NASA Opens New Office for Deep Space Missions

Artist's rendering of the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle on a deep space mission.
CREDIT: NASA 

To embark on its next chapter in human space exploration, NASA has created a new department to oversee manned spaceflight in the post-space-shuttle era.

The department is called the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, and combines two previous organizations, the Space Operations Directorate and the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate.

The reorganization is part of top-to-bottom changes moving through the space agency, which finds itself at a turning point. This year NASA retired its 30-year-old space shuttle program, which was the focus and most visible part of its activities over the last few decades. The agency is now gearing up for an era of human missions to deep space, including trips back to the moon, then on to asteroids and Mars.

President Obama has charged NASA to put astronauts on a space rock by 2025, and on the Red Planet by the mid 2030s. To reach those goals, the United States must develop a new heavy-lift rocket capable of traveling that far, and a capsule to bring people safely there and back again. [Photos: NASA's New Spaceship for Deep Space]

The new Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate will be responsible for overseeing all this and more.

"America is opening a bold new chapter in human space exploration," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. "By combining the resources of Space Operations and Exploration Systems, and creating the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, we are recommitting ourselves to American leadership in space for years to come."

While NASA is targeting human missions farther out into the solar system than ever before, it hopes to pass on the torch of low-Earth orbit travel to the private space industry. The new office will oversee NASA's Commercial Crew Development program, which aims to stimulate the development of private spacecraft to carry people to orbit, as well as the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, which does the same for cargo.

Meanwhile, NASA will continue operating the International Space Station. Until private spaceships are ready, U.S. astronauts will rent rides to the station aboard Russian rockets. The orbiting laboratory is planned to run through at least 2020. This, too, will be supervised from the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate.

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NASA Announces STS-134 Wakeup Song Winners; Face In Space Totals

HOUSTON -- NASA announced the winners of its "Original Song Contest" after six weeks of public voting. The songs will awaken the STS-134 astronauts aboard space shuttle Endeavour during their ongoing mission. 

"Sunrise Number 1" by Jorge Otero and the band Stormy Mondays from Oviedo, Spain, earned first place. Shuttle Commander Mark Kelly, Pilot Greg H. Johnson, Mission Specialists Mike Fincke, Drew Feustel, Greg Chamitoff and Roberto Vittori of the European Space Agency will hear the song at 5:56 p.m. EDT on May 31 - the day before the crew returns to Earth. "Sunrise Number 1" received 787,725 votes, or 49.8 percent of the total ballots. 

"Dreams You Give" by Brian Plunkett from Halfway, Mo., earned second place with 612,959 votes, or 38.8 percent. It will wake the crew at 6:56 p.m. on May 30. 

The Original Song Contest received 1,350 entries for consideration, and NASA selected 10 songs as finalists. The public cast 1,581,531 votes for their favorite song from March 29 through May 16. To listen to the songs and see the all the results, visit: 

https://songcontest.nasa.gov/voteOrigResult.aspx

The winning songs also have videos. To view the video for "Sunrise Number 1," visit: 

To view the video for "Dreams you Give," visit: 

NASA also released the final tally of submissions to the Space Shuttle Program's "Face in Space" campaign for the STS-134 mission. Participants submitted 128,940 photos for uplink to Endeavour via the Mission Control Center at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The images will return to Earth through a data transmission, and contributors will be able to print certificates verifying their photos flew aboard Endeavour. 

More than 7,550 other photos already have been submitted to fly aboard the last shuttle mission targeted to launch July 8. Submissions will be accepted through the liftoff date. To take part in the STS-135 Face in Space campaign, visit:

https://faceinspace.nasa.gov

And by the way, I participate :) so may be I found My name there :D

For more information about the Space Shuttle Program and the STS-134 mission to the International Space Station, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

For more information about the space station, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/station

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Radio Telescopes Capture Best-Ever Snapshot Of Black Hole Jets

WASHINGTON -- An international team, including NASA-funded researchers, using radio telescopes located throughout the Southern Hemisphere has produced the most detailed image of particle jets erupting from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy.

"These jets arise as infalling matter approaches the black hole, but we don't yet know the details of how they form and maintain themselves," said Cornelia Mueller, the study's lead author and a doctoral student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.

The new image shows a region less than 4.2 light-years across -- less than the distance between our sun and the nearest star. Radio-emitting features as small as 15 light-days can be seen, making this the highest-resolution view of galactic jets ever made. The study will appear in the June issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics and is available online.

Mueller and her team targeted Centaurus A (Cen A), a nearby galaxy with a supermassive black hole weighing 55 million times the sun's mass. Also known as NGC 5128, Cen A is located about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Centaurus and is one of the first celestial radio sources identified with a galaxy.

Seen in radio waves, Cen A is one of the biggest and brightest objects in the sky, nearly 20 times the apparent size of a full moon. This is because the visible galaxy lies nestled between a pair of giant radio-emitting lobes, each nearly a million light-years long.

These lobes are filled with matter streaming from particle jets near the galaxy's central black hole. Astronomers estimate that matter near the base of these jets races outward at about one-third the speed of light.

Using an intercontinental array of nine radio telescopes, researchers for the TANAMI (Tracking Active Galactic Nuclei with Austral Milliarcsecond Interferometry) project were able to effectively zoom into the galaxy's innermost realm.

"Advanced computer techniques allow us to combine data from the individual telescopes to yield images with the sharpness of a single giant telescope, one nearly as large as Earth itself," said Roopesh Ojha at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The enormous energy output of galaxies like Cen A comes from gas falling toward a black hole weighing millions of times the sun's mass. Through processes not fully understood, some of this infalling matter is ejected in opposing jets at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. Detailed views of the jet's structure will help astronomers determine how they form.

The jets strongly interact with surrounding gas, at times possibly changing a galaxy's rate of star formation. Jets play an important but poorly understood role in the formation and evolution of galaxies. NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has detected much higher-energy radiation from Cen A's central region.

"This radiation is billions of times more energetic than the radio waves we detect, and exactly where it originates remains a mystery," said Matthias Kadler at the University of Wuerzburg in Germany and a collaborator of Ojha. "With TANAMI, we hope to probe the galaxy's innermost depths to find out."

Ojha is funded through a Fermi investigation on multiwavelength studies of Active Galactic Nuclei.

The astronomers credit continuing improvements in the Australian Long Baseline Array (LBA) with TANAMI's enormously increased image quality and resolution. The project augments the LBA with telescopes in South Africa, Chile and Antarctica to explore the brightest galactic jets in the southern sky.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, along with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the U.S.

The Australia Long Baseline Array is part of the Australia Telescope National Facility, which is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility managed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. 

For more information and images, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/radio-particle-jets.html 

NASA Clears Endeavour for Next-to-Last Shuttle Flight

At NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, space shuttle Endeavour awaits its final liftoff from Launch Pad 39A.
CREDIT: NASA

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA officials have given the space shuttle Endeavour a "go" to launch on its final space voyage Monday (May 16).

The shuttle is now scheduled to lift off from here at Kennedy Space Center (KSC)'s Launch Pad 39A at 8:56 a.m. EDT (1256 GMT). [Photos: Shuttle Endeavour's Final Mission]

We had "unanimous consent from the mission management team to press on with the launch countdown," mission management team chair Mike Moses said during a briefing today (May 14). "We should be in really good shape for launch Monday morning."

Weather forecasters predict a 70 percent chance the weather will cooperate for Endeavour's launch on Monday.

"Overall, it's looking promising for launch, with a 30 percent chance of KSC weather prohibiting launch," shuttle weather officer Kathy Winters said. The main concerns at launch time will be winds at the emergency landing site here at KSC, and the chance of a low cloud ceiling, she said.

This will be the shuttle's second launch try after an earlier attempt was foiled by a failed heater that insulates a critical power unit called an Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) on the shuttle.

Engineers replaced a faulty switch box that had sparked the heater problem, along with wiring to and from the box. [The People Behind Endeavour: Engineers Reflect on NASA's Youngest Shuttle]

Mission managers have "really high confidence" the problem is fixed now, Moses said. "In our minds we are good to go and we have no problems expected with this APU heater anymore in this count."

This will be the last mission for shuttle Endeavour, and the next-to-last flight of NASA's 30-year space shuttle program. Endeavour's goal is to deliver a $2 billion antimatter hunting experiment and a haul of spare supplies for the International Space Station.

Endeavour will spend about 16 days in orbit on a mission that includes four ambitious spacewalks to pack away the spare supplies and upgrade the exterior of the station.

Commander Mark Kelly will lead Endeavour's veteran crew of six astronauts. Kelly's wife, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., is expected to attend the launch in person despite having been shot in the head in January. Giffords is undergoing rehabilitation at a hospital in Houston.

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Photos: NASA's First Space Shuttle Flight: STS-1

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 The First Space ShuttleCredit: NASAThe space shuttle Columbia, NASA's first orbiter, is showered with lights in this nocturnal scene at Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., during preparations for the first flight (STS-1) of NASA's new reusable spacecraft system. This photo was taken in March 1981 ahead of Columbia's April 12, 1981 launch  Source

SPACE MUSIC: SETI ARTIST IN RESIDENCE AND AN ORBITAL FLAUTIST

We have some cool bits of Space Music to roundup this week. First, we've already covered NASA's first and last artist in residence (AIR), but what aboutSETI?

 

The ET-seeking non-profit just signed on multimedia artist Charles Lindsay for a three year stint as its first AIR, during which he'll grow the program and "encourage cross disciplinary artistic expression in order to explore and illuminate the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe."

As you see in the image above, Lindsay's work definitely has a spaced-out look to it. He uses a camera-less, carbon-based emulsion photographic process. His works also creates custom ambient soundscapes to accompany his work -- a process that includes processing samples from NASA's audio archives. Visit his official website to hear some of this.

As shared over at Wired, it was also a good week for live music aboard the International Space Station. In the following video, astronaut Catherine Coleman plays the flute for us in microgravity, continuing a long tradition of live music in orbit. In the past, humans have taken up. everything from synths to didgeridoos. In fact, ten days before Christmas 1965, the astronauts aboard Gemini 6 performed a rendition of the holiday tune "Jingle Bells" using a harmonica and bells. Anyway, here's Coleman (she whips it out around 1:20):

What else is there to listen to this week? Well, Luke Twyman of Neverest Songs recently scored the film "All that Glitters" and you can test drive the tracks right here. I interviewed Twyman in this previous space music post about his excellent SolarBeat space music application. It's good stuff to drift away to.

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Spaceships of the World: 50 Years of Human Spaceflight

Source SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration

Nobel Prize Winner Baruch Blumberg Dies of Apparent Heart Attack

A NASA portrait of Dr. Baruch Blumberg in 1999.

Nobel Prize winner Dr. Baruch "Barry" Blumberg, who served as the first director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at NASA's Ames Research Center, died of an apparent heart attack while attending a conference at Ames on Tuesday, April 5. He was 85.

Blumberg served as the first director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute from 1999 to 2002. He is best known as the winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Medicine for identifying the Hepatitis B virus. Blumberg shared the Nobel Prize with D. Carleton Gajdusek for their work on the origins and spread of infectious viral diseases.

Lynn Harper of NASA's Ames Research Center and Dr. Baruch Blumberg attended the International Space Station (ISS) National Laboratory Workshop in October 2007

Blumberg was a featured speaker and participant at the International Lunar Research Park Exploratory Workshop being held in the NASA Ames Conference Center when he was stricken.

"Barry Blumberg was a great biochemist and researcher," said Ames Center Director Pete Worden. "He was a leading light in the scientific community and a great humanitarian. He also was a loyal and supportive friend to NASA, Ames Research Center and the nation's space program." 

Dr. Baruch Blumberg was introduced as the first director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute during a press conference held at NASA's Ames Research Center in May 1999.

A native of New York, N.Y., Blumberg had been a member of the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia since 1964 and held the rank of University Professor of Medicine and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania since 1977. Since 2005, he had served as president of the American Philosophical Society, the oldest learning society in the United States, dating back to 1743. He had been a member of the society since 1986.

Blumberg first entered the graduate program in mathematics at Columbia University, but soon switched to medicine and enrolled in Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons, graduating with his M.D. in 1951. He remained at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center for the next four years, first as an intern and then as a resident. He began his graduate work at Balliol College, Oxford, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1957.  

"The world has lost a great man," said former NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin, who served as NASA administrator from 1992 to 2001. "Barry saved lives through his research on the Hepatitis B virus. He also inspired a whole generation of people worldwide through his work in building the NASA Astrobiology Institute. On a personal level, he improved my life through his friendship. Our planet is an improved place as a result of Barry's few short days in residence."

For more information about Baruch Blumberg, visit: 

http://lunarscience.arc.nasa.gov/bios/baruch-blumberg

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NASA Braces for Possible Government Shutdown

The U.S. Capitol

NASA is once again bracing for a potential shutdown of the federal government, which could begin this weekend if Republicans and Democrats in Congress can't agree on a budget.

U.S. lawmakers have yet to pass a budget for fiscal year 2011, which began in October. As a result, the government has been operating under a series of stopgap funding measures called continuing resolutions. The latest of these is set to expire at 12:01 a.m. EDT Saturday (April 9).

NASA officials expressed hope that Democrats and Republicans can reach an agreement in time to forestall a government shutdown— but they're not necessarily counting on it.

"Given the realities of the calendar, however, prudent management requires that we plan for an orderly shutdown should Congress be unable to pass a funding bill," NASA chief Charlie Bolden wrote in a recent memo to agency employees that was posted online by the websiteSpaceRef.com today (April 6).

Furloughs could be coming

At this point, Republicans are seeking deeper cuts in federal spending than Democrats are willing to concede. If the two sides can't come together by Friday, the federal government could shut down for the first time since 1995.

Federal activities deemed essential to the nation's safety and economic well-being — such as air-traffic control and food inspection — would continue to receive funding. But many other operations would be suspended, and many federal employees furloughed.

NASA has now begun the process of trying to figure out which of its operations and employees would be affected.

"Our contingency planning for the potential funding lapse includes determining which agency functions are excepted from a furlough," Bolden wrote. "Should it become necessary to implement our contingency plans, you will receive formal notice from your manager no later than Friday, April 8th regarding the designation of your position and furlough status."

"Essential" employees exempt from a furlough would almost certainly include anyone involved with keeping astronauts safe and healthy in space, NASA officials said — not to mention the astronauts themselves.

Keeping astronauts safe

There are two NASA astronauts in space today – Cady Coleman and Ron Garan. They are two of the six spaceflyers making up the International Space Station's Expedition 27 crew.

Coleman and two crewmates are currently living on the station. Garan and two other crewmembers will arrive at the orbiting laboratory tonight. They launched into space Monday aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

"We will take the steps necessary to ensure the safety of our astronauts on the International Space Station and our other missions," said NASA spokeswoman Katherine Trinidad. "Critical personnel will remain in place."

Engineers and technicians actually operating the various NASA spacecraft flying through the solar system could probably stay on as well, experts have predicted. Researchers analyzing spacecraft data, on the other hand, might have to go home for a spell — along with large numbers of support staff, from cafeteria workers to office managers.

NASA's next space shuttle flight — Endeavour's STS-134 mission to the space station — is slated to launch April 29. The space agency is looking into how a government shutdown might complicate preparations for that flight, the shuttle program's second-to-last before it retires later this year.

"NASA is still assessing the potential impact to orbiter processing and the upcoming STS-134 mission," Trinidad told SPACE.com.

It's happened before

This is not the first time a possible government shutdown has loomed. Just last month, for example, lawmakers avoided a potential shutdown by passing another continuing resolution.

And in November 1995, President Clinton and congressional Republicans — led by then House Speaker Newt Gingrich — couldn't come to an agreement in time. A shutdown ensued right in the middle of the space shuttle Atlantis' STS-74 mission to Russia's Mir space station.

NASA employees considered essential to that mission stayed on. But many other workers were furloughed, including NASA's public affairs office.

The 1995 shutdown dragged on for three weeks. While NASA officials hope lawmakers can avert such an incident this time around, they're firming up employees' resolve just in case.

"Your contributions touch people's lives in so many significant ways, and I want you to know how deeply I appreciate your dedication and your expertise," Bolden wrote in the memo. "We're a determined and resilient team and we'll get through this!"

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Russian Spaceship 'Gagarin' Arrives at Space Station

The Soyuz spaceship "Gagarin" approaches the International Space Station for docking on April 6, 2011.
CREDIT: NASA TV

A Russian spaceship bearing the name of history's most famous cosmonaut docked at the International Space Station late Wednesday  (April 6) to deliver three new crewmembers to the orbiting lab.

The Soyuz TMA-21 — nicknamed "Gagarin" after Yuri Gagarin, who became the first person in space on April 12, 1961 — successfully docked with the station's Poisk module at 7:09 p.m. EDT (2309 GMT). The spacecraft had launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 4, blasting off from the same pad used for Gagarin's historic flight nearly 50 years ago.

"Contact and capture — docking confirmed," a NASA official announced as the "Gagarin" sidled up to the orbiting lab.   

The "Gagarin" launched into space Monday (April 4 EDT) carrying  two cosmonauts and one NASA astronaut to join three other crewmembers already aboard the station, rounding out the orbiting lab's Expedition 27.

The three spaceflyers — NASA's Ron Garan and Russians Alexander Samokutyaev and Andrey Borisenko — will also stay on as part of the next station mission, Expedition 28.

"It was a great couple of days and we're ready to get to work," Garan said.

Garan and Samokutyaev will be flight engineers on both expeditions. Borisenko will serve as a flight engineer on Expedition 27 and later serve as the commander of Expedition 28. [Vote Now! The Best Spaceships of All Time]

The crew received a flood of congratulatory calls from Russia's Mission Control center near Moscow after docking at the space station. Russian space official and the families of the astronaut and cosmonauts were on hand to wish the crew well.

"We love you," Garan's wife Carmel told her husband and his crewmates after their arrival on the station. "We'll keep the fires burning at home, and we'll welcome you home with open arms at the end of your successful mission."

The International Space Station seen from the Soyuz "Gagarin," as the spaceship approaches for docking on April 6, 2011.
CREDIT: NASA TV

 

Marking many milestones

All three spaceflyers — and the "Gagarin" — will stay at the space station until September, when they'll come back down to Earth. They'll therefore be aboard the orbiting lab for a series of big spaceflight anniversaries and milestones.

There's the 50th anniversary of Gagarin's flight and the 30th anniversary of the first space shuttle flight. Both of those events occurred on April 12 - Gagarin's mission in 1961 and the shuttle fleet's first launch 20 years later, in 1981. The three new crewmembers will also be aloft for the 50th anniversary of the first American in space — Alan Shepard's flight of May 5, 1961.

They'll also bid farewell to NASA's space shuttle program from the orbiting lab. The space agency isretiring the workhorse vehicles later this year after three decades of service. The last two shuttle flights — Endeavour's STS-134 mission and Atlantis' STS-135 flight — are slated to launch toward the station in April and June, respectively.

The three crewmembers already aboard the station — cosmonaut Dmitry Kondratyev, NASA astronaut Cady Coleman and European spaceflyer Paolo Nespoli — have been there since December. They're scheduled to return to Earth next month.

Gagarin's historic flight

Yuri Gagarin's 1961 flight was a significant victory for the Soviet Union in its escalating space race with the United States. It opened wounds first inflicted by the Soviets' surprise launch of Sputnik 1 — the world's first artificial satellite — in October 1957. [The Top 10 Soviet and Russian Science Missions]

Gagarin launched in a spherical Vostok 1 capsule, orbited Earth once, then landed safely in a Russian field 108 minutes later.

While Gagarin's name will live forever in the history books, the man himself died tragically young. His plane crashed during a military training exercise in 1968, killing the cosmonaut at the age of 34.

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Russia, NASA to hold talks on nuclear-powered spacecraft

Russia, the US and other nations are to discuss cooperation on building a nuclear-powered spacecraft, according to the head of Roscosmos – the Russian space agency.
Anatoly Perminov, Roscosmos chief, tells state-owned newswire RIA Novosti that nuclear spacecraft plans are to be discussed with NASA on April 15. Perminov added that "countries with a high level of reactor manufacturing technology" are to take part in the talks. The report mentions China, France, Germany and Japan: technically the UK can also make reactors but its capability is weak compared to the main nuclear players and its space presence even more so.

Perminov went on to add that Russia intends to complete its design of a "nuclear engine" for use in space by 2012, and that in order to actually build this, funding of 17 billion roubles ($600m) will be required. He envisages this funding coming primarily from Rosatom, the state nuclear agency, rather than Roscosmos. The international discussions suggest that funding or at any rate cooperation will also be sought from overseas.

In previous reports, Perminov has been quoted as saying that the "engine" design now being worked on is of the type known as "megawatt-class nuclear space power systems" (MCNSPS). This refers specifically to use of a nuclear reactor to generate electricity, but other previous remarks regarding a propulsion capability suggest that the Russian engine could also use reactor heat to eject reaction mass, providing thrust as well as electrical power. Reactors normally generate a large surplus of heat energy over and above their electrical output, so the scope is there to do both propulsion and power generation at once: nuclear rockets using reactors to heat reaction mass were tested decades ago. Because they can use reaction mass selected to be good reaction mass – rather than being forced to accept what chemical fuels can produce – they can get much more shove out of a given weight of fuel.
Modern thinking, however, usually favours nuclear-electric propulsion employing ion engines or plasma rockets rather than a nuclear rocket as such. These can't produce anything like as much thrust as thermal nuclear or chemical rockets – they could never lift themselves off the Earth – but they are far more reaction-mass efficient even than nuclear rockets. They could make interplanetary journeys lasting weeks rather than months, and allow spaceships to carry other things than fuel to a much greater extent.
It's widely acknowledged in the space community that propulsion more powerful than chemical rockets and power generation more capable than solar panels will be necessary if travel beyond Earth orbit is to become a serious activity. From the earliest days of spaceflight and before, in fact, it was assumed that nuclear power would provide both – and that space travel, mining, industry and so forth would soon spread through most of the solar system.
In the real world, humanity's deep-seated fear of nuclear power has meant that very few reactors have ever flown in space. The most powerful were the relatively puny Topaz units employed in Soviet radar-ocean-reconnaissance spysats of yesteryear: so, far from being megawatt-class, these could produce just a few kilowatts. Still feebler radioisotope power units have been used in spy satellites and some scientific projects intended to operate far from the Sun: for instance NASA's next Mars rover is intended to be radioisotope-powered in order to give it the ability to move faster than a very slow crawl. (Despite their tremendous longevity, the present solar-powered Martian rovers have yet to travel as far as the much shorter-lived Soviet moon rovers of the 1970s.)
The Russians are showing every sign of being willing to finally break through the barriers of fear and deploy a powerful nuclear spaceship of the sort which might one day move the space operations of humanity beyond Earth orbit: what the Russians are not showing much sign of is having the money to do so.
The necessary $600m isn't a lot of money to NASA: but in fact NASA has plenty of nuclear space engine designs of its own on file if it wanted to build one. It's hard to see the discussions later this month bearing much fruit, much though space enthusiasts might hope for such. ®

SECRET MILITARY SPACE PLANE STRUTS ITS STUFF

The U.S. military’s secret space plane, a robotic demonstrator version of a next-generation space shuttle, has been spotted by astronomers. It flashed. SpaceWeather.com got the story.

From SpaceWeather.com:

The US Air Force's X-37B space plane is circling Earth and, although it is on a classified mission with an officially unpublished orbit, sky watchers have spotted it. "I saw the X-37B from my home in Pasadena, California, around sunrise on March 31st," reports Anthony Cook of the Griffith Observatory. "The spacecraft's appearance was remarkable. When overhead it was a little brighter than a 2nd magnitude star with a slight yellow hue. Then it flared. As the X-37B moved toward the horizon it became silvery and brightened to around magnitude -6, far outshining Venus below it." The flare was presumably caused by sunlight glinting from some flat surface on the shuttle-shaped spacecraft, but no one can say for sure because it is a classified mission.

So, speculate all you like. It's classified.

Source 

Russian Rocket to Launch New Space Station Crew Today

At the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, NASA astronaut Ron Garan (left), Expedition 27 flight engineer; along with Russian cosmonauts Alexander Samokutyaev (center), Soyuz commander; and Andrey Borisenko, flight engineer, pose for pictures outside their Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft during a check of its systems March 22, 2011. 
CREDIT: NASA/Victor Zelentsov

A veteran NASA astronaut and two rookie cosmonauts are poised to begin their journey into space today (April 4) by launching into orbit aboard a Russian spaceship named Gagarin.

The spaceflyers are due to liftoff from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome at 6:18 p.m. EDT (2218 GMT) aboard the Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft, nicknamed the Yuri Gagarin in honor of the 50th anniversary of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's first human spaceflight on April 12, 1961. [Russia Honors First Man in Space With Rocket Launch ]

Flying on the Soyuz Gagarin will be NASA astronaut Ron Garan and cosmonauts Andrey Borisenko and Alexander Samokutyaev, who are beginning a planned six-month mission to the International Space Station. They will join three other crewmembers already living aboard the orbiting laboratory. [Photos: Building the International Space Station]

Here's a brief look at the veteran astronaut and two first-time flyers set to launch aboard the Gagarin today:

The gee whiz factor

Ron Garan, a native of Yonkers, N.Y., will be making his second trip to space after riding the space shuttle Discoveryon the STS-124 mission in 2008. He will join the station crew as an Expedition 27 and Expedition 28 flight engineer.

Garan's mission is expected to overlap with the final flight of the space shuttle Endeavour, which is set to launch on the STS-134 mission April 19. After that, NASA has only one more shuttle mission planned before the three-orbiter fleet is retired.

"It's going to be a sad day when it's retired," Garan, 49, told SPACE.com. "I think it's going to be many generations before we have the capability that the space shuttle provides us right now. It's an amazing vehicle."

Garan is a retired colonel in the U.S. Air Force. He was selected as an astronaut in July 2000.

Garan has dreamed about becoming an astronaut since watching the first moon landing on a black and white TV at a family party when he was a child, he said. He's still amazed at his luck in landing the job.

"The gee whiz factor, it's never worn off," he said.

He and his wife Carmel have three sons: two 20-year-old twins and a 16-year-old.

"For them this is really all they’ve ever known, to them this is just what I do for a living," Garan said.

First-time commander

Andrey Borisenko, who was selected as a cosmonaut in May 2003, will be making his first trip to space when the Gagarin lifts off today.

"I greatly look forward to the flight itself," Borisenko, 35, told SPACE.com. "I think every minute of our flight will bring something new and something amazing. From what I have heard from other crewmembers, it is quite possible that the six-month increment will fly by as one minute."

He is due to serve as an Expedition 27 flight engineer, and then transition to the role of commander of Expedition 28 in May. 

Borisenko and his wife Zoya have a son, Ivan. The proud father said it is unlikely his son would ever choose to become a cosmonaut, but he'd be pleased if he did.

"My stories of spaceflight have not been very exciting for him and I'm worried that he watches too much television and is not interested in what we are doing in space," he said. "He has seen Star Wars by George Lucas so the actual cosmonaut life does not seem very exciting to him."

In Gagarin's shadow

The third member of the Soyuz Gagarin flight, Alexander Samokutyaev, will also be making his rookie trip to orbit and will command the Soyuz trip to the International Space Station.

Samokutyaev, 41, said it was a special honor to be flying aboard Gagarin, because he was particularly inspired by Gagarin's groundbreaking Vostok 1 mission as a child.

"I was born 10 years after flight of Yuri Gagarin," Samokutyaev said."All I know is based on what I heard. Quite often thousands of people would gather on the streets to listen to the radio. Everyone back then wanted to become cosmonauts."

He and the other space station crewmembers will spend most of their time running the station and conducting scientific research.

"Personally for me, I'm most interested in Earth monitoring experiments where you monitor Earth's surface and try to predict natural disasters," Samokutyaev said.

Samokutyaev, a lieutenant-colonel in the Russian Air Force,was selected as a cosmonaut candidate in 2003. He and his wife Oksana have a 16-year-old daughter, Anastasia.

He said his family's experience throughout his busy training schedule for the mission would help them get through the long months with only the phone and e-mail to communicate.

"My wife and daughter were always with me wherever I would go," Samokutyaev said. "They have been supporting me here throughout my training in Houston. At this point I think they're so much used to all of this."

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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:

http://www.nas.nasa.gov

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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."

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