It was worth the wait! NASA has posted the first new images released by the Hubble ERO folks, following the refurbishment of the space telescope.  Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) had the honor of presiding at this long awaited unveiling.  With the help of Digsby, Twitter and NASA’s award winning website, I was able to grab one of several wonderful images for your viewing pleasure.  The image above is called “Stephan’s Quintet – Galactic wreckage.”

STS-128 has completed its mission to the International Space Station, exchanging members of the ISS Expedition 20 team, and resupplying the space station.  With good weather in Florida, the crew will land early Thursday evening.

Supplemental links – Hat tip to my regular contributor, Jon, for the links marked with a (#):

• “Astronauts pack Buzz Lightyear for ride home#,” is from Yahoo! News (9/7/09).
• “Space Sights and Smells Surprise Rookie Astronauts#,” is from Yahoo! News (9/5/09).

Links in boldface are important new elements to the NASA stories to be explored in a subsequent post.  The links indicate the Augustine Commission’s recommendations to the Obama administration regarding the future of U.S. space flight, jeopardized by a lack of money.  I highly recommend the NPR article (in the Zemanta box below) as a first look at the panel’s findings.  And here is the intro to the  Augustine Commission’s Summary Report.  To quote:

Related articles by Zemanta

• Panel Tells Obama Moon Return Is A No-Go (npr.org)
• New Look at a Colossal Cosmic Collision (space.com)
• Refurbishments Complete, Astronauts Let Go of Hubble (nytimes.com)

Space: Lunar probes, Hubble troubles, old moon photos

The next day after the STS-127 shuttle mission was postponed, NASA moved its focus to a different launch pad, hardly missing a beat.  In a wonderfully choreographed negotiation between the two different projects, within hours two unmanned lunar probes were launched, riding on a single rocket.  The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is now in orbit around the moon, mapping the way for a subsequent and long-awaited manned mission to the moon.  The media coverage follows:

“Closing in on the Moon,” is from Space.com (6/23/09).  To quote:

Four-and-a-half days after launch, NASA’s $504 million Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter fired its main thrusters for 40 minutes early Tuesday, successfully braking into an initial elliptical orbit around the Moon.

“NASA returning to the moon with first lunar launch in a decade,“  is from NASA Breaking News (6/18/09).  To quote:

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter launched at 5:32 p.m. EDT Thursday aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The satellite will relay more information about the lunar environment than any other previous mission to the moon.

“NASA successfully launches lunar impactor,” is from NASA Breaking News (6/18/09).  To quote:

NASA successfully launched the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, Thursday on a mission to search for water ice in a permanently shadowed crater at the moon’s south pole. The satellite lifted off on an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., at 5:32 p.m. EDT, with a companion mission, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO.LRO safely separated from LCROSS 45 minutes later.  LCROSS then was powered-up, and the mission operations team at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., performed system checks that confirmed the spacecraft is fully functional.

“Rocket launches new U.S. Moon probes,” is by Tarik Malik from Space.com (6/18/09). To quote:

NASA launched its first lunar mission in more than a decade on Thursday, sending two unmanned probes to explore the moon, hunting for water ice and mapping the lunar surface.

The two new probes – a powerful lunar orbiter and a smaller craft destined to crash into the moon’s south pole – atop an Atlas 5 rocket that lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Their launch comes nearly 40 years after the Apollo astronauts first set foot on the moon in July 1969.

. . . LRO is expected to spend a year building complete maps of the moon and take a close look at 50 potential landing sites for future manned missions. The spacecraft also carries sophisticated gear to measure the radiation hazards future astronauts might face and seek out pockets of hydrogen-rich areas, which may contain frozen water at the bottom of permanently shadowed craters around the moon’s south pole.

. . . Unlike LRO, it will take NASA’s second lunar probe about four months to reach the moon. LCROSS actually consists of two part – a small shepherding spacecraft and a massive, 41-foot (12-meter) tall Centaur rocket stage that it will slam into the moon in early October.

The mission is simple: crash two probes into a permanently shadowed crater at the moon’s south pole at about 5,580 mph (8,980 kph), and sift the resulting ejecta for signs of water.

. . . NASA plans to use LRO, the Hubble Space Telescope and other satellites, as well as a network of ground-based professional and amateur astronomers to watch as LCROSS guides the Centaur in to its crash, and then follows with its own impact four minutes later.

“Return to the moon,” is from EurekAlert! (6/17/09).  To quote:

The Interdisciplinary A building on the Arizona State University Tempe campus. . . For nearly two years, professor Mark Robinson and his team have called this building home, developing it into a state-of-the-art Science Operations Center (referred to as the SOC) to work in conjunction with their contribution to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). The instrument payload of LRO consists of seven scientific instruments from institutions around the nation and globe that will return lunar imagery, topography, temperatures, and more. Robinson is Principal Investigator of one of the instruments on board, the imaging system known as LROC (short for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera).

. . . “We’re collecting the data that will be used to determine where the first lunar outposts, and eventually settlements, will be located,” says LROC scientist Samuel Lawrence, a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Earth and Space Exploration in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

“Lunar Exploration Missions Roll to Pad for Thursday Launch,” is from NASA Breaking News (6/17/09).

Introduction — Space.com’s Charles Choi wrote an earlier (6/16/09) Space.com story introduced the concept to readers with the headline, “Crash & Splash: NASA Probes to Dash Toward Moon.“  Summary: “After more than a decade, NASA is once more ready to launch two probes to the moon, one of which will smack into the lunar surface.”

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Not long after being repaired, refurbished and returned to orbit, the Hubble Space Telescope engineers had a scare.  One of the critical computers crashed.  But, just like the rest of us, operators were able to reboot it and get it running again.  Whew!

“Hubble Telescope bounces back from computer glitch,” is by Tariq Malik at Space.com (6/18/09).  To quote:

The Hubble Space Telescope is bouncing back from a potentially alarming computer glitch just weeks after its last overhaul by astronauts.  Hubble program manager Preston Burch told SPACE.com that a computer in the iconic observatory’s new data handling unit seized up inexplicably early Monday, forcing engineers on Earth to reboot the space telescope remotely.

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In a wonderful connection to the space program’s distant past, original close-up moon photos from decades ago will help the current reconnaissance mission.  This is a great and heart-warming story:

“Old photos focus on the moon’s south pole,” is from MSNBC.com (6/17/09).  Nearly 1800 photos were digitally restored using the old tape players that had been stored in a NASA staffer’s barn.  They are published at  Moonviews.com.  To quote:

Restored photos of the moon’s south pole, taken by lunar orbiters in 1967, were released this week in anticipation of NASA’s launch of two new probes that will look for signs of underground ice in the region.

“Moon’s South Pole gets Close-up in restored photos,” is by Robert Goodier from Space.com (6/17/09).  Summary: “NASA restored its 1967 photographs of the moon’s dark south pole before launching two probes to search for underground ice.”

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The moon mapping mission with high resolution photos will be sending lots of information back to scientists and planners for a year.  And in a lettle less that 4 months, the L-Cross will slam into the moon, sending up a plume of material that lots of people are hoping shows that there is H2O on the moon.

The whole thing is still “golly-gee-whiz” to this old Space Junkie who started watching and vicariously travelling back when the U.S. first started space exploration.

Space News Update

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is in the midst of great change these days, and yet many of its ways are remarkable and wonderfully the same.  In a very quick turnaround,  the space shuttle Endeavor will launch June 13 with Mission STS-127. It was moved to a different launch pad after being readied for a rescue if needed ot the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope, a landmark mission completed recently.  To quote NASA News on STS-127:

The 16-day mission will feature five spacewalks and complete construction of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Kibo laboratory. Astronauts will attach a platform to the outside of the Japanese module that will allow experiments to be exposed to space.The STS-127 crew members are [Commander Mark] Polansky [@Twitter], Pilot Doug Hurley and Mission Specialists Dave Wolf, Christopher Cassidy, Tom Marshburn, Tim Kopra and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Julie Payette. Kopra will join the space station crew and replace Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata. Wakata will return to Earth on Endeavour to conclude a three-month stay at the station.

A panel of experts is beginning an independent review of NASA’s plans for the future of the space program.  And the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee has invited the public to give its input via a special new interactive website, according to NASA News (6/5/09).  The Committee will be chaired by Norman Augustine.  About the site he said, “The human space flight program belongs to everyone.  Our committee would hope to benefit from the views of all who would care to contact us.”  Those interested will be able to ask questions, upload documents or comment about the committee’s operations.  The first meeting will be held June 17 in Washington, D. C and will be free and open to the public.  Members of the Augustine review committee with whom you might be familiar include former astronauts Dr. Leroy Chiao and Dr. Sally Ride.  Others are all leaders in their fields associated with space flight.  Quoting from the story:

During the course of the review, the panel will examine ongoing and planned NASA development activities and potential alternatives in order to present options for advancing a safe, innovative, affordable and sustainable human space flight program following the space shuttle’s retirement. The committee will present its results in time to support an administration decision on the way forward by August 2009.

. . . The committee will hold several public meetings at different U.S. locations. The first public meeting will take place June 17 from 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. EDT at the Carnegie Institution, located at 1530 P Street NW in Washington. Topics on the agenda for the meeting include previous studies about U.S. human space flight; national space policy; international cooperation; evolved expendable launch vehicles; commercial human space flight capabilities; and exploration technology planning.

. . . NASA Acting Administrator Chris Scolese signed the charter for the committee Monday, enabling it to begin operations.

New administrator to be appointed – It was announced in late May that President Obama will name a former astronaut,  space shuttle commander Charles Bolden to lead NASA, as I reported in a previous post.

Decades since we landed a man on the moon, space programs around the world are interested in sending humans back to the moon, or in unmanned lunar exploration. The NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, spacecraft are set to launch together to the moon aboard an Atlas V rocket on June 17.  This exciting dual spacecraft mission will send a very sophisticated and powerful orbiter around the poles of moon, in preparation for NASA’s human return to the moon in a few years.  And four or five months from launch the LCROSS will slam into the moon to send up a debris plume that can be studied to determine lunar composition and the presence of water ice or hydrated minerals, according to NASA News.

I am a space news junkie, as my friends here know.  These are such exciting times at NASA, tinged with sadness at what is about to come to an end, and blessed with anticipation for the wonderful new things and people to come.

NASA and the Pentagon

Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, Muslim astronaut from Malaysia

Is the only way of saving NASA to use the military’s rockets to get to the ISS and the moon? Just like a number of other Obama transition teams, the space team has been gathering information that will be used to assist the President in deciding his administration’s space policy for the future.

Julie Payette, Canadian astronaut.

Hold, Mr. President-elect — My co-assistant editor at The Reaction, Libby Spencer broke this story at The Impolitic, and I must say she makes the points that I want to reinforce with this post. The U.S. has long been committed to the principle of living out the peaceful use of space. The International Space Station truly lives up to its international name, with the deep and wide participation for years with the U.S. of Canada, Russia, the European Union and Japan, to name but a few. To quote:

I have mixed feelings about this news. Obama’s transition team is pondering merging NASA and Pentagon programs on manned space missions . . .

I find myself in agreement with Chris Bowers on this one. While I’m excited at the prospect of combining our efforts to make our space exploration program more efficient, I’m not keen on giving the Pentagon more control over civilian programs. It seems to me that line has become much too blurred already.

There are complex problems now confronting the Obama Space Transition Team.. Today’s Bloomberg.com News story reveals a great deal more about the issues. They range from political and budgetary, to those associated with turf wars, and to competition with our old adversaries Russia and China. NASA administrator, Mike Griffin and Lori Garver, a former NASA associate administrator who heads the space transition team, have been in direct conflict over NASA’s planned future for the Constellation program, the next generation of manned vehicles after the Space shuttles are retired. Griffin is publicly concerned that the six members of the transition team “lack the engineering expertise to properly assess some of the information they have been given” about the program now in place. The Orlando Sentinal article, from which this info comes, details the primary areas of disagreement, including Griffin’s demands that NASA personnel and contractors clear what they say to Obama’s team. NASA Administrator Mike Griffin’s wife and others are lobbying the Obama Transition team to keep Griffin on into the next administration. Though Griffin may be the best administrator ever at NASA, his political handling of all of this has been ham handed, inelegant and it will not serve him or the space agency well.

Five-year hardware gap after Shuttle retires — More recently the articles add new complications to the issues surrounding NASA’s future. A New York Times piece, “The Long Countdown: The Fight Over NASA’s Future,” views the questions more from a scientific point of view than a political one. The engineering requirements, as always with space, are absolutely daunting. The Space Shuttles are old, and Griffin maintains, increasingly unsafe to fly.

Anousha Ansari, Pavel Vinogradov, Jeff Williams.

Russia’s Soyuz space craft are minimalist but sturdy and pretty dependable as taxis back and forth to the ISS. There is nothing demeaning about being in a position of interdependence with Russia in space. I cannot think of a better pause-maker in U.S./Russian relations than the joint knowledge that our folks “are up there depending on the trust and good will of each other and their leaders just to stay alive.” Would it not be possible to imagine an analogous situation some day with China? After all our countries are deeply interdependent on the trading and financial good will of each other.

Then there is the national security aspect, just beginning to come to the fore following China’s shoot-down of their old satellite last year. The impetus may also come from an implied competition with China’s unilateral manned space program. Yesterday’s Yahoo! News headlined, “Obama Moves to Counter China With Pentagon-NASA Link.” To quote rather extensively:

The potential change comes as Pentagon concerns are rising over China’s space ambitions because of what is perceived as an eventual threat to U.S. defense satellites, the lofty battlefield eyes of the military.

. . . China, which destroyed one of its aging satellites in a surprise missile test in 2007, is making strides in its spaceflight program. The military-run effort carried out a first spacewalk in September and aims to land a robotic rover on the moon in 2012, with a human mission several years later.

. . . Obama has said the Pentagon’s space program — which spent about $22 billion in fiscal year 2008, almost a third more than NASA’s budget — could be tapped to speed the civilian agency toward its goals as the recession pressures federal spending.

NASA faces a five-year gap between the retirement of the space shuttle in 2010 and the first launch of Orion, the six- person craft that will carry astronauts to the International Space Station and eventually the moon. Obama has said he would like to narrow that gap, during which the U.S. will pay Russia to ferry astronauts to the station.

. . . At the Pentagon, there may be support for combining launch vehicles. While NASA hasn’t recently approached the Pentagon about using its Delta IV and Atlas V rockets, building them for manned missions could allow for cost sharing, said Steven Huybrechts, the director of space programs and policy in the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who is staying on into the new administration.

. . .To boost cooperation between NASA and the Pentagon, Obama has promised to revive the National Aeronautics and Space Council, which oversaw the entire space arena for four presidents, most actively from 1958 to 1973. The move would build ties between agencies with different cultures and agendas.

The crucial thing to remember with our new Pragmatists who will be in charge is that bedrock principles still apply. The oceans, the poles and space are to be held in common for all the people of the world. Humans are explorers at a genetic level, and I am afraid to say that too many are also warriors at that basic level. The Department of Defense should not run the U.S. and the world. It is now too much. Civilians are in charge of the military. The military does warring. Diplomats do negotiating. What you spend your money on says what you truly care about.

We will be far more unsafe if space is fully militarized that if NASA has to live within its timeline and its budget as a civilian agency. And mark my words whenever the military partners with other arms of the government the military gets to be in charge. It is in charge of AfriCom, it now has active military stationed on U.S. soil, it runs its own intelligence operations, and many ex-military officials populate the executive branch, both out-going and in-coming.

Sunitha Williams, of East Indian descent, a “Spacey Woman” who ran the Boston marathon in space.

The military is an extremely admirable institution, smart, well-trained, courageous, self-sacrificing, well-disciplined and heroic. But those qualities have never meant that the military needs to do everything that is hard. We are dangerously out of balance. I had hoped that President-elect Obama would be the one to lead the re balancing.

References:

1. Militarization of Space – Questia Online Library
2. Militarisation of Space – Wikipedia (note “too few citations” disclaimer)
3. As further background, The Only Redhead in Taiwan asked this question at the beginning of last year, “Does the US encourage China’s space militarization?“
4. European Union space policy (from Wikio): To quote:
   

   The Transnational Institute, a Dutch think-tank, said: “EU-financed communication and spy satellites are slowly becoming reality and in the long term the inclusion of space-based missile defense and other more offensive uses of space are real options for an increasingly ambitious EU military space policy.” Telegraph

Leopold Eyharts, French astronaut

(Cross-posted at The Reaction.)

My “creativity and dreaming” post today is at Making Good Mondays.

Technorati tags: news news and politics politics space programs NASA obama transition military

At Home In Hollywood

The KWTF cameras visit Tom Cruise at home…

Landing on Mars was a 50-50 chance.

(NASA image – Mars “Sol Zero”)

The Phoenix mission’s planners thought it was going to be that tough and so did I. All of us who are long time “space junkies” sat through another nail-biter as the robotic effort played out millions of miles away on the polar ice cap of the planet Mars. “NASA’s Phoenix Spacecraft Lands at Martian Arctic Site” was NASA’s understated news release title. To quote from the story about how difficult the challenge was expected to be,

Among those in the JPL control room was NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, who noted this was the first successful Mars landing without airbags since Viking 2 in 1976.

“For the first time in 32 years, and only the third time in history, a JPL team has carried out a soft landing on Mars,” Griffin said. “I couldn’t be happier to be here to witness this incredible achievement.”

. . . Phoenix uses hardware from a spacecraft built for a 2001 launch that was canceled in response to the loss of a similar Mars spacecraft during a 1999 landing attempt. Researchers who proposed the Phoenix mission in 2002 saw the unused spacecraft as a resource for pursuing a new science opportunity. Earlier in 2002, Mars Odyssey discovered that plentiful water ice lies just beneath the surface throughout much of high-latitude Mars. NASA chose the Phoenix proposal over 24 other proposals to become the first endeavor in the Mars Scout program of competitively selected missions.

Space junkie bloggers are having fun with the news. “Heaving Mars,” was the clever post title by DarkSyde at DailyKos; it refers to frost heaving. A Texas Kaos post, “Phoenix has landed on Mars,” has some good video links by “boadicea,” a proud grad of the University of Arizona. Robert Roy Britt at Live Science blogs on Space and Astronomy worries that talk of life on Mars will start up again.

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