India’s first lunar mission has ended not with a bang, but with dead silence. India‘s space agency lost contact with the lunar orbiter, Chandrayaan-I, over the weekend; when efforts to restore communication were futile Indian officials declared that the mission was over.
The launch of Chandrayaan-1 in October 2008 put India in an elite club of countries with moon missions. Other countries with similar satellites are the United States, Russia, the European Space Agency, Japan and China [AP]. Indian officials hope that either NASA or the Russian space agency will agree to track the orbiter, which is currently circling 125 miles from the moon’s surface. The satellite’s orbit will slowly decay over the next several years, and it is expected to crash into the moon in about 1,000 days.
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A panel evaluating NASA‘s goals has made some bold suggestions for the agency, including yearlong missions into deep space and even landing on Mars‘ moon, Phobos.
NASA’s current goal is to land humans on the moon once again by 2020, but the panel, which was set up by the White House, has suggested other possible ventures that could speed NASA towards another goal: a manned mission to Mars. For example, long missions to deep space would help scientists learn how to manage long-duration space missions far from Earth, which human missions to Mars would require…”It is true we need to gain experience exploring planetary surfaces, but in fact we’ve done some of that…. What we actually have almost no experience at all with is operations in deep space” [New Scientist], said committee member Edward Crawley. Missions into deep space would require further research into how to protect humans from space radiation, the harmful charged particles from which lower-orbit missions are shielded by the Earth’s magnetic field.
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Forty years ago today, two men walked on the moon. To celebrate that moment of transcendent ambition and triumph, the world is looking back to July 20, 1969: NASA has released restored video footage of the Apollo 11 landing, and a new NASA moon orbiter has taken snapshots of the Apollo landing site, where left-behind gear still sits on the lunar surface. But for some space buffs, the anniversary has a touch of melancholy to it.
For all the promised “giant leap for mankind” the mission foretold, the prophesied future of moon bases and journeys to Mars, Jupiter and beyond is still science fiction. The last of six moon landings, bringing two men each time to the lunar surface, was in 1972. Since then, no one has left low Earth orbit. For many advocates, there is a consensus that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is suffering from what President Obama this March called “a sense of drift” [Washington Post].
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On July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were packing up equipment in their lunar lander, getting ready to blast back to the moon‘s orbit where command module was waiting to bring the Apollo 11 mission back home. But another dramatic scene was also taking place on the lunar surface: the unmanned Russian probe Luna 15 was crashing to the ground. Now, never-before released recording—from a British control room that was monitoring all the lunar activity—transports the listener back to that tight finale of the moon phase of the space race, 40 years ago.
The recordings were made over three days at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Manchester, where researchers used the Lovell Radio Telescope to listen to transmissions from Apollo 11—and Luna 15. Sir Bernard Lovell, the inventor of the telescope and the founder of Jodrell Bank, can be heard narrating events with conversation from the Apollo 11 astronauts in the background. Sir Bernard notes a change in the orbit of Luna 15 to take it closer to the US landing site and later reports a rumour from a “well-informed source in Moscow” that the craft is about to land. People in Jodrell’s control room can then be heard shouting “it’s landing” and “it’s going down much too fast” as they track Luna 15′s final moments before it crashes [Telegraph].
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The first permanent node of the “interplanetary internet” has been installed and tested out aboard the International Space Station, in what NASA officials say is the first step to a communication system that could one day span the solar system. The interplanetary internet got its first deep space tryout last fall, when a spacecraft called EPOXI that’s on its way to a comet rendezvous used the system to send images back to its controllers on Earth. Now, researchers are ready to test it out in regular communications with the space station.
There’s a fringe benefit: In just a few months, astronauts will be able to tweet live from the international space station. “NASA is trying to leverage the popularity of Twitter to get its message out,” said [researcher] Kevin Gifford…. “To tweet from space will have a lot of glitz value” [Denver Post]. Currently, astronauts on the space station have to schedule times to send or receive data from mission control below; that’s why the first astronaut to make use of Twitter on a space shuttle flight, Mike Massimino, aka @Astro_Mike, had to send his tweets to Houston and have a NASA employee post them to his profile.
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As the second man to ever walk on the moon (he stepped out of the lunar module about 15 minutes after Neil Armstrong), Buzz Aldrin knows a little something about space exploration, about bold ambitions and great risks. Now, Aldrin is speaking out about NASA, and declaring loudly that the space agency has lost its boldness. The next step in humanity’s exploration of space must be a bootprint on Mars, he says.
Says Aldrin: “As I approach my 80th birthday, I’m in no mood to keep my mouth shut any longer when I see NASA heading down the wrong path. And that’s exactly what I see today. The agency’s current Vision for Space Exploration will waste decades and hundreds of billions of dollars trying to reach the moon by 2020—a glorified rehash of what we did 40 years ago. Instead of a steppingstone to Mars, NASA’s current lunar plan is a detour” [Popular Mechanics].
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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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