| | JSC TODAY CATEGORIES - Headlines
- ATV-5 Launches New Research to the Space Station
- Last Week to Register: BOCTW Day - Aug. 14
- Innovation Awards Have New Deadline - Aug. 11
- NASA@work Challenges: Submit Your Solutions! - Organizations/Social
- New Agencywide T-shirt Offer
- Apollo 45th Shirts Back in Stock at Starport
- Black Holes as Spacecraft Propulsion - Aug. 13
- Raise Your Glass - Space Explorers Toastmasters
- Last Chance Lunch
- So Your Kid is Going to College - Jobs and Training
- RLLS Portal Training for August - Via WebEx - Community
- Knocking Out Hunger With YOUR Help
- Observe the Perseid Meteor Shower Aug.12 |  |
| Headlines - ATV-5 Launches New Research to the Space Station
ATV-5 is nicknamed "Georges Lemaitre" after the Belgian priest and astronomer who in 1927 proposed what later came to be called the Big Bang Theory of the universe's origin. The 13-ton Georges Lemaitre is further loaded with more than 7 tons of food, scientific experiments and other supplies, making the craft the heaviest vehicle ever to be launched by an Ariane 5. One experiment, the European Space Agency's "Electromagnetic Levitator," will heat metals to 2,900 degrees Fahrenheit (1,600 degrees Celsius) and then cool them down quickly. Studying these processes in microgravity may help us better understand the physics underlying atomic arrangement and rearrangement. - Last Week to Register: BOCTW Day - Aug. 14
Don't miss this year's Bring Our Children to Work (BOCTW) Day on Thursday, Aug. 14, at Space Center Houston. Guest speakers, breakout sessions, demonstration booths and hands-on activities will be scheduled throughout the day to further enhance your child(ren)'s experience! - Innovation Awards Have New Deadline – Aug. 11
Now you have an even better chance to take home two new NASA awards that celebrate the spirit of innovative behavior, as the competition deadline has been extended to Aug. 11. The two categories are Lean Forward; Fail Smart Award and Champion of Innovation.
Nominators will need to provide a written narrative and a short (less than two minutes) video clip that details the innovative idea, project or behavior. The videos can be made with your smart phone, computer, cameras or other recording devices. NASA is not looking for a professional quality video. Here's a link to some helpful hints from our External Relations Office.
The Lean Forward; Fail Smart Award is for innovative performance and is open to NASA employees, teams and support contractors. The Champion of Innovation Award is designed to show the role supervisors and managers play in fostering innovation and must be submitted by a group of subordinates. For more information on both awards and the submission process, click here.
As part of Innovation 2014, JSC submissions will be posted to the JSC 2.0 website to allow the JSC workforce to vote for their top choice for Lean Forward and Champion of Innovation. - NASA@work Challenges: Submit Your Solutions!
There are three active challenges that need your inputs! - NASA@work Incentive Program: Submit Your Theme Ideas
- Challenge Seeking Automated Entity and Entity Relationship Extraction from Web Content
- Seeking Technical Experts for Minority STEM Engagement
Read more about these different challenges and submit your solutions today. Are you new to NASA@work? NASA@work is an agencywide, collaborative problem-solving platform that connects the collective knowledge of experts (like YOU) from all centers across NASA. Challenge owners post problems, and members of the NASA@work community participate by responding with their solutions to posted problems. Anyone can participate! Click here for more information. Organizations/Social - New Agencywide T-shirt Offer
Starport is offering an Orion/Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1) T-shirt and cap to all NASA and contractor employees for a special price of just $11 for the hat and $7 (sizes youth medium to adult XL) or $8 (for sizes 2X to 4X) for the shirt. Order online and select "TX-JSC-Starport" as your delivery option to pick up your shirts at Starport (distribution dates and locations to be announced), or have the them shipped to your home for an additional fee. Wear your shirt any Friday through Jan. 31 to receive a 10 percent discount on store merchandise (standard exclusions apply). Order yours today to "get onboard" and show your support for the Orion Program's EFT-1, the first step to deep space. - Apollo 45th Shirts Back in Stock at Starport
Apollo 45th anniversary T-shirts are back in stock in the Buildings 3 and 11 Starport Gift Shops. Shirts are available in sizes youth medium to adult 4X for $12. Supply is limited. - Black Holes as Spacecraft Propulsion - Aug. 13
Join us for JSC's SAIC/Safety and Mission Assurance speaker forum on Aug. 13 featuring Jeff Lee, researcher and project lead for the X-Physics Propulsion and Power Group at Icarus Interstellar and faculty member of Crescent School. Topic: Using Laser-Generated Quantum Black Holes as Power and Propulsion Sources for Future Spacecraft Date/Time: Wednesday, Aug. 13, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Location: Teague Auditorium Are you interested in traveling beyond low-Earth orbit and the future of space travel? If you enjoyed Dr. Cleaver's presentation on "Icarus Interstellar and NASA's 100-Year Starship Project Goal" earlier this year, you don't want to miss this presentation by Lee. He will discuss the applications and implications of Schwarzschild Kugelblitz (SKs) and the potential speeds and displacements of SK-powered future spacecraft. Laser-generated quantum black holes (SKs) have been proposed as power and propulsion sources for spacecraft. - Raise Your Glass – Space Explorers Toastmasters
For hosting, teaching, presenting and toasting. For poetry, prose, entertaining and roasting. Toastmasters has a plan and a platform for you. Space Explorers Toastmasters (SETM) meets weekly as members prepare and practice speeches and other forms of audience communications. Guests are welcome to observe and participate. Check out SETM so you can raise the bar on your public speaking skills and raise your glass for a job well done. Visit the next SETM meeting tomorrow, July 31, from 11:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. in Building 30A, Room 1010. - Last Chance Lunch
You're invited to greet, meet and eat with the last summer students for 2014's High School Aerospace Scholars. These Texas-based, high-school students want to know: - YOUR NASA story
- YOUR college advice
- YOUR career suggestions
Today's lunch-chat is a valuable opportunity to connect our workforce with the next generation of NASA employees. Take your lunch break and inspire students to come work at NASA. Wednesday Summer Schedule - Building 3 café
- Noon to 1 p.m.
- July 30
- So Your Kid is Going to College
Sending a child off to college is a wonderful milestone, but it is also a time of considerable stress and anxiety for both the parent and the child. Separation, studies, time management, safety, drinking and socialization are just a few of the concerns parents have as their child prepares to leave, and these issues can often make the last few weeks of summer tense for both parents and kids. Please join Employee Assistance Program Director Jackie Reese for an informative discussion on how to navigate this bittersweet transition with sensitivity and confidence. Jobs and Training - RLLS Portal Training for August - Via WebEx
The August monthly RLLS Portal Education Series - via WebEx sessions: - Aug. 6 at 2 p.m. CDT, Translation Support Module Training
- Aug. 7 at 2 p.m. CDT, Transportation Module Training
- Aug. 13 at 2 p.m. CDT, Meeting Support Module Training
- Aug. 14 at 2 p.m. CDT, Flight Arrival Departure Module Training
These 30-minute training sessions are computer-based WebEx sessions, offering individuals the convenience to join from their own workstation. The training will cover the following: - System login
- Locating support modules
- Locating downloadable instructions
- Creating support requests
- Submittal requirements
- Submitting on behalf of another
- Adding attachments
- Selecting special requirements
- Submitting a request
- Status of a request
After each session is an opportunity for Q&A. Please remember that TTI will no longer accept requests for U.S.-performed services unless they are submitted through the RLLS Portal. Email or call 281-335-8565 to sign up. Community - Knocking Out Hunger With YOUR Help
For seniors, food insecurity and hunger can be a problem. Often it comes down to spending their limited income on housing, medication or food. The Galveston County Food Bank's Senior/Disabled Program works to alleviate that insecurity, and we can help through our JSC Feeds Families Program. Drop a donation into any of the collection bins on-site, or purchase a voucher or prepackaged bag of food at either of the Starport Gift Shops. Donations benefit the Galveston County Food Bank and Clear Lake Food Pantry. Since 2000, the amount of food distributed by the Clear Lake Food Pantry has greatly increased. Hungry people come from Clear Lake, Webster, Nassau Bay, Pasadena, Dickinson, Texas City, Alvin and Houston. In 2009, approximately 350 to 400 families per week came to the pantry—many every week—and others only until they found employment or recovered from a family crisis. Join us in knocking out hunger! - Observe the Perseid Meteor Shower Aug.12
The George Observatory will be open on Aug. 12 from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. for the Perseid Meteor Shower. Come out and watch the show! Please remember that stargazing is weather dependent. For more information about the George Observatory, click here. Note: Park entrance fees apply at $7 per person for everyone over 12 years old. | |
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| JSC Today is compiled periodically as a service to JSC employees on an as-submitted basis. Any JSC organization or employee may submit articles. Disclaimer: Accuracy and content of these notes are the responsibility of the submitters. |
NASA and Human Spaceflight News
Wednesday – July 30, 2014
HEADLINES AND LEADS
Ariane 5 boosts last ATV cargo ship into orbit
William Harwood – CBS News
A powerful Ariane 5 rocket carrying the European Space Agency's fifth and final Automated Transfer Vehicle cargo ship roared to life and climbed away from French Guiana Tuesday, kicking off a two-week flight to deliver more than seven tons of equipment and supplies -- including cappuccino and tiramisu -- to the International Space Station.
Ariane 5 Launches Final ATV Mission to Station
Peter B. de Selding – Space News
Europe's Ariane 5 heavy-lift rocket on July 29 successfully launched the fifth and final Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) cargo carrier toward the international space station, marking the beginning of the end for a program whose most important legacy may be a U.S.-European partnership of mutual dependence in manned spaceflight.
NASA maps out geysers, finds evidence of liquid water on surface of Saturn moon
CNN Wire
On the surface of one of Saturn's icy moons, scientists have discovered the possible existence of a very important, life-sustaining element: liquid water.
101 Geysers Spotted on Saturn's Icy Moon Enceladus
The icy Saturn moon Enceladus sports at least 101 geysers, which reach all the way down to the satellite's subsurface ocean, new research suggests.
Geysers on Saturn moon fueled by hidden sea and convulsing ice
Pete Spotts – The Christian Science Monitor
Researchers have identified the icy equivalent of a mini Yellowstone on Saturn's moon Enceladus – 101 geysers spewing ice and water vapor, each erupting from its own tiny hot spot in the moon's south polar region.
Scientists Discover 101 Geysers Erupting at Saturn's Intriguing Icy Moon Enceladus
Ken Kremer – Universe Today
Scientists analyzing the reams of data from NASA's Cassini orbiter at Saturn have discovered 101 geysers erupting from the intriguing icy moon Enceladus and that the spewing material of liquid water likely originates from an underground sea located beneath the tiny moons ice shell, according to newly published research.
Happy 56th Birthday, NASA!
NCC Staff - Constitution Daily
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is such a part of our lives that it's hard to image it not existing. But on July 29, 1958, Congress and the President moved to make NASA a reality.
Crunch time for NASA Glenn's budget, bigger than LeBron and RNC 2016, but where's the outcry? Brent Larkin
Brent Larkin – Cleveland Plain Dealer
There's not much downside to Cleveland landing the Republican National Convention and LeBron James' return to the Cavaliers.
Navy veteran's career touches North Pole, outer space
Sylvia Carignan - The Frederick (MD) News-Post
Mount Airy resident John R.V. Jones has left his mark at the North Pole and in space in a varied career that he humbly says "really isn't that interesting."
No issues between space programs from Russia, U.S.: 'We're just guys working together'
Paul Gattis - Huntsville (AL) Times
Any diplomatic tensions between the United States and Russia haven't spilled over into the space programs between the two nations, a NASA astronaut said Tuesday.
Sanctions From ISS Partner Nations Slow Moscow 2024 Decision
Amy Svitak – Aviation Week
A new round of U.S. and European sanctions leveled at Russia's rising aggression against Ukraine could slow a key decision this year on Moscow's participation in the International Space Station (ISS) beyond 2020.
NASA Lining Up Cubesats for Heavy-lift Rocket's Debut
Debra Werner – Space News
When NASA's Space Launch System takes off on its maiden voyage, instead of carrying astronauts, the heavy-lift rocket is expected to send 11 cubesats on missions to the Moon, an asteroid and other destinations.
NASA limits foreign contributions to U.S. planetary missions
Eric Hand – Science Magazine's Science Insider
How much international collaboration is too much? When it comes to foreign instruments provided to NASA planetary science missions, the answer is anything more than 33%.
NASA Eyes Robotic Space Gas Stations for Satellites
NASA wants to create a robotic gas station in space.
Popular Astronaut Mike Massimino Departs NASA for Position at Columbia University
Mike Killian – AmericaSpace
This week, after nearly two decades with NASA, one of the space agency's most popular astronauts, Mike Massimino, announced his departure to take a full-time position at his Alma Mater, Columbia University in New York.
SpaceX Says "Headcount Reduction" Due To Annual Reviews, Not Layoffs
Jeff Foust – Space News
The loss of up to 200 jobs at SpaceX this month is due to firing of "low performer" employees as part of its annual review process, and not layoffs, the company's president said July 26.
Hartman: U.S. and Russian Crews to Fly Both Soyuz and U.S. Commercial Vehicles
NASA intends to use future U.S. commercial crew vehicles to carry not only its astronauts, but also those of its Russian partner, to the International Space Station (ISS), said Dan Hartman, deputy space station program manager, at a NASA Advisory Council (NAC) meeting on Monday (July 28).
COMPLETE STORIES
Ariane 5 boosts last ATV cargo ship into orbit
William Harwood – CBS News
A powerful Ariane 5 rocket carrying the European Space Agency's fifth and final Automated Transfer Vehicle cargo ship roared to life and climbed away from French Guiana Tuesday, kicking off a two-week flight to deliver more than seven tons of equipment and supplies -- including cappuccino and tiramisu -- to the International Space Station.
Shattering the overnight calm at the Guiana Space Center, the Ariane 5's hydrogen-fueled Vulcain first stage engine ignited with a flash at 7:47 p.m. EDT (GMT-4), throttling up to full power an instant before a pair of large solid-fuel boosters ignited with a rush of exhaust.
The towering rocket quickly climbed away from its launching stand on the northeast coast of South America, arcing out over the Atlantic Ocean into the plane of the space station's orbit.
The ascent appeared to go smoothly, with the strap-on boosters falling away as planned two minutes and 24 seconds after launch. Six-and-a-half minutes after that, the Ariane 5 first stage fell away and the rocket continued the climb to space on the power of its single second-stage Aestus engine.
The second stage shut down 17 minutes after launch, putting the spacecraft into a preliminary parking orbit. A second, shorter firing was executed 42 minutes later to establish a circular 162-mile-high orbit, about 100 miles below the space station.
The ATV-5 spacecraft, named after the Belgian priest and astrophysicist Georges Lemaitre, then was released from the Ariane 5's second stage about one hour after liftoff to complete the launch phase of the mission, the 60th success in a row for the Ariane 5. The ATV's solar arrays unfolded and locked in place about a half hour after separation.
"The last of the litter is now in orbit," said ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain. "The ATV, Georges Lemaitre, is doing well."
The flight plan calls for the cargo ship to execute a series of carefully planned rocket firings to catch up with the space station, flying below the outpost before looping up and over, dropping back to a point directly behind and below the lab complex. From there, the spacecraft will move in for docking at the aft port of the Zvezda command module around 9:30 a.m. on Aug. 12.
The ATV-5 vehicle is the heaviest payload ever launched by an Ariane 5, the European Space Agency's fifth and final station cargo flight. Station resupply now will depend solely on Russian Progress spacecraft, Japanese HTV cargo ships and commercial freighters built for NASA by SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp.
ESA, which supplied the station's Columbus laboratory module, is looking ahead to development of power, propulsion and life support systems that will be used by NASA's Orion deep space exploration vehicle.
"It's really a great achievement," Eric Beranger, director of space programs for ATV-builder Airbus Defence and Space, said of the cargo craft. "It's the best we've ever launched. It's the last, but at the same time it's a beginning, because it is also preparing for the future Orion missions where we will provide the service module."
ESA's partnership with NASA on the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle -- Orion -- "will be the first time ever Europe and Airbus are providing a critical system to a U.S. human spaceflight rated capsule," Beranger said. "We will provide propulsion, energy and life support, which is absolutely key for human spaceflight. It's both an au revoir and the beginning of a new adventure."
Bart Reijnens, in charge of orbital systems and space exploration at Airbus Defence and Space, said preparing the ATV for the program's final flight brought mixed emotions after three decades of planning and development.
"It's not easy to say farewell to ATV," he told reporters before launch. "You can be sure about that. The pain is much less because at the same time, European member states, together with NASA, have taken a commitment to jointly go for MPCV/Orion. This is our next challenge, and our engineers want to have a challenge."
Asked how much the knowledge and experienced gained building and flying the ATV will play into Orion, Reijnens said "it's huge. To say it very bluntly, if Europe had not done ATV, the service module for MPCV would have been a no go."
Thomas Reiter, a space station veteran who now serves as director ESA's human spaceflight program, said his agency's commitment to Orion demonstrates "that all the effort we have taken to build such a fantastic vehicle to do cargo transfer and automated docking is not lost, but it's built upon for future activities."
The ATV-5 is loaded with 5,941 pounds of dry cargo, including crew supplies, spare parts and research gear, 1,858 pounds of water, three tanks of oxygen and air totaling 220 pounds, 4,669 pounds of propellant that will be used for station maneuvers and 1,896 pounds of fuel that will be pumped aboard for use by the station's Russian thrusters.
ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst will serve as loadmaster aboard the station, coordinating the transfer of dry cargo into the the lab complex and overseeing the ATV's reloading with trash and no-longer-needed equipment.
Among the cargo bound for the station is the European Space Agency's Electromagnetic Levitator, an 882-pound research apparatus designed to suspend various metals in weightlessness, heat them to nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit and then rapidly cool the samples.
"Blacksmiths have been using this technique for centuries, creating steel tools and weapons by heating, hammering and quenching in water," ESA said in a web description. "This process sets the steel's structure and causes it to be hard and stay sharp.
"Understanding the underlying physics of this simple example is complicated and factors such as gravity and the mould used to hold the metal in place influence the process making it difficult to get to the fundamentals. ... For scientists, observing liquid metals cooling in weightlessness removes unnecessary complexity to reveal the core processes."
The experiments will be conducted by Gerst in ESA's Columbus research module.
Also on board the ATV are a pump for the station's water recycling system and an experimental joystick known as Haptics-1, described by ESA as a "touchy-feely joystick, which will investigate how people feel tactile feedback in space, preparing for remote robotic operations from orbit."
ATV-5 is expected to remain attached to the station until Jan. 25. After undocking, it will carry out one final engineering experiment during its catastrophic plunge back into the atmosphere. The spacecraft is carrying an infrared camera that will document the breakup from inside.
NASA and the Japanese space agency have flown similar instruments, but the break-up camera, or BUC, is a first for ESA.
"The infrared camera, bolted to an ATV rack, will burn up with the rest of the spacecraft, but imagery of the final 20 seconds will be passed to the Re-entry SatCom, a spherical capsule protected by a ceramic heat shield," ESA wrote in a web description.
After the ATV breaks up, the Re-Entry SatComn will transmit its stored data to an Iridium communications satellite for relay back to engineers on the ground. The goal is to learn more about the forces spacecraft are subjected to during atmospheric entry and how various systems respond.
Ariane 5 Launches Final ATV Mission to Station
Peter B. de Selding – Space News
Europe's Ariane 5 heavy-lift rocket on July 29 successfully launched the fifth and final Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) cargo carrier toward the international space station, marking the beginning of the end for a program whose most important legacy may be a U.S.-European partnership of mutual dependence in manned spaceflight.
Weighing 20,300 kilograms — including adaptors in addition to the vehicle itself — the ATV-5 was placed into a 260-kilometer orbit and was reported in good health by its ground managers at the European Space Agency. The vehicle is carrying some 7,000 kilograms of fuel, water, food and other supplies.
ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain announced shortly after the launch that ATV-5's solar panels had been deployed successfully.
It is scheduled to dock automatically to the space station Aug. 12, where it will stay for about six months before being loaded with garbage and sent on a destructive re-entry into Earth's atmosphere over the South Pacific.
ATV-5 has two mission elements that set it apart from its four predecessors, which were launched between March 2008 and June 2013. The first uses a laser-optical sensor and three visible- and infrared-spectrum cameras to examine the station in a 'fly under' maneuver before docking. During the maneuver, the ATV will approach to within 3.5 kilometers of the station to image it in ways that ground teams hope will be useful for future space surveillance and rendezvous activities with 'non-cooperative targets' and orbital-debris-removal attempts.
The second element comes into play during ATV-5's descent into the atmosphere over the South Pacific. The four preceding ATVs were guided into a steep dive into the atmosphere to minimize the area in which any debris that survived re-entry fell into the ocean. At NASA's request, ESA decided to have ATV-5 enter the atmosphere at a much shallower angle, spending more time in the upper atmosphere to simulate the behavior of the space station when the time comes to retire it.
The station weighs some 420,000 kilograms, is composed of multiple modules and has a vast field of solar arrays, but similarities between the basic configuration of the two vehicles make it useful to see how ATV-5 breaks up over a longer flight through the atmosphere.
NASA, which is the station's general contractor, wants to continue operating the space station until 2024 and is waiting for the other space station partners — Russia, Japan, Europe and Canada — to signal their intentions. Currently the other partners are committed only until 2020.
The end of the ATV program deprives the station partners of the only vehicle that, by itself, could deorbit the space station. Current planning is to use two or three Russian Progress vehicles for the job.
ESA officials said their agency is set up to perform research and development and not to build identical copies of the same hardware. In the meantime, NASA had contracted with Space Exploration Technologies Corp. of Hawthorne, California, and Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Virginia, to deliver freight to the station.
Japan's H-TV freighter continues in operation, leaving four vehicles to handle station resupply — enough to meet the requirements.
The ATV has been used by ESA to pay its 8 percent share of the station's common operating costs. At the end of the ATV-5 mission, ESA will have paid NASA the European share of operations through 2017.
For the remaining three years — or perhaps longer — ESA has agreed to use many ATV technologies to provide NASA with the service module for the U.S. agency's Orion multipurpose crew-transport vehicle. The current agreement carries ESA's role only through the construction and delivery of a first Orion service module and provision of components for a second service module.
NASA retains the intellectual property to the ESA work and could assign a U.S. contractor to do it if the ESA-NASA cooperation accord does not continue. But NASA and ESA officials have said the goal is that ESA will remain on the "critical path" for NASA's human space flight program by continuing to provide the service module.
ESA's most immediate space station goal is to secure its member governments' commitment of some 205 million euros ($279 million) needed to complete the current Orion service module work.
Many in Europe regret that the ATV is being retired so early, but ESA officials said the cost of delivering a kilogram to orbit aboard ATV was too high to continue the program.
William H. Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said July 29 that while ATV is a formidable vehicle, the station partners have taken steps to compensate for its retirement. The station's on-board fuel reservoirs have been filled, Gerstenmaier said.
In addition, the orbital complex flies at a higher orbit than it did during the years when it was being assembled. Station controllers have also learned to save fuel by maneuvering the solar arrays to reduce atmospheric drag.
NASA has also learned to maneuver the station without fuel, which costs some $10,000 per pound to deliver to orbit. The Zero-Propellant Maneuver uses the small control momentum gyroscopes on board to make small adjustments.
NASA maps out geysers, finds evidence of liquid water on surface of Saturn moon
CNN Wire
On the surface of one of Saturn's icy moons, scientists have discovered the possible existence of a very important, life-sustaining element: liquid water.
NASA scientists announced Monday the identification of 101 distinct geysers erupting on Saturn's moon Enceladus. Their analysis suggests that water, a crucial component for life beyond our planet, can reach the Saturnian moon's surface.
First sighted in 2005, the geysers erupt from four "tiger stripe" fractures along the moon's south polar terrain and spew tiny ice particles and water vapor, NASA said in news release.
After seven years of collecting mission data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, scientists found the geysers to be powered by small hot spots — the result of water vapor condensing and venting from subsurface seawater; thus, answering questions about the geysers' origins.
Researchers had previously thought the geysers' ice particles and water vapor came from either frictional heat or from water vapor below the surface.
"Once we had these results in hand, we knew right away heat was not causing the geysers, but vice versa," said NASA adviser Carolyn Porco, who led the Cassini imaging team. "It also told us the geysers are not a near-surface phenomenon, but have much deeper roots."
101 Geysers Spotted on Saturn's Icy Moon Enceladus
The icy Saturn moon Enceladus sports at least 101 geysers, which reach all the way down to the satellite's subsurface ocean, new research suggests.
Scientists mapped out 101 geysers of water vapor and ice near Enceladus' south pole after analyzing images captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft over a period of nearly seven years. This effort also helped astronomers trace the eruptions to their source, researchers said.
Cassini first spotted geysers erupting from four "tiger stripe" fractures on Enceladus — a 310-mile-wide (500 kilometers) moon covered by an icy shell — in 2005, but their origin remains the subject of some debate to this day.
For example, some scientists think the geysers are driven by frictional heat generated when the tiger stripes' walls rub together. This scenario implies that the plumes consist of material from Enceladus' surface, or just beneath it.
But other researchers posit that the geysers reach all the way down to the ocean of liquid water that sloshes beneath Enceladus' icy shell, and that they blast into space when the fractures open up. If this is the case, future spacecraft that collect material from the plumes could sample this ocean without even touching down on the moon — a prospect that excites astrobiologists, who view Enceladus as one of the solar system's best bets to host alien life.
Researchers compared the locations of the newly mapped 101 geysers with precision data gathered in 2010 by Cassini's heat-sensing gear. They determined that each eruption is associated with a hot spot measuring just a few dozen feet across — too small to be generated by fracture walls rubbing together.
"Once we had these results in hand, we knew right away heat was not causing the geysers, but vice versa," lead author Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini imaging team from the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. "It also told us the geysers are not a near-surface phenomenon, but have much deeper roots." Those roots reach the moon's subsurface sea via unfrozen conduits in Enceladus' ice shell, the team concluded.
In a second study, astronomers found that Enceladus' overall geyser-generated plume varies in brightness as the moon makes its way around Saturn. The exact cause of the brightness variation remains a mystery, however.
Both new studies appear in the latest issue of the Astronomical Journal.
The $3.2 billion Cassini mission — a joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency — launch in 1997 and arrived in orbit around Saturn in 2004. The spacecraft is scheduled to keep studying the ringed planet and its many moons until September 2017, when it will perform an intentional death dive into the gas giant's atmosphere.
Geysers on Saturn moon fueled by hidden sea and convulsing ice
Pete Spotts – The Christian Science Monitor
Researchers have identified the icy equivalent of a mini Yellowstone on Saturn's moon Enceladus – 101 geysers spewing ice and water vapor, each erupting from its own tiny hot spot in the moon's south polar region.
The observations from instruments aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft, currently touring Saturn and its moons, point to a plumbing system that reaches all the way down to a sea some 17 to 25 miles below the surface, the researchers say.
The work represents the most comprehensive look yet at unusual heat signatures in the south polar region, the geysers, and the forces that govern the pattern of their eruptions.
The analysis, which appears in two papers in the September issue of the Astronomical Journal and posted online Monday, looks to settle a debate over where the geysers originate, boosting Enceladus' already considerable scientific draw as a place to look for habitable environments.
Some 99 percent of the water-ice particles the geysers spew are rich in salts, suggesting that water came in contact with a rocky core. The salt content is similar to that of sea water. And the water vapor carries trace amounts of methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide, and light hydrocarbons.
During the past seven years, researchers have considered two sources for the geysers.
One idea posits that the sources are near the surface, where the ice is brittle. Gravitational interactions with another moon, Dione, force Enceladus to trace an elliptical orbit around Saturn. The changing stresses from Saturn's gravity during each orbit would prompt the sides of near-surface cracks on Enceladus to slide back and forth against each other, generating friction that would melt some of the ice. This would make liquid available for geysers.
The second possibility is that the liquid comes directly from the under-ice sea. The tidal forces from Saturn's gravity would serve as the invisible hand prying open, then closing the cracks that serve as conduits for the rising water and water vapor.
The new results favor this explanation. Enceladus' plumbing involves the pressure of an ice crust bearing down on the sea underneath, forcing water up through cracks in the ice, according to the picture assembled by one of the two teams
Once the ice rises high enough, the pressure subsides to be replaced by the release of carbon dioxide dissolved in the water. Once Saturn's gravity pries apart the cracks at the surface, the gas-laden water and water vapor are launched as a plume like spray from a shaken soda can. On the way out through the chilly surface, the latent heat in the water and water vapor – in essence the heat it took to convert ice to liquid and liquid to vapor in the first place – is released, generating the hot spots Cassini sees.
The results of the studies are a boon for future missions, which could sample the plumes for evidence of habitability, says Carolyn Porco, a planetary scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., who heads Cassini's imaging team.
Plumes from geysers driven by near-surface melting could have salts or biological materials in them. But the salts and biological material likely would have arrived at the surface after millions of years of convection within the ice crust, explains Dr. Porco, who is the lead author on one of the two papers. The plume would contain ancient material.
Plume material coming directly from the under-ice sea takes only a few days to reach the surface, she says. "That's way better than investigating recently melted ice."
The team drew on data Cassini gathered over 6-1/2 years. Each Enceladus flyby came at a different approach angle and had a different angle of incoming sunlight. This allowed the team to map the location individual geysers by triangulation.
The geysers appeared along four large gashes in the south polar region's crust that the team dubbed tiger stripes when they were first discovered in 2005. Thermal images from Cassini indicate that one or two geysers are associated with each hot spot. The hots spots are about 30 feet across.
The researchers note that if the source of the geysers was frictional heating along near-surface cracks, the heat signatures would tend to cover a few kilometers of the surface. Instead, the hot spots are tiny and follow the tiger stripes.
Hot is a relative term. The team estimates that the hot spots are about 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The rest of the surface is estimated for now at more than 350 degrees below zero. That may be generous. Porco notes that the measurements underpinning the estimate were taken during the south polar summer, when the region was in sunlight. A more accurate reading of the region's intrinsic temperature should come next year, when Cassini flies by Enceladus during the south polar winter.
In addition to the heating detected so far along the tiger stripes, she says, "We could have regional tidal heating, which could heat the whole area."
Scientists Discover 101 Geysers Erupting at Saturn's Intriguing Icy Moon Enceladus
Ken Kremer – Universe Today
Scientists analyzing the reams of data from NASA's Cassini orbiter at Saturn have discovered 101 geysers erupting from the intriguing icy moon Enceladus and that the spewing material of liquid water likely originates from an underground sea located beneath the tiny moons ice shell, according to newly published research.
The geysers are composed of tiny icy particles, water vapor and trace amounts of simple organic molecules. They were first sighted in Cassini imagery snapped during flyby's of the 310-mile-wide (500 kilometers wide) moon back in 2005 and immediately thrust Enceladus forward as a potential abode for alien life beyond Earth and prime scientific inquisition.
Liquid water, organic molecules and an energy source are the key requirements for life as we know it.
The eruptions emanated from a previously unknown network of four prominent "tiger stripe" fractures, named Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo and Alexandria sulci, located at the south polar region of Saturn's sixth largest moon.
Using imagery gathered over nearly seven years of surveys by Cassini's cameras, researchers generated a survey map of the 101 geysers erupting from the four tiger strips.
The new findings and theories on the physical nature of how the geysers erupt have been published in two articles in the current online edition of the Astronomical Journal.
Scientists had initially postulated that the origin of the geysers could be frictional heating generated from back and forth rubbing of the opposing walls of the tiger stripe fractures that converted water ice into liquids and vapors. Another theory held that the opening and closing of the fractures allowed water vapor from below to reach the surface.
The geysers locations was eventually determined to coincide with small local hot spots erupting from one of the tiger stripe fractures after researchers compared low resolution thermal emission maps with the geysers' locations and found the greatest activity at the warmest spots.
After later high-resolution data was collected in 2010 by Cassini's heat-sensing instruments the geysers were found to coincide with small-scale hot spots, measuring only a few dozen feet (or tens of meters) across.
"Once we had these results in hand we knew right away heat was not causing the geysers, but vice versa," said Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini imaging team from the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and lead author of the first paper. "It also told us the geysers are not a near-surface phenomenon, but have much deeper roots."
"Thanks to recent analysis of Cassini gravity data, the researchers concluded the only plausible source of the material forming the geysers is the sea now known to exist beneath the ice shell. They also found that narrow pathways through the ice shell can remain open from the sea all the way to the surface, if filled with liquid water," according to a NASA press release.
These are very exciting results in the search for life beyond Earth and clearly warrant a follow up mission.
"In casting your sights on the geysering glory of Enceladus, you are looking at frozen mist that originates deep within the solar system's most accessible habitable zone," writes Porco in her Captain's Log summary of the new findings.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). Cassini was launched by a Titan IV rocket in 1997 and arrived at Saturn in 2004.
In 2005 Cassini deployed the Huygens probe which landed on Titan, Saturn's largest moon sporting oceans of organic molecules and another prime location in the search for life.
The Cassini mission will conclude in 2017 with an intentional suicide dive into Saturn to prevent contamination on Titan and Enceladus – but lots more breathtaking science will be accomplished in the meantime!
Happy 56th Birthday, NASA!
NCC Staff - Constitution Daily
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is such a part of our lives that it's hard to image it not existing. But on July 29, 1958, Congress and the President moved to make NASA a reality.
It's also hard to imagine in today's world of partisan gridlock that the executive and legislative branches created by the Founders could create a major government agency in little less than one year's time.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the act to "provide for research into the problems of flight within and outside the Earth's atmosphere, and for other purposes." Congress had already passed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which became a priority after one shocking event in 1957.
"The enactment of this legislation is a historic step," Eisenhower said. "I want to commend the Congress for the promptness with which it has created the organization."
On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. The launch and subsequent Soviet successes started the "Space Race," a battle of will and technology between the United States and the U.S.S.R.
Congress immediately addressed the issue when Senate Majority Leader (and future President) Lyndon Johnson chaired hearings on American space and missile activities.
The United States had been involved in serious research and development activities about rocket technology for some time. The Department of Defense had been involved in rocketry and upper atmospheric sciences since World War II. And a separate agency, National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), had considerable resources.
The NACA had about 8,000 employees, a $100 million budget and three research labs. About half of the NACA's work involved aeronautics.
President Eisenhower spearheaded the legislation effort on the executive side. Nelson Rockefeller was also involved in an advisory role. An important decision was the creation of a new civilian agency, instead of revamping the NACA or leaving space decisions solely in military hands.
By April 1958, Congress was already holding final hearings about the act. Johnson was credited as the driving force behind the legislation within Congress, working with John McCormick.
When NASA officially started operations in October 1958, about a year after the Sputnik launch, NASA combined all the assets of the NACA with space science group of the Naval Research Laboratory in Maryland, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (managed by the California Institute of Technology for the Army), and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama.
The addition Huntsville facility was important , because it included Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket engineers.
By 1959, NASA started Project Mercury, continuing a program that originated with the Air Force. NASA's successes over the following decade culminated in the first moon landing in July 1969, and its later successes included Skylab, the Space Shuttle Program and International Space Station.
Crunch time for NASA Glenn's budget, bigger than LeBron and RNC 2016, but where's the outcry? Brent Larkin
Brent Larkin – Cleveland Plain Dealer
There's not much downside to Cleveland landing the Republican National Convention and LeBron James' return to the Cavaliers.
Both will ring the cash register for the entire Northeast Ohio economy. And both are an undeniable plus for the city's image.
But given that Cleveland is unaccustomed to an avalanche of good news, it's important the cheerleaders don't lose perspective.
As good as these two things are for the local economy, there's a 350-acre patch of land adjacent to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport that is so much more important to Northeast Ohio than a political convention or a 29-year-old basketball player that it's probably an insult to mention the three of them in the same sentence.
That land is home to NASA Glenn Research Center, arguably Greater Cleveland's most important economic asset -- an asset where officials there are once again deeply worried about the prospect of pending federal budget cuts.
A congressional decision on NASA Glenn's fiscal 2015 budget isn't expected until after the November election (its fiscal year technically begins Oct. 1). But it's not too early to worry, as a big cut in the research center's funding would be nothing short of devastating.
The prospect of Congress taking an ax to NASA Glenn's budget has been an ongoing concern here for nearly 20 years. It hasn't happened yet. Instead, a year-by-year look at the center's funding finds what resembles a death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy.
NASA Glenn today is home to 1,626 employees, down from more than 2,200 in 1997. There are also 1,511 employees at NASA who work for private contractors. Its workforce is among the best-educated on the planet. Two thirds of NASA's 1,108 scientists and engineers have advanced degrees. Twenty five percent are Ph.Ds.
A Cleveland State University study determined that in fiscal year 2012, NASA Glenn had a $1.2 billion impact on the Northeast Ohio economy, generating $83 million in taxes.
Whereas NASA Glenn generates those breathtaking dollar amounts every 12 months, the one-time impact of the Republican National Convention will be about $400 million. James should be worth about $50 million annually to the Northeast Ohio economy for the five years or so he remains a superstar.
NASA's Cleveland center is the space agency's primary driver of research, technology and systems designed to advance not only space exploration, but also aviation.
Cleveland native James Free, the 45-year-old NASA Glenn director, said when scientists from the center attend international conferences, "They're treated like rock stars."
Indeed, since 1966, NASA Glenn has won more research and development awards than all other NASA centers combined. During a recent, two-hour tour of the NASA complex, a small group of us were blown away by the wondrous work that goes on there. And not all of that work is about space travel.
Cutting edge, NASA Glenn research improves and saves lives in literally dozens of meaningful ways. A few of those ways include research on jet engine icing designed to prevent passenger planes from falling from the sky, huge advances in new medical devices that save lives, and increased automobile fuel economy.
NASA Glenn's problem has always had more to do with politics than performance. Members of Congress from the deep South, mostly senators, have succeeded in climbing the ladders of power on congressional committees that control NASA's programs and purse strings.
For decades, that southern strategy has forced Ohio's senators and Northeast Ohio members of Congress to fight a strategy designed to minimize NASA Glenn's losses. While NASA space centers in the South have expanded, NASA Glenn's influence has waned.
For NASA's fiscal year 2014, which ends Sept. 30, the Obama administration had proposed $684 million for NASA Glenn. Congress cut that funding to $567 million.
Officials at NASA Glenn and the Greater Cleveland Partnership have been lobbying for months to preserve the Obama administration's proposed $587 million in funding for 2015.
"NASA Glenn has been a very high-priority item for us for a long time, but for some it's not on the radar screen like it is in places like Alabama, Florida and Texas," said GCP head Joe Roman. "Our federal delegation doesn't sit on the key committees like they do in those states. And the general public here doesn't live and breathe NASA like local communities in the South."
Brook Park Mayor Tom Coyne thinks now might be a good time to start. Coyne has been one of NASA's biggest boosters for decades. And in one of biggest steals since the Louisiana Purchase, in 2001 he negotiated a deal with Cleveland where income-tax proceeds from NASA workers now go to Brook Park.
In return, Cleveland and Mayor Michael R. White got the IX Center and land on which White wanted to build a runway for all those 16-hour flights that leave Hopkins each day for places like Beijing, Hong Kong and Tokyo.
"I'm so happy for Mayor Jackson about the convention," said Coyne. "And I'm ecstatic about LeBron. But we're missing the boat on NASA. For all these years, people have talked about NASA being our crown jewel. And every time its budget is threatened, the results are the same. It never changes. We lose funding.
"Sherrod Brown and Rob Portman [Ohio's senators], and everyone in this congressional delegation should be screaming bloody murder. We've really missed the boat on this."
If the budget cuts continue, we'll be missing not only the boat, but the engine that helps drive the entire economy.
Brent Larkin was The Plain Dealer's editorial director from 1991 until his retirement in 2009.
Navy veteran's career touches North Pole, outer space
Sylvia Carignan - The Frederick (MD) News-Post
Mount Airy resident John R.V. Jones has left his mark at the North Pole and in space in a varied career that he humbly says "really isn't that interesting."
As a quality assurance representative working under a contractor for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in the 1990s, he and his team inspected the entire International Space Station.
"Every bolt, every resistor, every board," he said.
Jones said one implement his team worked on was the pistol grip tool, which looks and acts much like a typical power drill. The piece was designed at Goddard Space Flight Center to service the Hubble Space Telescope, and it ended up on the International Space Station.
The tool is powered by lithium-ion batteries, which were not nearly as prevalent in the early 1990s as they are now in consumer electronics. The pistol grip tool's predecessor was powered by C batteries, Jones said.
He said it was NASA's investment in the technology for that tool that helped accelerate the battery's development.
He was also employed to witness a test of an International Space Station radiator system in Goddard's Space Environment Simulator, which was used to test the Hubble Space Telescope before it was launched into orbit.
"Most of the things I worked on are actually still flying on Hubble," Jones said.
Scott Robinson, a Columbia resident, led Jones' quality assurance team and said his was an "extremely" stressful job.
"If something blew up or fell back to Earth, damaged the shuttle, or injured the astronauts, it was our butts on the line," Robinson said. "The guys in suits would come looking at our records first."
Jones said the feeling of liability that came from the job affected every member of his team, but he was somewhat prepared for the high-stress job because of his military background.
Growing up in northern Virginia, Jones said he knew he liked working with electronics, and he wanted to be a submariner, but he struggled in school.
"Astronomy was the only high school class I actually aced," he said.
He joined the Navy in 1979 and was on active duty for almost a decade. He became part of the Navy's Submarine Force and in 1986, went to the North Pole in a submarine for a mission.
Jones said the specifics of that mission are still classified.
"Trust me, what we were testing really wasn't that interesting," he said.
He said he lost 70 pounds on that mission because his submarine lost its capability for refrigerating and freezing food about a month after they began. They survived on canned ham, salami and powdered food for the rest of the mission.
"To this day, I still don't eat much deli ham," he said.
Jones is retired but currently works as a lead investigator of the Mid-Atlantic Paranormal Research Team. He and a colleague are working to film evidence of the paranormal in abandoned and haunted places in Carroll County for a documentary, "Haunted Sykesville."
No issues between space programs from Russia, U.S.: 'We're just guys working together'
Paul Gattis - Huntsville (AL) Times
Any diplomatic tensions between the United States and Russia haven't spilled over into the space programs between the two nations, a NASA astronaut said Tuesday.
Richard Mastracchio joined Michael Hopkins at Marshall Space Flight Center to discuss their recent six-month mission to the International Space Station.
During a briefing with the media, Mastracchio was asked about a comment from a Russian official that suggested NASA launch its astronauts to the ISS using a trampoline rather than a Russian Soyuz rocket. With the retiring of the space shuttle, the U.S. has been hitching rides to the space station on Russian rockets.
"After analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest to the USA to bring their astronauts to the International Space Station using a trampoline," Rogozin said in April via his Russian-language Twitter account, according to an NBC News report.
"We're working on it, right?" Mastracchio said with a smile on Tuesday. "We don't call it a trampoline, though. We're working on launch vehicles to get U.S. astronauts back to orbit and that's a great thing. We need to get U.S. astronauts launching from the U.S. and we're working on it so that will happen pretty soon."
NASA is developing the Space Launch System – a giant rocket designed to send Americans to deep space – at Marshall Space Flight Center.
As for U.S.-Russian relations, Mastracchio said any friction hasn't affected the space programs at all. NASA has said that any issues with Russia will not prevent the U.S. from its role on the space station.
"It's like any relationship," he said. "There are high times and low times. And I think maybe Russia and the U.S. may be going through some tough times in terms of the relationship. In terms of the space program, our relationship with them is fantastic. At the working level when we're in orbit with the cosmonauts or training with them, these guys are our friends.
"We don't look at them as our foes or worried about sanctions we have against them or they have against us. We're just guys working together to try to accomplish a mission. At the working level with the engineers and the scientists and the crew members, the relationship is fantastic. Of course, as you get higher and higher up in the chain, maybe the relationship is not as good. I don't know; I'm not involved in all that. But it's really no impact on us in orbit or us in training in any way."
Sanctions From ISS Partner Nations Slow Moscow 2024 Decision
Amy Svitak – Aviation Week
A new round of U.S. and European sanctions leveled at Russia's rising aggression against Ukraine could slow a key decision this year on Moscow's participation in the International Space Station (ISS) beyond 2020.
For now, mounting political tensions are "more or less" not affecting day-to-day operations aboard the orbiting outpost, says Alexey Krasnov, head of human spaceflight at Russian space agency Roscosmos. Speaking to reporters here on the eve of the Europe's fifth and final Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV-5) launch to the ISS, Krasnov said personnel at NASA are doing "everything they can to make sure politics do not affect our ability to work together."
However, with Moscow set to approve a new space road map this year for the period 2016-2025, Roscosmos needs to know now whether to budget for ISS hardware purchases that could keep the Russian elements of the space station functioning beyond 2020. Given rising political tensions over the escalating conflict in eastern Ukraine, Krasnov says it is unclear whether Moscow will approve Russia's continued role in the ISS any time soon.
"We were told there would be support for the 2024 date, but our arguments were generated before April," when U.S. sanctions against Russian individuals and entities were put into force, he says.
Led by NASA, the ISS remains the largest international technology undertaking in history, one in which the U.S., Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan expect to have invested more than $100 billion by the end of the decade. As the lead ISS nation, the U.S. announced plans earlier this year to continue space station operations four years beyond a previously planned retirement in 2020.
However, Russia and Europe have not agreed to continue participating in the program after that date. With the threat of additional sanctions looming, the space station's future appears increasingly murky.
William Gerstenmaier, NASA's head of human spaceflight and operations, is confident Russia will stick with the ISS through 2024, though the current geopolitical climate suggests they may be reluctant to unveil such plans.
"Where before I was thinking Russia probably would step up first, that may not be the case now, and we have to be prepared for that," Gerstenmaier told reporters here July 29. "But if the U.S. can stay strong and we can still articulate why it makes sense to extend, then I think that also lets all the other partners think about this process and move forward."
Gerstenmaier said even if Russia does not plan for ISS extension this year, benefits of continued participation remain, should Moscow reach a decision within the next couple of years.
"There's an opportunity lost by not knowing the station is going to be extended fully," Gerstenmaier said. "Having a 10-year research horizon is pretty important to them. Now, what this has done is put some uncertainty as to whether this 10-year horizon is going to happen. I think it will, but if it gets delayed two years, the benefit isn't as real."
In the meantime, tonight's final ATV mission will leave Moscow responsible for key aspects of the orbiting outpost. Slated to lift off this evening at 8:47 p.m. local time, the retirement of ATV makes Russia's Progress transport vehicles the sole means of propulsive support to the ISS, including the ability to refuel the Russian Zvezda module, reboost the space station's degrading altitude and occasionally maneuver it from the path of space debris.
Space station partners already rely on Russia's Soyuz vehicle as the only form of crew transport to and from the ISS. With the final ATV, Progress becomes the lone spacecraft capable of deorbiting the space station at the end of its mission life, a retirement that is expected to occur within a decade.
With no more ATVs to deliver fuel to the ISS, Russia will be charged with managing propulsive support to the station, as well as for its eventual deorbit, a controlled re-entry that will send the 450-metric-ton structure into the Pacific Ocean.
"We are working on different deorbit scenarios," he said, including emergency evacuation of the ISS. "Two or three Progress vehicles can do this," he says.
Gerstenmaier says the partners have ample time to determine how to retire the space station.
"I have a long time to do this," he said, adding that ISS nations are likewise prepared for an emergency evacuation of the station. "But you're multiple failures away before you get there," he said.
While NASA is the lead partner on ISS, all five members share responsibility for deorbiting the space station on a pro-rata basis determined by each member's percentage of hardware mass.
But with relations deteriorating among the governments of the space station's top three partners, one of the primary goals of the ISS agreement – the potential to use the station as a springboard for cooperative space exploration – appears in doubt.
"This could affect our ability to explore together beyond low Earth orbit," Krasnov said, though Gerstenmaier says the multinational partnership could offer common ground on which governments can build trust.
"Even though it's an uncertain time, that basis for exploration is still there," Gerstenmaier said. "When these crises occur between countries, it's important to have something you can talk about that you mutually agree is supportable by all countries. And having the space station as this multilateral engineering achievement, that offers the politicians an avenue for communication."
NASA Lining Up Cubesats for Heavy-lift Rocket's Debut
Debra Werner – Space News
When NASA's Space Launch System takes off on its maiden voyage, instead of carrying astronauts, the heavy-lift rocket is expected to send 11 cubesats on missions to the Moon, an asteroid and other destinations.
Although the project is still in planning stages, NASA Human Exploration and Operations Directorate's Advanced Exploration Systems program has already selected three missions to ride along: BioSentinel, a NASA Ames Research Center project to study the damage radiation causes to living organisms; Lunar Flashlight, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory cubesat equipped with a solar sail to provide propulsion and illuminate permanently shadowed craters near the Moon's south pole; and Near Earth Asteroid Scout, a Marshall Space Flight Center mission to rendezvous with an asteroid and gather detailed imagery.
Officials within NASA's Science and Space Technology mission directorates are drafting plans to select additional cubesats for the voyage. In June, the Space Technology Mission Directorate's Centennial Challenges Program issued a request for information, seeking public input on contests to award $3 million in prizes to competitors who demonstrate advanced cubesat propulsion, communications and longevity in lunar orbit and $1.5 million for cubesats capable of communicating with Earth from ten times the distance between Earth and the Moon.
All the projects are focused on sending six-unit cubesats, which measure 10 centimeters by 20 centimeters by 30 centimeters, into heliocentric orbit from the second stage of SLS. The cubesats would be released after the rocket sends the Orion capsule into a distant lunar retrograde orbit. The Centennial Challenges solicitation requests comments on how doubling the size of proposed cubesats would benefit various projects.
Under current plans, SLS — which is slated to make its debut at the end of 2017 — would carry a ring of 11 cubesats directly below the Orion crew capsule in the space usually reserved for life support systems and associated electronics. "SLS will get out of Earth's gravity well and eject the cubesats in cis-lunar space where you could use low energy propulsion such as solar sails or ion engines to go to different places and do different things," said Barbara Cohen, Lunar Flashlight science lead at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
As NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate examines comments submitted in July on proposed prizes, NASA Advanced Exploration Systems officials are preparing to review mission concepts for BioSentinel, Lunar Flashlight and Near Earth Asteroid Scout. If those missions are approved, researchers plan to begin designing and building the cubesats.
BioSentinel is designed to extend beyond low Earth orbit the biological research NASA Ames scientists have performed for many years. Future manned missions to an asteroid or Mars will require a better understanding of the radiation environment beyond low Earth orbit, said Matt Sorgenfrei, NASA Ames BioSentinel propulsion system lead.
The BioSentinel mission will carry into a deep-space heliocentric orbit multiple cultures of a genetically modified strain of yeast that researchers have manipulated to respond to DNA damage by reproducing, as well as a radiation spectrometer and dosimeter for taking measurements, Sorgenfrei said.
"We can track the growth of this culture of yeast cells to deduce information about the radiation flux being experienced by the spacecraft in this deep space orbit," Sorgenfrei said. "What makes the biology payload exciting is that by studying growth of the yeast cells and their response to DNA damage, we start to build up a little bit of an analogy of what might happen to humans while they are traveling to an asteroid or Mars."
The BioSentinel team plans to build three identical payloads. In addition to the SLS cubesat, one is for the international space station and the other would remain on the ground. "We would be able over the life of the mission to collect three data points: one from the deep space environment where you don't have the benefit of the protection of Earth's magnetic field, one from the standard low Earth orbit environment where humans have spent the vast majority of their time in space, and this additional control on the ground, which we could blast with specific types of radiation at someplace like Brookhaven [National] Laboratory or let it grow as a standard control."
Lunar Flashlight is focused on the Moon. The mission is designed to travel to the Moon's south pole to determine whether it holds water ice that future exploration missions could tap for a variety of uses including fuel production and astronaut hydration.
"We have data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and other missions that indicate stores of water trapped at the lunar poles," Cohen said. "This is a mission to further characterize the surface layer and to understand whether the water ice may exist as a frost on the surface or whether it's buried at depth."
In addition, Lunar Flashlight seeks to demonstrate new technology, including an 80-square-meter solar sail to propel and guide the spacecraft into a highly elliptical orbit that passes near the Moon's south pole. During the majority of the orbit when the cubesat travels far from the lunar surface, the solar sail would provide propulsion and guidance. When the cubesat approaches the Moon, it turns the solar sail to face the sun, making sunlight bounce onto the lunar surface and providing enough light to enable a spectrometer to look for water ice, Cohen said.
The Near Earth Asteroid Scout is designed to use an identical solar sail to enable a cubesat to travel slowly past an asteroid. The cubesat would use an onboard camera with color filters to gather high-resolution imagery.
"The mission paves the way for future exploration of near Earth asteroids by reducing uncertainty and retiring risk," said Julie Castillo-Rogez, Near Earth Asteroid Scout principal investigator at JPL.
"We will obtain for the first time up close observations of a near Earth asteroid smaller than 100 meter [diameter] and determine what it looks like, its shape, how quickly it rotates and whether there is debris around that object," Castillo-Rogez said. "High resolution imaging of the surface will show us the surface regolith and if slopes are stable or there are landslides. This is the type of information we need in preparation for human exploration."
The three cubesats would use NASA's Deep Space Network to relay observations. "Because the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle will be on its way to circumnavigate the Moon and come home, these huge antennas will be pointing out to deep space. Cubesats floating around in that beam width, we can opportunistically phone home," Sorgenfrei said.
NASA limits foreign contributions to U.S. planetary missions
Eric Hand – Science Magazine's Science Insider
How much international collaboration is too much? When it comes to foreign instruments provided to NASA planetary science missions, the answer is anything more than 33%.
Earlier this month, NASA unveiled a draft set of rules for its next Discovery competition, which funds planetary science missions costing no more than $450 million. Today, at a meeting of asteroid and comet scientists in Washington, D.C., NASA officials explained some of the new rules for the next mission, to be selected in 2016. Among them was a stipulation that the principal investigator would not be allowed to recruit foreign instrument contributions in excess of one-third the value of the U.S. instruments on the payload, even though those contributions don't count against the $450 million cap.
The new rule is a response to a current Discovery-class mission with no major U.S.-made instruments. InSight, a Mars lander built at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, that will launch in 2016, carries a French-made seismometer and a German-made heat probe. "The American scientific instrument community was not happy with that," says Michael New, the lead Discovery Program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
NASA wants to make sure that some of the $18 million a year the agency invests in developing planetary science instruments pays off, New says. He also points out that NASA has less ability to enforce the on-time delivery of foreign instruments and ensure that data from those instruments get shared quickly with the public. "With foreign contributions come increased risk and increased potential problems with data archiving," he says.
InSight is not the only Discovery mission with a science payload dominated by foreign scientists.
Dawn, en route to the asteroid Ceres after visiting Vesta, was designed to carry five instruments, three of which were U.S.-led. But two were cut from the mission before its 2007 launch. That left the spacecraft with a German camera, an Italian spectrometer, and a U.S. gamma ray and neutron detector.
Bruce Banerdt, the principal investigator for InSight, says he's not surprised that NASA is cracking down with the new policy. "I've heard it described as the InSight rule." But he defends his choice of foreign-made instruments. He says the teams he selected were the best providers of a seismometer and a heat probe necessary to study Mars's interior. "I feel comfortable saying we picked the best and almost sole sources for these kinds of instruments," he says.
Although Banerdt acknowledges the importance of spending U.S. tax dollars at home, he points out that InSight's two instruments, valued at more than $50 million, will produce data to be shared globally. "National boundaries don't apply to scientific knowledge."
NASA Eyes Robotic Space Gas Stations for Satellites
NASA wants to create a robotic gas station in space.
While that might call to mind visions of interstellar starships, the unmanned depot won't actually be used to refuel rockets leading to the outer solar system or other worlds. Instead, it will service satellites orbiting Earth.
Thousands of satellites currently circle the Earth, transmitting everything from GPS navigation signals to weather forecasts to television shows, and all of them need fuel to maneuver in orbit. Without a way to refuel these aging machines, many satellites that could otherwise provide many more years of service break down and are retired.
NASA's Satellite Servicing Capabilities Office at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland teamed with the Kennedy Space Center (in Florida) in 2011 to concoct a way to refuel satellites as they zip around the planet. Under their solution, this refueling will be carried out robotically.
By creating this new technology, "NASA hopes to add precious years of functional life to satellites and expand options for operators who face unexpected emergencies, tougher economic demands and aging fleets," NASA's Bob Granath wrote in a statement. This robotic technology is not limited to fueling, though. NASA can also use it to fix malfunctioning satellites and build entirely new structures in outer space.
The partnership between Goddard and Kennedy has been fruitful thanks to each organization's special capabilities. Kennedy's long history of preparing spacecraft for launch, for instance, meant that it had a lot of experience with loading propellant. In addition, because of Kennedy's involvement, "project participants were able to use existing equipment, facilities and excess Space Shuttle Program hardware, saving millions of dollars in development costs," NASA said.
Goddard, meanwhile, focused on the robotics. In fact, they recently shipped a robotic arm to Kennedy, 800 miles (1,287 kilometers) away, to test the system's remote-control capability. During the test, the remote robot operator, located at Goddard, connected the end of the robot arm to a valve on the side of a simulated satellite, which was located at Kennedy. The Kennedy team then made sure that the nitrogen tetroxide, a substance commonly used in spacecraft, flowed smoothly through the valve.
One beneficial side effect of refueling satellites in orbit is that it lessens the amount of dangerous space junk in the area just above Earth's atmosphere. Instead of having dead satellites floating around uncontrolled, engineers on the ground can extend their lives with refueling, putting off costly launches and slowing the rate of material sent into space. At the geosynchronous orbit level, a region 22,236 miles (35,786 km) above Earth, there are more than 100 government-owned spacecraft and 360 "commercial communication satellites."
Therefore, "the capability to refuel and repair satellites at this orbit could make GEO [geosynchronous Earth orbit] more sustainable and help mitigate orbital debris problems," officials with NASA's Satellite Servicing Capabilities Office wrote on their website. Popular Astronaut Mike Massimino Departs NASA for Position at Columbia University
Mike Killian – AmericaSpace
This week, after nearly two decades with NASA, one of the space agency's most popular astronauts, Mike Massimino, announced his departure to take a full-time position at his Alma Mater, Columbia University in New York.
"Mike has played a significant role within the astronaut office in his time here," said Bob Behnken, Chief of the Astronaut Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "His technical expertise was extremely helpful in the many roles he fulfilled, not the least of which was his part in the successful Hubble servicing missions."
A New York native, Massimino logged more than 570 hours in space over the course of two missions, both of which brought him to the highest altitude the space shuttle could fly to service the aging Hubble Space Telescope. After graduating from Columbia University with his undergraduate degree, Massimino went on to earn four additional degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge—two master's degrees, one in mechanical engineering and a second in technology and policy, and a doctorate in mechanical engineering.
Then, in 1996, he brought his expertise and talent to NASA, but before he ever boarded a space shuttle Massimino first served in the Astronaut Office Robotics Branch and in the Astronaut Office Extravehicular Activity (EVA, or spacewalk) Branch.
His first flight, STS-109 on the Columbia in 2002, was the fourth such mission to visit Hubble, and Massimino performed two spacewalks, totaling 14 hours and 46 minutes, while performing various tasks such as installing a second solar array on Hubble, installing a new reaction wheel to help it move from target to target, installing the Advanced Camera for Surveys to replace the original Faint Object Camera, and installing the Electronic Support Module (the first part of an experimental cooling system that was installed on the final spacewalk of the mission).
Following his return to Earth, Massimino went on to serve as a CAPCOM (spacecraft communicator) in Mission Control and as the Astronaut Office Technical Liaison to the Johnson Space Center EVA Program Office, but his first visit to Hubble, however, was just a taste of what his next mission to space would be like. When NASA decided to make one final dangerous servicing mission to Hubble, care of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, they called on Massimino again.
"We really wanted the Hubble's capability back, so we started working, and for five years, we designed a spacewalk," said Massimino in an article he wrote for Esquire in 2013. "We designed over one hundred new space tools to be used—at great taxpayers' expense, millions of dollars, thousands of people worked on this." And that was for just one of his two spacewalks on the mission, STS-125.
In his first walk of the mission, on flight day five May 15, 2009, Massimino helped fellow astronaut Michael Good with removing and replacing Hubble's three gyroscope rate sensing units (RSUs), each of which contains two gyroscopes that allow the telescope to point itself. Although doing so turned out to be much more complicated than most can imagine, all went well in the end and Massimino was ready for his second spacewalk two days later. Once again with Good by his side, the pair went to work to replace Hubble's failed Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), which blew a power supply in 2004.
"It was our last time to Hubble, so we felt a responsibility to do the best we could with the telescope," said Massimino after the mission. "We put as much work on that mission as we felt we could do. It was a wonderful experience, great crew, some of my best friends, my second family was on STS-125."
All total, Massimino walked in space on STS-125 for nearly 16 hours, putting his grand total hours walking in space at 30.
Massimino became an easily familiar face to many in the general public for his use of social media, and he grew to become one of NASA's strongest public relations tools. He was the first person to ever Tweet from space, during the STS-125 mission, with the first official Tweet from space saying: "From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!" Massimino provided the public regular updates and images throughout the STS-125 mission via social media and shared his experiences while racing with Hubble 350 miles above the Earth at 17,500 mph. He has also starred in the popular TV series The Big Bang Theory several times and assisted in research for the Hollywood movie Gravity.
"Mike embraced the opportunity to engage with the public in new ways and set the stage for more space explorers to be able to share their mission experience directly with people around the globe. We wish him well in his new role fostering the dreams and innovations of students just beginning their career paths," Behnken said.
"I go outside, and I take my tether, and I clip it on a handrail, and I let go, and I just look. And the Earth—from our altitude at Hubble, we're 350 miles up. We can see the curvature. We can see the roundness of our home, our home planet. And it's the most magnificent thing I've ever seen. It's like looking into heaven. It's paradise. And as I looked at the Earth, I also noticed that I could turn my head, and I could see the moon and the stars and the Milky Way galaxy. I could see our universe. And I could turn back, and I could see our beautiful planet. And that moment changed my relationship with the Earth. Because for me the Earth had always been a kind of a safe haven, you know, where I could go to work or be in my home or take my kids to school. But I realized it really wasn't that. It really is its own spaceship. And I had always been a space traveler. All of us here today, even tonight, we're on this spaceship Earth, amongst all the chaos of the universe, whipping around the sun and around the Milky Way galaxy." — Former NASA Astronaut Mike Massimino
SpaceX Says "Headcount Reduction" Due To Annual Reviews, Not Layoffs
Jeff Foust – Space News
The loss of up to 200 jobs at SpaceX this month is due to firing of "low performer" employees as part of its annual review process, and not layoffs, the company's president said July 26.
"We did our annual performance review, there were some low performers, and we terminated them," SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said after an appearance on a panel at the NewSpace 2014 conference here. She didn't know how many employees were fired, but noted that in past performance reviews, the figure was around three percent of the company's workforce.
"There was an annual review cycle completed recently, along with some rebalancing of resources," a company spokesman said in a July 25 statement. "Our resulting headcount reduction was less than 5%."
According to the SpaceX website, the company has more than 3,000 employees, and in presentations in recent months company officials said SpaceX had close to 4,000 employees. That would put the total number of employees terminated as high as about 200.
A lack of legal filings would support SpaceX's claims that the firings were not layoffs. In California, where Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notices must be issued 60 days in advance of any layoffs of 50 or more employees, the company had not filed such a notice through July 14, according to the state of California's Economic Development Department website. In Texas, where SpaceX has test facilities, the company had also not filed a WARN notice with the Texas Workforce Commission as of July 23, according to its website. Companies are not required to file WARN notices when they terminate employees for cause.
SpaceX, in its statement, said it "expects to see net positive employee growth in 2014 of approximately 20 percent" despite the recent terminations.
As of July 29, the company had more than 350 open positions listed on its website.
Hartman: U.S. and Russian Crews to Fly Both Soyuz and U.S. Commercial Vehicles
NASA intends to use future U.S. commercial crew vehicles to carry not only its astronauts, but also those of its Russian partner, to the International Space Station (ISS), said Dan Hartman, deputy space station program manager, at a NASA Advisory Council (NAC) meeting on Monday (July 28).
Different international vehicles routinely transport crew and cargo to and from the ISS, a laboratory circling some 250 miles above Earth. Currently, the U.S. commercially provided Orbital Sciences Corporation's Cygnus and SpaceX's Dragon, Russia's Progress, Japan's H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) and Europe's Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) provide cargo resupply to the space station. ATV-5, scheduled to lift off today from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, is the last of its kind.
Russia's Soyuz, however, remains the world's sole operational crew vehicle, on which NASA must continue to rely until U.S. commercial alternatives are ready.
"We're going to stay mixed" though, Hartman said at a meeting of NAC's Committee on Human Exploration and Operations at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia. NASA's plan is for some NASA astronauts to continue launching on the Soyuz from Kazakhstan and some Russian cosmonauts to be launched from the United States by private companies, he explained. The idea is to barter: "It would be just a seat for a seat."
Soyuz spacecraft not only transport crews to and from ISS, but serve as "lifeboats," always docked to the ISS as an emergency evacuation route if needed. The number of crew aboard the ISS is, in part, limited by how many Soyuz seats are available for evacuation. Each Soyuz can accommodate a three-person crew. If two Soyuz are attached, six people can be in residence. Soyuz spacecraft can remain attached to the ISS for as long as six months, setting up what is now the routine 4-6 month crew rotation schedule. SpaceX, at least, is designing its Dragon V2 so that it could serve as a lifeboat as well. Other commercial crew competitors may have similar plans.
Hartman's point was that in an emergency, it might not make sense to have all the Russians leave on one spacecraft and the Americans and others on a separate spacecraft because a mixture of experience may be needed to conduct operations. "When you have these rescue vehicles on orbit and you have to leave the station…it doesn't make much sense for three Russians to leave and expect the four Americans onboard to operate the Russian segment [of the ISS] and vice versa, right?" Hartman said.
NASA plans to award at least one contract under the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) phase of the commercial crew program in August or September 2014. NASA officials are prohibited from providing any details of the bids that have been submitted, including which companies made the bids. NASA is funding three companies in the current phase of the program, CCiCap (Commercial Crew Integrated Capability) – Boeing, Sierra Nevada and SpaceX. Under CCtCap, at least one crewed flight test to the space station is required before certification is granted. NASA hopes that at least one U.S. commercial crew vehicle will be ready to transport astronauts to the ISS by late 2017.
President Obama has proposed extending ISS operations until at least 2024. The governments of NASA's space station partners—Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan—have not formally accepted yet.
"I don't think we need that answer from them for another year or so," Hartman said. Other NASA officials have said they do not expect answers from the partners for several years and today's strained U.S.-Russian geopolitical relationship complicates future planning on many fronts.
Presently, three Russians, one European and two Americans are living and working aboard the space station.
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