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Thursday, March 31, 2011

NASA Extends Contract For Supercomputing Support Services

WASHINGTON -- NASA will exercise the third one-year option on a contract with Computer Sciences Corp. in Lanham, Md., to provide supercomputing support services at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. The option is valued at approximately $58.6 million.

The option exercised on the cost-plus-award-fee contract begins April 1 and continues until March 31, 2012. The contract consists of a two-year base period, which began Aug. 1, 2007, and eight one-year priced options with a maximum value of approximately $597 million if all options are exercised.

The company will continue to support supercomputing services provided by the agency's primary high performance computing facility operated by the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at Ames. The facility serves as the supercomputing pathfinder for the agency and develops and operates some of the largest, most advanced and productive supercomputers in the world.

The contract is structured so the company also may provide supercomputing services to the NASA Center for Computational Sciences facility at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and additional high performance computing support to other agency field centers as needed.

For more information about high performance advanced supercomputing at Ames, visit:



Ice on Mercury? NASA Probe May Solve That Mystery and Others

A view of the horizon of Mercury, taken by NASA's Messenger spacecraft on March 29, 2011. The picture shows a stretch of land about 750 miles long, from top to bottom.
CREDIT: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
 A NASA spacecraft now circling Mercury is set to tackle some big mysteries of the scorched, tiny world – including whether or not water ice lurks in its shadowy craters.
NASA's Messenger probe became the first spacecraft ever to orbit Mercury when it arrived at the planet on March 17. While the spacecraft won't officially start its yearlong science mission until April 4, the observations it's already made hint at many discoveries to come, researchers said.

"We're really seeing Mercury now with new eyes," Messenger principal investigator Sean Solomon, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, told reporters today (March 30). "As a result, an entire global perspective is unfolding, and will continue to unfold over the next few months." [New Photos of Mercury From Messenger]

The search for water ice on the blisteringly hot planet is one of the mission's driving motivations. Though Mercury's surface temperatures can top 842 degrees Fahrenheit (450 degrees Celsius), ice may survive on the floors of permanently shadowed polar craters.

And about 20 years ago, radar data first picked up intriguing evidence of reflective materials at Mercury's poles that might just be water ice, researchers said.
"Could ice be trapped there? The thermal models say yes, it's possible," Solomon said. "But is it water ice? There are alternative ideas."

Messenger will also investigate other questions about Mercury — why it's so much denser than the other rocky planets, for example. Also, the mission team wants to learn more about how the planet's core is structured, the nature of its global magnetic field and other aspects of Mercury's composition and history.

That work will start in earnest next week. In the meantime, scientists are sifting through the spacecraft's increasing pile of new Mercury photos. By the end of tomorrow, it will have snapped 1,500 photos of the planet from orbit, researchers said — more than it captured during its three previous flybys of the planet in 2008 and 2009.

The first photos

Messenger — whose name is short for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging — is still officially in a commissioning phase, during which time mission scientists are checking out its cameras and other instruments.

But the probe has not been idly waiting for its main mission to start. Messenger snapped the first photos of Mercury from orbit yesterday (March 29), imaging previously unseen areas of the planet — terrain near the poles that Messenger missed on its three flybys.
Bright rays, consisting of impact ejecta and secondary craters, radiate from Mercury's Debussy crater, located at the top. The image, acquired by NASA's Messenger spacecraft on March 29, 2011, shows a small portion of Debussy's large system of rays in greater detail than ever before. 
CREDIT: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
 
The pictures show the battered, crater-strewn surface of Mercury in great detail.
"We are delighted to be able to see the surface at the very high latitudes," Solomon said.
So far, everything is going well with Messenger's mission and its instruments.

"All subsystems and instruments are on and operating nominally, within specifications," said Messenger mission systems engineer Eric Finnegan, of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory. "This is a tremendous achievement for the entire Messenger team."

Much more to come

Over the next 12 months, Messenger will continue taking pictures and peering at Mercury with its seven instruments, mapping the planet's surface and helping scientists better understand its composition, tenuous atmosphere and geologic history. [Most Enduring Mysteries of Mercury]
This information could shed light on how our solar system formed and evolved — and perhaps, by extension, how alien planetary systems have come about as well, researchers said.
 
The observations Messenger has made from orbit thus far suggest the probe will beam home all sorts of eye-opening information, researchers said. It may, for instance, help researchers learn why Mercury — like Earth — has a global magnetic field, while its rocky planet cousins Mars and Venus do not.

In its first five days in orbit, Messenger tripled the number of spacecraft observations of Mercury's magnetic field available to astronomers, researchers said.
"We are rapidly ramping up a much larger dataset with which to characterize the geometry of Mercury's magnetic field," Solomon said. "That will tell us a lot about Mercury's internal structure and dynamics."

A busy year ahead

The $446 million Messenger probe launched in August 2004. The spacecraft is now in an extremely elliptical orbit that brings it within 124 miles (200 kilometers) of Mercury at the closest point and retreats to more than 9,300 miles (15,000 km) away at the farthest point.

While Messenger is the first mission ever to orbit Mercury, it is not the first spacecraft to visit the planet. NASA's Mariner 10 spacecraft flew by the planet three times in the mid-1970s.

On April 4, Messenger will start mapping and studying the entire surface of Mercury, a process that is expected to require about 75,000 images. But the early science returns have whetted the appetites of mission scientists, who can't wait for the data to really start pouring in.

"It's just a wonderful adventure for those of us on the science team that have front-row seats for these new data that are coming down," Solomon said. "It's a wonderful time in the history of exploration of planet Earth's neighborhood, and we are delighted to be a part of that."

Dark Matter Could Be the Life of the Party for Starless Planets

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the distribution of dark matter in the center of the giant galaxy cluster Abell 1689, containing about 1,000 galaxies and trillions of stars.
CREDIT: NASA, ESA, D. Coe (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, and Space Telescope Science Institute), N. Benitez (Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, Spain), T. Broadhurst (University of the Basque Country, Spain), and H. Ford
 There may be worlds that float through intergalactic space in darkness without stars to warm them. Such lonely planets, endlessly adrift in night, might seem too cold and dark to ever serve as homes for life.
But mysterious, unseen dark matter could help make warm these starless planets and make them habitable, a new study suggests. The idea may be a bit out there, but it’s not impossible, researchers say.

Scientists think invisible, as-yet-unidentified dark matter makes up about 85 percent of all matter in the universe. They know it exists because of the gravitational effects it has on galaxies. [Video: Dark Matter in 3-D]

Warmth from dark matter?

Among the leading candidates for what dark matter is are massive particles that only rarely interact with normal matter. These particles could be their own antiparticles, meaning they annihilate each other when they meet, releasing energy.
If these dark matter particles do exist, they could get captured by a planet's gravity and unleash energy that could warm that world, reasoned physicist Dan Hooper and astrophysicist Jason Steffen at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Although this amount of energy would be negligible when it
 
Researchers created a 3D map of dark matter in a large portion of the universe by combining gravitational lensing data from more than half a million galaxies scattered across a range of distances from Earth. The three axes of the box (bottom) correspond to sky position, and distance from Earth, increasing from left to right.
CREDIT: NASA, ESA, R. Massey (Caltech)
 
comes to Earth — a few megawatts at most — they calculate that larger, rocky "super-Earths" in regions with high densities of slow-moving dark matter could be warmed enough to keep liquid water on their surfaces, even in the absence of additional energy from starlight or other sources.

The density of dark matter is expected to be hundreds to thousands of times greater in the innermost regions of the Milky Way and in the cores of dwarf spheroidal galaxies than it is in our solar system.

"We are talking about rare and special environments, but not implausible ones," Hooper told SPACE.com. [The Strangest Alien Planets]
The scientists surmised that on planets in those areas, it may be that dark matter rather than light makes it possible for life to develop and survive. After all, on Earth, there is life virtually wherever there is water.

"You can have all the basic elements you need for organic life without a star," Hooper said.
An artist's illustration of the extrasolar planets discovered around the star Kepler 11 by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope.
CREDIT: Nature
 
Dark matter: Better than a star

Indeed, dark matter could keep the surfaces of such warm for trillions of years, outliving all regular stars, the researchers suggested. Given their extremely long lifetimes, such planets may prove to be the ultimate bastion of life in our universe, they added. For comparison, the universe is estimated to be 13.7 billion years old.

"I imagine 10 trillion years in the future, when the universe has expanded beyond recognition and all the stars in our galaxy have long since burnt out, the only planets with any heat are these ones here, and I could imagine that any civilization that survived over this huge stretch of time would start moving to these dark-matter-fueled planets," Hooper said.
However, the scenario lies in the more optimistic end of models calculating how dark matter behaves.
Also, assuming that such planets exist, "there probably aren't many of them," Hooper cautioned. Also, current planet-hunting missions focus on worlds that starlight can help detect — dark-matter-fueled planets not only might lie far away from any stars, but are not especially hot, making them difficult to see. "I don't see us discovering planets like this anytime soon," he said.

The scientists detailed their findings online March 25 in a paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.

Searching for Alien Life? Try Failed Stars

This artist's illustration shows a brown dwarf with a disk of planet-forming material around it. Brown dwarfs are bodies without enough mass to ignite nuclear fusion and become stars. 
CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The search for alien life usually focuses on planets around other stars. But a lesser-known possibility is that life has sprung up on planets that somehow were ejected from their original solar systems and became free-floating in the universe, as well as on small bodies called sub-brown dwarfs, which are stars so small and dim they are not really stars at all, but function more like planets.

Studies show these bodies could potentially host atmospheres and surfaces where some form ofextraterrestrial life could take hold.
Researcher Viorel Badescu of the Polytechnic University of Bucharest in Romania recently investigated the possibilities for life on free-floating planets (FFPs) and sub-brown dwarfs (SBDs) that might containlakes of the chemical ethane. He found that such life is not impossible, though it would be significantly different from life on Earth.

His findings were detailed in the August 2010 issue of the journal Planetary and Space Science.

Failed stars
Sub-brown dwarfs are not large enough to generate the nuclear fusion that powers normal stars. Having failed as stars, they slowly radiate their internal thermal energy as heat and very dim light – hence, they are extremely hard to detect. Both free-floating planets and sub-brown dwarfs don't always orbit around a parent star, and can be found in interstellar space.
Lacking a star, life on FFPs and SBDs would have to rely on the body's internal heat and the decay of radioactive elements for energy. "One may expect a rather stable heat release for long periods of time, exceeding two or three times the present age of the solar system," said Badescu. Though meager, this heat could be trapped on the object by an optically thick atmosphere.

But life needs more than just heat to thrive. Another important ingredient for habitability is a solvent – a liquid environment where important chemical reactions can occur. Life on Earth uses water as a solvent, but that's not the only option.

"Synthesis of observational data makes it possible to conceive chemical reactions that might support life involving non-carbon compounds, occurring in solvents other than water," Badescu wrote in his paper.
In particular, Badescu found that ethane – a compound of carbon and hydrogen – could function well as a solvent for alien life. [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life]
In this illustration, twin brown dwarfs orbit each other. Despite the name "brown dwarf", these objects cool and change over time, and therefore do not have a definitive color. 
CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech
 
 
Life without water
It seems odd to consider the possibility of life on an object more massive than Jupiter or Saturn, especially since most scientists think such gas giant planets -- with their high radiation, hostile atmospheres and potential lack of a planetary surface -- would not harbor life as we know it. 
But Badescu said that some sub-brown dwarfs might have lakes or oceans of liquid ethane that could prove quite homey to alien microbes.
The main difference between water and ethane for use as a solvent is that water is a polar molecule, meaning one end of the molecule is positively charged, and one end of it is negatively charged. This has proven integral to Earth life, because the polar properties of water enable certain kinds of molecules to dissolve easily in water, while others remain stable.
The molecules that code for life – DNA and RNA – have electrical charge properties that allow them to change their internal structure – the specific order of the base molecules within them – and still have the same overall physical properties. This is all enabled by the way their charge properties interact with the polar quality of water.

That would not be the case with ethane, which is a non-polar molecule. With DNA and RNA in this situation, "small changes in molecular structure may create large changes in molecular behavior," Badescu said. "That is not acceptable in an encoding biopolymer that must support Darwinian evolution, in which case, the molecule's physical properties must remain relatively constant when the informational content changes."

However, the challenge is not insurmountable – a completely different type of molecule could be used to code life's blueprint on a FFP or SBD.
Scientists think sub-brown dwarfs or free-floating planets might contain lakes of ethane that could host life. This artist's concept shows similar lakes of ethane thought to exist on Saturn's moon Titan. 
CREDIT: NASA/Karl Kofoed
 
 
Searching for life
Ultimately, free-floating planets and sub-brown dwarfs could prove a fertile place to look for extraterrestrial creatures.
Besides their habitable qualities, these bodies seem to be quite common in the universe. Sub-brown dwarfs weighing between 1 and 13 Jupiter masses may be about as common as stars, Badescu said.

"The total number of FFPs and SBDs may exceed the number of stars by two orders of magnitude, although most of them should be low-mass rock/ice planetary embryos ejected from planetary systems in formation," i.e. not the type with large gaseous atmospheres that would retain the heat required for life, Badescu said. "Thus, it might be conceivable that FFPs and SBDs are the most common sites of life in the universe."

Given this fact, he advocated ramping up our efforts to search for free-floating planets and sub-brown dwarfs and to characterize them to determine which might be habitable.
"Present day technology does not allow a systematic search for habitable FFPs and SBDs," Badescu said. "However, the existing observation programs of young star forming regions should be supplemented with activities related to FFP and SBD identification and characterization."

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Venus and the Moon to Shine Together Thursday Morning

This sky map shows how Venus and the crescent moon will appear just before sunrise on March 31, 2011 as viewed under clear morning conditions.
CREDIT: Starry Night Software

Early-bird skywatchers graced with clear weather tomorrow morning (March 31) will get a celestial treat before sunrise, when Venus and the moon appear together in the east-southeast sky. 

Venus will be low onthe horizon,a brilliant “morning star,” with a lovely waning crescent moon hovering less than 5 degrees (about half the width of a human fist) above the planet and to its left. The moon will be just 9 percent illuminated, since it is less than three days before its new phase. [Moon Phases Explained]

While not an exceptionally close conjunction, the cosmic event should not disappoint skywatchers. Venus and the moon are the two brightest luminaries of the night sky, and the pair should make for a striking sight in the dawn twilight.

How to see Venus and the moon
Make sure there are no tall obstructions like buildings or trees, since by sunup Venus will only be about 12 degrees above the horizon. Your clenched fist held at arm’s length covers about 10 degrees of the sky, so Venus will only be a little higher than one fist above the horizon at daybreak. The moon will appear a bit above that.

This sky map of Venus and the moon shows how they will appear during their March 31 rendezvous.
Considering that we’re now back on daylight saving time, and sunrise is coming rather late again, there will no doubt will be a number of morning commuters heading out to work and school who might wonder what that “bright light” below and to the right of the slender sliver of moon is. [Amazing Moon Photos]

Then again, those who only now might notice Venus probably haven’t been paying much attention to what has been visible in the early morning skyof late. 

Dance of Venus
Venus has been putting on a dazzling show in the pre-sunrise eastern sky since November. During December and January, it soared high into the sky and was visible for nearly four hours before sunrise.

But from now through the month of April, Venus will linger low in the eastern predawn sky. The brilliant orb will rise like clockwork just over an hour before sunrise, but still can be easily identified as the brightest thing besides the moon.
Late in April, Venus will be joined by three other planets – Mercury, Mars and Jupiter.

All four planets ultimately will converge in an unusual planetary gathering that will persist through much of May.But more on that next month.
 
Do you plan to photograph Venus and the moon? Do you have skywatching photos you'd like to share with SPACE.com? If so, feel free to send them to managing editor Tariq Malik at: tmalik[at]space[dot]com for potential galleries or stories.
Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York.

Cosmic Rose Blooms in Star Cluster Photo

The star cluster NGC 371 appears in this new image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope. 
CREDIT: ESO/Manu Mejias, images

A bright star cluster surrounded by iridescent red gas looks like a blooming cosmic rose in a new photo from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.
The photo depicts the star cluster NGC 371, a stellar nursery in our neighboring galaxy the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy about 200 000 light-years from Earth. Such regions of ionized hydrogen — known as HII regions — are sites of recent star birth. [More Photos by the Very Large Telescope]

NGC 371 is an open cluster surrounded by a nebula. The stars in open clusters all originate from the same diffuse HII region, and over time the majority of the hydrogen is used up by star formation, leaving behind a shell of hydrogen such as the one in this image, along with a cluster of hot young stars.

This cluster is of particular interest to astronomers due to the unexpectedly large number of variable stars it contains. These are stars that change in brightness over time. Variable stars play a pivotal role in astronomy: Some types are invaluable for determining distances to far-off galaxies and the age of the universe.

The Small Magellanic Cloud contains stars at all stages of their evolution, from the super-bright young stars found in the NGC 371 cluster to the supernova remnants of long-dead stars.
The energetic young stars emit copious amounts of ultraviolet radiation, causing surrounding gas, such as leftover hydrogen from the stars' parent nebula, to light up with a colorful glow that extends for hundreds of light-years in every direction.
This new image was created using the FORS1 instrument on the Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile's Atacama desert.

Japanese Spaceship Loaded with Garbage Burns Up in Earth's Atmosphere


An unmanned Japanese space cargo ship met its fiery demise overnight when it intentionally re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere late Tuesday (March 29) one day after its departure from the International Space Station.

The robotic spacecraft, an H-2 Transfer Vehicle called Kounotori 2 (which means "White Stork" 2), was destroyed to dispose of itself and its cargo of space station trash after a successful two-month mission to the orbiting laboratory.
Along with the station trash aboard Kounotori 2, a high-tech sensor onboard the cargo ship successfully monitored the hot and fiery details of the spacecraft’s plunge to destruction into the South Pacific Ocean. It related its data via satellite to researchers for later analysis. The spacecraft also carried three paper cranes folded by the space station's three-person crew as a symbol of hope for the victims of the massive Japanese earthquake and tsunami that struck the country on March 11.

 
The sensor on Kounotori 2 – a small and autonomous device called the Re-entry Breakup Recorder, or REBR for short – recorded temperature, acceleration, rotational rate and other data during the spacecraft's high dive into Earth’s atmosphere.
“REBR collected data during the breakup of the Kounotori 2 vehicle and successfully 'phoned home' that data prior to final impact,” said William Ailor, Director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at The Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, Calif. “In fact, it is still transmitting while floating in the ocean.”
Recovery of the device is not planned.

REBR was made possible by using tiny sensors and miniature cell phone technology, built as basically a satellite phone with a heat shield. [Photos: Spotting Spaceships From Earth]
Ailor told SPACE.com that analysis of the data will take six to eight weeks. The Aerospace Corporation designed REBR to collect data during atmospheric reentries of space hardware in order to help understand breakup and increase the safety of such reentries. 


The REBR project was supported by the U.S. Air Force, NASA, and the Boeing Company. The first flight test of the small, autonomous device was coordinated by the Department of Defense’s Space Test Program. A second test will be REBR’s reentry aboard the European Autonomous Transfer Vehicle 2, called Johannes Kepler, in early June.

Kounotori 2, also known as HTV-2, was the second disposable H-2 Transfer Vehicle built by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to ferry tons of cargo to the International Space Station. The first HTV spacecraft, HTV-1, visited the station in 2009.

 
"The HTV-2 carried various important cargo, including spare units of the external ISS system and potable water for the crew, which has been mostly transported by the space shuttle up to now," JAXA President Keiji Tachikawa said in a statement. "I believe that this success proves that the HTVs are reliable transportation vehicles essential for maintaining the ISS, and that Japan, as an international partner of the ISS, is eligible to play an important role for ISS operations."
The spacecraft are about 33 feet (10 meters) long and 14 feet (4.4 m) wide. They can carry cargo inside a pressurized compartment – which astronauts can retrieve after docking – as well as haul spare station parts on an unpressurized pallet to be retrieved by a robotic arm.

JAXA's HTV spacecraft are part of an international robot spaceship fleet that regularly resupplies the space station. Russia's unmanned Progress spacecraft and Europe's ATV vehicles also make supply shipments.
The Kounotori 2 spacecraft launched in January and arrived at the station on Jan. 27. The next HTV spacecraft is expected to fly in January 2012.

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines and has written for SPACE.com since 1999.

European Rocket to Launch New Satellites Today

Communications satellites for the Middle East and Africa are buttoned up for blastoff today (March 30) inside an Ariane 5 rocket.
The 165-foot-tall rocket is scheduled to lift off at 2145 GMT (5:45 p.m. EDT) from the ELA-3 launch zone at the Guiana Space Center, a French-run spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
The Ariane 5 launcher has 67 minutes to get off the ground Wednesday evening or else wait until another day.

Positioned atop a mobile rail platform, the workhorse expendable rocket rolled from the space center's final assembly building to the launch pad Tuesday. Workers planned to make electrical, communications and fueling connections between the ground and the launcher later Tuesday.  [Spaceflight Now's Ariane 5 Mission Archive]

The European rocket will haul the Yahsat 1A and Intelsat New Dawn communications satellites into an egg-shaped transfer orbit stretching more than 22,200 miles above Earth.
It will take 35 minutes for the Ariane 5 to deploy both satellites in the correct orbit.

First to separate from the Ariane 5 will be the Yahsat 1A spacecraft.
The high-powered Yahsat 1A satellite will be located in geosynchronous orbit along the equator at 52.5 degrees east longitude, putting the craft in range of communications customers across the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Southwest Asia.
Operated by Al Yah Satellite Communications Co. of Abu Dhabi, Yahsat 1A will provide direct-to-home television programming, secure Ka-band communications capacity for government and military applications in the United Arab Emirates and other nations.

Yahsat 1A will also support communications links for corporate data networks and Internet trunking, according to the satellite operator.

"The launch of Yahsat's first satellite is a fantastic achievement and a moment of pride for all involved," said Jassem Mohamed Al Zaabi, Yahsat's CEO. "By expanding our satellite communication capabilities, we are supporting the development of an advanced information and communications infrastructure that will drive economic diversification and social progress across the whole region."

Weighing 13,150 pounds at launch, Yahsat 1A is based on the Eurostar E3000 satellite bus from Astrium. Thales Alenia Space of France built Yahsat 1A's Ku-band, C-band and Ka-band communications payload.

Yahsat 1A is designed to work in space for more than 15 years.
Intelsat New Dawn will ride in the lower position during the Ariane 5's ascent into orbit. Once Yahsat 1A deploys, the rocket will jettison a Sylda dual-payload adapter to make way for the Intelsat satellite's release.

The $250 million satellite was built by Orbital Sciences Corp. and is based on that firm's Star 2 platform.
The 6,600-pound spacecraft will link Africa, Western Europe, the Middle East and Pakistan through Ku-band and C-band transponders and antennas. Intelsat New Dawn is geared for wireless broadband, television and other media applications.
Mostly financed by South African investment houses, Intelsat New Dawn is one of four satellites Intelsat is launching between 2010 and 2012 to bolster the company's presence in Africa.

Intelsat New Dawn will be parked at 32.8 degrees east longitude, where it will operate for more than 15 years.
Final countdown procedures are scheduled to begin at 1015 GMT (6:15 a.m. EDT). A check of electrical systems is expected around 1415 GMT (10:15 a.m. EDT), and the launch team will begin fueling the rocket with super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants at about 1645 GMT (12:45 p.m. EDT).

Chilldown conditioning of the Vulcain 2 first stage engine will occur at 1845 GMT (2:45 p.m. EDT), and a communications check between the rocket and ground telemetry, tracking and command systems is scheduled for 2035 GMT (4:35 p.m. EDT).
The computer-controlled synchronized countdown sequence will begin seven minutes before launch to pressurize propellant tanks, switch to on-board power and take the rocket's guidance system to flight mode.

The Vulcain 2 engine will ignite as the countdown clock reaches zero, followed by a health check and ignition of the Ariane 5's solid rocket boosters seven seconds later to send the 1.7 million-pound launcher skyward.
Five seconds after blastoff, the rocket will begin pitching east from the ELA-3 launch pad, surpassing the speed of sound less than a minute into the mission. The Ariane 5's twin solid rocket boosters will jettison 2 minutes and 21 seconds after liftoff.

Once above the dense atmosphere, the launcher's payload fairing will fall away at an altitude of nearly 70 miles. The Ariane 5's first stage will shut down at 8 minutes, 53 seconds, followed moments later by stage separation and ignition of the hydrogen-fueled cryogenic HM7B upper stage engine.

The rocket's upper stage will fire for more than 16 minutes, accelerating to a velocity of 5.8 miles per second to reach an orbit with a planned high point of 22,236 miles and a targeted low point of 155 miles.
The release of Yahsat 1A is scheduled for 27 minutes, 27 seconds. The rocket's barrel-shaped Sylda 5 dual-payload adapter will be jettisoned a few minutes later.

Intelsat New Dawn will separate from the lower portion of the payload stack at 35 minutes, 2 seconds.
Click here for Spaceflight Now's coverage of rocket launches and all Arianespace and other spaceflights.
Copyright 2011 SpaceflightNow.com, all rights reserved.

NASA nixes James Cameron Mars 3D camera

James Cameron (right) inspects a mast camera system designed for NASA's Curiosity Mars rover.
(Credit: NASA)
NASA has shelved a special 3D camera system that was developed with filmmaker James Cameron for the $2.4 billion Mars rover Curiosity, which is due to launch later this year.

The zoom mast camera for Curiosity was nixed because there isn't enough time to prepare it for launch in November, according to developer Malin Space Science Systems and NASA.

The system was in the final stages of development, but time ran out. Technical difficulties prevented engineers from delivering it as scheduled last December. The system did not work as well as the fixed focal length cameras now installed on Curiosity, Malin said.

The Fixed Focal Length Mast Camera (Mastcam) has two cameras--a 100-millimeter telephoto lens and a 34-millimeter wide-angle lens.
"While Curiosity won't benefit from the 3D motion imaging that the zooms enable, I'm certain that this technology will play an important role in future missions," Cameron was quoted as saying. "In the meantime, we're certainly going to make the most of our cameras that are working so well on Curiosity right now."

Curiosity's mission is to make observations on Mars and help assess whether the planet could support microbial life.

Source

01.Entropy

After some time, this cold glass
will reach thermal equilibrium
Perhaps there’s no better way to understand entropy than to grasp the second law of thermodynamics, and vice versa. This law states that the entropy of an isolated system that is not in equilibrium will increase as time progresses until equilibrium is finally achieved.

Let’s try to elaborate a little on this equilibrium thing. Note that in the succeeding examples, we’ll assume that they’re both isolated systems.

First example. Imagine putting a hot body and a cold body side by side. What happens after some time? That’s right. They both end up in the same temperature; one that is lower than the original temperature of the hotter one and higher than the original temperature of the colder one.

Second example. Ever heard of a low pressure area? It’s what weather reporters call a particular region that’s characterized by strong winds and perhaps some rain. This happens because all fluids flow from a region of high pressure to a region of low pressure. Thus, when the fluid, air in this case, comes rushing in, they do so in the form of strong winds. This goes on until the pressures in the adjacent regions even out.

In both cases, the physical quantities which started to be uneven between the two bodies/regions even out in the end, i.e., when equilibrium is achieved. The measurement of the extent of this evening-out process is called entropy.

During the process of attaining equilibrium, it is possible to tap into the system to perform work, as in a heat engine. Notice, however, that work can only be done for as long as there is a difference in temperature. Without it, like when maximum entropy has already been achieved, there is no way that work can be performed.

Since the concept of entropy applies to all isolated systems, it has been studied not only inphysics but also in information theory, mathematics, as well as other branches of science and applied science.
Because the accepted view of the universe is that of one that is finite, then it can very well be considered as a closed system. As such, it should also be governed by the second law of thermodynamics. Thus, like in all isolated systems, the entropy of the universe is expected to be increasing.
So what? Well, also just like all isolated systems, the universe is therefore also expected to end up in a useless heap in equilibrium, a.k.a. a heat death, wherein energy can no longer be extracted from anymore. To give you some relief, not everyone involved in the study of cosmology is totally in agreement with entropy’s so-called role in the grand scheme of things though.
You can read more about entropy here in Universe Today. Want to know why time might flow in one direction? Have you ever thought about the time before the Big Bang? The entire entropy concept plays an important role in understanding them.
There’s more about entropy at NASA and Physics World too. Here are a couple of sources there:
Here are two episodes at Astronomy Cast that you might want to check out as well:
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