Really Rocket Science

The liftoff of the Soyuz-FG rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan later this week is set to make history — twice.

On board will be Malaysia’s first astronaut and an American who will become the first woman to command the international space station.

The AP reports: 

The Soyuz-FG rocket is scheduled to blast off from the Central Asian steppe on Wednesday night to take Malaysia’s Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, Peggy Whitson of Beaconsfield, Iowa, and Russian Yuri Malenchenko into orbit.

During his 12-day space trip, Shukor is to study of the effects of microgravity and space radiation on cells and microbes, as well as experiments with proteins for a potential HIV vaccine.

The rocket — adorned with a Malaysian flag and coat of arms and carrying a Soyuz TMA-11 spacecraft — was moved Monday to the launch pad from its assembly site at the Baikonur cosmodrome, which Russia rents from Kazakhstan.

"It’s too exciting to be cold," said Shankini Dovaisingam, a Malaysian aerospace engineer observing the final preparations. "It’s amazing to see the Malaysian flag on a Soyuz spaceship."

The mission coincides with the last days of Ramadan, the holy month when Muslims fast from dawn until sundown, but Malaysian clerics decreed that Shukor will be excused from fasting while in space.

We wrote about how Shukor will adhere (or be excused) from his religious customs here. 

Also be sure to check out the AP slideshow on the left of this page for more photos of the rocket rollout and the security at Baikonur. 

U.S. Naval officer and NASA astronaut Sunita Williams (pictured at left) is revered in India for her accomplishments and Indian American heritage. The depth of that reverence was apparent in a visit she made to India last week.

First she called on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who called her a "source of inspiration" for youngsters in India as he announced special scholarships named after her for space studies:

Manmohan Singh told Williams that India was "truly proud of her achievements" and that she was a "source of inspiration for all our young people".

Expressing her gratitude, she said she was overwhelmed by the love and affection she received in India and by the interest of young Indians in aeronautics and space exploration.

According to a Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) statement, Manmohan Singh announced that the "Government of India will finance 10 scholarships, five for girls and five for boys, to promote the study of outer space. These scholarships will be called the Sunita Williams Scholarships for Higher Education in Space (SWISHES)."

Williams also received a "rousing reception" from hundreds of delegates participating in the 58th International Astronautical Congress (IAC), which met last week in Hyderabad:

As soon as the US naval officer and NASA astronaut entered the precincts of the Hyderabad International Convention Centre, where the IAC is being held, there was a round of applause and a bit of commotion with television crews and paparazzi vying for a better glimpse of Sunita. She was welcomed by the hosts with a traditional aarti and vermillion (bindi) mark on her beaming face.

Among the first to meet Sunita was Indian cosmonaut Rakesh Sharma. They exchanged notes on their respective trips to space.

About 2,000-odd Indian and overseas delegates from 45 countries and hundreds of school and college students from the twin cities eagerly waited to listen to Sunita share her experiences of spinning in the earth orbit for over six months on board the International Space Station (ISS).

A security ring around the venue guarded her movements.

Here’s an image of the tight security that surrounded Williams’ rock-star visit. And Google Video has a 23-minute video of her presentation: 

We’re one day until launch. NASA’s newest mission, a 3-billion mile, 8-year journey, will explore the asteroid-belt. The mission’s chief engineer, Marc Rayman, sure knows how to build the excitement: "In my view, we’re going to be visiting some of the last unexplored worlds in the inner solar system."

"Dawn" will, appropriately, launch just after sunrise tomorrow morning. That is, if the forecast of rain holds off.

USA Today has the mission details:

Dawn will travel to the two biggest bodies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter — rocky Vesta and icy Ceres from the planet-forming period of the solar system.

Ceres is so big — as wide as Texas — that it’s been reclassified a dwarf planet. The spacecraft will spend a year orbiting Vesta, about the length of Arizona, from 2011 to 2012, then fly to Ceres and circle there in 2015.

Dawn’s three science instruments — a camera, infrared spectrometer, and gamma ray and neutron detector — will explore Vesta and Ceres from varying altitudes.

[…]

Because Vesta and Ceres are so different, researchers want to compare their evolutionary paths.

No one has ever attempted before to send a spacecraft to two celestial bodies and orbit both of them. It’s possible now because of the revolutionary ion engines that will propel Dawn through the cosmos.

Dawn is equipped with three ion-propulsion thrusters. Xenon gas will be bombarded with electrons, and the resulting ions will be accelerated out into space, gently shoving the spacecraft forward at increasingly higher speeds.

"It really does emit this cool blue glow like in the science fiction movies," Rayman said.

NASA tested an ion engine aboard its Deep Space 1 craft, which was launched in 1998. Ion engines have been used on only about five dozen spacecraft, mostly commercial satellites.

Dawn also has two massive solar wings, nearly 65 feet from tip to tip, to generate power as it ventures farther from the sun. Ceres is about three times farther from the sun than Earth.

You can watch the launch live on NASA TV — available on web stream. The "pregame show" begins at 5:15am. The main event will begin sometime between 7:20am and 7:49am:

Dawn’s Sept. 27 launch window is 7:20 to 7:49 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (4:20 to 4:49 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time). At the moment of liftoff, the Delta II’s first-stage main engine along with six of its nine solid-fuel boosters will ignite. The remaining three solids are ignited in flight following the burnout of the first six. The first-stage main engine will burn for 4.4 minutes. The second stage will deposit Dawn in a 185-kilometer-high (100-nautical-mile) circular parking orbit in just under nine minutes. At about 56 minutes after launch, the rocket’s third and final stage will ignite for approximately 87 seconds. When the third stage burns out, actuators and push-off springs on the launch vehicle will separate the spacecraft from the third stage.

If you see a shiny new Airstream trailer in front of your local school, it’s not necessarily because of classroom overcrowding: it’s likely part of the "NASA to the Schools, Penn State" program, a new 5-year cooperative program that’s putting the Big Ten athletic conference school forward as the face of NASA’s K-12 educational outreach.

EarthTimes.org reports: 

 The $27 million agreement comes under NASA’s Aerospace Education Services Program, one of the oldest National Aeronautics and Space Administration programs now in its 35th year.

Penn State took over Sept. 1 from Oklahoma State University.

"This is the only program in the United States that can put professional science educators on the ground in 50 states and territories," said Penn Sate Professor William Carlsen, director of the university’s Center for Science and the Schools.

The Penn State program will shift the existing emphasis from one-time school visits and short teacher seminars to university-based, space-oriented summer courses for teachers.

School visits will continue, but rather than emphasizing auditorium presentations, NASA education specialists will work closely with teachers and school administrators to infuse cutting-edge science content into extended instructional units, officials said.

Penn State’s Center for Science and the Schools website can be found here. They’ve got some innovative plans for curriculum development and teacher training:

A meeting at Cornell University with scientists who study Mars will kick off development of the first course for teachers. To supplement instruction by classroom teachers who have enrolled in summer courseware, the six Airstream “NASA to the Schools” vehicles will crisscross the country with a scaled-down version of a Martian Rover. Just like a real Rover, these half-pints will sport cameras that enable them to monitor their environment in 3-D. In a novel twist, the educational rovers will also have the capability of projecting images in 3-D using "GeoWall" technology, letting students see exactly what the Rovers saw on Mars.

NASA to the Schools will use many new instructional technologies, developing continuing education content for delivery through NASA’s Digital Learning Network. Education specialists will get in on the ground floor of new NASA projects to aid them in their continuing education components as well.

For a preview of what the tots might experience as part of their "Rover" education, check out this video of the latest Rover Flight Director’s report. 

The Phoenix Mars Lander has passed its first in-flight check. The collaborative project, part of NASA’s Mars Scout class, is headed by the Universtiy of Arizona but includes efforts by Lockheed-Martin and The Max Planck Institute. The mars lander, slated to explore the arctic region of mars, analyzing samples of soil and ice, launched on August 4th and is expected to land on May 25, 2008. Last week, it received its first in-flight report, including a photo taken from its robotic arm camera:

The Robotic Arm Camera took an image of the Robotic Arm scoop using its red LED (Light-Emitting Diode) lamp. Human eyes see this image only in shades of gray, so the picture has been enhanced in false color to better represent what the camera sees.

Images from the Robotic Arm Camera, one of five imaging instruments on the lander, will be the only pictures taken and returned to Earth until Phoenix approaches and lands on Mars on May 25, 2008. Additional images will be taken by the Robotic Arm Camera later in the cruise stage.

The Robotic Arm Camera check was one of a series of instrument tests being completed as Phoenix cruises toward the red planet. Phoenix was about 57 million miles from Earth when the image was sent back. It is traveling at 76,000 miles per hour in relation to the sun.

On Mars, the Robotic Arm will dig trenches, scoop up soil and water-ice samples and deliver them to several instruments on the lander’s deck for chemical and geological analysis.

The Robotic Arm Camera, built by the UA and Max Planck Institute, is attached to the Robotic Arm just above the scoop and will provide close-up, full-color images of the Martian surface, prospective soil and water-ice samples, samples collected in the scoop before delivery to the lander’s science deck, and of the floor and side walls of the trenches.

While the photo doesn’t look like much, it provides welcome relief to the project team. From the project’s excellent blog:

At the moment all we have to look at is the scoop on RA that we’ll use to dig into the surface of Mars. Although we see numbers flow back during these health checks, a picture is something very tangible. It tells us in an image what it takes pages of numbers to understand. We see a sharp focus, the lights are on, the multitude of commands executed properly, the data pipe that the images stream down all work, After all RAC is a camera, all the work is to have an instrument that takes images and the result is we get a picture here on Earth from tens of millions of miles from home. Makes me confident we’ll get back pictures after we land on Mars.

I find this very comforting. Not only have we endured launch, deep cold of space, but we also survived the Van Allen Radiation Belts that surrounds the Earth (some 1500 rems / year compared to 0.04 here on earth). We’ve prepared for this and we’d prepared well. It certainly is exciting to see our hearty little friend is healthy so far from Earth on her extraterrestrial journey to her new home on Mars.

The same in-flight check returned the lander’s cruising temperature (a touch colder than a Wisconsin winter):

So far all looks well on the spacecraft and the instruments are at a balmy -30° C with some places near 0°C. The RAC at a comfortable -15°C!So much for the interplanetary weather report.

Meanwhile, the weather on Mars isn’t much better. Earlier this summer, a global dust storm swept the red planet creating a sky-darkening dust clout, nearly killing NASA’s solar-dependent exploration rovers. The rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have worked 40 months more than their original 3-month goal. Along the way, they’ve survived a lot:

"These rovers are tough. They faced dusty winds, power starvation and other challenges — and survived. Now they are back to doing groundbreaking field work on Mars. These spacecraft are amazing," said Alan Stern, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

Let’s hope the Phoenix has similar longevity. So far, so good.

Two weeks ago the Perseids lit up the night sky, delighting astronomy buffs with a fireworks display of meteors.

But what would happen if a true grand finale was coming our way in the form of an asteroid that could change life on Earth as we know it?

That’s a question posed in the latest issue of Popular Science.  

From the article: 

There are between one and two million near-Earth objects (NEOs)—chunks of space rock whose orbits may pass within 30 million miles of Earth—that pose a significant impact threat to the planet. Of the 4,535 NEOs detected and tracked (704 of which are real whoppers), none are on a definite collision course, but there could be millions more, many of them potentially lethal, lurking in the cosmos.

Detection
Who’s Watching? Most spotting is done by half a dozen optical telescopes in the U.S., Italy, Japan and Australia, coordinated by such programs as the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project, a NASA-funded collaboration between MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and the U.S. Air Force tasked solely with the detection and cataloging of potential NEOs. Amateur astronomers worldwide also aid the effort. Collectively, the programs discover a new NEO every few days.

What’s the Plan? Since 1998, NASA has funded Spaceguard, a consortium of observatories working to find 90 percent of the half-mile-plus NEOs by 2008; the group has found three quarters of the predicted 1,100 NEOs in this size class. Spaceguard’s next step is to find 90 percent of NEOs measuring 460 feet or larger—potentially up to 12,000 objects—by 2020, but funding has not been secured. Larger wide-field scopes should come online in Hawaii, Arizona and Chile in the next decade, greatly speeding detection.

Our knowledge of asteroids and the early formation of our solar system is likely to increase dramatically in the coming decade, thanks to this fall’s launch of NASA’s Dawn mission: 

[T]he Dawn mission will study the asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres, celestial bodies believed to have accreted early in the history of the solar system. The mission will characterize the early solar system and the processes that dominated its formation…

Vesta is a dry, differentiated object with a surface that shows signs of resurfacing. It resembles the rocky bodies of the inner solar system, including Earth. Ceres, by contrast, has a primitive surface containing water-bearing minerals, and may possess a weak atmosphere. It appears to have many similarities to the large icy moons of the outer solar system.

By studying both these two distinct bodies with the same complement of instruments on the same spacecraft, the Dawn mission hopes to compare the different evolutionary path each took as well as create a picture of the early solar system overall. Data returned from the Dawn spacecraft could provide opportunities for significant breakthroughs in our knowledge of how the solar system formed.

Where’s the best place to watch the Dawn, er, rise? Apparently, Australia:

A team of four personnel from the United States Air Force will visit Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory to monitor the launch …

The US team will arrive at Alice Springs and travel to Tennant Creek where they will establish a small temporary ground station. Tennant Creek was selected as it affords the best view of the crucial booster separation phase of the launch. As part of the same mission a United States Air Force NKC-135 aircraft will be operating out of Perth International Airport from mid-September and flying over northwest Australia. The launch from Cape Canaveral is planned for between 19 September and 15 October depending on weather and atmospheric conditions.

If you’re more interested in dusk, as it were, be sure to check out Popular Science’s excellent slideshow of past asteroid collisions with our home planet.

Last week, we told you about Google Sky, which is the Internet company’s effort to point the gaze of its incredibly successful Google Earth platform out into space.

But that’s not Google’s only foray into space:

Google and NASA have worked next to and with each other for a number of years; I’ve never been bothered by this fact, and I’m not complaining now.  Yet the lines are getting even more blurred as former astronaut Ed Lu has gained a job with the search engine giant.

“Lu, who has a doctorate in astrophysics from Stanford University and a strong background in the academic research environment, will have a lot to offer to GoogleSky as well as to GoogleScholar and GoogleBooks,” writes Loretta Whitesides in an article for Wired….

[Lu] "may also play a role in the NASA-Google Space Act Agreement projects, announced in December 2006,” Whitesides continues.  “Lu even has an article published in Nature on his idea for a ‘Gravity Tractor’ mission that could gently pull an asteroid off course over time.”

As WiredPro’s David Caverly points out, Google seems to be intent on covering its lunar bases.

(Hat tip to Wired.) 

Billions of miles away from earth, way past the edge of our solar system, Voyager 1 is quietly (we assume) celebrating its pearl anniversary this week.

Space.com reminds us of the two Voyagers’ origins: 

Voyager 2 launched on Aug. 20, 1977, and Voyager 1 launched on Sept. 5, 1977. Both spacecraft continue to return information from distances more than three times farther away than Pluto, where the sun’s outer heliosphere meets the boundary of interstellar space…

Voyager 1 currently is the farthest human-made object at a distance from the sun of about 9.7 billion miles (15.6 billion kilometers). Voyager 2 is about 7.8 billion miles (12.6 billion kilometers).

Originally designed as a four-year mission to Jupiter and Saturn, the Voyager tours were extended because of their successful achievements and a rare planetary alignment. The two-planet mission eventually became a four-planet grand tour. After completing that extended mission, the two spacecraft began the task of exploring the outer heliosphere.

During their first dozen years of flight, the spacecraft explored Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and their moons. These planets were previously unknown worlds. The Voyagers returned never-before-seen images and scientific data and helped make fundamental discoveries about the outer planets and their moons.

The spacecraft revealed Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere, which includes dozens of interacting hurricane-like storm systems, and erupting volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io. They also showed waves and fine structure in Saturn’s icy rings from the tugs of nearby moons.

 
The NASA Voyager site also contains some amazing facts about the spacecraft, their navigation and observation technologies, and the scientific discoveries that they have made possible.

30 years is a long time, to be sure — but we should enjoy many more anniversaries to come: 

 Barring any serious spacecraft subsystem failures, the Voyagers may survive until the early twenty-first century (~ 2020), when diminishing power and hydrazine levels will prevent further operation. Were it not for these dwindling consumables and the possibility of losing lock on the faint Sun, our tracking antennas could continue to "talk" with the Voyagers for another century or two!

Very cool video by Andrewwski, courtesy of NASA SpaceFlight.com Six minutes of entertainment. They put this up on a server over at the Johnson Space Center and the crew viewed the video and loved it.

These are the kind of video edits NASA TV should be broadcasting!

Yes, the International Space Station is for rent. From NewsDay:

For the past two years, much of the science at the space station has been oriented toward returning astronauts to the moon, and even going on to Mars.

“We didn’t need the entire capacity of the space station to do exploration-related research,” said Mark Uhran, NASA’s assistant associate administrator of the space station. “So the capacity that was freed up after we restructured our program is now available to other agencies or private sector companies.”

The space station’s first section was launched in 1998 and it has been inhabited continuously since 2000 by Russian, U.S. and European crew mates. By 2009, the station’s three-member crew is expected to grow to six people.

The station was designed to last until at least 2015, but managers now believe it could operate as late as 2022.

“What probably drives the life is … probably how much the space station is utilized,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations.

Once it is completed, it will cost about $1.5 billion a year to run the space station. About half the space station’s U.S. section would be available for the use by outsiders, who wouldn’t have to pay a fee for its use.

NASA’s plans to open up the space station to outsiders, though, depend on whether private companies build spaceships that could travel to the outpost as a replacement for the grounded shuttles after 2010. NASA has given $500 million in seed money to two private companies to build spacecraft and has signed agreements with others.