NASA in the new age...what's up for the future of American and outer space?  Next to last flight of Space Shuttle...cellphone pix story.




Giant Nasa rover launches to Mars
Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News
26 November 2011 Last updated at 11:01 ET

Nasa has launched the most capable machine ever built to land on Mars.  The one-tonne rover, tucked inside a capsule, left Florida on an Atlas 5 rocket at 10:02 local time (15:02 GMT).

Nicknamed Curiosity, the rover will take eight and a half months to cross the vast distance to its destination.  If it can land safely next August, the robot will then scour Martian soils and rocks for any signs that current or past environments on the planet could have supported microbial life.  The Atlas flight lasted almost three-quarters of an hour. By the time the encapsulated rover was ejected a path to the Red Planet, it was moving at 10km/s.

Nasa was expecting a first communication from the cruising spacecraft about an hour after lift-off. Engineers can then tell if all the systems came through the stresses of launch in good shape.  The rover - also known as the Mars Science laboratory (MSL) - is due to arrive at the Red Planet on the morning of 6 August 2012, GMT.

It is being aimed at a deep equatorial depression called Gale Crater, which contains a central mountain that rises some 5km above the plain below.

The crater was chosen as the landing site because satellite imagery has suggested that surface conditions at some point in time may have been benign enough to sustain micro-organisms. This included pictures of sediments at the base of the peak that were clearly laid down in the presence of abundant water.

MSL is equipped with 10 sophisticated instruments to study the rocks, soils and atmosphere in Gale Crater.

The $2.5bn (£1.6bn) mission is funded for an initial two Earth years of operations, but MSL-Curiosity has a plutonium battery and so should have ample power to keep rolling for more than a decade. It is likely the mechanisms on the rover will wear out long before its energy supply.


The odds are...pretty good...that someone, somewhere will find the satellite or a bit of it.

NASA Unveils Giant New Rocket Design
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
September 14, 2011

WASHINGTON (AP) — The design for NASA's newest behemoth of a rocket harkens back to the giant workhorse liquid rockets that propelled men to the moon. But this time the destinations will be much farther and the rocket even more powerful.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and several members of Congress joined Wednesday in unveiling the Obama administration's much-delayed general plans for its rocket design, called the Space Launch System. The multibillion-dollar program will carry astronauts in a capsule on top and start test launching from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in six years.

"This is a great day for NASA, I think, for NASA and the nation," Bolden said.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., called it "a monster rocket." He said the holdup in presenting the design was so all the details would be in order, before the program was presented and defended by the administration.

"Will it be tough times going forward? Of course it is," Nelson told journalists. "We are in an era in which we have to do more with less — all across the board — and the competition for the available dollars will be fierce. But what we have here now are the realistic costs that have been scrubbed by an outside, independent third party."

Nelson puts the cost of the program at about $18 billion over the next five years — or $3 billion a year. Some estimates, however, are closer to $35 billion.

The size, shape and heavier reliance on liquid fuel as opposed to solid rocket boosters is much closer to Apollo than the recently retired space shuttles, which were winged, reusable ships that sat on top of a giant liquid fuel tank, with twin solid rocket boosters providing most of the power. It's also a shift in emphasis from the moon-based, solid-rocket-oriented plans proposed by the George W. Bush administration.

"It's back to the future with a reliable liquid technology," said Stanford University professor Scott Hubbard, a former NASA senior manager who was on the board that investigated the 2003 space shuttle Columbia accident.

NASA figures it will be building and launching about one rocket a year for about 15 years or more in the 2020s and 2030s, according to senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the announcement was not yet made. The idea is to launch its first unmanned test flight in 2017 with the first crew flying in 2021 and astronauts heading to a nearby asteroid in 2025, the officials said. From there, NASA hopes to send the rocket and astronauts to Mars — at first just to circle, but then later landing on the Red Planet — in the 2030s.

At first the rockets will be able to carry into space 77 tons to 110 tons of payload, which would include the six-person Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle capsule and more. Eventually it will be able to carry 143 tons into space, maybe even 165 tons, the officials said. By comparison, the long-dormant Saturn V booster that sent men to the moon was able to lift 130 tons.

The plans dwarf the rumbling liftoff power of the space shuttle, which could haul just 27 tons. The biggest current unmanned rocket can carry about 25 tons.

The size plans elicited an amazed "good grief" from Hubbard, who said it would limit how often they could be built or launched. Unlike the reusable shuttle, these rockets are mostly one-and-done, with new ones built for every launch.

Some of the design elements, the deadline and the requirement for such a rocket were dictated by Congress.

While the recently retired space shuttle's main engines were fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, it was primarily powered into orbit by solid rockets. Solid rocket boosters were designed to be cheaper, but a booster flaw caused the fatal space shuttle Challenger accident in 1986. The biggest drawback was that solid rockets can't be stopped once they are lit; liquid ones can.

The new plan is to use a giant rocket powered by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Apollo, Gemini and Mercury flew into space on liquid rockets, and liquids fuel most of the world's unmanned commercial rockets. Russia's Soyuz rocket is liquid fueled too.

During its initial test flights the rocket will use five solid rocket boosters designed for the shuttle strapped on its outside and will have shuttle main engines powering it on the inside. But soon after that the solid rocket boosters will be replaced with new boosters that should have new technology and may be either liquid or solid, the officials said

NASA figures it will spend about $3 billion a year on the plan, officials said. The key financial part of this arrangement is that NASA hopes to save money by turning over the launching of astronauts to the International Space Station, which orbits the Earth, to private companies and just rent spaces for astronauts like a giant taxi service. NASA would then spend the money on leaving Earth's orbit and the Earth-moon system.

Hubbard worries that NASA has a history of spending way more than initially proposed — the space shuttle cost about twice what it was supposed to — and this new rocket system will drain money from other NASA missions.


Space weather could wreak havoc in gagdet-driven world
YAHOO
by Kerry Sheridan Kerry Sheridan
19 February 2011

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The Earth just dodged a solar bullet. But it won't be the last. Experts say a geomagnetic storm, sparked by a massive solar eruption similar to the one that flared toward the Earth on Tuesday, is bound to strike again, and the next one could wreak more havoc than the world has ever seen.

Modern society is increasingly vulnerable to space weather because of our dependence on satellite systems for synchronizing computers, navigational systems, telecommunications networks and other electronic devices.

A potent solar storm could disrupt these technologies, scorch satellites, crash stock markets and cause months-long power outages, experts said Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting.

The situation will only get more dire because the solar cycle is heading into a period of more intense activity in the coming 11 years.

"This is not a matter of if, it is simply a matter of when and how big," said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration administrator Jane Lubchenco.

"The last time we had a maximum in the solar cycle, about 10 years ago, the world was a very different place. Cell phones are now ubiquitous; they were certainly around (before) but we didn't rely on them for so many different things.

"Many things that we take for granted today are so much more prone to the process of space weather than was the case in the last solar maximum," she continued.

The experts admitted that currently, little that can be done to predict such a storm, much less shield the world's electrical grid by doing anything other than shutting off power to some of the vulnerable areas until the danger passes.

"Please don't panic," said Stephan Lechner, director of the European Commission Joint Research Center. "Overreaction will make the situation worse."

The root of the world's vulnerability in the modern age is due to global positioning systems, or GPS devices, that provide navigational help but also serve as time synchronizers for computer networks and electronic equipment.

"GPS helped and created a new dependency," said Lechner, noting that the technology's influence extends to aerospace and defense, digital broadcast, financial services and government agencies.

In Europe alone, there are 200 separate telecommunication operators and "nothing is standardized," he said.

"We are far from understanding all the implications here."

World governments are rushing to develop strategies for cooperation and information sharing ahead of the next anticipated storm, though forecasters admit they are not sure when that may occur.

"Actually, we cannot tell if there is going to be a big storm six months from now, but we can tell when conditions are ripe for a storm to take place," said the European Space Agency's Juha-Pekka Luntama.

On Tuesday at 0156 GMT, the strongest solar eruption since 2006 sent a torrent of charged plasma particles hurtling toward the Earth at a speed of 560 miles (900 kilometers) per second.

The force of the Class X flash, the most powerful of all solar events, lit up auroras and disrupted some radio communications, but the effects were largely confined to northern latitudes.

"Actually it turned out that we were well protected this time. The magnetic fields were aligned parallel so not much happened," said Luntama.

"In another case, things might have been different."


Voyager is approaching the edge of the bubble of charged particles the Sun has thrown out into space

13 December 2010 Last updated at 23:43 ET
Voyager near Solar System's edge
By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News, San Francisco

Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, has reached a new milestone in its quest to leave the Solar System.

Now 17.4bn km (10.8bn miles) from home, the veteran probe has detected a distinct change in the flow of particles that surround it.  These particles, which emanate from the Sun, are no longer travelling outwards but are moving sideways.  It means Voyager must be very close to making the jump to interstellar space - the space between the stars.

Edward Stone, the Voyager project scientist, lauded the explorer and the fascinating science it continues to return 33 years after launch.

"When Voyager was launched, the space age itself was only 20 years old, so there was no basis to know that spacecraft could last so long," he told BBC News.

"We had no idea how far we would have to travel to get outside the Solar System. We now know that in roughly five years, we should be outside for the first time."

Dr Stone was speaking here at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the largest gathering of Earth scientists in the world.

Particle bubble

Voyager 1 was launched on 5 September 1977, and its sister spacecraft, Voyager 2, on 20 August 1977.  The Nasa probes' initial goal was to survey the outer planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, a task completed in 1989.

They were then despatched towards deep space, in the general direction of the centre of our Milky Way Galaxy.  Sustained by their radioactive power packs, the probes' instruments continue to function well and return data to Earth, although the vast distance between them and Earth means a radio message now has a travel time of about 16 hours.  The newly reported observation comes from Voyager 1's Low-Energy Charged Particle Instrument, which has been monitoring the velocity of the solar wind.

This stream of charged particles forms a bubble around our Solar System known as the heliosphere. The wind travels at "supersonic" speed until it crosses a shockwave called the termination shock.  At this point, the wind then slows dramatically and heats up in a region termed the heliosheath. Voyager has determined the velocity of the wind at its location has now slowed to zero.

Racing onwards

"We have gotten to the point where the wind from the Sun, which until now has always had an outward motion, is no longer moving outward; it is only moving sideways so that it can end up going down the tail of the heliosphere, which is a comet-shaped-like object," said Dr Stone, who is based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

This phenomenon is a consequence of the wind pushing up against the matter coming from other stars. The boundary between the two is the "official" edge of the Solar System - the heliopause. Once Voyager crosses over, it will be in interstellar space.

First hints that Voyager had encountered something new came in June. Several months of further data were required to confirm the observation.

"When I realized that we were getting solid zeroes, I was amazed," said Rob Decker, a Voyager Low-Energy Charged Particle Instrument co-investigator from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

"Here was Voyager, a spacecraft that has been a workhorse for 33 years, showing us something completely new again."

Voyager is racing on towards the heliopause at 17km/s. Dr Stone expects the cross-over to occur within the next few years.


22 November 2010 Last updated at 06:04 ET, I-BBC
'Eavesdropper' satellite rides huge rocket from Florida
Delta-4 Heavy (Pat Corkery/United Launch Alliance) It is only the fourth time the giant rocket has flown

The US National Reconnaissance Office has launched what is reputed to be the largest satellite ever sent into space.

The spacecraft was put into orbit on a Delta-4 Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force station on Sunday.

The NRO gave no details about the payload but it is understood the satellite will be used to eavesdrop on enemy communications.

For comparison, the largest commercial satellite ever launched was the seven-tonne Terrestar-1 telecoms spacecraft.

It had an 18m antenna-reflector to relay phone and data traffic.

US websites have speculated that the mesh antenna on the new NROL-32 satellite would exceed this, and could even be substantially bigger than the 22m-diamater structure orbited last week on another commercial platform called Skyterra-1.

The Delta-4 Heavy rocket, the largest unmanned American launch vehicle, lifted off at 1758 local time (2258 GMT).

It is only the fourth time the giant booster has flown since its maiden outing in 2004.

The rocket features three core boosters strapped side by side. Each has a Rocketdyne-built RS-68 engine, which burns a tonne of propellant every second and produces 2,900 kiloNewtons (650,000lbs force) of thrust at lift-off.

The Apollo Moon rockets, by comparison, could produce more than three times the thrust of the Delta.

The Delta-4 heavy can put up to 13 tonnes in a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). It does not operate in the commercial market.


"This doesn't say anything about the question of whether or not life has existed on Mars”  Chris McKay Nasa's Ames Research Center
The soil of the Atacama desert shown above left is believed to resemble that of Mars;  Viking lander on Mars  (r).  The Vikings probed the Martian soil back in 1976 - we thought the Vikings discovered America.

Mars may not be lifeless, say scientists
By Katia Moskvitch Science reporter, BBC News
6 September 2010 Last updated at 08:18 ET

Carbon-rich organic molecules, which serve as the building blocks of life, may be present on Mars after all, say scientists - challenging a widely-held notion of the Red Planet as barren.

When Nasa's two Viking landers picked up and examined samples of Martian soil in 1976, scientists found no evidence for carbon-rich molecules or biology.  But after the Phoenix Mars Lander discovered the chlorine-containing chemical perchlorate in the planet's "arctic" region in 2008, scientists decided to re-visit the issue.

They travelled to the Atacama Desert in Chile, where conditions are believed to be similar to those on Mars.

After mixing the soil with perchlorate and heating it, they found that the gases produced were carbon dioxide and traces of chloromethane and dichloromethane - just like the gases released by the chemical reactions after the Viking landers heated the Martian soil more than three decades ago.

Surprising result

They also found that chemical reactions effectively destroyed all organic compounds in the soil.

"Our results suggest that not only organics, but also perchlorate, may have been present in the soil at both Viking landing sites," said the study's lead author, Rafael Navarro-González of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City.

But despite the excitement about the finding, the researchers warn it is too early to conclude that the Red Planet has ever had life.

"This doesn't say anything about the question of whether or not life has existed on Mars, but it could make a big difference in how we look for evidence to answer that question," said Chris McKay of Nasa's Ames Research Center, California.

He explained that organics can come from either biological and non-bio sources - many meteorites that have fallen on Earth have organic material.

Perchlorate, an ion of chlorine and oxygen, could have been present on Mars for billions of years and only manifest itself when heated, destroying all the organics in the soil.
The Atacama desert, Chile

When scientists originally examined the data from the Viking probes, they interpreted the chlorine-containing organic compounds as contaminants from cleaning fluids carried on the spacecraft.

It is not yet clear whether the organic molecules are indigenous to the Red Planet or have been brought by meteorites.

This will be one of the goals of upcoming missions to Mars. In 2011, Nasa is planning to kick off its Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, with the Curiosity rover designed to search for organic material on the planet.


Private Rocket Has Successful First Flight
By KENNETH CHANG, NYTIMES
June 4, 2010

The maiden flight of a privately-developed rocket that may eventually carry NASA astronauts to space took off Friday afternoon and reached orbit in what appeared to be an almost flawless flight.

The Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, SpaceX for short, launched the 154-foot, 735,000-pound Falcon 9 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, heading eastward over the Atlantic. The nine first-stage engines ignited at 2:45 p.m. Eastern time. After burning for three minutes, the first stage dropped off into the ocean while the second-stage engine burned about six minutes to place a capsule into orbit.

The launching was pushed back almost four hours after the countdown hit a few snags, including a delay to fix a glitch in the rocket’s self-destruct system and a last-second abort at 1:30 p.m. because of engine readings outside the acceptable range. SpaceX engineers reset the systems and resumed the countdown before the launching window closed at 3 p.m.

The success is a major boon to those supporting President Obama’s proposal to turn the launching of astronauts over to private companies. A spectacular failure would have provided abundant ammunition to opponents who call that approach too risky. Debate over the future of NASA’s human spaceflight program will continue through the summer as the Obama administration and Congress try to arrive at a compromise.

Within a few months, SpaceX plans to launch a second Falcon 9 to demonstrate to NASA its capabilities before it gets the go-ahead to take cargo and supplies to the International Space Station.

That flight will include a full version of the Dragon capsule, which can hold cargo and astronauts; Friday’s maiden flight held a mock-up of the capsule, aiming it for a circular orbit 155 miles from Earth. The engines appeared to all fire properly, but the second stage started a slow spin near the end of the ascent into orbit.

Flights carrying cargo to the space station are scheduled to begin next year. SpaceX has said it can build a version for astronauts in three years once it has a contract.

SPACE SHUTTLE PROGRAM WINDING DOWN AFTER 30 YEARS...

FROM NASA WEBSITE (NEXT TO LAST SHUTTLE MISSION):
No pun intended, this program has had it's ups and downs. One highlight was example of Dr. Sally Ride, at the time an inspiration to women.  Retired from NASA 1987.


Woman's plane photos of space shuttle go viral
YAHOO
By MATT SEDENSKY, Associated Press
Wed May 18, 2011 9:36 am ET

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – Groggy from a late night watching the Yankees, frigid from a chilled airplane cabin, Stefanie Gordon stirred to action after the pilot's announcement. Lifting her iPhone to the plane's window, she captured an otherworldly image that rocketed around the globe as fast as her subject: Space shuttle Endeavour soaring from a bank of clouds, its towering plume of white smoke lighting the azure sky.

She had never imagined the response her airborne image — capturing the last launch of Endeavour and the next-to-last space shuttle flight — would ignite. The images and video have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Twitter alone, landed on network newscasts and been published in newspapers worldwide.

In turn, they've made a photographic celebrity of sorts of the unemployed 33-year-old from Hoboken, N.J.

"It just blew up," she said of the attention.

Gordon caught an early Delta flight from New York to West Palm Beach on Monday to visit her parents and had a whole row to herself, never imagining the history she would record.

She stretched out and took a nap. Then she awoke shortly before the pilot announced the descent had begun and a sighting of the shuttle was possible. She had forgotten Endeavour was even taking off at 8:56 a.m. EDT, but readied her iPhone just in case.

Then, the pilot came on again, alerting passengers the shuttle was in sight.

"Everybody ran over to the east side of the plane," Gordon said Tuesday, "and all of a sudden there it was in the clouds."

All told, she shot 12 seconds of footage of the shuttle arcing on its simple stream of smoke into space. She also shot three still photographs.

The plane landed minutes later in West Palm Beach and while she was waiting at the luggage carousel, at 9:31 a.m., she began uploading to Twitter. As she waited for her father to pick her up, she realized her work was making a splash.

"My phone just started going crazy," she said.

Among those who reached out to Gordon was Anne Farrar, a photo editor at The Washington Post, who saw the images after they were posted by a friend on Facebook. She said she'd never seen anything quite like this view of a shuttle launch before.

"It was just a really imaginative way to bring it to our readers," Farrar said. "It's almost like an underwater view."

Endeavour is on a 16-day trip — the second to last space shuttle flight. Its main mission is to attach to the space station a $2 billion physics experiment.

The Associated Press contacted Gordon through Facebook and purchased the images. The AP often obtains photos from eye witnesses, called citizen journalists.

As for Gordon, she lost her job at as a meeting planner at a nonprofit organization last month. If the exposure from her pictures helps land her dream job of working in the sports field on special events and promotions, she said, it would all be worth it. Or if someone thinks her photographic eye qualifies her for a permanent job shooting video or photos, she wouldn't turn that down either.

For now, she's basking in the afterglow of her launch shots and hoping for some rest once the media frenzy passes.

"Laying by the pool would be really nice," she said.



Space shuttle Discovery, crew of 7 back on Earth
YAHOO
By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer
20 April 2010

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Shuttle Discovery and its astronauts returned safely to Earth on Tuesday after making a rare flyover of America's heartland to wrap up their 15-day, 6 million-mile journey to the International Space Station.

The touchdown was delayed by rain and fog that dissipated as the sun rose, allowing Mission Control to take advantage of the morning's second landing opportunity.

Discovery swooped through a hazy sky before landing on the Kennedy Space Center runway. NASA briefly considered bringing the shuttle in to the opposite end of the strip because of puffy clouds, but the glare from the sun was too great and flight controllers stuck to the original plan.

In the end, commander Alan Poindexter made what appeared to be a smooth touchdown, a day late because of rain.

"Welcome home," Mission Control said, radioing congratulations on the entire flight.

"It was a great mission. We enjoyed it," Poindexter said. "And we're glad that the International Space Station is stocked up again."

NASA had promised a spectacular show, weather permitting, for early risers in Helena, Mont., and all the way along Discovery's flight path through the Midwest and Southeast.

With the space shuttle program winding down, there weren't expected to be any more continental flyovers.

This was, in fact, Discovery's next-to-last flight. Only one more mission remains for NASA's oldest surviving shuttle. As soon as it's removed from the runway, it will be prepped for the final shuttle flight, scheduled for September.

Discovery zoomed over the North Pacific on its way home before crossing into North America over Vancouver, British Columbia. Then it headed toward the southeast, flying over northeastern Washington, Helena, Mont.; Wyoming; southwestern Nebraska; northeastern Colorado; southwestern Kansas; Oklahoma; Arkansas; Mississippi; Alabama; Georgia and finally Florida east of Gainesville.

NASA had anticipated the sonic booms might be heard as far north as Kansas. There were no immediate reports.

Before the shuttle began its descent, Mission Control described to the astronauts the route they would be taking to Cape Canaveral. "Sounds like a great ground track," Poindexter observed.

It was the first time since 2007 that a space shuttle descended over so much of the United States.

NASA typically prefers bringing a shuttle home from the southwest, up over the South Pacific, Central America and the Gulf of Mexico. That way, there's minimal flying over heavily populated areas. In 2003, space shuttle Columbia shattered over Texas during re-entry, but no one on the ground was injured by the falling wreckage.

NASA wanted to maximize the crew's work time in orbit, while minimizing fatigue. That resulted in this North American crossing.

Before leaving the space station Saturday, Poindexter and his crew dropped off tons of supplies and equipment. The main delivery was a tank full of ammonia coolant, which took three spacewalks to hook up.

A nitrogen pressure valve refused to open after the tank was installed, and for a day, NASA considered sending the shuttle astronauts out on a fourth spacewalk to fix the problem. But engineers concluded it was not an emergency and that the space station crew or future shuttle fliers could deal with it.

History, meanwhile, was made with the presence of four women in space: three on the shuttle and one at the station.

Discovery returned with a couple tons of trash and discarded space station equipment. Most of that was jammed into a cargo carrier that rocketed away aboard the shuttle back on April 5. The carrier will be re-outfitted and fly back up on Discovery in September, and be installed permanently at the orbiting outpost.

Only three shuttle missions remain for NASA before the fleet is retired this fall after nearly 30 years of operation. Atlantis will carry up a small Russian lab and other equipment next month.

The same bad weather that prevented Discovery from returning home Monday also stalled Atlantis' trip to the launch pad. The three-mile move from the hangar has been rescheduled for Tuesday night. Liftoff is targeted for May 14.


Space shuttle Atlantis, 7 astronauts back on Earth
DAY
By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer
Nov 27, 10:01 AM EST

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- Space shuttle Atlantis and its seven astronauts returned to Earth with a smooth touchdown Friday to end an 11-day flight that resupplied the International Space Station.  With bright sunlight glinting off it, the shuttle swooped through a clear sky and landed on the runway right on time. Mission Control said no one could remember such welcoming conditions; there were no clouds in sight for Atlantis' midmorning arrival, and the temperature was in the 50s.

"Couldn't have picked a clearer day," commander Charles Hobaugh said. Mission Control congratulated him on a "picture perfect" landing.

It was an especially sweet homecoming for two of the crew.  Astronaut Nicole Stott was away for three months, living at the space station. Fellow crew member Randolph Bresnik's baby daughter was born last weekend.

"Everybody, welcome back to Earth, especially you, Nicole," Mission Control radioed.

Hobaugh and his crew spent a week stockpiling the space station. They delivered big spare parts and performed three spacewalks to install equipment and carry out maintenance.  The pumps, gyroscopes and storage tanks should keep the outpost in business for another five to 10 years, long after Atlantis and the two other shuttles are retired.  Stott was feeling the full effects of gravity for the first time since she rocketed to the space station at the end of August. Her mission lasted 91 days.

She said all week that she couldn't wait to see her husband and 7-year-old son, who were at Kennedy Space Center for the landing. She also was looking forward to some pizza and icy cola.  Bresnik had even bigger plans: to hold his infant daughter for the first time.  Abigail Mae Bresnik was born Saturday night, right after her father took his first spacewalk. But he'll have to wait until Saturday to see her. Bresnik's wife, Rebecca, stayed home in Houston with Abigail and 3-year-old big brother Wyatt.

Atlantis - which brought back broken equipment from the space station's water-recycling system - logged 4.5 million miles and circled Earth 171 times.

This was Atlantis' next-to-last mission. Only five shuttle flights remain, all to the space station next year. Station construction will essentially end at that point, so NASA used the trip to send up as many hefty spare parts as possible. None of the other visiting spacecraft - from Russia, Japan and Europe - can carry so much in a single load.  Atlantis, which delivered nearly 15 tons of gear, left the space station 86 percent complete.

NASA's next shuttle flight is in February. Endeavour will deliver a full-fledged module to the space station, complete with a cupola for prime Earth gazing with a domed chamber that has seven windows.

The five remaining space station residents, meanwhile, may have to dodge a piece of space junk this weekend.

NASA said Friday that flight controllers were monitoring a large piece of an old Delta rocket that could pass within an uncomfortably close six miles of the outpost Saturday afternoon. The rocket was used to launch NASA's Stardust spacecraft in 1999 to gather comet dust samples.

A decision on whether to move the space station to avoid a possible hit was expected later Friday.
Shuttle Atlantis Lifts Off for 11-Day Mission
NYTIMES
By WILLIAM HARWOOD
November 17, 2009

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The shuttle Atlantis vaulted into orbit Monday and set off after the International Space Station, carrying 15 tons of spare parts and equipment as a hedge against failures after the shuttle fleet is retired next year.

“We’re looking for the long-term outfitting of station,” said the shuttle commander, Col. Charles O. Hobaugh of the Marines.

With Colonel Hobaugh and Capt. Barry E. Wilmore, a Navy pilot, at the controls, Atlantis’s twin solid-fuel boosters ignited with a blast of fire at 2:28 p.m., Eastern time, instantly pushing the winged spacecraft away from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.

Wheeling about to line up on a northeasterly trajectory, Atlantis accelerated through a partly cloudy sky, on course for a docking with the space station around noon Wednesday.

Joining Colonel Hobaugh and Captain Wilmore for the 11-day mission were Capt. Michael J. Foreman, a retired Navy officer; Lt. Col. Randolph J. Bresnik of the Marines; Leland D. Melvin, an expert in materials testing (and a former pro football draft pick); and Dr. Robert L. Satcher Jr., an orthopedic surgeon with a doctorate in chemical engineering.

It will be the first shuttle flight for Captain Wilmore, Dr. Satcher and Colonel Bresnik, whose wife is scheduled to deliver the couple’s second child, a girl, during the mission.

The primary goal of the 129th shuttle flight is to deliver critical spares to the space station that are too large to be launched on the European, Japanese and Russian cargo ships that will be used to support the outpost after the shuttle is retired next year.

Mounted on twin pallets in Atlantis’s payload bay are two spare gyroscopes, used to control the space station’s orientation in space, a high-pressure oxygen tank for the lab’s airlock, and a spare pump module, ammonia coolant and nitrogen that will be needed at some point by the station’s cooling system.

Other components include a spare mechanical hand-like appendage for the station’s robot arm, a power cable spool used by the arm’s mobile transporter, a solar array battery charge-discharge unit and a device designed to prevent electrical arcing that could pose a threat to spacewalkers.

The Atlantis astronauts also plan to bring a space station flight engineer, Nicole P. Stott back to Earth after three months in orbit.

This will be the last shuttle mission to carry a crew member to or from the space station. Until a shuttle replacement starts flying in five to seven years, American, European, Canadian and Japanese astronauts will ride Russian Soyuz capsules to the station, paying $50 million per seat.

If all goes well, the Atlantis astronauts will celebrate Thanksgiving in space and land back at the Kennedy Space Center on Nov. 27.



BY JUPITER, ANOTHER SHUTTLE SAFELY HOME (C), ANOTHER ABOUT TO TAKE OFF!
A large impact mark on Jupiter’s south polar region (l) captured on Monday by NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Mauna Kea, Hawaii. (R) Note arrow upper left:  biwwions and biwwions of kilometers away...

I-BBC
3 February 2012 Last updated at 04:35 ET
Hubble snaps stunning barred spiral galaxy image

The Hubble space telescope has captured an image of a "barred spiral" galaxy that could help us better understand our own Milky Way.

Most of the known spiral galaxies fall into this "barred" category - which are defined by the pronounced bar structure across their centres.

The presence of this structure may be an indication of a galaxy's age.

Two-thirds of nearby, younger galaxies have the bar, while only a fifth of older, more distant spirals have it.

The new picture also continues the Hubble space telescope's long heritage of striking astronomical images.

In the upper left of the image is a cluster showing recent star formation that is just visible to Hubble's cameras.

But it is a bright source in X-ray light; astronomers believe that this IXO-5 X-ray source is actually a "binary" system comprising a star and a black hole in mutual orbit.


Shuttle Back After 16-Day Mission
NYTIMES
By WILLIAM HARWOOD
August 1, 2009

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The shuttle Endeavour closed out a grueling 16-day space station assembly mission with a smooth Florida landing on Friday, bringing Japan’s first long-duration astronaut back to Earth after four and one-half months in orbit.

Approaching from the south after a high-speed computer-orchestrated descent, the mission commander, Mark Polansky, took over manual control 50,000 feet above the Florida spaceport, banked to line up on runway 15 and guided the 110-ton shuttle to a picture-perfect touchdown at 10:48 a.m. Eastern time.

“Welcome home. Congratulations on a superb mission from beginning to end,” astronaut Alan Poindexter radioed from mission control in Houston. “Very well done.”

“Well, thanks to you and the whole team,” Mr. Polansky replied. “That’s what it’s all about. We’re happy to be home.”

Mr. Polansky and his shuttle crewmates — Marine Col. Douglas Hurley, the pilot; the Canadian flight engineer, Julie Payette; Dr. David Wolf; Dr. Thomas Marshburn; and Navy Cmdr. Christopher Cassidy — left Army Col. Timothy Kopra behind on the space station and brought Koichi Wakata back to Earth in his place.

Representing the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Mr. Wakata was launched to the station aboard the shuttle Discovery last March. His stay at the lab complex was extended by a month when Endeavour’s launching was delayed from June 13 to July 15 by technical problems and bad weather.

He made the trip back to Earth resting on his back, in a recumbent seat on Endeavour’s lower deck, to ease the transition back to gravity.

Asked what he was looking forward to the most after reunions with family and friends, he listed fresh sushi, cold noodles and a visit to hot springs back home.

During a departure ceremony before Endeavour’s undocking from the station on Tuesday, the station commander — Gennady Padalka, a Russian cosmonaut — offered rare praise and “a special thanks to Koichi-san.” “He’s very dedicated and a very, very good flight engineer,” Mr. Padalka said. “As crew commander, I want to say we could rely on him in any situation.”

Among his scientific duties and routine maintenance chores, Mr. Wakata also tested bacteria-killing, water-absorbing Japanese underwear designed to be worn in space for weeks at a time.

“I wore them for about a month, and my station crew members never complained!” he said Thursday. “So I think the experiment went fine.”

Swapping out station crew members was just one of the goals of Endeavour’s mission.

Dr. Wolf, Dr. Marshburn and Commander Cassidy, a Navy SEAL, staged five spacewalks, attaching an experiment platform to Japan’s Kibo lab module, replacing aging solar array batteries and storing critical spare parts.

The astronauts also re-wired two of the station’s stabilizing gyroscopes, installed television cameras needed for the docking of a Japanese cargo ship in September, and deployed a jammed spare-parts mounting mechanism on the station’s main truss.

Only seven more shuttle flights remain before the fleet is retired next year, and NASA is launching as many spare parts to the station as possible to protect against future failures when smaller cargo ships may not be able to accommodate large components.

With Endeavour safely home, NASA will turn its attention to readying the shuttle Discovery for launch around Aug. 25 on a mission to deliver more supplies and equipment to the space station along with Colonel Kopra’s replacement, Nicole Stott.

Engineers are still assessing what caused an unusual amount of foam insulation to fall from the central section of Endeavour’s external tank during launch on July 15. Testing indicated that Discovery’s tank is in good shape, but additional checks were ordered on Thursday.

Assuming no problems are found, Discovery will be hauled to launch pad 39A on Monday.



Atlantis mission landing at top, (California desert); take-off in Florida; comment by Hubble "chief repairman" below...

Storms Force Space Shuttle to Land in California
NYTIMES
By DENNIS OVERBYE
May 25, 2009

As Odysseus learned, getting home can be the hardest part of any journey. Seven astronauts aboard the space shuttle Atlantis finally made it home Sunday after a voyage of more than 5 million miles.

After skirting bad weather at its home port in Florida for two and a half days, the Atlantis materialized out of a blue sky over the California desert like a stubby-winged white dove. Trailing its trademark twin sonic booms and roping at 260 feet per second, it touched the Earth at Edwards Air Force Base at 11:39 am.

The safe return brought a successful end a 13-day mission to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope one last time.

“It was a thrill from start to finish,” the pilot, Commander Scott Altman, said upon rolling to a stop on the runway. “We took a great ride. It took a whole team across the country to pull it off.”

NASA would have preferred to land Atlantis at its home port at Kennedy because it takes a week or more and $1.8 million to get the shuttle back to Florida, flying piggyback on a special 747, leaving workers a week behind in preparing it for its next flight in August. But thunderstorms were threatening the landing area on Friday and Saturday. Because the weather was fine in California and Atlantis had plenty of provisions, the mission controllers kept going around, hoping to get a break in Florida.

On Sunday, presaging the wild re-entry to come, the astronauts were awakened to the sound of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” After one more attempt to land in Florida, the flight director, Norm Knight, and his team decided to bring Atlantis down in California.

Atlantis fired its engines to drop out of orbit at 10:24 am. “Atlantis is a good ship,” Commander Altman reported back to Houston. The shuttle re-entered the atmosphere about 400,000 feet over the Pacific about 40 minutes later.

The Atlantis blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on May 11 and snatched the veteran telescope from the sky on May 13. In spacewalks on five succeeding days, the astronauts swapped out the telescope’s batteries, gyroscopes and an ailing data computer, installed two new scientific instruments and repaired two others that were not designed to be worked on in space.

Hubble was returned to its rightful place in the heavens last Tuesday. The telescope, which had two working instruments a month ago, now has five, counting an infrared camera that needs defrosting. NASA said that it should keep beaming down its iconic cosmic postcards and other astronomical measurements for another five to ten years.

In an interview in space a few days ago, Commander Altman said the mission “highlighted the ability of humans to work in space alongside machines.”

But that ability at least as science is concerned, it about to come to an end. The touchdown marked the beginning of the end — at least for now — of a dream that has motivated the American space program for the last four decades and helped sell the concept of the space shuttle: namely, that astronauts could service scientific instruments in space, riding up to orbit in a kind of space truck and launch satellites by just tossing them over the side, and then pluck them back in for repair and maintenance.

That dream started to die when Challenger exploded in 1986, killing seven astronauts, delaying the launch of Hubble for four years. NASA shifted most of its satellite launches to unmanned rockets. Hubble was launched, in 1990, the first of four so-called Great Observatories, but it wound up being the only one built to be serviceable by astronauts.

Hubble was visited five times by astronauts and is now, depending on which measurement is used, 30 to 70 times more powerful as a scientific instrument than it has ever been.

The whole observatory has cost $9.6 billion, according to NASA accounting, which includes the cost of six shuttle launches. Hubble will wind up in the ocean after its batteries and gyros eventually die.

The shuttles are scheduled to be retired next year, and NASA has been pressing ahead with a new fleet of spacecraft called Constellation, intended to return humans to the Moon. But President Obama has asked for a review of the program.

John Grunsfeld, an astronaut who has made eight spacewalks to work on Hubble over the years, said from the Atlantis that going to low Earth orbit, where the space telescope lives and where the space shuttle can reach, has been fun. But he added: “It’s time to leave low Earth orbit, go out and explore the cosmos. It’s a great solar system and it’s time for humans to start going out.”
Weather Sends Shuttle to California
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:37 a.m. ET
May 24, 2009

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) -- Space Shuttle Atlantis and its crew of seven streaked toward California on Sunday to wind up their exalted Hubble Space Telescope repair mission, after stormy weather in Florida prevented a return to NASA's home base.

Mission Control waited as long as possible, hoping the weather would improve at Florida's Kennedy Space Center before finally giving up and directing commander Scott Altman and his crew to the backup landing site in the Mojave Desert. Conditions there were ideal.

''We could not get comfortable with the KSC weather,'' Mission Control said, referring to Kennedy.

''Copy that, we're going to Edwards,'' Altman replied.

NASA passed up Sunday's first landing opportunity at Kennedy because of storm clouds offshore. The astronauts took an extra swing around the world as flight controllers kept watch over the increasingly overcast sky. When told of the pristine conditions awaiting him at Edwards Air Force Base, Altman said, ''A beautiful day in the desert.''

Minutes later, Altman and his co-pilot fired the braking rockets and set Atlantis on its hourlong descent.

After 13 days in orbit, many of them tending to Hubble, Altman and his crew were anxious to get back on the ground. They were supposed to return to Earth on Friday, but NASA opted to keep the astronauts circling the world in case the bad weather from a massive low-pressure system eased up.

NASA loses at least a week of work and close to $2 million in ferry costs by landing in California. And the astronauts will have to wait another day to be reunited with their families, who were in Florida.

Atlantis' astronauts left behind a refurbished Hubble that scientists say is better than ever and should keep churning out pictures of the universe for another five to 10 years. They carried out five spacewalks to give the 19-year-old observatory new science instruments, pointing devices and batteries, and fix a pair of broken instruments, something never before attempted. Stuck bolts and other difficulties made much of the work harder than expected.

The $1 billion overhaul was the last for Hubble and, thanks to the crew's valiant effort, won praise from President Barack Obama and members of Congress. But with space shuttles retiring next year, no more astronauts will visit the telescope, and NASA expects to steer it into the Pacific sometime in the early 2020s.

As a souvenir for the masses, the astronauts were bringing back the old wide-field camera they pulled out, so it can be put on display at the Smithsonian Institution. The replacement camera and other new instruments will enable Hubble to peer deeper into the universe, to within 500 million to 600 million years of creation.

It will take almost all summer for scientists to check out all the new telescope systems. NASA expects to release the first picture in early September.

This mission almost didn't happen. It was canceled in 2004, a year after the Columbia tragedy, because of the dangers of flying into a 350-mile-high orbit that did not offer any shelter in case Atlantis suffered damage from launch debris or space junk. The public protest was intense, and NASA reinstated the flight after developing a rescue plan and shuttle repair kits.

Shuttle Endeavour was on standby for a possible rescue mission until late last week, after inspections found Atlantis' thermal shielding to be solid for re-entry. Endeavour now will be prepped for a June flight to the international space station.
Shuttle Lifts Off for Final Trip to Telescope
NYTIMES
By DENNIS OVERBYE
May 12, 2009

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Seven astronauts blasted off for one last dance with the Hubble Space Telescope on Monday.

The space shuttle Atlantis, commanded by Scott D. Altman, bolted through the sky on a pillar of smoke and fire just after 2 p.m. Monday. Atlantis is carrying 22,000 pounds of custom-designed tools, replacement parts and new instruments to slice and dice starlight as well as the hearts of scientists and stargazers everywhere. It is rushing toward a Wednesday rendezvous with the telescope, which happened to be floating about 350 miles directly above Cape Canaveral at launching time.

If all goes well, in five spacewalks starting Thursday morning, the crew members will revamp and refresh the telescope, which has dazzled the public and the science community with its iconic cosmic postcards. Then they will say goodbye on behalf of humanity forever. Sometime in the middle of the next decade, the Hubble will run out of juice, and it will eventually be crashed into the ocean.

Besides Commander Altman, the crew includes Gregory C. Johnson, as pilot, and John M. Grunsfeld, Michael J. Massimino, Michael T. Good, Andrew J. Fuestel and K. Megan McArthur, as mission specialists.

The Atlantis astronauts will spend Tuesday examining the shuttle with cameras looking for any dings or nicks or holes caused by flying debris during the launching. The shuttle Columbia was doomed in 2003 because a hunk of insulating foam broke off the external fuel tank and damaged the tiles that protected the spacecraft from the searing heat of re-entering the atmosphere.

The astronauts carry a tool kit for fixing small holes or cracks in the fragile tiles. If there is something they cannot fix, they will hunker down and await the shuttle Endeavour, which is sitting on another launching pad, ready to blast off with a four-man crew and retrieve the Atlantis astronauts from danger.

“The sad thing is if we get to orbit and see something bad and get waved off and don’t get to fix Hubble,” Dr. Grunsfeld said. “That would be the saddest.”

Among other things, Endeavour would have to bring a spacesuit for Commander Altman, who takes an extra-large that is not stocked on Atlantis. The two most experienced spacewalkers on Atlantis, Dr. Grunsfeld and Dr. Massimino, would then escort their shipmates along a rope to the Endeavour in a two-day dance of swapping spacesuits that would include a sleepover for Dr. Grunsfeld on the Endeavour.

Because of changes to the design of the fuel tank that make it less likely to sustain major damage during launching, the bigger risk this time around comes from micrometeoroids and space junk, which is more prevalent at Hubble’s altitude and orbit than at the lower space station. There is about a 1 in 229 chance of a catastrophic collision, so the astronauts will take another close look at their craft at the end of the mission.

The flight comes as NASA is once again at a crossroads. The agency lacks a permanent administrator; Christopher Scolese has been acting administrator since Michael D. Griffin stepped down in January, and the White House is said to have been having trouble finding a candidate who can pass various forms of muster.

The agency has begun laying off workers as part of the decision to retire the shuttles next year. Last week, President Obama ordered a review of the agency’s long-heralded plan to return humans to the Moon and of the Constellation spacecraft that are to succeed the shuttle.

So if it is the beginning of the last act for the Hubble, the flight Monday also marks the beginning of the end for the space shuttle, whose greatest legacy might very well be the role it played in the repair and maintenance of the Hubble, what Commander Altman recently called “an incredible example of how humans and machines can work together.”

Dr. Grunsfeld, who has earned the sobriquet of “Hubble repairman” for his previous exploits in space with the telescope, said: “The only reason Hubble works is because we have a space shuttle. And of all things we do, I think Hubble is probably the best thing we use it for.”

As Mario Livio, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, put it, “It’s not just a telescope, it’s the people’s telescope.”

Atlantis is scheduled to rendezvous with the Hubble on Wednesday, latch it down in the shuttle cargo bay and take a good look at it with the robot arm and cameras. The engineers say they will not be surprised to find flapping insulation blankets or micrometeorite hits.

After all, it’s been seven years.


NASA hits the Moon with help of private industry
Northrop develops $79 million spacecraft to help government find lunar water
 YAHOO
By Christopher Hinton, MarketWatch
Oct. 9, 2009, 9:39 a.m. EDT

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- NASA on Friday morning slammed a missile into the Moon's surface in the hope the debris kicked up from the impact would reveal water vapor, an important resource for astronauts on any future missions to the lunar surface.

But the engineering behind the spacecraft that carried and launched the kinetic missile wasn't built by any government agency, but by Northrop Grumman Corp., as the nation's space agency looks more toward private business for its equipment and support services.

NASA
The LCROSS spacecraft built by Northrop Grumman.

In a news release from Northrop , the Los Angeles-based aerospace company said the LCROSS spacecraft, shorthand for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, was built on a tight budget over the course of 29 months for a total mission cost of just $79 million.

LCROSS uses a standard structure, off-the-shelf commercial hardware and flight-proven payload instruments that helped to keep the mission cost low, according to Northrop.

"The success of this mission is a tribute to the tremendous engineering skills and partnership between Northrop Grumman and NASA Ames Research Center," said Steve Hixson, vice president of the company's advanced concepts-space and directed energy systems business.

LCROSS launched a two-ton missile that hit the moon's surface at twice the speed of a bullet at about 7:30 a.m. Eastern time. NASA is now analyzing the debris from the impact.

In August, a group of astrophysicists, astronauts, former aerospace industry executives and Air Force generals said the U.S. should rely more on private industry for its equipment because of severe budget cuts in the agency.

Private business is more likely to get more value for each government dollar spent on future missions, as it can execute more cost-effective planning and adopt more rapidly new technology, according to the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee. 




S U P E R   C OL L I D E R    N E W S    H E A D Q U A R T E R S
Check out the news here, including video of BBC reporter bicycling around in it.



European atom smasher sets collision record
Washington Times
Alexander G. Higgins ASSOCIATED PRESS
Originally published 08:42 a.m., March 30, 2010, updated 08:58 a.m., March 30, 2010

GENEVA (AP) -- The world's largest atom smasher set a record for high-energy collisions on Tuesday by crashing proton beams into each other at three times more force than ever before.

In a milestone in the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider's ambitious bid to reveal details about theoretical particles and microforces, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, collided the beams and took measurements at a combined energy level of 7 trillion electron volts.

The collisions herald a new era for researchers working on the machine in a 17-mile tunnel below the Swiss-French border at Geneva.

"That's it! They've had a collision," said Oliver Buchmueller from Imperial College in London as people closely watched monitors.

In a control room, scientists erupted with applause when the first successful collisions were confirmed. Their colleagues from around the world were tuning in by remote links to witness the new record, which surpasses the 2.36 TeV CERN recorded last year.

Dubbed the world's largest scientific experiment, scientists hope the machine can approach on a tiny scale what happened in the first split seconds after the Big Bang, which they theorize was the creation of the universe some 14 billion years ago.

The extra energy in Geneva is expected to reveal even more about the unanswered questions of particle physics, such as the existence of antimatter and the search for the Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle that scientists theorize gives mass to other particles and thus to other objects and creatures in the universe.

Tuesday's initial attempts at collisions were unsuccessful because problems developed with the beams, said scientists working on the massive machine. That meant that the protons had to be "dumped" from the collider and new beams had to be injected.

The atmosphere at CERN was tense, considering the collider's launch with great fanfare on Sept. 10, 2008. Nine days later, the project was sidetracked when a badly soldered electrical splice overheated, causing extensive damage to the massive magnets and other parts of the collider some 300 feet below ground.

It cost $40 million to repair and improve the machine. Since its restart in November 2009, the collider has performed almost flawlessly and given scientists valuable data. It quickly eclipsed the next largest accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago.

Two beams of protons began 10 days ago to speed at high energy in opposite directions around the tunnel, the coldest place in the universe, at a couple of degrees above absolute zero. CERN used powerful superconducting magnets to force the two beams to cross, creating collisions and showers of particles.

"Experiments are collecting their first physics data -- historic moment here!" a scientist tweeted on CERN's official Twitter account.

"Nature does it all the time with cosmic rays (and with higher energy) but this is the first time this is done in Laboratory!" said another tweet.

When collisions become routine, the beams will be packed with hundreds of billions of protons, but the particles are so tiny that few will collide at each crossing.

The experiments will come over the objections of some people who fear they could eventually imperil Earth by creating micro black holes -- subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

CERN and many scientists dismiss any threat to Earth or people on it, saying that any such holes would be so weak that they would vanish almost instantly without causing any damage.

Bivek Sharma, a professor at the University of California at San Diego, said the images of the first crashed proton beams were beautiful.

"It's taken us 25 years to build," he said. "This is what it's for. Finally the baby is delivered. Now it has to grow."

AP writer Frank Jordans contributed to this report.
Atom smasher takes a break
DAY
Dec 18, 9:24 AM EST

GENEVA (AP) -- Operators of the world's largest atom smasher say they have shut down the machine until February to prepare for an expected groundbreaking research program.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research said Friday the break is necessary to increase the levels of the energy used to smash protons into each other.

The new collisions are expected to shatter the subatomic particles into even smaller fragments that could reveal secrets of matter and the universe.

Among the goals are studying suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and ultimately what happened in the first split seconds after the creation of the universe.

Many scientists theorize the universe occurred as a massive explosion known as the Big Bang 14 billion years ago.

© 2009 The Associated Press.
Collider Sets Record, and Europe Takes U.S.’s Lead
NYTIMES
By DENNIS OVERBYE
December 10, 2009

It’s all very fine to worry about the value of the dollar. But what about the value of the proton?

Late Tuesday night, tiny spitfires of energy blossoming under the countryside outside Geneva heralded the arrival of a new European particle collider as the biggest, baddest physics machine in the world.

Scientists said that the new Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile loop underneath the Swiss-French border, had accelerated protons to energies of 1.2 trillion electron volts apiece and then crashed them together, eclipsing a record for collisions held by an American machine, the Tevatron, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.

Officials at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, which built the collider, said that the collisions lasted just a few minutes as a byproduct of testing, and that the Champagne was still on ice in Geneva. But in conjunction with other recent successes, those tiny fireballs displaced American physicists as the leaders in the art of banging subatomic particles together to see what nature is made of.

The collider first boosted protons to the new energy record of 1.2 trillion electron volts on Nov. 29, and CERN hopes to be having sustained collisions at that energy within a week. In the future, as the collider ramps up to 7 trillion electron volts, the dateline for physics discoveries will be Geneva, Switzerland, not Batavia, Ill., the home of Fermilab.

That future, physicists say, includes not just the sheen of announcing exotic particles and strange dimensions, but the ancillary rewards of increased technological competence and innovation that spring from the pursuit of esoteric knowledge. The World Wide Web, lest anyone forget, was invented by particle physicists at CERN. Detectors developed for physics experiments are now used in medical devices like PET scans, and it was the industrial scale production of superconducting magnets for the Tevatron that made commercial magnetic resonance imagers possible, said Young-Kee Kim, deputy director of Fermilab.

“Particle accelerators and detectors (initially with the bold and innovative ideas and technologies) have touched our lives in many ways and I have no doubt that this will continue,” she wrote in an e-mail message.

Those spinoffs now will invigorate the careers and labs of Europe, not the United States, pointed out Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas in Austin, who won the Nobel Prize for work that will be tested in the new collider. Americans will work at CERN, but not as leaders, he said in an e-mail interview.

“There is also a depressing symbolism,” he added, “in the fact that the hottest new results in fundamental physics will for decades not be coming from our country.”

This moment has been inevitable ever since the fall of 1993, when Congress canceled a behemoth project in Texas known as the Superconducting SuperCollider, after estimated costs rose to $11 billion. That accelerator, designed at 54 miles and 20 trillion electron volts, would have been working by now and would have had an even greater reach for new physics than Europe’s machine. American physicists have reacted to the L.H.C. with a mixture of excitement, good sportsmanship and wistfulness.

The United States has not exactly been shut out of the action at the new collider, as Dr. Kim pointed out. It contributed $531 million to the project, and about 1,700 of the 10,000 scientists who work on the giant particle detectors in the collider tunnel are Americans, the largest of any national group (Italians are next).

Thanks in part to delays with the CERN collider and other problems that will keep it from performing up to snuff for the next couple of years, she said, Fermilab’s Tevatron is still in the lead in the hunt for one of the collider’s main quarries, the Higgs boson, a particle that is thought to imbue other particles with mass.

In the meantime, Fermilab is investing $53 million from the federal stimulus package in a “Project X” to make more intense proton beams, which in turn could be used to make beams of the strange ghostlike particles called neutrinos. The lab is also going into cosmology. Other physics labs, like Brookhaven on Long Island and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, or SLAC, have converted their accelerators into powerful X-ray sources, which can be used to plumb the properties and structures of molecules in work that led to this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry.

For CERN, the Fermilab-topping collisions will be only the end of the beginning of a 15-year, $10 billion quest to recreate laws and particles that prevailed just after the Big Bang, when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old.

Particle colliders get their magic from Einstein’s equation of mass and energy. The more energy that these machines can pack into their little fireballs, in effect the farther back in time they can go, and the smaller and smaller things they can see.

The first modern accelerator, the cyclotron built by Ernest Lawrence at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1932, was a foot in diameter and boosted protons to just 1.25 million electron volts.

CERN, a 20-nation consortium, grew from the ashes of World War II and has provided a template for other pan-European organizations like the European Space Agency and the European Southern Observatory. With a budget and dues set by treaty, CERN enjoys a long-term stability that is the envy of American labs. For decades, CERN and Fermilab leapfrogged each other building bigger and bigger machines, but the game ended when the supercollider was canceled.

Despite the lack of competition, CERN’s collider has not had a bump-free ride. In 2007 the housing around one magnet exploded during a pressure test, necessitating the removal and redesign of nine 80-foot magnet assemblies. In September 2008, the junction between two magnets vaporized, shutting down the project for a year.

Testing revealed that the collider is riddled with thousands of defective electrical joints and dozens of underperforming magnets that will keep it from reaching its full potential until an overhaul scheduled for 2011. When it starts doing real physics after the holidays, the collider will be running at half power.

The collider was designed to investigate what happens at energies and temperatures so high that the reigning theory of particle physics called the Standard Model breaks down. In effect, the new machine’s job is to “break” the Standard Model and give physicists a glimpse of something deeper and more profound.

The future of particle physics depends on whether the Large Hadron Collider finds anything.

If it yields nothing, in the words of CERN physicist, John Ellis, it would mean that theorists have been talking rubbish for the last 35 years. Actually, he used a stronger word.

CERN: Big Bang machines sets power record
YAHOO
By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS, Associated Press Writer
November 30, 2009

GENEVA – The world's largest atom smasher broke the record for proton acceleration Monday, sending beams of the particles at 1.18 trillion electron volts around the massive machine.

The Large Hadron Collider eclipsed the previous high of 0.98 1 TeV held by Fermilab, outside Chicago, since 2001, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN, said.  The latest success, which came early in the morning, is part of the preparation to reach even higher levels of energy for significant experiments next year on the make-up of matter and the universe.  It comes on top of a rapid series of operating advances for the $10 billion machine, which underwent extensive repairs and improvements after it collapsed during the opening phase last year.

CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer said early advances in the machine located in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel under the Swiss-French border have been "fantastic."

"However, we are continuing to take it step by step, and there is still a lot to do before we start physics in 2010," Heuer said in a statement. "I'm keeping my champagne on ice until then."

The organization hopes the next major step will be to collide the proton beams at about 1.2 TeV before Christmas for an initial look at the tiny particles and what forces might be created.  Ultimately, scientists want to create conditions like those 1 trillionth to 2 trillionths of a second after the Big Bang — which scientists think marked the creation of the universe billions of years ago.  Physicists also hope the collider will help them see and understand other suspected phenomena, such as dark matter, antimatter and supersymmetry.

The level reached Monday isn't significantly higher than what Fermilab has been doing, and real advances are not expected until the LHC raises each beam to 3.5 TeV during the first half of next year.  CERN said one of the two small beams of protons first broke the energy level Sunday evening when it was accelerated from the initial operating energy of 450 billion electron volts late Sunday evening.

"Three hours later both LHC beams were successfully accelerated to 1.18 TeV," shortly after midnight, the organization said.

Beams were colliding last week at low energy, to make sure the machine was working properly. But they have yet to be smashed together at higher intensity.  Steve Myers, CERN's research and technology director, said he had been at CERN when it switched on the last major particle accelerator, the Large Electron-Positron collider that operated from 1989-2000.

"I thought that was a great machine to operate, but this is something else," he said. "What took us days or weeks with LEP, we're doing in hours with the LHC. So far, it all augurs well for a great research program."

CERN said operators will continue preparing the 2,000 superconducting magnets and other parts so that the energy can be increased safely.

Attempts to make new discoveries at the LHC are scheduled for the first quarter of 2010, at a collision energy of 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam).

The electron volt is an extremely small measure used in particle physics. One TeV is about the energy of the motion of a flying mosquito, but it becomes signficant in the submicroscopic collisions of the collider.

The energy is concentrated in the hairline beams of particles that whiz around the accelerator at near the speed of light. Although apparently small to the outsider, CERN uses a great amount of electricity and powerful equipment to raise the energy of the beam.

The speed can increase only slightly when the accelerator steps up the power, but that raises the force with which the protons will collide, revealing more insight into what makes them up.  It may take several years before the LHC can make the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson, the particle or field that theoretically gives mass to other particles. That is widely expected to deserve the Nobel Prize for physics.

The LHC operates at nearly absolute zero temperature, colder than outer space, which allows the superconducting magnets to guide the protons most efficiently. Physicists have used smaller, room-temperature colliders for decades to study the atom. They once thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of the atom's nucleus, but the colliders showed that they are made of quarks and gluons and that there are other forces and particles.

More than 8,000 physicists from labs around the world also have work planned for the Large Hadron Collider. The organization is run by its 20 European member nations, with support from other countries, including observers from Japan, India, Russia and the United States, which have made big contributions.
Quick restart of Big Bang machine stuns scientists
YAHOO
By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS, Associated Press Writer
Nov. 21, 2009

GENEVA – Scientists moved Saturday to prepare the world's largest atom smasher for exploring the depths of matter after successfully restarting the $10 billion machine following more than a year of repairs.

The nuclear physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider were surprised that they could so quickly get beams of protons whizzing near the speed of light during the restart late Friday, said James Gillies, spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The machine was heavily damaged by a simple electrical fault in September last year.

Some scientists had gone home early Friday and had to be called back as the project jumped ahead, Gillies said.

At a meeting early Saturday "they basically had to tear up the first few pages of their PowerPoint presentation which had outlined the procedures that they were planning to follow," he said. "That was all wrapped up by midnight. They are going through the paces really very fast."

The European Organization for Nuclear Research has taken the restart of the collider step by step to avoid further setbacks as it moves toward new scientific experiments — probably starting in January — regarding the makeup of matter and the universe.

CERN, as it is known, had hoped by 7 a.m. (0600 GMT) Saturday to get the beams to travel the 27-kilometer (17-mile) circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border, but things went so well Friday evening that they had achieved the operation seven hours earlier.

Praise from scientists around the world was quick. "First beam through the Atlas!" whooped an Internet message from Adam Yurkewicz, an American scientist working on the massive Atlas detector on the machine.

"I congratulate the scientists and engineers that have worked to get the LHC back up and running," said Dennis Kovar of the U.S. Department of Energy, which participates in the project.

"The LHC is a machine unprecedented in size, in complexity, and in the scope of the international collaboration that has built it over the last 15 years," said Kovar.

The next step, possibly later Saturday, was to decide whether to collide beams in the detectors to get necessary measuring data or to try using the machine to accelerate the protons to higher energy than any machine has ever reached, said Gillies.

In the meantime CERN is using about 2,000 superconducting magnets — some of them 15 meters (50 feet) long — to improve control of the beams of billions of protons so they will remain tightly bunched and stay clear of sensitive equipment.

Gillies said the scientists are being very conservative.

"They're leaving a lot of time so that the guys who are operating the machine are under no pressure whatsoever to tick off the boxes and move forward," he said.

Officials said Friday evening's progress was an important step on the road toward scientific discoveries at the LHC, which are expected in 2010.

"We've still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we're well on the way," CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said.

With great fanfare, CERN circulated its first beams Sept. 10, 2008. But the machine was sidetracked nine days later when a badly soldered electrical splice overheated and set off a chain of damage to the magnets and other parts of the collider.

Steve Myers, CERN's director for accelerators, said the improvements since then have made the LHC a far better understood machine than it was a year ago.

The LHC is expected soon to be running with more energy the world's current most powerful accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago. It is supposed to keep ramping up to seven times the energy of Fermilab in coming years.

This will allow the collisions between protons to give insights into dark matter and what gives mass to other particles, and to show what matter was in the microseconds of rapid cooling after the Big Bang that many scientists theorize marked the creation of the universe billions of years ago.

When the machine is fully operational, the magnets will control the beams of protons and send them in opposite directions through two parallel tubes the size of fire hoses. In rooms as large as cathedrals 300 feet (100 meters) below the ground the magnets will force them into huge detectors to record what happens.

The LHC operates at nearly absolute zero temperature, colder than outer space, which allows the superconducting magnets to guide the protons most efficiently.

Physicists have used smaller, room-temperature colliders for decades to study the atom. They once thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of the atom's nucleus, but the colliders showed that they are made of quarks and gluons and that there are other forces and particles. And scientists still have other questions about antimatter, dark matter and supersymmetry they want to answer with CERN's new collider.

The Superconducting Super Collider being built in Texas would have been bigger than the LHC, but in 1993 the U.S. Congress canceled it after costs soared and questions were raised about its scientific value

Gillies said the LHC should be ramped up to 3.5 trillion electron volts some time next year, which will be 3 1/2 times as powerful as Fermilab. The two laboratories are friendly rivals, working on equipment and sharing scientists.

But each would be delighted to make the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson, the particle or field that theoretically gives mass to other particles. That is widely expected to deserve the Nobel Prize for physics.

More than 8,000 physicists from other labs around the world also have work planned for the LHC. The organization is run by its 20 European member nations, with support from other countries, including observers Japan, India, Russia and the U.S. that have made big contributions.

Great photo - on the I-BBC, a 14-second video didn't capture the moment as well as this!

Proton Beams Are on Track at Collider
NYTIMES
By DENNIS OVERBYE
November 21, 2009

Physicists returned to their future on Friday. About 10 p.m. outside Geneva, scientists at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, succeeded in sending beams of protons clockwise around the 17-mile underground magnetic racetrack known as the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment.

For physicists, the event was a milestone on the way back from disaster and the resumption of a 15-year, $9 billion quest to investigate laws and forces that prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old.

The collider was designed to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts apiece and smash them together in tiny fireballs in an effort to replicate and study the conditions of the Big Bang.

The first time protons circled the collider, on Sept. 10, 2008, the event was celebrated with Champagne and midnight pajama parties around the world. But the festivities were cut short a few days later when an electrical connection between a pair of the collider’s giant superconducting electromagnets vaporized.

Subsequent work revealed that the machine was riddled with thousands of connections unable to handle the high currents required to run the collider at its intended energy.

Physicists and engineers have spent the past year testing and making repairs. While they have not replaced all the faulty connections, they have patched things up enough to allow the collider to run at less than full speed.

Calling the past year’s work a “Herculean effort,” CERN’s director for accelerators, Steve Myers, said the engineers had learned from painful experience and understood the collider far better than they had before.

CERN’s director, Rolf Heuer, said in a statement, “It’s great to see beam circulating in the LHC again,” but he and others cautioned that there was a long way to go before the collider started producing the physics it was designed for.

When the collider begins to do real physics next year, it will run at half its original design energy, with protons of 3.5 trillion electron volts. The energy will be increased gradually during the year, but it could be years, physicists say, before the machine reaches its full potential.

Thousands of the troublesome junctions will have to be rebuilt during a yearlong shutdown in 2011, and engineers have to figure out why several dozen of the superconducting magnets seem to have lost their ability to operate at high intensities.

The delay has given new life to the collider’s main rival, the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.

If all goes well, CERN says, the protons will start colliding at low energies in about a week.

Those first collisions will occur at the so-called injection energy of 450 billion electron volts. The machine will then quickly step up to 1.1 trillion electron volts, which is just above the energy of the Tevatron.

CERN is hoping to achieve that landmark as a symbolic Christmas present before a short holiday shutdown.

Page last updated at 16:14 GMT, Tuesday, 17 November 2009
LHC nears restart after repairs
Atlas (Cern/C. Marcelloni)
The giant Atlas detector will search for hints of the elusive Higgs boson particle

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could restart as early as this weekend after more than a year of repairs.

Officials have avoided giving an exact date for sending beams of protons around the 27km (17 mile) circular tunnel which houses the collider.

The LHC was first switched on in 2008, but had to be shut down when a faulty electrical connection caused one tonne of helium to leak into the tunnel.

The vast machine is located 100m below the French-Swiss border.

Operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), the LHC will recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang.

Two beams of protons will be fired around the tunnel. These beams will travel in opposite directions around the main "ring" at close to the speed of light.

At allotted points around the tunnel, the proton beams will cross paths, smashing into one another with enormous energy.

Scientists hope to see new particles in the debris of these collisions, revealing fundamental new insights into the nature of the cosmos.

But the first beams to circulate around the collider will be injected at a low energy of about 450 billion electron volts.

For the restart, engineers are determined to take things one step at a time, and officials are not setting hard and fast deadlines.

Once the collider is circulating two beams in opposite directions, engineers will attempt low-intensity collisions.

This will provide scientists with data they can use for calibration purposes.

After this, the beams' energy will be increased so that the first high-energy collisions can take place.

These will mark the real beginning of the LHC's research programme.



Giant Particle Collider Struggles
By DENNIS OVERBYE
August 4, 2009

The biggest, most expensive physics machine in the world is riddled with thousands of bad electrical connections.

Many of the magnets meant to whiz high-energy subatomic particles around a 17-mile underground racetrack have mysteriously lost their ability to operate at high energies.

Some physicists are deserting the European project, at least temporarily, to work at a smaller, rival machine across the ocean.

After 15 years and $9 billion, and a showy “switch-on” ceremony last September, the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator outside Geneva, has to yet collide any particles at all.

But soon?

This week, scientists and engineers at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, are to announce how and when their machine will start running this winter.

That will be a Champagne moment. But scientists say it could be years, if ever, before the collider runs at full strength, stretching out the time it should take to achieve the collider’s main goals, like producing a particle known as the Higgs boson thought to be responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass, or identifying the dark matter that astronomers say makes up 25 percent of the cosmos.

The energy shortfall could also limit the collider’s ability to test more exotic ideas, like the existence of extra dimensions beyond the three of space and one of time that characterize life.

“The fact is, it’s likely to take a while to get the results we really want,” said Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist who is an architect of the extra-dimension theory.

The collider was built to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts and smash them together in search of particles and forces that reigned earlier than the first trillionth of a second of time, but the machine could run as low as four trillion electron volts for its first year. Upgrades would come a year or two later.

Physicists on both sides of the Atlantic say they are confident that the European machine will produce groundbreaking science — eventually — and quickly catch up to an American rival, even at the lower energy. All big accelerators have gone through painful beginnings.

“These are baby problems,” said Peter Limon, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., who helped build the collider.

But some physicists admit to being impatient. “I’ve waited 15 years,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a leading particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. “I want it to get up running. We can’t tolerate another disaster. It has to run smoothly from now.”

The delays are hardest on younger scientists, who may need data to complete a thesis or work toward tenure. Slowing a recent physics brain drain from the United States to Europe, some have gone to work at Fermilab, where the rival Tevatron accelerator has been smashing together protons and antiprotons for the last decade.

Colliders get their oomph from Einstein’s equivalence of mass and energy, both expressed in the currency of electron volts. The CERN collider was designed to investigate what happens at energies and distances where the reigning theory, known as the Standard Model, breaks down and gives nonsense answers.

The collider’s own prodigious energies are in some way its worst enemy. At full strength, the energy stored in its superconducting magnets would equal that of an Airbus A380 flying at 450 miles an hour, and the proton beam itself could pierce 100 feet of solid copper.

In order to carry enough current, the collider’s magnets are cooled by liquid helium to a temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero, at which point the niobium-titanium cables in them lose all electrical resistance and become superconducting.

Any perturbation, however, such as a bad soldering job on a splice, can cause resistance and heat the cable and cause it to lose its superconductivity in what physicists call a “quench.” Which is what happened on Sept. 19, when the junction between two magnets vaporized in a shower of sparks, soot and liberated helium.

Technicians have spent most of the last year cleaning up and inspecting thousands of splices in the collider. About 5,000 will have to be redone, Steve Myers, head of CERN’s accelerator division, said in an interview.

The exploding splices have diverted engineers’ attention from the mystery of the underperforming magnets. Before the superconducting magnets are installed, engineers “train” each one by ramping up its electrical current until the magnet fails, or “quenches.” Thus the magnet gradually grows comfortable with higher and higher current.

All of the magnets for the collider were trained to an energy above seven trillion electron volts before being installed, Dr. Myers said, but when engineers tried to take one of the rings’ eight sectors to a higher energy last year, some magnets unexpectedly failed.

In an e-mail exchange, Lucio Rossi, head of magnets for CERN, said that 49 magnets had lost their training in the sectors tested and that it was impossible to estimate how many in the entire collider had gone bad. He said the magnets in question had all met specifications and that the problem might stem from having sat outside for a year before they could be installed.

Retraining magnets is costly and time consuming, experts say, and it might not be worth the wait to get all the way to the original target energy. “It looks like we can get to 6.5 relatively easily,” Dr. Myers said, but seven trillion electron volts would require “a lot of training.”

Many physicists say they would be perfectly happy if the collider never got above five trillion electron volts. If that were the case, said Joe Lykken, a Fermilab theorist who is on one of the CERN collider teams, “It’s not the end of the world. I am not pessimistic at all.”

For the immediate future, however, physicists are not even going to get that. Dr. Myers said he thought the splices as they are could handle 4 trillion electron volts.

“We could be doing physics at the end of November,” he said in July, before new vacuum leaks pushed the schedule back a few additional weeks.

“It’s not the design energy of the machine, but it’s 4 times higher than the Tevatron,” he said.

Pauline Gagnon, an Indiana University physicist who works at CERN, said she would happily take that energy level. “The public pays for this,” she said in an e-mail message, “and we need to start delivering.”


New Earth-Size Blot on Jupiter, Found By an Amateur
NYTIMES
By Robert Mackey, NASA/JPL, via Associated Press
July 21, 2009, 8:59 am

NASA has confirmed the discovery of a new hole the size of the Earth in Jupiter’s atmosphere, apparently showing that the planet was hit by something large in recent days. The impact mark was first spotted on Monday morning by an amateur astronomer in Australia, who then drew the attention of scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to the dark mark on Jupiter’s south polar region.

The apparent impact comes almost exactly 15 years after a comet named Shoemaker-Levy 9 struck Jupiter, “sending up blazing fireballs and churning the Jovian atmosphere into dark storms, one of them as large as Earth,” as The New York Times reported on July 19, 1994.

Images of the impact mark, as seen through a NASA telescope in Hawaii, were posted on the space agency’s Web site on Monday with this explanation:
Following up on a tip by an amateur astronomer, Anthony Wesley of Australia, that a new dark “scar” had suddenly appeared on Jupiter, this morning between 3 and 9 a.m. PDT (6 a.m. and noon EDT) scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, gathered evidence indicating an impact.

New infrared images show the likely impact point was near the south polar region, with a visibly dark “scar” and bright upwelling particles in the upper atmosphere detected in near-infrared wavelengths.

Glenn Orton, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said “It could be the impact of a comet, but we don’t know for sure yet.”

Mr. Orton told New Scientist magazine that the planet could have been hit by a block of ice or a comet that was too faint for astronomers to detect before the impact. Leigh Fletcher, an astronomer at the Jet Propulsion Lab told the magazine the impact scar “is about the size of the Earth.”

In Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the amateur astronomer, Anthony Wesley, a 44-year-old computer programmer from a village north of Canberra, made the discovery “using his backyard 14.5-inch reflecting telescope.” The Herald explained: “Wesley, who has been keen on astronomy since he was a child, said telescopes and other astronomy equipment were so inexpensive now that the hobby had become a viable pastime for just about anybody. His own equipment cost about $10,000.”

Mr. Wesley recorded the discovery of the impact mark, and posted several of the first images he took of it, in an observation report he posted online:
I came back to the scope at about 12:40am I noticed a dark spot rotating into view in Jupiters south polar region started to get curious. When first seen close to the limb (and in poor conditions) it was only a vaguely dark spot, I thouht likely to be just a normal dark polar storm. However as it rotated further into view, and the conditions improved I suddenly realised that it wasn’t just dark, it was black in all channels, meaning it was truly a black spot.

My next thought was that it must be either a dark moon (like Callisto) or a moon shadow, but it was in the wrong place and the wrong size. Also I’d noticed it was moving too slow to be a moon or shadow. As far as I could see it was rotating in sync with a nearby white oval storm that I was very familiar with - this could only mean that the back feature was at the cloud level and not a projected shadow from a moon. I started to get excited.

It took another 15 minutes to really believe that I was seeing something new - I’d imaged that exact region only 2 days earlier and checking back to that image showed no sign of any anomalous black spot.

Now I was caught between a rock and a hard place - I wanted to keep imaging but also I was aware of the importance of alerting others to this possible new event. Could it actually be an impact mark on Jupiter? I had no real idea, and the odds on that happening were so small as to be laughable, but I was really struggling to see any other possibility given the location of the mark. If it really was an impact mark then I had to start telling people, and quickly.

The Guardian reports that Mr. Wesley, who “spends about 20 hours a week on his passion of watching and photographing Jupiter,” almost missed making the discovery because he interrupted his work late on Sunday night to watch sports on television. Mr. Wesley told The Guardian:

I was imaging Jupiter until about midnight and seriously thought about packing up and going back to the house to watch the golf and the cricket. In the end I decided to just take a break and I went back to the house to watch Tom Watson almost make history.

I came back down half an hour later and I could see this black mark had turned into view.

In another interview, Mr. Wesley told the Sydney Morning Herald that spotting the impact mark on Jupiter made him glad the huge planet is in Earth’s neighborhood: “If anything like that had hit the Earth it would have been curtains for us, so we can feel very happy that Jupiter is doing its vacuum-cleaner job and hoovering up all these large pieces before they come for us.”

Asteroid in near-miss with Earth
CT POST
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Posted: 03/04/2009 08:40:55 AM EST


PASADENA, Calif. -- An asteroid about the size of one that blasted Siberia a century ago just buzzed by Earth.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported that the asteroid zoomed past Monday morning.

The asteroid named 2009 DD45 was about 48,800 miles from Earth. That is just twice the height of some telecommunications satellites and about one-fifth of the distance to the Moon.

The space ball measured between 69 feet and 154 feet in diameter. The Planetary Society said that made it the same size as an asteroid that exploded over Siberia in 1908 and leveled more than 800 square miles of forest.

Most people probably didn't notice the cosmic close call. The asteroid was spotted only two days ago and at its closest point passed over the Pacific Ocean near Tahiti.
New NASA Administrator for new Administration?
NASA’s Next Leader Arriving at Time of Transition
NYTIMES
By KENNETH CHANG
May 4, 2009

More than 100 days into his presidency, Barack Obama has yet to name the person he wants to lead the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. In this delay Mr. Obama has company: President George W. Bush did not decide on his choice, Sean O’Keefe, until November of his first year in office.

But NASA is on the cusp of a once-in-a-generation transition, winding down space shuttle flights and construction of the International Space Station before ramping up ambitions for a return to the moon and an eventual trip to Mars.

Since Michael D. Griffin stepped down as NASA administrator in January, Christopher Scolese, a longtime NASA official, has served in the role on an interim basis. A new NASA boss, however, will arrive at the agency too late to take part in several important decisions. Mr. Scolese and other NASA officials are in the middle of putting together the agency’s 2010 budget, which may be unveiled as soon as this week. They are also grappling with the impending retirement of the nation’s space shuttles.

On Thursday, a Congressionally mandated prohibition that would have prevented NASA from taking any steps that might prevent additional shuttle flights after 2010 expired. NASA announced the first major round of layoffs among shuttle contractors — about 160 workers — and up to 900 jobs will be eliminated by the end of the fiscal year in September as the agency moves forward on the assumption that there will be, at most, nine flights left.

The new administrator will also step into a contentious debate over whether development of the next generation of rockets, known as the Constellation program, has gone awry with technical problems or whether it is struggling just because it has received less financing than originally promised.

Constellation managers decided last month to trim the capacity of the new crew capsule, at least initially, from six astronauts to four. The program had been developing two versions — a six-seater for the space station and Mars and a four-seater for lunar missions — and managers say the larger one is not needed for now.

They are considering other major changes in the development of the Ares I, the first of the Constellation rockets, including eliminating one of the test flights to improve the chances of keeping to the schedule of launching the first astronauts in March 2015.

The delay in naming a top administrator has revived speculation that NASA and space exploration are low priorities for Mr. Obama.

An early Obama campaign document in 2007 proposed delaying the Constellation rockets by five years to pay for an education initiative. Mr. Obama later stated that he favored the current goal, devised in the aftermath of the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003, to return to the moon by 2020.

On the Senate floor last month, Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who is one NASA’s primary Congressional champions, said he considered Mr. Obama a strong supporter of NASA. But Mr. Nelson expressed frustration at the lack of a nominee for the top agency job.

“NASA is adrift,” he said, “because it doesn’t have a vigorous leader, appointed by the Obama administration, to take charge; someone who understands space flight, who understands management, who understands aeronautics.”

Scott Pace, a former NASA official and director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said he had “not much” concern about the delay, noting that many positions in other parts of the federal government also remain unfilled.

“You have a career person who’s there who’s extremely competent,” Dr. Pace said of Mr. Scolese.

Dr. Pace said that naming an administrator was not urgent, because the Obama administration appeared to agree with the post-Columbia vision for space exploration set forth by the Bush administration that received bipartisan support in Congress. “There’s not as if there’s a policy uncertainty,” he said.

In a speech to the National Academy of Sciences last week, Mr. Obama made several references to NASA and the exploration of space. But the references were all nostalgic.

“You know, the average age in NASA’s mission control during the Apollo 17 mission was just 26,” Mr. Obama said, referring to the last human visit to the moon 37 years ago. “I know that young people today are just as ready to tackle the grand challenges of this century.”

Space exploration was not among Mr. Obama’s present-day grand challenges. Other than a quick mention of NASA’s role in climate research, Mr. Obama did not talk about what he wanted the space agency to accomplish. He said he would seek to double the budgets for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He did not promise more money for NASA.

In a speech last month to the National Space Club, Dr. Griffin, the former administrator, said the Constellation program had received $12 billion less than originally proposed by the Bush administration and that after a slight increase this year, the budget will go down by $3.5 billion over the next four years.

“Funding for lunar return in the Constellation program was already less than $4 billion in the years prior to 2015,” Dr. Griffin said. “This was to be allocated to early work on the Ares 5 heavy-lifter, and the Altair lunar lander. With only a half-billion dollars now available, this work cannot be done.”

What NASA will do once it gets back to the Moon may also change. In testimony to a House appropriations subcommittee, Mr. Scolese said the agency might scale back plans for a permanent outpost.

The new administrator will face the difficult task of juggling the work force, both within NASA and at its contractors, as shuttle workers are laid off before new jobs emerge in the Constellation program. The administrator may also revisit the long-debated question of whether NASA’s mission could be better accomplished through more robotic spacecraft like the highly successful Mars rovers rather than much more expensive human space flight.

Among the robotic missions, there is a question of looking up at the planets and distant universe versus looking down at Earth. Mr. Obama’s budget outline in February proposed a greater emphasis on Earth science.


Satellite Will Track Carbon Dioxide
NYTIMES
By KENNETH CHANG
February 23, 2009

Thirty billion tons of carbon dioxide waft into the air from the burning of fossil fuels each year. About half of the 30 billion tons stays in the air. The other half disappears. Where it all goes, nobody quite knows.

With the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, a NASA satellite scheduled to be launched Tuesday morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, scientists hope to better understand the comings and goings of carbon dioxide, the key greenhouse gas driving the current warming of the planet.

The new data could help improve climate models and improve the understanding of the “carbon sinks” like oceans and forests that currently absorb much of the carbon dioxide.

Year-to-year variations — in some years, all of the excess carbon dioxide disappears; in some years, all of it stays in the air — indicate that some of the sinks might fill up and spill some of the absorbed carbon dioxide back into the air.

“Something out there is changing dramatically,” said David Crisp, a scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the principal investigator of the mission.  Humans account for only 2 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions — natural sources like the decay of dead plants account for the other 98 percent — but that is enough to tip the balance.

Before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago, carbon dioxide levels were at about 280 parts per million. Today, the level is 387 parts per million and projected to rise sharply in the coming decades.

Scientists have good estimates how much carbon dioxide is released by the burning of fossil fuels, but other human influences like clearing of forests and the harvesting of crops “affect CO2 in ways we don’t understand,” Dr. Crisp said.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory will measure carbon dioxide levels by using an instrument with three spectrometers to analyze light reflected off Earth. Carbon dioxide absorbs certain wavelengths of light, particularly in the near infrared, and by measuring how dim those parts of the spectrum are, the observatory can determine how many carbon dioxide molecules the light has passed through.

At the same time, the instrument will make a similar measurement for oxygen. Combining the two measurements gives the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air. Because carbon dioxide mixes quickly with the other gases in air, the measurements will have to pick out small variations, expected to be less than 5 percent.  Dr. Crisp said the spacecraft will be able to pick out emissions from a power plant or from along highways. More difficult will be picking out the carbon sinks, which tend to be spread out over large areas. Scientists know that the oceans are by far the largest sinks, but the absorbing powers of forests, for example, is still uncertain. Shifting winds further complicate the analysis.

Liftoff is set for 1:51 a.m. Pacific Time. The satellite will rise into orbit aboard a Taurus XL rocket to 400 miles above the surface. Then, over the next several weeks, it will be nudged upward into a 438-mile-high polar orbit, where it will take its place among a series of Earth-watching satellites known as the “A-Train.”

Several months of calibration will follow, validating the spacecraft’s observations with measurements on the ground.

“It’s a brand new kind of science measurement,” Dr. Crisp said. “It’s going to take us a while to get the measurement right.”

The spacecraft and the Taurus rocket were both built by Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., which will operate the spacecraft.

Debris Spews Into Space After Satellites Collide
NYTIMES
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
February 12, 2009

For decades, space experts have warned of orbits around the planet growing so crowded that two satellites might one day slam into one another, producing swarms of treacherous debris.

It happened Tuesday. And the whirling fragments could pose a threat to the International Space Station, orbiting 215 miles up with three astronauts on board, though officials said the risk was now small.

“This is a first, unfortunately,” Nicholas L. Johnson, chief scientist for orbital debris at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said of the collision.

It happened some 490 miles above northern Siberia, at around noon Eastern time. Two communications satellites — one Russian, one American — cracked up in silent destruction. In the aftermath, military radars on the ground tracked large amounts of debris going into higher and lower orbits.

“Nothing to this extent” has ever happened before, Mr. Johnson said. “We’ve had three other accidental collisions between what we call catalog objects, but they were all much smaller than this,” the objects always very small and moderate in size.

The communication satellites, he added, “are two relatively big objects.”

The American satellite was an Iridium, one of a constellation of 66 spacecraft. Liz DeCastro, corporate communications director of Iridium Satellite, based in Bethesda, Md., said that the satellite weighed about 1,200 pounds and that its body was more than 12 feet long, not including large solar arrays.

In a statement, the company said that it had “lost an operational satellite” on Tuesday, apparently after it collided with “a nonoperational” Russian satellite.

“Although this event has minimal impact on Iridium’s service,” the statement added, “the company is taking immediate action to address the loss.” The company’s hand-held phones can be used anywhere around the globe to give users voice and data communications.

Mr. Johnson said the Russian satellite was presumably nonfunctional. Officials at the Russian Embassy in Washington could not be reached for comment.

Mr. Johnson said the United States military’s tracking radars had yet to determine the number of detectable fragments. “It’s going to take a while,” he said. “It’s very, very difficult to discriminate all those objects when they’re really close together. And so over the next couple of days we’ll have a much better understanding.”

At a minimum, Mr. Johnson added, “I think we’re talking many, many dozens, if not hundreds.”

The debris could threaten the space station and its astronaut crew, he said.

“There are actually debris from this event which we believe are going through space station altitude already,” he said. The risk to the station, Mr. Johnson added, “is going to be very, very small.” In the worst case, he said, “We’ll just dodge them if we have to. It’s the small things you can’t see that are the ones that can do you harm.”

In Houston, International Space Station controllers have often adjusted its orbit to get out of the way of speeding space debris, which can move so incredibly fast that even small pieces pack a destructive wallop.

John Yembrick, a NASA spokesman in Washington, said the agency now judged the risk of collision with the speeding fragments to be “very small.” The threat, he added, is defined and acceptable.

Mr. Johnson, who works at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, said the new swarms of whirling debris might also eventually pose a threat to other satellites in an orbital chain reaction.

“What we’re doing now is trying to quantify that risk,” he said. “That’s a work in progress. It’s only been 24 hours. We put first things first,” meaning the station and preparing for the next shuttle mission.

William Harwood contributed reporting.
The Pheonix has landed (Memorial Day, 2008).  What has it found out so far?  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7408033.stm

USA land Phoeonix rover on Mars - searches for water...from the look of this photo, there IS water there - GROUNDWATER!  Phoenix landed in the blue ice-rich area (top left of map), near Mars' north pole

Link here to NASA webpage on Mars project.

This is the route of Mars rover...or else it is AAA's most direct "trip tik"
From the I-BBC - below right is the EU Mars effort.

NASA also has other programs, including assistance on International Space Station.

CT native on latest Shuttle crew!  Atlantis 2006.
Daniel C. Burbank (CAPTAIN, USCG)
NASA Astronaut

PERSONAL DATA: Born July 27, 1961 in Manchester, Connecticut, but considers Tolland, Connecticut, to be his hometown. Married. Two children. Enjoys running, skiing, hiking, sailing, amateur astronomy, playing guitar. His parents, Dan and Joan Burbank, reside in Tolland, Connecticut. His sister, Suzanne Burbank, resides in Fort Myers, Florida.

EDUCATION: Graduated from Tolland High School, Tolland, Connecticut, in 1979; received a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in 1985, and a master of science degree in aeronautical science from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 1990.

ORGANIZATIONS: National Space Society; Order of Daedalians; U.S. Coast Guard Pterodactyls; U.S. Coast Guard Academy Alumni Association.

AWARDS: NASA Space Flight Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal, Air Medal, Coast Guard Commendation Medals (2), Coast Guard Achievement Medal, Coast Guard Commandant’s Letter of Commendation Ribbons (2), Coast Guard Meritorious Team Commendations (3), National Defense Service Medal, Humanitarian Service Medal, and various other service awards.

SPECIAL HONORS: Awarded the Orville Wright Achievement Award and honorary membership in the Order of Daedalians as the top naval flight training graduate during the period January 1 to June 30, 1988. Awarded Texas Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution Achievement Award as the top Coast Guard graduate of flight training for the year 1988.

EXPERIENCE: Burbank received his commission from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in May 1985, and was assigned to the Coast Guard Cutter Gallatin (WHEC 721) as Deck Watch Officer and Law Enforcement/Boarding Officer. In January 1987, he reported to naval flight training at Pensacola, Florida, and graduated in February 1988. Burbank was then assigned to Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City, North Carolina, where he became an Aircraft Commander in the HH-3F Pelican and then an Aircraft Commander/Instructor Pilot in the HH-60J Jayhawk. While at Elizabeth City, he completed training in Aviation Maintenance/Administration in preparation for assignment as an Aeronautical Engineering Officer. He also earned a master’s degree in aeronautical science. In July 1992, Burbank was assigned to Coast Guard Air Station Cape Cod, Massachusetts, as the Rotary Wing Engineering Officer and HH-60J Aircraft Commander/Instructor Pilot. In May 1995, he was assigned to Coast Guard Air Station Sitka, Alaska, as the Aeronautical Engineering Officer and HH-60J Aircraft Commander.

Burbank has logged over 3,500 flight hours, primarily in Coast Guard helicopters, and has flown more than 1,800 missions including over 300 search and rescue missions.

NASA EXPERIENCE: Selected by NASA in April 1996, Burbank reported to the Johnson Space Center in August 1996. After completing two years of training and evaluation, Burbank worked technical issues for the Astronaut Office Operations Planning Branch, and the International Space Station, and served as CAPCOM (spacecraft communicator) for both Shuttle and Space Station. He was also a member of the Space Shuttle Cockpit Avionics Upgrade design team. Twice flown, he served as a mission specialist on STS-106 and STS-115 and has logged over 23 days in space, and 7 hours and 11 minutes in one EVA.

SPACE FLIGHT EXPERIENCE: STS-106 Atlantis (September 8-20, 2000). During the 12-day mission, the crew successfully prepared the International Space Station for the arrival of the first permanent crew. The five astronauts and two cosmonauts delivered more than 6,600 pounds of supplies and installed batteries, power converters, oxygen generation equipment and a treadmill on the Space Station. Two crewmembers performed a space walk in order to connect power, data and communications cables to the newly arrived Zvesda Service Module and the Space Station. STS-106 orbited the Earth 185 times, and covered 4.9 million miles in 11 days, 19 hours, and 10 minutes.

STS-115 Atlantis (September 9-21, 2006) successfully restarted assembly of the International Space Station. During the 12-day mission the crew delivered and installed the massive P3/P4 truss, and two sets of solar arrays that will eventually provide one quarter of the station’s power. The crew also performed unprecedented robotic work using the Shuttle’s arm. With the help of a fellow crew member, Burbank made one spacewalk (EVA) that completed truss installation, enabled the solar arrays to be deployed and prepared an important radiator for later activation. They also installed a signal processor and transponder that transmits voice and data to the ground and performed other tasks to upgrade and protect the station’s systems.

OCTOBER 2006



NASA Global Hawk Continues Flight Expansion in Preparation for Environmental Research Missions as Part of the 2010 GloPac Campaign
YAHOO
Press Release Source: Northrop Grumman Corp.
Monday January 18, 2010, 8:00 am

SAN DIEGO, Jan. 18, 2010 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Northrop Grumman (NYSE:NOC - News) announced today that the NASA Global Hawk unmanned aircraft system (UAS) has completed 10.4 hours for pilot training and flight characterization in preparation for the Global Hawk Pacific (GloPac) Campaign set to start this spring. Five flawless flights have been completed since the first flight of Air Vehicle Six (AV-6) on 23 October. Prior to this, the aircraft had not flown in more than 6 1/2 years.

A photo accompanying this release is available at: http://media.globenewswire.com/noc/mediagallery.html?pkgid=6992

Currently, AV-6 is being modified to carry eleven different earth science sensors in preparation for the GloPac Campaign. Missions will be based from NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base and be conducted over remote areas of the Pacific and Arctic. Initial flights to test these sensors will begin in March.

AV-6 is one of two Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration Global Hawk aircraft that were transferred from the U.S. Air Force to NASA Dryden. Both are being operated under the Space Act Agreement signed in 2008 that allows NASA and Northrop Grumman to share the aircraft for various operations. NOAA is also partnered with NASA to provide appropriate payloads for environmental science missions. The second aircraft, AV-1, is being readied for flight later this year.

As part of the program, Northrop Grumman designed a new UAS mission control center that is married to a payload station and housed in the Global Hawk Operations Center (GHOC) located at Edwards Air Force Base. A distributed set of workstations are configured with specific functionality to initiate, monitor and track aircraft operations, as well as to collect and distribute data from various onboard sensors. The payload workstations are configured to manage numerous scientific payloads simultaneously which will be vital during the GloPac Campaign.

The GloPac Campaign provides a unique opportunity to extend operator evaluation of the control system, which is at the heart of the GHOC. Analyzing the multi-function architecture during operations will further the understanding and development of mission management and control systems for various heterogeneous UAS. Lessons learned on training and mission execution will be considered for inclusion in future programs where government customers are looking for interoperability and commonality to meet mission management requirements.

Northrop Grumman Corporation is a leading global security company whose 120,000 employees provide innovative systems, products, and solutions in aerospace, electronics, information systems, shipbuilding and technical services to government and commercial customers worldwide.