Space Exploration [Archive] - Wired New York Forum

NYatKNIGHT

January 8th, 2004, 03:30 PM

Yes, the distances are mind boggling.
I like that website, though I think I've found conflicting data:

Size:
Titan is Saturn's largest satellite. At more than 5,150 kilometers in diameter, this moon is about the size of Mars and Mercury combined.

I think it should say Titan's size is midway between Mars and Mercury, (as if you combined the two).

http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/datamax.html

Distance Radius Mass
Name Orbits (000 km) (km) (kg)
--------- ------- -------- ------- -------
Sun 697000 1.99e30
Jupiter Sun 778000 71492 1.90e27
Saturn Sun 1429000 60268 5.69e26
Uranus Sun 2870990 25559 8.69e25 *
Neptune Sun 4504300 24764 1.02e26 *
Earth Sun 149600 6378 5.98e24
Venus Sun 108200 6052 4.87e24
Mars Sun 227940 3398 6.42e23
Ganymede Jupiter 1070 2631 1.48e23 +
Titan Saturn 1222 2575 1.35e23 +
Mercury Sun 57910 2439 3.30e23 +
Callisto Jupiter 1883 2400 1.08e23
Io Jupiter 422 1815 8.93e22
Moon Earth 384 1738 7.35e22
Europa Jupiter 671 1569 4.80e22
Triton Neptune 355 1353 2.14e22
Pluto Sun 5913520 1160 1.32e22

*Note: Neptune is slightly denser than Uranus.
+Note: Mercury is much denser than Ganymede and Titan.

This composite shows Earth and the remaining 11 large solar system objects at a scale of 100 km/pixel.

http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/gif/SmallWorlds.gif

Titan is the orange ball down and to the right of Earth.
That blue image of Venus, next to Earth, is false color.
This is what it looks like:
http://www.planetary.org/learn/solarsystem/images/venus-0001.jpg

And according to this website:

The Best Prospects for Life
Name Why
--------- -------
Earth
Mars most Earth-like; more so in the past; ALH84001
Europa may have liquid water
Enceladus may have liquid water
Titan complex chemistry and liquids likely
Io complex chemistry, warmer than most
Jupiter long shot: warm, plenty of organic material

"all of this remains very speculative. None of these prospects are really very good. Good arguments can be made why life (at least life as we know it) cannot exist on any of these bodies."

TLOZ Link5

January 8th, 2004, 04:19 PM

Jupiter is a gas giant, though. You can't exactly land on it, though an orbital space station of some sort would work.

Gulcrapek

January 8th, 2004, 04:43 PM

*thinks of Jupiter Station from ST: TNG and VOY*

Ninjahedge

January 8th, 2004, 04:56 PM

Read the Red, Blue and Green mars books from Kim Stanley Robertson.

VERY good trilogy there. Deals more with politics and HR than science, but makes the science BELIEVABLE.

Kris

January 9th, 2004, 01:00 AM

January 9, 2004

Bush to Announce Ventures to Mars and the Moon, Officials Say

By MATTHEW L. WALD and DAVID E. SANGER

President Bush will make a speech next week outlining a major space initiative, the White House said last night.

Administration officials said they expected that Mr. Bush would propose a research and development program with the aim of establishing a base on the moon, as a prelude to a longer-term goal of sending humans to Mars.

Aboard Air Force One en route to Washington, the president's press secretary, Scott McClellan, told reporters, "The president directed his administration to do a comprehensive review of our space policy, including our priorities and the future of the program, and the president will have more to say on it next week."

But another administration official cautioned that the proposal could be broad and open-ended, more in the nature of "a mission statement" rather than a detailed road map and schedule.

Still, the announcement, combined with Mr. Bush's call this week to revamp laws regarding immigration, would signal the second major policy initiative put forward by the White House at the beginning of an election year. Both new policy directives would allow the president to be portrayed as an inspirational leader whose vision goes beyond terrorism and tax cuts.

They also would have the added political benefit of diverting attention from the Democratic presidential candidates trudging through the retail politics of the Iowa caucuses.

NASA officials have said publicly since late summer that a group of senior policy advisers, convened by the White House, was meeting to establish new goals for the agency. The report on the Feb. 1 breakup of the space shuttle Columbia, which killed seven astronauts, said one of NASA's problems was the lack of a long-term, inspiring goal and called for a public debate on the issue. But that debate has largely waited for the White House, which has been distracted by the war in Iraq.

The report was released in late August, and in the months since, several news reports have appeared asserting that the White House was preparing to announce a return to the moon as a steppingstone to Mars. Some of these suggested that the announcement would come when the president attended a commemoration of the centennial of powered flight, in Kitty Hawk, N.C., on Dec. 17, but the president made no policy statement there.

In exhorting the country to undertake an ambitious space program, Mr. Bush would follow the example of at least two presidents. In 1961, John F. Kennedy challenged the nation to send a man to the moon by the end of the decade. And in 1989, Mr. Bush's father, George Bush, proposed establishing a base on the Moon, sending an expedition to Mars and beginning "the permanent settlement of space."

But while President Kennedy's challenge resulted in an eight-year sprint to the moon, the elder President Bush's proposal went nowhere. By the time the Columbia space shuttle disintegrated in February, NASA had made no significant progress on how it would return to the moon, much less laying the groundwork for the far more complex question of developing a space ship with sufficient propulsion and speed to take people to Mars.

The NASA administrator, Sean O'Keefe, has spoken publicly in some detail about the problems of a manned landing on Mars, saying the nation would have to develop new methods of propulsion and electricity generation in space and a way to protect the astronauts from large radiation doses.

The problems are related; the radiation dose is proportional to the length of the round trip, which depends in part on propulsion, and the propulsion could be driven by electricity.

The questions Mr. O'Keefe raised are integral to another nagging problem: what should replace the shuttle? There are three surviving shuttles, but the program has been operating for 20 years, and the design is even older. NASA has begun preliminary design work on a new system to carry astronauts to low earth orbit, to reach the International Space Station and presumably achieve other goals as well, but its purpose is not yet clear.

The issue is urgent because any replacement would probably be a decade away, by which time the shuttles, if they are still flying, would be about 30 years old, experts say.

The administration, however, is facing competing priorities, experts say. One question, as noted by the chairman of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in August, is how much the nation can commit to spending, at a time of record budget deficits.

"This stuff is not cheap," said the chairman, Harold W. Gehman Jr., a retired admiral.

John Logsdon, the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, who was a member of Admiral Gehman's investigative board, said yesterday evening that the report had "led the administration to say we need to articulate a vision for the program and give a sense of where we're going and why."

Aides on Capitol Hill said they were uncertain about precisely what mission the president would call for, although many analysts have argued that a simple return to the moon, which astronauts first visited almost 35 years ago, would not be enough.

One expert on NASA management, Harold E. McCurdy of American University, said that if, in fact, the plan was to go to the moon, the overall goal would be broader.

"The ultimate purpose of going back to the moon is not to go the moon," Mr. McCurdy said. "It's to go to Mars and explore the inner solar system. It's like climbing Mount Rainier in preparation for an ascent of Mount Everest."

But several space experts said yesterday evening that the announcement might be in the nature of a long-term goal and research program. This would avoid any huge expenditure in the near term, unlike, for example, the drive in the 1960's to reach the moon the first time.

If the announcement comes next week, it will probably occur as NASA's new Mars lander continues to send back stunning photos and other information.

Congressional aides also said they expected the announcement to detail a reorganization of the nation's space effort, to bring the military and civilian sides closer together to make better use of limited resources.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Kris

January 9th, 2004, 11:17 PM

January 10, 2004

For Space Glory, Reach for the Stars, Experts Say

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Disasters big and small have struck the federal space establishment with alarming regularity of late: satellites have failed, space shuttles have blown up, astronauts have died.

NASA has captivated the public this week with dazzling pictures from the rover it just landed on Mars. But closer to Earth, at the International Space Station, air is slowly leaking and no one knows why. The Pentagon, after spending billions, is having trouble making a booster rocket for the antimissile system it is trying to build. A new generation of spy satellites is behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. Landsat 7, a federal satellite that observes the Earth, is sending back fuzzy pictures and acting like a malfunctioning video camera.

All of these troubles raise the question of whether the nation has the technical muscle to achieve President Bush's vision of setting up a human base on the moon and sending Americans to Mars, a plan he is expected to announce next week.

"NASA has gotten obese and encumbered," said Rick N. Tumlinson, a founder of the Space Frontier Foundation, a private group in Nyack, N.Y., that advocates bold exploration. "It's like a former Olympic athlete eating potato chips and drinking beer while watching reruns of past glories."

The consensus of experts is that NASA and the nation's wider space community are damaged in vital areas and now clearly unable to do anything ambitious.

But the space program could soar again, they said, even with modest funding increases — if it is revitalized by bold leadership and tough political calls, like finding a graceful way to end the shuttle program, which has already outlasted its intended life span and is a huge drain on NASA's resources.

If done right, they said, the initiative could end the string of failures and replace them with new achievements.

"This is a way of fixing a lot of that by providing a focus that will draw good people back into the space program," Dr. John M. Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said. "The current problems are a result of a lack of focus."

Any return to the moon, let alone a much more ambitious and dangerous foray to Mars, would require new generations of advanced rockets, engines, air and food supplies, communications gear and shields to protect humans from blasts of solar radiation.

But Jerry Grey, policy director of the American Institute of Astronautics and Aeronautics, a professional group of aerospace engineers based in Washington, said the technical woes were not insurmountable or uniform. He noted that the Spirit robot that recently landed on Mars was apparently working flawlessly as it readied to explore the planet.

"The technical establishment is not fine," he said. "There are a lot of things wrong with it. But it's not about to fall apart. And an initiative like what President Bush appears to be ready to announce would open up a lot of opportunities."

Mr. Tumlinson of the Space Frontier Foundation said no big budget increases would be needed for President Bush's plan but that NASA would have to be completely restructured, with unneeded centers shut down and new divisions set up to mobilize new talent.

"We're at our best when we're given our biggest challenges," he said. "When the challenges are mediocre, when they don't call on us to reach beyond ourselves, we have a tendency to perform in a mediocre fashion."

Such work, Mr. Tumlinson added, now characterized the space shuttles, which are grounded, and the space station, which is down to two crew members from three and leaking air. "We have to call on NASA to do something beyond itself," he said.

Experts who have consulted in the decision-making process said Mr. Bush's plan may call for retiring the shuttles and ending station work sometime early next decade as the nation begins a new round of moon landings.

But the political handiwork needed just to end the shuttle program would be significant, requiring major assaults on entrenched interests: When up and running, the spaceport in Florida employs some 14,000 people and each year pumps $1.4 billion into the state's economy.

Analysts said the current slump began after the cold war when the federal government cut back on its enormous investments in space technology. At the same time, scientific research in the nation's private sector took off, drawing into computers and medicine many of the best students who otherwise might have gone to NASA or the space programs of other federal agencies, including the Defense Department.

This loss of talent was one of the factors behind the Columbia space shuttle disaster last year, which killed seven astronauts, according to the panel that investigated the accident. It singled out a "broken safety culture" at NASA that played down potential problems and was too influenced by the need to meet flight schedules. It found that decision making was flawed, safety procedures incomplete and communications poor.

Similar problems have been identified in the military's space programs. Last May in a thick report, a high-level advisory panel to the Pentagon, the Defense Science Board, said those efforts were suffering from major cost increases and schedule delays, with "a devastating effect on program success."

It said the problems grew out of bureaucratic failings in which estimates had grown unrealistic and undisciplined, and that good managers were so scarce that the government's abilities to lead and manage acquisition programs "have seriously eroded."

Despite wide atrophy and decay, many experts said that bold leadership could revitalize the nation's space establishment.

Dr. Bruce C. Murray, the former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who is now at the California Institute of Technology, said the plan that Mr. Bush is expected to announce could work if clear and properly structured.

An important part of the initiative, he said, should be for the human spaceflight program to shed its historic aversion to computers and robotic technology and to integrate them into the heart of the new work, cutting costs and empowering bold technologies for opening new frontiers.

"On earth, humans and computers are developing an enormous symbiosis," Dr. Murray noted. "But none of that is happening on the human side of spaceflight. The future belongs to that symbiosis. And we of all nations have the maximum capability to take advantage of this evolving symbiosis, and we of all nations have not."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

ZippyTheChimp

January 12th, 2004, 08:16 AM

Bush to Announce Ventures to Mars and the Moon, Officials Say
Expanding the search for WMD.

ZippyTheChimp

January 15th, 2004, 08:20 AM

Cars on Mars! (http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/spirit_rolling_040115.html)

NASA (http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/m2k4/index1.html)

ZippyTheChimp

January 17th, 2004, 09:42 AM

Closer to home...

January 17, 2004

NASA Cancels Trip to Supply Hubble, Sealing Early Doom

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Savor those cosmic postcards while you can. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration decreed an early death yesterday to one of its flagship missions and most celebrated successes, the Hubble Space Telescope.

In a midday meeting at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., two days after President Bush ordered NASA to redirect its resources toward human exploration of the Moon and Mars, the agency's administrator, Sean O'Keefe, told the managers of the space telescope that there would be no more shuttle visits to maintain it.

A visit by astronauts to install a couple of the telescope's scientific instruments and replace the gyroscopes and batteries had been planned for next year. Without any more visits, the telescope, the crown jewel of astronomy for 10 years, will probably die in orbit sometime in 2007, depending on when its batteries or gyroscopes fail for good.

"It could die tomorrow, it could last to 2011," said Dr. Steven Beckwith, director of the Space Telescope Institute on the Johns Hopkins University campus in Baltimore. Dr. Beckwith said he and his colleagues were devastated.

At a news conference last night, Dr. John M. Grunsfeld, the agency's chief scientist and an astronaut who has been to the Hubble two times, called the the telescope the "best marriage of human spaceflight and science."

"It is a sad day that we have to announce this," Dr. Grunsfeld added.

As the news flashed around the world by e-mail, other astronomers joined the Hubble team in their shock. Dr. David N. Spergel, an astronomer at Princeton and a member of a committee that advises NASA on space science, called it a "double whammy" for astronomy. Not only was a telescope being lost, but $200 million worth of instruments that had been built to be added in the later shuttle mission will also be left on the ground, Dr. Spergel said.

Dr. Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz who is also on the advisory committee, said, "I think this is a mistake," noting that the Hubble was still doing work at the forefront of science.

Dr. Tod Lauer, of the National Optical Astronomy Observatories in Tucson, said, "This is a pretty nasty turn of events, coming immediately on the heels of `W's' endorsement of space exploration."

The demise of the Hubble will leave astronomers with no foreseeable prospect of a telescope in space operating primarily at visible wavelengths. The announcement also precludes hopes that astronomers had of using the Hubble in tandem with the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launching in 2011 and which is being designed for infrared wavelengths, to study galaxies at the far reaches of time.

Ground-based telescopes like the 10-meter-diameter Kecks on Mauna Kea are growing more powerful, and the use of adaptive optics to tune out the blurring effects of the atmosphere lets them approach the resolution of the Hubble in limited cases. But they are blinded by the atmosphere to ultraviolet and infrared light.

Floating above the murky atmosphere of Earth, the Hubble, launched in 1990, has had the ability to see into the depths of space and time with unprecedented clarity, glimpsing galaxies that were under construction when the universe was half its present age and helping cosmologists chart how the mysterious "dark energy" has gradually taken over the expansion of the universe.

Periodic service calls by shuttle astronauts repaired a series of early problems and have continually refurbished the telescope and kept it at the fore of cosmic research. The mission next year would have left the telescope in good shape to continue working through the end of the decade, when NASA plans to bring it down. But the service missions are expensive, more than $500 million each.

More important, NASA officials say, after the Columbia catastrophe a year ago, the missions are also considered dangerous. The shuttles do not carry enough fuel to reach the space station in case of trouble.

In its report on the shuttle disaster last summer, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board recommended that there be a way to inspect and repair the shuttle's heat shields, which were damaged after the Columbia lifted off. That is easily conducted if the craft is at the space station, but not at the Hubble.

In his remarks to the astronomers on Friday, according to those present, Mr. O'Keefe referred to that recommendation and said it would be too difficult to develop that ability for a single trip to the telescope.

Given enough time, NASA might have developed the tools to do it, Dr. Grunsfeld said, but the decision to retire the shuttles in 2010 foreclosed that possibility.

"Cost was not an issue," he said.

Many astronomers, however, noting that the decision came on the heels of Mr. Bush's directive to NASA to reallocate $11 billion of its resources over the next five years into returning people to the Moon, said money was doubtless also a consideration.

Presenting the decision as a safety-related issue, the astronomers said, lessened the odds that it would be challenged, by, say NASA's Congressional overseers.

NASA is not completely off the hook as far as the Hubble is concerned. The agency is committed to bringing it back to Earth safely after its useful life ends. Until the Columbia accident, NASA had planned to retrieve the telescope with a shuttle and put it in the Smithsonian. Now the plan is to build a robotic rocket that would go up, attach itself to the telescope and fire its engine to brake Hubble out of orbit and drop it in the ocean.

Paradoxically, Dr. Spergel said, the cost of developing such a rocket, estimated at $300 million or more, would come out of the NASA astronomy budget. It is, he said, another double whammy.

One mission gets canceled, he said, and "what's our next mission, deorbit the telescope?"

For now, of course, the Hubble lives. Dr. Beckwith said: "We at the institute are devastated by the potential loss of Hubble. But we will do our absolute best to make the final years of its life the most glorious science you've ever seen."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

ZippyTheChimp

January 19th, 2004, 09:13 AM

Getting to Mars (http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101040126/pop/)

NYatKNIGHT

January 19th, 2004, 11:59 AM

Every time they service the Hubble Telescope they update it with the latest technology and always get MUCH better results - Hubble's greatest achievements were to come from its final years. Too bad.

NYatKNIGHT

January 22nd, 2004, 02:52 PM

NASA unable to communicate with Mars rover

CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/01/22/spirit.contact/index.html)

Mars Rover Stops Sending Intelligible Data Back to Earth

New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/international/22CND-MARS.html?hp)

:!: :!: :!:

NYatKNIGHT

January 23rd, 2004, 11:53 AM

Mars Rover sending limited data again (http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/01/23/spirit.contact/index.html)

NASA (http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/20040123b.html)

Second Rover, Opportunity, scheduled to land on Martian equator this weekend (http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/22jan_meridianiplanum.htm)

ZippyTheChimp

January 24th, 2004, 10:42 AM

January 24, 2004

Mars Rover Communicates Again, but From Sickbed

By KENNETH CHANG

PASADENA, Calif., Jan. 23 — The Mars rover Spirit called home on Friday morning, re-establishing contact after two days of garbled transmissions. But mission controllers said that they were still confused by its brief messages and inconsistent behavior and that it would be some time before the problem could be diagnosed and repaired, if ever.

"I think many days, perhaps a couple of weeks, even under the best of circumstances," Peter Theisinger, project manager for the mission, said at a news conference at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory here.

But Mr. Theisinger added that it was too soon to give up hope, saying, "We've got a long way to go here with the patient in intensive care."

Talking with journalists later, Edward J. Weiler, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's associate administrator for space science, compared the problem to a jigsaw puzzle. "We're starting to get some of the perimeter pieces," Mr. Weiler said.

The troubles with the rover are likely to lead mission controllers to take extra caution in deploying Opportunity, a robotic twin of the Spirit. That rover is to land on the opposite side of Mars at 12:05 a.m. on Sunday, Eastern Standard Time, in the second half of the $820 million mission.

With the limited data they received from the Spirit on Friday, mission controllers have determined that its power systems are working properly, and that it can hear and respond to commands from Earth. This will enable them to begin question-and-answer sessions with the rover to determine what ails it.

The rover's software has been crashing repeatedly, and the Spirit is unable to use its main antenna. It has also not shut itself down at night, draining batteries.

"I expect this to go on in this mode for several days," Mr. Theisinger said, "talking to the spacecraft, gathering more data, whittling down theories, testing those theories against spacecraft observables and continuing that process."

In the last two days, the computer on the Spirit has rebooted itself more than 60 times, but each time the problem recurs. "For you at home, this is just like resetting your computer," Mr. Theisinger said. "We should boot up fine."

That leads him to suspect that something on the rover has broken, he said, and that the hardware failure is confusing the software.

"It is still critical," he went on. "We are still critical. We do not know to what extent we can restore functionality to the system, because we don't know what the problem is."

At the least, the diagnosis sessions are likely to cut deeply into the amount of exploration the rover will be able to do. Its mission, to examine the geology of what might be an ancient lake bed, was to last three months, and three weeks have already passed. Extending the mission may be troublesome, because dust collecting on the solar panels will reduce the power they can generate.

Controllers spent the first two weeks after the rover's landing on Jan. 3 checking out its systems. Last Saturday, it finally rolled off its platform and moved 10 feet on its first expedition, to examine a rock that scientists have named Adirondack.

The rover, which had been working almost flawlessly, began malfunctioning on Wednesday as it started its work on Adirondack. Controllers radioed a series of commands for the rover to pivot a mirror in an instrument to test its performance. "That sequence did not run to completion," Mr. Theisinger said.

The instrument's motor is one area controllers are looking at, as well as the rover's most powerful antenna, which has not sent any data since the problems began.

Brief beeps via a smaller antenna were received by the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor on Wednesday night, but the message contained only a random series of meaningless 1's and 0's. Another beeping signal was received Thursday morning, but it also held no information.

Early Friday morning, mission controllers tried to hail the rover. It did not respond.

"As we were preparing to send a second beep," Mr. Theisinger said, "the spacecraft talked to us."

The message, dispatched at a glacial 10 bits per second, was heard about 7:34 a.m. Eastern Standard Time by NASA's Deep Space Network antennas near Madrid, and lasted 10 minutes. About an hour later, the flight controllers successfully communicated with the spacecraft for 20 minutes at 120 bits per second. The rover's most powerful antenna, when working, sends data at 11,000 bits per second.

A further problem, perhaps unrelated, is that the rover has not been shutting itself down at night as it should. The rover could exhaust its batteries overnight.

Even with dead batteries, the rover can still revive itself each morning with energy from its solar panels, and recharge the batteries. But if the condition persists, it could limit the rover's activities if it is resuscitated. On Friday afternoon, when the Spirit should have been sleeping, it sent a large burst of data, mostly gibberish, to the Mars Odyssey as it passed overhead.

The rover Opportunity will make its plunge through Mars atmosphere about midnight on Saturday, aiming for a spot on the other side of Mars from the Spirit. Like its twin, the Opportunity will be slowed first by a parachute, then retrorockets. Finally, at a height of about 30 feet, it will be dropped, and the rover, encased in a cocoon of air bags, will bounce and roll for perhaps half a mile before coming to a stop.

At the news conference on Friday, Wayne Lee, chief engineer for entry, descent and landing for the rovers, said the Spirit's landing worked mostly as expected, although the craft was buffeted by a large gust of wind just before landing. The retrorockets were able to compensate, Mr. Lee said, slowing the speed of the rover's first bounce to 25 miles per hour from 50 m.p.h. The air bags are designed to cushion impacts up to 60 m.p.h.

The unrolling of the tether connecting the retrorockets and the rover, encased in air bags, also took longer than expected, so controllers have modified the Opportunity's landing sequence to deploy the parachute at a higher altitude.

The Opportunity's target is a region known as Meridiani Planum, which contains a deposit of iron oxide the size of Oklahoma. The iron oxide, known as hematite, interests scientists, because on Earth, it usually forms in the presence of water.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Meanwhile, the NASA satellite Global Surveyor, in orbit around Mars since 1997, has photographed the landing site of Spirit. It will now begin looking for Beagle 2, the British lander which has not been heard from since it landed last month.

Just like their cars. :P

ZippyTheChimp

March 3rd, 2004, 06:07 AM

March 3, 2004

Mars Could Once Support Life, Scientists Now Say, but Did It?

By KENNETH CHANG

Water is the elixir of life, and scientists reported almost certain evidence yesterday that the tiny crater that holds the Mars rover Opportunity was once soaked by it.

The finding greatly increases the likelihood that Mars was a much more hospitable planet early in its history, possibly even amenable to the rise of life.

The scientists do not know what kind of wet environment existed at the Opportunity landing site: perhaps groundwater percolating up through volcanic ash, perhaps a lake, perhaps something else.

Nevertheless, "we believe at this place on Mars for some period in time, it was a habitable environment," said Dr. Steven W. Squyres, an astronomy professor at Cornell and the mission's principal investigator.

"This is the kind of place that would have been suitable for life," Dr. Squyres went on, but quickly added: "Now that doesn't mean life was there. We don't know that."

Dr. Squyres, at a news conference in Washington yesterday to announce the findings, said he could not say when the area had been wet or how long it remained that way, except that the period was not recent.

Dr. Edward J. Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for space science, said: "Our ultimate quest at Mars is to answer the age-old question, `Was there life, is there life on Mars?' Today's results are a giant leap toward achieving that long-term goal."

Dr. Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, a space advocacy group, agreed. "If liquid water still exists underground, and there is ample evidence from more than this mission that it does," said Dr. Zubrin, who is not part of the mission, "then astronauts could reach it and then culture it to see if there is any Mars life there. Then we could see if it follows the pattern of life as we know it on Earth."

When people do go to Mars, he said, existing water would make greenhouse agriculture possible to sustain a base and also provide raw materials for fuel.

The surface of Mars is now cold and arid, and ice still exists at its poles. But persistent speculation, based on huge canyons and channels carved in parts of the surface, is that the atmosphere was once thick and warm enough to allow liquid water to exist on the surface. Another possibility is that Mars has always been cold, and liquid existed only for brief episodes following volcanic eruptions or meteor impacts.

The mission of the two rovers that NASA landed on Mars in January is to search for signs of past water. At least in a small crater on the flat plains of Meridiani Planum, the landing site of the Opportunity, scientists have succeeded.

Since its arrival on Jan. 25, the Opportunity has spotted hints of past water — fine layers in bedrock that might be sedimentary rock deposited at the bottom of a lake or sea and an iron mineral that usually forms in the presence of water. In both cases, however, there are plausible alternative explanations: the layers could be volcanic ash or sediments carried by wind, or the iron could have formed directly from lava.

But close examination of the bedrock, exposed along the rim of the crater that the Opportunity has been scooting around in, provided four lines of evidence.

The most compelling is large quantities of jarosite, a mineral that contains iron, sulfur and trapped water. "This is a mineral that you've got to have water around to make it," Dr. Squyres said.

Instruments also measured high levels of sulfur in the rocks, probably in the form of sulfur salts.

"The only way you can form such large concentrations of salt on Earth normally is to dissolve it in water and have the water evaporate," said Dr. Benton C. Clark III, chief scientist of space exploration at Lockheed Martin Space Systems and a member of the science team.

Photographs also show holes in the rocks roughly the shape and size of pennies. The scientists believe these are where minerals carried by water formed crystals that subsequently dissolved or fell out.

The final evidence is the curious round pebbles, nicknamed blueberries, that are scattered around the surface and are also embedded in the bedrock. The blueberries, the scientists said, are objects known as concretions that form within sedimentary rocks.

Dr. John P. Grotzinger, professor of earth sciences at M.I.T., said other explanations were ruled out because the pebbles did not displace the layers around them, indicating that they formed within the rock, and they were evenly distributed throughout the rock. Had the pebbles been, for instance, glass beads formed from molten rock from a volcanic eruption of a meteor impact, the pebbles would have pressed down the layers where they struck and be found only in certain layers, he said.

The discoveries make Meridiani Planum a promising candidate for a future robotic mission, probably a decade away, that would bring pieces of Mars back to Earth for closer examination.

Dr. Christopher Chyba, an astrobiologist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who is not involved in the mission, said it was exciting to have solid evidence that water in liquid form once flowed on Mars.

"People have been talking about wet Mars for a long time," Dr. Chyba said. "There's nothing like actually having data. It's one thing to talk about it based on models and photographs. It's another thing to be on the surface and have evidence on the surface that Mars was wet. That's an exciting step."

Next, the Opportunity will cozy up to a section of the bedrock nicknamed Big Bend where scientists may find evidence that the rocks not only sat in water but also formed in water. Low-resolution photographs already show ripples and angled layers that might indicate sediment that was pushed around by flowing water.

"We don't have an answer to that one yet," Dr. Squyres said. "We may have something for you in another week to two weeks."

Warren E. Leary contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Kris

March 13th, 2004, 05:48 AM

March 13, 2004

ESSAY

A Red Planet Forever in the Orbit of Science and Dreams

By KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/03/13/arts/mars.xlarge.jpg
Mars and science fiction: a feedback loop has made both famous.

Mars and science fiction came of age together in the 1890's, and ever since they have had a tight relationship, a feedback loop that has made both famous.

It began with the American astronomer Percival Lowell, who built a technically advanced telescope and through it saw straight lines on the surface of the red planet. He explained that these had to be the canals of an alien race whose planet was drying out, forcing them to convey water from the polar caps, also visible.

Of course Lowell's elaborately postulated Martian culture was a kind of self-hypnosis, in effect a science-fiction novel already. But his speculative leap from limited evidence was not that different in method from the archaeology of Schliemann at Troy, or Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos. And so his Mars was widely accepted as a possibility based on real data.

The news galvanized the world. Other writers immediately recognized that if there really were a civilization on Mars, it could be anything; Lowell's version was only one guess. Quickly other Martian fictions appeared in all the leading industrial nations, and many had a major impact. In Germany Kurd Lasswitz's "Two Planets" (1897) sold several hundred thousand copies, and clubs formed to discuss it. Lasswitz described a Martian technological utopia, enjoying great domestic comfort through advances in food production, transport, urban planning and space travel. Young men like Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley were greatly impressed, so much so that they later became rocket scientists. It could even be said that it was Lowell's imagination that got us to the moon by 1969.

In Russia the book was "Red Star," by Aleksandr Bogdanov. Here the utopia is political, though also technically advanced. Mars's socialist civilization has been living in peace for five centuries, but when it sends emissaries to Earth, terrible problems arise. Can social progress be imposed on a less developed culture?

This very impressive novel, written in 1908, considers this and other questions while offhandedly predicting much of 20th-century history. It, too, inspired clubs, debates, professional and amateur sequels, and a generation of young scientists, including engineers in the Soviet space program.

A decade earlier in England, H. G. Wells considered what might happen if this advanced Martian civilization decided to come here and take our water, which would be as valuable to Martians as oil is to us. Wells intended "War of the Worlds" to remind British readers of the recent massacre of the Tasmanian aborigines — while putting them at the wrong end of the gun.

In the United States, on the other hand, the pulp-action adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter series abjured any heavy political message, except perhaps the idea that it would be fun to live in a fantasy Wild West forever, especially if you could leap much higher than the bad guys.

Thus from the turn of the 20th century through the 1920's, many scientifically literate people considered a Martian civilization quite possible, and fiction speculating about it was widespread and influential. By the end of the 1930's, however, the scientists were shaking their heads. Radio telescopes were revealing that the Martian atmosphere was extremely thin, and had neither oxygen nor water. Not only was civilization unlikely, but life itself looked as if it would have a hard time as well. And then Orson Welles's radio dramatization of "War of the Worlds" scared people and was declared a hoax, and this somehow debunked the whole idea.

What came after could be called Mars's dry era. Writers still wrote about the planet, and they still included aliens, but they were reduced by the new theory to postulating creatures like sentient tumbleweed or telepathic lichen beds. Arthur C. Clarke's "Sands of Mars" is a good example of this, and Philip K. Dick's "Martian Time-Slip" uses the desiccated Mars as another version of the 20th century's spiritual wasteland.

A different response to the dry Mars scenario appeared in Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles." Bradbury grasped that although Lowell had been wrong, and that whole world had been lost, the stories it had generated would endure, so that whenever humans arrived on Mars, a ghost culture would already be there, ready to haunt them. This is a story that will always be true.

The Mariner and Viking missions in the 1960's and 70's gave us the actual place, all at once, fully photographed and mapped: its spectacular, gigantic landscape features were astonishing, like a dream of Monument Valley. There were clear signs of water, yet the landers indicated that the planet was entirely lifeless. Empty but real — what an opportunity.

These very findings were also part of what stimulated planetary scientists like Carl Sagan to begin discussing terraforming: altering a planet until it could support an Earthlike biosphere. As these first terraforming theorists pointed out, Mars would be the perfect candidate for the process. We could start a new Earth.

A flood of Mars terraforming novels soon followed, mine among them. Combining Viking's data with terraforming theory created an imaginative space as rich as that of Lowell's Mars, or richer, because with the aliens finally gone, the story became so clearly about us. Humanity on a rocky planet, trying to tend a biosphere. It was not only possible but necessary to consider wilderness, sustainability, ecology, economics, social justice, utopia — in short, all the things novels should talk about, and all laid out with marvelous clarity on the clean slate of Mars. It was a lucky time to be writing science fiction.

Now some kind of post-Viking era in Mars thinking has already arrived, marked by the return of the possibility of life, this time in the form of bacteria underground. This possibility changes the terraforming proposal a great deal: bringing life to a dead rock is not the same as intruding on an already existing biosphere.

Meanwhile, the feedback loop between science and science fiction continues to flow. It is, as we have seen, an elliptical loop, like the orbit of a comet. Science-fiction writers seize on new scientific findings and immediately leap to conclusions, in the form of stories. Then these stories dive into young minds and percolate there, shaping future scientists and giving them dreams, visions, plans.

Leap and percolate. These days I sometimes hear from young people who tell me they are studying some kind of science because of my Mars books. ("But you forgot to mention the math.") I feel like part of the science-fiction loop. I still follow the latest Mars news, and sometimes I wonder what the next wave of Mars stories will be like.

It seems awkward. I suppose the thing to do would be to tell the story of the robot rovers, because that's what we're going to have for a while. Maybe rovers much more powerful than Spirit and Opportunity — artificial intelligences, in fact, and happy to be on Mars, because it's the world they were designed for, and they're protecting an indigenous cryptoendolithic, or hidden in rock, bacterial culture they have discovered. So that when humans finally arrive in person, it's a disaster in the making for all concerned, and the rover artificial intelligences and little red people have to play dumb and play ghost and change humanity for the good of all, and . . .

On the stories will go.

Kim Stanley Robinson is a science-fiction writer. His new novel, "Forty Signs of Rain" (Bantam), is to be published in June.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

NYatKNIGHT

March 16th, 2004, 05:05 PM

Latest from www.NASA.gov (http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html)

The Bonneville Crater:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/spirit/20040315a/x_pubeng_bonnevillecolor-A071R1_br.jpg

ZippyTheChimp

March 20th, 2004, 11:37 PM

That's a really detailed picture of sand and rocks.

March 21, 2004

Off-Off-Off-Roading on Mars in a $414 Million S.U.V.

By JERRY GARRETT

PASADENA, Calif.

TO date, there are no traffic jams on Mars. This is a good thing for John R. Wright, an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory here, whose daily drive includes time at the controls of the Mars rover Spirit, whose $414 million price tag makes the most luxurious Range Rover look cheap.

But even with so many vehicular dollars in his control, Mr. Wright is not the most attentive of drivers: while his rover explores the Martian surface he has been known to watch TV, play on the computer, participate in staff meetings, yak on the cellphone, go for coffee - even visit the men's room.

But lightning-quick reflexes are not really necessary in his job, given the distance in light speed between the two planets. If either of the two rovers now on Mars - the other is called Opportunity - decided to emulate the homicidal HAL 9000 from "2001: A Space Odyssey," it would take 15 minutes for Mission Control to find out.

But Spirit is no HAL anyhow. Compared with the independent-thinking spaceship command system of the movie, the computer aboard each Mars rover is a relative dimwit. Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is affiliated with NASA and the California Institute of Technology, had design objectives for the rovers that stressed the need for comparatively little computer power - less, in fact, than the laptop on which this report was written. The designers needed something straightforward, simple, direct and light enough to be hurled 35 million miles on a tankful of rocket fuel.

The "less is more" theory of computing works better on Mars than a recent "more is more" effort on Earth: a vehicle designed by some of the same scientists, with no limits on computer size or weight, went only a few miles before crashing last weekend in an attempt to travel from Barstow, Calif., to Primm, Nev., by remote control.

Granted, the Spirit rover didn't work as well as expected in its initial Mars outings. "The problem was like one you'd have on your home computer," Mr. Wright explained. "Its hard drive was full." Once Mission Control figured out how to cleanse Spirit's memory, control was restored.

To prepare for each day's explorations, the drivers sit before twin computer monitors. For a multidimensional view of the terrain, each wears sophisticated goggles (more so than the plastic 3-D movie glasses that a prankster placed atop the monitors).

"Looks like Barstow," a visitor said of the Martian view, to which Mr. Wright replied: "Yeah, there's the outlet mall over there." Driving a rover involves little more than uploading a batch of command macros (control M is a right turn) to Mars each morning. Each Mars morning, that is.

A day on Mars is 20 minutes longer than one on Earth, and the earthbound crew lives on Martian time during the mission. Each day, they go to work at progressively later times. "Even on your days off, you have to stay on Martian time," Mr. Wright said. "So you wind up visiting a lot of all-night diners, watching bizarre movies on cable."

Many of the laboratory's scientists own fast sports cars. (Mr. Wright has a Corvette.) Their need for speed may be intensified by days spent driving rovers around at considerably less than 1 mile an hour.

Each Rover runs on six 20-watt direct-current motors capable of generating a whopping 0.06 horsepower, powered by lithium-ion batteries recharged by solar panels. The batteries are stored in a warm electric box that keeps them toasty enough to maintain a charge. Batteries tend to lose power faster in a cold climate, like that of Mars.

Top speed is officially listed at 0.1 mph, but Mr. Wright concedes that Spirit could go faster if it needed to hurry. As it might, for instance, to avoid capture by territorial Martians. ("We see a lot of 'Earthling, go home' signs up there," he confided.)

The 384-pound rovers go exploring only during daylight hours on Mars. "We could drive at night," Mr. Wright said, "but we didn't put any headlights on the rovers. So we would probably just crash into stuff."

And with no body shops in sight, crashing isn't an option.

A rover driver who crashes would be likely to lose his intragalactic driving privileges, not to mention the secret T-shirt that each of the nine drivers wears. The shirts say "Rover Driver" on the front and display the image of a flaming skull on the back.

Not that crashes are likely. While capable of climbing over 15-inch rocks without tipping, the six-wheel rovers are seldom asked to do much more than scoot a few feet a day to take a closer look at something. Each has a scraping tool capable of testing soil composition and evaluating rock samples.

The mission is scheduled to come to a pragmatic end sometime this spring, when the financing runs out. "At that point, I guess we'll just turn out the lights, lock the doors in here, and go on to something else," Mr. Wright said.

Then the trusty rovers will sit patiently on Mars waiting, like Pavlov's dogs, to answer a bell that is unlikely to ring again.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

ZippyTheChimp

March 21st, 2004, 05:54 AM

March 21, 2004

Is the Aerospace Industry Ready for Mars?

By JOHN SCHWARTZ and MICHELINE MAYNARD

CAN they do it?

When President Bush announced a plan early this year to send Americans back to the moon - and beyond, to Mars - skeptics wondered whether NASA, with its decades of tread-water budgets and institutional inertia, was up to the job.

Equally important, though, is a companion question: Is the aerospace industry up to the job? Boeing, for one, says it is eager to take up the challenge, and refers to decades of expertise in running enormously complex space ventures.

But the very process that made it the biggest NASA contractor - a sweeping consolidation of the aerospace industry - has sharply reduced competition, and with it, critics say, the creative clash of ideas that helps produce great technological leaps.

Boeing, Lockheed Martin and other companies that contribute to the space program are the stewards of an ailing industry, facing a brain drain as its aging engineers retire, with few newcomers entering the field.

The uncertainty has been underscored recently. Since Mr. Bush made his initial announcement, which was greeted with some public skepticism, he has been largely silent on the subject, not even mentioning it in his State of the Union address.

"Is the nation really going to support, given the budget deficit, spending more money on a manned mission?" asked Cai von Rumohr, an aerospace analyst at SG Cowan. Given all the unknowns, he said, trying to estimate the impact on particular companies is not even worth the effort. "You're talking lots of dollars, a long-term horizon, an unclear political mandate," he said. "There's still lots of 'ifs.' "

For Boeing, any rewards in Mr. Bush's vision are especially vague, said Prof. Charles Hill at the University of Washington in Seattle, who has studied the company for years and calls himself "extremely skeptical."

If space exploration proceeds, of course, Boeing stands to benefit tremendously. The company has absorbed the military and aerospace units of Rockwell, builder of the space shuttle; Rocketdyne, a Rockwell unit that built the main shuttle engines; and McDonnell Douglas, builder of some shuttle components.

Though any missions to the moon or to Mars would be "strategically important" to Boeing in its attempts to broaden beyond commercial aviation and military work, it has pressing issues to deal with now, Professor Hill added.

Last year, Airbus surpassed it in commercial aviation sales. Last month, the government canceled its longstanding development work on the Comanche helicopter. The company also said that it would curb production of its 767 tanker plane because of the Pentagon's review of whether Boeing acted improperly by hiring a former military official. In 2003, the space unit of Boeing lost nearly $1.8 billion on $3 billion in revenue.

Though a Mars mission could be lucrative, it would not lift Boeing out of its current trough, Professor Hill said. "It is so far out in the future,'' he said.

Still, John M. Lounge, a former astronaut who is director of program development for Boeing NASA Systems in Houston, said he was energized by the prospect of President Bush's proposal. "I was afraid we were on a 'going out of business' plan for American human space flight," he said.

Mike Mott, a Boeing vice president and general manager for its NASA systems, said the company was up to the task. "The complexity of developing, integrating and operating the dozens, if not hundreds, of robotic, human and telerobotic systems it will take to launch, assemble, transfer, land and build permanent habitats on the moon and Mars far exceeds anything we have ever attempted to do in space," he testified on March 5 before the President's Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy. "But we have been building vehicles in space for a fairly long time. We know how to do that part of it. We have been integrating very large, complex, adaptable, long-term systems. So we know how to do that, as well."

BUT those who have studied today's space program and NASA's relationships with its biggest contractors have misgivings.

For one thing, technical skill is slipping away as the generations of engineers who gave the nation the Apollo and shuttle programs have been laid off or have retired. The aerospace industry has shrunk by half since its peak of 1.3 million workers in 1989. Some 27 percent of those remaining will probably retire by 2008, according to the Aerospace Industries Association; three-quarters of NASA's technicians are over 60.

When NASA needed to build a new shuttle after the Challenger disaster in 1986, companies like McDonnell Douglas had to bring engineers out of retirement, said Randy Jayne, a former aerospace executive who is now a senior partner at Heidrick & Struggles International, the executive search firm. Now, he said, with retired engineers even older, rehiring them "is less realistic as an option."

And their expertise is not being replenished. Bright engineering students are now more likely to go into areas like the Internet or biotechnology. Once the "industry of choice" for technical workers, aerospace "presents a negative image to potential employees," the industry association said. A survey of 500 American aerospace workers found that 80 percent would not recommend that their children follow them into the field.

Consolidation has hurt, too. Pulling rivals into a big tent can create a "more comfortable atmosphere" for corporate management, according to a study by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in 2002, but over time it drains the industry of competition - the lifeblood of innovation - and "leads unavoidably to stagnation."

Reduced financing causes a further squeeze, the report said. Companies shifted their focus from the space business, which has thin profit margins and is subject to the capriciousness of politics, making even the commercial jet business seem reliable by comparison.

Private industry has always had a role in the space program, but that role has expanded so much that the final report on last year's Columbia disaster concluded that the space agency had given too much authority to contractors like the United Space Alliance, which is owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin. An appendix to the report recommended something that could be seen as heretical: looking to new companies for support in future contracts.

NASA is not the only government agency with complex projects and risky goals, the report said: "The Department of Energy solicits competitive bids for management and operating contracts, with the result that nationally known construction firms, component manufacturers, nonprofit institutions, universities and even aerospace firms regularly vie for the work at a fraction of the fee NASA pays for these services. If they can design nuclear weapons and naval nuclear propulsion plants for the Department of Energy, why cannot NASA overcome its attachment to the aerospace industry to seek management and operating support from a broader base?"

John M. Logsdon, the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University and a member of the commission that investigated the Columbia accident, said he found such conclusions "narrow minded." But he agreed that the relationships between NASA and its contractors needed to be revitalized.

The grand challenge of missions to the moon and to Mars, he said, may be just the thing to breathe new life into those programs. "What this vision does is provide a focus, not only for revitalization of NASA, but the revitalization of the U.S. civil space capability," he said, "including the industrial base, including academia."

MR. LOUNGE of Boeing said the important thing was to keep exploring. "This isn't a project that takes 5 or 10 years or even 20 years,'' he said. "This is a 100-year activity. This is something we choose to do because it's fundamental to our nature to explore."

More than contracts or politics, space flight is about wonder, Mr. Lounge said. As an astronaut, he recalled having little free time during missions to think about the larger aspects of space flight. But before he went to sleep, he said, "my nose was against the window looking out, saying, 'Oh my God, can you believe it?' "

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

ZippyTheChimp

May 4th, 2004, 07:48 AM

May 4, 2004

Postcards From the Mars Rover Mission

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Exceeding their original three-month missions, the two NASA rovers on Mars have now traversed more of the surface of another planet than any previous mission (although the Apollo astronauts did view a larger portion of the lunar landscape).

The rover Spirit has rolled more than four-fifths of a mile across the 95-mile-wide expanse of Gusev crater, where a meteor struck the planet long ago. The basin may have once been filled with water if, as some scientists think, Mars was once a warmer and wetter place.

On the other side of Mars, the rover Opportunity has traveled less, just over half a mile, but that is because it landed smack in the middle of a scientific trove. On a vast flat plain known as Meridiani Planum, the Opportunity ended up by luck in a 70-foot-wide crater with exposed bedrock along the inner rim.

The Opportunity spent its first two months crawling around the crater before leaving in March.

Mission managers at NASA have become much more efficient at driving the rovers. Initially moving in increments of 10 feet a day, the rovers now routinely make drives of hundreds of feet in a day.

Here are some of the places that the Spirit and the Opportunity have been, and some of the things they have seen.

Kenneth Chang

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Paths of Mars Landers (http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/science/20040504_MARS/sci_MARS_040504_01.pdf)

NYatKNIGHT

May 7th, 2004, 11:03 AM

May 7, 2004

New Crater Beckons Mars Rover

By KENNETH CHANG

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/05/07/science/07mars.583.jpg
The Mars rover Opportunity took this panoramic photograph of the 430-foot-wide crater known as Endurance, which scientists are eager to explore with the rover's instruments.
NASA photo

Perched on the edge of a 430-foot-wide crater, the Mars rover Opportunity has spied a new treasure trove of rocks that promise to tell a richer, deeper story of the planet's geological past.

At a news conference yesterday at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., Dr. Steven W. Squyres, the mission's principal investigator, called a high-resolution color panorama "surely the most spectacular image yet from this mission."

The photograph of the crater, named Endurance after Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton's ship in the 1914 expedition to Antarctica, is spectacular not just for "sheer scenic grandeur," Dr. Squyres said, but "also for the scientific potential that it offers."

The Opportunity will spend several weeks circling the outside of Endurance as mission managers try to figure out whether the rover can safely enter it and, more uncertain, make its way out again.

The crater is up to 66 feet deep, with slopes of 20 degrees and steeper. But Dr. Squyres said it was conceivable that the Opportunity would be sent in, even if mission managers were convinced it would be a one-way trip.

The scientists want to examine the crater's bedrock close-up with a suite of instruments on the rover. The $835 million mission of the Opportunity and the Spirit, its twin on the other side of Mars, is to look for signs that the planet was once much warmer and wetter, perhaps even amenable to life. Both rovers are to operate through at least September.

Based on the analysis of bedrock of the small crater that it landed in, the Opportunity has already discovered compelling evidence that the vast, flat plain Meridiani Planum was once a salty sea.

The Opportunity crawled out of the first crater, Eagle, in March, headed east toward Endurance crater, almost a half-mile away. It arrived last Friday.

Since then, it has been taking photographs and measurements.

Endurance crater exposes the same bedrock layers seen previously, but also reveals deeper layers that could tell what existed there before the sea. "We see enormous outcrops," Dr. Squyres said, "much bigger than anything we've seen before of layered rock."

In the Eagle crater, about a foot of bedrock was exposed. In Endurance, bedrock yards high is visible. "Here, there are cliffs that the rover could fall off and die if we're not careful," Dr. Squyres said.

The mineralogy of the lower rock layers appears markedly different, Dr. Squyres said, rich in basalt and lacking the sulfates seen in the upper layers, and there are hints in the photographs of large angled layers that may be the remains of sand dunes that turned to stone.

"We're going to be looking for evidence of a beach environment — was there something like that going on?" Dr. Squyres said. "I don't know what it's going to be, but it ain't what we saw back at Eagle. It's something different."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Jasonik

May 7th, 2004, 11:14 AM

COOL :shock:

Gulcrapek

June 21st, 2004, 03:12 PM

Private craft soars into space, history
By Michael Coren
CNN
Monday, June 21, 2004 Posted: 2:10 PM EDT (1810 GMT)

MOJAVE, California (CNN) -- SpaceShipOne left the Earth behind on Monday morning and made its indelible entry in the history books as the first private spacecraft to carry humans into space. It touched down safely at Mojave Airport at 11:15 ET.

"It looks great," said Burt Rutan, chief of Scaled Composites, which built the craft. He gave a thumbs up on the runway as he squinted into the sun at the aircraft he designed.

At 10:51 ET, Mike Melvill ignited the rocket engines and piloted SpaceShipOne into the blackness of space. His trajectory took him more than 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, above Earth's surface, according to Scaled Composites flight officials.

"It was a mind-blowing experience, it really was -- absolutely an awesome thing," Melvill said after landing.

"The colors were pretty staggering. From up there, it's almost a religious experience."

Melvill said once he reached weightlessness, he opened a bag of M&M's in the cockpit that floated around for three minutes while the ship sailed high above California.

The rocket plane lifted off about 9:45 ET carried by the jet White Knight for an hourlong ascent.

At 10:35 ET, it reached 33,000 feet and the pilot reported all systems checked out for its space launch.

It received clearance to land and "go for light" -- the signal to begin launch countdown -- at 10:46 ET.

The pair approached 50,000 feet a few minutes later and SpaceShipOne decoupled from the jet. After a brief glide, Melvill ignited the engines and ascended at Mach 3, three times the speed of sound, into space.

From the cockpit, the curvature of the Earth and a thin blue line that demarcates our atmosphere was visible against the black sky. Melvill, the first astronaut to pilot a private spacecraft, maneuvered the plane for descent on the same runway it departed nearly two hours earlier.

On landing, Melvill told of a loud bang he heard during the flight. He said it appeared to have been part of the composite airframe buckling near the rocket nozzle. However, the slight indention in SpaceShipOne's exterior did not appear to have jeopardized the craft's performance.

"There was a lot thrust from the plane," said Melvill. "It took me by surprise back there. Everything went really well. I feel great."

The flight marks the pinnacle of Rutan's vision of affordable, safe private space travel. His company Scaled Composites built SpaceShipOne with financial backing from Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, for a little more than $20 million. From just a concept in 1995 to reality less than a decade later, Rutan said this was the realization of a long dream..

"I'm so proud of that, it brings tears to my eyes," he said.

The rocket plane made its farthest and fastest flight to date.

A prelude to future flights
Those on hand for the launch -- including officals from NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration, the X Prize foundation and the Guinness Book of Records -- were reverent of the historic moment. Peter Diamandis, co-founder of the X Prize, the $10 million prize for civilian spaceflight, said Rutan's vision would open the door for those with the same dream and designs on the X prize.

"This is a warm-up for the Ansari X Prize, but it's a historic moment for all Americans," he said. "(I've heard), 'If God wanted us to fly into space, he would have given us more money'. Hopefully, the technology demonstrated here today will lead to designs that are cheaper and easier."

Scaled Composites is one of 24 companies from several countries competing for the X Prize, which will go to the first privately funded group to send three people on a suborbital flight 62.5 miles (100.6 kilometers) high and repeat the feat within two weeks using the same vehicle.

The nonprofit X Prize Foundation is sponsoring the contest to promote the development of a low-cost, efficient craft for space tourism in the same way prize competitions stimulated commercial aviation in the early 20th century.

The prize is fully funded through January 1, 2005, according to the foundation's Web site.

With Melvill on board, Monday's flight tested SpaceShipOne's ability to reach the 62.5-mile altitude, the internationally agreed-upon boundary of space.

Spectators witness history

SpaceShipOne landed safely in the Mojave Desert Monday after flying into space, reaching an altitude of 62.5 miles.
The remote desert Mojave airport, home to the world's only civilian test flight center and a licensed spaceport, was also host to an assortment of vehicles that converged on the site from around the country.

Buses, RVs, electric scooters, small ultralights and a menagerie of other vehicles were parked in the sandy soil across from the runway.

A sense of historic anticipation was shared by many of the spectators. Some said that after waiting decades, they were finally witnessing the first steps toward spaceflight for them.

Josh Collins, 25, said he had flown from Maryland to see the attempt.

"Some people thought I was crazy, other people are jealous," he said. "I can't wait to see the launch. It's going to be historic."

Scaled Composites is one of 24 companies from several countries competing for the $10 million Ansari X Prize, which will go to the first privately funded group to send three people on a suborbital flight 62.5 miles (100.6 kilometers) high and repeat the feat within two weeks using the same vehicle.

The nonprofit X Prize Foundation is sponsoring the contest to promote the development of a low-cost, efficient craft for space tourism in the same way prize competitions stimulated commercial aviation in the early 20th century.

The prize is fully funded through January 1, 2005, according to the foundation's Web site.

BigMac

June 21st, 2004, 03:53 PM

Yahoo! News
June 21, 2004

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?p=news&g=events/sc/060304spaceshipone&e=1&tmpl=sl]Slide (http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/photos/recip/ss/*[url) Show: SpaceShipOne Project[/url]

http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/nm/20040621/mdf603486.jpg

SpaceShipOne lifted off early on June 21, 2004 in the initial stage of the world's first attempted commercial space flight. The privately funded rocket plane was attached to a larger plane called the White Knight and took off from a runway in the Mojave Desert in California, about 100 miles north of Los Angeles. The unprecedented $20 million project is intended to demonstrate the viability of commercial space flight and open the door for space tourism. The SpaceShipOne is pictured landing at the Mojave Airport in this undated photograph. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

Gulcrapek

June 20th, 2005, 11:13 PM

www.planetary.org/solarsail (http://www.planetary.org/solarsail)

http://www.planetary.org/solarsail/images/Sail_Pics/sail_and_earth_small.jpg

Cosmos 1 is the world's first orbital solar sail. It uses pressure from photons to gain altitude.

The spacecraft will be lauched on a former Soviet ICBM (Volna) by a submarine in the Barents sea at 3:46 EDT.

Some text from the site:
"Launch!
At launch, the main engine of the first stage of the Volna rocket will burn before shutting down and disengaging from the main body. The second stage will then ignite, burn, and disengage from the third stage, which in turn will separate from the payload compartment after completing its burn. A little more than 6 minutes after shooting up from the submarine, the three-stage Volna rocket will have completed its role in the mission.

At this point the apogee kick motor, which is attached to the payload compartment and unofficially named the “TPS Motor,” will begin a 70 seconds orbit insertion burn. When this is completed the motor and the protective cover encasing the payload compartment will be discarded, leaving the spacecraft alone in orbit, spinning at 22 revolutions per minute. The entire process, from submarine launch to orbit insertion, will last just under 20 minutes."

Mission update:

"With less than 24 hours to launch, the Cosmos 1 team is going through final preparations. At Project Operations Pasadena (POP), located at The Planetary Society headquarters, the team, headed by Project Operations Manager Jim Cantrell, has been finishing up a series of rehearsals. Project Director Louis Friedman, meanwhile, is already in Moscow, where he will follow the mission from the Flight Control Center at NPO Lavochkin. Bud Schurmeier, the project’s Systems Engineering consultant, is there with him.
Speaking from Moscow, Friedman described the ongoing preparations in Russia leading up to the launch. “We had a meeting today at the Tarusa ground station with the entire group,” he said. Tarusa is a UHF tracking station located 75 miles southeast of Moscow, which will play a critical role in the early stages of the mission. “During the first orbit,” explained Friedman, “Tarusa will be responsible for most of the ground control and communications with the spacecraft.”

At the meeting Friedman and Schurmeier heard a detailed report on the spacecraft testing that took place at the naval base in Severmorsk during the past two weeks. All the tests were satisfactory, and the spacecraft is ready for flight. The meeting also included a report on the ground-station preparations. Communications between the different stations have been tested, including the transference of data between Russian, Czech, and American stations spread around the world.

“It is looking good - no one has reported any anomalies or problems,” said Friedman. “The feeling here is the usual one before a space mission, ranging from nervousness to optimism.” “The group here is extremely professional and experienced – they have done this before.” But as is always the case with a space mission, Friedman added, “there are no guarantees.”

Meanwhile in Severmorsk, the submarine that will launch Cosmos 1 has been designated. It is none other than the Borisoglebsk – the same Delta III nuclear submarine that launched the suborbital flight of the solar sail in July 2001. Borisoglebsk will leave harbor in the evening hours of Tuesday, June 21, and cruise for 4 or 5 hours to its designated launch station. Then, shortly before midnight (19:46 UT), it will launch the Volna rocket carrying Cosmos 1, the first Solar Sail spacecraft."

Gulcrapek

June 21st, 2005, 04:23 PM

T +2 min: first stage separation confirmed.

T + 32 min: ground station at Petropavlovsk reports receiving a brief signal from the spacecraft, then losing it. Most likely due to one of the orbital insertion burns. Majuro will be the next contact.

Gulcrapek

June 21st, 2005, 04:34 PM

T +46 min: Majuro did not receive a signal. Next contact will be in about 50 minutes at Panska Ves.

Gulcrapek

June 21st, 2005, 04:53 PM

Analyzation of the brief intial signal indicates the engine burns happened about when they were supposed to.

Gulcrapek

June 21st, 2005, 08:59 PM

:(

It disappeared. :(

Gulcrapek

June 22nd, 2005, 01:43 AM

w00tness: reanalysis of data from the Majuro and Panska Ves stations reveals a weak singal at both places.

TLOZ Link5

June 22nd, 2005, 12:18 PM

Star Wars geek moment:

In Episode II, Count Dooku has a starship that uses a solar sail.

Gulcrapek

June 22nd, 2005, 02:54 PM

Russian military now reports that the Volna booster failed at T+83 seconds. This would mean that the spacecraft is either in pieces around Russia or in a lower orbit.

However, the signals received last night would tend to disagree with the pieces option.

Ninjahedge

June 22nd, 2005, 05:14 PM

Time to getthe sail crew going to see if they can get some tack!!!!

;)

This sounds interesting though. Imagine being able to launch stuff to different planets simply by timing the launch....

Getting back might be difficult though... :(

lofter1

September 19th, 2005, 10:12 AM

NASA to offer $100 billion moon program

By Reuters
http://news.com.com/NASA+to+offer+100+billion+moon+program/2100-11397_3-5871563.html (http://news.com.com/NASA+to+offer+100+billion+moon+program/2100-11397_3-5871563.html)

Story last modified Sun Sep 18 14:13:00 PDT 2005

With the shuttle fleet grounded and the International Space Station staffed by a skeleton crew, NASA is set to unveil plans on Monday to take people and cargo to the moon.

Even before the official announcement, there is criticism from Capitol Hill over the reported $100 billion cost of the lunar program, given U.S. government commitments to the Iraq war and the recovery from Hurricane Katrina (http://news.com.com/RFID+chips+used+to+track+dead+after+Katrina/2100-11390_3-5869708.html?tag=nl).

"This plan is coming out at a time when the nation is facing significant budgetary challenges," Rep. Bart Gordon, a Tennessee Democrat on the House Science Committee, said in a statement. "Getting agreement to move forward on it is going to be heavy lifting in the current environment, and it's clear that strong presidential leadership will be needed."

To get astronauts back to the moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, one team of designers envisioned an Apollo-style capsule sitting atop rockets fashioned from shuttle components, including the shuttle's massive external tank and solid rocket boosters. There would be a separate space vehicle to carry only cargo.

The Space.com Web site reported that this scenario was presented to White House officials last week before its formal unveiling to the public on Monday. The new $100 billion lunar program would begin in 2018 by landing four people on the moon for a seven-day stay, Space.com reported.

NASA officials could not be reached for comment on Sunday.

President's vision for space

President George W. Bush's plan to send Americans back to the moon by 2020 and eventually on to Mars has drawn skepticism since its unveiling in January 2004, less than a year after the Feb. 1, 2003, shuttle Columbia disaster.
Bush's Vision for Space Exploration called for the development of a system to replace the aging shuttles, a goal that appears even more important given problems with the shuttle fleet's return to flight.

The same problems with falling debris that doomed Columbia recurred in July with the launch of Discovery (http://news.com.com/Discovery+lands+with+its+future+up+in+the+air/2100-7337_3-5827211.html?tag=nl), prompting the grounding of the shuttle fleet even as Discovery continued to fly its mission. A September shuttle mission was delayed until November and then to March.

Some $1.1 billion damage by Hurricane Katrina to NASA facilities in Louisiana and Mississippi could push the launch date back further still.

Bush's plan also mandated the completion of the International Space Station, but without shuttles to do the heavy lifting, that process has been on hold. A pair of Russian vehicles--the space taxi Soyuz and the space delivery van Progress--have been ferrying people and material.

Since the fatal Columbia disaster, only two-person crews, rather than the normal three-person crews, have stayed aboard the station.

With the shuttles slated for retirement in 2010, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has estimated that the number of construction flights to the station could be pared from its earlier estimate of 28 to 15.

Story Copyright (http://news.com.com/2106-12-0.html) © 2005 Reuters Limited (http://news.com.com/redir?destUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.reuters.com&edId=3&siteId=3&oId=2001-12-0&ontId=12&lop=reut_copy_ni). All rights reserved.

Copyright (http://www.cnet.com/aboutcnet/0-13611-7-811029.html?tag=ft) ©1995-2005 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.

BrooklynRider

September 19th, 2005, 10:27 AM

Wow! We're flush in cash!

A billion a day in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two hundred billion for Katrina. One hundred million for the moon.

These tax cuts are really paying off. I can't wait until we get to the stupid things like healthcare, social security,and higher education. But, I'm glad they understand the priority of visiting the moon. I was afraid for a minute that George W. was out of touch...

TLOZ Link5

September 19th, 2005, 02:07 PM

Well, if it weren't for the space program, we wouldn't have the Internet, or sattelites, or all of those other ridiculous and unneeded technological advances.

BrooklynRider

September 19th, 2005, 05:48 PM

True - we also wouldn't have Tang, or Sudafed and a hundred other things that were developed for "space". However, they could just have easily been developed for civilian use. It wasn't the "space science" that developed these things - it was our tax dollars.

ryan

September 19th, 2005, 06:09 PM

Well, if it weren't for the space program, we wouldn't have the Internet, or sattelites, or all of those other ridiculous and unneeded technological advances.

This is true, but NASA is far from the most efficient way to develop new technologies. It's like throwing a trillion dollars at a wall and seeing what sticks. Perhaps the X Prize (http://www.xprizefoundation.com/) model could waste less while still developing new technology.

Ninjahedge

September 20th, 2005, 11:35 AM

True, but that is the case with most political agencies Ryan.

Except with them, it is like throwing the money up in the air to see what it sticks to. At least this is throwing it at something a little more solid.

And if I hear one more person mention "Tang" as the ultimate achievement of the space program, I am going to smack them. Agreed, we REALLY do not need to know that ants find it hard to build anthills in space but at the same time, total abandonment of scientific exploration because things seem to be bad at home is not a viable excuse for the curtailment of all exploration of scientific research.

I think the funding of bridges in Alaska, or homeland security in Kansas would be things I find to be more easily discountable as unnecessary tax expendatures in a time of fiscal crisis.

Also, as McCain said, programs like the Medicare (medicaid?) persciption plan need to be re-vamped from the very base up. As tehy are written now they are almost a direct funding of Pharmeceutical companies rather than a way to make perscriptoin medication affordable.....

Edward

October 1st, 2005, 08:34 AM

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Russia-Space.html
October 1, 2005
U.S. Space Tourist Blasts Off in Russian Rocket
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:48 a.m. ET

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (AP) -- A Russian rocket roared into space Saturday in a burst of flame from the Central Asian steppes, launching the world's third space tourist, U.S millionaire scientist Gregory Olsen, and a U.S-Russian crew on a two-day trip to the international space station.

With a brief gasp from relatives and friends of Olsen, cosmonaut Valery Tokarev and astronaut William McArthur, the Soyuz craft lifted off with an earsplitting roar from the Baikonur cosmodrome just before 10 a.m. and soared north into the bright autumn sky over the steppes of Kazakhstan.

More than 150 people, including Russian and U.S. space dignitaries, tourists and relatives of the three men, watched as the rocket rose into the air. Some gave gasped at the explosive separation of the first booster segment, which sent a puff of white smoke as the rocket turned downrange. Then, as the announcement came that the spacecraft had entered its initial designated orbit nine minutes after launch, the crowd burst into applause. The crew reported that all was well aboard the craft.

Olsen, the 60-year-old founder of an infrared-camera maker based in Princeton, N.J., reportedly paid $20 million for a seat on the Expedition 12 flight.

Olsen's daughter, Krista Dibsie, 31, videotaped the launch, craning her head skyward as tears rolled down her cheeks. Her 4-year-old son, Justin, held his hands over his ears, his mouth wide open, near more than 20 other friends, relatives and employees of Olsen's company, Sensors Unlimited Inc.

''There goes Dad,'' she said quietly. ''Love ya' Dad.''

''Now I'm nervous for him,'' she said. ''I wasn't before but now he's up there and gosh, he's out of this world. I know that's a corny thing to say, but I can't believe it.''

Olsen holds advanced degrees in physics and materials science.

''Life is good,'' said Cynthia McArthur, whose husband William is a three-time veteran of U.S. space shuttle flights.

McArthur and Takarev will spend six months on the station, replacing Russian Sergei Krikalev and American John Phillips, who will return to Earth on Oct. 11 along with Olsen.

In the hours leading up the launch, the trio, outfitted in bulky space suits, had tested systems in the capsule. Shortly beforehand, they lowered the clear plastic covers on their helmets and activated the spacesuits' oxygen supply.

The Soyuz TMA-7 capsule will rendezvous in two days with the station floating some 250 miles above the Earth. Olsen, Tokarev and McArthur will bring cargo aboard and perform experiments.

The cash-strapped Russian Federal Space Agency has turned to space tourism to generate money. Olsen is the third non-astronaut to visit the orbiting station. California businessman Dennis Tito paid about $20 million for a weeklong trip to the space station in 2001, and South African Mark Shuttleworth followed a year later.

Olsen said prior to the flight that he preferred the term ''space flight participant'' to ''space tourist.''

'''Tourism' implies that anyone can just write a check and go up there. That's not what happened,'' he told The Associated Press.

Eric Anderson, whose company, Space Adventures, brokered the arrangements with the Russian agency, said allowing non-astronauts to fly to the ISS expanded the boundaries of space travel.

''People going into space is interesting no matter what. But when it's a civilian like Greg, it just shows how accessible space flight can be,'' he said.

With the rocket being fueled on the launch pad Friday, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin met with his Russian counterpart, Anatoly Perminov, for talks on the future of joint space missions, with NASA's chief warning that Moscow's demands for payment could end U.S participation.

Griffin said a 2000 U.S. law banning space station-related payments to Russia because Moscow helped Iran build a nuclear plant ''could end a continuous American presence'' on the station.

Since the 2003 Columbia disaster grounded the U.S. shuttle fleet, Russia's Soyuz and Progress spacecraft have been the workhorses of the joint space projects, shuttling crews and cargo to the space station. Discovery visited the station in July, but problems with the foam insulation on its external fuel tank have cast doubt on when the shuttle will fly again.

Russia has made it clear that it expects the United States to make payment or some sort of capital investment in exchange for future U.S. participation on Russian flights.

However, the Iran Nonproliferation Act of 2000 penalizes countries that sell unconventional weapons and missile technology to Iran. Russia is building an $800 million nuclear power plant in Iran despite U.S objections that this could help Tehran build atomic bombs.

The U.S. Senate agreed unanimously last week to amend the law, lifting the ban on NASA purchases of Soyuz seats until 2012. The House has yet to act on the measure.

Griffin said unless exemptions are made for NASA's work with Russia, it was possible that no U.S. astronauts would be flying on the next Soyuz mission in April.

''At issue is whether there will be future U.S. crew members and future U.S. crew missions if the congressional provisions are not granted,'' he said.

NASA officials in Houston said Thursday that they expect McArthur to return to Earth aboard a Soyuz in the spring, one way or another.

redhot00

October 1st, 2005, 09:00 AM

The only thing I got out of this story is how ironic it is that the guy is paying $20 million for a two day joy ride that departs from Kazakhstan, a country whose poverty level is alarming, and the orphanages can't even hold all the parent-less children. I hope he enjoys himself.

Edward

October 1st, 2005, 03:38 PM

What I get from the story is that if it were not for Olsen, americans would not be on the international space station. Somebody has to pay for the rockets, and it's not Kazakhstan, but Russians who pay for it. I think Russians also pay Kazakhstan for the use of launch pad.

Edward

October 1st, 2005, 03:54 PM

This logic of this issue of nonproliferation ban and cooperation on international space station escapes me. What was the thinking - "We will punish Russians by not giving money for the rockets, but since we need these rockets to keep space station alive and send americans there, it's OK to use it for free?"

Gregory Tenenbaum

October 4th, 2005, 06:53 AM

Gulcrapek

October 8th, 2005, 11:41 AM

The Soyuz is amazing. I think in its variations it's flown over 1700 flights without failure.

ZippyTheChimp

October 8th, 2005, 12:07 PM

I wish I had the airfare.

Gulcrapek

October 10th, 2005, 09:21 PM

Landed.

ZippyTheChimp

January 16th, 2006, 07:16 PM

NASA Set to Launch Spacecraft to Pluto

By MIKE SCHNEIDER
The Associated Press
Monday, January 16, 2006; 6:09 PM

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- An unmanned NASA spacecraft the size of a piano is set to lift off Tuesday on a nine-year journey to Pluto, the last unexplored planet in the solar system.

Scientists hope to learn more about the icy planet and its large moon, Charon, as well as two other, recently discovered moons in orbit around Pluto.

The $700 million New Horizons mission also will study the surrounding Kuiper Belt, the mysterious zone of the solar system that is believed to hold thousands of comets and other icy objects. It could hold clues to how the planets were formed.

"They finally are going! I can't believe it!" said Patricia Tombaugh, 93, widow of Clyde Tombaugh, the Illinois-born astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930.

Patricia Tombaugh, her two children, and the astronomer's younger sister planned to witness the launch of the New Horizons spacecraft at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Tuesday afternoon.

Pluto is the only planet discovered by a U.S. citizen, though some astronomers dispute Pluto's right to be called a planet. It is an oddball icy dwarf unlike the rocky planets of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars and the gaseous planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

NASA has sent unmanned space probes to every planet but Pluto.

"What we know about Pluto today could fit on the back of a postage stamp," said Colleen Hartman, a deputy associate administrator at NASA. "The textbooks will be rewritten after this mission is completed."

New Horizons will lift off on an Atlas V rocket, which was rolled to the launch pad Monday, and speed away from Earth at 36,000 mph, the fastest spacecraft ever launched. It will reach Earth's moon in about nine hours and arrive in 13 months at Jupiter, where it will use the giant planet's gravity as a slingshot, shaving five year off the 3-billion-mile trip.

and speed away from Earth at 36,000 mph, the fastest spacecraft ever launched. It will reach Earth's moon in about nine hours and arrive in 13 months at Jupiter, where it will use the giant planet's gravity as a slingshot, shaving five year off the 3-billion-mile trip.

The launch had drawn protests from anti-nuclear activists because the spacecraft will be powered by 24 pounds of plutonium, which will produce energy from natural radioactive decay.

NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy have put the probability of an early-launch accident that could release plutonium at 1 in 350. The agencies have brought in 16 mobile field teams that can detect radiation and 33 air samplers and monitors.

"Just as we have ambulances at football games, you don't expect to use them, but we have them there if we need them," NASA official Randy Scott said.

___

On the Net:

Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space:

http://www.space4peace.org

New Horizons Mission: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu

© 2006 The Associated Press

space.com (http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/sfn_060116_newhorizons_rollout.html)

NYatKNIGHT

January 17th, 2006, 03:32 PM

Been looking forward to this mission for a long time. Guess we'll have to wait a little longer. Launch scrubbed - too windy.

If for some reason it doesn't launch before Feb. 14 they won't be able to use Jupiter as a slingshot adding years more to reach Pluto.

Ninjahedge

January 17th, 2006, 03:43 PM

The launch had drawn protests from anti-nuclear activists because the spacecraft will be powered by 24 pounds of plutonium, which will produce energy from natural radioactive decay.

What the hell is their problem on this?

1. Like radiation is so uncommon in space
2. I guess the plutonium would be better here on earth.
3. I guess the plutonium would be better used as an explosive.

I, myself, do not like the idea of radioactive waste and all that, but protesting this is just plain stupid.

ZippyTheChimp

January 17th, 2006, 06:13 PM

to use Jupiter as a slingshotI think it's funny that the momentum gained by the spacecraft is lost by Jupiter, so it will rotate a little slower.

Edward

January 17th, 2006, 06:17 PM

What the hell is their problem on this?Their belief system states that plutonium is evil.

Ninjahedge

January 18th, 2006, 09:13 AM

Their belief system states that plutonium is evil.

So shouldn't we be sending it home? ;)

NYatKNIGHT

January 19th, 2006, 02:18 PM

New Horizons successfully launched at 2:00 pm today.
Next stop, Jupiter - in only one year.

ZippyTheChimp

January 19th, 2006, 05:02 PM

Plutonium on a journey to Pluto.

I think that's very holistic.

Ninjahedge

January 19th, 2006, 06:02 PM

Plutonium on a journey to Pluto.

I think that's very holistic.

It's better than the place they were thinking of storing Uranium.......

ZippyTheChimp

January 19th, 2006, 06:07 PM

Gulcrapek

January 23rd, 2006, 10:33 AM

Yay. I actually looked for this thing for 3 days at its scheduled launch times from the Caribbean. Never saw it. My name is onboard New Horizons along with many others.

NYatKNIGHT

February 1st, 2006, 04:36 PM

^So is mine!

News on Kuiper Belt Object, UB313, Pluto's big brother.....

Bigger Than Pluto, but Smaller Than a Planet?

By KENNETH CHANG (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=KENNETH CHANG&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=KENNETH CHANG&inline=nyt-per)
Published: February 1, 2006

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/02/01/science/01cnd-planet.184.jpg

Astronomers describe measurements that pin a size on 2003 UB313, a large ball of ice and dust in the outskirts of the solar system.

Bigger than a breadbox. Bigger than Pluto.

Still smaller than a planet?

In an article to be published on Thursday in the journal Nature, a team of German astronomers describe measurements that pin a size on 2003 UB313, a large ball of ice and dust discovered last year in the outskirts of the solar system.

"This is the first measurement of the size," said Frank Bertoldi, a professor of astronomy at the University of Bonn and the lead author of the Nature paper. The scientists said 2003 UB313 is 1,860 miles in diameter, give or take 250 miles, or 30 percent wider than Pluto, which has a diameter of 1,400 miles. Like Pluto, 2003 UB313 is a member of the Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy debris that orbits beyond Neptune.

As soon as it was discovered, astronomers knew that 2003 UB313 had to be larger than Pluto, because it appears surprisingly bright in the sky. At a distance of 9 billion miles from the Sun, 2003 UB313, even if it had a perfectly reflective surface, would have to possess a greater surface area than Pluto in order to appear that bright.

To figure out how large 2003 UB313 is, Dr. Bertoldi and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, measured the amount of heat emanating from 2003 UB313 and calculated a surface temperature of about minus-418 degrees Fahrenheit. Combined with the previous optical observations, the astronomers calculated that 2003 UB313 reflects about 60 percent of the light that hits it.

That, in turn, gives the size.

The discovery of 2003 UB313 has renewed debate about what should be considered and what should not be. Some astronomers feel that any object in the solar system large enough that gravity has shaped it into a sphere should be called a planet — but that would add not just 2003 UB313 to the planetary pantheon but also several asteroids and other Kuiper Belt objects.
Others would like to demote Pluto and count only eight planets. A third possibility is to arbitrarily call anything larger than Pluto a planet.

The debate has put off the naming of the body; 2003 UB313 is a temporary designation. If it is a planet, it would probably also be named after a Roman deity like the other planets.

"There is still a stalemate on the meaning of 'planet,'" said Brian G. Marsden, director of the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, "and no progress on providing a name for 2003 UB313."

Its discoverer, Michael E. Brown of the California Institute of Technology, nicknamed it Xena, after the title character of a television series about the exploits of an ancient warrior woman. Dr. Brown has proposed a formal name, but has not revealed it publicly.

Dr. Bertoldi said he preferred keeping Pluto as a planet and bestowing planethood on 2003 UB313 as well. "As a personal opinion, I don't want to downgrade Pluto as not a planet," he said. "It would be impolite."

NYatKNIGHT

February 8th, 2006, 01:30 PM

I just merged numerous threads into one for Space Exploration. Let's try to keep all related stories together since the science, technology, and funding are often related.

NYatKNIGHT

February 8th, 2006, 01:36 PM

Planetary Society Charges Administration with Blurring its Vision for Space Exploration

Cites Cancelled Plans for a Europa and Other Science Missions

6 February, 2006

The NASA Budget released today shortchanges space science in order to fund 17 projected space shuttle flights. Despite recent spectacular results from NASA's science programs, this budget puts the brakes on their growth within the agency. It seriously damages the hugely productive and successful robotic exploration of our solar system and beyond.

According to this budget, flight projects that were already underway, such as the Space Interferometry Mission, will be delayed. Others, such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder and a mission to Jupiter's moon Europa (http://planetary.org/programs/projects/explore_europa/), will be deferred indefinitely. Furthermore, the new budget slashes funding for the fundamental space science that makes such missions possible and turns raw data into discoveries.

"Using money intended for science programs to fund continued operation of the shuttle is a serious setback to the U.S. space program," said Planetary Society President, Wesley T. Huntress, Jr. (http://www.planetary.org/about/wesley_huntress.html) "NASA is essentially transferring funds from a popular and highly productive program into one scheduled for termination."

The Planetary Society Board of Directors points out that the very first goal stated in the original Vision for Space Exploration announced by President Bush was to "implement a sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and beyond." The Vision then went on to state that NASA would "conduct robotic exploration across the solar system for scientific purposes and to support human exploration. In particular, explore Jupiter's moons, asteroids, and other bodies to search for evidence of life, to understand the history of the solar system, and to search for resources."

"Instead," said Society Executive Director Louis Friedman (http://www.planetary.org/about/louis_friedman.html), "NASA's robotic exploration program is being flat-lined, setting aside a mission to Europa to search for its ice-covered ocean and perhaps for life itself."

Both the National Academy of Sciences and internal NASA advisory committees have endorsed Europa exploration as the highest priority solar system objective after Mars. Last year, the U.S. Congress directed NASA to plan a fiscal year 2007 start on a Europa mission. If the proposed budget is adopted, that directive will be ignored, and no Europa mission will be planned.

The Society's disappointment with the NASA budget extends beyond the single item of omitting the Europa mission. Other major problems are:

Delay of the Space Interferometry Mission - a key effort contributing to the understanding of the universe and the search for other planetary systems;
Cancellation of the long-sought Terrestrial Planet Finder, a mission also supported in the original Vision for Space Exploration, to discover Earth-like planets and possible abodes for life around other stars;
Previously announced cancellation of the liquid oxygen/methane engine in the new exploration transportation system. The methane system was designed to test how a Mars ascent vehicle might be fueled on Mars, using in-situ resources. The proposed budget continues to downplay Mars as a goal for human exploration.Society Vice-President Bill Nye (http://www.planetary.org/about/bill_nye.html) stated, "After reaching the Moon, we kept on building big engineering projects for humans in space with the shuttle and space station. We got bogged down in Earth orbit; our exploration got stalled." Nye added that the Society strongly supports human exploration driven by science as defined in the Vision, stating, "To justify the cost and risk of human space flight, we need to be exploring other worlds and searching for extraterrestrial life."

Full funding of the shuttle was the result of political pressure from Congressional representatives from areas with vested interests in shuttle work, as well as international pressure from partners focused on completing the space station.

Friedman questioned the realism of the shuttle's even being able to do 17 more flights in any reasonable time period (before 2010) and said, "Investing in the shuttle is an investment in the past. NASA should be investing in the future."

The Surface of Jupiter's Moon Europa
http://www.planetary.org/image/PIA03878.jpg

Many scientists believe that Europa, with its suspected subterranean ocean, is the most likely object in the solar system to bear life. According to the proposed 2006 budget, a planned mission there will be put off indefinitely.

Copyright © 1993 – 2006 The Planetary Society.

Jasonik

February 8th, 2006, 02:11 PM

February 5, 2006
NY TIMES

A Bold Plan to Go Where Men Have Gone Before

Interactive Feature
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/02/05/business/rocket.162.jpg (http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/business/20060205_ROCKET_FEATURE/blocker.html)

By LESLIE WAYNE

EL SEGUNDO, Calif.
ASK Elon Musk what he wants to do with his life — after having amassed a $300 million fortune from the Internet — and the answer is surprising. At 34, he says he is too young to retire. Philanthropy is a bit staid. Starting another Web-based venture is hardly a challenge, not for a man who bought the idea for PayPal, built it up and then sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion.

In seeking a new direction in life that would be as ambitious as his dreams, Mr. Musk has picked a doozy: cheap and reliable access to space.

Making money from space is a road that several other self-made millionaires have traveled, from a Texas banker named Andrew Beal to one of Microsoft's co-founders, Paul G. Allen. There have been enough of them to warrant a mocking nickname: "thrillionaires." And so far their efforts have either ended in failure or have been just ventures in "space tourism" that brought test pilots to the fringe of space.

Mr. Musk wants more, and he has put $100 million of his fortune on the line to try to get it. His goal is to make a business out of inexpensively launching satellites into orbit. Inexpensive, of course, is a relative term, in a business where launchings of private commercial weather, telecommunications and other payloads start at $30 million and go up to $85 million or more.

Through his company, Space Explorations Technology, or SpaceX, Mr. Musk wants to send things to space for one-third of the going rate or less — even bringing down the price to $7 million for small payloads to low Earth orbit — with a series of simple rockets of his own design. His goal is to build a Volkswagen of the cosmos, a bare-bones and dirt-cheap rocket that will go into space and return, to be used again and again. Commercial launchings currently cost $5,000 to $10,000 per pound of payload; Mr. Musk says his simple rockets could do it for $1,000 a pound.

His first rocket, the Falcon 1, is a two-stage, liquid fuel design that is scheduled to lift off on Wednesday from a United States Army facility on Omelek Island in the Kwajalein Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands. On board will be a 43-pound satellite, the FalconSAT-2, which was designed by Air Force Academy cadets to study the ionosphere.

THE launching has been postponed twice for technical reasons, but if it succeeds, it will move SpaceX closer to filling some of the $200 million in firm launching orders already placed by the Pentagon, foreign governments and private companies.

Less clear is whether a success will also silence the many skeptics who have seen wealthy space dreamers fail in the past.

"This is an enormously difficult business to make money in," said John E. Pike, a space policy analyst at GlobalSecurity.Org, a nonprofit group in Alexandria, Va., that analyzes national security issues. "The best way to make a small fortune in space is to start out with a large one. New rocket science has a high mortality rate, and we don't know what he's got his hands on until he's flown it a half-dozen times."

Part dreamer and part realist, Mr. Musk says he was drawn to the project not only because he has long been fascinated by space — he has a degree in physics from the University of Pennsylvania — but also because he sees a market opportunity in America's declining share of the world's satellite-launching business.

In the commercial market, the United States' two big rocket giants, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, have been priced out by lower-cost competitors from Russia, Ukraine and France. Lockheed's Atlas 5 had only one commercial order in 2005, compared with 22 in 1998. Boeing has withdrawn its Delta 4 rocket from the commercial market and relies exclusively on business from the United States government.

At stake is a market that was worth $4 billion last year, when governments and businesses paid for 55 launchings, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Of those, 18 were commercial, with a value of $1 billion.

American companies compete for commercial orders only by teaming with foreign partners — often former cold-war foes. Lockheed has teamed up with Khrunichev State Research of Russia to form International Launch Services, which mainly uses Russia's Proton rockets. Boeing has joined with several nations to form a consortium called the Sea Launch; it uses the Ukrainian Zenit 3SL to put up commercial payloads.

Mr. Musk says he wants to develop an all-American option that will be price-competitive and break the duopoly of Lockheed and Boeing on contracts with the federal government. Ultimately, he wants to send people into space, to the moon and beyond.

"We have to do something dramatic to reduce the cost of getting to space," said Mr. Musk in an interview in his cubicle at SpaceX's offices here. "If we can get the cost l