The Most Memorable Space Shuttle Missions

NASA's storied space shuttle program has seen some amazing highs, and a couple devastating lows over the course of its 30-year history. Soon, the world's first reusable spacecraft will retire to make way for NASA's next phase. But for now, here's a look back at the most memorable missions of the space shuttle's tenure.

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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.

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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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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.