Really Rocket Science

NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer gave their acronym department a lay-up. They called it WISE and launched it a couple of days ago from Vandenburg:

WISE will see the infrared colors of the whole sky with sensitivity and resolution far better than the last infrared sky survey, performed 26 years ago. The space telescope will spend nine months scanning the sky once, then one-half the sky a second time. The primary mission will end when WISE’s frozen hydrogen runs out, about 10 months after launch.

Just about everything in the universe glows in infrared, which means the mission will catalog a variety of astronomical targets. Near-Earth asteroids, stars, planet-forming disks and distant galaxies all will be easy for the mission to see. Hundreds of millions of objects will populate the WISE atlas, providing astronomers and other space missions, such as NASA’s planned James Webb Space Telescope, with a long-lasting infrared roadmap.

JPL manages the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The mission was competitively selected under the Explorers Program, managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. NASA’s Launch Services Program at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Fla., managed the payload integration and the launch service.

Launch video…

Very cool mission, managed by JPL and CalTech. Be sure to read their "top 10 factoids."

Iran plans to launch its own satellite by 2011, since no one seems willing to help; Iran claims it is a communications satellite – Israel says it is a spy satellite.
[Fox News – 11/20/2009]

The MIRAS instrument on the European Space Agency’s SMOS satellite launched earlier this month, has been switched on and is operating normally – it will map soil moisture and ocean salinity.
[Space Mart – 11/20/2009]

Russia may delay maiden launch of the new Angara carrier rocket, designed to put heavy payloads into orbit, for at least one year due to shortage of funds from the Defense Ministry.
[Space Travel – 11/20/2009]

DirecTV announces completion of merger with Liberty Entertainment following Liberty Media stockholders’ OK for split of Liberty Entertainment; acquisition by AT&T or Verizon is a possibility.
[iStockAnalyst – 11/19/2009]   –   [Wall Street Journal blog – 11/20/2009]

NSR industry briefing sees the satellite-based earth observation market entering a phase of impressive growth, expected to generate $6.2B in satellite manufacturing, commercial data, and value added services in 2018.
[NSR – 11/19/2009]

President Obama and Chinese president Hu Jintao agree to expand and formalize U.S.-Chinese discussions on new cooperative space efforts at Beijing summit.
[Spaceflight Now – 11/18/2009]

Quick-thinking Chinese ground controllers able to maneuver high-value Chinese spacecraft out of path of space debris, marking first such save by China, and emphasizing the mounting orbital debris hazards faced by space-faring nations.
[Spaceflight Now – 11/18/2009]

DirecTV chooses Michael white, former vice chairman of PepsiCo, as new CEO; Echostar elevates Michael Dugan to CEO as Charley Ergen vacates the post.
[CED Magazine – 11/18/2009]

Iridium teams with three new partners to expand satellite services offering in Mexico.
[CNN Money – 11/18/2009]

Shuttle Atlantis successfully docks with International Space Station.
[Spaceflight Now – 11/18/2009]

ViaSat offers new Ethernet Service Expansion Module for its Enhance Bandwidth Efficient Modem that promotes Frequency Division Multiple Access across Department of Defense satellite networks.
[SatNews – 11/18/2009]

Sri Lanka signs agreement with Surrey Satellite Technology Limited of the UK to obtain an Earth Observation satellite, representing Sri Lanka’s first communications satellite.
[Space Mart – 11/18/2009]

NASA chief is ready to work with China on space exploration, as Beijing aims to send a manned mission to the moon by around 2020.
[Space Daily – 11/17/2009]

SES invests $75M in O3b to become a key shareholder, aiming to support development of the O3b high-speed satellite internet network.
[Satellite Today – 11/17/2009]

Gilat reports third quarter revenue decline, and announces hiring of former Intelsat General president Susan Miller as SIGS CEO.
[Satellite Today – 11/17/2009]

Spot LLC responds to budget conscious holiday shoppers by offering a $50 Holiday Rebate for the SPOT Satellite Personal Tracker, the award-winning personal and portable satellite-based communications messenger.
[CNN Money – 11/17/2009]

SatMax completes installation of Iridium satellite communications repeater systems for ITT Corporation; the Defense Department plans to use SatMAX systems indoors to provide non-line-of-site access to Iridium satellites.
[CNN Money – 11/17/2009]

Stratos Global is recognized by the World Teleport Association as the world’s largest independent teleport operator again in 2009.
[PR Newswire – 11/17/2009]

SpaceX protests U.S. Air Force contract award to Orbital Sciences Corp. for missile hardware.
[Satellite Today – 11/17/2009]

KVH TracPhone V7 and mini-VSAT Broadband service will be deployed by the United States Coast Guard on its 110 ft. and 225 ft. cutters.
[SatNews – 11/17/2009]

Spot Image Corporation and the U.S. Geological Survey have begun to distribute, over the internet, SPOT satellite data collected over North America between 1986 and 1998.
[SatNews – 11/17/2009]

Eutelsat and Asia Broadcast Satellite strike strategic agreement for cooperation at 75 Degrees East position in satellite orbital arc.
[PR Newswire – 11/16/2009]

Stratos Global expands its line of Stratos MobileLink fixed-to-mobile calling services, enabling fast, affordable connectivity from fixed locations to Iridium and Inmarsat mobile satellite terminals, to help customer avoid high tariffs charged by local telephone companies.
[SatNews – 11/16/2009]

Newtec’s Sat3Play and ASTRA2Connect internet connection rated EXCELLENT by leading independent German consumer organization group.
[SatNews – 11/16/2009]

TCS acquires substantially all of the assets of Sidereal Solutions, Inc., a satellite communications technology engineering, operations, and maintenance support services company.
[SatNews – 11/16/2009]

Atlas launch of Intelsat 14 is halted due to power interruption to Ordnance Remote Control Assembly; launch will be rescheduled following the space shuttle Atlantis launch.
[Universe Today – 11/15/2009]

NSR report – Global Satellite-Base Earth Observation – the industry has taken rapid strides in the last decade, reinventing itself by expanding application base from military and weather to industries including infrastructure, energy, and insurance.
[NSR Report – November 2009]

NSR Report – Global Assessment of Satellite Supply & Demand, 6th Edition – was Intelat’s purchase of ProtoStar-1 for $210M a good deal or not?
[NSR Report – November 2009]

FCC claims that cable and satellite set-top-boxes may be impeding the growth of broadband internet connectivity into homes.
[Washington Post blog Post Tech – November 2009]

WBMSAT PS – Satellite Communications Consulting Services

Nice effect by Red Huber of the Orlando Sentinel. Check it out and you’ll see why you shouldn’t stand so close to the pad…

Great work by NASA in getting a useful iPhone App out last week:

 The NASA App collects, customizes and delivers an extensive selection of dynamically updated information, images and videos from various online NASA sources. Users can access NASA countdown clocks, the NASA Image of the Day, Astronomy Image of the Day, online videos, NASA’s many Twitter feeds and other information in a convenient mobile package. It delivers NASA content in a clear and intuitive way by making full use of the iPhone and iPod touch features, including the Multi-Touch user interface. The New Media Team at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., developed the application.

The NASA App also allows users to track the current positions of the International Space Station and other spacecraft currently orbiting Earth in three views: a map with borders and labels, visible satellite imagery, or satellite overlaid with country borders and labels.

Yeah, it’s free and very good.

Even better: Akamai is letting us watch NASA TV — LIVE — on your iPhone. That’s cool.

NASA’s LCROSS mission is getting some attention today. Tweets galore, too.

NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, created twin impacts on the moon’s surface early Friday in a search for water ice. Scientists will analyze data from the spacecraft’s instruments to assess whether water ice is present.

The satellite traveled 5.6 million miles during an historic 113-day mission that ended in the Cabeus crater, a permanently shadowed region near the moon’s south pole. The spacecraft was launched June 18 as a companion mission to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"The LCROSS science instruments worked exceedingly well and returned a wealth of data that will greatly improve our understanding of our closest celestial neighbor," said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS principal investigator and project scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "The team is excited to dive into data."

In preparation for impact, LCROSS and its spent Centaur upper stage rocket separated about 54,000 miles above the surface of the moon on Thursday at approximately 6:50 p.m. PDT.

Moving at a speed of more than 1.5 miles per second, the Centaur hit the lunar surface shortly after 4:31 a.m. Oct. 9, creating an impact that instruments aboard LCROSS observed for approximately four minutes. LCROSS then impacted the surface at approximately 4:36 a.m.

"This is a great day for science and exploration," said Doug Cooke, associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The LCROSS data should prove to be an impressive addition to the tremendous leaps in knowledge about the moon that have been achieved in recent weeks. I want to congratulate the LCROSS team for their tremendous achievement in development of this low cost spacecraft and for their perseverance through a number of difficult technical and operational challenges."‪

Other observatories reported capturing both impacts. The data will be shared with the LCROSS science team for analysis. The LCROSS team expects it to take several weeks of analysis before it can make a definitive assessment of the presence or absence of water ice.

"I am very proud of the success of this LCROSS mission team," said Daniel Andrews, LCROSS project manager at Ames. "Whenever this team would hit a roadblock, it conceived a clever work-around allowing us to push forward with a successful mission."

Here’s the video clip…

…and here’s the simulation…

Cool, ey?

Goddard’s Laser Ranging Facility aiming laser toward LROGoddard’s Laser Ranging Facility directing a laser (green beam) toward the LRO spacecraft in orbit around the moon (white disk). The moon has been deliberately over-exposed to show the laser. Credit: Tom Zagwodzki/Goddard Space Flight Center

This is pretty cool, via NASA GSFC:

 On certain nights, an arresting green line pierces the sky above NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It’s a laser directed at the moon, visible when the air is humid. No, we’re not repelling an invasion. Instead, we’re tracking our own spacecraft.

28 times per second, engineers at NASA Goddard fire a laser that travels about 250,000 miles to hit the minivan-sized Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft moving at nearly 3,600 miles per hour as it orbits the moon.

The first laser ranging effort to track a spacecraft beyond low-Earth orbit on a daily basis produces distance measurements accurate to about four inches (10 centimeters). For comparison, the microwave stations tracking LRO measure its range to a precision of about 65 feet (20 meters).

Read more about Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Laser Ranging Support, and check out this time-lapse photo video…

Nice shuttle launch from Cape Canaveral:

With seven astronauts and a host of experiments and equipment on board, space shuttle Discovery completed a flawless ascent into orbit Friday night to begin a two-day chase of the International Space Station. With Commander Rick "C.J. " Sturckow at the controls, the shuttle lifted off on-time at 11:59 p.m. EDT from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew will rendezvous and dock with the station Sunday and the crew will begin transferring equipment to the outpost during the 13-day mission.

After flying up on Discovery, Nicole Stott will trade places with station resident Tim Kopra, who went into space last month aboard Endeavour. Equipment and science racks for the orbiting laboratory are riding inside the Leonardo cargo module, which is secured tightly inside Discovery’s payload bay. The module will be lifted out of Discovery and locked onto the station so the crew can transfer the gear efficiently. The treadmill named for comedian Stephen Colbert also is aboard Discovery and destined for the station.

The video…

"Anomaly" is a very bad word when referring to in-orbit spacecraft. That’s what the LCROSS team is dealing with now, via SpaceRef.com:

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:58:30 PM EDT

Upon starting an early morning communications pass on Aug. 22, 2009, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission operations
team discovered the spacecraft had experienced an anomaly.

According to spacecraft data, the LCROSS Internal Reference Unit (IRU) experienced a fault. The IRU is a sensor used by the spacecraft’s attitude control system (ACS) to determine the orientation and trajectory of the spacecraft. The anomaly caused the spacecraft ACS to switch to the Star Tracker Assembly for spacecraft positional information and caused the spacecraft’s thruster to fire excessively, consuming a substantial amount of fuel. Initial estimates indicate that the spacecraft still contains sufficient fuel to complete the full mission.

LCROSS mission operations declared a ‘spacecraft emergency’ and were allocated additional communications time on the Deep Space Network. The team conducted procedures to mitigate the problem and were able to restart the IRU and reduce fuel consumption to a nominal level. Automatic operations procedures also were implemented to minimize the possibility of another IRU anomaly from occurring while the spacecraft is out of contact with the ground. Since the re-start of the IRU, the spacecraft has not experienced any additional problems.

The team continues to actively assess and mitigate the situation and is in contact with the manufacturers of the IRU and star tracker to investigate the root cause of the problems. Mission managers remain optimistic the LCROSS mission can reach its successful conclusion with projected impact at the lunar south pole currently set for 4:30 a.m. PDT on Oct. 9, 2009.

Can’t drive 55? Try 1 million MPH:

Stars in a distant galaxy move at stunning speeds — greater than 1 million mph, astronomers have revealed.

These hyperactive stars move at about twice the speed of our sun through the Milky Way, because their host galaxy is very massive, yet strangely compact. The scene, which has theorists baffled, is 11 billion light-years away. It is the first time motions of individual stars have been measured in a galaxy so distant.

While the stars’ swiftness is notable, stars in other galaxies have been observed to travel at similarly high speeds. In those situations, it was usually because they were interlopers from outside, or circling close to a black hole.

But in this case, the stars’ high velocities help astronomers confirm that the galaxy they belong to really is as massive as earlier data suggested.

Bizarre, indeed

The compact nature of this and similar galaxies in the faraway early universe is puzzling to scientists, who don’t yet understand why some young, massive galaxies are about five times smaller than their counterparts today.

"A lot of people were thinking we had overestimated these masses in the past," said Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum, leader of the new study. "But this confirms they are extremely massive for their size. These galaxies are indeed as bizarre as we thought they were."

Scientists used the new velocity measurements, conducted with the Gemini South telescope in Chile and the Hubble Space Telescope, to test the mass of a galaxy identified as 1255-0. The same way that the sun’s gravity determines the orbiting speed of the Earth, the galaxy’s gravity, and thus its mass, determines the velocities of the stars inside it.

That’s awesome. Check the NASA site for details.

Astronomers confess that it is a difficult riddle to explain how such compact, massive galaxies form, and why they are not seen in the current, local universe. “One possibility is that we are looking at what will eventually be the dense central region of a very large galaxy,” explains team member Marijn Franx of Leiden University in the Netherlands. “The centers of big galaxies may have formed first, presumably together with the giant black holes that we know exist in today’s large galaxies that we see nearby.”

To witness the formation of these extreme galaxies astronomers plan to observe galaxies even further back in time in great detail. By using the Wide Field Camera 3, which was recently installed on the Hubble Space Telescope, such objects should be detectable. “The ancestors of these extreme galaxies should have quite spectacular properties as they probably formed a huge amount of stars, in addition to a massive black hole, in a relatively short amount of time,” says van Dokkum.

This research follows recent studies revealing that the oldest, most luminous galaxies in the early universe are very compact yet surprisingly have stellar masses similar to those of present-day elliptical galaxies. The most massive galaxies we see in the local universe (where we don’t look back in time significantly) which have a mass similar to 1255-0 are typically five times larger than a young compact galaxy. How galaxies grew so much in the past 10 billion years is an active area of research, and understanding the dynamics in these young compact galaxies is a key piece of evidence in eventually solving this puzzle.

 Looking back in time, 10 billions ago. A million mile per hours. This astronomy stuff can be so mind-boggling.

 My wife, like astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper, is a busy woman — and a Ukrainian-American. Last November, during a spacewalk, a tool bag got loose and got away. My wife loses her car keys about once a week, but we seem to find them just fine.

That tool box? Amateur astronomers were tracking it, and Universe Today predicted it would drop into the Pacific Ocean over the weekend, in a fireball no less. Space.com confirmed it:

The $100,000 tool bag plunged toward Earth and burned up as it re-entered the atmosphere, according to the U.S. Air Force’s Joint Space Operations Center tracking it and more than 19,000 other pieces of space junk in orbit today from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Here’s how it happened…

If it was a Craftsman Tool Box, it might have survived. In the 70’s, a friend of mine was working on a 1968 Ford Bronco is his driveway (it was a mess; we called it "Skylab"). While the thing was up on cinder blocks, it crashed while he was under it. It fell on the tool box, which saved him from major injury — or worse.

He later sold the Bronco, but he kept the tool box. Still uses it, too.