Special Guest: Dr. Steve B. Howell, Project Scientist on Kepler to discuss the great new results coming form the K2 mission – the repurposed Kepler mission.
A shuttle will soar again from American soil before this decade is out, following NASA’s announcement today (Jan 14) that an unmanned version of the Dream Chaser spaceplane was among the trio of US awardees winning commercial contracts to ship essential cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) starting in 2019.
Special Guest:Elizabeth S. Sexton-Kennedy, who works at FermiLab as Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Offline Coordinator. CMS (at CERN/LHC) is a particle detector that is designed to see a wide range of particles and phenomena produced in high-energy proton collisions in the LHC.
Now that SpaceX has successfully and safely demonstrated the upright recovery of their Falcon 9 booster that flew to the edge of space and back on Dec. 21 – in a historic first – the intertwined questions of how did it fare and what lies ahead for the intact first stage stands front and center.
There are several space stories we’re anticipating for 2016 but one story might appear — to some — to belong in the realm of science fiction: sometime in the coming year Elon Musk will likely reveal his plans for colonizing Mars.
Early in 2015, Musk hinted that he would be publicly disclosing his strategies for the Mars Colonial Transport system sometime in late 2015, but then later said the announcement would come in 2016.
“The Mars transport system will be a completely new architecture,” Musk said during a Reddit AMA in January 2015, replying to a question about the development of MCT. “[I] am hoping to present that towards the end of this year. Good thing we didn’t do it sooner, as we have learned a huge amount from Falcon and Dragon.”
Big Rockets
As far as any details, Musk only said that he wants to be able to send 100 colonists to Mars at a time, and the “goal is 100 metric tons of useful payload to the surface of Mars. This obviously requires a very big spaceship and booster system.”
He has supposedly dubbed the rocket the BFR (for Big F’n Rocket) and the spaceship similarly as BFS.
Most online discussions describe the MCT as an interplanetary ferry, with the spaceship built on the ground and launched into orbit in one piece and perhaps refueled in low Earth orbit. The transporter could be powered by Raptor engines, which are cryogenic methane-fueled rocket engines rumored to be under development by SpaceX.
The Challenge of Landing Large Payloads on Mars
While the big rocket and spaceship may seem to be a big hurdle, an even larger challenge is how to land a payload of 100 metric tons with 100 colonists, as Musk proposes, on Mars surface.
As we’ve discussed previously, there is a “Supersonic Transition Problem” at Mars. Mars’ thin atmosphere does not provide an enough aerodynamics to land a large vehicle like we can on Earth, but it is thick enough that thrusters such as what was used by the Apollo landers can’t be used without encountering aerodynamic problems such as sheering and incredible stress on the vehicle.
With current landing technology, a large, heavy human-sized vehicle streaking through Mars’ thin, volatile atmosphere only has about 90 seconds to slow from Mach 5 to under Mach 1, change and re-orient itself from a being a spacecraft to a lander, deploy parachutes to slow down further, then use thrusters to translate to the landing site and gently touch down.
90 seconds is not enough time, and the airbags used for rovers like Spirit and Opportunity and even the Skycrane system used for the Curiosity rover can’t be scaled up enough to land the size of payloads needed for humans on Mars.
NASA has been addressing this problem to a small degree, and has tested out inflatable aeroshells that can provide enough aerodynamic drag to decelerate and deliver larger payloads. Called Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (HIAD), this is the best hope on the horizon for landing large payloads on Mars.
The Inflatable Reentry Vehicle Experiment (IRVE-3) was tested successfully in 2012. It was made of high tech fabric and inflated to create the shape and structure similar to a mushroom. When inflated, the IRVE-3 is about 10-ft (3 meter) in diameter, and is composed of a seven giant braided Kevlar rings stacked and lashed together – then covered by a thermal blanket made up of layers of heat resistant materials. These kinds of aeroshells can also generate lift, which would allow for additional slowing of the vehicle.
“NASA is currently developing and flight testing HIADs — a new class of relatively lightweight deployable aeroshells that could safely deliver more than 22 tons to the surface of Mars,” said Steve Gaddis, GCD manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center in a press release from NASA in September 2015.
NASA is expecting that a crewed spacecraft landing on Mars would weigh between 15 and 30 tons, and the space agency is looking for ideas through its Big Idea Challenge for how to create aeroshells big enough to do the job.
With current technology, landing the 100 metric tons that Musk envisions might be out of reach. But if there’s someone who could figure it out and get it done, Elon Musk just might be that person.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL – Buildup of the first of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner crew spaceships is ramping up at the company’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility (C3PF) – the new spacecraft manufacturing facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
Elon Musk’s dream and ultimate goal of establishing a permanent human presence on the Red Planet in the form of “A City on Mars” took a gigantic step forward with the game changing rocket landing and recovery technology vividly demonstrated by his firm’s Falcon 9 booster this past Monday, Dec. 21 – following a successful blastoff from the Florida space coast just minutes earlier on the first SpaceX launch since a catastrophic mid-air calamity six months ago.
“There and back again,” said SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk after the amazing successful ‘Return to Flight’ launch of the firms Falcon 9 rocket and history making vertical return landing at Cape Canaveral, Fla, on Monday evening, Dec. 21.
For the first time in history, the first stage of a rocket blazing to orbit with a payload, separated successfully from the upper stage at high speed, turned around and then flew back to nail a successful rocket assisted upright touchdown back on the ground.
The upgraded “full thrust” SpaceX Falcon 9 blasted off Monday night, Dec. 21 at 8:29 p.m. from Space Launch Complex 40 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. carrying a constellation of ORBCOMM OG2 communications satellites to low Earth orbit.
“The Falcon Has Landed!” gushed exuberant SpaceX officials during a live webcast.
Read below what some excited eyewitnesses told Universe Today.
Accompanied by multiple shocking loud sonic booms, the 156 foot tall Falcon 9 first stage separated about 3 minutes into flight and landed successfully on the ground about 10 minutes later at the SpaceX Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) complex at the Cape, some six miles south from pad 40.
The goal of SpaceX is to recover and eventually reuse the boosters in order to radically reduce the the cost of sending payloads and people to space, as often stated by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
My colleague and well known long time space photographer Julian Leek, remarked that the whole experience was fantastic!
“It was fantastic! You just would not believe the feeling,” space photographer Julian Leek told Universe Today. See his photos below.
“One of the best things I have seen since Apollo 11 liftoff!”
“It was one of the most spectacular space events I’ve seen,” said Jeff Seibert, another media photographer colleague.
“We felt like the rocket was coming down on top of us!”
See the dramatic landing in this SpaceX video taken from a nearby helicopter:
“Honestly it will be something I’ll always remember!” astronomy enthusiast Carol Higgins of the Mohawk Valley Astronomical Society of Utica NY, told Universe Today.
“Seeing that thing falling so fast toward Earth, then the engine fire to slow it down, then watching it falling closer to the Cape – my heart was pounding so fast and hard I wasn’t sure what was going to happen to me LOL!”
This morning, Dec. 22, media reps were taken on a boat trip along the Cape’s Atlantic Ocean coastline past Landing Zone 1 for a birdseye view of the Falcon 9 standing upright.
Two cranes from Beyel Bros Crane and Rigging were seen hoisting and moving the Falcon 9 first stage from the vertical to horizontal position at ‘Landing Zone 1’ according to Steven M Beyel.
The primary mission of the Falcon 9 launch was to carry a fleet of eleven small ORBCOMM OG2 commercial communications satellites to orbit on the second of two OG2 launches. All 11 satellites were successfully deployed at an altitude of about 400 mi (620 km) above Earth.
The next generation ORBCOMM OG2 satellites provide Machine – to – Machine (M2M) messaging and Automatic Identification System (AIS) services with capabilities far beyond the OG1 series.
Here’s an expanding galley of photos and video for the Dec 21, 2015 launch and landing at Cape Canaveral.
So check back later for more!
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing Earth and planetary science and human spaceflight news.