DIY ISS: Big Home Improvement Projects for Space Station

STS-126 Crew. Credit: NASA

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Astronauts on the crew of STS-126, scheduled to launch on space shuttle Endeavour on Friday, Nov. 14 will be doing some big home improvement projects on their visit to the International Space Station. This mission will allow the ISS to double its crew size, as well as making sure there will be enough power for everyone living on board the orbital outpost. “It’s the most jam-packed logistics module we have ever carried up there,” STS-126 Commander Chris Ferguson said. “We’re taking a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house and turning it into a five-bedroom, two-bathroom house with a gym.”

The major additions are extra sleeping compartments, another bathroom, specialized workout equipment, a state-of-the-art water recycling system, and a refrigerator. But spacewalking astronauts will also attempt to clean up a malfunctioning SARJ – the Solar Alpha Rotary Joint that allows the station’s solar arrays to constantly track the sun. The huge mechanism hasn’t worked right for more than a year, and astronauts will clean up metal shavings from grinding parts, replace the trundle bearing assemblies and add special lubrication. It’s a big job, and will take four spacewalks to complete, including adding lubrication the port side SARJ, which has been working fine. But NASA doesn’t want to take any chances.

So astronauts will be busy both outside and in at the station during the mission, which will bring 14,500 lbs of supplies and equipment to the ISS.

“We’re going to use up a lot of the new space that we’ve brought up on the past few missions, with Node 2 and Columbus and the Kibo module,” lead shuttle flight director Mike Sarafin said. “The six-person crew is an important step toward utilizing the space station to its full capability.”

STS-126 crew.  Credit: NASA
STS-126 crew. Credit: NASA

The crew includes: Christopher Ferguson, commander, Eric Boe, pilot, Sandra Magnus, Stephen Bowen, Donald Pettit, Robert (Shane) Kimbrough and Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper.

But in addition to fully utilizing the space station, the equipment brought up will allow the space station to start depending less on the space shuttle. A new regenerative environmental control and life support system will give the station the ability to recycle urine and the condensation that the crew breathes into the air into pure water that can be used for drinking or to cool the station’s systems.

Endeavour’s commander, Christopher Ferguson, considers the water system the single most important piece of equipment that he’s delivering. It’s important for when the shuttle fleet is retired in 2010, and its water deliveries dry up. But Ferguson said the benefits go beyond the space station.

“This is really it, and it has no parallel. I would challenge you to find any other system on the Earth that recycles urine into drinkable water. It’s such a repulsive concept that nobody would even broach it. But that day will come on this planet, too, where we’re going to need to have these technologies in place, and this is just a great way to get started.”

“Up until this point, the majority of the station’s drinking water was coming up from the shuttle or the Russian’s Progress vehicle,” Sarafin said. “This sets us up for long-term sustainability of the station without the shuttle.”

Nobody will be drinking the water generated by the system just yet – an onboard purity monitor needs to be checked out and multiple water samples must be analyzed by scientists on the ground first. To get that water sample home as quickly as possible, Endeavour’s crew will take a shot at getting the system hooked up before they leave.

Here’s more info on the urine-to-water system.

The new additions to the space station will be a good way to mark the 10th birthday of the International Space Station on Nov. 20 – 10 years after the first station module was launched into space and construction began.

“We’ll be transitioning to true utilization and setting up for six-person crew at that 10-year bench mark,” Sarafin said. “It’s been a tremendous international effort to get to this point, and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate it.”

Source: NASA, Houston Chronicle

Impressive Craters on Earth

Vredefort Crater. Image: NASA

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Ever since our recent encounter with asteroid 2008 TC3 — the first asteroid that was correctly predicted to hit our planet — I’ve had impact craters on the brain. Earth has about 175 known impact craters, but surely our planet has endured more bashing than that in its history. All the other terrestrial planets and moons in our solar system are covered by impact craters. Just look at our Moon through a telescope or binoculars, or check out the recent images of Mercury sent back by the MESSENGER spacecraft, or pictures of Mars from the armada of spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet, and you’ll see that impact craters are the most common landforms in our solar system.

But since two-thirds of Earth is covered by water, any asteroid impacts occurring in the oceans are difficult to find. And even though Earth’s atmosphere protects us from smaller asteroids, just like in the case of 2008 TC3, which broke up high in the atmosphere, weathering, erosion and the tectonic cycling of Earth’s crust have erased much of the evidence of Earth’s early bombardment by asteroids and comets. Most of Earth’s impact craters have been discovered since the dawn of the space age, from satellite imaging. In fact, a geologist recently discovered an impact crater using Google Earth!

Here’s my list of Earth’s Ten Most Impressive Impact Craters, starting with #1. the largest and oldest known impact crater, Vredefort Crater, shown above, located in South Africa. It is approximately 250 kilometers in diameter and is thought to to be about two billion years old. The Vredefort Dome can be seen in this satellite image as a roughly circular pattern. What an impact that must have been!

Manicouagan Reservoir.  Credit: NASA
Manicouagan Reservoir. Credit: NASA

2. Manicouagan Crater: fifth largest known impact crater. This crater is located in Quebec, Canada. It was created about 212 million years ago. Now, it is an ice-covered lake about 70 km across. This image, taken by space shuttle astronauts, shows an outer ring of rock. Close up, the rock reveals clear signs of having been melted and altered by a violent collision. The original rim of the crater, though now eroded away, is thought to have had a diameter of about 100 km.

Chicxulub Crater.
Chicxulub Crater.

3. Chicxulub Crater, third largest and possible dinosaur killer. The third largest impact crater lies mostly underwater and buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. At 170km (105 miles) in diameter, the impact is believed to have occurred roughly 65 million years ago when a comet or asteroid the size of a small city crashed, unleashing the equivalent to 100 teratons of TNT. Likely, it caused destructive tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions around the world, and is widely believed to have led to the extinction of dinosaurs, because the impact probably created a global firestorm and/or a widespread greenhouse effect that caused long-term environmental changes.

Aorounga Crater.  Credit: NASA
Aorounga Crater. Credit: NASA

4. Aorounga Crater: possible triple crater. The main Aorounga Crater in Chad, Africa, visible in this radar image from space, shows a concentric ring structure that is about 17 kilometers wide. But, this crater might have been formed as the result of a multiple impact event. A second crater, similar in size to the main crater, appears as a circular trough in the center of the image. And a third structure, also about the same size, is seen as a dark, partial circular trough on the right side of the image. The proposed crater “chain” could have formed when a 1 km to 2 km (0.5 mile to 1 mile) diameter object broke apart before impact. Ouch!
Clearwater craters. Credit: NASA
Clearwater craters. Credit: NASA

5. Clearwater Craters: two for the price of one. Twin, lake-filled impact craters in Quebec, Canada were probably formed simultaneously, about 290 million years ago, by two separate but probably related meteorite impacts. The larger crater, Clearwater Lake West has a diameter of 32 km, and Clearwater Lake East is 22 km wide.

Barringer Crater.
Barringer Crater.

6. Barringer Crater: well preserved. While this crater isn’t all that big, what’s most impressive about Barringer Crater in Arizona (USA) is how well preserved it is. Measuring 1.2 km across and 175 m deep, Barringer Crater was formed about 50,000 years ago by the impact of an iron meteorite, probably about 50 m across and weighing several hundred thousand tons. Most of the meteorite was vaporized or melted, leaving only numerous, mostly small fragments with in the crater and scattered up to 7 km from the impact site. Only about 30 tons, including a 693-kg sample, are known to have been recovered.
Wolfe Creek Crater
Wolfe Creek Crater

7. Wolfe Creek Crater, well preserved, too. Another relatively well-preserved meteorite crater is found in the desert plains of north-central Australia. Wolfe Creek crater is thought to be about 300,000 years old and is 880 meters across and and about 60 meters deep. It’s partially buried under the wind-blown sand of the region, and although the unusual landform was well-known to the locals, scientists didn’t find the crater until 1947.
Deep Bay Crater.  Credit: NASA
Deep Bay Crater. Credit: NASA

8. Deep Bay Crater: deep and cold. Deep Bay crater is located in Saskatchewan, Canada. The bay is a strikingly circular 13 km wide impact crater and is also very deep (220 m). It is part of an otherwise irregular and shallow lake. The age of the crater is estimated to be 99 million years old.

Kara-Kul Crater.  Credit: NASA
Kara-Kul Crater. Credit: NASA

9. Kara-Kul Crater: high altitude crater. This crater was formed about 10 million years ago, and is located in Tajikistan, near the Afghan border. In total, the crater is about 45 km in diameter and is partially filled with a 25 km-wide lake. This might be the “highest” impact crater, almost 6,000 m above sea-level in the Pamir Mountain Range. It was found only recently from satellite images.

Bosumtwi Crater.
Bosumtwi Crater.

10. Bosumtwi Crater: built of bedrock. The last crater on our tour of impressive impact craters is this located in Ghana, Africa. It is about 10.5 km in diameter and about 1.3 million years old. The crater is filled almost entirely by water, creating Lake Bosumtwi. The lakebed is made of crystalline bedrocks.

Source:
Wikipedia: Impact Craters

Phoenix Lander At Mission’s End

Capturing the world's attention: Phoenix (NASA/UA)

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The Phoenix Mars Lander has not communicated since Nov. 2, and engineers from the mission assume the vehicle is now completely out of power. Therefore, at a news conference today, mission managers announced the Phoenix the mission is now officially over. “At this time we’re pretty convinced the vehicle is no longer available for us to use, and we’re declaring the end of the mission,” said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager. “We’ve been surprised by this vehicle before, and we’re still listening. We’ll try to hail Phoenix, but no one has the expectation we’ll hear from it again. We’re completely proud of what we’ve accomplished. We’ve achieved all of the science goals and then some.”

But there’s still more to come from Phoenix, as scientists can now focus fully on analyzing the science data returned by the lander. Could Phoenix have found possible organic substances on Mars?

Peter Smith, Principal Investigator for Phoenix, didn’t rule out the possibility. “We haven’t analyzed the data at that level yet,” he said. “These are subtle signatures. We have the data sets that could reveal that. But until we actually do the work, we can’t say we didn’t find it…I’m still holding out hope here. Its’ really a question of what is the truth on Mars, and we’re trying to make sure we get the right answer here and not come rushing out with a quick analysis. This is very tricky stuff and the data sets are quite complex in regards to organics.”

Tests done by Phoenix didn’t reveal the acid soils Smith and his team were expecting to find, but alkaline salts and perchlorates, which are possible energy sources and nutrients for microbes. Smith doesn’t think there’s anything alive on Mars now, its just too cold. “It’s possible that in a warmer and wetter period on it Mars, it could have been habitable,” he said.

As anticipated, the seasonal decline in sunshine at the arctic landing site is not providing enough sunlight for the solar arrays to collect the power necessary to charge batteries that operate the lander’s instruments. And a dust storm at the landing site made the sunlight decrease even further, ending the mission a little sooner than the team had hoped.

As for any possibility of re-contacting the lander next year when spring returns to Mars’ northern arctic, Goldstein didn’t rule it out, but said its not very likely. “By the mid October (2009) time frame, there would be enough sunlight hitting the solar arrays to create power,” he said. “But its highly unlikely the vehicle will come back. It will be encased in CO2 ice, in temperatures under -150 C. The solar arrays will likely crack and fall off the vehicle,… the electronics will become brittle and break, so the wiring boards won’t work. But this vehicle has behaved so superlatively, we’ll look again in October.”

Look for an official epitaph for Phoenix from Universe Today soon.

Forgotten Apollo Data Could Solve Moon Dust Problem

An IMB 726, a precursor of the 729 data recorder. Credit: IBM

Old, forgotten data from three Apollo moon missions could help overcome one of the biggest environmental hurdles facing future lunar colonists. Pervasive moon dust can clog equipment, scratch helmet visors –or worse, get inside astronaut lungs and cause serious health problems. But 173 data tapes hold information that could be essential in overcoming the problems the dust causes. The only trouble is that the tapes are archived on “ancient” 1960’s technology and no one could find the right equipment to playback the tapes. However, the Australian Computer Museum has an old IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive that should do the trick, IF the machine can be restored to operable condition again…

The IBM729 Mark 5 tape recorder is about as big as a household refrigerator. It recorded data from Apollo 11, 12 and 14 missions that carried “dust detectors.” Information from the detectors was beamed back to earth and recorded onto tapes. Copies of the tapes were supposedly sent to NASA, but the tapes were lost or misplaced before they could be archived in NASA’s holdings. But the original data tapes have sat in Perth, Australia for almost 40 years.

Physicist Brian O’Brien invented the detectors. He wrote a couple of papers on the information in the 1970’s, but no one was very interested in moon dust back then. However now, scientists realize this information could help make future missions to the moon more feasible.

Apollo astronaut Gene Cernan covered with moon dust.  Credit: NASA
Apollo astronaut Gene Cernan covered with moon dust. Credit: NASA

“These were the only active measurements of moon dust made during the Apollo missions, and no one thought it was important,” said O’Brien. “But it’s now realised that dust, to quote Harrison Schmitt, who was the last astronaut to leave the moon, is the number one environmental problem on the moon.”

O’Brien quit his work on lunar dust when he left the University of Sydney. Two years ago, someone at NASA remembered the data had been taken, but couldn’t find the duplicate tapes.

O’Brien says there is no indication as to when exactly the tapes were lost, but he guesses that it was “way, way back.” When O’Brien learned of the tape loss, he was contacted by Guy Holmes from a data recovery company who offered to try and extract the information on the old, original tapes. But Holmes realized he needed some old equipment to do the job, and came across the right IBM tape drive at the Australian Computer Museum.

The archaic-looking recorder is in need of refurbishing, however. Holmes jokes that a 1970s Toyota Corolla fan belt could be used to get the recorder up and running.

“The drives are extremely rare, we don’t know of any others that are still operating,” he said.

“It’s going to have to be a custom job to get it working again. It’s certainly not simple, there’s a lot of circuitry in there, it’s old, it’s not as clean as it should be and there’s a lot of work to do.”

Holmes is hopeful of getting the tape recorder working again in January, and then he says it should only take a week to extract information that has been locked away since the early 1970s.

Source: Australia’s ABC News

Chandrayaan-1 Now Successfully in Lunar Orbit

Chandrayaan-1 in lunar orbit. Credit: ISRO

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Chandrayaan-1, India’s first unmanned spacecraft mission to moon, successfully entered lunar orbit on November 8. The spacecraft fired its engines to reduce velocity and enable the Moon’s gravity to capture it; engines were fired for 817 seconds when Chandrayaan-1 was about 500 km away from the moon. Next up for the spacecraft will be to reduce the height of its lunar orbit to about 100 km. Then, on Nov. 14th or 15th, the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) will be launched, and crash into the Moon’s surface (more about the MIP below). If you enjoy watching animations and want to see exactly how the spacecraft attained its lunar orbit, here’s a few animations for you:

A simple animation of how the spacecraft went from its spiraling elliptical orbit around Earth to its now spiraling elliptical orbit around the moon can be found on the India Space Agency’s site. (Sorry, the file was to big to insert here.)

Another quite large animation that was created by Doug Ellison (of UnmannedSpaceflight.com) shows how the X-ray Spectrometer aboard Chandrayaan-1 will work. This one takes a long time to download, but the wait is well worth it: the animation is spectacular.

Here’s a video that shows an animation of the entire mission; again, some great animation here. Enjoy.

The spacecraft is now orbiting the moon in an elliptical orbit that passes over the polar regions of the moon. The nearest point of this orbit (perigee) lies at a distance of about 504 km from the moon’s surface while the farthest point (apogee) lies at about 7502 km. Currently, Chandrayaan-1 takes about 11 hours to orbit the moon.

The MIP carries three instruments:

Radar Altimeter – measures the altitude of the probe during descent and for qualifying technologies for future landing missions.

Video Imaging System – acquires close range images of the surface of the Moon during descent. The video imaging system consists of analog CCD camera.

Mass Spectrometer measures the constituents of lunar atmosphere during descent.

Source: ISRO

In Their Own Words: Apollo Astronauts say “We Went to the Moon”

Happy 40th Anniversary, Apollo 15!
Image from Apollo 15. Credit: NASA

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Someone approached me recently and wanted to ask about how the US faked going to the Moon back in the 1960’s and 70’s. I was so shocked, appalled and dumbfounded, I really didn’t know what to say. I just directed them to Phil Plait’s Moon Hoax Hoax info. Then I wondered, what do the Apollo astronauts say if someone asks them the same question? Now I know. I just finished watching “In the Shadow of the Moon,” a documentary of the Apollo era presented by Ron Howard, directed by David Sington (*correction). It’s a wonderful film with fantastic and rare footage along with interviews of several of the Apollo astronauts. I highly recommend it! And the end, as the credits are rolling, each of the astronauts responds to an unsaid question about the those who think this greatest adventure in human history was a hoax:

Mike Collins: “I don’t know how I would grab someone by the collar who didn’t believe and shake them and somehow change their mind.” And later Collins added, “I don’t know two Americans who could have a fantastic secret without one of them blurting it out to the press. Can you imagine thousands of people being able to keep this secret?”

Charlie Duke: “We’ve been to the moon nine times. If we faked it, why did we fake it nine times?”

Alan Bean: “Some of the tabloids are saying that we did this in a hanger in Arizona. Maybe that would have been a good idea!” (meaning, it would have been a lot safer)

Dave Scott: “Any significant event in history, somebody has had a conspiracy theory one way or the other about it.”

Gene Cernan: “Truth needs no defense. Nobody, nobody can ever take those footsteps that I made on the surface of the moon away from me.”

And Buzz Aldrin said this on a the UK TV show, “Where Are They Now:” “I’m an honest person. If I tell you I was on the moon and you choose not to believe it, forget it.”

The next time someone approaches me, I’ll be better prepared. And I can hardly wait for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s launch early next year. LRO will carry a powerful camera into low orbit over the Moon’s surface. While its primary mission is not to photograph old Apollo landing sites, it will probably photograph them, many times, providing the first recognizable images of Apollo relics since 1972.

The spacecraft’s high-resolution camera, the LROC, or Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, has a resolution of about half a meter. That means that a half-meter square on the Moon’s surface would fill a single pixel in its digital images.

Apollo moon rovers are about 2 meters wide and 3 meters long. So in the LROC images, those abandoned vehicles will fill about 4 by 6 pixels.

Check out “In the Shadow of the Moon” website.

Astronomers Discover Odd Kuiper Belt Pair

KBO Binary. Credit: Gemini Observatory

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Astronomers have discovered a pair of small Kuiper Belt Objects that are gravitationally bound to each other. This is somewhat unusual in itself. But even though these two objects are gravitationally connected, they have an enormous separation between them, about 125,000 kilometers (one third the distance from the Earth to the Moon). Astronomers say, as a comparison, this is equivalent to a pair of baseballs gravitationally “connected” and orbiting each other at a distance of 200 kilometers!

The extreme binary, 2001 QW322, orbits at 43 astronomical units or about 6.5 billion kilometers from the Sun. The pair was originally discovered in August 2001 with the Canada-France-Hawai‘i Telescope. Since then, (from 2002-2007), the pair has been monitored closely using 8-meter-class telescopes (Gemini North, Gemini South and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope) to obtain high precision photometric observations of the faint double system.

In the above images, their separation was 1.8 arcseconds. Their radii are about 50 kilometers.
There are on the order of about a billion additional Kuiper Belt Objects in our solar system with Pluto and Charon being among the largest members of this important group of minor planets. These small icy bodies move in low eccentricity and low inclination orbits beyond Neptune, extending possibly as far as 1,000 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

Most Kuiper Belt Objects are single objects. The advent of adaptive optics and various survey techniques has created a surge in the discovery of binaries in the main asteroid and Kuiper belts. Astronomers say 2001 QW322 clearly stands out as the widest orbit, near-equal mass binary of the solar system.

Source: Gemini Observatory

Deepest Ultraviolet Image Shows a Sea of Distant Galaxies

A Pool of Distant Galaxies. Credit: ESO

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Dive right in to this image that contains a sea of distant galaxies! The Very Large Telescope has obtained the deepest ground-based image in the ultraviolet band, and here, you can see this patch of the sky is almost completely covered by galaxies, each one, like our own Milky Way galaxy, and home of hundreds of billions of stars. A few notable things about this image: galaxies were detected that are a billion times fainter than the unaided eye can see, and also in colors not directly observable by the human eye. In this image, a large number of new galaxies were discovered that are so far away that they are seen as they were when the Universe was only 2 billion years old! Also…

This image contains more than 27 million pixels and is the result of 55 hours of observation, made primarily with the Visible Multi Object Spectrograph (VIMOS) instrument. To get the full glory of this image, here’s where you can download the full resolution version. It’s worth the wait while it downloads. Or click here to be able to zoom around the image.

In this sea of galaxies – or island universes as they are sometimes called – only a very few stars belonging to the Milky Way are seen. One of them is so close that it moves very fast on the sky. This “high proper motion star” is visible to the left of the second brightest star in the image. It appears as a funny elongated rainbow because the star moved while the data were being taken in the different filters over several years.

The VLT folks describe this image as a “uniquely beautiful patchwork image, with its myriad of brightly coloured galaxies.” It shows the Chandra Deep Field South (CDF-S), one of the most observed and best studied regions in the entire sky. The CDF-S is one of the two regions selected as part of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), an effort of the worldwide astronomical community that unites the deepest observations from ground- and space-based facilities at all wavelengths from X-ray to radio. Its primary purpose is to provide astronomers with the most sensitive census of the distant Universe to assist in their study of the formation and evolution of galaxies.

The image encompasses 40 hours of observations with the VLT, just staring at the same region of the sky. The VIMOS R-band image was obtained co-adding a large number of archival images totaling 15 hours of exposure.

Source: ESO

Are We Close to Finding Dark Matter?

Dark Matter Halo. Credit: Virgo Consortium

Scientists say he search for the mysterious substance which makes up most of the Universe could soon be at an end. A massive computer simulation was used to show the evolution of a galaxy like the Milky Way, and analysts were able to “see” gamma-rays given off by dark matter. Dark matter is believed to account for 85 per cent of the Universe’s mass but has remained invisible to telescopes since scientists inferred its existence from its gravitational effects more than 75 years ago. If the computations are correct, the findings could help NASA’s Fermi Telescope to search for the dark matter and open a new chapter in our understanding of the Universe.

The consortium of scientists, called Virgo Consortium looked at dark matter halos – structures surrounding galaxies – which contain a trillion times the mass of the Sun. The simulations showed how the galaxy’s halo grew through a series of violent collisions and mergers between much smaller clumps of dark matter that emerged from the Big Bang.

The researchers found that gamma-rays produced when particles collided in areas of high dark matter density could be most easily detectable in regions of the Milky Way lying close to the Sun in the general direction of the galaxy’s centre.

They suggest the Fermi Telescope should search in this part of the galaxy where they predict that gamma-rays from dark matter should glow in “a smoothly varying and characteristic pattern”.

If Fermi does detect the predicted emission from the Milky Way’s smooth inner halo the Virgo team believes it might be able to see otherwise invisible clumps of dark matter lying very close to the Sun.

The Virgo research involved scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, The Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University, UK, the University of Victoria in Canada, the University of Massachusetts, USA, and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

Professor Carlos Frenk, Director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology, at Durham University, said: “Solving the dark matter riddle will be one of the greatest scientific achievements of our time.

“The search for dark matter has dominated cosmology for many decades. It may soon come to an end.”

Sources: EurekAlert, Virgo Consortium

Floating Battle Droids On Board ISS

SPHERES on the ISS. Credit: NASA

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Three free-flying spheres are currently zooming around inside the International Space Station. Is the crew of Expedition 18 using them to hone their light-saber battle skills a la Luke Skywalker or sharpen their ability to detect UFOs? No, these bowling-ball sized spherical satellites are part of an experiment devised by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to test autonomous rendezvous and docking maneuvers for future formation flying spacecraft. Called SPHERES – which stands for Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites — these color-coded robots are flying inside the ISS, testing different flight formations. But these have to be a lot of fun to play with during off hours on the space station: zero-g bowling or space volleyball, anyone?

Astronauts Greg Chamitoff, Mike Fincke and spaceflight participant Richard Garriott posed with SPHERES.  Credit: NASA
Astronauts Greg Chamitoff, Mike Fincke and spaceflight participant Richard Garriott posed with SPHERES. Credit: NASA

Each satellite is self-contained with power, propulsion, computers and navigation equipment. The results are important for satellite servicing, vehicle assembly and formation flying spacecraft configurations. One future formation flying mission is the Terrestrial Planet Finder Interferometer, which will use multiple small vehicles flying in formation to create an orbiting infrared interferometer.
Terrestrial Planet Finder Interferometer array.
Terrestrial Planet Finder Interferometer array.

If successful, these mini-satellites, and their potentially larger versions, would be able to refuel/repair other satellites, establish positioning around space-based telescopes, and support space docking routines. So, battle droids would become maintenance droids.

And smaller, multiple satellite missions are economical and provide redundancy. Instead of launching one big, heavy satellite, launching lots of little is easier. They can orbit Earth in tandem, each doing their own small part of the overall mission. If a solar flare zaps one satellite—no problem. The rest can close ranks and carry on. Launch costs are reduced, too, because tiny satellites can hitch a ride inside larger payloads, getting to space almost free of charge.

The SPHERES can also test the ability to build spaceships in orbit. One way to build a larger ship to go to, for instance, Mars, is to assemble it piece by piece in Earth orbit. The SPHERES are helping engineers design software that could be used to maneuver the pieces of a spaceship together.

Sources: Science@NASA, NASA, MIT