Really Rocket Science

An engine fire destroyed Space-X’s Falcon 1 rocket on its maiden voyage today, according to reports.

The International Reporter has early details:

The US vehicle, developed by the Space Exploration Technologies Corp, was destroyed soon after take-off from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. The vision of Elon Musk, co-founder of the electronic payment system PayPal, the Falcon was designed to cut the cost of current satellite launches.

An onboard camera appeared to show the rocket rolling out of control shortly before the video signal was lost….

The rocket was attempting to carry a 19.5kg satellite to a low-Earth orbit of 450km. The satellite, FalconSat-2, was built by US Air Force Academy cadets to investigate the phenomenon known as "space weather".

Elon Musk has additional details on the Space-X blog: 

The good news is that all vehicle systems, including the main engine, thrust vector control, structures, avionics, software, guidance algorithm, etc. were picture perfect.  Falcon’s trajectory was within 0.2 degrees of nominal during powered flight. 

It may be surprising to many people, but when NASA scientists receive data back from distant probes, their experience is akin to downloading "Bohemian Rhapsody" (or, pick your own epic-length song) on 56K. Which is to say, there’s a lot of waiting involved. But that could change:

 Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology have developed a tiny light detector that could one day boost interplanetary communications to broadband speeds.

Images from Mars, like this computerized one of a canyon, are transmitted at a data rate of 128,000 bits per second.

The work could permit the transmission of color video between astronauts and satellites and scientists on Earth across interplanetary distances, something that is not practical with current technologies.

The new light detector improves detection efficiency to 57% at a wavelength of 1,550 nanometers — the same wavelength used by optical fibers on Earth to carry broadband signals to homes and offices. Currently, light detectors only absorb about 20% of the light they receive.

"It can take hours with the existing wireless radio frequency technology to get useful scientific information back from Mars to Earth," said study team member Karl Berggren from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But an optical link can do that thousands of times faster."

The work is detailed in the Jan. 23 issue of the journal Optics Express. 

This is a great effort:

Join thousands of other students, families, and educators by participating in GLOBE at Night – an international event designed to observe and record the visible stars as a means of measuring light pollution in a given location. Participation is open to anyone – anywhere in the world – who can get outside and look skyward during the week of March 22-29, 2006! There is no cost to participate in GLOBE at Night. Help us reach our goal of 5000 observations from around the world!

 The National Optical Astronomy Observatory, which is sponsoring the event, also has a cool online tool that allows you to witness the changes in the night sky that result from light pollution.

For more information, download the GLOBE Family Activity Packet PDF (in English and Spanish) or subscribe to the GLOBE email list. 

We’ve written before about the incipient space tourism industry; yesterday the AP released a story that summarizes the gathering momentum of what was, not too long ago, a "sleepy industry":

Two years after the first privately financed space flight jump-started a sleepy industry, more than a dozen companies are developing rocket planes to ferry ordinary rich people out of the atmosphere.

Several private companies will begin building their prototype vehicles this summer with plans to test fly them as early as next year. If all goes well, the first tourist could hitch a galactic joy ride late next year or 2008 – pending approval by federal regulators….

"This time, it’s personal. This space race is about getting ‘us’ into space," said space historian Andrew Chaikin.

For now, commercial space travel remains an exclusive club.

Over the past few years, three tourists have paid a reported $20 million each to ride aboard a Russian rocket to the orbiting international space station.

Instead of days in space, the commercial spaceships under development will only reach suborbital space, a region about 60 miles up that is generally considered the beginning of the rest of the universe. Since the private spaceships lack the speed to go into orbit around Earth, the flights are essentially up and down experiences – lasting about two hours with up to five minutes of weightlessness.

The article includes a summary of the major contenders in the space-tourism arena:

The biggest name is Virgin Galactic, a space tourism firm founded by British billionaire tycoon Richard Branson. Branson has partnered with Burt Rutan, whose SpaceShipOne in 2004 became the first private manned craft to reach space, to build a fleet of suborbital commercial spaceships called SpaceShipTwo….

_Oklahoma-based Rocketplane Kistler is one of Virgin Galactic’s biggest competitors. Rocketplane Kistler, whose main investor is American businessman George French, hopes to start test flights next January and fly commercially by next summer. French owns several businesses including a space education company in Wisconsin….

_Space Adventures, a Virginia-based space travel agency best known for brokering three tourists to the international space station, is the latest entrant.

Last month, Space Adventures announced a partnership with members of the Ansari family – the major funders of the $10 million X Prize won by SpaceShipOne – to develop Russian-designed suborbital rockets that would launch from a proposed spaceport in the United Arab Emirates by 2008.

You can check out Rocketplane here and Virgin Galactic here.

Wired has a good article out today on how the next-generation of commercial imaging satellites is going to change, er, the way we view the world– or at least the details of our view:

Critics of overhead imagery services like Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth generally fall into two categories: government agencies who say the services show too much, and users who lament they can’t see more.

As the next generation of commercial imaging satellites moves closer to launch, the first camp may be out of luck.

Forthcoming features such as enhanced zoom capabilities, higher-resolution views and faster updates of stock imagery will reveal far more detail of Earth’s surface than anything visible on a computer screen today. While satellite imagery won’t be real-time, or capable of distinguishing individuals, it will be good enough to pinpoint ground-level details too blurry to identify using today’s technology.

"We’re just starting," said Matthew M. O’Connell, CEO of GeoEye (formerly Orbimage), which plans to launch a satellite in early 2007 that can show images of objects as small as 1.3 feet across. "At that resolution, we can literally count the manhole covers in Manhattan."

Just a few years ago, the idea of zooming in from a PC screen to any point on Earth would have seemed like the stuff of fantasy. Now that it’s reality, satellite and aerial mapping applications are drawing millions of addicted users. Hardly a week goes by without news of some strange or scandalous finding: Last week amateur astronomer Emilio González of Spain used Google Earth to find what might be a previously unknown impact crater in Chad.

 

Read the whole story here. 

Although the reach of radio remains infinitely larger, a major milestone in the distribution of new media content was hit when the number of podasts exceeded the number of radio stations recently. SiliconRepublic:

There are now more podcasts than there are radio stations worldwide, matching a prediction made on an Irish blog site last year….

Podcasts cover a range of areas; the most popular is science, followed by religion, audio blogs, technology and talk radio. Other common categories include news, arts, movies and TV, sport, health, travel and food….

“[Podcasts] not equal in size or money or importance but it’s about choice,” Greene added, suggesting that the alternative listening choice now available to the public via podcasting would mean the end for what he calls “wallpaper radio”. Unlike many mainstream radio stations which take their playlists from a narrow selection of music formats, podcasts are designed to appeal to niche audiences.

Joyzelle Davis reports in the Rocky Mountain News:

EchoStar Communications’ Chief Executive Charlie Ergen gave the strongest indication yet that the satellite-television provider would team with larger rival DirecTV to establish a broadband service.

DirecTV, whose controlling shareholder is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., is working on technology that could allow it to offer services including phone and wireless high-speed Internet to homes and mobile devices. That would give satellite-TV providers a way to counter cable companies’ bundle of video, high-speed Internet and phone service….

A partnership would allow EchoStar to split the "excessive" costs of building the network and help craft standards for the industry, Ergen said…

If such a partnership were to occur, it would mark the first strategic alliance between the companies that sought to merge four years ago.

 Read more about the plan here.

"The tension is mounting for scientists and engineers of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) mission as their spacecraft heads toward a red planet rendezvous today," Space.com reports:

 MRO is expected to enter Mars orbit after a 27-minute maneuver around the planet’s southern hemisphere, completing a seven-month trek. That burn is set to begin at 4:25 p.m. EST (2125 GMT) this afternoon, with MRO swinging back into communications range by 5:16 p.m. EST (2216 GMT).

NASA will broadcast MRO’s Mars approach and orbital arrival live on NASA TV beginning at 3:30 p.m. EST today. You can watch it here. 

Technorati Tags:  Science, Space, technology, Cool Stuff, NASA, Planetary

"One of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus, is spewing out a giant plume of water vapor that is probably feeding one of the planet’s rings, scientists said on Thursday," Reuters reports, indicating the potential for biological life on the tiny moon.

NASA made the announcement yesterday, and it quickly became headline news around the world:

The findings, published in the journal Science, suggest that tiny Enceladus could have a liquid ocean under its icy surface which in theory could sustain primitive life, similar to Jupiter’s moon Europa. The plume was spotted by Cassini, a joint U.S.-European spacecraft that is visiting Saturn….

Several moons have been found to have evidence of liquid water and the chemical elements needed to make life, including Europa. But scientists are far more intrigued by the plume itself, a gigantic geyser of water vapor and tiny ice particles.

"It’s basically this giant plume of gas coming out of the south pole of Enceladus," Candy Hansen of NASA’S Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California said in a telephone interview.

"The plume is half the size of the moon. It’s huge," said Hansen, a planetary scientist. "Water is being spewed out of this moon. It solves some real mysteries that we have been struggling with over the years."

Indirect observations had shown the moon, discovered in 1789 by William Herschel, was rich in oxygen and hydrogen. But whether this was because of water was not clear.

Both water vapor and water particles were observed, as well as a smattering of other compounds such as methane and carbon dioxide, the international team of scientists report in a series of papers in Science.

It is possible the plume comes directly from ice, but more likely there is a liquid source, they said. It would have to be under the moon’s surface, which is covered with ice.

"If a wet domain exists at the bottom of Enceladus’ icy crust, like a miniature Europan ocean, Cassini may help to confirm it," Jeffrey Kargel of the University of Arizona at Tucson wrote in a commentary. "Might it be a habitat? Cassini cannot answer this question," Kargel added.

"Any life that existed could not be luxuriant and would have to deal with low temperatures, feeble metabolic energy, and perhaps a severe chemical environment. Nevertheless, we cannot discount the possibility that Enceladus might be life’s distant outpost."

Technorati Tags:  

Science, Space, technology, Cool Stuff, PHYSICS, News, NASA, Planetary

Aviation Week and Space Technology reports on the recently-shelved Blackstar system, a two-stage-to-orbit system designed to place a small military spaceplane in orbit:

 

This two-vehicle "Blackstar" carrier/orbiter system may have been declared operational during the 1990s.

A large "mothership," closely resembling the U.S. Air Force’s historic XB-70 supersonic bomber, carries the orbital component conformally under its fuselage, accelerating to supersonic speeds at high altitude before dropping the spaceplane. The orbiter’s engines fire and boost the vehicle into space. If mission requirements dictate, the spaceplane can either reach low Earth orbit or remain suborbital.

The manned orbiter’s primary military advantage would be surprise overflight. There would be no forewarning of its presence, prior to the first orbit, allowing ground targets to be imaged before they could be hidden. In contrast, satellite orbits are predictable enough that activities having intelligence value can be scheduled to avoid overflights.

Exactly what missions the Blackstar system may have been designed for and built to accomplish are as yet unconfirmed, but U.S. Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) officers and contractors have been toying with similar spaceplane-operational concepts for years. Besides reconnaissance, they call for inserting small satellites into orbit, and either retrieving or servicing other spacecraft. Conceivably, such a vehicle could serve as an anti-satellite or space-to-ground weapons-delivery platform, as well.

Read the full story here.