History > 2008 > USA > Space (II)

Endeavour Lands in California,

Avoiding Florida Weather

December 1, 2008
The New York Times
By WILLIAM HARWOOD

Jarring the Mojave Desert calm with rumbling sonic booms, the shuttle Endeavour dropped out of a cloudless blue sky and glided to a smooth landing Sunday at Edwards Air Force Base in California to close out a 16-day assembly mission for the International Space Station.

Diverted from a planned landing in Florida by low clouds and high crosswinds at the Kennedy Space Center, Capt. Christopher J. Ferguson of the Navy, the shuttle commander, guided the winged orbiter to a picture-perfect touchdown on Runway 4 at 4:25 p.m. Eastern time.

A few moments later, Col. Eric A. Boe of the Air Force, the shuttle’s pilot, released a red and white braking parachute and the shuttle rolled to a halt, wrapping up a 6.6-million-mile voyage that included 250 orbits since its launching on Nov. 14.

“Wheels stopped, Houston,” Captain Ferguson radioed.

“Copy, wheels stopped, Endeavour,” replied Capt. Alan G. Poindexter of the Navy from the mission control center in Houston. “Welcome back. It was a great way to finish a fantastic flight, Fergie.”

The astronauts had hoped to land in Florida, where friends and family had gathered, but low clouds and high crosswinds from a cold front forced the flight director, Bryan Lunney, to wave off two landing opportunities. He briefly held open the option of keeping the astronauts in orbit an extra day and trying again for Florida on Monday. But forecasters concluded there was little chance the weather would improve.

Flight surgeons were standing by to assist the outgoing space station flight engineer, Gregory E. Chamitoff, returning to the unfamiliar tug of Earth’s gravity after six months aboard the space station. To ease his return to gravity, Dr. Chamitoff made the trip resting on his back in a recumbent seat on the shuttle’s lower deck.

Also on board: More than a gallon of processed urine and condensate, the first samples from a newly installed water recycling system aboard the station that is a central element in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s plans for increasing the lab’s crew size to six from three next May. At least three months of testing are required before station astronauts will be allowed to drink any recycled water.

Joining Captain Ferguson, Colonel Boe, Dr. Chamitoff and Mr. Pettit for the trip home were Capt. Heidemarie M. Stefanyshyn-Piper and Capt. Stephen G. Bowen, both of the Navy, and Lt. Col. Robert S. Kimbrough of the Army.

Endeavour delivered more than eight tons of equipment and supplies to the space station for what was dubbed an extreme home makeover, including the water recycling gear, a new toilet, a new galley, a refrigerator and two astronaut sleep stations.

While their crewmates worked inside the station, Captain Stefanyshyn-Piper, Captain Bowen and Colonel Kimbrough carried out four spacewalks to overhaul the space station’s damaged right-side solar array rotary mechanism and to lubricate its left-side counterpart. They also installed a spare cooling system component, removed a spent nitrogen tank and prepared the Japanese Kibo lab module for attachment of an external experiment platform next year.

Endeavour also delivered Sandra H. Magnus, Dr. Chamitoff’s replacement. Dr. Magnus will remain aboard the lab with Michael Fincke, the Expedition 18 commander and an Air Force colonel, and Yury Lonchakov, a cosmonaut and a colonel in the Russian air force, until the next shuttle visit in February.

Endeavour Lands in California, Avoiding Florida Weather, NYT, 1.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/science/space/01shuttle.html

Astronauts focus

on water recycling system

23 November 2008
USA Today

HOUSTON (AP) — Astronauts hope they have a solution for getting a pivotal piece of equipment working so it can convert urine and sweat into drinkable water and allow the international space station to grow to six crewmembers.
Flight controllers asked station commander Michael Fincke on Sunday to change how a centrifuge is mounted in the $154 million water recycling system. The centrifuge is on mounts and Mission Control asked Fincke to remove them.

"Fantastic! That is something we can do," Fincke told Mission Control.

The astronauts have been working for the past three days to get the system running so that it can generate samples for testing back on Earth, but the urine processor only operates for two hours at a time before shutting down.

The water recycling system, delivered a week ago by the space shuttle Endeavour, is essential for allowing more astronauts to live on the space station next year.

Lead flight director Ginger Kerrick said engineers hope the problem is fixed, but they were studying whether six crewmembers would still be able live at the space station with the urine processor only working for two hours at a time. The space station crew is scheduled to grow from three to six residents next year.

"If this is as good as it's going to get, we do need to be able to answer that question," Kerrick said.

Flight controllers had hoped that the water samples brought back for testing had a mixture in which 70% came from condensation and 30% came from urine. Given the problems with the urine processor, that ratio stands at 90% condensation and 10% urine. Crewmembers won't be able to use the contraption until several rounds of tests show that it is safe.

Mission managers have decided not to extend the mission by an extra day since the astronauts have obtained enough water samples, Kerrick said. Endeavour is scheduled to undock from the space station on Thanksgiving Day.

While Fincke tinkered on the urine processor, Endeavour's seven astronauts were being given part of the day off Sunday. The time off followed an intense day of work that included the third of four spacewalks planned during Endeavour's two-week visit to the space station.

Astronauts Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper and Stephen Bowen spent nearly seven hours outside the space station cleaning and lubing a jammed joint which allows the station's solar wings to follow the direction of the sun for generating power.

Stefanyshyn-Piper — who lost a $100,000 tool kit during Tuesday's spacewalk — had to share grease guns again with Bowen. To make up for the grease gun shortage, they took out a caulking gun normally reserved for repairs to the shuttle's heat shield, but they didn't need it.

The spacewalkers ran out of time before they could finish all the desired tasks, but NASA officials said they could be finished during the fourth and final spacewalk of the mission set for Monday.

"We really appreciate how hard you're all working," Mission Control radioed for them to come inside. "I know it's painful to call it quits like that, but we think it's the right thing to do."

    Astronauts focus on water recycling system , UT, 23.11.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2008-11-23-space-endeavour_N.htm

Astronauts End Space Walk

Marred by Lost Tool Bag

November 18, 2008
Filed at 11:56 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- A spacewalking astronaut accidentally let go of her tool bag Tuesday after a grease gun inside it exploded, and helplessly watched as the tote and everything inside floated away.

It was one of the largest items ever to be lost by a spacewalker, and occurred during an unprecedented attempt to clean and lube a gummed-up joint at the international space station.

Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper was just starting to work on the joint when the mishap occurred.

She said her grease gun exploded, getting the dark gray stuff all over a camera and her gloves. While she was wiping everything off, the white, backpack-size bag slipped out of her grip, and she lost all her tools.

''Oh, great,'' she mumbled.

She and her fellow spacewalker, Stephen Bowen, then finished their tasks in almost seven hours by sharing tools. Bowen had his own tool bag with another set of grease guns, putty knives and oven-like terry cloth mitts to wipe away metal grit from the joint.

''Despite my little hiccup, or major hiccup, I think we did a good job out there,'' Stefanyshyn-Piper said after returning to the space station.

Flight controllers were assessing the impact the lost bag would have on the next three planned spacewalks. The astronauts may be asked to keep sharing tools or use caulking-style guns intended for repairs to the shuttle's thermal shielding.

Earlier, the spacewalkers spotted a screw floating by, but were too far away to catch it. ''I have no idea where it came from,'' Stefanyshyn-Piper told Mission Control.

Flight director Ginger Kerrick said neither the bag nor the screw posed hazards to the spacecraft. By late Tuesday, the bag was already 2 1/2 miles in front of the shuttle-station complex. ''It's well on its way away from us,'' she assured reporters.

NASA was not sure how the bag got loose; it should have been tethered to a larger equipment bag. Another unknown: why the grease gun discharged.

''It is a human endeavor. Mistakes can happen. Equipment can fail,'' said John Ray, the lead spacewalk officer in Mission Control. He noted that Stefanyshyn-Piper showed ''real character and great discipline'' by continuing on and doing a fine job for the rest of the spacewalk. She was the first woman to be assigned as lead spacewalker for a shuttle flight.

Other items lost in past spacewalks include a foot restraint, bolts and a spatula used during a test to repair the shuttle. The lost bag marred what had been a near-flawless mission by Endeavour and its seven-member crew.

For more than a year, the jammed joint has been unable to automatically point the right-side solar wings toward the sun for maximum energy production. The repair work -- expected from the outset to be greasy and hand-intensive -- is supposed to take up much of all four spacewalks.

The joint is located near the extreme reaches of the 220-mile-high outpost. The spacewalkers had 85-foot safety tethers to keep them connected to the mother ship at all times.

NASA suspects a lack of lubrication caused the massive joint to break down; grinding parts left metal shavings everywhere and prompted flight controllers to use the joint sparingly. Besides scraping and wiping away the grit and applying grease, the spacewalkers will replace the bearings.

As a precaution, extra grease will be applied on a later spacewalk to the joint on the opposite side of the space station that has allowed those solar wings to produce ample electricity.

As the action unfolded outside, the astronauts inside the shuttle-station complex started unloading gear from a huge trunk that was brought up by Endeavour.

The big-ticket item -- and one of the first things to be hooked up -- is a recycling system that will convert astronauts' urine and sweat into drinking water. It is essential if NASA is to double the size of the space station crew to six next June.

Endeavour also delivered an extra bathroom, kitchenette, two bedrooms, an exercise machine and refrigerator that will allow space station residents to enjoy cold drinks for the first time.

The additions -- coming exactly 10 years after the first space station piece was launched -- will transform the place into a two-bath, two-kitchen, five-bedroom home.

Endeavour arrived at the space station Sunday. The next spacewalk is set for Thursday.

On Tuesday, mission managers cleared Endeavour to return to Earth at the end of the month. A thorough inspection of images of the shuttle showed no evidence of any damage to its heat shield like the kind that doomed Columbia in 2003.

------

On the Net:

NASA: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov

    Astronauts End Space Walk Marred by Lost Tool Bag, NYT, 18.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Space-Shuttle.html

Space shuttle Endeavour

races toward space station

14 November 2008
USA Today
By Marcia Dunn, AP Aerospace Writer

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Space shuttle Endeavour raced toward the international space station on Saturday for a home makeover job after a brilliant moonlit launch that had NASA managers in awe.

The shuttle and its seven astronauts blasted into orbit Friday night on a mission to redo the insides of the space station, adding some extra bedrooms and a spare bathroom and kitchenette.

"It's our turn to take home improvement to a new level after 10 years of international space station construction," commander Christopher Ferguson called out.

Ferguson and his crew will double as plumbers and installers once they arrive at the 220-mile-high space station Sunday, hooking up extra cooking and sleeping equipment as well as a new water recycling system so the station's crew can expand next year.

The work will keep the astronauts up over Thanksgiving; NASA expects to add a 16th day to the mission, thanks to the on-time launch.

"Very few things that we do beat a night launch like you saw tonight," said LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team. "We're off to a great start on what's going to be an extremely exciting, very complex and challenging mission."

NASA almost delayed the launch because of a door frame left loose at the pad by a worker who promptly admitted his mistake. Launch controllers determined the flapping frame would not hit the shuttle.

A nearly full moon, glowing orange at times, adorned the sky as Endeavour began its journey.

Soon after liftoff, Mission Control informed the astronauts that a quick look at the launch pictures revealed two pieces of debris trailing Endeavour, one at 33 seconds after liftoff and the other around the two-minute mark. It did not appear that the debris hit the shuttle, but analyses will continue for several more days to be certain the spacecraft was not damaged.

The astronauts' main priority Saturday is to survey their ship's wings and nose with a laser-tipped boom for any signs of damage. The day-after-launch inspection has been standard procedure ever since the 2003 Columbia disaster.

Besides enough Thanksgiving turkey dinners to go around, Endeavour is carrying thousands of pounds of equipment for the space station, most notably a revolutionary recycling system to turn urine into drinking water.

That, along with the new bathroom, kitchenette, exercise machine and two extra bedrooms being delivered, should allow NASA to double the size of the space station crew. The goal is to add three more residents, for a total of six, by next June.

By the time Endeavour leaves, the space station will have morphed into a five-bedroom, two-bath, two-kitchen home.

"We're about to get an extreme home makeover," the space station's commander, Mike Fincke, told Mission Control. "It doesn't get better than this, my friends."

The shuttle astronauts also will take on a lube job at the space station.

A massive joint that rotates half of the solar wings toward the sun has been jammed for more than a year; it's clogged with metal grit from grinding parts. The spacewalking astronauts will clean and lubricate that joint, replace its bearings and apply extra grease to keep a twin joint working.

The space agency has just 10 shuttle flights, including this one, before the fleet is retired in 2010 to make way for a new rocketship capable of taking astronauts to the space station and, eventually, the moon. An additional shuttle flight or two could be in NASA's future, however, to narrow the projected five-year gap between the last shuttle flight and the first manned launch of the new spaceship.

"As you saw today, we arranged to have the moon out there ... that's the perfect analogy of transition," said Bill Gerstenmaier, head of NASA's space operations.

    Space shuttle Endeavour races toward space station, UT, 14.11.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/money/topstories/2008-11-14-2675003529_x.htm

Now in Sight: Far-Off Planets

November 14, 2008
The New York Times
By DENNIS OVERBYE

A little more of the universe has been pried out of the shadows. Two groups of astronomers have taken the first pictures of what they say — and other astronomers agree — are most likely planets going around other stars.

The achievement, the result of years of effort on improved observational techniques and better data analysis, presages more such discoveries, the experts said, and will open the door to new investigations and discoveries of what planets are and how they came to be formed.

“It’s the tip of the iceberg,” said Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia. “Now that we know they are there, there is going to be an explosion.”

Dr. Marois is the leader of a team that recorded three planets circling a star known as HR 8799 that is 130 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. The other team, led by Paul Kalas of the University of California, Berkeley, found a planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut, only 25 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Piscis Austrinus.

In an interview by e-mail, Dr. Kalas said that when he finally confirmed his discovery last May, “I nearly had a heart attack.”

In scratchy telescope pictures released Thursday in Science Express, the online version of the journal Science, the planets appear as fuzzy dots that move slightly around their star from exposure to exposure. Astronomers who have seen the new images agreed that these looked like the real thing.

“I think Kepler himself would recognize these as planets orbiting a star following his laws of orbital motion,” Mark S. Marley of the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., wrote in an e-mail message elaborating on HR 8799.

More than 300 so-called extrasolar planets have been found circling distant stars, making their discovery the hottest and fastest-growing field in astronomy. But the observations have been made mostly indirectly, by dips in starlight as planets cross in front of their home star or by wobbles they induce going by it.

Astronomers being astronomers, they want to actually see these worlds, but a few recent claims of direct observations have been clouded by debates about whether the bodies were really planets or failed stars.

“Every extrasolar planet detected so far has been a wobble on a graph,” said Bruce Macintosh, an astrophysicist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and a member of Dr. Marois’s team. “These are the first pictures of an entire system.”

The new planetary systems are anchored by young bright stars more massive than our own Sun and swaddled in large disks of dust, the raw material of worlds.

The three planets orbiting HR 8799 are roughly 10, 9 and 6 times the mass of Jupiter, and orbit their star in periods of 450, 180 and 100 years respectively, all counterclockwise.

The Fomalhaut planet is about three times as massive as Jupiter, according to Dr. Kalas’s calculations, and is on the inner edge of a huge band of dust, taking roughly 872 years to complete a revolution of its star.

Both systems appear to be scaled-up versions of our own solar system, with giant planets in the outer reaches, leaving plenty of room for smaller planets to lurk undetected in the warmer inner regions. Dust rings lie even farther out, like the Kuiper belt of icy debris extending beyond the orbit of Neptune.

“This is a window into what our own solar system might have looked like when it was 60 million years old,” Dr. Marois said.

Sara Seager, a planetary theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said it was significant that the planets in both cases seemed to be associated with disks of dust, particularly Fomalhaut, one of the brightest and closest stars known to be host to a massive disk.

“Fomalhaut is like a Hollywood star to astronomers, so we have some personal excitement here,” Dr. Seager said. “It feels like finding out that one of your four closest friends just won the lottery big time”

Alan Boss, a planetary theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said the triple-planet system in Pegasus was particularly promising, “as we expect planets to form in systems in general, whereas spurious background interlopers will generally appear as single ‘planets.’ ” But he and others cautioned that much more study of these objects was necessary and that the masses imputed to them were still highly uncertain.

Being able to see planets directly opens the door to spectroscopic observations that can help determine the composition, temperature and other physical characteristics of planets and allow for comparisons with one another and with their parent stars. Dr. Macintosh said he hoped to train a spectroscope on his new planets as early as Monday.

The new images are the fruits of a long campaign by astronomers to see more and more of the unseeable. In particular, it is a triumph for the emerging technology of adaptive optics, in which telescope mirrors are jiggled and warped slightly many times a second to compensate for the atmospheric turbulence that blurs star images.

The problem in seeing other planets is picking them out of the glare of their parent stars, which are millions of times brighter, at least in visible light. As a result, planet hunters usually look for infrared, or heat radiation, which is emitted copiously by planets still shedding heat from the process of formation.

For their observations, Dr. Marois and his colleagues used the 8-meter in diameter Gemini North and the 10-meter Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, both of which had been fitted with adaptive optics. Then they processed the images with a special computer program, which Dr. Marois described as “a software coronagraph,” for processing the images.

The team first spied a pair of dots about four billion and six billion miles out from HR 8799 in October last year. Following up, they discovered a third planet closer in, at about two billion miles. Then they discovered an old observation from 2004, which also showed the planets and how far they had moved around the star in three years.

“Seeing the orbit is one of the coolest things,” Dr. Macintosh said.

Dr. Kalas did his work with the Hubble Space Telescope, which is immune to turbulence because it is in space. He used a coronagraph to block light from the actual star.

He said he had been driven to look for a planet around Fomalhaut after Hubble photographs in October 2004 showed that a dust ring around the star had a suspiciously sharp inner edge, often a clue that the ring is being sculpted by the gravity of some body orbiting nearby.

A second set of Hubble observations, in July 2006, revealed a dot moving counterclockwise around the star. “I basically held my breath for three days until I could confirm the existence of Fomalhaut in all of my data,” Dr. Kalas recalled.

Fomalhaut is also a young star, about 200 million years old, and its dust ring extends 11 billion to 20 billion miles from its planet, Dr. Kalas said. In order not to disturb or roil the dust ring, Fomalhaut’s planet must be less than three Jupiter masses, well within regulation planet size, Dr. Kalas and his collaborators calculated.

A more detailed analysis, with another team member, Eugene Chiang of the University of California, Berkeley, as lead author will appear in the Astrophysical Journal, Dr. Kalas said.

In an e-mail message, Dr. Kalas pointed out that Fomalhaut was the closest exoplanet yet discovered, “close enough to contemplate sending spacecraft there.”

    Now in Sight: Far-Off Planets, NYT, 14.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/science/space/14planet.html?hp

Mars Lander Succumbs to Winter

November 11, 2008
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG

The Phoenix Mars lander is dead.

Mission managers said Monday that they had not heard from the NASA spacecraft for a week and that they thought it had probably fallen quiet for good.

“At this time, we’re pretty convinced that the vehicle is no longer available for us to use,” said Barry Goldstein, the project manager. “We’re actually ceasing operations, declaring an end to mission operations at this point.”

With the onset of winter and declining power generated by the Phoenix’s solar panels, managers knew the lander would succumb soon, but had hoped to squeeze out a few more weeks of weather data.

But on Oct. 27, just after Phoenix finished its last major experiment analyzing Martian soil, an unexpected dust storm hit. The batteries, already low from running the experiment, ran out of energy.

The spacecraft first put itself into a low-energy “safe mode,” then fell silent. It revived itself on Oct. 30, but, with the dust still swirling, was never able to fully recharge its batteries. Each day, the solar panels would generate enough electricity for the spacecraft to wake up, but then the batteries drained again.

The last communication came on Nov. 2. Mr. Goldstein said the orbiting spacecraft would continue to listen for a few more weeks on the faint chance that the Phoenix defies their expectations.

The Phoenix landed in May to examine the northern arctic plains, and the $428 million mission, originally scheduled to last three months, was extended twice

“I’m just thrilled to death what we’ve been able to do here,” said Peter H. Smith of the University of Arizona, the mission’s principal investigator. The spacecraft accomplished all of its main objectives, but some science remained unfinished. The Martian soil proved to be extremely clumpy, and the spacecraft had recurrent trouble getting the samples through gratings into the spacecraft’s laboratory apparatus.

Dr. Smith admitted disappointment that a sample from one of the trenches that the Phoenix had dug was never successfully analyzed. “We got it all the way up to the instrument and even tried pressing it down,” Dr. Smith said. “But it wouldn’t go in.”

But Dr. Smith highlighted what the Phoenix did discover. It confirmed a layer of ice not far below the surface. It found some carbonates and clays, which suggest that liquid water may have be present within the past few millennia. It found the arctic soil to be alkaline, not acidic as has been observed in other parts of Mars. It also discovered perchlorates, a class of chemicals that in high concentrations can be toxic to life, but which can also serve as a food source for some microbes.The spacecraft took 25,000 photographs, including panoramas of the landing and microscopic images of dust particles.

“It’s really an Irish wake, not a funeral that we’re looking forward to,” said Douglas McCuiston, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA headquarters. “NASA got what it wanted out of this mission.”

The data may yet reveal the presence of carbon-based molecules that could be building blocks for life, Dr. Smith said, and that the region might, at least occasionally, be suitable for life. The Phoenix was not designed to look directly for signs of life. Dr. Smith said the scientists had begun writing the scientific articles describing their findings.

In the coming months, when sunlight disappears entirely in the northern plains, temperatures will fall to minus-240 to minus-300 degrees Fahrenheit, and the Phoenix will become encased within carbon dioxide ice. When spring returns, NASA plans to try reviving the Phoenix again, but the expectation is that the spacecraft’s electronics will not survive the long, deep freeze.

    Mars Lander Succumbs to Winter, NYT, 11.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/science/space/11mars.html?hp

The Long Countdown

One Way Up:

U.S. Space Plan Relies on Russia

October 6, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

STAR CITY, Russia — This place was once no place, a secret military base northeast of Moscow that did not show up on maps. The Soviet Union trained its astronauts here to fight on the highest battlefield of the cold war: space.

Yet these days, Star City is the place for America’s hard-won orbital partnership with Russia, where astronauts train to fly aboard Soyuz spacecraft. And in two years Star City will be the only place to send astronauts from any nation to the International Space Station.

The gap is coming: from 2010, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shuts down the space shuttle program, to 2015, when the next generation of American spacecraft is scheduled to arrive, NASA expects to have no human flight capacity and will depend on Russia to get to the $100 billion station, buying seats on Soyuz craft as space tourists do.

As NASA celebrates its 50th anniversary this month, the time lag in the Bush administration’s plan to retire the nation’s three space shuttles and work on a return to the Moon has thrust the United States space program squarely into national politics and geopolitical controversy.

Senators John McCain and Barack Obama have denounced the gap and promoted their commitment to the space program while on trips to Florida, where thousands of workers will lose their jobs when the shuttle program ends. And antagonism between the United States and Russia, over the conflict in Georgia and other issues, is clouding the future of a 15-year partnership in space, precisely when NASA will be more reliant on Russia than ever before.

The administrator of NASA, Michael D. Griffin, has called the situation “unseemly in the extreme.” In an e-mail message he sent to his top advisers in August, Dr. Griffin wrote that “events have unfolded in a way that makes it clear how unwise it was for the U.S. to adopt a policy of deliberate dependence on another power.”

Dr. Griffin is worried enough that he ordered his staff to explore flying the aging shuttles past 2010. He did so, he said in an interview last month, “about five minutes after the Russians invaded Georgia, because I could see this coming.” But he warned that any extension would be costly and could further delay NASA’s return to the Moon and threaten America’s role as the leading space power.

China’s Gains

Last month, China made the third successful launching of its Shenzhou VII spacecraft and the first spacewalk by one of its astronauts. The Chinese government has said it hopes to establish a space station and eventually make a Moon landing. The United States plans to return to the Moon by 2020 at the earliest; some observers believe China might get there first.

The interruption in American-controlled access to space rankles some in Washington, including Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, a leading proponent of the space program. In an interview, Mr. Nelson said it was “inexcusable” for the country’s space program to be put in a position of dependence on such a politically volatile partner. “We’ve got a Russian prime minister who believes he’s czar,” he said of Vladimir Putin, referring to Russia’s military action in Georgia.

The United States has had periods in which its astronauts could not reach space: from the end of the Apollo program in 1975 to the beginning of shuttle flights in 1981, and for more than two years after the loss of the shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. But the coming interval could be the longest if the rollout of NASA’s new rockets is significantly delayed.

Even though the outlines of the gap have been known since soon after Dr. Griffin began running the agency in 2005, Cmdr. Scott J. Kelly of the Navy, an astronaut who has made two trips to orbit, warned in April that the prospect of a United States that could not send humans into space on its own rockets would come as a shock. “A large part of the American public is going to be surprised,” he said, adding that people would cry, “Who let that happen?”

The Politics

The Bush administration chose to give up the nation’s own access to space for five years and move to the next phase of space travel. The administration decided to retire the shuttles and in January 2004 announced a sweeping “vision for space exploration.”

Under the plan, NASA would stop using the aging and risky shuttle fleet and move to a new launching program, Constellation, built around Ares rockets and Orion capsules that are designed to return astronauts to the Moon and even to explore near-Earth asteroids and Mars.

To get from one program to the other without inflating NASA’s $17 billion annual budget, the administration decided to wind down the shuttle program and ramp up Constellation. The decision has always been portrayed as difficult, but in recent months, criticism has flared. The Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, for example, have pledged to keep America flying.

“As president, I will act to ensure our astronauts will continue to explore space, and not just by hitching a ride with someone else,” Mr. McCain said in a statement this year. Mr. Obama has criticized what he has called the “poor planning and inadequate funding” that have led to the situation.

Both candidates say NASA should explore the continuation of the shuttle program for at least one additional flight and try to speed up the development of Constellation with more financing.

Any new money, though, would come too late to greatly shorten the development time for the new craft. “It is essentially unfixable now,” Dr. Griffin said. His growing frustration was clear in his e-mail message to aides on Aug. 18, which included the order to study the additional flights.

“In a rational world, we would have been allowed to pick a shuttle retirement date to be consistent with Ares/Orion availability,” Dr. Griffin wrote. Within the administration, he wrote, “retiring the shuttle is a jihad rather than an engineering and program management decision.”

After the message was published by The Orlando Sentinel, Dr. Griffin issued a statement saying his message had failed “to provide the contextual framework for my remarks, and my support for the administration’s policies.”

At the time, legislation vital to NASA’s gap plans — permission by Congress to buy Soyuz seats after 2011 — was stalled by the furor over the Russian action in Georgia. That problem was resolved last month when Congress quietly granted approval, but the broader issues presented by the gap remain. And Dr. Griffin’s concerns do not end with Russia and Washington politics. He has repeatedly warned that China’s space program is moving forward rapidly.

In testimony to the Senate last year, Dr. Griffin said it was likely that “China will be able to put people on the Moon before we will be able to get back.” That prospect concerns Representative Tom Feeney, Republican of Florida. A fellow congressman recently suggested naming the first new lunar base after Neil Armstrong. Mr. Feeney recalled responding, “What makes you think the Chinese are going to give us permission to name their base after one of our astronauts?”

The Partnership

The growing tension with Russia complicates a longstanding international alliance in space that helped defuse the cold war, especially among those who had served at the front lines.

William M. Shepherd, the first commander of the station and a former member of the Navy Seals, recalled that when he and his crewmate Yuri Gidzenko first orbited the Earth, the two cold warriors pointed to bases where, years before, they had trained and waited on alert.

“I realized at that moment we were not an American and a Russian any more,” Mr. Shepherd said.” “It was about something that transcended that whole canvas.”

The partnership began in the 1990s, as the Soviet Union and its economy collapsed and Russian knowledge about carrying people into orbit — or bombs to distant destinations — was at risk of falling into the hands of hostile nations. In paying to help keep the Russian space program going, the logic went, the United States would limit arms proliferation. By the mid-1990s Americans began serving aboard the Mir space station as the United States and Russia planned what would become the International Space Station.

The early days were marked by wariness. Mark Bowman, an early contract employee in Russia who is now back in Moscow as a NASA representative, said that Korolev, where mission control is, “was a closed city” when he arrived in 1993. “Foreigners were not allowed here,” Mr. Bowman said.

These days, teams of NASA workers live year round in Russia and dozens of others come through for training runs, launchings and landings. “I’d venture to say the people who work at NASA know the Russians better than any other branch of our government,” Commander Kelly, the astronaut, said.


Susan Eisenhower, an expert on United States-Russia relations and the space programs, said the Russians proved after the loss of the shuttle Columbia that they would hold up their end of the bargain by continuing to take Americans to the station. “When we had no choice because of the shuttle failure the Russian could have blackmailed us around this tragedy and did not do so,” Ms. Eisenhower said.

Vitaly Davidov, the deputy director of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, said in an interview at mission control that Russia would honor its commitments to fly crews to the station.

That does not mean the going will be easy. The United States and Russia are at loggerheads over many trade and political issues. But Michael Krepon, who helped found the Henry L. Stimson Center, a policy institute, said that while the Russian space monopoly created risk, “there is a longstanding etiquette: you do not mess with the safety of humans in space.”

“I don’t think this is going to get very ugly if the gap problem continues,” Mr. Krepon said. “But it will become expensive.”

    One Way Up: U.S. Space Plan Relies on Russia, NYT, 6.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/science/space/06gap.html?hp

Test of Mars Soil Sample

Confirms Presence of Ice

August 1, 2008
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG

Heated to 32 degrees Fahrenheit, a sample of soil being analyzed by NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander let out a puff of vapor, providing final confirmation that the lander is sitting over a large chunk of ice.

“We’ve now finally touched it and tasted it,” William V. Boynton, a professor at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona and the lead scientist for the instrument that detected the water, said at a news conference on Thursday. “And I’d like to say, from my standpoint, it tastes very fine.”

The main goal of the lander is to analyze ice in the northern arctic plains. Since it arrived on the planet on May 25, scientists have visually seen what they were almost certain was ice: a flat, shiny patch beneath the lander and tiny white chunks in a trench dug by the lander’s robotic arm.

But the analysis performed in one of the instruments, heating the sample in a tiny oven and then observing what vaporized, was the first direct measurement.

At the news conference, Michael Meyer, chief scientist for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Mars Exploration Program, said the mission had been extended to Sept. 30, five weeks beyond the original three-month primary mission. Dr. Meyer said the mission had already met the milestones for what the agency would consider “minimum mission success” and was close to “full mission success.”

“The mission is going very well,” Dr. Meyer said, “and it’s been proving very successful, and Mars has certainly proved itself to be interesting.”

A 360-degree panoramic image of the landscape has been completed, and a weather station has been providing meteorological information like temperature, pressure and wind speeds.

The lander has had some difficulty shaking the clumpier-than-expected soil out of its scoop into the instruments for analysis.

One sample of soil was analyzed by the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer, or Tega, in June. That sample, taken at the surface, did not contain water ice. (The sample did release water vapor, but at much higher temperatures, which indicated water trapped within minerals.)

The second sample was scraped from a trench dug two inches into the soil. The lander was finally successful in pouring the trench scrapings into a Tega oven on Wednesday.

Signs of vast quantities of underground ice in the polar regions were first spotted from orbit by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft in 2002. With the up-close analysis by the Phoenix Mars lander, scientists hope to determine, from tell-tale signs in the minerals, whether the ice had ever melted and whether the region was ever habitable for life.

So far, the soil has turned out to be somewhat alkaline and contains mineral nutrients like sodium, magnesium and potassium. No organic molecules have been detected.

Peter H. Smith, the mission’s principal investigator, said the analysis had just begun.

“I ask for a little patience here as we get to the part of the mission where we do the scientific analysis of the soil and contact with ice,” Dr. Smith said. “This does take some time, and we still have not collected all our data.”

As part of the extended mission, scientists plan to dig two more trenches and take a more detailed panoramic picture of the surrounding plains.

One of the new trenches will be named Cupboard because, Dr. Smith said, “maybe the cupboard is full, and this is a place for new discoveries.”

Test of Mars Soil Sample Confirms Presence of Ice, NYT, 1.8.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/01/science/space/01mars.html