Universe Today

July 14, 2009December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Build Your Own Apollo 11 Landing Computer

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I’m classifying this one under “Extreme Geek.” But very cool Extreme Geek.

Remember the computer on the Apollo 11 Eagle lander that kept reporting “1201” and “1202” alarms as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin approached landing on the Moon? Well, now you can have one of your very own. Software engineer John Pultorak worked 4 years to build a replica of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), just so he could have one. And then he wrote a complete manual and put it online so that anyone else with similar aspirations wouldn’t have to go through the same painstaking research as he did. The manual is available free, but Pultorak says he spent about $3,000 for the hardware.

The 1,000 page documentation includes detailed descriptions and all schematics of the computer. You can find them all posted on Galaxiki, downloadable in pdf. format (the files are large).

During the first moon landing, the AGC guided Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin towards a large crater with huge boulders around it. Knowing he didn’t want to land there, Armstrong took manual control of the lunar module while Aldrin called out data from the radar and computer, guiding the Eagle to a safe landing with about 30 seconds of fuel left.

Even with that inauspicious beginning, the AGC did its job for the Apollo missions, and did it well. It had to control a 13,000 kg spaceship, orbiting at 3,500 kilometers per hour around the moon, land it safely within meters of a specified location and guide it back from the surface to rendezvous with a command ship in lunar orbit. The system had to minimize fuel consumption because the spacecraft only contained enough fuel for one landing attempt.

The original Apollo AGC cost over $150,000. It didn’t have a disk drive to store any software, and only 74 kilobytes of memory that had been literally hard-wired, and all of 4 Kb of something that is sort of like RAM.

It was developed by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and it a pretty amazing piece of hardware in the 1960s, as it was the first computer to use integrated circuits. The AGC mutlitasking operating system was called the EXEC, it was capable of executing up to 8 jobs at a time. The user interface unit was called the DSKY (display/keyboard, pronounced “disky”); an array of numerals and a calculator-style keyboard used by the astronauts to communicate with the computer.

Each Apollo mission featured two AGC computers – one in the Apollo Command Module and one in the Apollo Lunar Module.

Reportedly, Aldrin later said he kept the guidance system on while the descent radar was also on. The computer wasn’t designed for that amount of simultaneous input from both systems, which was why the alarms kept going off. But Aldrin’s reasoning was if the descent had to be aborted he didn’t want to have to turn on the guidance while they were doing their abort rocket burn to escape from crashing. As the story goes, while the alarms were going off, computer engineer Jack Garman told guidance officer Steve Bales in mission control it was safe to continue the descent and this was relayed to the crew. Garman remembered the 1201 and 1202 alarms occurring during one of the hundreds of simulations the team performed in preparation of the Apollo 11 mission, and knew it would be OK to continue.

The rest is history. And now you can build yourself a little piece of it.

Sources: Galaxiki, Apollo 11 Wikipedia

July 14, 2009December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Crew Emerges from Simulated Mars Mission

The Mars 500 crew at the halfway point of their mission. Credit: ESA

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Six crewmembers emerged from 105 days of isolation on Tuesday, completing a simulated Mars mission. This experiment was the first phase of the Mars 500 program to help understand the psychological and medical aspects of long spaceflights. “We have successfully completed our mission,” said crew member Oliver Knickel. “This is a big accomplishment that I am very proud of. I hope that the scientific data we have provided over the last months will help to make a mission to Mars possible.”

The simulated mission began on March 31 of this year. Inside the isolation facility in Moscow, Russia the crew participated in a range of scenarios as if they really were traveling to the Red Planet – including launch, the outward journey, arrival, transfer to and from the Martian surface, simulated emergencies, and finally the long journey home.

All communications with anyone outside the facility had a delay of up to 20 minutes each way, just as a real mission to Mars would have. The only thing missing was microgravity during the simulated flight and one-third of Earth’s gravity during the simulated time on Mars. Plus, of course, the crew never faced any of the real dangers of launch, spaceflight, landing or living on a planet hostile to human life.

The crew includes Knickel, a mechanical engineer in the German army, Cyrille Fournier, an airline pilot from France and four Russians: cosmonauts Sergei Ryazansky (commander) and Oleg Artemyev, Alexei Baranov, a medical doctor, and Alexei Shpakov, a sports physiologist.

An external view of the Module for Mars 500 Image Credit: ESA

The crew grew some of their own food to supplement the usual space-style pre-packaged meals. Any spare time was spent reading, watching films and playing music and games together.

“We had an outstanding team spirit throughout the entire 105 days,” said Cyrille Fournier. “Living for that long in a confined environment can only work if the crew is really getting along with each other. The crew is the crucial key to mission success, which became very evident to me during the 105 days.”

This initial 105-day study is the precursor to a complete simulation of a fully-fledged mission to Mars and back due to start in early 2010. That exercise will see another six-member crew sealed in the same chamber to experience a complete 520-day Mars mission.

Source: ESA

July 14, 2009December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Welcome “Copernicium,” Our Newest Element

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The newest element on the periodic table will likely be named in honor of scientist and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Element 112 will be named Copernicum, with the element symbol “Cp.”

“We would like to honor an outstanding scientist, who changed our view of the world”, says Sigurd Hofmann, head of the team who discovered the element.

Element 112 is the heaviest element in the periodic table, 277 times heavier than hydrogen. With that distinction, several interesting suggestions for a name have recently been floating around the blogosphere (Fat Bottomum was my favorite; another was naming it to honor Carl Sagan). But the scientists said they wanted to honor the scientist who paved the way for our view of the modern world by discovering that the Earth orbits the Sun. Our solar system is a model for other physical systems, such as the structure of an atom, where electrons orbit the atomic nucleus. Exactly 112 electrons circle the atomic nucleus in an atom of copernicium.

Thirteen years ago, element 112 was discovered by an international team of scientists at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung (Center for Heavy Ion Research) in Darmstadt, Germany.

The element is produced by a nuclear fusion, when bombarding zinc ions onto a lead target. As the element already decays after a split second, its existence can only be proved with the help of extremely fast and sensitive analysis methods. Twenty-one scientists from Germany, Finland, Russia and Slovakia have been involved in the experiments that led to the discovery of element 112.

A few weeks ago, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, IUPAC, officially confirmed their discovery. In around six months, IUPAC will officially endorse the new element’s name. This period is set to allow the scientific community to discuss the suggested name “copernicium” before the IUPAC naming.

Since 1981, GSI accelerator experiments have yielded the discovery of six chemical elements, which carry the atomic numbers 107 to 112. The discovering teams at GSI already named five of them: element 107 is called bohrium, element 108, hassium; element 109, meitnerium; element 110, darmstadtium; and element 111 is named roentgenium.

Source: PhysOrg

July 14, 2009December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Could Ares Be Axed?

The Constellation program's Ares rockets. Credit: NASA

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Members of the Augustine Panel reviewing NASA’s future plans have asked the space agency to consider different approaches to send astronauts back to the moon. According to an article in the Orlando Sentinel, panel members have told NASA they want to see the effects of both “minor tweaks and wholesale changes to its Constellation Program,” which includes the newly designed Ares rocket and the Orion crew capsule. Ares has been controversial from the start, but NASA has spent the past four years and more than $3 billion creating and defending the rocket. Would starting over just mean a bigger gap between the shuttle and whatever comes next?

Current plans have the Ares rocket ready to launch by 2015, however, most critics say there’s no way the Constellation program can meet its 2015 launch schedule — let alone return astronauts to the moon by 2020 — given the technical problems and multibillion-dollar cost overruns on its Ares I rocket.

The White House named the 10-member review panel, chaired by retired Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine, to review NASA’s manned-space strategy for the next decade. The Sentinel reported, “One of the [panel’s] subcommittees has asked the [Constellation] program to present both the baseline … program and one of the variants that they have studied as well,” said one committee official, who asked not to be named because he’s not authorized to speak for the committee.

The official provided no details about the “variant,” but the request coincides with NASA pulling engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville Alabama from their work on Ares I to study creation of a smaller version of the Ares V that could carry both crew and heavy equipment.

Other possible options include a shuttle-derived architecture presented to the committee by shuttle program manager John Shannon, or the Direct 3.0 launch system created by a group of NASA engineers.

The Sentinel reports that NASA insiders and contractors say pulling engineers from Ares is “far from standard practice and could herald the demise of the Ares I.”

“They are looking at a whole new launch architecture,” the Sentinel quoted one NASA contractor familiar with the study. “Although it’s still too early to pronounce Ares I dead, it is safe to assume that members of the committees have doubts about it.”

Meanwhile, NASA presses ahead with a planned first launch test of the Ares I-X rocket planned for August 30. Just today the third motor segment for rocket has been moved to the Vehicle Assembly Building for to mate with the rest of the Ares stack tonight.

Stay tuned.

Source: Orlando Sentinel

July 14, 2009December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

New Map Hints at Venus’ Wet, Volcanic Past

Artistic interpretation of a possible volcano on Venus. Credits: ESA - AOES Medialab

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Venus is often referred to as Earth’s twin, as the two planets share a similar size. But perhaps the similarities don’t end there. A new infrared map from Venus Express hints that our neighboring world may once have been more Earth-like, with a plate tectonics system and an ocean of water. While previous radar images have given us a glimpse of Venus’ cloud-shrouded surface, this is the first map that hints at the chemical composition of the rocks. The new data are consistent with suspicions that the highland plateaus of Venus are ancient continents, once surrounded by ocean and produced by past volcanic activity.

“This is not proof, but it is consistent. All we can really say at the moment is that the plateau rocks look different from elsewhere,” says Nils Müller at the Joint Planetary Interior Physics Research Group of the University Münster and DLR Berlin, who headed the mapping efforts.

The first temperature map of the planet's southern hemisphere at infrared wavelengths, charted with Venus Express's Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer, VIRTIS. Credits: ESA/VIRTIS/INAF-IASF/Obs. de Paris-LESIA

The map shows Venus’ southern hemisphere comprised over a thousand individual images, recorded between May 2006 and December 2007. The Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) instrument captured infrared radiation given off by the various surfaces on Venus during the spacecraft’s night-time orbits around the planet’s southern hemisphere.

Different types of rocks radiate different amounts of heat at infrared wavelengths owing to a material characteristic known as emissivity. The new map shows that the rocks on the Phoebe and Alpha Regio plateaus are lighter in color and look old compared to the majority of the planet. On Earth, such light-colored rocks are usually granite and form continents.

“If there is granite on Venus, there must have been an ocean and plate tectonics in the past,” says Müller.
Granite is formed when ancient rocks, made of basalt, are driven down into the planet by shifting continents, a process known as plate tectonics. The water combines with the basalt to form granite and the mixture is reborn through volcanic eruptions.

Müller points out that the only way to know for sure whether the highland plateaus are continents is to send a lander there. Over time, Venus’ water has been lost to space, but there might still be volcanic activity. The infrared observations are very sensitive to temperature. But in all images they saw variations of only 3–20°C, instead of the kind of temperature difference they would expect from active lava flows.

“Venus is a big planet, being heated by radioactive elements in its interior. It should have as much volcanic activity as Earth,” he says. Indeed, some areas do appear to be composed of darker rock, which hints at relatively recent volcanic flows.

Lead image caption: Artistic interpretation of a possible volcano on Venus. Credits: ESA – AOES Medialab

Source: ESA

July 13, 2009April 26, 2016 by Nancy Atkinson

A Tale of Two Launches

SpaceX Falcon 1 launch. Credit: SpaceX Webcast

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While space shuttle Endeavour’s launch on Monday was scrubbed –again — due to weather, another launch took place later, which successfully launched the first commercial payload on board a rocket built by a commercial space company. SpaceX launched their Falcon 1 rocket from Omelek Island at Kwajalein Atoll to put a Malaysian RazakSAT satellite in a near equatorial orbit. SpaceX was able to overcome troubles with a helium system as well as bad weather, both of which caused delays. But eventually, the Falcon 1 launched flawlessly.

This was the second successful launch in five tries for the Falcon 1 rocket. Later this year. SpaceX hopes to launch its larger Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral

Space shuttle Endeavour stands on Launch Pad 39A after weather prevented Monday's scheduled liftoff. Image credit: NASA TV

Meanwhile, for the second day in a row, thunderstorms near the Kennedy Space Center forced a scrub for Endeavour and her crew. It was the fifth delay for the STS-127 mission, going back to a hydrogen leak which delayed the launch in June.

NASA has decided to pass up a Tuesday launch opportunity, and try for a sixth launch attempt Wednesday July 15 at 6:03:10 p.m. EDT. The weather looks like it has a better chance of allowing a launch (60 percent chance of good weather as opposed to a 40 percent chance on Tuesday), plus the extra day will give .
engineers a chance to repair a rocket thruster rain cover came loose.

Delaying the shuttle launch may mean rescheduling when a Progress resupply ship can dock to the space station. If it launches as scheduled on July 24, it needs to dock by July 29.

July 13, 2009December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Astro ‘Shop of the Week

Ballerina Galactica. Credit: Alan Lipkin

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We’ve got some extremely creative readers of Universe Today who really know their way around image editing software. One of those people is Alan Lipkin, who submitted his latest Photoshop handiwork to us, which he calls “Ballerina Galactica.” Of course, you’ll recognize the tutu as the Sombrero Galaxy and the backdrop as the Wild Duck Star Cluster. The big star and earring are both Sirius. Wonderful!

Alan’s image gave me an idea: Why not have a regular feature where readers can submit astronomical images they have messed around with using image editing software? A few rules: the images submitted must be space or astronomy related and they must be in good taste. The images can be submitted to Nancy here. We’re looking forward to seeing and sharing the creative side of our readers!

July 13, 2009December 29, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Carnival of Space #111 — Apollo 11 Launch Anniversary Edition

Apollo 11 launch in 1969, the first successful Moon landing (NASA)

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This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Bruce Cordell at 21st Century Waves.

Click here to read the Carnival of Space #111.

And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to [email protected], and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out, let Fraser know if you can be a host, and he’ll schedule you into the calendar.

Finally, if you run a space-related blog, please post a link to the Carnival of Space. Help us get the word out.

July 12, 2009December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Who Flew the Ship When Mike Collins Went to Sleep?

I mentioned in a previous post that upcoming, there would be lots of fun ways to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and here’s one I hope you enjoy. My latest podcast on the 365 Days of Astronomy is my reminiscences about that event, which includes another song I wrote. It’s about Apollo 11 through the eyes of a young girl, (which I was at the time), with all the interesting questions and the unique viewpoint that children can bring.

Back on July 20 1969, with everyone focusing on whether Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would make it down to the lunar surface, my thoughts stayed with Mike Collins up orbiting all alone in the command and service module, which is what the song is about. I was inspired and brought back to that time by a children’s book, “The Man Who Went to the Far Side of the Moon: The Story of Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins” by Bea Uusma Schyffert. It’s a wonderful book that focuses on Michael Collins and what he did, and what he saw, and the things he thought about in space.

The book brought me back to that time, and how I sat in front of the TV watching history unfold. I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking or the questions I had, but I’m sure there was a lot going on inside my little head, and likely, that event was part of what brought me to where I am today.

I hope you enjoy it. Apollo 11 Through the Eyes of a Young Girl

July 10, 2009December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Shuttle is Go For Launch, But is the Weather?

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With the fuel leak apparently fixed, space shuttle Endeavour is ‘”go” for launch for the STS-127 mission. But the weather could force another delay. Forecasters predict a 60 percent chance thunderstorms on Saturday evening at Kennedy Space Center, and Endeavour’s launch is scheduled for 7:39:35 p.m. EDT. “Bottom line from the team, everybody’s go for launch, we have no major issues at all,” said Mike Moses, director of shuttle launch integration at the Kennedy Space Center. “We’re in really good shape for launch. We do have some challenges with the weather, but we’ll just work through those.”

Two previous launch attempts on June 13 and 17 were scrubbed when a hydrogen vent line attached to the side of the tank began leaking during fueling. NASA engineers replaced a one-piece Teflon seal with a different and more flexible two-piece seal, and in a fueling test on July 1, no leaks were detected.

The 16-day mission will feature five spacewalks and complete construction of the Japanese Kibo laboratory, adding a platform to the outside of the module that will allow experiments to be exposed to space.
Endeavour’s crew consists of commander Mark Polansky, pilot Douglas Hurley, Canadian flight engineer Julie Payette, David Wolf, Christopher Cassidy, Thomas Marshburn and space station flight engineer Timothy Kopra .