Ripples in Space Are Evidence of Universe's Early Growth Spurt

When the universe expanded tremendously after the Big Bang, the resulting gravity waves interacted with the cosmic microwave background to produce this characteristic “B-mode” pattern. Credit: BICEP2 Collaboration

Big news in the cosmos today! Researchers from the BICEP2 south pole telescope have found ancient proof that the universe expanded tremendously after the Big Bang, a theory known as inflation. The discovery tells us (albeit indirectly) about an even earlier stage of the universe than we’ve ever before observed, and it provides crucial evidence that inflation did indeed occur. In so doing, it extends our model of the early universe from about one second after the Big Bang right back to less than 10-37 seconds after the event — a stunning leap forward (or backward, as the case may be).

To understand this, let’s back up 13.8 billion years or so, to the Big Bang. Also known as the birth of the cosmos and the origins of time and space, this burst of everything set the universe in motion. But a few niggling issues cast some doubts on the Big Bang theory — one of which was the mystery of how the universe came to be so uniformly spread out.

Enter the idea of inflation, in 1980, which suggested that just a few instants after the big moment, the universe suddenly grew enormously. This addition to the cosmic timeline explained why the universe was relatively uniform and it fit nicely with what we already knew about the universe’s earliest moments. However, cosmologists had no direct proof of inflation.

One way to prove inflation occurred, physicists thought, would be to look for gravitational waves created in its wake. These are basically ripples in the “fabric” of space-time — what the universe is made out of. Gravity is a relatively weak force, though, so we could only hope to detect the largest waves out there, caused by huge interactions like black holes colliding. Even though inflation was a relatively huge thing — it literally shaped the whole universe — the gravity waves it produced are now too weak to measure directly.

So instead, researchers were looking for the effect of inflation’s gravity waves on light. And not just any light, but the cosmic microwave background, “echoes” of light leftover from the Big Bang’s energy, created when the universe was just 380,000 years old. When this light interacted with the gravity waves, the theories said, it would have produced a distinctive pattern, called the B mode, in the light’s polarization. Such a pattern would be direct evidence that the gravity waves caused by inflation were real, and thus a key proof of inflation. And today, scientists announced they’d found it.

Assuming the finding is confirmed (and that looks likely — the team apparently spent 3 years going over their own data to make sure it was sound before coming forward with it), that’s huge news for cosmology. Direct evidence for inflation has been sought after for decades. Nature quotes Alan Guth, the main “inventor” of inflation, as saying, “This is a totally new, independent piece of cosmological evidence that the inflationary picture fits together,” and adding that the findings are “definitely” Nobel prize-worthy.

But it’s also big news for a couple of other reasons. First, in addition to being the first evidence for inflation, it’s also the first direct evidence for gravitational waves. Even though some observatories have been (and will continue!) looking for these gravitational waves, they’re still incredibly hard to find. The more data we have on these weird, space-time warping ripples, the more we’ll be able to understand the universe itself, and this is a great step in that direction. 

And the other bit of significance to this has to do with understanding gravity in the first place. It’s currently the only one of the four fundamental forces not to play nice with quantum mechanics, which explains how things work on the tiniest scales. At high temperatures (like those found shortly after the Big Bang), the other three even begin to unify into a single super-force. One of the biggest issues in physics today is figuring out how (or if) gravity fits into this picture, and the findings that gravitational waves can result from inflation, a fundamentally quantum phenomenon, suggests that quantum gravity might indeed be possible.

A glimpse into the very first milliseconds of our universe, plus bigger questions ahead — all in all, it’s a pretty good day for science.

View the original article here

'Bionic man' makes debut at Washington's Air and Space Museum

An engineer makes an adjustment to the robot ''The Incredible Bionic Man'' at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington October 17, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts

By Lacey Johnson

WASHINGTON | Thu Oct 17, 2013 4:14pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A first-ever walking, talking "bionic man" built entirely out of synthetic body parts made his Washington debut on Thursday.

The robot with a human face unveiled at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum was built by London's Shadow Robot Co to showcase medical breakthroughs in bionic body parts and artificial organs.

"This is not a gimmick. This is a real science development," museum director John Dailey said.

The 6-foot-tall (1.83 meter), 170-pound (77-kg) robot is the subject of a one-hour Smithsonian Channel documentary, "The Incredible Bionic Man," airing on Sunday.

A "bionic man" was the material of science fiction in the 1970s when the television show "The Six Million Dollar Man" showed the adventures of a character named Steve Austin, a former astronaut whose body was rebuilt using synthetic parts after he nearly died.

The robot on display at the museum cost $1 million and was made from 28 artificial body parts on loan from biomedical innovators. They include a pancreas, lungs, spleen and circulatory system, with most of the parts early prototypes.

"The whole idea of the project is to get together all of the spare parts that already exist for the human body today - one piece. If you did that, what would it look like?" said Bertolt Meyer, a social psychologist from the University of Zurich in Switzerland and host of the documentary.

The robot was modeled after Meyer, who was born without a hand and relies on an artificial limb. He showed off the bionic man by having it take a few clumsy steps and by running artificial blood through its see-through circulatory system.

"It, kind of, looks lifelike. Kind of creepy," said Paul Arcand, a tourist who was visiting from Boston with his wife.

The robot has a motionless face and virtually no skin. It was controlled remotely from a computer, and Bluetooth wireless connections were used to operate its limbs.

The bionic creation's artificial intelligence is limited to a chatbot computer program, similar to the Siri application on the Apple iPhone, said Robert Warburton, a design engineer for Shadow Robot.

"The people who made it decided to program it with the personality of a 13-year-old boy from the Ukraine," he said. "So, he's not really the most polite of people to have a conversation with."

Assembly began in August 2012 and took three months to finish.

The robot made its U.S. debut last week at New York's Comic Con convention. It will be on display at the museum throughout the fall.

(This story has been corrected to fix spelling of documentary host's first name to Bertolt, not Bertold, paragraph 7)

(Additional reporting by Ian Simpson; editing by Barbara Goldberg and Leslie Adler)

View the original article here

Astronaut Scott Carpenter, fourth American in space, dies at 88

By Alex Dobuzinskis and Bill Trott

Thu Oct 10, 2013 6:50pm EDT

n">(Reuters) - Astronaut Scott Carpenter, who in 1962 became the fourth American in space and the second to orbit the Earth, died on Thursday in Colorado at age 88 of complications from a stroke, his wife Patty Carpenter said.

Carpenter, who lost radio contact with NASA controllers during his pioneering space flight and was found in the ocean 250 miles from the targeted splashdown site, went on to explore the ocean floor in later years. His wife said he died in a Denver hospice.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration chose Carpenter and six other pilots to be astronauts in 1959 for the Mercury space program as the United States entered its space race with the Soviet Union. The only surviving member of that Mercury 7 team is John Glenn, 92, now a retired U.S. Senator from Ohio. In 1962, Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, and Carpenter was his backup on that mission.

Later that year, Carpenter made his only spaceflight, taking the Aurora 7 spacecraft on three laps around Earth on May 24, a few weeks after his 37th birthday. The flight of less than five hours made him the second American to orbit Earth.

The other Mercury astronauts had piloted fighter jets during the Korean War, but Carpenter mostly flew surveillance in multi-engine propeller planes.

"Scott was the only one with a touch of the poet about him in the sense that the idea of going into space stirred his imagination," Tom Wolfe wrote in "The Right Stuff," his best-selling book about the first astronauts.

A former gymnast known among colleagues for his fitness, Carpenter trained as Glenn's backup for NASA's first orbital flight. When Glenn blasted off on the Friendship 7 mission on February 20, 1962, Carpenter sent him off with a simple yet poignant radio transmission: "Godspeed, John Glenn."

Despite his fame as an astronaut, Carpenter spent considerably more time on the ocean floor than he did in outer space. In 1965, the astronaut became an aquanaut as part of the Navy's SEALAB II project, spending 30 days living and working at a depth of 204 feet off the California coast.

Born in Boulder, Colorado, he split his time between Vail, Colorado, and West Palm Beach, Florida, Patty Carpenter said. His given name was Malcolm Scott Carpenter but he used Scott as a first name.

DRAMATIC RE-ENTRY

Carpenter's space flight ran into problems upon re-entry to Earth's atmosphere, raising questions about whether he would make it back alive. His spacecraft had used too much fuel after he forgot to shut off one of the fuel systems.

After Carpenter fired the retrorockets to power his return, NASA controllers lost radio contact and feared a tragedy.

Aerial search teams eventually spotted Carpenter and the bobbing Mercury capsule - doing fine despite having ended up about 250 miles off the splashdown target in the Atlantic.

When President John F. Kennedy called to congratulate him, Carpenter offered his "apologies for not having aimed a little better on re-entry."

Carpenter became the first American to eat solid food in space, a breakthrough since scientists were not sure how the digestive process would work in zero gravity. He dined on chocolate, figs, dates and cereal that had been compressed into cubes. He told mission control it tasted fine but left crumbs floating throughout his space capsule.

Since so little was known about spaceflight at the time, Carpenter's mission included relatively simple jobs such as releasing signal balloons, photographing clouds and observing flares fired from Earth.

He discovered that what Glenn had described as looking like "fireflies" around the capsule actually were illuminated ice particles formed by water vapor being vented into space.

"The most important driver in everything we did then was curiosity," Carpenter told the Orange County Register in 2009. "It's revelatory. Addictive. Beautiful beyond description. To have been in space is very satisfying of one's curiosity. It's instructive. It's marvelous."

LIFE UNDER THE SEA

The sea also piqued Carpenter's curiosity. He was an experienced diver and during his time in SEALAB, part of the Navy's underwater habitat program, he helped test tools, salvage methods and use of a dolphin to transport supplies from the surface to the lab.

"The sea is a more hostile environment than space," Carpenter told Time magazine after his SEALAB experience.

Carpenter badly injured his left arm in a 1964 motorcycle accident, leaving the limb with limited range, which ruled him out of future spaceflights.

He returned to NASA two years after his SEALAB mission and helped design the Apollo program's lunar module that landed on the moon in 1969. He retired from NASA in 1967 and left the Navy in 1969.

Carpenter's love of the ocean led to work with renowned French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, whom Carpenter considered a hero. He also wrote two novels described as "underwater techno-thrillers."

Carpenter was married four times and had seven children, according to "For Spacious Skies," the autobiography he wrote with his daughter, Kris Stoever.

(Reporting by Bill Trott; Writing by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and David Gregorio)

View the original article here

Astronaut Scott Carpenter, fourth American in space, dies at 88

By Alex Dobuzinskis and Bill Trott

Thu Oct 10, 2013 6:50pm EDT

n">(Reuters) - Astronaut Scott Carpenter, who in 1962 became the fourth American in space and the second to orbit the Earth, died on Thursday in Colorado at age 88 of complications from a stroke, his wife Patty Carpenter said.

Carpenter, who lost radio contact with NASA controllers during his pioneering space flight and was found in the ocean 250 miles from the targeted splashdown site, went on to explore the ocean floor in later years. His wife said he died in a Denver hospice.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration chose Carpenter and six other pilots to be astronauts in 1959 for the Mercury space program as the United States entered its space race with the Soviet Union. The only surviving member of that Mercury 7 team is John Glenn, 92, now a retired U.S. Senator from Ohio. In 1962, Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, and Carpenter was his backup on that mission.

Later that year, Carpenter made his only spaceflight, taking the Aurora 7 spacecraft on three laps around Earth on May 24, a few weeks after his 37th birthday. The flight of less than five hours made him the second American to orbit Earth.

The other Mercury astronauts had piloted fighter jets during the Korean War, but Carpenter mostly flew surveillance in multi-engine propeller planes.

"Scott was the only one with a touch of the poet about him in the sense that the idea of going into space stirred his imagination," Tom Wolfe wrote in "The Right Stuff," his best-selling book about the first astronauts.

A former gymnast known among colleagues for his fitness, Carpenter trained as Glenn's backup for NASA's first orbital flight. When Glenn blasted off on the Friendship 7 mission on February 20, 1962, Carpenter sent him off with a simple yet poignant radio transmission: "Godspeed, John Glenn."

Despite his fame as an astronaut, Carpenter spent considerably more time on the ocean floor than he did in outer space. In 1965, the astronaut became an aquanaut as part of the Navy's SEALAB II project, spending 30 days living and working at a depth of 204 feet off the California coast.

Born in Boulder, Colorado, he split his time between Vail, Colorado, and West Palm Beach, Florida, Patty Carpenter said. His given name was Malcolm Scott Carpenter but he used Scott as a first name.

DRAMATIC RE-ENTRY

Carpenter's space flight ran into problems upon re-entry to Earth's atmosphere, raising questions about whether he would make it back alive. His spacecraft had used too much fuel after he forgot to shut off one of the fuel systems.

After Carpenter fired the retrorockets to power his return, NASA controllers lost radio contact and feared a tragedy.

Aerial search teams eventually spotted Carpenter and the bobbing Mercury capsule - doing fine despite having ended up about 250 miles off the splashdown target in the Atlantic.

When President John F. Kennedy called to congratulate him, Carpenter offered his "apologies for not having aimed a little better on re-entry."

Carpenter became the first American to eat solid food in space, a breakthrough since scientists were not sure how the digestive process would work in zero gravity. He dined on chocolate, figs, dates and cereal that had been compressed into cubes. He told mission control it tasted fine but left crumbs floating throughout his space capsule.

Since so little was known about spaceflight at the time, Carpenter's mission included relatively simple jobs such as releasing signal balloons, photographing clouds and observing flares fired from Earth.

He discovered that what Glenn had described as looking like "fireflies" around the capsule actually were illuminated ice particles formed by water vapor being vented into space.

"The most important driver in everything we did then was curiosity," Carpenter told the Orange County Register in 2009. "It's revelatory. Addictive. Beautiful beyond description. To have been in space is very satisfying of one's curiosity. It's instructive. It's marvelous."

LIFE UNDER THE SEA

The sea also piqued Carpenter's curiosity. He was an experienced diver and during his time in SEALAB, part of the Navy's underwater habitat program, he helped test tools, salvage methods and use of a dolphin to transport supplies from the surface to the lab.

"The sea is a more hostile environment than space," Carpenter told Time magazine after his SEALAB experience.

Carpenter badly injured his left arm in a 1964 motorcycle accident, leaving the limb with limited range, which ruled him out of future spaceflights.

He returned to NASA two years after his SEALAB mission and helped design the Apollo program's lunar module that landed on the moon in 1969. He retired from NASA in 1967 and left the Navy in 1969.

Carpenter's love of the ocean led to work with renowned French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, whom Carpenter considered a hero. He also wrote two novels described as "underwater techno-thrillers."

Carpenter was married four times and had seven children, according to "For Spacious Skies," the autobiography he wrote with his daughter, Kris Stoever.

(Reporting by Bill Trott; Writing by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and David Gregorio)

View the original article here

Commercial cargo ship reaches International Space Station

By Irene Klotz

Sun Sep 29, 2013 7:18pm EDT

n">(Reuters) - An unmanned U.S. commercial cargo ship flew to the International Space Station on Sunday, completing the primary goal of its test flight before supply runs begin in December.

After a series of successful steering maneuvers, the Orbital Sciences Cygnus freighter parked about 39 feet from the station at 6:50 a.m. EDT/1050 GMT as the ships sailed 260 miles above the Southern Ocean south of Africa.

Ten minutes later, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano and NASA's Karen Nyberg used the station's robotic arm to pluck the capsule from orbit and guide it to a berthing slip on the station's Harmony connecting node.

"That's a long time coming, looks great," radioed astronaut Catherine Coleman from NASA's Mission Control in Houston.

Cygnus' arrival had been delayed a week - first by a software glitch and then by the higher priority docking of a Russian Soyuz capsule ferrying three new crewmembers to the $100 billion outpost, a project of 15 nations.

Orbital Sciences' new unmanned Antares rocket blasted off on September 18 from a new launch pad on the Virginia coast to put Cygnus into orbit.

"We learned a lot on this one," Orbital Sciences executive vice president Frank Culbertson told reporters after launch.

NASA contributed $288 million toward Antares' and Cygnus' development and awarded Orbital Sciences a $1.9 billion contract for eight station resupply missions, the first of which is targeted for December.

The U.S. space agency also provided $396 million to privately owned Space Exploration Technologies to help develop the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon cargo ship. The company, known as SpaceX, holds a $1.5 billion NASA contract for 12 cargo runs to the station, two of which already have been completed.

Unlike SpaceX's Dragon capsule, Cygnus is not designed to return to Earth. After astronauts unload more than 1,500 pounds (680 kg) of food, clothing and supplies that were packed aboard Cygnus, it will be filled with trash, detached from the station and flown into the atmosphere for incineration.

Thales Alenia Space, a consortium led by Europe's largest defense electronics company, France's Thales, is a prime contractor on the capsule.

For now, NASA is the only customer for Cygnus, but Orbital Sciences expects additional business as the United States and other countries launch exploration initiatives beyond the space station's orbit.

(Reporting by Irene Klotz in Lompoc, California; Editing by Bill Trott and Stacey Joyce)

View the original article here

Russia's Medvedev fires space agency chief

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev speaks during the United Russia political party convention in Moscow October 5, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Sergei Karpukhin

MOSCOW | Thu Oct 10, 2013 2:41pm EDT

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev dismissed the country's space agency (Roskosmos) chief Vladimir Popovkin on Thursday, three months after the latest botched satellite launch.

"I hope that a number of problems that we have unfortunately seen in Roskosmos' activity will be overcome with your appointment," Medvedev told Popovkin's successor to the post, former deputy defence minister Oleg Ostapenko.

Popovkin, a former senior defence ministry official, denied media reports earlier this year saying that had been hospitalised after a drunken brawl in the Roskosmos office.

Russia lost roughly $200 million after a rocket carrying satellites crashed shortly after lift-off from the Russian-leased Baikonur launchpad in Kazakhstan in July.

Medvedev at the time said that Russia had lost 10 satellites in seven failed launches in less than a year.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees defence industry in the cabinet, wrote on Twitter that Popovkin would be given a senior post in Russia's space industry.

The practice to rotate officials regardless of their failures dates back to the Soviet political system dominated by the Communist Party, operating as a one-class club with internal disagreements rarely coming to light.

Russia is increasing spending on space and plans to send a probe to the moon in 2015. But the pioneering Russian programme that put the first man in space in 1961 has been plagued in recent years by setbacks, including abortive satellite launches and a failed attempt to send a probe to a moon of Mars.

(Reporting by Alexei Anishchuk; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

View the original article here

'Bionic man' makes debut at Washington's Air and Space Museum

An engineer makes an adjustment to the robot ''The Incredible Bionic Man'' at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington October 17, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts

By Lacey Johnson

WASHINGTON | Thu Oct 17, 2013 4:14pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A first-ever walking, talking "bionic man" built entirely out of synthetic body parts made his Washington debut on Thursday.

The robot with a human face unveiled at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum was built by London's Shadow Robot Co to showcase medical breakthroughs in bionic body parts and artificial organs.

"This is not a gimmick. This is a real science development," museum director John Dailey said.

The 6-foot-tall (1.83 meter), 170-pound (77-kg) robot is the subject of a one-hour Smithsonian Channel documentary, "The Incredible Bionic Man," airing on Sunday.

A "bionic man" was the material of science fiction in the 1970s when the television show "The Six Million Dollar Man" showed the adventures of a character named Steve Austin, a former astronaut whose body was rebuilt using synthetic parts after he nearly died.

The robot on display at the museum cost $1 million and was made from 28 artificial body parts on loan from biomedical innovators. They include a pancreas, lungs, spleen and circulatory system, with most of the parts early prototypes.

"The whole idea of the project is to get together all of the spare parts that already exist for the human body today - one piece. If you did that, what would it look like?" said Bertolt Meyer, a social psychologist from the University of Zurich in Switzerland and host of the documentary.

The robot was modeled after Meyer, who was born without a hand and relies on an artificial limb. He showed off the bionic man by having it take a few clumsy steps and by running artificial blood through its see-through circulatory system.

"It, kind of, looks lifelike. Kind of creepy," said Paul Arcand, a tourist who was visiting from Boston with his wife.

The robot has a motionless face and virtually no skin. It was controlled remotely from a computer, and Bluetooth wireless connections were used to operate its limbs.

The bionic creation's artificial intelligence is limited to a chatbot computer program, similar to the Siri application on the Apple iPhone, said Robert Warburton, a design engineer for Shadow Robot.

"The people who made it decided to program it with the personality of a 13-year-old boy from the Ukraine," he said. "So, he's not really the most polite of people to have a conversation with."

Assembly began in August 2012 and took three months to finish.

The robot made its U.S. debut last week at New York's Comic Con convention. It will be on display at the museum throughout the fall.

(This story has been corrected to fix spelling of documentary host's first name to Bertolt, not Bertold, paragraph 7)

(Additional reporting by Ian Simpson; editing by Barbara Goldberg and Leslie Adler)

View the original article here

New cargo ship's docking at space station delayed to Saturday

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL | Mon Sep 23, 2013 1:22pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL (Reuters) - A traffic jam at the International Space Station is prompting a second delay in the arrival of a new commercial cargo ship that is making a test run to the orbital outpost, officials said on Monday.

The docking of the Cygnus freighter was retargeted for Saturday to avoid conflicting with Wednesday's scheduled arrival of new crew members at the space station.

Orbital Sciences originally had planned to fly the Cygnus to the station on Sunday following four days of maneuvers and communications tests. A problem processing navigation data from the space station early on Sunday forced the rendezvous to be rescheduled for Tuesday.

Resolving the problem with a software fix left Orbital Sciences with a tight schedule to rendezvous and dock the Cygnus capsule at the space station before the Wednesday arrival of a Russian Soyuz spaceship carrying three new crew members.

Station operators need at least 48 hours between arrivals of spacecraft at the orbital outpost, a $100 billion complex that flies about 250 miles above Earth.

"Both Orbital and NASA felt it was the right decision to postpone the Cygnus approach and rendezvous until after Soyuz operations," the company wrote in a status report on its website.

Cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy and NASA astronaut Michael Hopkins are scheduled for launch at 4:58 p.m. EDT on Wednesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. They should reach the station about six hours later.

"This new schedule will allow the Orbital operations team to carefully plan and be well-rested before restarting the critical final approach to the space station," Frank Culbertson, Orbital's executive vice president, said in the statement. "Meanwhile, Cygnus has all the resources needed to remain in orbit for an extended period of time."

Cygnus blasted off for a debut mission aboard an Orbital Sciences' unmanned Antares rocket from a new spaceport in Virginia on September 18. The company is the second of two hired by NASA to restore U.S. supply lines to the station following the retirement of the space shuttles in 2011.

Competitor Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, which began working with the U.S. space agency about 18 months before Orbital, so far has made a test flight and two cargo runs to the station.

(Editing by Tom Brown and Bill Trott)

View the original article here

Joint U.S.-Russian crew reaches space station

By Irene Klotz

Wed Sep 25, 2013 11:21pm EDT

n">(Reuters) - A Russian Soyuz rocket blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday to deliver three new crew members to the International Space Station.

The Soyuz rocket and capsule lifted off at 4:58 p.m. EDT on an express route to the station, which orbits about 250 miles above Earth.

Less than six hours after liftoff, veteran Russian commander Oleg Kotov and rookies Sergey Ryazanskiy of Russia and Michael Hopkins of the United States reached the outpost, a $100 billion project of 15 nations. Only two other crews have made the journey as quickly. Previous Soyuz capsules took two days of orbital maneuvers to reach the station.

The arrival of Kotov, Ryazanskiy and Hopkins returns the station to its full, six-member live-aboard crew. Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin, NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg and European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano have been running the station on their own since September 10.

The skeleton crew was to have overseen the arrival of a commercial cargo ship on a test flight to the station this week.

But a software problem left the unmanned Cygnus freighter unable to receive navigation data properly from the station, delaying its arrival until no earlier than Saturday to avoid conflicting with the Soyuz's berthing. Typically, at least 48 hours are needed between spacecraft dockings.

The cargo ship, built and launched by Orbital Sciences with backing from NASA, blasted off aboard an Antares rocket on September 18 from a new launch pad on the Virginia coast.

"As a crew we're very excited to be up there when Cygnus rendezvous and docks and (we're) looking forward to opening that hatch," Hopkins said on Tuesday during a prelaunch press conference.

Hopkins and Ryazanskiy are making their first flights. Kotov, who will take over command of the station when Yurchikhin leaves in November, has made two previous long-duration missions on the station.

During their five-month stay, Kotov and Ryazanskiy are scheduled to make three spacewalks, the first of which will include taking an unlighted Olympic torch outside the airlock to promote the Sochi Olympic Games in Russia, which open in February 2014.

"Our goal here is to make it look spectacular," Kotov, speaking through a translator, told reporters.

"We'd like to showcase our Olympic torch in space. We will try to do it in a beautiful manner. Millions of people will see it live on TV and they will see the station and see how we work," Kotov said.

The torch is scheduled to be delivered to the station on November 6 by the next crew launching to the outpost. Yurchikhin, Nyberg and Parmitano will then bring it back to Earth when they return home four days later so the traditional torch relay can continue.

"Unfortunately we cannot light it in space so we will simply take it to space and take pictures and some video with the station and the Earth in the background," Ryazanskiy said in a prelaunch NASA interview.

An Olympic torch previously flew aboard NASA's now-retired space shuttle Atlantis prior to the 1996 Olympics.

(Reporting by Irene Klotz in Mojave, California; Editing by Jane Sutton, Cynthia Osterman and Lisa Shumaker)

View the original article here

Joint Russian-U.S. crew blasts off for space station

By Irene Klotz

Wed Sep 25, 2013 5:51pm EDT

n">(Reuters) - A Russian Soyuz rocket blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday to deliver three new crew members to the International Space Station.

The Soyuz rocket and capsule lifted off at 4:58 p.m. EDT on an express route to the station, which orbits about 250 miles above Earth.

Veteran Russian commander Oleg Kotov and rookies Sergey Ryazanskiy of Russia and Michael Hopkins of the United States were expected to reach the outpost less than six hours after liftoff. Only two other crews have made the journey as quickly. Previous Soyuz capsules took two days of orbital maneuvers to reach the station.

The arrival of Kotov, Ryazanskiy and Hopkins will return the station to its full, six-member live-aboard crew. Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin, NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg and European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano have been running the station on their own since September 10.

The skeleton crew was to have overseen the arrival of a commercial cargo ship on a test flight to the station this week.

But a software problem left the unmanned Cygnus freighter unable to receive navigation data properly from the station, delaying its arrival until no earlier than Saturday to avoid conflicting with the Soyuz's berthing. Typically, at least 48 hours are needed between spacecraft dockings.

The cargo ship, built and launched by Orbital Sciences with backing from NASA, blasted off aboard an Antares rocket on September 18 from a new launch pad on the Virginia coast.

"As a crew we're very excited to be up there when Cygnus rendezvous and docks and (we're) looking forward to opening that hatch," Hopkins said on Tuesday during a prelaunch press conference.

Hopkins and Ryazanskiy are making their first flights. Kotov, who will take over command of the station when Yurchikhin leaves in November, has made two previous long-duration missions on the station.

During their five-month stay, Kotov and Ryazanskiy are scheduled to make three spacewalks, the first of which will include taking an unlighted Olympic torch outside the airlock to promote the Sochi Olympic Games in Russia, which open in February 2014.

"Our goal here is to make it look spectacular," Kotov, speaking through a translator, told reporters.

"We'd like to showcase our Olympic torch in space. We will try to do it in a beautiful manner. Millions of people will see it live on TV and they will see the station and see how we work," Kotov said.

The torch is scheduled to be delivered to the station on November 6 by the next crew launching to the outpost. Yurchikhin, Nyberg and Parmitano will then bring it back to Earth when they return home four days later so the traditional torch relay can continue.

"Unfortunately we cannot light it in space so we will simply take it to space and take pictures and some video with the station and the Earth in the background," Ryazanskiy said in a prelaunch NASA interview.

An Olympic torch previously flew aboard NASA's now-retired space shuttle Atlantis prior to the 1996 Olympics.

(Reporting by Irene Klotz, Editing by Jane Sutton and Cynthia Osterman)

View the original article here

Commercial cargo ship reaches International Space Station

By Irene Klotz

Sun Sep 29, 2013 7:18pm EDT

n">(Reuters) - An unmanned U.S. commercial cargo ship flew to the International Space Station on Sunday, completing the primary goal of its test flight before supply runs begin in December.

After a series of successful steering maneuvers, the Orbital Sciences Cygnus freighter parked about 39 feet from the station at 6:50 a.m. EDT/1050 GMT as the ships sailed 260 miles above the Southern Ocean south of Africa.

Ten minutes later, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano and NASA's Karen Nyberg used the station's robotic arm to pluck the capsule from orbit and guide it to a berthing slip on the station's Harmony connecting node.

"That's a long time coming, looks great," radioed astronaut Catherine Coleman from NASA's Mission Control in Houston.

Cygnus' arrival had been delayed a week - first by a software glitch and then by the higher priority docking of a Russian Soyuz capsule ferrying three new crewmembers to the $100 billion outpost, a project of 15 nations.

Orbital Sciences' new unmanned Antares rocket blasted off on September 18 from a new launch pad on the Virginia coast to put Cygnus into orbit.

"We learned a lot on this one," Orbital Sciences executive vice president Frank Culbertson told reporters after launch.

NASA contributed $288 million toward Antares' and Cygnus' development and awarded Orbital Sciences a $1.9 billion contract for eight station resupply missions, the first of which is targeted for December.

The U.S. space agency also provided $396 million to privately owned Space Exploration Technologies to help develop the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon cargo ship. The company, known as SpaceX, holds a $1.5 billion NASA contract for 12 cargo runs to the station, two of which already have been completed.

Unlike SpaceX's Dragon capsule, Cygnus is not designed to return to Earth. After astronauts unload more than 1,500 pounds (680 kg) of food, clothing and supplies that were packed aboard Cygnus, it will be filled with trash, detached from the station and flown into the atmosphere for incineration.

Thales Alenia Space, a consortium led by Europe's largest defense electronics company, France's Thales, is a prime contractor on the capsule.

For now, NASA is the only customer for Cygnus, but Orbital Sciences expects additional business as the United States and other countries launch exploration initiatives beyond the space station's orbit.

(Reporting by Irene Klotz in Lompoc, California; Editing by Bill Trott and Stacey Joyce)

View the original article here

Japanese astronaut to command space station in March

Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata is seen on a monitor during a training exercise in a cetrifuge at the Star City space centre outside Moscow, August 9, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Sergei Remezov

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Wed Aug 28, 2013 5:58pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The first Japanese astronaut to live aboard the International Space Station is preparing for a return flight, this time to serve as commander, officials said on Wednesday.

Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, is due to leave in November with a pair of veteran astronauts from the United States and Russia.

Wakata, 50, is expected to take command of the orbital research outpost in March, marking the first time a Japanese astronaut will lead a human space mission.

"It means a lot to Japan to have its own representative to command the International Space Station," Wakata told a news conference broadcast from the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

"It's a big milestone for Japan ... to have this experience," he said.

In 2009, Wakata became the first astronaut from Japan to live aboard the $100 billion research laboratory that flies about 250 miles above Earth.

Japan, one of 15 nations participating in the project, provided the station's largest and most elaborate laboratory, named Kibo, as well as cargo resupply ships.

Wakata, who was part of two missions on NASA's now-retired space shuttles, is training for his fourth flight along with NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, both 53.

Mastracchio, a veteran of three shuttle missions and one of NASA's most experienced spacewalkers, will be making his first long-duration flight. Tyurin will be living aboard the station for a third time.

Command of the station typically rotates between a U.S. astronaut and Russian cosmonaut. In 2009, Belgium astronaut Frank De Winne became the first European to command the station. Canada's first commander, Chris Hadfield, was in charge from March until May.

Wakata, a native of Saitama, Japan, holds a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering, a master's in applied mechanics and a doctorate in aerospace engineering from Kyushu University. Before being selected as an astronaut in 1992, he worked as an aircraft structural engineer for Japan Airlines.

Wakata's first two spaceflights, in January 1996 and October 2000, were aboard NASA space shuttles. He was Japan's first live-aboard space station resident from March to July 2009. Upon returning to the station in November, Wakata will serve as a flight engineer before taking over command in March.

(Reporting by Tom Brown,; Editing by Stacey Joyce)

View the original article here

NASA adds more space launch platforms for sale to private firms

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Tue Aug 20, 2013 7:11pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - While NASA considers competing bids to take over a shuttle launch pad at Kennedy Space Center, it added three mobile launch platforms to its list of excess equipment available to private industry, officials said on Tuesday.

Ideally, NASA wants a commercial launch company to take over one or more of the massive steel platforms, which were originally built in 1967 to support the Apollo moon program's Saturn rockets. The 25-foot (7.6-meter) tall platforms were later modified for the space shuttles, which flew from 1981 until 2011.

Recycling the platforms, which measure 160 feet by 135 feet is another option, a solicitation on NASA's procurement website shows.

The U.S. space agency also is interested in other uses for the mobile launch platforms, which served as bases to stack and assemble the shuttle and then transport it to the launch pad. The platforms provided power and umbilical connections and had open sections for flames and rocket exhaust to pass through.

"At this point, NASA is looking to gauge interest for potential use of the (platforms) and concepts for potential use," spokeswoman Tracy Young said.

Proposals are due September 6.

NASA is already assessing bids for the shuttle launch pad from two competing firms backed by Internet billionaires.

NASA is also turning over the shuttle's runway to Space Florida, a state-backed economic development agency. Space Florida, in turn, plans to make the runway and support facilities available to a variety of commercial companies, including privately owned XCOR Aerospace, which is developing a two-person, suborbital spaceship called Lynx that takes off and lands like an airplane.

Another potential customer is Stratolaunch Systems, an orbital space vehicle backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

The most contentious - and highest profile - piece of shuttle equipment available is a Kennedy Space Center launch pad that has attracted competing bids from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, co-founder of Paypal and chief executive of electric car company Tesla Motors.

Bezos and Musk, both billionaires, are vying for Launch Complex 39A. NASA intends to keep the second shuttle launch pad, 39B, for a new heavy-lift rocket under development called the Space Launch System.

Musk's Space Exploration Technologies of Hawthorne, California, wants 39A to launch its Falcon 9 and planned Falcon Heavy rockets. The privately owned firm, also known as SpaceX, already flies from a leased launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, located just south of the Kennedy Space Center.

The first Falcon 9 rocket flight from a new launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California is scheduled for next month. The company has a backlog of more than 50 launches, including 10 missions to fly cargo for NASA to the International Space Station.

SpaceX also is developing a version of its Dragon cargo ship to fly astronauts.

Startup Blue Origin, a Kent, Washington, firm owned by Bezos, submitted an alternative proposal to NASA to run pad 39A as a multi-user facility.

Both firms say they are ready to take over maintenance and operations of the launch pad on October 1.

United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, did not bid on the shuttle's launch pad, but has publicly endorsed Blue Origin's proposals. The company, which has a lucrative monopoly on launching U.S. military satellites, is facing its first competition for the business from rival launch pad bidder SpaceX.

The main NASA facilities that will remain are the shuttle launch pad 39B, plus various hangars for the Orion deep space capsule to be launched by NASA's heavy lift rocket, due to begin test flights in 2017.

(Editing by Philip Barbara)

View the original article here

Three space station crewmembers land after 166-day mission

The International Space Station crew members (L to R) U.S. astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin walk after donning space suits before the launch at the Baikonur cosmodrome March 28, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Sergei Ilnitsky/Pool

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Tue Sep 10, 2013 11:18pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Two Russian cosmonauts and a U.S. astronaut left the International Space Station on Tuesday, leaving a skeleton crew to maintain the outpost until replacements arrive later this month.

Outgoing station commander Pavel Vinogradov, NASA astronaut Christopher Cassidy and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin bid their crewmates good-bye and climbed aboard their Russian Soyuz capsule to prepare for a 3.5-hour flight back to Earth after 166 days in orbit.

"The time has gone by so incredibly fast," Cassidy said during an inflight interview last week.

"It'll be really sad to leave. This is an incredible experience ... but by the same token, I'm ready to go. It's time for some other people to come ... and I'm really excited to go back and see my friends and family."

Before leaving, Vinogradov, a veteran of three spaceflights, transferred command of the $100 billion station, a project of 15 nations, to fellow cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, who remains aboard with Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano and NASA's Karen Nyberg.

"We had a great environment here, very friendly and very warm," Vinogradov said through a translator in a ceremony on NASA TV on Monday marking the change in command.

Strapped inside their Soyuz capsule, Vinogradov, Cassidy and Misurkin pulled away from the station's Poisk module at 7:35 p.m. EDT/1135 GMT as the two ships sailed 258 miles above Mongolia, said NASA mission commentator Brandi Dean.

Three hours later, the Soyuz hit the top of Earth's atmosphere, giving the men their first sampling of gravity since their launch on March 28.

The final leg of the journey took place under parachutes, with the capsule finally coming to a stop on the steppes of Kazakhstan at 10:58 p.m. EDT/0258 GMT, marking the end of the Expedition 36 mission.

The space station has been continuously staffed by rotating crews of astronauts and cosmonauts since November 2000.

Following medical checks, Vinogradov and Misurkin will be flown to Star City near Moscow. Cassidy will fly on a NASA jet back to the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

A replacement space station crew, headed by veteran cosmonaut Oleg Kotov and including rookies Sergey Ryazanskiy and Michael Hopkins, is due to launch on September 25.

(Editing by Christopher Wilson)

View the original article here

Pentagon, NASA to spend $44 billion on space launches through 2018: GAO

Tourists take pictures of a NASA sign at the Kennedy Space Center visitors complex in Cape Canaveral, Florida April 14, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Carlos Barria

WASHINGTON | Mon Sep 9, 2013 7:42pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Defense Department and NASA expect to spend about $44 billion to launch government satellites and other spacecraft over the next five years, including $28 billion in procurement funding, the Government Accountability Office said on Monday.

The GAO, a congressional watchdog agency, said it was difficult to determine exact funding plans because both agencies used different accounting methods, but it arrived at the combined total by analyzing Pentagon and NASA budget documents, and looking at funding from other government agencies.

GAO said the projected funding data was an initial step toward answering a larger request from lawmakers who question the steep cost of space launches, and why efforts to inject more competition have not gotten more traction.

"Defense and civilian government agencies together expect to require significant funding, nearly $44 billion, in 'then-year' dollars that factor in anticipated future inflation, for launch-related activities from fiscal years 2014 through 2018," the agency said in a letter to the investigations subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who chairs the investigations subcommittee, and John McCain, the top Republican on the panel, had asked GAO to investigate space launch funding to get a better handle on the overall government effort.

GAO said it would continue to look into the larger question surrounding "impediments to economical procurement of government launch vehicles and launch services."

The Pentagon and NASA have sought in recent years to introduce more competition to the space launch business, which is largely dominated by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co, the Pentagon's two largest suppliers.

Orbital Sciences Corp and privately held Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, are trying to break into the market for launching large government satellites into space.

In a letter to the Levin and McCain, GAO said it hoped the aggregated data would help "inform plans to lower launch costs, increase competition, and invest in new programs."

GAO said planned procurement funding of $28 billion accounted for about 65 percent of the total amount through fiscal 2018, with the Pentagon accounting for about $16 billion of that amount.

Combined research, development and testing activities accounted for about $11 billion, or 26 percent, according to the GAO letter. NASA accounts for the lion's share of that projected funding, or $10.5 billion, including about $7 billion on its work on a launch vehicle and the ground systems needed to support human exploration of deep space.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa; Editing by Ken Wills)

View the original article here

Mannequin Cosmonaut Ivan Ivanovich - It Happened In Space

Leading up to Yuri Gagarin's historic Vostok 1 flight, the Soviet Union launched two missions with a man-like mannequin, Ivan Ivanovich, on board.

View the original article here

NASA Plans Test of Electronic Nose on International Space Station

International Space Station November 19, 2008

PASADENA, Calif. – NASA astronauts on Space Shuttle Endeavour's STS-126 mission will install an instrument on the International Space Station that can "smell" dangerous chemicals in the air. Designed to help protect crew members' health and safety, the experimental "ENose" will monitor the space station's environment for chemicals such as ammonia, mercury, methanol and formaldehyde.

The ENose fills the long-standing gap between onboard alarms and complex analytical instruments. Air-quality problems have occurred on the International Space Station, space shuttle and Russian Space Station Mir. In most cases, the chemicals were identified only after the crew had been exposed to them, if at all. The ENose, which will run continuously and autonomously, is the first instrument on station that will detect and quantify chemical leaks or spills as they happen.

"The ENose is a 'first-responder' that will alert crew members of possible contaminants in the air and also analyze and quantify targeted changes in cabin environment," said Margaret A. Ryan, the principal investigator of the ENose project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, in Pasadena, Calif. JPL built and manages the device.

Station crew members will unpack the ENose on Dec. 9 to begin the instrument's six-month demonstration in the crew cabin. If the experiment is successful, the ENose might be used in future space missions as part of an automated system to monitor and control astronauts' in-space environments.

"This ENose is a very capable instrument that will increase crew awareness of the state of their air quality," said Carl Walz, an International Space Station astronaut and Director for NASA's Advanced Capabilities Division, which funds the ENose. "Having experienced an air-quality event during my Expedition 4 mission on the space station, I wish I had the information that this ENose will provide future crews. This technology demonstration will provide important information for environmental control and life-support system designers for the future lunar outpost."

Specifically, the shoebox-sized ENose contains an array of 32 sensors that can identify and quantify several organic and inorganic chemical species, including organic solvents and marker chemicals that signal the start of electrical fires. The ENose sensors are polymer films that change their electrical conductivity in response to different chemicals. The pattern of the sensor array's response depends on the particular chemical types present in the air.

The instrument can analyze volatile aerosols and vapors, help monitor the cleanup of chemical spills or leaks, and enable more intensive chemical analysis by collecting raw data and streaming it to a computer at JPL's ENose laboratory. The instrument has a wide range of chemical sensitivity, from fractional parts per million to 10,000 parts per million. For all of its capabilities, the ENose weighs less than nine pounds and requires only 20 watts of power.

The ENose is now in its third generation. The first ENose was tested during a six-day demonstration on the STS-95 shuttle mission in 1998. That prototype could detect 10 compounds but could not analyze data immediately. The second-generation ENose could detect, identify and quantify 21 chemical species. It was extensively ground-tested. The third-generation ENose includes data-analysis software to identify and quantify the release of chemicals within 40 minutes of detection. While it will look for 10 chemical species in this six-month experiment, the new ENose can be trained to detect many others.

For more information about the ENose and the Advanced Environmental Monitoring and Control Project, visit: http://aemc.jpl.nasa.gov/instruments/enose.cfm

For more information about NASA's exploration program, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/exploration

For more information about the International Space Station, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/station

Media contacts: Rhea Borja
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-0850
Rhea.R.Borja@jpl.nasa.gov

Grey Hautaluoma/Ashley Edwards
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-0668/1756
grey.hautaluoma-1@nasa.gov
ashley.edwards-1@nasa.gov

2008-218

View the original article here

NASA Space Telescope Finds Fewer Asteroids Near Earth

NEOWISE observations indicate that there are at least 40 percent fewer near-Earth asteroids in total that are larger than 330 feet, or 100 meters. Our solar system's four inner planets are shown in green, and our sun is in the center. Each red dot represents one asteroid. Object sizes are not to scale. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
› Larger image | › See animation September 29, 2011

PASADENA, Calif. -- New observations by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, show there are significantly fewer near-Earth asteroids in the mid-size range than previously thought. The findings also indicate NASA has found more than 90 percent of the largest near-Earth asteroids, meeting a goal agreed to with Congress in 1998.

Astronomers now estimate there are roughly 19,500 -- not 35,000 -- mid-size near-Earth asteroids. Scientists say this improved understanding of the population may indicate the hazard to Earth could be somewhat less than previously thought. However, the majority of these mid-size asteroids remain to be discovered. More research also is needed to determine if fewer mid-size objects (between 330 and 3,300-feet wide) also mean fewer potentially hazardous asteroids, those that come closest to Earth.

The results come from the most accurate census to date of near-Earth asteroids, the space rocks that orbit within 120 million miles (195 million kilometers) of the sun into Earth's orbital vicinity. WISE observed infrared light from those in the middle to large-size category. The survey project, called NEOWISE, is the asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE mission. Study results appear in the Astrophysical Journal.

"NEOWISE allowed us to take a look at a more representative slice of the near-Earth asteroid numbers and make better estimates about the whole population," said Amy Mainzer, lead author of the new study and principal investigator for the NEOWISE project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It's like a population census, where you poll a small group of people to draw conclusions about the entire country."

WISE scanned the entire celestial sky twice in infrared light between January 2010 and February 2011, continuously snapping pictures of everything from distant galaxies to near-Earth asteroids and comets. NEOWISE observed more than 100 thousand asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, in addition to at least 585 near Earth.

WISE captured a more accurate sample of the asteroid population than previous visible-light surveys because its infrared detectors could see both dark and light objects. It is difficult for visible-light telescopes to see the dim amounts of visible-light reflected by dark asteroids. Infrared-sensing telescopes detect an object's heat, which is dependent on size and not reflective properties.

Though the WISE data reveal only a small decline in the estimated numbers for the largest near-Earth asteroids, which are 3,300 feet (1 kilometer) and larger, they show 93 percent of the estimated population have been found. This fulfills the initial "Spaceguard" goal agreed to with Congress. These large asteroids are about the size of a small mountain and would have global consequences if they were to strike Earth. The new data revise their total numbers from about 1,000 down to 981, of which 911 already have been found. None of them represents a threat to Earth in the next few centuries. It is believed that all near-Earth asteroids approximately 6 miles (10 kilometers) across, as big as the one thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs, have been found.

"The risk of a really large asteroid impacting the Earth before we could find and warn of it has been substantially reduced," said Tim Spahr, the director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

The situation is different for the mid-size asteroids, which could destroy a metropolitan area if they were to impact in the wrong place. The NEOWISE results find a larger decline in the estimated population for these bodies than what was observed for the largest asteroids. So far, the Spaceguard effort has found and is tracking more than 5,200 near-Earth asteroids 330 feet or larger, leaving more than an estimated 15,000 still to discover. In addition, scientists estimate there are more than a million unknown smaller near-Earth asteroids that could cause damage if they were to impact Earth.

"NEOWISE was just the latest asset NASA has used to find Earth's nearest neighbors," said Lindley Johnson, program executive for the Near Earth Object Observation Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The results complement ground-based observer efforts over the past 12 years. These observers continue to track these objects and find even more."

WISE is managed and operated by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at the University of California, Los Angeles. The WISE science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing occur at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology.

For more information about the mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/wise .

Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

2011-304

View the original article here

NASA Awards Space Technology Research Fellowship Grants

RELEASE : 11-246 NASA Awards Space Technology Research Fellowship Grants WASHINGTON -- NASA has selected the inaugural class of Space Technology Research Fellows. Eighty-one students will receive graduate student fellowships from NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist to pursue master's or doctoral degrees in relevant space technology disciplines at their respective institutions.

This first class of Space Technology Fellows is part of NASA's strategy to develop the technological foundation for its future science and exploration missions. The program's goal is to provide the nation with a pipeline of highly skilled engineers and technologists to improve U.S. competitiveness.

"These fellowships will develop America's technology leaders for tomorrow, leaders that will help us out-innovate, out-educate and out-build our competitors and maintain our leadership in space," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. "President Obama has said, 'America's competitiveness rests on the excellence of our citizens in technical fields.' These grants are an investment in America's intellectual capital and our nation's future."

NASA Space Technology Fellows will perform innovative space technology research while building the skills necessary to become future technological leaders. Selected candidates will perform graduate student research on their respective campuses and at NASA centers and nonprofit U.S. research and development laboratories.

For a list of fellowship recipients, their research institutions and their research topics, visit: http://go.usa.gov/BfN

The fellowships program is managed for NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist by the agency's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. For information about the Office of the Chief Technologist and the fellowships program, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/oct  

- end -

text-only version of this release

NASA press releases and other information are available automatically by sending a blank e-mail message to hqnews-subscribe@mediaservices.nasa.gov. To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send a blank e-mail message to hqnews-unsubscribe@mediaservices.nasa.gov.

Back to NASA Newsroom | Back to NASA Homepage

View the original article here

Caltech Space Challenge

Your browser is reporting that it is too old to support this site.
Please visit our Browser Compatibility page for a variety of solutions to this issue, so that you may fully experience all that Caltech.edu has to offer.

If you're a student who's ever wanted to plan a manned space mission—or channel your inner Bruce Willis from the movie Armageddon—now's your chance. This September, Caltech will a host a workshop inviting about 20 graduate and undergraduate students from around the world to design a mission to an asteroid or comet in Earth's neighborhood—a so-called Near-Earth Object (NEO)—that would return a sample of rock or ice. The Caltech Space Challenge, sponsored by the Keck Institute for Space Studies, will pit two groups against each other to plan the best mission.

"Designing a human-exploration mission to a near-Earth asteroid is both timely and exciting," says Donald Yeomans, who manages NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at JPL and is one of the faculty mentors for the workshop. "The most spacecraft-accessible asteroids in Earth's neighborhood are also the most dangerous in terms of their ability to collide with Earth."

Experts from Caltech and JPL will give talks and mentor the students, providing them with the basic knowledge to plan a space mission. The two teams will then put their heads together and come up with a target and trajectory, a spacecraft design, experiments and instruments, and everything else needed for a mission. The workshop will look for students from a variety of fields—chemists, mechanical engineers, software engineers, and, for a manned mission, even someone with a medical background, says Prakhar Mehrotra, one of the graduate students leading the project.

Mehrotra says he came up with the idea after taking part in a similar program with the European Space Agency in 2009. In that program, called the Space Station Design Workshop, participants had to design a mission to the moon. The experience was so rewarding that he wanted to do something similar at Caltech, taking advantage of the resources at JPL to receive practical training in engineering and research.

In 2010, President Obama announced his goal to land an astronaut on an asteroid by 2025. So this year, Mehrotra teamed up with Jon Mihaly, a graduate student in aerospace engineering, to organize a workshop that challenges students to plan a mission that does just that.

In addition to developing possible techniques to divert a future, life-threatening asteroid impact, Yeomans says, an asteroid mission will help scientists learn more about the origins of the solar system and life on Earth. NEOs were left over from the processes that formed the solar system, and they likely brought with them water and organic compounds that are crucial for life when they slammed into Earth early in the planet's history. These kinds of impacts played a critical role in shaping the evolution of life. One such collision might have led to the demise of the dinosaurs, for example.

After the workshop, scientists and engineers from JPL will cull the ideas and apply them toward the design of an asteroid mission, Mehorotra says. Participants might be able to parlay their experiences into research internships at JPL.

"I really think it's important to get people interested in this field," adds Mihaly. With an aging NASA, it's crucial to train the mission planners of the future.

The Caltech Space Challenge will take place from September 12 to 16. To apply or to learn more, click here. Applications are due July 8.

View the original article here