The International Space Station. Credit: NASA
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Monday, June 4, 2012
SPACEX DRAGON CAPSULE RETURNS TO EARTH AFTER FIRST COMMERCIAL FLIGHT TO SPACE STATION
FROM: NASA
HOUSTON -- SpaceX's Dragon capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean
at 11:42 a.m. EDT a few hundred miles west of Baja California,
Mexico, marking a successful end to the first mission by a commercial
company to resupply the International Space Station.
"Congratulations to the teams at SpaceX and NASA who worked hard to
make this first commercial mission to the International Space Station
an overwhelming success," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said.
"This successful splashdown and the many other achievements of this
mission herald a new era in U.S. commercial spaceflight. American
innovation and inspiration have once again shown their great strength
in the design and operation of a new generation of vehicles to carry
cargo to our laboratory in space. Now more than ever we're counting
on the inventiveness of American companies and American workers to
make the International Space Station and other low Earth orbit
destinations accessible to any and all who have dreams of space
travel."
The Dragon capsule will be taken by boat to a port near Los Angeles,
where it will be prepared for a return journey to SpaceX's test
facility in McGregor, Texas, for processing. Some cargo will be
removed at the port in California and returned to NASA within 48
hours. The remainder will be returned to Texas with the capsule.
The capsule delivered to the station 1,014 pounds of supplies
including experiments, food, clothing and technology. On its return
trip to Earth, the capsule carried science experiments that will be
returned to researchers hoping to gain new insights provided by the
unique microgravity environment in the station's laboratories. In
addition to the experiments, Dragon returned a total of 1,367 pounds
of hardware and cargo no longer needed aboard the station.
Dragon's journey to the space station was SpaceX's second
demonstration mission under NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation
Services (COTS) Program, which provides investments to stimulate the
commercial space industry in America. The mission began May 22 as the
capsule launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida
aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Following a series of tests of its
maneuverability and abort systems, the capsule was grappled and
berthed to the space station by the crew members of Expedition 31
aboard the orbiting complex.
In the next several weeks, NASA will evaluate the Dragon capsule's
mission performance to close out remaining COTS milestones. Once that
work is completed NASA and SpaceX will set the target date for the
company's first full cargo mission.
In addition to fostering the development of new American cargo
vehicles, NASA also is helping spur innovation and development of new
spacecraft and launch vehicles from the commercial industry to
develop safe, reliable and cost-effective capabilities to transport
astronauts to low Earth orbit and the space station.
NASA also is developing the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System
(SLS), a crew capsule and heavy-lift rocket that will provide an
entirely new capability for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit.
Designed to be flexible for launching spacecraft for crew and cargo
missions, SLS and Orion will expand human presence beyond low Earth
orbit and enable new missions of exploration across the solar system.
Sunday, June 3, 2012
NASA'S PEGASUS
Pegasus Fairing Removed
Orbital Sciences’ Pegasus XL rocket is viewed over the Pegasus payload fairing, positioned part in and part out of the environmental enclosure in Orbital’s hangar on Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Half of the Pegasus fairing has been removed from around NASA’s NuSTAR spacecraft. Access to the spacecraft is needed for compatibility testing to verify communication with a tracking station in Hawaii.
Image credit: NASA/Randy Beaudoin, VAFB
April 10, 2012
Saturday, June 2, 2012
NASA PREPARING TO LAUNCH ITS NEWEST X-RAY TELESCOPE ARRAY CALLED NUSTAR
NASA PREPARING TO LAUNCH ITS NEWEST X-RAY EYES
WASHINGTON -- NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR,
is being prepared for the final journey to its launch pad on
Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean. The mission will study
everything from massive black holes to our own sun. It is scheduled
to launch no earlier than June 13.
"We will see the hottest, densest and most energetic objects with a
fundamentally new high-energy X-ray telescope that can obtain much
deeper and crisper images than before," said Fiona Harrison, the
NuSTAR principal investigator at the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif., who first conceived of the
mission 20 years ago.
The observatory is perched atop an Orbital Sciences Corporation
Pegasus XL rocket. If the mission passes its Flight Readiness Review
on June 1, the rocket will be strapped to the bottom of an aircraft,
the L-1011 Stargazer, also operated by Orbital, on June 2. The
Stargazer is scheduled to fly from Vandenberg Air Force Base in
central California to Kwajalein June 5-6.
On launch day, the Stargazer will take off and at around 11:30 a.m.
EDT (8:30 a.m. PDT) will drop the rocket, which will then ignite and
carry NuSTAR to a low orbit around Earth.
"NuSTAR uses several innovations for its unprecedented imaging
capability and was made possible by many partners," said Yunjin Kim,
the project manager for the mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "We're all really excited to see
the fruition of our work begin its mission in space."
NuSTAR will be the first space telescope to create focused images of
cosmic X-rays with the highest energies. These are the same types of
X-rays that doctors use to see your bones and airports use to scan
your bags. The telescope will have more than 10 times the resolution,
and more than 100 times the sensitivity, of its predecessors while
operating in a similar energy range.
The mission will work with other telescopes in space now, including
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which observes lower-energy X-rays.
Together, they will provide a more complete picture of the most
energetic and exotic objects in space, such as black holes, dead
stars and jets traveling near the speed of light.
"NuSTAR truly demonstrates the value that NASA's research and
development programs provide in advancing the nation's science
agenda," said Paul Hertz, NASA's Astrophysics Division director.
"Taking just over four years from receiving the project go-ahead to
launch, this low-cost Explorer mission will use new mirror and
detector technology that was developed in NASA's basic research
program and tested in NASA's scientific ballooning program. The
result of these modest investments is a small space telescope that
will provide world-class science in an important but relatively
unexplored band of the electromagnetic spectrum."
NuSTAR will study black holes that are big and small, far and near,
answering questions about the formation and physics behind these
wonders of the cosmos. The observatory will also investigate how
exploding stars forge the elements that make up planets and people,
and it will even study our own sun's atmosphere.
The observatory is able to focus the high-energy X-ray light into
sharp images because of a complex, innovative telescope design.
High-energy light is difficult to focus because it only reflects off
mirrors when hitting at nearly parallel angles. NuSTAR solves this
problem with nested shells of mirrors. It has the most nested shells
ever used in a space telescope, 133 in each of two optic units. The
mirrors were molded from ultra-thin glass similar to that found in
laptop screens and glazed with even thinner layers of reflective
coating.
The telescope also consists of state-of-the-art detectors and a
lengthy 33-foot (10-meter) mast, which connects the detectors to the
nested mirrors, providing the long distance required to focus the
X-rays. This mast is folded up into a canister small enough to fit
atop the Pegasus launch vehicle. It will unfurl about seven days
after launch. About 23 days later, science operations will begin.
NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by JPL
for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft
was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation in Dulles, Va. Its
instrument was built by a consortium including Caltech; JPL;
University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley); Columbia
University in New York; NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Md.; the Danish Technical University in Denmark; Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.; and ATK Aerospace
Systems in Goleta, Calif. NuSTAR will be operated by UC Berkeley,
with the Italian Space Agency providing its equatorial ground station
located at Malindi, Kenya. The mission's outreach program is based at
Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, Calif. NASA's Explorer
Program is managed by Goddard. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.
Friday, June 1, 2012
HUBBLE OBSERVES GALAXY 4980
FROM: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE ARMED WITH SCIENCE
Written on MAY 27, 2012 AT 7:10 AM by JTOZER
A Spiral Galaxy in Hydra
This image from the NASA Hubble Space Telescope shows NGC 4980, a spiral galaxy in the southern constellation of Hydra. The shape of NGC 4980 appears slightly deformed, something which is often a sign of recent tidal interactions with another galaxy. In this galaxy’s case, however, this appears not to be the case as there are no other galaxies in its immediate vicinity.
The image was produced as part of a research program into the nature of galactic bulges, the bright, dense, elliptical centers of galaxies. Classical bulges are relatively disordered, with stars orbiting the galactic center in all directions. In contrast, in galaxies with so-called pseudobulges, or disc-type bulges, the movement of the spiral arms is preserved right to the center of the galaxy.
Although the spiral structure is relatively subtle in this image, scientists have shown that NGC 4980 has a disc-type bulge, and its rotating spiral structure extends to the very center of the galaxy.
A galaxies’ bright arms are the location of new star formation in spiral galaxies, and NGC 4980 is no exception. The galaxy’s arms are traced out by blue pockets of extremely hot newborn stars are visible across much of its disc. This sets it apart from the reddish galaxies visible in the background, which are distant elliptical galaxies made up of much older, and hence redder, stars.
This image is composed of exposures taken in visible and infrared light by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. The image is approximately 3.3 by 1.5 arcminutes in size.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
SPACEX DRAGON HEADS INTO SPACE AND THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION
The Launch of SpaceX Dragon
KSC-2012-2897 (22 May 2012) --- The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket soars into space from Space Launch Complex-40 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 3:44 a.m. (EDT) May 22, 2012, carrying the Dragon capsule to orbit. The launch is the company's second demonstration test flight for NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, or COTS, Program. During the flight, the Dragon will conduct a series of check-out procedures to test and prove its systems, including rendezvous and berthing with the International Space Station. If the capsule performs as planned, the cargo and experiments it is carrying will be transferred to the station. The cargo includes food, water and provisions for the station's Expedition crews, such as clothing, batteries and computer equipment. Under COTS, NASA has partnered with two aerospace companies to deliver cargo to the station. Photo credit: NASA
NASA RELEASES MARS ROVER IMAGE
NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity catches its own late-afternoon shadow in this dramatically lit view eastward across Endeavour Crater on Mars. The rover used the panoramic camera (Pancam) between about 4:30 and 5:00 p.m. local Mars time to record images taken through different filters and combined into this mosaic view. Most of the component images were recorded during the 2,888th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity's work on Mars (March 9, 2012). At that time, Opportunity was spending low-solar-energy weeks of the Martian winter at the Greeley Haven outcrop on the Cape York segment of Endeavour's western rim. In order to give the mosaic a rectangular aspect, some small parts of the edges of the mosaic and sky were filled in with parts of an image acquired earlier as part of a 360-degree panorama from the same location. Opportunity has been studying the western rim of Endeavour Crater since arriving there in August 2011. This crater spans 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter, or about the same area as the city of Seattle. This is more than 20 times wider than Victoria Crater, the largest impact crater that Opportunity had previously examined. The interior basin of Endeavour is in the upper half of this view. The mosaic combines about a dozen images taken through Pancam filters centered on wavelengths of 753 nanometers (near infrared), 535 nanometers (green) and 432 nanometers (violet). The view is presented in false color to make some differences between materials easier to see, such as the dark sandy ripples and dunes on the crater's distant floor. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
SPACEX DRAGON LIFTS OFF
The Launch of SpaceX Dragon
KSC-2012-2913 (22 May 2012) --- On Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, Space Launch Complex-40 is ablaze as the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off at 3:44 a.m. (EDT) May 22, 2012. The launch is the company's second demonstration test flight for NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, or COTS, program. During the flight, the Dragon capsule will conduct a series of check-out procedures to test and prove its systems, including rendezvous and berthing with the International Space Station. If the capsule performs as planned, the cargo and experiments it is carrying will be transferred to the station. The cargo includes food, water and provisions for the station's Expedition crews, such as clothing, batteries and computer equipment. Under COTS, NASA has partnered with two aerospace companies to deliver cargo to the station. Photo credit: NASA
Monday, May 28, 2012
SUNRISE IN SPACE STATION CUPOLA
FROM: NASA
Sunrise in Station Cupola
ISS031-E-062066 (6 May 2012) --- The International Space Station was over the central South Pacific about 240 miles northeast of the Marshall Islands when one of the Expedition 31 crew members positioned on the station's Cupola captured this image of the sun coming up.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Saturday, May 26, 2012
NASA RECEIVES WIDESPREAD CONCEPTS FOR FUTURE MARS MISSIONS
FROM: NASA
WASHINGTON -- NASA's call to scientists and engineers to help plan a
new strategy to explore Mars has resulted in almost double the amount
of expected submissions with unique and bold ideas.
About 400 concepts or abstracts were submitted to the Concepts and
Approaches for Mars Exploration Workshop in Houston, which was
organized to gather input for the reformulation of NASA's Mars
Exploration Program. Submissions came from individuals and teams that
included professional researchers, undergraduate and graduate
students, NASA centers, federal laboratories, industry, and
international partner organizations.
NASA is reformulating the Mars Exploration Program to be responsive to
high-priority science goals and President Obama's challenge of
sending humans to Mars orbit in the 2030s.
"This strong response sends a clear message that exploring Mars is
important to future exploration," said John Grunsfeld, associate
administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's
headquarters in Washington and an astrophysicist and astronaut. "The
challenge now will be to select the best ideas for the next phase."
Selected abstracts will be presented during a workshop June 12-14
hosted by the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. Selectees are
now being invited to present and discuss concepts, options,
capabilities and innovations to advance Mars exploration. Workshop
discussion will help inform a strategy for exploration within
available resources beginning as early as 2018, and stretching into
the next decade and beyond. Proceedings will be streamed live online.
"Developing abstracts is very time consuming, requiring intense
preparation, and we appreciate the fabulous response," said Doug
McCuistion, director, NASA's Mars Exploration Program in Washington.
"Even though space is limited, to ensure transparency in the process
anyone can observe the scientific and engineering deliberations via
the Web."
Based on the abstracts selected, associated working groups will
consider the ideas and concepts in depth during the workshop.
Near-term ideas will be taken into consideration for early mission
planning in the 2018-2024 timeframe, while mid- to longer-term ideas
will inform program-level architecture planning for 2026 and beyond.
The Mars Program Planning Group (MPPG), tasked with developing options
for a reformulated Mars Exploration Program, will consider the
workshop inputs for the various options, taking into consideration
budgetary, programmatic, scientific, and technical constraints.
Options developed by the MPPG are expected to advance the science
objectives in the National Research Council's Planetary Science
Decadal Survey. The survey rated the return of Mars samples to Earth
as a top scientific goal. Developed in consultation with the
scientific and technical community, the MPPG report is expected to be
delivered for NASA review at the end of the summer.
The MPPG reports to Grunsfeld, who chairs the overall, agencywide
reformulation strategy along with William Gerstenmaier, associate
administrator for NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission
Directorate, NASA Chief Scientist Waleed Abdalati and NASA Chief
Technologist Mason Peck.
"Getting to Mars is hard," said Grunsfeld. "We've had successes and
losses, but the human spirit to continue exploring the Red Planet
prevails."
This August, NASA will land the Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity, on
the planet's surface. This roving science laboratory will assess
whether Mars was or is today an environment able to support life. In
2013, NASA will launch the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution
(MAVEN) orbiter, the first mission devoted to understanding the
Martian upper atmosphere.
Friday, May 25, 2012
ORS-1 BREAKING NEW GROUND
FROM: U.S. AIR FORCE SPACE COMMAND
1 SOPS stands up alternate ORS-1 ops floor
by Scott Prater
Schriever Sentinel
5/23/2012 - SCHRIEVER AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. -- Operationally Responsive Space-1 has been breaking new ground since it launched in 2010, so it only makes sense that the squadrons responsible for command and control of the satellite would need to take some innovative steps during its lifespan.
Members of the 1st and 7th Space Operations Squadrons established a backup ground-system location for ORS-1 recently, creating an alternate operations floor for the system at another Air Force installation.
Since ORS-1 is a unique satellite system that was developed and implemented much faster and has a shorter life expectancy than traditional satellite systems, a backup wasn't initially planned. But, squadron engineers figured out a way to nearly double the satellite's expected lifespan after it was launched.
"Most of us have experienced some kind of computer failure," said Lt. Col. Mike Manor, 1 SOPS commander. "Unfortunately, it happens more often than most people would like and with ORS-1's expanded life it made sense to create a backup system at an alternate location. Just in case the unexpected occurs here, our crews can rapidly deploy to the backup to ensure the vehicle is safe and the mission is not impacted."
As a space asset, ORS-1 performs an intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance mission and features a modified version of the Senior Year Electro-Optical Reconnaissance System-2 camera, normally employed by U-2 aircraft. The program was established during 2008 after U.S. Central Command expressed an urgent requirement for enhanced battle space awareness.
Once its lifespan grew to more than four years, redundancy of secure operations became a key priority for 1 and 7 SOPS.
Lt. Col. Robb Owens, 1 SOPS director of operations, explained the alternate location's operations floor provided a near perfect setting for the ORS-1 backup system.
"We have some mission-unique software, but since they use the same ground system architecture we can deploy our personnel and operate from there easier than we could somewhere else," Owens said. "It was an obvious fit."
The backup operations center will be activated in three phases, according to Manor.
In the first phase, which has already taken place, 1 and 7 SOPS operators, orbital analysts and engineers checked out the compatibility of systems and confirmed contact was possible with ORS-1. In the second phase, command and control crews actually contacted the vehicle via the Air Force Satellite Control Network and performed state-of-health commanding. The third phase will involve performing a station-keeping maneuver.
"If we can perform station-keeping maneuvers to maintain the vehicle's correct altitude and check the vehicle's health we know we can keep it operating," Manor said. "Those are two critical functions we need to accomplish."
Phase three, which also involves installing and testing mission-planning software, should occur later this year.
"At that point we will be able to sever ties with Schriever during an emergency situation and run operations from the backup operations floor," Manor said.
The combined 1 and 7 SOPS will not keep a permanent crew at the alternate location but will designate appropriate personnel for temporary assignment as needed.
"Our team is focused on ensuring mission operations remain uninterrupted regardless of the situation," Manor said. "The Joint force and our nation depend on our mission data, and it's incredibly important to have an extra layer of redundancy so we can deliver when needed."
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