Five days after their launch, NASA’s two new lunar probes have successfully rendezvoused with their target. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter fired its thrusters this morning to settle into orbit around the moon, while the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) swung past the moon, streaming live video all the while. (NASA promises to put the video playback online soon.)
The paired satellites will spend the next year mapping the moon and searching for traces of water ice, culminating in a dramatic crash when LCROSS plunges into a crater. But for now, NASA is busy celebrating the successful first steps. The $504 million LRO is the first NASA vessel to orbit the moon since 1998. “LRO has returned NASA to the moon,” a flight controller said as NASA’s LRO mission control center erupted in applause. The probe’s lunar arrival comes just under one month ahead of the 40th anniversary of NASA’s first moon landing by Apollo 11 astronauts on July 20, 1969 [SPACE.com].
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NASA is turning its attention back on a familiar target–the moon–but in service of a unprecedented goal. Two new spacecraft are expected to launch this week on a robotic mission aimed at finding the best site for Earth’s first off-world colony, the centuries-old dream of science fiction writers and utopians…. “We’re going to provide NASA with what is needed to get human beings back to the moon and to stay there for an extended duration” [Los Angeles Times], explains NASA’s Craig Tooley. However, whether such a lunar outpost will ever be built is still an open question.
The spacecraft duo comprises an orbiter and a crash-lander; the two spacecraft will take off for the moon aboard a single Atlas V rocket, but once in space they’ll separate and take different routes. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) will make a four-day journey to the moon’s orbit where it will begin mapping the moon’s surface, looking for potential moon base sites in polar locations that are bathed in near-constant sunlight (which would be useful for solar panels). The orbiter will also carry pieces of plastic designed to simulate the density and chemical proportions of human skin and muscle…. The LRO’s particle detectors will measure how this plastic interacts with cosmic rays – a form of space radiation made up of particles such as protons that can lead to cancer by damaging DNA [New Scientist].
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By pretending to observe the sunlight shining through the Earth’s atmosphere from the vantage point of the moon, astronomers have gained a clue that may help them in the search for Earth-like exoplanets that could be harboring life.
The astronomers made their observations on 16 August 2008 during a lunar eclipse — in which the Moon moves into Earth’s shadow. Even when the Moon is totally eclipsed by Earth, it is still bathed in a dim red light — from sunlight that has been bent as it passes through the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. Using Earth-based telescopes, the astronomers detected some of this light after it bounced back from the Moon [Nature News].
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The man tasked with steering NASA through difficult transitions and pointing the space agency boldly towards the stars will be a former astronaut who has piloted the space shuttle. On Saturday, President Barack Obama announced his long-awaited nomination for NASA administrator: Charles F. Bolden Jr. If confirmed by the Senate, the former astronaut and retired Marine Corps general will be the first African-American to head the space agency.
The pick has been celebrated by NASA insiders, and is viewed as a signal that, after some signs of ambivalence, President Obama is now embracing the expensive manned spaceflight program. “Clearly Charlie Bolden would not have taken the job if he were being asked to shut down human spaceflight,” said John Logsdon, a space policy expert in Washington…. He added that a recent announcement of the administration’s plans to review the Ares 1 rocket and Orion spacecraft, which are to replace the space shuttle by 2015, is not a shot across the bow of NASA’s human spaceflight program. He said it would be a review of the hardware, not the destination or goals [Los Angeles Times].
However, it is not clear whether the new leadership will adopt all of the goals for human exploration of the solar system that were laid out by the Bush administration: namely, returning to the moon by 2020 and then working towards landing humans on Mars.
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While NASA’s central mission is the same as it always was–to send astronauts up, up, and away!–the details of how it will send bold explorers into the space frontier are suddenly, well, up in the air. After months of signaling displeasure with NASA’s operations, the Obama administration has ordered a 90-day review of the human space flight program. In a letter to NASA Acting Administrator Christopher Scolese, the president’s science adviser, John Holdren, wrote that “it would be only prudent” to review NASA’s human space flight program given the magnitude of its ambitions and “the significant investment of both funds and scientific capital” [Washington Post].
The crux of the matter is the Constellation program, which aims to replace the aging space shuttles with the newly designed Ares rockets and Orion crew capsule. But during the past several months, watchdog agencies have questioned whether NASA can deliver the Constellation program on time and within budget. Its estimated costs through 2015 have risen from $28 billion in 2006 to more than $40 billion today, and engineers still are wrestling with design flaws that would cause Ares I to shake violently during ascent and also possibly drift into its launch tower [Orlando Sentinel]. Back in December, Obama’s transition team reportedly asked NASA officials if military rockets used to launch satellites could be reconfigured to boost astronauts to the International Space Station and on to the moon.
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NASA astronauts may not be assigned to a stint at a lunar base anytime soon. A statement by a NASA official suggested that the space agency is likely to scrap the idea of a permanent moon base, but could instead try to speed up other, more ambitious manned missions to explore our solar system.
NASA has been working towards returning astronauts to the moon by 2020 and building a permanent base there. But some space analysts and advocacy groups like the Planetary Society have urged the agency to cancel plans for a permanent moon base, carry out shorter moon missions instead, and focus on getting astronauts to Mars [New Scientist]. When the agency’s acting administrator, Chris Scolese, testified before a congressional subcommittee yesterday, he said that the agency probably won’t aim to build an outpost on the moon, suggesting that the agency may be following those advocates’ advice.
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In an attempt to smooth the way for future manned missions to the moon, a researcher who studied lunar dust almost 40 years ago has returned to his data to investigate why the dust behaves in such problematic ways. The tiny grains cling to spacesuits and scientific instruments, causing myriad problems—clogging, abrasion, inhalation, obfuscation—for lunar visitors and the experiments they leave behind [Scientific American].
Physicist Brian O’Brien worked on several Apollo lunar landing missions from 1969 to 1971, building dust detection devices that were planted on the moon’s surface. In 2006 he learned that NASA had lost the original data from those devices and decided to go back through his own set of data tapes from the experiments, to see if anything new could be learned. “Dust is the number one environmental hazard on the moon, yet its movements and adhesive properties are little understood,” said O’Brien [SPACE.com]. Lunar dust generally refers to only the tiniest particles of lunar regolith, the loose blanket of rock fragments that covers most of the moon’s surface.
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Astronomers are hoping to catch a glimpse of debris that could be leftover from a cosmic collision between our Earth and a Mars-sized planet called Theia–if, in fact, it existed at all. “It’s a hypothetical world. We’ve never actually seen it, but some researchers believe it existed 4.5 billion years ago — and that it collided with Earth to form the moon,” said Mike Kaiser, a NASA scientist [SPACE.com].
The research will be done with the two Stereo spacecraft that are on their way to observe the sun; on their way they’ll have a chance to do some “bonus science,” as one researcher called it. The spacecraft are passing through two regions of space, called Lagrangian points, where the gravity from the Earth and the sun combine to form wells that tend to collect solar system detritus…. Scientists think Theia may even have formed in one of these gravitational points of balance from the accumulation of flotsam that had built up there [SPACE.com].
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A Chinese lunar probe ended its mission with a controlled crash on the surface of the moon on Sunday, Chinese news sources report. The crash of the Chang’e probe, named after a moon goddess, was intended to give the Chinese space agency data and experience as it prepares for soft lunar landings in the next decade.
China launched the probe in late October 2007 to have it survey the entire surface of the moon. Slung into space by a Long March 3A rocket, the satellite surveyed the moon’s surface using stereo radar and other tools [AP]. In November 2007 the probe transmitted China’s first full, 3-D map of the lunar surface. Despite the worldwide economic crisis China’s ambitious space program shows no sign of slowing down: Plans include a Chinese space station and a manned mission to the moon.
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Around 3.9 billion years ago a massive asteroid may have slammed into the moon with such force that it changed the satellite’s rotation, according to a new analysis by a pair of astrophysicists. The impact may have set the moon to spinning, so that it eventually settled down with a 180 rotation from its previous orientation. Currently, earthlings looking up at the moon always see its same side; the other “dark side” of the moon is pointed away as a result of synchronous rotation, a sort of orbital lockstep that keeps the moon rotating once for every lap it takes around Earth [Scientific American]. The new findings suggest that Earth had a different view of the moon 3.9 billion years ago, although there was probably no life on the planet to take notice.
The researchers came to this surprising conclusion by analyzing the moon’s craters. According to earlier computer simulations, the moon’s western hemisphere as viewed from Earth should have about 30 per cent more craters than the eastern hemisphere. That’s because the west always faces in the direction in which the moon orbits, which makes it more likely to be hit by debris, for the same reason that more raindrops strike a moving car’s front windshield than its rear [New Scientist]. When researchers examined the age of the craters, however, they found a more complex scenario. The western hemisphere did have the greatest concentration of young impact basins, but the eastern hemisphere had most of the old craters. This suggests that the eastern hemisphere was once positioned to receive a heavy bombardment, and that the moon once had a different orientation.
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A tiny moon rock only two inches across that was picked up by one of the last astronauts to walk on the moon has given researchers new insight into the geological history of Earth’s satellite. The rock, scooped up during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, is about 4.2 billion years old, and shows evidence that the moon once had a molten iron core that generated a magnetic field in the satellite’s early days. The findings are forcing researchers to rethink the prevailing notion that objects smaller than Mars can’t maintain a stable magnetic field.
Many of the rocks brought back from the Moon have a faint magnetic signal, suggesting that they originally cooled from magma when the Moon had a magnetic field. That was a surprise to many scientists who thought the Moon was too small and too cold to have ever possessed a geomagnetic dynamo where electric currents from the convection of molten iron generate a field [The New York Times]. But a molten core wasn’t the only explanation for the magnetic traces; some researchers thought that an intense bombardment of meteorites and asteroids created shocks that magnetized the rocks.
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Forty years ago today, a brave crew of NASA astronauts were approaching the moon’s orbit for the first time, in a risky mission that lifted the hearts of Americans in a troubled era. Apollo 8 blasted off on the morning of December 21, and eased into the moon’s orbit on Christmas Eve, when hundreds of millions of people tuned in to hear the astronauts describe their view and read from the Bible. To the public, the Apollo 8 mission was an antidote to all the toxic events that had subverted most of 1968, including the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the eruption of inner-city rioting and the peak of American involvement in the Vietnam War [Chicago Tribune].
Apollo 8 wasn’t originally intended to go to the moon; it was scheduled to orbit Earth and test the new lunar landing vehicle. But the vehicle wasn’t ready, and the CIA was reporting that the Soviets were on the verge of sending their own manned expedition around the moon, so NASA decided to push ahead. It was a gutsy, dangerous decision, and not just because flying without a lunar lander meant that Apollo 8’s crew – Commander Frank Borman, James Lovell, and Bill Anders – would be stranded without a lifeboat if anything went wrong. Houston still didn’t have the software Apollo would need to navigate to the moon. And the huge Saturn V rocket required to launch a spacecraft beyond the Earth’s gravity was still being perfected, and had never been used on a manned flight. By today’s standards, the risks were unthinkable. Apollo’s program director, Chris Kraft, figured the odds of getting the crew home safely were no better than 50-50 [The Boston Globe].
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NASA officials have long pronounced themselves ready to move on from the aging space shuttles, which could be retired as soon as 2010, but the incoming Barack Obama administration has raised new doubts about what the next step should be. Last week, news reports surfaced that Obama’s transition team was questioning NASA about alternatives to the Ares I rocket that is currently under development as the shuttle’s replacement, and now transition team members are reportedly considering using modified military rockets instead. No decision has been made and the concept raises major technical, funding and policy issues. But in recent weeks, the transition team assigned to [NASA] has been asking aerospace industry officials about the feasibility of such a dramatic shift in priorities [The Wall Street Journal].
The Ares I rocket is designed to bring the new Orion crew capsule to the International Space Station, and eventually back to the moon and on to Mars. Technical difficulties and budget problems have raised doubts about the program, but NASA officials have dismissed these issues as a normal part of the process, and have argued against a change in plans. NASA officials stressed that moving away from the current Ares rocket designs almost certainly would entail extra costs and lengthy delays in getting the shuttle replacement off the ground. With the first Ares 1 test flight tentatively scheduled for next summer, “going to completely different hardware would put a big gap” in the workforce focusing on rocket development, said Steve Cook, Ares program manager. “We would really be stepping backward” by deciding that the shuttle replacement could ride safely on an alternate rocket [The Wall Street Journal].
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NASA engineers have finally tested an “interplanetary Internet” that could be crucial for future communications with rovers and astronauts exploring the moon, Mars, or other planets. NASA says the system would rely on probes and orbiters to serve as relay stations, or routers, to send communications around the solar system. The space agency has been working for 10 years on the project with Vint Cerf, one of the Internet’s key inventors and now chief Internet evangelist for Google [AP].
The protocols (the language computers use to speak to each other) used for our terrestrial Internet won’t work for deep space, because they assume that the network’s nodes will be connected continuously, and that messages will travel swiftly. But communication between objects in space are frequently disrupted by solar storms and obstructing planets, and sending a message from Earth to Mars can take up to 20 minutes. So engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory worked with Cerf to come up with a new protocol, called Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN).
With the new communications design, each network node is designed to hold onto data packets, instead of discard them, until a destination path can be found. “The incentive to use Internet-like protocols over space links was to take advantage of automated routing,” [said NASA's Leigh Torgerson]. “With standard space-link communications, the ground sends commands to spacecraft to tell it what time and what data to send. It’s very hands-on-intensive” [Computerworld].
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Today the entire nation of India rejoiced as the nation’s first lunar orbiter send an impact probe smashing into the moon’s surface. As the probe was painted with the jaunty tricolor flag of India, millions of ecstatic citizens saw it as a near equivalent to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s planting of the American flag on lunar soil almost 40 years ago. “Just as we had promised, we have given India the moon,” said G. Madhavan Nair, Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation [The Hindu].
Lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-1 — Chandrayaan means “moon craft” in Sanskrit — was successfully launched from southern India on October 22 and is now orbiting the moon. Its two-year mission is to take high-resolution, three-dimensional images of the moon’s surface, especially the permanently shadowed polar regions. It also will search for evidence of water or ice and attempt to identify the chemical composition of certain lunar rocks [CNN]. The Indian government has said that the $79 million mission to map the lunar surface is just a prelude to the landing of a robotic lunar rover in 2012, and a manned mission to the moon by 2020.
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