyday lives. Energy and radiation from solar flares and coronal mass ejections can:

Harm astronauts in space
Damage sensitive electronics on orbiting spacecraft…
Cause colorful auroras, often seen in the higher latitudes…
Create blackouts on Earth when they cause surges in power grids.

Understanding the changing Sun and its effects on the solar system, life, and society is a main goal of NASA's Heliophysics research program. Many NASA missions focus on the Sun and its interactions with Earth. Current missions include STEREO, SOHO, ACE, THEMIS, SORCE, and Cluster. The next to be launched will be the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).