History > 2007 > USA > Space (II)

Crew Ready

to Tackle Power Problems

October 31, 2007
Filed at 8:50 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

HOUSTON (AP) -- NASA scrambled Wednesday to deal with two power problems at the international space station that could delay future missions and make it even harder to finish building the orbiting outpost before the space shuttles must be retired.

Both issues competed for the precious little spacewalking time that's left in Discovery's mission, which already was extended a day after the first problem cropped up last weekend. Spacewalks were scheduled for Thursday and Saturday.

Discovery commander Pamela Melroy said that her crew is ready to tackle whatever repairs are ordered -- even if that means extending the mission and adding another spacewalk.

''I think we're kind of in the groove right now, so if the ground decides that's the right thing to do and they ask us to do it, we'll be ready to support it,'' Melroy said Wednesday.

Astronauts Scott Parazynski and Douglas Wheelock were getting ready Wednesday to spend the mission's fourth spacewalk thoroughly inspecting a malfunctioning rotary joint that keeps the station's solar panels turned toward the sun.

Spacewalkers may spend Discovery's fifth planned spacewalk repairing a giant solar wing that ripped as it was being unfurled on Tuesday. The tear forced the space agency to halt the process before the wing was fully extended.

Until at least one of the problems is resolved, the station won't be able to generate enough power to support new equipment, such as a European lab that is supposed to be delivered by Atlantis in December. Delaying that mission would set back other deliveries, including the planned February installation of a new Japanese lab.

NASA is up against a hard 2010 deadline for completing the space station and retiring the three remaining shuttles.

Space station program manager Mike Suffredini hinted Tuesday that another two days could be added to the flight if the newest problem is deemed serious enough. The flight was extended one day after the rotary joint problems were discovered.

The solar panel ripped just after Parazynski and Wheelock finished a seven-hour spacewalk to install the beam that holds the wings. Deploying the damaged wing's twin went off without a hitch.

Melroy said the crew did the best they could with the deployment, given the fact that the sun was shining directly into their cameras.

''Of course we're always going to second guess ourselves ... but I think we certainly aborted as soon as we saw something that wasn't right,'' she said during a joint crew news conference.

Astronauts took pictures of the wing tear, but NASA engineers couldn't tell what caused the damage, space station flight director Heather Rarick said late Tuesday.

''Until we know what we think the cause is, maybe until we get some better pictures, I don't think we really have any solid leads on how to fix it yet,'' Rarick said.

Astronaut Daniel Tani said he noticed a second, smaller tear near the 2 1/2-foot rip while he was taking additional pictures Wednesday.

NASA also wasn't sure about the cause of the rotary joint problem. Steel shavings were found during a spacewalk over the weekend in the joint on the right side of the station. Until NASA figures out what's grinding inside the gears and fixes it, the right joint will remain in a parked position as much as possible, limiting power collection.

On Thursday, Parazynski and Wheelock plan to remove 21 protective covers from the joint and search for whatever's causing the problem. They also may clean up some of the debris.

The fifth spacewalk is dedicated to preparing the newly installed Harmony module to be moved to its permanent space station home. Discovery delivered the new compartment last week and it was installed in a temporary location. The three-person space station crew plans to move the module after Discovery leaves.

Those tasks could be postponed if NASA figures out a way for spacewalkers to repair the solar wing.

Wheelock planned to use a backup spacesuit glove on Thursday after noticing a small hole in his right glove following Tuesday's spacewalk. It was the third time in four shuttle missions that a spacewalker has noticed a cut in his glove.

The hole only penetrated the exterior part of Wheelock's multi-layered glove. If something penetrated the entire glove, the spacewalker's suit could leak, putting him in danger if he couldn't quickly get back inside the station.

Discovery currently is scheduled to undock from the station on Monday and land on Nov 7.

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On the Net:

NASA: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov

Crew Ready to Tackle Power Problems, NYT, 31.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Space-Shuttle.html

Astronauts Bolt Tower to Space Station

October 30, 2007
Filed at 12:54 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

HOUSTON (AP) -- Spacewalking astronauts bolted a solar power tower to the international space station on Tuesday, completing an ambitious three-day moving process that ended with elation when the beam's giant solar panels began to unfurl.

Their joy turned to concern, however, when a rip was spotted in the second solar panel.

NASA needs to get the tower up and running to prevent malfunctioning station equipment from delaying the addition of a much-anticipated European research lab.

A massive rotary joint is supposed to make sure the solar panel wings on the right side of the space station are facing the sun. But the gear, which was installed in June, has been experiencing electrical current spikes for nearly two months.

The solar panels on the 17 1/2-ton girder that was installed at its new location Tuesday were folded up like an accordion for the move, and the first one slowly was unfurled as the seven-hour spacewalk wrapped up, gleaming like gold in the sun.

The crew kept spacewalker Scott Parazynski and Douglas Wheelock apprised of the first solar wing's unfurling as they floated back inside. Their reaction: ''Wow, that's great,'' and ''Awesome!''

''It's a good day's work right there,'' Parazynski said.

The astronauts abruptly stopped the unfurling of the second panel, however, as soon as they saw the rip on the edge of the panel. The panel was almost completely unfurled when the rip was spotted. The astronauts beamed down photos of the torn and crumpled section so NASA can analyze them and determine the extent of the damage.

A spacewalking astronaut found black dust resembling metal shavings inside the motorized joint on Sunday. NASA has limited the joint's motion to prevent the debris from causing permanent damage, but that also limits the system's ability to generate power for the station.

Parazynski spent part of Tuesday inspecting the matching rotary joint that turns the space station's left set of solar wings toward the sun. NASA will examine images he gathered of the perfectly running unit to compare it to the malfunctioning one.

There were no shavings inside the joint, and Parazynski said everything looked pristine.

''It's right out of the shop, no debris whatsoever,'' he said.

Parazynski and Wheelock guided astronauts inside the station as they used a robotic arm to hook up the beam to the orbiting outpost's backbone. The spacewalkers then began installing bolts to hold the beam in place and connecting wires to provide power.

''Oh I love this job,'' Parazynski said as they worked 220 miles above southeast Asia. ''Beautiful view.''

Given the problems with the right rotary joint, NASA needs the power generated by the newly installed solar panels to proceed with the planned December launch of the European Space Agency's science lab, named Columbus.

That lab and a Japanese lab set to be delivered early next year will latch onto the new Harmony module that Discovery delivered last week.

The space agency added a day to Discovery's mission so spacewalking astronauts could conduct a detailed inspection of the troublesome joint. That work is scheduled for Thursday.

To make room for that inspection, managers canceled a shuttle thermal tile repair demonstration that was scheduled for that spacewalk. The test was added to the mission after a piece of fuel-tank foam gouged Endeavour's belly on the last shuttle flight in August.

Any repairs to the malfunctioning gear would be put off until after Discovery departs.

Discovery is now scheduled to undock from the space station on Monday and return to Earth on Nov. 7.

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On the Net:

NASA: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov 

    Astronauts Bolt Tower to Space Station, NYT, 30.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Space-Shuttle.html

Astronauts Discover

Damage to Space Station

October 29, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Spacewalking astronauts yesterday found evidence of damage to a crucial part of the International Space Station’s power system.

The discovery of what appear to be metallic shavings in one of the station’s enormous rotating joint assemblies suggested problems for the orbiting space station that could affect ambitious plans to add two power-hungry laboratories.

The problem was found during the second of five scheduled spacewalks of the space shuttle Discovery’s current mission. The astronauts Scott E. Parazynski and Daniel M. Tani unbuckled a solar array atop the space station so it could be relocated and made progress on outfitting the exterior of the station’s newest room, the Harmony module.

The part in question, known as the Solar Alpha Rotary Joint, or SARJ, is 10 feet across; one sits toward each end of the station’s long truss. The motorized joint allows solar panels to rotate and constantly face the sun during the sunny part of each orbit.

“It’s quite clear,” said Mr. Tani, describing what he saw after removing a protective cover over an assembly of gears and bearings. “There’s metal-to-metal scraping, or something, and it’s widespread.” Mr. Tani collected some of the material with tape.

A sharp-eyed space station flight controller had noticed several weeks ago that the joint on the right side of the station was experiencing unusual vibrations as it rotated.

Further examination revealed that the motor on that joint was using greater-than-expected amounts of current, which suggested that it was having to work harder than it should to turn the 30,000-pound paddle wheel-like array. So on Friday, mission managers added the inspection to the spacewalk.

Mission managers said in a briefing yesterday that the origin of the shavings was unclear. The leading theory, they said, was that a foil backing of aluminized Mylar on a protective cover could be rubbing against the mechanism and shredding into it.

NASA might have astronauts take off the other 21 covers, one by one, to see if any have been damaged in that way; this could happen on an additional spacewalk or on one already planned. Even if the source of the shavings is identified, however, cleaning the mechanism will be difficult.

The space station program manager, Michael T. Suffredini, said the troubled joint would be “parked” in a position that allowed it to pick up a fair amount of sunlight while NASA continued to investigate. He said though the calculations were still being worked through, he believed “we’ll have the power we need.”

The problem could have effects that ripple beyond this mission because additional laboratory modules are likely to require more power than the current configuration can produce. Also, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans to fly an additional solar array to the station next year for the same joint, which adds pressure to resolve the problem.

The rotary joint system is built with a measure of redundancy, and there are backup motors and controllers for each rotary joint, with an additional race, or ring, for the motors to turn the joint already on the wheel. So if a solution cannot be found with the existing set-up, Mr. Suffredini said, a complex switch-over might restore the system to full operation.

However, Mr. Suffredini added, “that would require multiple spacewalks and is strictly last resort.”

    Astronauts Discover Damage to Space Station, NYT, 29.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/science/space/29shuttle.html

Astronauts Conduct Second Spacewalk

October 28, 2007
Filed at 7:44 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

HOUSTON (AP) -- Two spacewalking astronauts unhooked a 35,000-pound girder from the international space station Sunday, starting the delicate process of moving the giant solar power tower to another part of the orbiting outpost.

Spacewalkers Scott Parazynski and Daniel Tani started their 6.5-hour jaunt by disconnecting cables and unscrewing bolts that connected the girder to the space station's backbone.

They then guided astronauts Stephanie Wilson and Doug Wheelock as they used the station's robotic arm to detach the huge truss.

''Don't drop it!'' joked one of the spacewalkers.

The robotic arm operators inside the station will move the girder to a location where it can be temporarily parked. Installation is set for Tuesday during the mission's third spacewalk.

Parazynski and Tani also planned to add equipment to the outside of Harmony, a school bus-sized chamber that was delivered by Discovery and installed during the mission's first spacewalk. The crew entered the room for the first time on Saturday.

Besides spacewalking handrails, the astronauts plan to install a fixture on Harmony that will allow the station's robotic arm to move the compartment from its current temporary location to its permanent home.

The space station's crew will relocate Harmony after Discovery leaves in another week.

The European Space Agency's science laboratory, named Columbus, will hook onto Harmony as early as December. The Japanese Space Agency's lab -- called Kibo or in English, Hope -- will latch onto Harmony early next year.

Harmony also will function as a nerve center, providing air, electricity and water for the space station.

Meanwhile, Tani is scheduled to inspect a rotary joint for the station's solar wings that is acting up and check for possible sharp edges on a rail for the robot arm.

NASA had to cut a spacewalk short during Endeavour's August mission after one of the astronauts noticed a quarter-inch-long rip in the thumb of his glove. Another glove was damaged during an earlier flight, and Mission Control said sharp edges on the rail may be to blame in both cases.

While they worked, Tani caught a glimpse of Ireland through the clouds and had a chance to wave at his friends and family there. Tani met his wife while golfing in Cork.

''Can't wait to get back there and share all my stories with them,'' he said.

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On the Net:
 
NASA: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov

    Astronauts Conduct Second Spacewalk, NYT, 28.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Space-Shuttle.html

Astronauts Begin First Spacewalk

October 26, 2007
Filed at 10:35 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

HOUSTON (AP) -- Astronauts using a robotic arm pulled a school bus-sized addition to the international space station from the shuttle Discovery's cargo bay Friday as two spacewalkers prepared to move another giant piece of equipment.

Spacewalking astronauts Scott Parazynski and Douglas Wheelock spent much of the morning readying the new live-in compartment to be transferred to the orbiting outpost.

The module -- called Harmony -- weighs nearly 16 tons and will increase the station's living and working space by more than 2,500 cubic feet. The Italian-made compartment will serve as the docking port for European and Japanese laboratories that will be delivered on the next three shuttle flights.

Astronauts Daniel Tani and Stephanie Wilson worked inside the shuttle, using the station's robotic arm to slowly move Harmony toward its new home. Outside, Parazynski and Wheelock were preparing a space station girder for relocation later in the mission.

Earlier Friday, the spacewalkers removed a broken antenna from the station and packed it aboard Discovery for its return to Earth.

Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli, who joined Discovery's crew to personally deliver the pressurized chamber, was coordinating the 6.5-hour spacewalk from inside the station.

A veteran spacewalker, Parazynski is set to participate in four of the record-tying five spacewalks scheduled for this jam-packed mission. This is Wheelock's first trip to space.

The 10 astronauts aboard Discovery and the space station face the most challenging construction tasks ever attempted in a single mission.

They may get a little more time to tackle their to-do list because engineers have not spotted any significant problems with the shuttle's thermal shield.

The crew has set aside several hours Saturday for a focused inspection of any trouble spots, but mission management team chairman John Shannon said that examination probably won't be necessary.

NASA has made damage inspections a priority since the disintegration of the shuttle Columbia in 2003.

A piece of foam broke off Columbia's external fuel tank during liftoff and gashed a wing, allowing hot gases to penetrate the spacecraft during its return to Earth. All seven of its astronauts were killed.

Further analysis is needed before NASA can say for sure that Discovery suffered no significant launch damage. But given all the construction work on this mission, ''We are extremely lucky that we have a vehicle that is in such incredible shape,'' Shannon said.

The spacewalkers started their jaunt about a half hour ahead of schedule and were quickly wowed by the view of the Andes and the Amazon rain forest as they floated over South America.

''You're not going to believe this,'' Parazynski told Wheelock as he opened the hatch.

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On the Net:

NASA:http://spaceflight.nasa.gov

    Astronauts Begin First Spacewalk, NYT, 26.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Space-Shuttle.html

Station Crew Greets Discovery

October 25, 2007
Filed at 1:22 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

HOUSTON (AP) -- The crew aboard the international space station greeted Discovery's seven astronauts with hugs and handshakes on Thursday after the shuttle arrived at the orbiting outpost to begin an ambitious construction mission.

It was an extra special moment for Discovery commander Pamela Melroy and station commander Peggy Whitson, the first women to simultaneously manage two spacecraft in the 50-year history of spaceflight. They warmly embraced one another when Melroy floated into the station.

With Melroy at the helm, Discovery snuggled up to the space station and latched on after performing a giant somersault to give engineers a close look at the ship's belly and make sure it wasn't damaged during liftoff.

They will pay special attention to see whether a patch of ice that formed just before launch on the shuttle's fuel tank plumbing hurt the ship. The ice apparently shook free and hit a hatch on the underside, but engineers were not sure if there was any damage.

NASA gave the go-ahead for launch, saying the ice was too small to pose a serious hazard. It appeared to be melting as the countdown entered its final minutes.

Flight director Rick LaBrode said engineers would be poring over the pictures taken Thursday but were not second guessing the decision to launch despite the ice patch.

''I think it did exactly what they anticipated it to do,'' he said.

NASA engineers didn't spot anything significant in a preliminary look at images captured during Wednesday's meticulous examination of Discovery's nose and wings, said John Shannon, head of the mission management team.

But officials will need even more data and analyses before they can be sure the shuttle's thermal shielding made it through the launch damage-free.

Photos taken during Endeavour's pre-docking backflip in August allowed engineers to spot a worrisome gouge in that ship's belly. The shuttle landed safely after several days of debate over whether in-flight repairs were needed.

Inspections like the one Wednesday became standard procedure after a piece of foam broke off Columbia's external fuel tank during liftoff and gashed a wing, allowing hot gases to penetrate the spacecraft during its return to Earth. The shuttle disintegrated, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

About six pieces of foam broke off Discovery's external fuel tank during launch and one or more may have hit the shuttle, but it happened late enough to be of little or no concern. Shannon said nothing appeared to come off the tank's brackets, which were modified after Endeavour's landing.

Soon after the hatches opened, shuttle astronaut Daniel Tani became a full-fledged member of the space station. He replaces Clayton Anderson, who has lived on the station since June and will return home with Discovery. Tani will remain on board until the next shuttle flight, slated for December.

''He's behind already one month in rent,'' Anderson joked.

The Discovery crew won't have much time to get comfortable with an action-packed schedule that calls for a record-tying five spacewalks.

The astronauts have to install Discovery's primary payload, a pressurized compartment that will be a docking port for European and Japanese laboratories being launched on the next three shuttle flights.

An Italian astronaut making his first spaceflight, Paolo Nespoli, is personally delivering the chamber, named Harmony by schoolchildren who took part in a national competition.

The astronauts also have to move a massive girder and set of solar wings on the station and pull out the solar wings and radiators.

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On the Net:

NASA: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov

    Station Crew Greets Discovery, NYT, 25.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Space-Shuttle.html

Discovery Docks With Station

October 25, 2007
Filed at 8:46 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

HOUSTON (AP) -- Space shuttle Discovery docked with the international space station on Thursday, and its crew prepared to embark on the most challenging construction work ever attempted in a single mission.

With commander Pamela Melroy at the helm, Discovery snuggled up to the space station and latched on after performing a giant somersault to give engineers a close look at the ship's belly and make sure it wasn't damaged during liftoff.

The docking marked the historic meetup of the first two spacecraft simultaneously commanded by women. Space station commander Peggy Whitson is the first woman to be in charge of the orbiting lab.

NASA engineers didn't spot anything significant in a preliminary look at images captured during Wednesday's meticulous examination of Discovery's nose and wings, said John Shannon, head of the mission management team.

But officials will need even more data and analyses before they can be sure the shuttle's thermal shielding made it through the launch damage-free.

Photos taken during Endeavour's pre-docking backflip in August allowed engineers to spot a worrisome gouge in that ship's belly. The shuttle landed safely after several days of debate over whether in-flight repairs were needed.

Inspections like the one Wednesday became standard procedure after a piece of foam broke off Columbia's external fuel tank during liftoff and gashed a wing, allowing hot gases to penetrate the spacecraft during its return to Earth. The shuttle disintegrated, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

About six pieces of foam broke off Discovery's external fuel tank during launch and one or more may have hit the shuttle, but it happened late enough to be of little or no concern. Shannon said nothing appeared to come off the tank's brackets, which were modified after Endeavour's landing.

Later Thursday, astronaut Daniel Tani will ceremoniously change places with Anderson, who has been living on the station since June and will return to Earth aboard Discovery. Tani will remain on board until the next shuttle flight, slated for December.

''I can't wait to settle into my new home,'' Tani said after being awoken to the song ''Dancing in the Moonlight.''

The Discovery crew won't have much time to get comfortable with an action-packed schedule that calls for a record-tying five spacewalks.

The astronauts have to install Discovery's primary payload, a pressurized compartment that will be a docking port for European and Japanese laboratories being launched on the next three shuttle flights.

An Italian astronaut making his first spaceflight, Paolo Nespoli, is personally delivering the chamber, named Harmony by schoolchildren who took part in a national competition.

The astronauts also have to move a massive girder and set of solar wings on the station and pull out the solar wings and radiators.

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On the Net:

NASA: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov

    Discovery Docks With Station, NYT, 25.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Space-Shuttle.html

Discovery Astronauts Checking for Damage

October 24, 2007
Filed at 7:49 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

HOUSTON (AP) -- Shuttle Discovery chased the international space station in orbit Wednesday as its seven astronauts began a painstaking laser inspection of their ship's wings.

It was the first full day of what NASA considers to be the most complicated space station construction mission yet. The shuttle was to reach the station Thursday.

NASA's space operations chief, Bill Gerstenmaier, said after Tuesday's liftoff that the astronauts face a tremendous series of challenges, but noted, ''I can't think of a better start to this mission than what we got today.'' It was the third on-time shuttle launch in a row.

At least six pieces of foam insulation came off Discovery's fuel tank during liftoff, but the debris posed no risk to the shuttle because it was shed after the crucial first two minutes, officials said.

''It's preliminary only, but it did look like a clean ascent,'' Mission Control informed Discovery's commander Pamela Melroy, only the second woman to lead a shuttle crew.

Melroy and her crew used a laser-tipped inspection boom Wednesday to check Discovery's vulnerable wings and nose.

The astronauts checked three wing panels for possible cracks just beneath a protective coating. It's unknown whether cracks could worsen and cause the coating to chip off and make the area more vulnerable to the 3,000-degree heat of re-entry.

The checks are standard since a strike by a slab of fuel-tank foam created a hole in Columbia's wing in 2003, downing the shuttle.

After a lengthy discussion last week, top mission managers deemed Discovery safe for launch even though NASA's own safety group wanted to delay the liftoff for repairs.

A small piece of foam broke off a bracket on Endeavour's fuel tank during the last launch in August, possibly along with ice, and gouged the shuttle's belly. That led to changes to Discovery's fuel tank to prevent dangerous ice buildup.

NASA officials will analyze the images gathered during Tuesday's launch and Wednesday's inspection before clearing Discovery for landing.

The shuttle's primary payload is an Italian-built compartment, about the size of a small bus, that will serve as the docking port for science labs due to arrive beginning in December. Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli is personally delivering the pressurized chamber, called Harmony.

During their 1 1/2-week station visit, the astronauts must install Harmony, relocate a giant girder and set of solar wings, extend those solar wings and radiators, and test a thermal tile repair kit. Five spacewalks are planned, which will be the most ever conducted while a shuttle is docked at the station.

Astronaut Daniel Tani will move into the station once Discovery docks. He will replace Clayton Anderson, who will return to Earth on the shuttle after five months in space.

As they prepared for the inspection, Melroy, Tani and astronauts Scott Parazynski and George Zamka hugged and waved into the cockpit camera.

''You all look like you're having way too much fun,'' Mission Control said.

''That would be the STS-120 crew,'' Melroy answered with a laugh. ''We're always having too much fun.''

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On the Net:

NASA: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov

    Discovery Astronauts Checking for Damage, NYT, 24.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Space-Shuttle.html

Space Shuttle Launches Despite Bad Weather

October 23, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

The shuttle Discovery thundered off the pad to space this morning on a construction mission to the International Space Station that will bring the new “Harmony” module to the orbiting laboratory.

Despite weather concerns and a small chunk of ice that threatened to delay the launching, everything seemed to fall into place in the final minutes before the scheduled time. Less than a half-hour before the engines roared, the launch director, Michael D. Leinbach, polled the mission team and received the “go for launch” recommendation from each group working toward the decision.

“Booster ignition and liftoff of Discovery,” said the launch commentator, Mike Curie, as the engines started up with their rasping roar, “hoisting Harmony to the heavens and opening new gateways for international science.”

The shuttle punched through a cloud on its way into the skies, briefly turning it bright yellow from within, and moved on toward a meeting with the station on Thursday.

The mission beginning today is crucial to future construction on the station, said Richard R. Arnold II, an astronaut who will be flying on a mission next fall to bring the final solar array to the station. Discovery and its crew is bringing up the long-awaited “Harmony” module, a room-sized canister that was made in Italy and will allow future crews to bring up and connect laboratories built by European and Japanese space agencies. When the mission is over and the new module is in place, Mr. Arnold said, “We’re going to be able to make this International Space Station truly international.”

The mission will pack a large number of construction tasks into its two-week duration — so many, that one astronaut, Scott Parazynski, has called the level of challenge “off-scale high.” Not only will the astronauts be bringing up the new “room” for the station — the first addition to the living space in six years — the combined crews of the shuttle and station will also pluck a 17.5-ton solar array and truss from its current position atop the station and move it to its permanent position at the farthest end of the port truss. This operation will require delicate handoffs between the robot and station arms.

“This one is almost like two missions in one,” said Sandra H. Magnus, an astronaut who flew aboard the shuttle Atlantis in 2002.

The commander for the 120th space shuttle mission is Col. Pam Melroy, who is a retired from the Air Force, and the pilot is Col. George D. Zamka of the Marine Corps. The other astronauts are Dr. Parazynski, Stephanie Wilson, Col. Doug Wheelock of the Army, and Paolo Nespoli, an Italian representing the European Space Agency. A seventh astronaut, Daniel Tani, is aboard to take his place aboard the space station with its commander, Peggy Whitson, and Yuri Malenchenko, a Russian flight engineer. The crew will bring back Clayton Anderson, who has served aboard the station since June.

The 11:38 launching went off without a hiccup despite earlier worries that poor weather would keep the shuttle and its seven-member crew from getting off the ground today. As the crew was being sealed inside the shuttle just before 10 a.m., NASA inspection teams took a close look at a hunk of ice that had formed toward the base of the shuttle’s orange external tank. The ice, a four-inch-by-one-inch piece, was on a line that feeds liquid hydrogen to the shuttle’s main engines. Falling ice and falling insulating foam debris can be hazardous to the delicate leading thermal tiles and panels that protect the shuttle from the heat of reentry. The piece was analyzed to see if its position and density pose a threat to shuttle tiles, but inspectors ultimately decided that Discovery was not threatened by the ice.

Discovery is also carrying a bit of Hollywood into orbit: a “light saber” that was used in the making of the “Star Wars” movies. The prop is being taken to space as part of the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the first Star Wars film.

The publicity stunt unintentionally contrasts the soaring, mythic quality of the science fiction series, with its touches of cowboy opera and World War II fighter films, with the less glamorous adventure of actually going to orbit and building a space station. But this mission has its own measure of risk.

In the weeks before the mission, safety concerns were raised by engineers at NASA’s engineering and safety office, who argued that this launching should be delayed until December so that at least three heat-resistant panels on the leading edge of the wings could be replaced. That group was created after the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew in 2003 to act as a technical backstop on safety issues, which had been played down by mission managers before and during Columbia’s last flight.

In the case of Discovery, testing showed a surprising amount of decay in the coating on the leading-edge panels, which must protect the craft from 3000-degree heat during reentry. The deterioration of the coatings led the safety engineers to argue that they do not fully understand the process or rate of deterioration, and should replace suspect panels to be as safe as possible.

Mission managers voted to go forward with the mission, while pledging to study the problem further. There was no evidence that the damage might accelerate, though the managers did acknowledge that in the worst case, a burned-through panel, and even the loss of a shuttle and crew, was possible. But any such damage could be detected during the on-orbit inspection that is now a part of every flight and could be repaired successfully with newly developed techniques and materials, mission managers said.

There were no official dissents entered against the decision to launch, but the agency’s chief engineer wrote his concerns into the record. The engineering center, which does not have a vote in the matter, did not change its recommendation against launching.

On Friday, when the crew arrived at Kennedy Space Center, Colonel Melroy, said she and the crew were comfortable with the decision to launch. She noted that discussions of the leading-edge panel problem went on for 12 hours, and said, “I feel very confident that everybody’s voice was heard.” She and the rest of the crew, she said, were “totally confident” that the heat shield on Discovery “is ready to protect us on our ride home.”

To Mr. Arnold, the length of the deliberations is important to the astronauts, since it shows that concerns are being aired openly and are being discussed seriously. “We believe in the system we have in place,” Mr. Arnold said. “We know there are a lot of people out there working hard to keep us safe. But we also know it’s an experimental vehicle — and every time we fly, we learn something new about it,” he added. “With experimental vehicles, there’s always risk.”

    Space Shuttle Launches Despite Bad Weather, NYT, 23.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/science/23cnd-shuttle.html?hp

Amid Concerns, an Ambitious Shuttle Mission

October 21, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

NASA is planning to launch the shuttle Discovery on Tuesday, beginning a mission to the International Space Station so crowded with construction tasks that one of the astronauts, the four-time space veteran Scott E. Parazynski, has called the challenge “off-scale high.”

But a conflict has emerged in recent weeks about whether this mission should be launching at all, and a last-minute dispute — in which NASA officials overruled safety engineers — is raising fundamental questions about the risks of the aging shuttle.

In defending the decision that launching involved “acceptable risk,” N. Wayne Hale Jr., the manager of the shuttle program, acknowledged last week that the craft “is not a safe vehicle by any normal standard.”

If all goes well, the mission will be a high point in the efforts to complete the space station before the shuttle program is wound down by 2010. The Discovery’s seven astronauts, working with the three-member space station crew, will add the first new “room” in six years. The closet-sized Harmony module will allow two new laboratories, from Europe and Japan, to be hooked up on future flights.

And in a set of unprecedented maneuvers, the crew will move a solar array and truss from atop the station to its permanent home on the far end of the port arm, and will extend the solar panels that were folded during previous missions. “When we leave the station, it’s going to look a whole lot different than when we joined it,” said Col. George D. Zamka of the Marine Corps, the pilot for the mission.

The work will require five spacewalks and the extensive use of robotic arms. Moving the 17.5-ton solar array and truss alone, Dr. Parazynski said, is “perhaps one of the most audacious things that we’ve done in space.”

The cloud over the ambitious mission is, once again, safety. Engineers at the NASA Engineering and Safety Center have argued that the launching should be delayed until December so that at least three heat-resistant panels on the leading edge of the craft’s wings can be replaced.

Experts at the center, which was formed after the Columbia tragedy to act as a second opinion on safety issues, expressed concerns that the protective coating on the panels was showing a surprising amount of decay — more than the previously accepted methods for testing the panels would suggest. They now believe that they do not fully understand the process of deterioration.

Though there were no official dissents entered against the decision to launch, NASA’s chief engineer wrote his concerns into the record. The safety center, which does not have a vote in the matter, did not change its recommendation against launching.

Mr. Hale conceded that in the worst case, the decay could lead to a burned-through panel and the “catastrophic loss of vehicle,” but he insisted that the possibility was remote. Even if there is damage, it can be detected and repaired in orbit, he said.

The decision to launch has drawn criticism from some who say it mirrors schedule-driven decisions that doomed the crews of the Challenger in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003. The newspaper Florida Today published an editorial last Monday that criticized the agency for “rolling the dice” and argued that flying now was “a risk NASA should not take.”

The Harmony module is inextricably linked to the loss of the Columbia. The module was originally called Node 2, and NASA’s leaders exerted intense pressure to launch it by February 2004, a year after the Columbia was to launch.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board report noted that before the accident, NASA was hard-pressed to prove it could meet schedules and budgets. If the launching deadline could not be met, it was believed, “NASA would risk losing support from the White House and Congress for subsequent space station growth,” the board said.

NASA headquarters even sent a computer screen saver to managers in the human spaceflight program that displayed a live countdown to Feb. 19, 2004 — the official date for the Node 2 launch — in days, hours, minutes and seconds. That pressure led managers to cut corners, the safety board found, especially in its consideration of the threats of insulating foam.

During the Columbia’s ascent, a 1.67-pound piece of foam broke from a ramp on the external fuel tank and smashed into the leading edge of the shuttle’s left wing. During re-entry two weeks later, superheated plasma entered the wing like a torch and destroyed the craft.

NASA officials and many workers say the space agency has changed since then. Derek Hassman, the lead station flight director for the coming mission, recalled at a press conference that in the old days, “Node 2 was held up as the be all and end all of the assembly sequence.” Now, he said, “I can say from my perspective, it’s night and day.”

At a press conference on Tuesday, officials said that all concerns had been taken seriously and that the space agency would continue to work on getting a better understanding of the panel issue. “I would love to be in a position of saying we understand all of our problems completely,” Mr. Hale said, but “the fact of the matter is that this is a very complicated vehicle — this is an old vehicle — and there are a lot of loose ends out there.”

Pamela A. Melroy, the mission’s commander and a retired Air Force colonel, said she and the crew were comfortable with the decision to launch. “With a 12-hour discussion, I feel very confident that everybody’s voice was heard,” she said in a press conference on the shuttle runway as the crew arrived at Kennedy Space Center on Friday.

In addition to Colonel Melroy, Colonel Zamka and Dr. Parazynski, the crew includes Paolo A. Nespoli, an Italian representing the European Space Agency; Col. Douglas H. Wheelock of the Army; and Stephanie D. Wilson. A seventh astronaut, Daniel M. Tani, will be on board to take his place aboard the space station with its commander, Peggy A. Whitson, and Col. Yuri I. Malenchenko, a Russian flight engineer.

The crew will bring back Clayton C. Anderson, who has served aboard the station since June. By coincidence, it will be the first time that there will be two female commanders in space.

John M. Logsdon, the director of the Institute of Space Policy at George Washington University and a member of the Columbia investigation board, acknowledged that the run-up to the mission “has some resemblance to the normalization of deviance,” using the term for the gradual playing down of safety concerns in the Challenger and Columbia disasters. “Clearly, there is some schedule pressure,” he said.

But Dr. Logsdon said he was loath to second-guess NASA’s current leadership, including Mr. Hale; William H. Gerstenmaier, the human spaceflight chief; and the agency’s administrator, Michael D. Griffin. He said they were “extremely competent engineers” who had “heard all the pros and cons” and operated under a bright spotlight.

“It’s a gutsy call,” Dr. Logsdon said. “It’s their job to make these tough judgments. I’m glad I’m not them.”

    Amid Concerns, an Ambitious Shuttle Mission, NYT, 21.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/science/space/21shuttle.html

A Giant Leap for Womankind

October 20, 2007
Filed at 2:53 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- A giant leap is about to be made for womankind.

When space shuttle Discovery blasts off Tuesday, a woman will be sitting in the commander's seat. And up at the international space station, a female skipper will be waiting to greet her.

It will be the first time in the 50-year history of spaceflight that two women are in charge of two spacecraft at the same time.

This is no public relations gimmick cooked up by NASA. It's coincidence, which pleases shuttle commander Pamela Melroy and station commander Peggy Whitson.

''To me, that's one of the best parts about it,'' said Melroy, a retired Air Force colonel who will be only the second woman to command a space shuttle flight. ''This is not something that was planned or orchestrated in any way.''

Indeed, Melroy's two-week space station construction mission was originally supposed to be done before Whitson's six-month expedition.

''This is a really special event for us,'' Melroy said. ''... There are enough women in the program that coincidentally this can happen, and that is a wonderful thing. It says a lot about the first 50 years of spaceflight that this is where we're at.''

Whitson -- the first woman to be in charge of a space station -- arrived at the orbital outpost on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on Oct. 12. She flew there with two men, one a Russian cosmonaut who will spend the entire six months with her.

Before the launch, an official presented her with a traditional Kazakh whip to take with her. It's a symbol of power, Whitson explained, because of all the horseback and camel riding in Kazakhstan.

Smiling, she said she took the gift as a compliment and added: ''I did think it was interesting though, that they talked a lot about the fact that they don't typically let women have these.''

At least it wasn't a mop. The whip stayed behind on Earth.

Eleven years ago, just before Shannon Lucid rocketed to the Russian space station Mir, a Russian space official said during a live prime-time news conference that he was pleased she was going up because ''we know that women love to clean.''

''I really haven't heard very much like that at all from the Russian perspective,'' Whitson said in an interview with The Associated Press last week. ''Russian cosmonauts are very professional and having worked and trained with them for years before we get to this point, I think makes it better because then it doesn't seem unusual to them either.''

''So I think I'm luckier. Shannon was probably breaking more barriers in that way than I have been,'' added Whitson, who spent six months aboard the space station in 2002.

Melroy, 46, a former test pilot from Rochester, N.Y., and Whitson, 47, a biochemist with a Ph.D. who grew up on a hog farm near Beaconsfield, Iowa, are among 18 female astronauts at NASA. Seventy-three astronauts are men.

What's more, Melroy is the only female shuttle pilot left at NASA. Eileen Collins, who in 1999 became the first woman to command a shuttle, quit NASA last year. Susan Kilrain, who flew as a shuttle pilot but never as a commander, resigned in 2002. Both have children.

Melroy and Whitson are married to scientists, and neither has children.

The countdown started Saturday for Discovery's launch. There was concern about rain on Tuesday morning, but meteorologists put the odds of acceptable weather at liftoff time at 60 percent. No major technical problems were being tracked.

This will be Melroy's third shuttle flight; her first two were as co-pilot. She became an astronaut in 1995, Whitson in 1996.

Their 1 1/2 weeks together in orbit will be extraordinarily busy and the work exceedingly complex. The shuttle is hauling up a pressurized compartment that will provide docking ports for the European and Japanese laboratories that will be launched over the next few months.

The 10 space fliers, seven of them men, will attach the new compartment, named Harmony, to the space station and move a girder and set of solar wings from one spot to another. Five spacewalks will be conducted, including one to test a repair technique on deliberately damaged shuttle thermal tiles.

Melroy and Whitson will oversee it all.

Their male crewmates offer plenty of praise. One of them -- Daniel Tani -- will report to both. He'll fly up on Discovery and swap places with an astronaut who has been living on the space station since June, and stay on board until another shuttle comes up in December.

''The joke has been that my life recently is run by women,'' said Tani, who is married with two young daughters. ''I have two bosses at work. I've got three bosses at home and as it was pointed out recently, much of the time when we're running the robotic arm, I'm the assistant to Stephanie'' Wilson, a shuttle crew member.

''So far, I've survived all of it so we'll see if I can get through the next couple months,'' he said with a laugh.

It's more of a novelty for Melroy's co-pilot, Marine Col. George Zamka. He never served with or for a woman in any of his military flying units.

''I understand it's a wonderful thing for young women to see Pam flying, but in terms of her, I look at her as an individual with some tremendous skills,'' Zamka said.

Melroy and Whitson said they don't know of any men -- American or Russian -- who would refuse to serve on their crews. It wasn't always that way at NASA, which didn't accept women as astronauts until 1978.

------

On the Net:

NASA: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov

    A Giant Leap for Womankind, NYT, 20.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Space-Shuttle-Women.html

NASA Extends Mars Rovers Mission

October 16, 2007
Filed at 2:00 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) -- Mars' aging twin rovers will explore the red planet for at least two more years under an extension approved by NASA.

It is the fifth time the space agency has continued the activities of the solar-powered, six-wheel robots, which landed on opposite ends of the planet in 2004.

The extension means Spirit and Opportunity will conduct science experiments through 2009 provided they stay healthy. The rovers weathered a giant dust storm earlier this year that at one point drastically reduced their power and scaled back their operations.

Spirit is currently exploring a plateau called Home Plate for evidence of volcanism. Last month, Opportunity reached its first stop inside a huge Martian crater and began studying the rock layers. Spirit has driven 4.5 miles while Opportunity has clocked 7.2 miles to date.

The price tag of the original mission, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was $820 million. NASA previously granted four extensions totaling about $106 million. The latest extension will cost at least $20 million.

------

On the Net:

Mars Rovers: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html 

    NASA Extends Mars Rovers Mission, NYT, 16.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Mars-Rovers.html

Stretching the Search for Signs of Life

October 11, 2007
The New York Times
By DENNIS OVERBYE

Call it a small step for E.T., a leap for radio astronomy.

Astronomers in Hat Creek, Calif., are planning today to switch on the first elements of a giant new array of radio telescopes that they say will greatly extend the investigation of natural and unnatural phenomena in the universe.

When the Allen Telescope Array, as it is known, is complete, it will consist of 350 antennas, each 20 feet in diameter. Using the separate antennas as if they were one giant dish, radio astronomers will be able to map vast swaths of the sky cheaply and efficiently.

The array will help search for new phenomena like black holes eating each other and so-called dark galaxies without stars, as well as extend the search for extraterrestrial radio signals a thousandfold, to include a million nearby stars over the next two decades.

Today, 42 of the antennas, mass-produced from molds and employing inexpensive telecommunications technology, will go into operation. “It’s like cutting the ribbon on the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria,” said Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the Seti Institute, in Mountain View, Calif., who pointed out that this was the first radio telescope ever designed specifically for the extraterrestrial quest.

The telescope, named for Paul G. Allen, who provided $25 million in seed money, is a joint project of the Radio Astronomy Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Seti Institute. “If they do find something, they’re going to call me up first and say we have a signal,” Mr. Allen said in an interview, adding, “So far the phone hasn’t rung.”

Describing himself as “a child of the 50s, the golden age of space exploration and science fiction,” Mr. Allen, a founder of Microsoft, said he first got interested in supporting the search for extraterrestrial intelligence after a conversation 12 years ago with Carl Sagan, the Cornell astronomer and exuberant proponent of cosmic wonder.

When the idea later arose to build a telescope array on the cheap, using off-the-shelf satellite dish technology and advanced digital signal processing, Mr. Allen was intrigued. “If you know anything about me,” he said, “you know I’m a real enthusiast for new unconventional approaches to things.”

Telescopes, including radio telescopes, have traditionally been custom-built one-of-a-kind items. The antennas for the Allen array are stamped from a mold. Mr. Allen’s family foundation put up the money to get the first part of the array built, with other contributions from Nathan Myhrvold, formerly of Microsoft and the chief executive of Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, Wash., among others.

Leo Blitz, director of the Radio Astronomy Laboratory, estimated that it would take three years and $41 million more, depending on the price of aluminum, to complete the array. The full array, astronomers say, will be useful not just for science, but also as practice for a truly giant telescope known as the Square Kilometer Array, which would have a combined receiving area of a square kilometer and which astronomers hope to build in Australia or South Africa in 10 or 20 years.

Dr. Blitz said the main advantage of the Allen array for regular radio astronomy was the ability to obtain images of large swaths of the sky, several times the size of the full moon, in a single pointing. At low frequencies, he said, the full array could map the entire sky in a day and night and do it again the next night.

“This has not been possible before,” he said.

In its partial form, Dr. Blitz said, the array is already almost as fast, and much cheaper to run, than larger telescopes.

The speed should make it possible to catch transient events, like radio bursts from colliding black holes, that might last only a few hours, while the mapping ability should enable astronomers to search for lumps of gas without stars, the so-called dark galaxies predicted by the prevailing models of cosmology.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has lived on the kindness of strangers since Congress canceled a NASA-sponsored search using existing radio telescopes in 1993, only a year after it had begun. The Seti Institute, which was to have conducted a search of nearby stars under contract to NASA, raised money from Silicon Valley and revived the search as Project Phoenix, using existing radio telescopes.

Project Phoenix was finished three years ago, having checked some 750 stars for signals, Dr. Shostak said. While that might sound like a lot, he said, “it doesn’t impress anybody who knows how many stars there are in the galaxy.”

There are some 200 billion stars in the galaxy, and a significant fraction of them have planets. Estimates of the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy have ranged from one (or none, if you are particularly discouraged about human affairs) into the millions.

Dr. Shostak calculated that the full Allen array would be able to detect a signal from as far as 500 light years that is only a few times more powerful than what can now be sent by the Arecibo radio telescope, a 1,000-foot-diameter dish in Puerto Rico that is the world’s largest (although it is in danger of being shut down to save money). That translates to about a million stars, which he said was getting into a promising number. Dr. Shostak described the expanded search as looking for the needle in the proverbial haystack with a shovel instead of a spoon.

Anyone out there and broadcasting, for whatever wacky alien reason, would also have to be broadcasting right at Earth. But advanced civilizations, Dr. Shostak said, would be able to tell there was life on Earth because of the oxygen in our atmosphere.

“We’ve been broadcasting that for 2.5 billion years,” he said.

The first thing Dr. Shostak and his colleagues plan to do with the newly operational 42-antenna array is to survey a strip across the center of the galaxy. There will be several billion stars in the field of view, but they will be very far away, 10,000 to 50,000 light years, so any signal would have to be huge to be detected. But who is to say that among galactic civilizations there are not a rare few with tremendous capabilities?

“I’ve never begrudged aliens any power in their transmitter,” Dr. Shostak said.

    Stretching the Search for Signs of Life, NYT, 11.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/science/11seti.html

Scientists to Shut Down Space Telescope

October 9, 2007
Filed at 9:45 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

BALTIMORE (AP) -- Having coaxed all the life they can out of an 8-year-old ultraviolet light-detecting space telescope, scientists will reluctantly turn it off later this month.

After that, NASA's Fuse observatory will be ''just another piece of space junk,'' orbiting the earth every 100 minutes until it falls back to Earth in about 30 years, said Bill Blair, the Fuse operations chief and an astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Fuse, short for Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, has been tuned to the short ultraviolet wavelengths that the Hubble Space Telescope can't see. Fuse has complemented its more famous cousin, detecting a circle of hot gas that surrounds the Milky Way and finding evidence of molecular hydrogen in Mars' atmosphere.

The $108 million observatory has given more than expected when launched in 1999. NASA extended Fuse's mission three times.

Its scientific instruments still have years of life in them, but are no longer able to be pointed at objects of interest, leading to the decision to shut it down Oct. 18, Blair said.

''So that's the sad part, that it was still very scientifically capable,'' he said. ''But I don't think any one of us could complain about the run we got out of this satellite.''

Slowly, the telescope's four reaction wheels, which control its direction, had begun to fail.

''Once we lost that last wheel, basically we could hold it steady in a safe mode, but we couldn't do any science,'' Blair said.

------

On the Net:

Johns Hopkins Fuse Web site:

http://fuse.pha.jhu.edu

    Scientists to Shut Down Space Telescope, NYT, 9.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-UV-Space-Telescope.html

NASA Rover Reaches First Stop in Crater

September 28, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:00 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- NASA's rover Opportunity has reached its first stop inside a huge Martian crater and was poised Thursday to carry out the first science experiments.

Ground controllers planned to send commands late in the day to the six-wheel robot to examine bright rock layers arranged like a bathtub ring within Victoria Crater. Results on how the rover fared were expected Friday, said John Callas, the rover project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Mission managers wanted to delay the science operations because of a power outage at one of the international network of antennas that communicates with interplanetary spacecraft. But they changed their minds after they secured another antenna.

Opportunity rolled to the crater lip last month and began a calculated descent down the inner wall toward a shiny band of bedrock that scientists believe may be part of an ancient Martian surface. After a series of three drives, the rover parked itself 40 feet below the rim at a 25-degree tilt -- the steepest angle it has encountered since landing on the planet.

Opportunity's first task will be to use the tools on its robotic arm to touch and drill into the rock slab. Mission scientists expect it to stay in place for at least a week before scaling farther down the crater to sample other rocks.

''We're going to take our time collecting the data,'' principal investigator Steve Squyres of Cornell University said in an e-mail. ''We invested way too much effort in getting here to blow it by being hasty.''

Opportunity and its twin Spirit have outlasted their original, three-month mission since parachuting to opposite sides of Mars in 2004. The solar-powered rovers recently survived a raging dust storm that forced them to go into sleep mode to conserve energy.

Spirit is currently exploring a plateau called Home Plate for evidence of volcanism. Though Martian winter is still seven months away, mission managers have started looking for a safe spot for Spirit to retreat to.

------

On the Net:

Mars rovers: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html

    NASA Rover Reaches First Stop in Crater, NYT, 28.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Mars-Rovers.html

NASA Launches Asteroid Mission

September 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:56 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- NASA's Dawn spacecraft rocketed away Thursday toward an unprecedented double encounter in the asteroid belt. Scientists hope the mission sheds light on the early solar system by exploring the two largest bodies in the belt between Mars and Jupiter: an asteroid named Vesta and a dwarf planet the size of Texas named Ceres.

Dawn's mission is the world's first attempt to journey to a celestial body and orbit it, then travel to another and circle it as well. Ion-propulsion engines, once confined to science fiction, are making it possible.

''To me, this feels like the first real interplanetary spaceship,'' said Marc Rayman, chief engineer. ''This is the first time we've really had the capability to go someplace, stop, take a detailed look, spend our time there and then leave.''

The 3 billion-mile trip began a little after sunrise. The Delta II rocket thundered through a clear blue sky and headed southeast above the thick clouds over the horizon. A harvest moon was faintly visible in the west.

''Dawn, you're on your way. Good luck,'' Launch Control said once Dawn separated from its third rocket stage an hour later, right on cue. Already, the spacecraft was 4,000 miles from Earth.

Dawn won't reach Vesta, its first stop, until 2011, and Ceres, its second and last stop, until 2015.

Scientists chose the two targets not only because of their size but because they are so different from one another.

Vesta, an asteroid about the length of Arizona and not quite spherical, is dry and rocky and appears to have a surface of frozen lava. It's where many of the meteorites found on Earth came from. Ceres, upgraded to a dwarf planet just last year, is nearly spherical, icy and may have frost-covered poles. Both formed around the same time some 4 1/2 billion years ago.

Spacecraft have flown by asteroids before -- albeit much smaller -- and even orbited and landed on them, and more asteroid missions are on the horizon. But none has attempted to orbit two on the same mission, until Dawn.

''While these other asteroid missions are, I think, very exciting, I hope one doesn't confuse the kind of asteroids that Dawn is going to with the near-Earth asteroids and these other small bodies,'' said Rayman, who is based at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. ''I think many people think of asteroids as kind of little chips of rock. But the places that Dawn is going to really are more like worlds.''

Dawn has cameras, an infrared spectrometer and a gamma ray and neutron detector to probe the surfaces of Vesta and Ceres from orbit. It also has solar wings that measure nearly 65 feet from tip to tip, to generate power as it ventures farther from the sun.

Most importantly, Dawn has three ion engines that will provide a gentle yet increasingly accelerating thrust. Electrons will bombard Dawn's modest supply of xenon gas, and the resulting ions will shoot out into space, nudging the spacecraft along.

Even ''Star Wars'' had only twin ion engines with its T.I.E. Fighters, Rayman noted with a smile earlier in the week.

The mission costs $357 million, excluding the unpublicized price of the rocket.

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On the Net:

Jet Propulsion Laboratory: http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/

    NASA Launches Asteroid Mission, NYT, 27.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Asteroid-Mission.html

NASA to Embark on Asteroid - Belt Mission

September 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:09 p.m. ET
The New York Times

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- NASA is about to embark on an unprecedented asteroid-belt mission with a spacecraft aptly named Dawn. The 3 billion-mile, eight-year journey to probe the earliest stages of the solar system will begin with liftoff, planned for just after sunrise Thursday. Rain is forecast, however, and could force a delay.

Scientists have been waiting for Dawn to rise since July, when the mission was put off because of the more pressing need to launch NASA's latest Mars lander, the Phoenix. Once Phoenix rocketed away in August, that cleared the way for Dawn.

''For the people in the Bahamas, on the 27th will be one day where they can say that Dawn will rise in the west,'' said a smiling Keyur Patel, project manager from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Dawn will travel to the two biggest bodies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter -- rocky Vesta and icy Ceres from the planet-forming period of the solar system.

Ceres is so big -- as wide as Texas -- that it's been reclassified a dwarf planet. The spacecraft will spend a year orbiting Vesta, about the length of Arizona, from 2011 to 2012, then fly to Ceres and circle there in 2015.

Dawn's three science instruments -- a camera, infrared spectrometer, and gamma ray and neutron detector -- will explore Vesta and Ceres from varying altitudes.

''In my view, we're going to be visiting some of the last unexplored worlds in the inner solar system,'' chief engineer Marc Rayman said Tuesday.

Because Vesta and Ceres are so different, researchers want to compare their evolutionary paths.

No one has ever attempted before to send a spacecraft to two celestial bodies and orbit both of them. It's possible now because of the revolutionary ion engines that will propel Dawn through the cosmos.

Dawn is equipped with three ion-propulsion thrusters. Xenon gas will be bombarded with electrons, and the resulting ions will be accelerated out into space, gently shoving the spacecraft forward at increasingly higher speeds.

''It really does emit this cool blue glow like in the science fiction movies,'' Rayman said.

NASA tested an ion engine aboard its Deep Space 1 craft, which was launched in 1998. Ion engines have been used on only about five dozen spacecraft, mostly commercial satellites.

Dawn also has two massive solar wings, nearly 65 feet from tip to tip, to generate power as it ventures farther from the sun. Ceres is about three times farther from the sun than Earth.

NASA put the cost of the mission at $357 million, but said that does not include the Delta II rocket. Officials refused Tuesday to provide the cost of the rocket, saying that was proprietary information.

------

On the Net:

Jet Propulsion Laboratory: http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/

    NASA to Embark on Asteroid - Belt Mission, NYT, 25.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Asteroid-Mission.html

Germs Taken to Space Come Back Deadlier

September 24, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:31 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- It sounds like the plot for a scary B-movie: Germs go into space on a rocket and come back stronger and deadlier than ever. Except, it really happened.

The germ: Salmonella, best known as a culprit of food poisoning. The trip: Space Shuttle STS-115, September 2006. The reason: Scientists wanted to see how space travel affects germs, so they took some along -- carefully wrapped -- for the ride. The result: Mice fed the space germs were three times more likely to get sick and died quicker than others fed identical germs that had remained behind on Earth.

''Wherever humans go, microbes go, you can't sterilize humans. Wherever we go, under the oceans or orbiting the earth, the microbes go with us, and it's important that we understand ... how they're going to change,'' explained Cheryl Nickerson, an associate professor at the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at Arizona State University.

Nickerson added, in a telephone interview, that learning more about changes in germs has the potential to lead to novel new countermeasures for infectious disease.

She reports the results of the salmonella study in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers placed identical strains of salmonella in containers and sent one into space aboard the shuttle, while the second was kept on Earth, under similar temperature conditions to the one in space.

After the shuttle returned, mice were given varying oral doses of the salmonella and then were watched.

After 25 days, 40 percent of the mice given the Earth-bound salmonella were still alive, compared with just 10 percent of those dosed with the germs from space. And the researchers found it took about one-third as much of the space germs to kill half the mice, compared with the germs that had been on Earth.

The researchers found 167 genes had changed in the salmonella that went to space.

Why?

''That's the 64 million dollar question,'' Nickerson said. ''We do not know with 100 percent certainty what the mechanism is of space flight that's inducing these changes.''

However, they think it's a force called fluid shear.

''Being cultured in microgravity means the force of the liquid passing over the cells is low.'' The cells ''are responding not to microgravity, but indirectly to microgravity in the low fluid shear effects.''

''There are areas in the body which are low shear, such as the gastrointestinal tract, where, obviously, salmonella finds itself,'' she went on. ''So, it's clear this is an environment not just relevant to space flight, but to conditions here on Earth, including in the infected host.''

She said it is an example of a response to a changed environment.

''These bugs can sense where they are by changes in their environment. The minute they sense a different environment, they change their genetic machinery so they can survive,'' she said.

The research was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Louisiana Board of Regents, Arizona Proteomics Consortium, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center, National Institutes of Health and the University of Arizona.

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On the Net:

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: http://www.pnas.org

    Germs Taken to Space Come Back Deadlier, NYT, 24.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Germs-in-Space.html

Earth - Imaging Satellite Travels to Space

September 18, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:39 p.m. ET
The New York Times

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) -- A rocket carrying a next-generation Earth-imaging satellite blasted off Tuesday on a mission that promises to zoom in on objects as small as 18 inches across.

The WorldView-1 satellite, built for DigitalGlobe, which supplies much of Google Earth's imagery, was lofted into space aboard a Delta 2 rocket. The satellite separated from the rocket about an hour after liftoff and was circling some 300 miles above the Earth.

WorldView-1 was designed to collect up to 290,000 square miles' worth of imagery a day -- an area about the size of Texas. Information gathered by the 5,000-pound probe can be used by governments and companies to assess damage after a natural disaster or plan escape routes before a catastrophe, the company said.

It is expected to be in operation for about seven years.

WorldView-1 is the first of two advanced remote sensing satellites that DigitalGlobe plans to launch. The company has said its sister satellite, WorldView-2, will be ready for launch late next year.

DigitalGlobe, a privately held Colorado-based provider of high-resolution commercial satellite imagery, also manages the QuickBird commercial satellite launched in 2001. While WorldView-1's resolution is only slightly higher than QuickBird, the new probe can store more images because it has a larger onboard system.

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On the Net:

DigitalGlobe: http://www.digitalglobe.com 

    Earth - Imaging Satellite Travels to Space, NYT, 18.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Satellite-Launch.html

Mars Orbiter in Safe Mode After Glitch

September 17, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:57 p.m. ET
The New York Times

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) -- The Mars Odyssey orbiter was in safe mode Monday after a computer glitch prevented the 6-year-old spacecraft from relaying data from the twin rovers rolling across the Martian surface.

Project leaders said the Mars Odyssey was not in danger. Engineers discovered the problem Friday after a software glitch caused the onboard computers to reboot. The spacecraft last went into safe mode was in December when it was hit by a cosmic ray.

Mission manager Bob Mase of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena said he expected the Mars Odyssey to return to normal by the middle of the week.

The rovers depend on the Mars Odyssey to send data to Earth and have been using their high-gain antenna to speak directly with Earth since the problem occurred.

One of the rovers, Opportunity, began a detailed investigation of the inner slope of Victoria Crater last week after doing a toe-dip of the massive hole. The six-wheeled robot is about 20 feet below the rim heading toward a light-toned layer of rock that may hold clues about the ancient environment.

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On the Net:

Mars Odyssey: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey

Mars rovers: http://origin.mars5.jpl.nasa.gov/home 

    Mars Orbiter in Safe Mode After Glitch, NYT, 17.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Mars-Probes.html

Earth Might Survive Sun’s Explosion

September 12, 2007
The New York Times
By DENNIS OVERBYE

What happens to planets when their stars age and die?

That’s not an academic question. About five billion years from now, astronomers say, the Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel and swell temporarily more than 100 times in diameter into a so-called red giant, swallowing Mercury and Venus and dooming life on Earth, but perhaps not Earth itself.

Astronomers are announcing that they have discovered a planet that seems to have survived the puffing up of its home star, suggesting there is some hope that Earth could survive the aging and swelling of the Sun.

The newly discovered planet is a gas giant at least three times as massive as Jupiter. It orbits about 150 million miles from a faint star in the constellation Pegasus known as V 391 Pegasi. But before that star blew up as a red giant sometime in the past and lost half its mass, the planet must have been about as far from its star as the Earth is to the Sun — about 90 million miles — the astronomers led by Roberto Silvotti of the Observatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte in Naples, Italy, calculated.

Dr. Silvotti said that the results showed that a planet at the Earth’s distance “can survive” the red giant and he hoped the discovery would spur searches for more like it. “With some statistics and new detailed models we will be able to say something more even to the destiny of our Earth (which, as we all know, has much more urgent problems by the way),” he said in an e-mail message.

He and his colleagues report their results in Nature on Thursday.

In an accompanying commentary in Nature, Jonathan Fortney of NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in Sunnyvale, Calif., wrote, “This system allows us to start examining what will happen to planets around stars such as our own Sun as they too evolve and grow old.”

The star V 391Pegasi is about 4,500 light years away and is now about half as massive as the Sun, burning helium into carbon. It will eventually sigh off another shell of gas and settle into eternal senescence as a “white dwarf.” Meanwhile, the star’s pulsations cause it to brighten and dim every 6 minutes.

After studying the star for seven years, Dr. Silvotti and his colleagues were able to discern subtle modulations in the 6-minute cycle, suggesting that it was being tugged to and fro over a three-year period by a massive planet. “Essentially the observers are using the star as a clock, as if it were a G.P.S. satellite moving around the planet,” explained Fred Rasio, of Northwestern University, who was not involved in the research.

This is not the first time that a pulsing star has been used as such a clock. In 1992, astronomers using the same technique detected a pair of planets (or their corpses) circling the pulsar PSR1257+12.

And , today, X-ray astronomers from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced they had detected the remains of a star that had been whittled by radiation down to planetary mass circling a pulsar in the constellation Sagittarius. Those systems have likely endured supernova explosions.

The Pegasus planet has had to survive relatively less lethal conditions, although it must have had a bumpy ride over its estimated 10 billion years of existence. Alan Boss, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said “stellar evolution can be a wild ride for a planet that is trying to survive, especially inner planets like Earth.”

When our own Sun begins to graduate from a hydrogen-burning “main sequence” star to a red giant, two effects will compete to determine the Earth’s fate, the astronomers explain. On one hand, as the Sun blows off mass in order to conserve angular momentum, the Earth will retreat to a more distant, safer orbit. But at the same time tidal forces between the Earth and the expanding star will try to drag the planet inward where it could be engulfed. The latter effect, in particular, is difficult to compute.

As a result, said Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute, of the inner planets, “the Earth’s fate is actually the most uncertain because it is at the border line between being engulfed and surviving.”

A particularly dangerous time for Earth, Dr. Silvotti said, would be at the end of the red giant phase when the Sun’s helium ignites in an explosive flash. In the case of V 391 Pegasi, that explosion sent a large fraction of the star’s mass flying outward.

“This is another reason why the survival of a planet in a relatively close orbit is not trivial,” he said.

    Earth Might Survive Sun’s Explosion, NYT, 12.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/science/space/12cnd-planet.html?hp

Mars Rovers OK After Dust Storm

August 31, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:01 p.m. ET
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- They're old and dirty, but NASA's Mars rovers are back in the exploration business after enduring a lengthy Red Planet dust bowl that blocked most of the sunlight they need for power.

With skies gradually brightening, the solar-powered rovers Spirit and Opportunity recently resumed driving and other operations that had been suspended during the dust storm.

''The rovers are in good health and in good shape,'' said John Callas, the rover project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. ''Things have improved from the more dire conditions that were existing previously due to the dust storm on Mars.''

During the storm, each of the rovers spent a couple of weeks sleeping most of the time.

''They were in sort of a hibernation state where we were only communicating with them every few days,'' Callas said Friday. ''The rovers would only be awake a very short amount of time each day to save power.''

The major concern was whether the rovers would have enough energy to keep sensitive electronics at proper temperatures on the frigid planet.

''At the darkest part of the storm, Opportunity had only 128 watt-hours of energy. Today, it has about 350 watt-hours of energy, so almost three times as much now,'' Callas said. ''The most energy that the rovers have ever seen in their 3 1/2 years on Mars is about 900 watt-hours of energy.''

The biggest problem left by the storm is dust on the instruments at the end of the rovers' robotic arms, he said. Some has fallen off or been blown off, and there are ways to measure how dust contamination is affecting an instrument, he said.

The longer-term concern is how the rovers, particularly Spirit, will deal with the next Martian winter, when the sun is low and less energy reaches their solar panels.

''The solar arrays are dusty on both rovers, but dustier on Spirit, and they are dustier now than they were exactly one Martian year ago. So if they don't get cleaner and they continue to accumulate dust at the same rate they saw last year, it will be a tough Martian winter for Spirit,'' Callas said.

The six-wheel rovers have been exploring opposite sides of Mars since landing in early 2004, finding geologic evidence that rocks were altered by flowing water in its ancient past. They have long outlasted their planned three-month missions, surpassing or nearing 1,300 ''sols,'' as Martian days are called.

''These are really very old rovers and their mechanisms are well beyond their design life by many, many factors, so we're fortunate that they're still working, but things could break -- important components could break at any moment -- but absent that, they're in good shape and we're ready to continue exploration of both sites.''

Spirit, studying Mars' Gusev Crater region, will soon drive to a spot that has been named ''Home Plate.''

Opportunity, in the Meridiani Planum region, has been waiting to enter Victoria Crater, a half-mile-wide hole blasted into the plains by a meteor. The rover will roll to an entry point in coming weeks, Callas said.
 

Mars Rovers OK After Dust Storm, NYT, 31.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Mars-Rovers.html