space-exploration

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The Discovery Channel marks the 50th anniversary of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration with “When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions”, a six-part, three-night series crafted from what a network news release describes as "NASA's own secret film vaults."

As fliers who weren't involved in, you know, bombing anything, yet were continually putting their own lives at risk, astronauts were especially attractive: Indeed, they were potentially leading the country into a post-national, interstellar future, when we would all be simply citizens of Earth and aliens would come only from other planets. Wasn't John Glenn's spacecraft called the Friendship 7?

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Angela Belcher
Edge work: “Programming” viruses to perform useful tasks
Why? It is clean and efficient.
Where? MIT
Initial response: “I was called insane.”

In a series of experiments at MIT, Belcher, working with a team of about 30 students and postdocs, has successfully programmed viruses to incorporate, then grow, a variety of inorganic materials, including nanoscale semiconductors, solar cells, and magnetic storage materials. Separately, she is using yeasts as scaffold organisms because of their abil­ity to grow many different materials. “We look at yeasts as factories,” she explains. “Instead of Budweiser, there’s Nanoweiser.” Belcher has begun working with the U.S. Army on nanoscale batteries that would weigh a fraction of what current batteries weigh and be woven into a soldier’s uniform. She is also training viruses to “find mistakes in materials and give off a signal.” One possible application: spraying viruses on an airplane fuselage to check for microscopic defects. In addition, the National Cancer Institute is funding Belcher to use viruses to find peptides that can specifically identify cancer cells.

Dimitar Sasselov
Edge work: Finding life on planets outside our solar system
Why? We have to know.
Where? Harvard University
Initial response: “People are always very excited.”  read more »

Original Source: BBC News

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The Phoenix lander is due to touch down on Monday in the far north of the Red Planet, after a 423-million-mile journey from Earth. The probe is equipped with a robotic arm to dig for water ice thought to be buried beneath the surface. Scientists say the mission should give the clearest indication yet of whether Mars could once have harbored life.

The final seven minutes of the probe's ten-month journey is regarded as the riskiest part of the mission. After it enters the top of the Martian atmosphere at nearly 5.7km/s (13,000 mph), the probe must perform a series of maneuvers to come safely to rest. It will release a parachute, use pulsed thrusters to slow to a fast walking speed, then come to a halt on three legs. If all goes to plan, the Phoenix lander will reach the surface of Mars at 0053 BST (1953 EDT) on May 26. Nasa controllers will know in about 15 minutes whether the attempt has been successful.

Landing on Mars is a notoriously tricky business. Of the 11 missions that have tried to land probes on Mars since 1971 - only five have succeeded. Phoenix is an apt name for the current mission, as it rose from the ashes of two previous failures. In September 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft crashed into the Red Planet following a navigation error caused when technicians mixed up "English" (imperial) and metric units. A few months later, another Nasa spacecraft, the Mars Polar Lander (MPL), was lost near the planet's South Pole. Phoenix uses hardware from an identical twin of MPL, the Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander, which was cancelled following the two consecutive failures. The probe was launched on 4 August 2007 on a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

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Original Source: Spaceflight Now

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PRINCETON, NJ -- When she peered into the screen of her computer one day in January, Alicia Soderberg was supposed to see a small, dull glowing smudge in one corner, the evidence of a month-old supernova that would help her better understand the mystery of these huge exploding stars. What the Princeton University astronomer saw instead was anything but dull. As Soderberg and Edo Berger, a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton, studied the X-ray emissions conveyed from space by NASA's Swift satellite, they saw an extremely bright light that seemed to jump out of the sky. They didn't know it, but they had just become the first astronomers to have caught a star in the act of exploding. The once-in-a-lifetime event, described in a paper published in the May 22 issue of Nature, has transfixed the worldwide astronomical community.

Soderberg and Berger wanted to observe a supernova known as SN 2007uy in the spiral galaxy NGC 2770, located 90 million light years from Earth in the constellation Lynx. They could plan to do that because they are able to view images captured by the telescope a few hours after the observation merely by downloading the data from the Swift website. The sudden appearance nearby of the X-ray burst of the newer supernova, easily captured by the NASA satellite with multiple instruments that can detect gamma rays, X-rays and ultraviolet light, has set scientists on a new path. "This phenomenon had been predicted more than 30 years ago, but is now observed for the first time," said Roger Chevalier, the W.H. Vanderbilt Professor of Astronomy at the University of Virginia. "These are the earliest observations of light from a supernova after the central collapse that initiated the explosion."

In the Nature paper, Soderberg and 38 colleagues show that the energy and pattern of the X-ray outburst is consistent with what scientists would have expected to see in the birth of a neutron star -- a shock wave blasting through the surface of the original massive star. Until now, astronomers have only been able to observe supernovae brightening days or weeks after the event, when the expanding shell of debris is energized by the decay of radioactive elements forged in the explosion.

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Photos Courtesy of AFP and NASA/Swift Science Team/Stefan Immler

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To celebrate the 18th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope launch, the Space Telescope Science Institute has released 59 beautiful images of galaxies spinning and colliding into each other.

About Hubble
The Hubble Space Telescope is a collaboration between ESA and NASA. It's a long-term, space-based observatory. The observations are carried out in visible, infrared and ultraviolet light. In many ways Hubble has revolutionised modern astronomy, by not only being an efficient tool for making new discoveries, but also by driving astronomical research in general.

The mission
The Universe is gloriously transparent to visible light over journeys lasting billions of years. However, in the last few microseconds before light arrives at telescope mirrors on Earth it must travel through our turbulent atmosphere and the fine cosmic details become blurred. It is this same atmospheric turbulence that makes the stars appear to twinkle on a dark night.  read more »

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has set a world record, launching 10 satellites in a single mission.

"It is carrying two Indian and eight foreign satellites. They are expected to provide data to enable India to plan rural and urban development. The satellites were deployed in orbit within minutes of each other and the entire operation lasted 20 minutes."

Image courtesy of BBC News

Original Source

Images courtesy of BBC News

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Richard Peckham, an engineer at EADS Astrium, explains how the test satellite Giove-B will be launched into space for Europe's global navigation system.

GIOVE, or Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element, is the name for two satellites built for the European Space Agency (ESA) to test technology in orbit for the Galileo positioning system.

Giove is the Italian word for "Jupiter". The name was chosen as a tribute to Galileo Galilei, who discovered the first four natural satellites of Jupiter, and later discovered that they could be used as a universal clock to obtain the longitude of a point on the Earth's surface.

The GIOVE satellites are operated by the GIOVE Mission (GIOVE-M) segment in the frame of the risk mitigation for the In Orbit Validation (IOV) of the Galileo positioning system.

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