SpaceX, Orbital Sciences Awarded ISS Re-supply Contract

SpaceX DragonLab™ - a free-flying, fully-recoverable, reusable spacecraft capable of hosting pressurized and unpressurized payloads. Credit: SpaceX

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Two upstart commercial space companies have been awarded contracts by NASA for commercial cargo resupply services to the International Space Station. SpaceX, also known as Space Exploration Technologies received a contract for $1.6 billion while Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va. has a contract valued at $1.9 billion. NASA has ordered 12 flights from SpaceX and eight from Orbital. In October, at this year’s International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight, SpaceX Vice President of Marketing and Communications Diane Murphy said that the six- year-old company has it in their sights to be able to fly to the space station by 2009. For now, the contract is for cargo only, however SpaceX’s Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket are human rated, and would be capable of delivering up to 7 crew members to the station. The Dragon could also be used as an escape vehicle. If SpaceX and Orbital can be successful in cargo re-supply, it could pave the way for a potential solution to the gap between the shuttle retirement in 2010 and when the Constellation program would be ready to fly, hopefully by 2015.

“The SpaceX team is honored to have been selected by NASA as the winner of the Cargo Resupply Services contract,” said Elon Musk, CEO and CTO, SpaceX. “This is a tremendous responsibility, given the swiftly approaching retirement of the Space Shuttle and the significant future needs of the Space Station. This also demonstrates the success of the NASA COTS program, which has opened a new era for NASA in US Commercial spaceflight.”

Orbital's Cygnus module will be used for ISS resupply.  Credit:  Orbital
Orbital's Cygnus module will be used for ISS resupply. Credit: Orbital

“We are very appreciative of the trust NASA has placed with us to provide commercial cargo transportation services to and from the International Space Station, beginning with our demonstration flight scheduled in late 2010,” said Mr. David W. Thompson, Orbital’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “The CRS program will serve as a showcase for the types of commercial services U.S. space companies can offer NASA, allowing the space agency to devote a greater proportion of its resources for the challenges of human spaceflight, deep space exploration and scientific investigations of our planet and the universe in which we live.”

Orbital will use their module called Cygnus to deliver cargo, launched on their Taurus rocket.
These fixed-price indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts will begin Jan. 1, 2009, and are effective through Dec. 31, 2016. The contracts each call for the delivery of a minimum of 20 metric tons of upmass cargo to the space station. The contracts also call for delivery of non-standard services in support of the cargo resupply, including analysis and special tasks as the government determines are necessary.

NASA has set production milestones and reviews on the contracts to monitor progress toward providing services. The maximum potential value of each contract is about $3.1 billion. Based on known requirements, the value of both contracts combined is projected at $3.5 billion.

These agreements do fulfill NASA’s need to for cargo delivery to the space station after the retirement of the space shuttle.

Sources: NASA, SpaceX, Orbital

ISS Spacewalk Attempts to Fix Soyuz Problem

Soyuz docked with the ISS, in a photo taken during Monday's spacewalk. Credit: NASA

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International Space Station Expedition 18 commander Mike Fincke and flight engineer Yury Lonchakov, conducted a five-hour 38-minute spacewalk on Dec. 23, successfully installing an electrical probe on the Russian Pirs airlock module designed to track down problems with Russian Soyuz capsule. They also retrieved a space exposure experiment and mounted instrumentation on the Zvezda command module that will monitor disturbances in the ionosphere. But the spacewalkers encountered problems with a second experiment package, designed to expose biological samples to the space environment, to properly plug into the station’s power and data system. After extensive troubleshooting, Russian flight controllers ordered Fincke and Lonchakov to disconnect the Expose-R experiment and return it to the airlock.

Russian scientists hope data from the probe installed by Fincke will help explain malfunctions that have occurred as the Soyuz crew return module has attempted to separate from the space station.

During the past two re-entries through Earth’s atmosphere in April of this year and October 2007, the Soyuz descended too steeply, leading to faster and bumpier-than-usual rides for the crews and off-target landings.

Investigators believe the Soyuz capsule detached too late because a pyrobolt — an exploding connector that keeps the module attached to the space station — failed to detonate on time.

Much of the spacewalk was devoted to arranging connectors and cables for various probes and experiments, and ensuring the reliability of telemetry from the data-gathering equipment.

Yury Lonchakov during the Dec. 23 spacewalk. Credit: NASA
Yury Lonchakov during the Dec. 23 spacewalk. Credit: NASA

Fincke and Lonchakov discovered a problem with the data transmission of a device they installed on a small platform outside the station’s Zvezda module. The European Space Agency experiment was supposed to gather data on the effects of the space environment on a variety of materials.

They successfully placed another device on the same platform to measure the plasma environment around the station. The pair also removed a biological experiment known as Biorisk 2, which exposes biological samples to space.

It was Fincke’s fifth spacewalk, Lonchakov’s first and the 119th spacewalk conducted from the international space station. During the spacewalk, Fincke said in Russian. “It’s good to be out here again.”

U.S. Flight Engineer Sandy Magnus, the third member of the station’s Expedition 18, was inside the station helping coordinate the mission with centers in Houston and in Korolyov, Russia.

Sources: NASA, Yahoo News

New Space Elevator Consortium

Artist concept of a space elevator. Credit:

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A coalition of leaders working on the concept of a space elevator has joined forces to form the International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC). The new independent group is designed to promote standards and foster research relating to the construction of an Elevator to Space at the global level. Founding members of ISEC include the Spaceward Foundation, the Space Elevator Reference, the Space Elevator Blog, EuroSpaceward and the Japan Space Elevator Association. Heading the new organization is Ted Semon of the Space Elevator Blog, who will serve as president. Michael Laine, president of the space elevator company Liftport is excited about the consortium. “I think it’s a great thing,” he said. “This has been in the works for months, and the need to bring the different organizations under one roof has been long overdue. All five of the major organizations have been acting independently, which made sense in the beginning, but now we need coordination and cooperation.”

“The Space Elevator is a project whose time has come,” said Semon. “With the challenges facing today’s global economy, it is clear that new industries and new ideas are needed to help our planet in the 21st Century. The Space Elevator can be a key positive contributor, from providing inexpensive nanotechnology material science breakthroughs that will make your car stronger and lighter, to the creation of new industries that offer opportunities for investment and job creation. The International Space Elevator Consortium devoted to its development can make this happen.”

According to the Consortium, the goal of ISEC is to promote the development, construction and operation of the Space Elevator as a revolutionary and efficient way to space for all humanity. The group will accomplish this through these key areas:
• Development of a unified plan and roadmap for the Space Elevator and the coordinated assignment of specific research topics
• Funding of research on technologies relevant to the Space Elevator
• Development of the international legal framework necessary for the operation of the Space Elevator
• Global public outreach and central information exchange on Space Elevator activities

“In the past, some things fell through the cracks because no one knew what anyone else was working on,” said Laine. “Some needed tasks didn’t get done because everyone assumed that someone else was working on it. What we’re going to do with the consortium is refine the tasks, and have a better coordinated effort.”

Laine is very excited about upcoming projects for the consortium, to be announced in the next few weeks. “They’ve got some good things coming,” he said. ISEC will be unveiling additional plans and details, including a board of directors, technical journals, university and industry relationships, research opportunities and scholarships. Memberships will be available on the individual, corporate, academic and governmental levels.

The ISEC is headquartered in the Los Angeles area, a center of the aerospace industry. The consortium is a non-profit organization devoted to the research and construction of an elevator to space. See the ISEC website for more information.

Source: Business Wire, interview with Michael Laine

How to Drive a Mars Rover, Part 3: Five Years on Mars

Santorini Panorama. Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell/James Canvin

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In preparation of celebrating Spirit and Opportunity’s fifth anniversary on Mars in January, we’ve been talking with rover driver Scott Maxwell, getting updates on the two Mars Exploration Rovers and learning about what it really is like to drive the rovers. Today, Scott will share some of the highlights of the past five years, and his outlook for the future. But first, in the latest updates from Scott via Twitter, he says Spirit tried to back-up off of ‘Home Plate’ but encountered quite a bit of slippage. It looks like she’ll probably end up driving forward and taking the long way around the low plateau to the next target objects, a hill called Von Braun, and a crater-like feature nearby called Goddard. Meanwhile, Opportunity is studying “cobbles” or loose rocks at a region called Santorini, where she has been stationed during solar conjunction. Now that radio transmissions are improving, Oppy will start receiving commands from the rover drivers to hit the road again. The image above is a panoramic image of Santorini, put together by James Canvin at his website, Martian Vistas.

Scott has actually been with the MER mission for longer than just the five years since the rovers landed. He joined the team early on, about three-and-a-half years before the rovers launched. He was part of the development team, helping to write the software used to drive the rovers. Back then, did he ever fathom the rovers would last this long?

How to Drive a Mars Rover, Part 1

How to Drive a Mars Rover, Part 2

“I think back, to that time, and we did all that work where we sat in our cubicles, had meetings and argued with each other about the best way to program the software,” said Scott. “We slaved away working on the mission, never knowing if the mission would succeed or not. We did all that work just for the chance, the hope, that the rovers would be working on Mars for three months. And it was worth it.”

The rover planners include Rich Morris, Scott Maxwell, Sharon Laubach, Joseph Carsten, John Wright and Brian Cooper; and (front row) Tara Estlin, Paolo Bellutta and Ashley Stroupe. Credit: PBS

“And then to do all that work and have the rovers on Mars for five years, it’s like you’re playing a slot machine and you put in your quarter and pull the lever, and not only do a few quarters come out, they keep coming and coming and coming, and it fills up your cup, and overflows. That’s what it’s like to work on this mission.”

OK, Scott, now we want to know the highlights for you from the past five years. Certainly there’s at least one or two memorable moments!

“Certainly for me, there are two things I think of,” Scott said. “One is the first time I ever drove the rover. There was the period early on where we lost contact with Spirit. But then we were able to recover her. But that was a month into the mission where we thought it was only going to last three months, and it delayed the time until I got my first chance to drive her.”

“I still remember the day. We planned and planned and rehearsed the drive. I checked over the sequence a million times before sending it. Then I went home and I should have gone to sleep, but I couldn’t. I just laid there in my bed and stared at the ceiling, and couldn’t get past the thought that right then, at that moment, there was a robot on another planet, doing what I had told it to do. It was just an awesome feeling to imagine that, and that feeling has never left me. I still feel like that every time I drive the rover.”

Scott says it’s an incredible feeling to go outside and look up and see Mars in the sky, and on that red dot way out there is an object, placed there by humans, and humans are telling it what to do. “And I’m one of the people doing that. It’s an absolutely amazing feeling. I feel that way all the time.”

Scott Maxwell, rover driver.  Image courtesy Scott Maxwell
Scott Maxwell, rover driver. Image courtesy Scott Maxwell

Its obvious Scott has a soft spot in his heart for Spirit, as another memorable aspect of the mission involves her, too. Scott tells the story so well and with such passion, I’ll just let him go:

“The other thing I always think about is that Spirit travels the 300 million miles to Mars, she gets to Mars, drives off the lander, and she’s gone all that way with the hope of finding evidence of past liquid water on Mars,” Scott said. “But instead, when she drives around, there’s nothing: just lava as far as the eye can see. She drives around the area and looks at rocks, and then drives over to Bonnevillle crater, which is her best chance of finding evidence of liquid water, thinking maybe if she goes down far enough into this crater there will be something there, but there’s nothing.”

“But way off in the east, there are a range of hills, the Columbia Hills, and (principal investigator) Steve Squyres says clearly the hills may be too far for us to get to, but maybe we can get some images that can tell us something. But Spirit takes off for those hills anyway, even though they are too far away, and never gives up and gets there; she actually makes it all the way to the bottom of the hills.”

“And then,” Scott continued, “she’s at the bottom of the hill, looking up at them, and it’s now twice as long as she should have survived and she has driven three times as far as she was supposed to be able to drive, and she’s tired and her wheels are sore, now is when the real challenge will begin. Now she won’t just be driving over flat terrain, like she was meant to drive on. She’s going to have to climb the hill, which is taller than the Statue of Liberty, and everyone thinks it’s way too tall for this poor little rover to climb. But she does it anyway.”

“She starts climbing up the hill and there are times when she can’t make any progress, so we have to turn her around and give up some of the altitude she’s won and go back and find another path, but she never gives up and goes all the way to the top of that hill that was just impossibly far away when she started.”

A special effect image of Spirit sitting on Husband Hill.  Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell.  Rover model by Dan Maas
A special effect image of Spirit sitting on Husband Hill. Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell. Rover model by Dan Maas

“When we came into work that day and we saw that image of Spirit standing on top of Husband Hill with the beautiful panorama of the world around her –she stood there for a long time and took the images of the area around her — to me, that’s one of the achievements, not just of this mission, but of engineering excellence in our whole civilization, to be able to do that. To be able to go so far and do so many impossible things, that image just says all of that for me. I know what it took to get there and be able to take that image, and I feel the pride of being part of the team that made it happen. It is just an amazing experience.”

As incredible as the MER mission has been, we all know the rovers won’t last forever. Someday – and we don’t know when – the rovers will eventually quit working. It’s hard to think about life without the rovers, but has Scott given any thought to what mission he would like to work on next?

“It’s all downhill from here!” Scott laughed. “But, really there’s a lot of cool and exciting stuff going on at JPL. We’ve got another rover we’re working on, the Mars Science Laboratory, and I’ve been working on that. I’m also involved with ATHLETE, which is a 12-ft. tall six legged robot spider on roller skates that we are going to send to the moon. There’s always so much like that going on here at JPL, it’s just like being an engineer in Disneyland. You come to work and say, ‘What cool stuff can I work on today?’ It’s just awesome, and there’s just no end to it.”

Scott says he has nothing against orbiter missions, but to be honest they’re not top on his list. “I’m not putting them down,” he said, “but orbiters don’t really float my boat. I kind of get into rovers, I kind of relate to them, in a way. But you look at a mission like Cassini and it’s amazing! Cassini is finding liquid water spewing out of Enceladus, and dropping a probe onto Titan and getting the first view beneath the thick clouds that cover that moon! It’s just amazing stuff. So even though orbiters aren’t my thing, I might end up on one of them, too, you never know.”

Scott has definitely shown his worth with the rovers, so, even though the MSL launch has slipped to 2011, the rover fans out there are secretly hoping Scott will have a place on the MSL team when the time comes.

Spirit heading off into the sunset.  Special effects image by NASA/JPL/Cornell
Spirit heading off into the sunset. Special effects image by NASA/JPL/Cornell

But in the meantime, Spirit and Opportunity, the Energizer Bunnies of Mars exploration keep going and roving, and sending back loads of data and images.

JPL has put out a video to celebrate the rovers’ five years on Mars, where Scott says it best: “It seems like every day is better than the day before. The mission keeps getting better and better the longer it goes.”

Happy birthday Spirit and Opportunity! We’ll take as many years as you can give us!

MRO: Mars Storm Chaser

Dust storm on Mars. Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

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What an incredible image of a storm on Mars! The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s main assignment is to study the surface of the Red Planet, looking for clues about the history of water on Mars. But while photographing, analyzing and mapping, it also spends time each day pursuing intense weather on Mars. Sometimes, MRO is able to capture a storm in action, as in the above image of a dust front rising from a network of canyons. Often, the storms are spirals like giant tornadoes on Earth, sometimes forming huge fronts of churning dust like the “dust bowl” of the 1930s in the US. While we sometimes think of Mars as an almost “dead” world, there’s a lot of action going on in the atmosphere, and MRO is always searching for the Perfect Storm!

Dust storms on Mars are catalysts for cloud formation. The storms lift dust particles high into the atmosphere, and the particles serve as seeds for water-ice cloud formation. Water ice condenses onto the dust particles to form wispy, white clouds. Daily variations in Mars’ atmosphere are quite large, in part because there is no ocean, which serves as large heat storage capacity on the surface. The ground warms up quickly during the day and cools off equally as quick at night. Daily temperature variations of 100 C (180 F) are common, and that cycle of heating and cooling is reflected in atmospheric variations. “That energy propagates up, and when integrated to the high altitudes, it can make a big difference from day to night in the densities that we saw at a given altitude,” said MRO Project Scientist Richard Zurek.

Storms as seen by the Mars Color Imager. Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Storms as seen by the Mars Color Imager. Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

These images show whirlwinds on top of volcanoes. Thin veils of icy clouds dissipate into the atmosphere above the dust plumes. The orbiter has discovered that smaller storms on Mars can feed into larger storms.
Dust devils seen by the HiRISE camera. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Dust devils seen by the HiRISE camera. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

And of course, dust devils on Mars are a common occurrence in several areas, as they have been photographed by both the Mars Exploration Rovers, as well as Phoenix.

Sources: MRO website, HiRISE site

How to Drive a Mars Rover, Part 2

Scott Maxwell, using his 3-D simulation software. Courtesy Scott Maxwell

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The Mars Exploration Rovers have been traversing the surface of the Red Planet for almost five years now. But how exactly are the two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, “driven” from Earth, about 150 million km away? Many of us might have visions of joysticks, similar to what are used for remote control toys, but it’s not like that at all. However, being a “Rover Driver” is one job where having experience with video games and simulation software looks good your resume! Scott Maxwell is one of fourteen rover drivers, or planners as they are also called, who last week gave us an update on Spirit and Opportunity’s status. Today, Scott provides the details of how to drive a Mars rover.

“The way we wished it would work,” said Scott in a phone interview from JPL, “is if we could have a joystick where if we pushed forward on the joystick the rover would go forward, or push back and the rover would stop. But, with lag time delays in the radio signals, you would push forward on the joystick and 10 minutes later the rover would get the signal to go. But on Earth, you won’t know if it worked for another 10 minutes after that because of the time it takes for the signal to get back to you.”

This would create a nightmare in logistics, planning and operations, because the drivers can’t “see” what the rover is doing in real time. So instead, the rover drivers work the Martian nightshift.

Recent view from Opportunity's hazard camera.  Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell
Recent view from Opportunity's hazard camera. Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell

“We take advantage that our solar powered rovers have to shut down for the night,” said Scott. “So as the sun is going down in the Martian sky, the rover is commanded to take pictures of the world around them and send it before they go to sleep. When we get that data back on Earth, we go to work. We take all the images and put them into a simulation. We have a 3-D simulation world — kind of like a video game — on our computers. Then, we have a simulated rover that we put down in that 3-D world and we drive that rover around instead.”

So in that 3-D world, the rover drivers can test every possibility, make all the mistakes (tip the rover, get stuck, drive off a precipice, crash into a big rock) and perfect the driving sequence while the real rovers are dozing securely and peacefully. This certainly has helped with the long life the rovers have led, as in five years the rover drivers have safely and successfully guided the rovers to drive in and out of craters, climb a challenging hill, and put on more mileage than anyone ever thought possible. The biggest driving calamity has been getting stuck in a sand dune, but now the driving team has a few tricks up their sleeves to avoid that (see Part 1).

So then, when the drivers perfect the commands inside the simulation and hone the exact sequence of movements for the rover, they upload those commands and send it to the real rover. Then as the sun is coming up on Mars, the rover wakes up, receives a communications uplink from Earth, processes the commands and it goes to work while the rover drivers go to sleep. “At the end of the rover’s day, it sends us more pictures and data, and we start the cycle all over again,” Scott said.

Rover test bed.  Credit: JPL
Rover test bed. Credit: JPL

If there’s a particularly difficult situation, such as how much tilt can the rover withstand without tipping over, a test rover can go through the same sequences in a simulated Mars environment out in JPL’s Mars Yard.

Back in 2004 during the “prime mission,” the first three months of the mission (the original length of time the rovers were slated to last) everyone who worked with MER lived on Mars time. Since the two rovers are on opposite sides of the planet, that meant operations going on 24 hours a day. And since a Mars day is 40 minutes longer than Earth’s day, that meant a perpetually shifting sleep/wake cycle, a difficult situation where your body continually feels “jet-lagged.” But now that the mission has been ongoing for such a long time, the planners operate in a more Earth-normal mode and even take some weekends off. But still, a planner’s eight- hour shift can start anywhere from 6:00 a.m. to noon.

So what’s an average drive for the rovers? “It varies widely,” Scott said, “but an average drive is in the neighborhood of a few meters.” Right now Spirit is struggling her way up the side of “Home Plate,” a low plateau, which for a rover is a steep hill. The crumbly soil gives out beneath her wheels as she makes the climb, making it difficult to drive father than a few centimeters in a day. Plus, Spirit is dealing with low power levels from dust-covered solar panels, providing limited energy for any big drives. Just after a recent dust storm, Spirit’s solar panels were producing only 89 watt hours, which is about the energy needed to run a small light bulb for an hour and half.

Spirit's dusty solar panels.  Credit:  NASA/JP
Spirit's dusty solar panels. Credit: NASA/JP

But Opportunity’s power levels are much better, and she recently had drives as long as 216 meters, as she puts the pedal to the metal in an attempt to reach Endeavour Crater, about 12 km away.

Some of the rover drivers work mainly with one rover (Steve Squyres has said it’s easy to get attached to one rover or the other, depending which one you’re working with) but Scott goes back and forth between the two. “That’s in part because I’m a team lead, and part because I’m the kind of person who wants to run around and be part of everything all the time!” he said. When we talked with Scott last week, he was working with Spirit, and thought that this week he will probably do a drive or two with Opportunity.

Currently Spirit’s total odometry is at about 7,530 meters (over 4.6 miles), while Opportunity’s odometer reads almost 14,000 meters (about 9 miles).

JPL has some wonderful videos of the rover’s treks, travails and progress, and you can keep track of the rovers’ progress by checking for regular updates on the MER website.

Tomorrow: What have you been doing the past five years? Scott Maxwell shares what five years of driving the Mars rovers has been like.


How to Drive a Mars Rover, Part 1

How to Drive a Mars Rover, Part 3

First Test Flight of WhiteKnightTwo

WhiteKnightTwo at liftoff. Credit: FlightGlobal.com

Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo (WK2) made its first test flight on Sunday, Dec. 21, a 59min shakedown flight of the twin fuselage aircraft at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. WK2 climbed to a maximum altitude of 16,000ft (4,880m). “It reached an altitude 4,000ft above the original test plan’s maximum altitude,” said Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn. “That is how confident we are about the aircraft. Now we have to download all the data. There will be another flight early in the new year.” WK2 will carry Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo, the space plane that will bring passengers on suborbital flights, hopefully by 2011. FlightGlobal.com obtained exclusive video of the test flight, which can be viewed here.

The hour-long test flight of the four-engine WhiteKnightTwo used a skeleton flight crew. Previously last week, WK2 was taken out for four runs down the runway and a brief lifting of the nose gear on Dec. 20, and low-speed trips down the runway on Dec. 16 and 12.

Both WK2 and SS2 are being built by Scaled Composites of Mojave, CA, and Virgin Galactic has five SS2 rocket planes and two of the carrier crafts on order, with options on more. The WK2/SS2 combination will serve as the backbone for Sir Richard Branson’s suborbital spaceline company. The price per seat on the two pilot/six passenger suborbital SS2 is $200,000.

SpaceShipTwo flight plan.  Credit:  Virgin Galactic
SpaceShipTwo flight plan. Credit: Virgin Galactic

Virgin Galactic hopes to start operating commercially by 2011 from the New Mexico Spaceport America. The new spaceport, soon to be under construction, announced that it had received its license from the FAA for horizontal and vertical space vehicle launches on 15 December and it expects to be fully operational in 2010.

Source: FlightGlobal.com

40th Anniversary of the Great Gamble: Apollo 8

Apollo 8's famous Earthrise picture. Would you like to have this view? Credit: NASA

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The Apollo 8 mission was a seminal moment not in only the history of spaceflight, but in human history as well. The mission came during a time when the US and the world were divided by war and racial issues. It’s been said that Apollo 8 “saved” 1968 from being an otherwise divisive and disheartening year, and because of the success of the mission – in terms of both technical and philosophical matters — the Apollo 8 crew of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders were named “Men of the Year” by Time Magazine. Apollo 8 was the first human mission to orbit the moon, but it wasn’t supposed to be. And the mission was responsible for one of the most iconic images of our time.

Read more about Apollo 8 and watch an excellent video NASA put together to commemorate the mission on its 40th anniversary


Originally the mission was slated to test the lunar lander hardware in Earth orbit. But the lunar lander wasn’t ready and then other political issues came into play. NASA was told, incorrectly it turned out, by the CIA that the Soviet Union was preparing its own manned lunar mission and was ready to launch. As NASA wanted to be first to the moon and also fulfill President John Kennedy’s call for a US manned lunar landing by the end of the decade, they took a gamble and designated Apollo 8 to go and orbit the moon.

The decision was controversial. NASA’s giant Saturn V rocket, the only rocket capable of taking humans to the Moon, had been fraught with problems and instrument failures on its two test flights. Also, fresh in everyone’s minds was the fire in 1967 in which killed three astronauts – Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee – during a ground test of an Apollo capsule.

Apollo 8 launch.  Credit: NASA
Apollo 8 launch. Credit: NASA

Yes, it was a gamble, but it paid off. The crew launched on December 21, and it was the first manned launch of the Saturn V rocket. It went well, although Anders tells the story how he felt severe vibrations during the first moments of launch, and feeling almost like a bug on top of a car antenna, vibrating back and forth. But the giant rocket, 363 feet tall and weighing 6.25 million pounds performed well and following a rocket burn for trans-lunar injection, the astronauts were on their way to the moon.

Early on Christmas Eve, Apollo 8 reached its destination. The astronauts fired the propulsion system to slow the rocket, putting them into lunar orbit. For its first three obits, the astronauts kept its windows pointing down towards the Moon and frantically filmed the craters and mountains below. One of their main tasks was to do reconnaissance for the future Apollo landings.

It was not until Apollo 8 was on its fourth orbit that Borman decided to roll the craft away from the Moon and to point its windows towards the horizon in order to get a navigational fix. A few minutes later, he spotted a blue-and-white object coming over the horizon. Transcripts of the Apollo 8 mission reveal the astronauts’ wonder and amazement at what they were seeing: Earth, from a quarter of million miles away, rising from behind the Moon. “Oh my God! Look at the picture over there. Here’s the Earth coming up,” Borman shouted. This was followed by a flurry of exclamations by Anders and Lovell and a scramble to find a camera. Anders found one first and the first image he took was black-and-white, showing Earth just peeping over the horizon. Then Anders found a roll of 70mm color film for the Hasselblad camera, and he took the photograph of Earthrise that became an icon of 20th-century, portraying technological advances and heightening ecological awareness.

Apollo 8 crew.  Credit: NASA
Apollo 8 crew. Credit: NASA

This was the way humans first recorded their home planet from another world. “It was the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life,” Borman said later, “one that sent a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me. It was the only thing in space that had any color to it. Everything else was either black or white. But not the Earth.”

Jim Lovell said that Earth was “a grand oasis in the vast loneliness of space.”

The three astronauts agree the most important thing they brought back from the mission was the photography, not only of the moon, but of Earth.

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of Apollo 8, the crew of the International Space Station’s Expedition 18, Commander Mike Fincke and Flight Engineers Sandy Magnus and Yury Lonchakov will send a message to be aired on a message that will air on NASA Television as part of the daily Video File, beginning at 11 a.m. CST, Friday, Dec. 19. The video also will be broadcast in high definition on the NASA TV HD channel at 10
a.m., noon and 3 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 19, and Tuesday, Dec. 23.

Sources: NASA, The Guardian

Another Discovery Points to Past Water and Habitability on Mars

Carbonates appear in green in this area about 20 km (12 miles) wide on Mars. NASA/JPL/JHUAPL/MSSS/Brown University

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Scientists from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have made a major discovery about the history of water on Mars. The CRISM instrument, the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has found carbonates, a long-sought-after mineral, embedded in bedrock on the Martian surface. The Phoenix Mars Lander also discovered carbonates in soil samples, which was a surprise and MRO has observed carbonates in windblown dust from orbit. However, the dust and soil could be mixtures from many areas, so the carbonates’ origins have been unclear. The latest observations indicate carbonates may have formed over extended periods on early Mars. Additionally the new findings indicate that Mars had neutral to alkaline water when the minerals formed at these locations more than 3.6 billion years ago, and not the acidic soil that appears to dominate the planet today. This means that different types of watery environments have existed on Mars. The greater the variety of wet environments, the greater the chances one or more of them may have supported life.

“We’re excited to have finally found carbonate minerals because they provide more detail about conditions during specific periods of Mars’ history,” said Scott Murchie, principal investigator for the instrument at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.

Carbonate rocks are created when water and carbon dioxide interact with calcium, iron or magnesium in volcanic rocks. Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere becomes trapped within the rocks. If all of the carbon dioxide locked in Earth’s carbonates were released, our atmosphere would be thicker than that of Venus. Some researchers believe that a thick, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere kept ancient Mars warm and kept water liquid on its surface long enough to have carved the valley systems observed today.

“The carbonates that CRISM has observed are regional rather than global in nature, and therefore, are too limited to account for enough carbon dioxide to form a thick atmosphere,” said Bethany Ehlmann, lead author of the article and a spectrometer team member from Brown University, Providence, R.I.

On Earth, carbonates include limestone and chalk, which dissolve quickly in acid.

“Although we have not found the types of carbonate deposits which might have trapped an ancient atmosphere,” Ehlmann said, “we have found evidence that not all of Mars experienced an intense, acidic weathering environment 3.5 billion years ago, as has been proposed. We’ve found at least one region that was potentially more hospitable to life.”

Possible carbonates in Nilli Fossae. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Possible carbonates in Nilli Fossae. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

The researchers report clearly defined carbonate exposures in bedrock layers surrounding the 1,489-kilometer-diameter (925-mile) Isidis impact basin, which formed more than 3.6 billion years ago. The best-exposed rocks occur along a trough system called Nili Fossae, which is 666 kilometers (414 miles) long, at the edge of the basin. The region has rocks enriched in olivine, a mineral that can react with water to form carbonate.

“This discovery of carbonates in an intact rock layer, in contact with clays, is an example of how joint observations by CRISM and the telescopic cameras on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are revealing details of distinct environments on Mars,” said Sue Smrekar, deputy project scientist for the orbiter at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

The findings will appear in the Dec. 19 issue of Science magazine and were announced Thursday at a briefing at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting in San Francisco.

Source: NASA

How to Drive the Mars Rovers, Part 1: Rover Updates

Rover Driver Scott Maxwell with a model of MER. Photo courtesy Scott Maxwell

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In January of 2004, NASA’s twin robot geologists, the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, landed on the Red Planet. During those nearly five years, the rovers have returned hundreds of thousands of images and enough data to keep scientists busy for decades. But almost nine years ago, Scott Maxwell started working on developing software and techniques for driving the rovers around on Mars surface. Today he’s the Mars Rover Driver Team Lead for MER at JPL, and he says that every day of working on this mission has been incredible. “It’s been an amazing experience,” he said, “and I like to say it’s the best job on two planets.” To celebrate the upcoming fifth anniversary of the rovers on Mars, Universe Today caught up with Scott to get an update on the current status of the two rovers, to find out what the five-year MER mission has been like for a rover driver, and to ask the pressing question, just how do you drive a rover from 150 million kilometers away?

Both rovers have been inactive recently because of solar conjunction, where the sun is between Earth and Mars, which makes communications difficult because the amount of radio noise generated by the Sun. So, when I talked to Scott on Wednesday of this week he was just working on the commands that would be sent to Spirit for the first drive she has taken since several weeks ago. So how is Spirit doing these days?

“Spirit is struggling valiantly to climb up the north face of Home Plate,” Scott said. “As you know, we’ve just come out of solar conjunction, and so we’re picking up where we left off on Spirit’s climb up the face. Her solar array energy levels are not as good as they were before the mini-dust storm we had before the conjunction, so that’s obviously a cause for concern. It’s unfortunate because that means we have less energy for driving. But she’s still alive and that’s a lot better than what we thought she’d be five years into the mission.”

Home Plate is the raised plateau.  Spirit is the dark spot at the 1 o'clock position.  Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Home Plate is the raised plateau. Spirit is the dark spot at the 1 o'clock position. Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Home Plate is a low plateau about 80 meters (260 feet) in diameter. Spirit spent the Martian winter parked on the north side of the plateau with her solar panels slanted towards the low sun in order to stay alive. But Spirit’s solar arrays are severely dust-covered, decreasing the amount of power available for science activities and driving. But the scientists and engineers haven’t given up on Spirit, and still have big plans for her.

“Our longer term goal is to head south from Home Plate to a pair of features called ‘Goddard’ and ‘Von Braun’,” said Scott. “Von Braun is a hill and Goddard is a crater-like feature next to it, and that’s the next area we’d like to explore. As you know, the area around home plate appears to be a region of past hot-springs or volcanic fumarole activity, the kind of place where life might have formed on Earth, so it makes it a particularly exciting place to explore on Mars, as we try to find out more about what was going on here.”

But ‘Goddard’ and ‘Von Braun’ are on the south side of Home Plate and Spirit is on the north side. The easiest route would be to “climb back up on the top of Home Plate and kind of skate across it where the driving is good” Scott said, but if Spirit isn’t able to make the climb, they will drive down the north slope and go around Home Plate the long way. But that might take more time, and time might be getting limited for Spirit.

Bonestell panorama, taken by Spirit during her winter stay on the north side of Home Plate.  Credit:  NASA/JPL/Cornell
Bonestell panorama, taken by Spirit during her winter stay on the north side of Home Plate. Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell

So, the shortest way is up and over Home Plate. But Spirit has a bum right front wheel, and is trying to climb up some difficult terrain. “Imagine you’re in the desert, climbing up a sand dune, but every step you take the sand crumbles out from beneath you,” said Scott. “That’s what Spirit is experiencing. So even though we’re commanding the wheels to go several meters, she might only make a few centimeters of progress in a sol (Martian Day).”

But the driving team will keep trying, as ‘Von Braun’ and ‘Goddard’ are of interest to the science team.

Opportunity, on the other hand, is in very different driving conditions. “Right now she’s basically on a parking lot, with only a couple of speed bumps every once in awhile,” Scott said. “Opportunity can drive 100 meters a sol, like the length of a football field every day, without breaking a sweat. We recently had a nearly record-setting drive, with Opportunity where we drove nearly 216 meters in one day,” Scott said proudly. “So that’s our silver medal drive, our second longest drive ever with either of the rovers.” (The longest drive was 220 meters in one day.)

One thing Opportunity does have to watch out for is sand dunes in the region. In 2005, Opportunity became stuck in one of those dunes, and it took the rover driving team over a month to figure out how to maneuver Opportunity out of the sand trap, called Purgatory Dune. In honor of the difficulties and lessons learned from getting stuck, all the potential sand traps in the region are called “Purgatoids.”
The "Purgatory" dunes around Opportunity.  Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell
“Opportunity is in a region where Purgatiods are all around her.” Scott said. “But the good news is that we have better data now, than we did when we first encountered these features.” The MER team now has the benefit of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE Camera in orbit around Mars, looking down at — if not watching over – the rovers and their activities. “So we have the data and images from HiRISE, and we think we have identified a way to pick out these Purgatoids from orbit.” Scott said. “So we take the images from MRO, and use them as part of our path planning for Opportunity every day, and also for our longer scale path planning. On top of that we have other measures we have adopted after that first Purgatory incident, where the rover stops every once in awhile and ‘checks’ itself, gauging whether it is actually moving or if it is stuck and the wheels are just spinning. So even if we get into a Purgatoid, we’ll be able to catch it before too long and have the chance to get ourselves out before we dig in too far.”

But so far, with the new technique of being able to identify Purgatoids from orbit, Opportunity hasn’t run into a single one.

Opportunity's traverse map through Sol 1716 As of sol 1707 (Nov. 11, 2008), Opportunity's total odometry was 13,493.85 meters (8.38 miles).
Opportunity's traverse map through Sol 1716 As of sol 1707 (Nov. 11, 2008), Opportunity's total odometry was 13,493.85 meters (8.38 miles).

“It makes us happy to put the pedal to the metal and just drive,” Scott said, “It’s a lot of fun.”

Opportunity is “putting the hammer down” to reach a crater about 12 kilometers (7 miles) away called Endeavour. The huge crater is 22 kilometers (13.7 miles) across, and scientists expect to see a much deeper stack of rock layers than Opportunity saw while she was in Victoria Crater the past two years. The 12 km driving distance would match the total distance it has traveled from 2004 to mid-2008. Even at the 100-meter plus pace each sol, the journey could take two years.

But Scott Maxwell and the 13 other rover drivers working on the MER mission are up for the challenge.

Tomorrow: Part 2: Just how do you drive a rover on another planet?
How to Drive a Mars Rover, Part 3