Universe Today

October 13, 2008December 24, 2015 by Ian O'Neill

Violent Polar Cyclones on Saturn Imaged in Unprecedented Detail by Cassini

These two previously released infrared images of Saturn show the entire south polar region with the hurricane-like vortex in the center. The top image shows the polar region in false color, with red, green, and blue depicting the appearance of the pole in three different near-infrared colors (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

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The Cassini mission has released some of the most detailed images of Saturn’s poles yet, revealing vast cyclones churning up the gas giant’s atmosphere in the north and south. These observations show very similar storms to the south pole observations imaged by the NASA spacecraft in 2006, only in far better detail. It is believed the north and south cyclones are generated by violent thunderstorms deep inside Saturn’s atmosphere; water condensing inside these storms output heat, fuelling the vortex extending 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometres) in diameter. The smallest features resolved are 120 kilometre (75 mile)-wide cumulus clouds rotating at velocities in excess of 325 mph (530 kph), more than twice the wind speed possible on Earth…

…and the mystery north pole hexagon is still there.

This is a side-by-side view of large cyclones at the north (left) and south (right) poles of Saturn taken in June 2008 by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer onboard the Cassini spacecraft (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona) — Images of the large cyclones at the north (left) and south (right) poles of Saturn taken in June 2008 by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer onboard the Cassini spacecraft (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

Cassini has wowed scientists with these brand new views of Saturn’s north pole. With detail at 10-times higher resolution than previously attained, Cassini has shown that both poles have vast swirling cyclones that highlight regions of planet-wide storm activity.

“These are truly massive cyclones, hundreds of times stronger than the most giant hurricanes on Earth,” said Kevin Baines, Cassini scientist on the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Dozens of puffy, convectively formed cumulus clouds swirl around both poles, betraying the presence of giant thunderstorms lurking beneath. Thunderstorms are the likely engine for these giant weather systems.”

The Saturn hexagon as seen by Voyager 1 in 1980 (NASA)

Interestingly, the northern storm observation still shows the mysterious hexagonal shape (as originally verified in 2006, after a sighting by Voyager 1 in 1980), only in far greater detail. Scientists are still uncertain why the northern cyclone should take such a stable form; the clouds within the hexagonal shape spin at high speeds without interfering with its six-sided shape.

Previous observations appeared to show an outer ring of high clouds surrounding a region thought to be clear air with a few puffy clouds circulating around the pole. These brand new images reveal a far more complex picture. The circulating clouds are actually smaller convective storms forming other, more distinct rings.

Oblique view of Saturn's south polar vortex. The Sun is located above the top-right-hand corner, showing the shadows of clouds towering above the vortex (NASA) — Oblique view of Saturns south polar vortex (NASA)

Tony DelGenio of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and Cassini imaging team member explains the scene: “What looked like puffy clouds in lower resolution images [from 2006] are turning out to be deep convective structures seen through the atmospheric haze. One of them has punched through to a higher altitude and created its own little vortex.”

These clouds push high above the main weather system, casting long shadows, indicating they are 25-45 miles (40-70 km) above the vortex rings (pictured above). These also appears to be an inner ring of clear air (the “eye” of the storm) over the poles, that appeared bigger in previous observations.

For me, the most perplexing feature to come out of these new Cassini observations is the enduring hexagonal shape in the circulating clouds. In 2006 when the lower-resolution north pole observations were released, many made the assumption that it was an unstable transient feature, appearing for a short period, only to disappear soon afterwards. But over a year later, the hexagon remains, as six-sided as ever. I’d guess this shape could be some atmospheric standing wave, what do you think?

See the Cassini video of the north pole hexagon being buffetted by the high-speed winds surrounding it »

Source: Space.com

October 13, 2008January 15, 2016 by Fraser Cain

What Color is the Moon?

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If the Moon’s up, go take a look and see what color it is. If you’re looking during the daylight, the Moon will look faint and white surrounded by the blue of the sky. If it’s night, the Moon will look bright yellow. Why does the color the Moon seem to change from white to yellow when you go from day to night. And why does the Moon look gray in many photographs, especially the ones from space? What color is the Moon?

The photographs of the Moon, taken from space are the best true-color views of the Moon. That gray color you see comes from the surface of the Moon which is mostly oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium and aluminum. The lighter color rocks are usually plagioclase feldspar, while the darker rocks are pyroxene. Most of the rocks that you can see are volcanic, and were extruded from the inside of the Moon during volcanic eruptions. Some rare rocks called olivine are actually green.

The dark regions you see on the Moon are called lunar maria, and they were formed by ancient volcanic eruptions. They’re less reflective than the lunar highlands, and so they appear darker to the eye. The maria cover about 16% of the lunar surface, mostly on the side we can see from Earth. Astronomers think the lunar maria were formed about 3-3.5 billion years ago, when the Moon was much more volcanically active.

When you see the Moon from here on Earth, the atmosphere partially blocks your view. The particles in the atmosphere scatter certain wavelengths of light, and permit other wavelengths to get through directly. When the Moon is low in the sky, you’re seeing its light go through the most atmosphere. Light on the blue end of the spectrum is scattered away, while the red light isn’t scattered. This is why the Moon looks more red. As it goes higher in the sky, the Moon is obscured by less and less atmosphere, so it turns more yellow – the same thing happens to the Sun as it rises in the sky.

During the day, the Moon has to compete with sunlight, which is also being scattered by the atmosphere, so it looks white.

Here’s an article from Universe Today about harvest moons, and here’s an article about how astronomers calibrate photographs from space.

Here’s an article that explains how to get the right color of the Moon in Photoshop, and here’s an article from Windows on the Universe about the Moon’s colors in fall.

You can listen to a very interesting podcast about the formation of the Moon from Astronomy Cast, Episode 17: Where Did the Moon Come From?

Reference:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/lroc-20100910_color_moon.html

October 13, 2008December 24, 2015 by Fraser Cain

Temperature of the Moon

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Are you planning a trip to the Moon and you’re wondering what kinds of temperature you might experience. Well, you’re going to want to pack something to keep you warm, since the temperature of the Moon can dip down to -153°C during the night. Oh, but you’re going to want to keep some cool weather clothes too, since the temperature of the Moon in the day can rise to 107°C.

Why does the moon’s temperature vary so widely? It happens because the Moon doesn’t have an atmosphere like the Earth. Here on Earth, the atmosphere acts like a blanket, trapping heat. Sunlight passes through the atmosphere, and warms up the ground. The energy is emitted by the ground as infrared radiation, but it can’t escape through the atmosphere again easily so the planet warms up. Nights are colder than days, but it’s nothing like the Moon.

There’s another problem. The moon takes 27 days to rotate once on its axis. So any place on the surface of the Moon experiences about 13 days of sunlight, followed by 13 days of darkness. So if you were standing on the surface of the Moon in sunlight, the temperature would be hot enough to boil water. And then the Sun would go down, and the temperature would drop 250 degrees in just a matter of moments.

To deal with this dramatic range in temperature, spacesuits are heavily insulated with layers of fabric and then covered with reflective outer layers. This minimizes the temperature differences between when the astronaut is in the sunlight and when in shade. Space suits also have internal heaters and cooling systems, and liquid heat exchange pumps that remove excess heat.

There are craters around the north and south poles of the Moon which are bathed in complete shadow, and never see sunlight. This places would always be as cool as -153°C. Similarly, there are nearby mountain peaks which are bathed in continuous sunlight, and would always be hot.

We have written many articles for Universe Today about some of the special regions of the Moon. Here’s an article about building a moon base, and here’s an article about a perfect crater for a human settlement.

Here’s an answer to the question from Windows on the Universe, and here’s some information from Teacher’s Domain.

You can listen to a very interesting podcast about the formation of the Moon from Astronomy Cast, Episode 17: Where Did the Moon Come From?

Reference:
NASA Moon Facts

October 13, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

An Inside Look at Comet Holmes

The astronomy world buzzed in the Fall of 2007 when Comet Holmes – a normally humdrum, run-of-the-mill comet — unexpectedly flared and erupted. Its coma of gas and dust expanded away from the comet, extending to a volume larger than the Sun. Professional and amateur astronomers around the world turned their telescopes toward the spectacular event. Everyone wanted to know why the comet had suddenly exploded. The Hubble Space Telescope observed the comet, but provided few clues. And now, observations taken of the comet after the explosion by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope deepen the mystery, showing oddly behaving streamers in the shell of dust surrounding the nucleus of the comet. The data also offer a rare look at the material liberated from within the nucleus. “The data we got from Spitzer do not look like anything we typically see when looking at comets,” said Bill Reach of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at Caltech.

Every six years, comet 17P/Holmes speeds away from Jupiter and heads inward toward the sun, traveling the same route typically without incident. However, twice in the last 116 years, in November 1892 and October 2007, comet Holmes exploded as it approached the asteroid belt, and brightened a millionfold overnight.

In an attempt to understand these odd occurrences, astronomers pointed NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope at the comet in November 2007 and March 2008. By using Spitzer’s infrared spectrograph instrument, Reach and his colleagues were able to gain valuable insights into the composition of Holmes’ solid interior. Like a prism spreading visible-light into a rainbow, the spectrograph breaks up infrared light from the comet into its component parts, revealing the fingerprints of various chemicals.

The Spitzer Space Telescope. Credit: NASA

In November of 2007, Reach noticed a lot of fine silicate dust, or crystallized grains smaller than sand, like crushed gems. He noted that this particular observation revealed materials similar to those seen around other comets where grains have been treated violently, including NASA’s Deep Impact mission, which smashed a projectile into comet Tempel 1; NASA’s Stardust mission, which swept particles from comet Wild 2 into a collector at 13,000 miles per hour (21,000 kilometers per hour), and the outburst of comet Hale-Bopp in 1995.

“Comet dust is very sensitive, meaning that the grains are very easily destroyed, said Reach. “We think the fine silicates are produced in these violent events by the destruction of larger particles originating inside the comet nucleus.”

When Spitzer observed the same portion of the comet again in March 2008, the fine-grained silicate dust was gone and only larger particles were present. “The March observation tells us that there is a very small window for studying composition of comet dust after a violent event like comet Holmes’ outburst,” said Reach.

Comet Holmes not only has unusual dusty components, it also does not look like a typical comet. According to Jeremie Vaubaillon, a colleague of Reach’s at Caltech, pictures snapped from the ground shortly after the outburst revealed streamers in the shell of dust surrounding the comet. Scientists suspect they were produced after the explosion by fragments escaping the comet’s nucleus.

In November 2007, the streamers pointed away from the sun, which seemed natural because scientists believed that radiation from the sun was pushing these fragments straight back. However, when Spitzer imaged the same streamers in March 2008, they were surprised to find them still pointing in the same direction as five months before, even though the comet had moved and sunlight was arriving from a different location. “We have never seen anything like this in a comet before. The extended shape still needs to be fully understood,” said Vaubaillon.

He notes that the shell surrounding the comet also acts peculiarly. The shape of the shell did not change as expected from November 2007 to March 2008. Vaubaillon said this is because the dust grains seen in March 2008 are relatively large, approximately one millimeter in size, and thus harder to move.

“If the shell was comprised of smaller dust grains, it would have changed as the orientation of the sun changes with time,” said Vaubaillon. “This Spitzer image is very unique. No other telescope has seen comet Holmes in this much detail, five months after the explosion.”

“Like people, all comets are a little different. We’ve been studying comets for hundreds of years — 116 years in the case of comet Holmes — but still do not really understand them,” said Reach. “However, with the Spitzer observations and data from other telescopes, we are getting closer.”

Source: Spitzer Press Release

October 13, 2008April 26, 2016 by Nancy Atkinson

Mars Satellite’s First Weather Report

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using its Mars Climate Sounder instrument. Credit: JPL

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The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling Mars for over two years now, and has provided unprecedented views of the Red Planet with its HiRISE Camera. But did you also know that MRO is a weather-monitoring satellite, too? The Mars Climate Sounder instrument is examining the Martian atmosphere and has issued its first Mars weather report. “It has taken 20 years and three missions but we finally have an instrument in orbit that gives us a detailed view of the entire atmosphere of Mars and it is already giving us fresh insights into the Martian climate,” said Professor Fred Taylor of Oxford University. Within a paper issued by the Mars ‘weather team’ comes surprising news: during the freezing Martian winter the atmosphere above the planet’s South Pole is considerably warmer than predicted.

The team discovered that even in the depths of the Martian winter, when the planet’s South Pole is frozen and in total darkness, at an altitude of 30-80km the atmosphere is being heated to 180 Kelvin – that’s 10-20 Kelvin warmer than expected.

“Winter at the Martian South Pole is severe even by the standards of our Antarctic,” said Professor Taylor. “The Pole is shrouded in total darkness for many months and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere freezes, creating blizzards and causing a thick layer of carbon dioxide ice to form across the surface. Yet what we’ve found is that 30 kilometers above the surface conditions are very different.”

The team, which also included Oxford physicists Dr Pat Irwin and Dr Simon Calcutt, believe that a vigorous circulation of the atmosphere – from the Martian equator to the Pole – is compressing the gas and causing the heating effect.

“It’s the same effect that warms the cylinder of a bicycle pump, or the pistons of a car engine, when you compress the gas inside,” said Taylor. “What we think we are observing is that the ‘engine’ of the Martian climate – this atmospheric circulation – is running as much as 50 per cent faster than our models predicted, resulting in this warming of the South Pole.”

These are just the first results from what the scientists hope will be many more years of study. In the long-term they hope to shed light on climate change on Mars, what controls it and what lessons can be drawn for climate change on Earth.

Studying the Martian climate helps us understand how a planet that was originally similar to Earth turned out so very different.

The team’s paper, ‘Intense polar temperature inversion in the middle atmosphere on Mars’, was published in Nature Geoscience on Oct. 12, 2008.

Source: Oxford University

October 13, 2008April 26, 2016 by Fraser Cain

Atmosphere of the Moon

Cold Cathode gauge, used to detect the Moon's atmosphere. Image credit: NASA

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The Moon has no atmosphere. None. That’s why astronauts have to wear their spacesuits when they get outside of their spacecraft on the surface of the Moon.

Okay… that’s not exactly true. The Moon does have a tiny atmosphere. If you could capture the entire atmosphere of the Moon, and pile it up, you would get a total mass of 10,000 kg. In other words, the entire mass of the atmosphere of the Moon weighs less than a large truck.

This lunar atmosphere comes from a few sources. One source for the atmosphere is outgassing, from radioactive decay processes deep inside the crust and mantle of the Moon. Another comes from debris kicked up by micrometeorite impacts on the surface of the Moon.

This creation of the atmosphere through impacts is known as “sputtering”. Earth-based telescopes have detected sodium and potassium in a diffuse cloud around the Moon, and NASA’s Lunar Prospector spacecraft detected radon-222 and polonium-201. Finally, detectors carried by the Apollo astronauts turned up argon, helium, oxygen, methane, nitrogen, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. But you’ve got to appreciate that these are in extremely low quantities.

One final atmosphere of the Moon might be electrostatically levitated moon dust. These tiny particles are constantly leaping up and down off the surface of the Moon. On the daylight side of the Moon, solar ultraviolet and X-ray radiation knocks electrons out of atoms in the lunar soil. This makes them build up a positive charge until they’re repelled from the surface and might launch meters or even kilometers above the surface of the Moon before falling back down.

But even with all these trace elements, the Moon really has no atmosphere at all. If you stepped outside of your spacecraft and onto the lunar surface without a spacesuit to provide you with an atmosphere, you would die in less than a minute.

Here are some articles about other moons that do have atmospheres. Here’s Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and Saturn’s moon Titan.

Here’s an article from Windows on the Universe about how static forces make dust jump on the Moon, and here’s an article from Astronomy 121.

You can listen to a very interesting podcast about the formation of the Moon from Astronomy Cast, Episode 17: Where Did the Moon Come From?

References:
http://lunar.arc.nasa.gov/project/faq.htm
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/moonfact.html

October 13, 2008December 24, 2015 by Fraser Cain

Age of the Moon

Artist’s impression of the impact that caused the formation of the Moon. Credit: NASA/GSFC

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How old is the Moon? Almost the entire Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago, when the solar nebula collapsed. But astronomers think that the Moon formed later than that, when a Mars-sized protoplanet smashed into the Earth. The debris from the collision splashed into orbit around the Earth and then reformed into the Moon, which still orbits us today.

So when did this happen?

Astronomers think this collision happened about 4.53 billion years ago, about 30-50 million years after the rest of the Solar System formed. This was relatively soon after the formation of the Solar System, and well before the time when life formed on Earth. Our planet was probably still mostly a molten ball of rock, and the impact of the Moon did little to change that. This is the dominant theory of how the Moon formed, but there are others. It’s possible that the Moon was captured by the Earth’s gravity, or it just formed in place around the Earth after the formation of the Solar System.

Evidence for this collision was found by the astronauts of the Apollo Moon landing missions. They turned up lunar rocks that have oxygen isotope compositions which are nearly the same as the Earth. This means that portions of the Moon were once part of the Earth. Scientists announced their findings in 1969 in the journal Science, saying that the Moon was at least 4 billion years old.

More recent research measured tungsten content in rocks returned from the moon. Tungsten-182 is what you get when hafnium-182 decays. So the scientists measured the ratios of tungsten to hafnium to determine exactly when the moon formed. This is where the number 4.527 billion years (give or take 10 million years).

One problem with this technique is that it’s based on the relative age of meteorites used to determine how old the Solar System is. If that research is incorrect, these estimates for the age of the Moon might be incorrect too.

We have written many articles about the Moon for Universe Today. Here’s an article about the giant impactor theory, and here’s an article about how scientists link the formation of the Earth and the Moon.

Here’s an article that talks about how the age of the Moon was determined. And some history from Stony Book labs, the people who analyzed the first moon rocks.

You can listen to a very interesting podcast about the formation of the Moon from Astronomy Cast, Episode 17: Where Did the Moon Come From?

References:
http://www.armaghplanet.com/pdf/AstroTopics/Solar%20System/Deeptime.pdf
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html

October 13, 2008April 26, 2016 by Nancy Atkinson

Where Are the Images from Asteroid 2008 TC3?

Asteroid-2008-tc3. From Kite Power El Gouna web cam.

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One of the big news items last week was the prediction that an asteroid was on a collision course with Earth. Although it was a small space rock – estimates ranged from 1-5 meters (3-15 feet), scientists were excited because this was the first time an asteroid was discovered with an imminent known impact. Granted, we’d all probably feel a little safer if we knew about this asteroid, named 2008 TC3, days or months ahead of time instead of only 19 hours, but it’s a step in the right direction. Astronomers even predicted correctly the asteroid would come through the atmosphere over Africa. So with this prediction, many were hoping someone with a camera would be watching the skies of Sudan. But the flight path of the object was over a remote area and so far the only ground-based image that has surfaced is the one shown here, taken by a webcam from a beach in Egypt. (The words on the image indicate the objects on the beach — which were illuminated by the fairly distant explosion low on the horizon. ~~try to find the tiny bright spot in the center of the image — that’s the asteroid~~.) But we do have satellites constantly monitoring Earth’s atmosphere and a few of them captured images and data about 2008 TC3. However, it’s not known if any parts of the meteoroid hit the ground.

The explosion was recorded directly by the cameras of a European weather satellite called METEOSAT-8. This was taken in infrared, and the temperature scale on the right is in Kelvin.

Asteroid 2008 TC3 seen from space in infrared. Credit: EUMETSAT

Data from this satellite helped determine the asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere at a velocity of 12.8 kilometers per second. “As it entered the Earth’s atmosphere, it compressed the air in front of it. The compression heated the air, which in turn heated the object to create a spectacular fireball, releasing huge amounts of energy as it disintegrated and exploded in the atmosphere, dozens of kilometers above ground,” the Eumetsat website explains. Meteostat also took a visible image:

Also, according JPL’s Near Earth Object Program, an undisclosed U.S. system has monitored the airburst and yielded a precise time (02:45:45 UTC) and explosive energy equivalent (0.9 to 1.0 kT of TNT). The NEO office also said, “Tthe follow-up astrometric observations from professional and sophisticated amateur astronomers alike were rather extraordinary, with 570 observations from 26 observatories being reported between the time of discovery by the Catalina Sky Survey to just before the object entered Earth’s shadow (57 minutes prior to impact).” These observations revealed a tumbling, rotating object. The CAST astronomical observatory created a “movie” of their observations of the asteroid before it entered into Earth’s shadow.

CAST astronomical obervatory in Italy created this 2008tc3 animation.

Here’s links to a few other ground based observatories and their pre-impact sightings: from Eric Allen of Observatoire du Cegep de Trois-Rivieres, Champlain, Quabec; from Ernesto Guido et al. of Remanzacco Observatory, Italy; from S.Korotkiy and T.Kryachko of Kazan State University Astrotel observatory, Russia

Also, SpaceWeather.com reported the crew of an airplane saw a flash in the sky which may have been from this object. But beyond that, sadly, there’s not many images available related to this extraordinary event. If any surface, we’ll be sure to post them.

Sources: SpaceWeather.com, Cosmos4U, Planetary Society Blog, JPL NEO Program

October 13, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

‘Little’ Gamma Ray Bursts Really Do Exist

Artist impression of a GRB. Credits: ESA, illustration by ESA/ECF

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Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are powerful blasts of energy that flash across the Universe. For a brief time, they are the brightest objects in the gamma-ray sky. Astronomers estimate that about 1,400 GRBs per year occur but because no one knows when and where they are going to appear, only a part of them happen to be detected. ESA’s Integral gamma-ray observatory detects about 10 GRBs a year, and those are of the big burst variety. But the spacecraft has observed several low-luminosity gamma-ray bursts, confirming the existence of an entire population of weaker bursts that have hardly been noticed so far. These aren’t just bursts from far away, but just weak bursts that are relatively close by. And astronomers are beginning to think these weak or faint variety of GRBs might be the most common.

When studying Integral’s gamma-ray burst data, Prof. Lorraine Hanlon from the School of Physics, University College Dublin, Ireland, and her colleagues, realized that some of the faintest bursts have distinctive gamma-ray emissions, and also present faint afterglows in the lower-energy X-ray and visible wavelengths.

Since, in general, GRBs are colossal explosions of energy triggered by the collision of very massive and compact objects such as neutron stars or black holes, or by the explosion of incredibly powerful supernovae, or hypernovae, one may think that these bursts are perceived as faint just because they take place very far away from us, in the remote corners of the Universe.

However, Prof. Hanlon and colleagues noticed that these faint bursts, just at the sensitivity threshold of IBIS, seem to originate in our cosmic neighborhood, within the nearby clusters of galaxies.

Distribution of faint GRBs. Credits: S. Foley/UCD

“If the bursts we have studied are so ‘close’ in cosmological terms, it means that they are faint from the beginning,” says Hanlon. “From this we can deduce that the processes triggering them could be less energetic than those generating the more powerful bursts we are more used to observing.”

The study team suggests that the faint bursts may be generated by the collapse of a massive star that does not present the characteristics of a supernova, or by the merger of two white dwarfs (small and dense stars about the size of Earth), or by the merger of a white dwarf with a neutron star or a black hole.

“Past observations had already hinted the existence of faint GRBs, and thanks to Integral’s sensitivity we can now say that an entire population of them exist,” added Hanlon. “Actually, their rate may even be higher than that of the most luminous GRBs but, just because they are weaker, we may be only able to see those which are relatively close by.”

“More Integral observations in the coming years will definitively help us understand the phenomenon of faint GRBs, and to explore the nature of this newly observed population,” she concluded.

Source: ESA

October 13, 2008December 24, 2015 by Ian O'Neill

Space Tourist Richard Garriott Launched on Space Station Vacation…

The Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft (Expedition 18) launches Michael Fincke, Yury V. Lonchakov and Richard Garriott (AP Photo/NASA)

[/caption]…but the station’s toilet has broken down again.

For $30 million, you can get a ride into space for a 10-day trip on board the International Space Station. To Richard Garriott, this is money well-spent. He got to spend months training for the experience and he will use the adventure to carry out experiments, educational programs and to follow in his father’s footsteps. 25-years earlier, Owen Garriott flew on Space Shuttle Columbia, and before that he served on Skylab. Having successfully launched on board the Soyuz launch vehicle on Sunday, Garriott Jr. is keen to make space travel a family affair, and make some history along the way; he is the first second-generation American astronaut ever to be launched into space. It sounds like an exciting few days await the 47 year old computer video game entrepreneur…

But like any positive story, there’s a flip-side. The International Space Station, far from being The Ritz at the best of times, has been inflicted with a rather annoying inconvenience… the main toilet is out of order, requiring all on board to use the Soyuz en-suite. Although it is doubtful Garriott will get a room credit for the inconvenience, I’m sure the view of the Earth rotating below, the excitement of being involved in the biggest space project ever conceived, and the joy of zero-G will more than make up for the bathroom situation…

At 3:01 AM EDT (0701 GMT) Sunday morning, Richard Garriott blasted off from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft. Expedition 18 is being used to ferry two new crewmembers to the ISS. American astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov will keep Garriott company until tomorrow’s (Tuesday) Soyuz docking with the station where the trio will join the existing ISS crewmembers Commander Sergei Volkov, Flight Engineer Oleg Kononenko and astronaut Gregory E. Chamitoff. Volkov and Kononenko will accompany Garriott when he is scheduled to return back to Earth on October 23rd.

The cosmonaut, astronaut and space tourist wave to onlookers before boarding Soyuz (AP Photo)

“Today, my dream of following in my father’s footsteps to explore new frontiers is being realized,” Garriott said in a statement shortly after launch in reference to his father, 77 year-old retired NASA scientist-astronaut Owen Garriott. “It’s with honour and appreciation that I launch on my greatest adventure yet, and step into a role assumed by only five private individuals before me.”

Watching his son being launched into orbit, Garriott Sr. supports Richard in all his space-faring dreams. “He wants to charge full speed ahead,” said Owen, who flew to the pioneering Sklab space station in 1973 and flew on shuttle Columbia 10 years later.

Richard Garriott has been preparing for this moment for many months, and his excitement is evident in the post on his website before launch. “I feel well prepared for this flight, and have complete faith in my crew mates, our beautiful rocket, and the huge number of people it takes to launch our Soyuz and operate the ISS,” Garriott said, wanting his friends and family to be there with him. “I wish I could share this experience with each of you, in the way I have had the opportunity to experience it.”

U.S. astronaut Owen Garriott looks at the Russian Soyuz TMA-13 that will carry his son into orbit (AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)

Unfortunately, there will be some uncomfortable days aboard the ISS. On Thursday, the main toilet facility broke down in the Russian Zvezda service module, leaving the crew to use the Soyuz bathroom facilities. The main toilet has been the source of much hassle to the crew and flight controllers; back in June Oleg Kononenko had to carry out a lengthy in-orbit plumbing job to get the gas-liquid separator assembly pump replacement up and running. It would appear a similar problem has struck again, only three months later. Perhaps the crew should ask Kononenko to use his skills once more before the cosmonaut has to return back to Earth with Garriott on October 23rd…

For now, plumbing issues to one side, we look forward to seeing Richard Garriott, the sixth space station tourist, carry out his experiments and observations, relaying all his experiences to the rest of the world who cannot afford the $30 million ticket.

“I will return to our earth in a few weeks, with a vast array of photographs, and a lifetime of new stories,” Garriott wrote in his website message. “I look forward to sharing them with you!”

Sources: NASA, Space.com