NASA's new moon probe settles into lunar orbit

NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft is pictured orbiting near the surface of the moon, in this artist's illustration released by NASA on August 15, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Dana Berry/NASA Ames/Handout via Reuters

By Irene Klotz

Mon Oct 7, 2013 7:39pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Politics may be keeping most of NASA's workers home, but that didn't stop the U.S. space agency's new moon probe from achieving lunar orbit, officials said on Monday.

The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, blasted off on September 6 aboard a small rocket that placed the spacecraft into a highly elliptical orbit around Earth.

After three trips around the planet, LADEE on Sunday was in precise position to fire its braking rocket, let itself be captured by the moon's gravity and then settle into lunar orbit.

The timing was not ideal. The ongoing partial shutdown of the U.S. government has sidelined about 97 percent of the NASA's 18,000 employees.

But among those still on the job were LADEE's flight controllers, who managed the difficult maneuver, said deputy project scientist Greg Delory, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

Over the next two weeks, LADEE will tweak its orbit so that it ends up about 155 miles above the lunar surface, an ideal vantage point for studying the gases surrounding the moon and search for electrically charged dust rising from the ground.

The government furlough also was not expected to impact a LADEE laser communications demonstration slated for later this month, Delory said.

Last week, NASA brought back workers preparing a new Mars orbiter for launch on November 18. Skeleton crews, meanwhile, are overseeing NASA's communications satellites and science probes.

(Editing by Tom Brown and Philip Barbara)

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NASA's new moon probe settles into lunar orbit

NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft is pictured orbiting near the surface of the moon, in this artist's illustration released by NASA on August 15, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Dana Berry/NASA Ames/Handout via Reuters

By Irene Klotz

Mon Oct 7, 2013 7:39pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Politics may be keeping most of NASA's workers home, but that didn't stop the U.S. space agency's new moon probe from achieving lunar orbit, officials said on Monday.

The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, blasted off on September 6 aboard a small rocket that placed the spacecraft into a highly elliptical orbit around Earth.

After three trips around the planet, LADEE on Sunday was in precise position to fire its braking rocket, let itself be captured by the moon's gravity and then settle into lunar orbit.

The timing was not ideal. The ongoing partial shutdown of the U.S. government has sidelined about 97 percent of the NASA's 18,000 employees.

But among those still on the job were LADEE's flight controllers, who managed the difficult maneuver, said deputy project scientist Greg Delory, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

Over the next two weeks, LADEE will tweak its orbit so that it ends up about 155 miles above the lunar surface, an ideal vantage point for studying the gases surrounding the moon and search for electrically charged dust rising from the ground.

The government furlough also was not expected to impact a LADEE laser communications demonstration slated for later this month, Delory said.

Last week, NASA brought back workers preparing a new Mars orbiter for launch on November 18. Skeleton crews, meanwhile, are overseeing NASA's communications satellites and science probes.

(Editing by Tom Brown and Philip Barbara)

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Glitch resolved, NASA probe on its way to the moon

1 of 2. The small car-sized Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) is a robotic mission that will orbit the moon to gather detailed information about the structure and composition of the thin lunar atmosphere and determine whether dust is being lofted into the lunar sky is pictured at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia September 5, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/NASA/Handout via Reuters

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Sun Sep 8, 2013 4:28pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Engineers have resolved a minor glitch with a new NASA robotic lunar probe, which blasted off Friday night for the first leg of a 30-day trip to the moon.

Shortly after the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, spacecraft separated from its Minotaur 5 launch vehicle, its positioning system shut down due to what appeared to be a high electrical current.

Engineers quickly determined there was no problem with the reaction wheels, which are needed to steer and stabilize the spacecraft. Rather, the glitch involved a fault protection system designed to safeguard the wheels.

"The limits that caused the powering off of the wheels soon after activation were disabled, and reaction wheel fault protection has been selectively re-enabled," NASA wrote in a statement posted on its website.

Engineers will assess how to manage the fault protection system, added project manager Butler Hine, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

LADEE blasted off aboard the Minotaur 5 rocket, which was making its debut flight, at 11:27 p.m. EDT/0327 GMT on Saturday from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia.

The rocket, made up of three decommissioned intercontinental ballistic missile motors and two commercial boosters, deposited LADEE into a highly elliptical orbit stretching as far as 170,000 miles from Earth. During its third pass around the planet, LADEE will be in position to fire its braking rocket and slip into lunar orbit.

A 30-day checkout of the probe's science instruments will follow. Engineers also will test a prototype two-way optical laser communications system that NASA is developing for use on future space probes.

LADEE's main mission is to analyze the thin shell of gases enveloping the lunar surface, a tenuous atmosphere known as an exosphere. It also will look for signs that the lunar dust rising off the surface.

Scientists believe the dust may be the cause of a strange glow on the lunar horizon spotted by the Apollo astronauts and NASA's 1960s-era Ranger robotic probes.

LADEE was the first deep-space probe to fly from the Wallops Island spaceport. On September 17, Orbital Sciences Corp. (NYSE: ORB) is scheduled to launch its Antares rocket and Cygnus cargo capsule on a trial run to the International Space Station for NASA.

The station, a project of 15 countries, flies about 250 miles above Earth.

(Reporting by Irene Klotz)

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NASA robotic spacecraft lifts off to probe lunar dust

By Irene Klotz

Sat Sep 7, 2013 5:17am EDT

n">(Reuters) - An unmanned Minotaur 5 rocket blasted off from the Virginia coast on Friday to send a small NASA science satellite on its way to the moon, officials said.

The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer spacecraft, known as LADEE, was designed to look for dust rising from the lunar surface, a phenomenon reported by the Apollo astronauts decades ago.

"For the first time in 40 years, we have the opportunity to address that mystery," project scientist Richard Elphic, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said during a launch broadcast on NASA TV.

From an orbit as low as about 31 miles above the lunar surface, LADEE also will probe the thin pocket of gases surrounding the moon. The tenuous atmosphere, which contains argon, helium, sodium, potassium and other elements, may hold clues about how water came to be trapped inside craters on the moon's frozen poles.

"We're taught in grade school and probably junior high that the moon has no atmosphere," Elphic said.

"Indeed it does have an atmosphere, but it's utterly unlike our own atmosphere. It's very tenuous," he said.

LADEE's 30-day trip to the moon began with an 11:27 p.m. EDT/0327 GMT Saturday liftoff of a five-stage Minotaur rocket making its debut flight. The first three stages are decommissioned intercontinental ballistic missile motors, and the last two stages are commercial motors manufactured by Alliant Techsystems Inc.

The rocket blasted off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Island Flight Facility, the first deep-space mission to fly from the Virginia spaceport.

Weather permitting, the rocket was expected to be visible from Maine to eastern North Carolina, and as far west as Wheeling, West Virginia. New Yorkers were due to be treated to a live televised view of the launch on the Toshiba Vision Screen in Times Square, just below the site where the famous New Year's Eve ball is dropped.

The use of decommissioned missile components drove the decision to fly from Wallops Island, one of only a few launch sites permitted to fly refurbished ICBMs under U.S.-Russian arms control agreements.

LADEE's month-long journey to the moon includes three highly elliptical passes around Earth, timed so that during the final orbit the probe will be far enough away to be captured by the moon's gravity after LADEE fires its braking rocket.

Once LADEE is in lunar orbit, scientists will check out the spacecraft's three instruments and test a prototype optical laser communications system. Science operations are expected to begin in November.

"This is a science mission, but it has some new technology," Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center, told Reuters. "We're confident stuff will work, but we certainly will be watching very, very carefully as each of these new things unfolds."

The $280 million mission is expected to last about six months.

(Reporting by Irene Klotz in Portland, Maine; Editing by Jackie Frank and Eric Walsh)

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China to land first probe on moon this year

China's Shenzhou 10 spacecraft and its carrier Long March 2-F rocket are seen being transferred to its launching site at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Jiuquan, Gansu province June 3, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Stringer

BEIJING | Wed Aug 28, 2013 10:07am EDT

BEIJING (Reuters) - China will land its first probe on the moon at the end of this year, state media reported on Wednesday, the next step in an ambitious space program which includes eventually building a space station.

In 2007, China launched its first moon orbiter, the Chang'e One orbiter, named after a lunar goddess, which took images of the surface and analyzed the distribution of elements.

That launch marked the first step in China's three-stage moon mission, to be followed by an unmanned moon mission and then the retrieval of lunar soil and stone samples around 2017.

The official Xinhua news agency said that the Chang'e Three was on track for a landing towards the end of the year.

"Chang'e Three has officially entered its launch implementation stage following its research and construction period," it cited a government statement as saying.

"The mission will see a Chinese orbiter soft-land, or land on the moon after using a technique to slow its speed, on a celestial body for the first time," Xinhua added, without providing further details.

Chinese scientists have talked of the possibility of sending a man to the moon after 2020.

China successfully completed its latest manned space mission in June, when three astronauts spent 15 days in orbit and docked with an experimental space laboratory critical in Beijing's quest to build a working space station by 2020.

China is still far from catching up with the established space superpowers, the United States and Russia, which decades ago learned the docking techniques China is only now mastering.

Beijing insists its space program is for peaceful purposes, but the U.S. Defense Department has highlighted China's increasing space capabilities and said Beijing is pursuing a variety of activities aimed at preventing its adversaries from using space-based assets during a crisis.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Ron Popeski)

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Quantum probe technique resonates with Caltech/JPL researchers

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$(document).ready(function(){$('.star-rating').rating({callback: function(value, link){ $.post("../../", {fuseaction: 'starrating.submitrating', starratingid:$("#starratingid").val(), objecttype:$("#objecttype").val(), objectid:$("#objectid").val(),starrating:value}, function(obj) { $('.star-rating').rating('readOnly',true); var newobj = eval('(' + obj + ')'); $('#starratingleftcontainer').html('Average Rating: ' + newobj.ratio + ' / 5 ('+ newobj.ratinghits +' ratings)'); $('#starratingid').val(newobj.starratingid); });}});$("#starratinghelpicon").hover(function() {$("#starratinghelptextcontainer").animate({opacity: "show"}, "slow");}, function() {$("#starratinghelptextcontainer").animate({opacity: "hide"}, "fast");});});Average Rating: 5 / 5 (1 ratings) Quantum probe technique resonates with Caltech/JPL researchers

A team from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has successfully demonstrated a system that will serve as a test-bed for exploring quantum mechanics in new limits and could shed light on fundamental issues such as the division between the classical and quantum worlds.

One of the fundamental issues with making measurements in the quantum regime is that the act of measuring can actually destroy the fragile quantum state of such a system. This occurs despite one’s best attempts to be discreet in the characterization process. Basically, measuring messes things up.

Such sensitive measurements are especially difficult for macroscopic scale objects, and even on micrometer scales the quantum nature of objects is generally lost in the noise of the larger world.

In atomic physics and, more recently, in solid-state physics, researchers have gotten around this conundrum by using other quantum systems as probes. For example, the quantum signature of an oscillating system, like an electromagnetic cavity, can be imprinted on a probe and then inferred through an independent measurement of the probe – without destroying the quantum state of the original system. Such probes include individual atoms and nano-scale electronic quantum bits or "qubits."

A qubit is the quantum computing equivalent of the binary digital bit in classical computing. Like the “1” or “0” of its digital counterpart, the qubit has a state that can be controlled and measured.

In the new technique demonstrated by the Caltech and JPL team, the qubit is a tiny electrode in which electrons can be made to take on a single energy state, i.e., charged or uncharged. The qubit is placed in close proximity to a nanoresonator, which is a tiny beam of stiff material that vibrates at high frequency. In this configuration, the vibration frequency of the resonator is sensitive to the energy state of the quantum bit, and vice versa. The Caltech and JPL scientists used the sensitive dependence of the resonator frequency to probe the state of the qubit. In principle, though, either component can be used as a probe to determine quantum information about the other.

“We’ve demonstrated that we can use the nanomechanical resonator to probe quantum effects in the qubit. Based on these measurements, it looks we should be able to turn the experiment around and start looking for quantum effects in the mechanical system,” said Caltech’s Matt LaHaye. LaHaye is lead author of a paper describing the team’s work, published in the June 18 issue of the journal Nature.

According to quantum mechanics, the energy stored in any vibrating system – including macroscopic scale systems – should take discrete, or quantized, values. This discreteness of energy has been verified beautifully in other vibrating systems, such as atomic and electromagnetic systems. However, observation of this subtle quantum effect in ordinary mechanical structures, like the nanoresonator described above, remains a hotly pursued challenge in quantum measurement. The new nanoscale system demonstrated by the Caltech and JPL team is a very promising approach that could ultimately meet this challenge.

“What’s really exciting is that a lot of people have been thinking about how to use this coupled system for manipulating and measuring quantum states of mechanical objects. There are many possible experiments and directions in which we could head, all with the potential for very rich physics,” said LaHaye.

A tantalizing possibility for the team’s measurement technique is to observe the resonator in a quantum superposition of states, where it is simultaneously oscillating at two distinct frequencies. It may also be possible to examine the quantum imprint of the resonator on the energy state of the qubit to look for “quantum jumps” in the resonator’s energy.

The JPL team members had been developing the qubits for quantum computing applications and contributed to the research with fabrication of the structures and expertise in their measurement.

The work resulted from a collaboration between Profs. Michael Roukes and Keith Schwab at Caltech and Dr. Pierre Echternach at JPL. Measurements at milli-Kelvin temperatures were performed by Dr. Matt LaHaye and graduate student Junho Suh at Caltech. Electron beam lithography was performed by Richard Muller at JPL.

Reference: M.D. LaHaye, J. Suh, P.M. Echternach, K.C. Schwab, M.L. Roukes. (2009). “Nanomechanical measurements of a superconducting qubit.” Nature 459, 960-964.

Caltech press release: http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/13271

JPL Microdevices Laboratory Website: http://microdevices.jpl.nasa.gov

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