NASA & World Space Exploration...News, Views, Photos & videos

Miragedriver · May 26, 2015

Slippery Slopes on Mars Send Curiosity Rover on Detour

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has found a new route to some interesting rocks after its original path proved too difficult to traverse.

Scientists want the car-size

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to check out a "geological contact" where two different rock units meet. Curiosity tried to reach such a contact earlier this month, but the robot's six wheels slipped too much during three out of four drives between May 7 and May 13, NASA officials said.

"Mars can be very deceptive," Chris Roumeliotis, Curiosity's lead rover driver at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California,

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.

"We knew that polygonal sand ripples have caused Curiosity a lot of drive slip in the past, but there appeared to be terrain with rockier, more consolidated characteristics directly adjacent to these ripples," Roumeliotis added. "So we drove around the sand ripples onto what we expected to be firmer terrain that would give Curiosity better traction. Unfortunately, this terrain turned out to be unconsolidated material too, which definitely surprised us and Curiosity."

So the rover team decided to map out a new route using images captured by Curiosity and NASA's

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, which has been circling the Red Planet since 2006. This alternate path would allow Curiosity to examine a similar contact to the west.

A 72-foot (21 meters) drive on Thursday (May 21), during which Curiosity climbed up a hill and dealt with 21-degree slopes, brought the rover close to this contact, NASA officials said.

Curiosity, which landed on Mars in August 2012, has been exploring the base of Mount Sharp since September 2014. The geological contact contains light-colored rocks similar to those that Curiosity has already studied near the mountain's base, as well as darker material less familiar to the rover team, researchers said.

The rover's main goal is to determine if Mars could ever have supported microbial life. Mission scientists have already answered that question in the affirmative, determining that the area near Curiosity's landing site was a habitable lake-and-stream system billions of years ago. The rover is now climbing up Mount Sharp's foothills, reading the rocks for clues about how the Red Planet's climate and surface conditions have changed over time.

Back to bottling my Grenache

Miragedriver · May 26, 2015

Did Curiosity Rover Cause Mars' Mysterious Methane Spike?

Is the Red Planet giving off methane?

The question has taunted scientists for nearly 50 years, ever since the Mariner 7 spacecraft detected a whiff of the gas near the south pole of

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. Researchers retracted the finding a month later after realizing that the signal was in fact coming from carbon dioxide ice.

Then in 2003 and 2004, earthbound telescopes and orbiting spacecraft rekindled the mystery with reports of large methane clouds in Mars' atmosphere. Most of Earth's methane comes from living organisms, though a small fraction can form when rocks and hot water interact. A burp of methane on Marswould indicate that the planet might be more alive than previously thought — whether biologically or geologically. But the "plumes" mysteriously vanished a few years later, sparking intense debate over whether they might have been seasonal, or the results of flawed measurements.

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would resolve the matter, everyone hoped. The rover sampled Mars's atmosphere six times for methane between October 2012 and June 2013 — and detected none. But the case for Martian methane remained far from settled. A few months later, Curiosity detected a sudden burst of the gas in four measurements over a period of two months.

Working hard to rule out potential anomalies and monitor the evolution of the burst over time, the Curiosity team waited an entire year before announcing

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at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December 2014. A paper was published in the journal Science in January 2015. Whether microbes lurking below the Martian surface or geology was at play, the Red Planet could well be alive in some way after all.

And yet, a researcher remains skeptical. Kevin Zahnle, a scientist at NASA's Ames Researcher Center in Moffett Field, California, who was not involved with the discovery, voiced his concerns last month in a seminar hosted by the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Virtual Planetary Lab.

"I am convinced that they really are seeing methane," he said. "But I'm thinking that it has to be coming from the rover."

Methane from Earth
Zahnle, who was also critical of the 2003 and 2004

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, said that it wouldn't take much from the rover to lead scientists astray. After all, the rover contains within a chamber some methane at a concentration 1,000 times higher than the puff supposedly found in Mars' atmosphere. Curiosity's methane comes from Earth.

Upon landing in Gale Crater, the rover's tunable laser spectrometer gave off an unusually high reading for methane. The scientists on the team quickly realized that some terrestrial air had leaked into the instrument while the rover was sitting on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. They pumped out most of that methane, keeping a small amount in the antechamber to the sample cell for calibration purposes.

But Curiosity's team insists that this known source hasn't interfered with the discovery.

"We are continuously monitoring that methane amount, and there hasn't been evidence of any leakage during the entire mission," said Chris Webster, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and lead author of the recent

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. "And while it's true that the concentration of methane in that chamber is 1,000 times higher than in Mars' atmosphere, the comparison is actually misleading."

"You have to look at the amount of methane, not the concentration," he explained. "The concentration of methane on the rover may seem high, but the actual amount is very small because the chamber is very small. To produce the amount we detected in

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, you'd need a gas bottle of pure methane leaking from the rover. And we simply don't have it."

Unknown sources?
Zahnle also contends that the terrestrial air could have infiltrated other areas on the rover.

"Ruling out the rover entirely as a cause is a hard thing to do," he said. "You'd have to know about every place where methane could be stored."

Chris McKay, a researcher at NASA Ames and co-author on the January paper, thinks that Zanhle's concerns are valid. "I think the possibility of a methane source aboard should still be considered until completely ruled out," he said.

But Paul Mahaffy, the principal investigator on Curiosity's

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(SAM) suite of instruments, doubts that the rover could be a possible source. "It seems unlikely that after more than a year on the surface of Mars a sudden source of methane from the spacecraft would appear, persist for 60 days and then disappear," he says. "Methane is a very volatile gas, and any residual methane brought to Mars should be long gone."

Webster agrees that an unknown source on the rover seems highly unlikely, but he says it's not impossible.

"There are a few areas that are sealed," he said. "They could, in theory, be a source if some methane had made its way into them and was then leaking out, but we've looked very hard for other sources and we haven't identified any."

What's next?

Curiosity is gearing up for new measurements later this year around the holiday season, which is when the mysterious burst was detected in 2013, one

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year ago. "If the methane comes back around that time, that will tell us that something seasonal is going on," Webster said. "That would be a huge discovery, and would put to rest the questions about the rover being a potential source."

Meanwhile, McKay is exploring another possibility — namely, that a meteorite may have recently fallen within the vicinity of the rover. Carbonaceous meteorites contain a small amount of organic materials, which can give off a plume of methane when broken down by ultraviolet radiation.

"It's probabilistically unlikely, but those events do happen," McKay said. "If the rover had been in the [Australian] town of Murchisonwhen the meteorite fell in 1969, it would have detected a pulse of methane."

The Curiosity team has searched for fresh craters near the rover by looking at images taken from orbit. They haven't found any. However, McKay noted that, unlike stony-iron meteorites,

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don't leave craters. Instead, they typically break apart in the atmosphere and fall in a rain of small organic fragments. McKay is currently working with a meteorite expert to determine the size of a potential object that could have produced the methane spike detected by Curiosity.

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a new mission led by the European Space Agency and planned for launch in 2016, will also scan the Martian atmosphere for trace amounts of methane and other exotic gases. India's Mars mission currently in orbit may also soon report its methane findings. Both will survey an area much greater than that covered by Curiosity, which will spend its lifetime in Gale Crater. Will they finally resolve the mystery behind Mars's capricious methane plumes? Time will tell.

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Back to bottling my Grenache

TerraN_EmpirE · May 27, 2015

The more I read it the more I can only conclude, It's a amazing that the Russians have a space program at all.

Russia’s Khrunichev center staff charged with 2013 Proton crash

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May 27, 10:49 UTC+3
Three employees, Denis Grishin, Alexander Nikolayaev and Diana Gudkova, have been charged with violating safety rules while carrying out works

© EPA/ROSCOSMOS

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© Artyom Geodakyan/TASS

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MOSCOW, May 27. /TASS/. Employees of Russia’s Khrunichev State Space Research and Production Centre have been charged in connection with the 2013 crash of Proton carrier rocket with Glonass satellites, Investigative Committee’s official spokesman Vladimir Markin said on Wednesday.

The Investigative Committee has completed the investigation into the criminal cases launched after a Proton-M rocket carrying three Glonass navigation satellites crashed in July 2013 seconds after liftoff, he said.

Three employees, Denis Grishin, Alexander Nikolayaev and Diana Gudkova, have been charged with violating safety rules while carrying out works. The head of Russia’s Defence Ministry’s 1653 military representation, Marat Nasibulin, has been charged with negligence.

According to investigators, Grishin, Nikolayev and Gudkova in 2011 were tasked with installing the angular rate sensors on the Proton rocket that are responsible for yaw control.

"As a result of their violation of technical discipline envisaged by engineering and technological documentation, these sensors were installed incorrectly / at 180 degrees from their correct position/," Markin said.

The installation error accounted for the vehicle’s wild trajectory, causing its crash and destruction. During the investigation, Grishin and Nikolayev partly admitted their guilt in committing the crime, he said.

In his turn, Nasibulin guided by the fact that over a long time no violations had been found during the installation process and also amid the job cuts withdrew the control operation from a respective list. He did not monitor the process and the sensors were installed without the due control.

"As a result of these crimes, the damage of more than 5 billion rubles ($98.4 million at the current exchange rate) was inflicted to the state," Markin said.

Currently, Grishin, Nikolayev and Gudkova have familiarized themselves with the case materials. The criminal case is sent to the Prosecutor General’s Office that is due to bring the indictment. Nasibulin and his lawyer now continue familiarizing themselves with the case.

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Russia’s Federal Space Agency should compensate for damage from launch delays — ministry

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May 27, 11:38 UTC+3
Russia lost a Proton carrier rocket with a Mexican satellite aboard during an abortive launch on May 16

© ITAR-TASS/Sergei Kazak

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© EPA/ROSCOSMOS

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KAZAN, May 27. /TASS/. Russia’s Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) should compensate for damage caused by delays in the launches of Russian communications satellites over the recent Proton-M carrier rocket accident, Communications Minister Nikolai Nikiforov said on Wednesday.

"There must be responsibility for everything. If a producer delivers a satellite to us behind a schedule, it pays a penalty in the amount of missed profit from the use of this satellite, and if Roscosmos delays Proton launches, it must not only resolve problems with Protons but also pay us damage," the minister said at a conference on information technologies in the defense industry held in the Volga Republic of Tatarstan.

Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev earlier said Russia should introduce financial liability for disruption of space projects, including carrier rocket launches.

Russia lost a Proton carrier rocket with a Mexican satellite aboard during an abortive launch on May 16.

The Proton-M carrier rocket with the Briz-M acceleration unit and Mexica’s Mexsat-1 satellite blasted off from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan at 08:47 a.m. Moscow time (05:47 GMT) on May 16.

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© Mikhail Japaridze/TASS

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The Briz-M acceleration unit with the Mexican satellite was expected to separate from the carrier rocket at 08:57 a.m. Moscow time (05:57 GMT). However, a minute before the designated separation, an emergency situation occurred at an altitude of 161 km, due to which the rocket’s head section and third stage failed to separate and burnt up in the dense layers of the Earth’s atmosphere above the Trans-Baikal area in East Siberia.

According to preliminary information, a breakdown occurred in a steering engine of the third stage, similar to the Proton accident last year.

The failure in the launch of a Proton-M carrier rocket in May 2014 was caused by a breakdown of a bearing in the turbine pump system of a steering engine.

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Basically at the end of the Soviet Era The Russian government "Privatized" There space program by handing ownership over the the factory managers. as time went by and more American, European, Chinese and other nations monies flowed in to keep the factory floors running.
The now Owners Realized that they could make a lot of monies by skimming from the glut of Foreign space capital, and they had A lot of American Dollars flowing for the ISS program Once that started they realized they could make even more money by cutting corners. this lead to issues soon after including a number of Russian ISS modules being canceled. As time went by the old Russian Adage came to be more and more proven fact. " The Fish Rots form the head first."
this has now come to a head as the Russian Space program has now suffered a number of EPIC Fails of the Proton Series Rockets by luck they have not lost any Manned missions. but Putin saw that if things kept going like this it was a matter of time. So he has had to take action.
The Russians have reabsorbed the "Private Space Industry" and have come to the realization of just how Corrupt It has become well at the same time the Russians also have started loosing contracts and inflow of Space Cash as True Private Space industry has emerged under bidding and proving a far better track record then expected and Foreign Space contracts have begun to move to private ( Space X), Emerging ( Japan, India, China) reemerging (US, European) Indigenous Space programs. This is placing the ROSCOSMOS under a lot of stress. This all came to a Head when Reports hit the Kremlin that Rocket Workers stopped working. Vlad Sent his best Hatchet men in to find out why and discovered things were so bad that the managers had stopped paying people and pocketed the cash. So now the Hatchet men have marching orders. This places The Future of Russian Grand Space Programs in some doubt. add to this the Political issues of the Ukraine Crisis with Russia and US/European Political relations under stress.
Which is worrying because NASA and The ESA and JAXA currently lack there own manned Space vehicles leaving the only other manned space program with the PRC, but by the Nature of the PRC program NASA and many others cannot use that due to close ties between the Chinese Space Program and The Second Artillery.

Miragedriver · May 27, 2015

Why China wants to land a spacecraft on the mysterious far side of the moon

China's previous lunar rover, Yutu, landed in 2013 and was photographed by the Chang'e 3 lander as it drove away.

China appears to be planning a space mission to a place no nation has ever been — the far side of the moon.

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) currently plans to launch Chang'e 4, a craft that will carry the country's second lunar rover, in 2020. According to comments recently made by Wu Weiren, the Lunar Exploration Program's chief engineer, the rover will likely touch down on the side of the moon that faces away from Earth.

"We probably will choose a site on which it is more difficult to land and more technically challenging,"

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. "Other countries have chosen to land on the near side of the moon. Our next move probably will see some spacecraft land on the far side of the moon."

ince 2007, China's ambitious lunar program has already placed two probes in the moon's orbit and one lander on its surface. Putting a rover on the far side could provide new data on the moon's geologic history — and demonstrate the CNSA's growing expertise in and recent dominance of lunar exploration.

China's ambitious lunar exploration program

The Chang'e 3 lander, which touched down on the moon in 2013. (
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)

Though China began launching satellites and conducting other activities in space all the way

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, the country's space agency has made its biggest strides since 2000, becoming the third nation to send astronauts into space in 2003. Since then, the CNSA has focused on a destination that NASA and other space agencies have mostly overlooked as of late: the moon.

In 2007, the CNSA sent its first spacecraft — named Chang'e 1, after the Chinese goddess of the moon — into lunar orbit. That was followed by the orbiter Chang'e 2 in 2010 and the lander Chang'e 3 in 2013, the latter of which brought a small rover (called Yutu) to the moon, and became the first craft to make a soft-landing there since the 1970s.

The next few missions will go even further. Chang'e 5, to be launched in 2017, will collect a rock sample and

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, in order to bring it back to Earth. (Confusingly, Chang'e 5 is launching before Chang'e 4 because the latter was originally built as a backup to Chang'e 3, then sat in storage for a few years and has since been retrofitted for the new mission.)

Plans call for Chang'e 4 to launch in 2020. Though Chang'e 3 successfully landed,

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prevented the rover it carried from traveling more than 100 meters. If all goes as planned, the new craft's rover will be able to gather much more data — and perhaps explore the moon's relatively unknown far side.

The mysterious far side of the moon

Because the moon rotates at the same rate it orbits the Earth, it's tidally locked, as shown at left — and the same side always faces Earth. If it didn't rotate, we'd see both sides equally, as shown at right. (
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From Earth, we always see one side of the moon because it's

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: it rotates at the same speed that it orbits us.

As a result, we know much less about the far side (calling it the "dark side," while a bit more poetic, isn't really accurate, because it gets just as much sunlight). And because there's no direct line of sight from the Earth to the far side, landing a craft there would require all communications to be routed through an orbiter before reaching the lander.

But as difficult as it sounds, a mission to the far side would yield plenty of rewarding data. Though the moon's entire surface has been extensively photographed by orbiting probes — starting with the USSR's Luna 3, in 1959, and currently by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter — no lander or rover has ever documented the far side up close.

We already know the near side of the moon is covered in

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, which are plains of basalt that formed after volcanoes erupted billions of years ago and their lava cooled.

The far side is different: it has few dark spots and lots of craters, though scientists don't fully understand why. It may be that underneath its surface, there were never as many volcanoes, but that explanation still isn't fully proven. Chang'e 4 might tell us more, by collecting data on the rock that covers the far side's surface.

Depending on where the rover is sent, it could also

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. The far side features the giant South Pole–Aitken basin — a huge crater in which the crust might be so thin that mantle rock peeks through. Data on this rock could help scientists better understand the

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.

Finally, there's

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that China might be interested in visiting the moon's far side and conducting sample-return missions for an entirely different purpose: harvesting

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, an isotope of helium that could someday be used for both nuclear weapons and energy production.

The isotope is much more abundant on the moon than on Earth, where it's extremely rare. And the moon's far side is believed to have the highest concentrations of it, because it's exposed to much more solar wind, which deposits helium-3 in the first place.

It's not certain that this is China's goal. In order to get usable quantities of helium-3, a craft would need to harvest way more rock than Chang'e 5 will be capable of doing. The CNSA, meanwhile, has never explicitly said that it's planning on mining helium-3.

Still, Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of CNSA's Lunar Exploration Program, has

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as a long-term potential benefit of the Chang'e program. It's conceivable that one reason for returning lunar samples and exploring the moon's far side is to collect initial data needed for this sort of ambitious extraction project.

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Back to bottling my Grenache

TerraN_EmpirE · May 27, 2015

Now If the Russian Space program were to hit a stop work could western agency find work around? yes but it would take time.

U.S. Air Force certifies SpaceX for national security launches
WASHINGTON | BY
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The U.S. Air Force on Tuesday said it has certified privately held SpaceX to launch U.S. military and spy satellites, ending a monopoly held by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co, since its creation in 2006.

The decision follows two years of discussions, reviews and legal disputes between the U.S. Air Force and Space Exploration Technologies, known as SpaceX, and means the company founded by entrepreneur Elon Musk, can compete for national security launches with its Falcon 9 rocket.

"SpaceX's emergence as a viable commercial launch provider provides the opportunity to compete launch services for the first time in almost a decade," Air Force Secretary Deborah James said in a statement.

Leveraging SpaceX's investment in an alternate launch vehicle would help drive down the cost and help improve the U.S. military's resiliency, James said.

SpaceX's first opportunity to compete against ULA would come in June, when the Air Force said it expects to kick off a competition for launches of additional Global Positioning System III satellites built by Lockheed.

The certification, initially expected last December, followed two years of intensive reviews by the Air Force and SpaceX, which already has won significant contracts with NASA to launch cargo and crews to the International Space Station.

The Air Force said it spent more than $60 million and dedicated 150 people to the effort, which included 2,800 discreet tasks, three certification flight demonstrations, 21 major subsystem reviews and 700 audits aimed at establishing a technical baseline for future flight worthiness determinations.

Musk called the decision "an important step toward bringing competition to national security space launch."

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain said he hoped SpaceX's certification would bring down what he called "unjustifiably high" launch costs and end U.S. reliance on Russian-built RD-180 engines that power ULA's Atlas 5 rocket.

The U.S. Congress has banned the use of Russian engines for national security launches after 2019. It passed the law after Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region last year.

James called the news "an important milestone" for the Air Force and the Pentagon. An independent review in March cited a "stark disconnect" between the two sides about the purpose of the certification process, and said the Air Force's approach had stifled the very competition it was seeking to promote.

SpaceX had shocked Air Force officials when it filed a lawsuit in April 2014 to protest its decision to award 36 rocket launches to ULA while delaying competition for 14 contracts that were meant to be open to competition.

The company dropped its lawsuit in January after the two sides agreed to work collaboratively to wrap up the certification process.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Edtiting by Leslie Adler, Diane Craft and Lisa Shumaker)

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The critical factor is commercial in my view real commercial, as NASA programs and European programs take a long time, are designed to take a lot of money and often are designed for political wants more then missions.

Lockheed-Boeing rocket venture needs commercial orders to survive
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United Launch Alliance, a 50-50 joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co, on Thursday said it would go out of business unless it won commercial and civil satellite launch orders to offset an expected slump in U.S. military and spy launches.

ULA President Tory Bruno said the company must attract those kind of orders to remain a "viable economic entity" so it is scrambling to restructure and develop a new rocket that in seven or eight years could launch satellites twice as fast at half the current cost.

Formed by the two largest U.S. weapons makers in 2006, ULA has long been the sole company able to launch U.S. military and intelligence satellites into orbit. It will face competition for the first time when the Air Force expects to certify a rival, privately held Space Exploration Technologies, to bid on some of those launches. That certification is expected next month.

ULA is also under pressure from a federal ban on use for national security launches after 2019 of the Russian RD-180 rocket engines that power its Atlas 5 rockets. Congress passed the law after Russia annexed the Crimea region of Ukraine.

Bruno said the number of U.S. military and intelligence satellite launches would likely drop in coming years to about five launches a year from 10 to 12, with the smaller number to be split among two or more rivals.

"We have to ... access commercial and civil opportunities. (We) cannot survive on two launches a year," Bruno told a lunch meeting hosted by the Washington Space Business Roundtable.

Bruno last week announced a 30-percent cut in management as part of the restructuring.

On Thursday he said Boeing and Lockheed were still approving investment in the new Vulcan rocket only one quarter at a time given uncertainty about how Russian engines the company can use to compete for national security launches.

He said the Air Force had a strong argument to request a Pentagon waiver if Congress continues to block use of Russian engines ordered but not paid for before the Crimea invasion.

Barring a waiver or change in the current law, ULA would only be able to compete for five Air Force launches between 2019 and 2022, when the new rocket is expected to be certified. ULA says its other rocket, the Delta 4, costs too much to compete.

"We must have access to the Atlas as a competitive platform until we have the replacement rocket engine. There really is no Plan B," he said.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by
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TerraN_EmpirE · May 27, 2015

Solar Sail fail.

Software Glitch Pauses LightSail Test Mission
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2015/05/26 21:35 UTC

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The Planetary Society’s LightSail test mission is paused while engineers wait out a suspected software glitch that has silenced the solar sailing spacecraft. Following a
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, LightSail spent more than two days sending about 140 data packets back to Earth.

But the long Memorial Day weekend here in the United States offered no respite for the LightSail team, as they scrambled to figure out why the spacecraft's automated telemetry chirps suddenly fell silent. It is now believed that a vulnerability in the software controlling the main avionics board halted spacecraft operations, leaving a reboot as the only remedy to continue the mission. When that occurs, the team will likely initiate a manual sail deployment as soon as possible.

What happened?
As of late Friday afternoon, LightSail was continuing to operate normally. The spacecraft’s ground stations at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Georgia Tech were receiving data on each pass. Power and temperature readings were trending stably, and the spacecraft was in good health.

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Cal Poly / Edited by Jason Davis

LightSail battery levels from start of mission through communications loss
But inside the spacecraft's Linux-based flight software, a problem was brewing. Every 15 seconds, LightSail transmits a telemetry beacon packet. The software controlling the main system board writes corresponding information to a file called beacon.csv. If you’re not familiar with CSV files, you can think of them as simplified spreadsheets—in fact, most can be opened with Microsoft Excel.

As more beacons are transmitted, the file grows in size. When it reaches 32 megabytes—roughly the size of ten compressed music files—it can crash the flight system. The manufacturer of the avionics board corrected this glitch in later software revisions. But alas, LightSail’s software version doesn’t include the update.

Late Friday, the team received a heads-up warning them of the vulnerability. A fix was quickly devised to prevent the spacecraft from crashing, and it was scheduled to be uploaded during the next ground station pass. But before that happened, LightSail fell silent. The last data packet received from the spacecraft was May 22 at 21:31 UTC (5:31 p.m. EDT).

The aftermath
LightSail is likley now frozen, not unlike the way a desktop computer suddenly stops responding. A reboot should clear the contents of the problematic beacon.csv file, giving the team a couple days to implement a fix. But to pull a phrase from recent mission reports, the outcome of the freeze is “non-deterministic.” That means sometimes the processor will still accept a reboot command; other times, it won’t. It’s similar to the way you deal with a frozen computer: You can try to struggle past sluggish menus and click reboot, but sometimes, your only recourse is pressing the power button.

As of Tuesday afternoon, there have been 37 Cal Poly and Georgia Tech ground station passes. During half of those, reboot commands were sent to the spacecraft. Nothing has happened yet. Therefore, we have to assume that LightSail is only going to respond to the power button method.

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with our CEO, Bill Nye, and system engineer Barbara Plante, last year, Nye points out a piece of hardware strapped to BenchSat, LightSail’s acrylic-mounted testing clone:

“There’s nobody in outer space to push that reset button,” says Nye.
“No one that we’ve gotten to volunteer for that job,” Plante replies. “But it’s open."
Since we can’t send anyone into space to reboot LightSail, we may have to wait for the spacecraft to reboot on its own. Spacecraft are susceptible to charged particles zipping through deep space, many of which get trapped inside Earth’s magnetic field. If one of these particles strikes an electronics component in just the right way, it can cause a reboot. This is not an uncommon occurrence for CubeSats,
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, for that matter. Cal Poly’s experience with CubeSats suggest most experience a reboot in the first three weeks; I spoke with another CubeSat team that rebooted after six. Coincidentally, this is close to the original 28-day sail deployment timeline.

Radio operators
A lot of amateur radio enthusiasts have been helping to track LightSail. Many of you have sent in data packets that you’ve received, and I’ve been getting a lot of questions about how to decode packet contents. First of all, thank you! The first operator to grab a full packet was Ken Swaggart (call sign W7KKE) from Lincoln City, Oregon. His packet was nabbed at 20:01 UTC on May 20—just five hours after launch.

This is a test flight in more ways than one. In addition to figuring out how LightSail behaves in space, we’re also refining our procedures for getting information out to the public—including the radio community. Because the team has been busy with actual spacecraft operations, I’ve been trying to field those inquiries myself. Unfortunately, I’m far from an expert in this area. I know what the data should look like after they are decoded; not so much on the raw radio signal side of things.

We don’t currently have a public decoder available, but Dr. John Bellardo at Cal Poly generously spent some time building a prototype web version that takes raw hexidecimal data and converts it to plain text. I’ve tried using it to decode some of the packets you’ve sent me, but to no avail thus far—meaning I have to send them over to our engineers instead. The team’s first duty is to the spacecraft itself, but we’ll get to your requests eventually, and iron out the process for our 2016 flight. In the meantime, you can still listen for LightSail and send reports to [email protected]. For more details, check out our Mission Control page at
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.

Finally, many folks have written in to tell me that our spacecraft ground track is getting stale. We know, and we’re just as anxious as you are to get that updated. We rely on JSpOC, the Joint Space Operations Center, for updated Two-Line Element sets. TLEs are numerical descriptions of an object’s orbit. Thus far, our only TLE came from the launch vehicle shortly after LightSail was deposited into orbit.

When we get a new TLE, we expect there to be several that represent the entire group of CubeSats that hitched a ride to space aboard the Atlas V Centaur upper stage. Since the spacecraft remain bunched relatively close together, there might not be discrete one-to-one matches between each TLE and its corresponding spacecraft. One way we can narrow down which spacecraft is LightSail is to measure its doppler shift, but since we're no longer transmitting, the process may take more time.

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Navid Baraty / The Planetary Society

Atlas V at night
This image of LightSail's Atlas V rocket was captured the night before launch after a sound-activated remote camera was inadvertently triggered.
Next steps
Cal Poly and Georgia Tech will keep listening for LightSail on each ground pass. Furthermore, Cal Poly is automating the reboot command transmission to be sent few ground station passes, on the hope that one command sneaks through (we don't send the command on every pass because a successful reboot triggers a waiting period before beacon transmissions begin). But as of right now, we can’t do much except wait, hoping a charged particle smacks the spacecraft in just the right way to cause a reboot. LightSail is capable of remaining in orbit about six months in its CubeSat form.

In the meantime, the team is looking at several fixes to work around the software vulnerability once contact is reestablished. One is a Linux file redirect that would send the contents of the troublesome beacon.csv file to a null location, a sort-of software black hole. Lab testing on this fix has been promising—over a gigabyte of beacon packets have already been sent into nothingness without a system freeze.

When we hear from LightSail again, the team will likely initiate a manual sail deployment as soon as possible. Planning has already started on that front—we’ll keep you updated.

In the meantime, I'll be refreshing the spacecraft's raw telemetry packet repository, ready to jump at the first sign of new data. With a little luck, the test mission isn’t over just yet. Hopefully LightSail will follow trends established by other CubeSat missions and reboot soon.
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Miragedriver · May 28, 2015

Brazil expands its Integration Laboratory Tests satellite and 50% for checking up to six tons devices

(Defensa.com) The Test and Integration Laboratory (LIT) of the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), founded in 1987 and located in Sao Jose dos Campos, will undergo a remarkable expansion of its facilities. The existing plant 22,000 square meters other areas 14,000 meters destined mainly to the development of future satellites Geostationary Satellite program Defence and Communication (SGDC) will be added.

The expansion of LIT / INPE allow integration testing and satellites with up to six tons and seven meters high (typical of telecommunications satellites, geostationary meteorological satellites radar, etc.). Currently, the laboratory's ability to satellites of up to two tons and four meters high is limited (for example, CBERS series, developed by Brazil and China). Once the expansion is completed LIT you can integrate up to four satellites and test different classes simultaneously. An initially estimated at 16 million dollars, a sum phase includes hiring specialized consultants to define the future shape and test equipment to be deployed, the recruitment of civil executive project and the expansion of the functions and of the hiring of building their new facilities, including facilities in basic infrastructure (electricity, hydraulics, air conditioning, etc.).

In 2014, the bidding process for the procurement of the company responsible for the architectural, civil and expanding facilities design was performed. The details of the ongoing project include preliminary stages, conceptual, basic and executive design. Once this step is completed, you can start the hiring process execution of the works itself. In addition to allowing the integration and testing of the satellite program SGDC and other large satellites, the new areas, together with the existing facilities, will allow the improvement with regard to the technological demands of the telecommunications (testing and rating of large antennas) and other (electronics, automotive, computer, hospital, etc.) industries.

Back to bottling my Grenache

Miragedriver · May 28, 2015

65th consecutive successful launch of Ariane 5

(Defensa.com) from Kourou, in French Guiana, the Ariane 5 has been successfully launched by sixty fifth consecutive time. With this release, DIRECTV 15, geostationary satellite telecommunications hundredth built by Airbus Defence and Space, has been put into orbit. The company has been the main contractor for both the launcher and satellite. The performance required by this flight number 223 of Ariane consisted placed in geostationary transfer orbit 9,960 kilograms, of which 9,200 corresponded to the two satellites (DIRECTV 15 SKYM-1). The remaining mass corresponded to launch dual SYLDA (Système de Lancement Double Ariane) and hardware integration of the payload.

Airbus Defence and Space has been prime contractor for the European launcher Ariane 5, one of the largest and most ambitious space programs of the world, since 2003. As a shareholder with a 50% stake in Airbus Launchers Safran, the company currently coordinates an industrial network comprising over 550 companies (over 20% of them SMEs) in twelve European countries, and manages the entire industrial supply chain of production equipment and stages, to complete integration launcher in Guiana, in line with customer specifications. Thanks to the expertise already acquired investments carried out by Airbus Defence and Space for over ten years, Ariane 5 has become the most dependable commercial launcher and achieved increase in nearly two tons transportation capacity into orbit geostationary. Real spearhead of the European acquis, the Ariane 5 was designed specifically for injection into orbit heavier payloads.

Back to bottling my Grenache

TerraN_EmpirE · May 28, 2015

One hell of a lawn ornament

Malmesbury millionaire buys a Russian rocket for his garden
11:12am Wednesday 27th May 2015 in
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Rory Sweet with his Russian-American 5,000mph rocket (27241189)

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A RUSSIAN rocket that once sailed through the earth’s atmosphere faster than any other man-made object today resides in a Wiltshire garden after being snapped-up by internet millionaire Rory Sweet.

Mr Sweet, 48, of Sherston, near Malmesbury, thought the Hypersonic Flying Laboratory - known as Kholod – was "the coolest thing I had ever seen" after he came across it at a car auction.

He promptly coughed-up £38,000 for the high flying craft which was once capable of almost 5,000mph before coming down to earth as a unique piece of garden furniture.

Almost 40ft long and weighing five tonne, the rocket was first flown in 1991 after being built by the Russians in collaboration with NASA at a cost $10 million.

For ten years it held the record for the fastest ever made-made machine before it was jettisoned as archaic.

Somehow it ended up at a car auction at South Marston where it was spotted by Mr Sweet while checking out vintage motors.

Mr Sweet, who runs the Cirencester-based computer company Zycko, said: "I saw it for sale at a car auction and decided to buy it, not really knowing what I was going to do with it."

He said the rocket had been stripped down and repainted by a company specialising in car restorations, and that he now planned to make a "bit of a garden feature out of it."

He said: "It's not something I've always wanted, but I saw it and I thought it looked absolutely amazing. I decided I had to buy it and find somewhere to put it on display.

"It was the coolest thing I had ever seen.”

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X-37B spaceplane’s orbit discovered

Posted on May 27, 2015 by
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Credit: Boeing

CAPE CANAVERAL — Hobbyists who keep track of the skies with remarkable precision have found the U.S. Air Force’s mini space shuttle in its no-longer-secret orbit around the Earth.

The X-37B craft, making the program’s fourth mission into space, was launched May 20 from Cape Canaveral atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.

The ascent entered a news blackout about five minutes after liftoff, as the Centaur upper stage began its burn to put the spaceplane into low-Earth orbit.

It wasn’t until later that officials confirmed the launch had gone smoothly for the Orbital Test Vehicle mission No. 4. It is believed the Centaur deployed X-37B about 19 minutes into flight.

Observers this week spotted the craft flying overhead in a 194 by 202 mile orbit (312 X 325 km), tilted 38 degrees relative to the equator.

That perch is lower than previous X-37B missions and the inclination is lower, too.

“OTV 4 entered the lowest initial altitude of the program,” said Ted Molczan, a respected satellite observing hobbyist.

“The ground track nearly repeats every 2 days. Frequently repeating ground tracks have been a common feature of the program. This could be an indication of a surveillance mission, or it may offer some operational advantage I have yet to figure out.”

Although the Air Force revealed two experiments to be conducted on this fourth mission — an electric propulsion thruster test and materials exposure in the space environment — much was classified about the flight, including the orbit, mission duration and even which of the two X-37B spaceplanes is making the trip.

“The X-37B testbed platform is unique because we can tailor to specific user needs and return experiments back to post-flight inspection,” said Ken Torok, Boeing’s director of experimental systems.

“Reliability, reusability and responsiveness of the X-37B will fundamentally change how we perform future space missions.”

OTV 1 (first flight of Vehicle No. 1)
Launch: April 22, 2010
Landing: Dec. 3 2010
Duration: 224 days

OTV 2 (first flight of Vehicle No. 2)
Launch: March 5, 2011
Landing: June 16, 2012
Duration: 469 days

OTV 3 (second flight of Vehicle No. 1)
Launch: Dec. 11, 2012
Landing: Oct. 17, 2014
Duration: 675 days

“These missions have proven the reliability and flexibility of the system to support a variety of experiments,” Torok said.

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TerraN_EmpirE · May 28, 2015

21st_century_us_manned_space_fleet_by_okan170-d8rxanl.jpg

NASA orders first commercial crew flight
May 27, 2015
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| Aerospace Daily & Defense Report

Los Angeles --
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has been awarded the first crew rotation mission to the International Space Station (ISS) from
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, marking a key milestone in the agency’s five-year effort to develop an indigenous U.S. capability to launch American astronauts to low earth orbit.

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says commercial crew program rival
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is “expected to receive its first order later this year,” and adds that the decision on which company will actually make the first flight to the station “will be made at a later time.” Although the first commercial crew mission to the ISS is scheduled for late 2017 the actual timing depends on whether the agency receives sufficient funding in the fiscal 2016 budget as well as whether Boeing and SpaceX are able to meet NASA’s readiness conditions.

Both Boeing and SpaceX are completing milestones under the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) phase of the program. NASA, which awards CCtCap contracts two to three years prior to the missions, says if it does not receive the full requested funding for fiscal 2016 and beyond, it “will have to delay future milestones for both partners proportionally and extend sole reliance on Russia for crew access to the station.”

Boeing has completed the integrated critical design review (CDR) for its CST-100 spacecraft under the fourth phase of the CCtCap program, and says it remains on track to fly by the end of 2017. “We are less than two years away from our first test flight,” says Chris Ferguson, director of crew and mission systems for Boeing. “We are beginning to see hardware come together. We are in the initial stages of assembling the initial orbital test article in the former orbiter processing facility 3 (
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, Florida) that we now call the commercial crew and cargo processing facility.”

Speaking at the recent Space Tech Expo conference in Long Beach, Ferguson adds that the crewed version of the CST-100 is designed to be reused up to 10 times. “We plan to build three at the moment and see where the future business takes us,” Ferguson says. A standard mission to the station will carry four NASA or NASA-sponsored crew members and about 220 lb. of pressurized cargo, according to NASA. The spacecraft will remain at the station for up to 210 days and serve as an emergency lifeboat during that time. The NASA contract will cover a minimum of two and a maximum of six missions. Boeing also plans to “create a cargo variant for the next cargo contract which is due for award later this year,” says Ferguson.

The CST-100 service module will be jettisoned prior to re-entry and “we will bring back the crew vehicle to any of five landing sites,” adds Ferguson. The CST-100 is designed to return to a soft landing on dry ground with the aid of parachutes and air bags. “We are out there right now signing agreements with those places. We have a string of agreements with various organizations such as Edwards AFB, (California), White Sands (New Mexico) and three other areas that work very nicely from an orbital mechanics standpoint. We will bring it back, turn it around and send it back to Kennedy Space Center for launch about six months later,” he says.

In the immediate future, Boeing’s target is the completion of a series of intensive software tests. “We have a key demonstration towards the end of the year in which we will run through an entire launch, orbit and landing sequence using our actual flight software. We have key demonstration in December in which this will work with our ground system software,” he adds.

SpaceX, which successfully completed a pad abort test of its crew Dragon vehicle from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral, Florida on May 6, is preparing for the forthcoming high-altitude abort test of the vehicle from Vandenberg AFB, California. Garrett Reisman, director of crew operations at SpaceX, says “we’ve been working lately on a lot of hardware milestones. We focused latterly on abort system hardware, and later we intend to do a high-altitude abort, which is the hardest point where you could try to get away from the rocket.” The test will be performed at the point where the Falcon 9 booster will be accelerating through maximum aerodynamic pressure (max Q). “That’s the most difficult phase from a controllability and thrust perspective,” says Reisman.

Although selected alongside Boeing for the commercial crew mission, Reisman says “we think competition is essential for this model, and we’d like to see that continue indefinitely so NASA can enjoy the benefits of a mixed fleet.” The company is developing an avionics test bed and will “have an iron bird (test rig) running by the end of year. SpaceX is also working on qualification of the docking system which it aims to complete this year. For 2016 “the big thing is we intend to do a complete mission to the ISS fully autonomously to make sure the crew Dragon is ready for people,” says Reisman.

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* Art from Deviant art

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I still wish Dream Chaser was going up.

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