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Results tagged “NASA” from Breaking Orbit

NASA Crashes the Moon Tomorrow Morning

Posted on October 8, 2009 | 1 Comments

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By James Robertson, National Geographic Digital Media

One of the coolest-sounding missions launched by NASA comes to an explosive end tomorrow morning.  The Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (or LCROSS) will smash into the moon at about 4:30 a.m. PST (7:30 a.m. EST), followed by another impact four minutes later. (Read the National Geographic News preview NASA Moon "Bombings" Tomorrow: Sky Show, Water Expected.)

The first stage of the LCROSS is designed to kick up a huge plume of dust in the permanently dark Cabeus crater at the south pole of the moon. The second stage contains scientific equipment to collect the dust and determine if it contains water ice, before crashing into the moon itself and causing a purely gratuitous explosion. 

According to the mission's NASA page, amateur astronomers with a 10 to 12-inch telescope should be able to see the dust plumes created by the impacts.

If you don't have a telescope, you can watch the camera footage from the satellite and mission control at the Newseum in Washington, DC, at a special watch party on their 40-foot high video wall, at other locations around the world, or on the Internet at http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html.

You will also be able to watch video and read about the mission afterward on National Geographic News.

If water ice is found in the dust, it would confirm findings of water and hydroxyl molecules by NASA instruments aboard the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft launched about a year ago.

Disclosure: James Robertson is a consultant for the Newseum.


Mars Orbiter Takes an Unscheduled Breather

Posted on February 26, 2009 | 1 Comments

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In the animal world, the fight-or-flight instinct is a pretty common response to danger. But when you're a multimillion-dollar spacecraft, caution is usually the only response you get preprogrammed with.

Adding to poor beleaguered NASA's spate of recent glitches, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter went into safe mode on Monday after suffering what appears to have been an unexpected power surge.

Initial analysis of the flight data shows that the batteries are charged and the solar panels are doing their thing. The orbiter is also "talking" normally to mission control.

"We are going to bring the spacecraft back to normal operations, but we are going to do so in a cautious way, treating this national treasure carefully," MRO project manager Jim Erickson said in a NASA statement. "The process will take at least a few days."

That means, for the time being, science operations are stalled until NASA can be sure the craft is healthy enough to get turned back on.

Aside from returning what could be some of the most artful images of Mars, since 2006 the craft has been a steady source of pretty cool science.

For example, just yesterday a joint NASA-USGS team announced MRO's high-resolution camera caught what appear to be the first evidence for columnar joints on any planet other than Earth.

mars-columnar-joints.jpg

—Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Columnar joints are fractures that form as lava cools and contracts. These particular joints, found inside an unnamed crater on Mars, resemble features seen on Earth when water gushes over and cools down basalt flows.

Study author Moses Milazzo, of the USGS, notes in the press release that his favorite place to see columnar joints up close is Grand Falls, east of Flagstaff, Arizona.

"If you hike down to the bottom during the dry season, you'll cross some perfect examples of columnar joints, which formed when enormous amounts of water flooded the cooling lava," he said.

Here's hoping the MRO can safely get back to work soon!

Next Mars Rover Held Up Until 2011

Posted on December 4, 2008 | 0 Comments

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The fevered race to pick a landing site and a new name for the Mars Science Lab seems to have come to a screeching halt today, as NASA announced that the mission will have to wait until fall 2011 to launch.

mars-science-lab.jpg

—Image courtesy NASA/JPL

Citing technical issues and a too-tight testing schedule, NASA officials told reporters at a press briefing that the planned fall 2009 takeoff would have to wait, and the next launch window wouldn't come for another two years.

Aside from the delay in collecting a whole new swath of data about the red planet and its past climate conditions, the delay means that an already over-budget MSL will cost almost a billion more U.S. dollars than it was approved to spend.

At the briefing, NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin said that agency officials think they can get by without canceling any other NASA programs, although it's almost certain that some projects will see delays due to budget cuts.

Bloated costs have definitely been an issue for NASA before, and Ed Weiler, the agency's associate administrator for its science missions, was quick to point out the roller coaster ride that accompanied the early days of the Hubble Space Telescope.

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NASA to Send Snarky High-School Girl to Jupiter

Posted on November 24, 2008 | 0 Comments

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Okay, not really, but I couldn't resist.

In reality, the agency has approved a new spacecraft dubbed Juno that will launch in 2011, making it into an elliptical polar orbit around Jupiter by 2016.

The mission isn't named for the teenage darling of independent film, but for the Roman goddess who was the jealous sister-wife of the god Jupiter [and also the namesake of the movie character—are those orange and white stripes a planetary homage?].

juno-compare.jpg

Striking resemblance?

According to myth, Jupiter was fond of stepping out on his woman, and at some point became particularly attracted to a priestess named Io.

To conceal his tryst, the lusty god spread a veil of clouds over Io, but jealous Juno was not fooled, and she used her goddess vision to penetrate the haze and catch the pair in flagrante delicto.

Along those lines, the Juno spacecraft is designed to peer through the gas giant's murky and tumultuous clouds to study the true nature of the planet, down to its deepest, darkest recesses.

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Countdown to Shuttle Launch

Posted on November 10, 2008 | 0 Comments

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sts126.jpg

On the 225-foot level of Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the STS-126 crew poses for a group photo.

—Image courtesy NASA

What an exciting week! This is Susan Poulton sitting in for Victoria Jaggard who is hopefully loving every minute of her trip to Egypt. I'm very excited to be blogging about one of my favorite topics—space. I'm a proud space geek and 1988 graduate of Space Camp (I even have my flight suit hanging on the back of my office door).

Since attending my first space shuttle launch for Return to Flight in the summer of 2005, I've tried to make it to every launch since. I've only missed two! This week I'll share with you some of the excitement of attending a launch (or attempting to attend, more on that later), and all the events happening in the week leading up to liftoff.

The countdown for the launch of STS-126, the 124th space shuttle flight, has begun with NASA recently confirming that they are go for launch on Friday, November 14th at 7:55pm EST. This mission is a servicing mission for the International Space Station, with Endeavour carrying life support systems that will transform the station from a residence for three astronauts, to a residence for six astronauts.

The seven-person crew will conduct four spacewalks to install various components and will exchange a crew member, Sandra Magnus, who will become the flight engineer aboard the space station replacing Gregory Chamitoff who will return home.

An interesting fact around the exchange of crew members is the point at which the transition becomes official. Each space station crew member has a molded seat made to fit their body for insertion into the Soyuz capsule that would be used for an emergency evacuation from the station. After the shuttle docks and the hatches are opened, the crew replaces the seat mold in the capsule with the one for the arriving crew member and the transition becomes official at that time.

Today I begin a long week of carefully watching the weather reports for Cape Canaveral before committing to purchase my ticket. Starting tomorrow, the weather squadron will issue a percentage chance that weather may prohibit launch. Anything less than a 60% chance of launch, and I pass on making the trip. I've spent many launch days driving to the press center, only to have the launch scrubbed and have to turn around and head back to the airport!

GoRVing ... on the Moon!

Posted on October 23, 2008 | 0 Comments

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Back in September I had a chance to get inside the Chariot, a prototype of the next-gen lunar rover being designed at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

It's a pretty wacky concept: Instead of just making a frame with wheels a la the original Apollo moon buggies, NASA is giving the lunar voyagers of 2020 a tricked-out RV.



This puppy comes equipped with six-wheel drive and an active suspension system, plus a full cabin with comfy seats, benches that double as beds, a pantry, a toilet, and enough juice to ride for 62 miles (100 kilometers) before heading home to recharge.

The idea is that a pair of astronauts could live in the rover wearing NASA-approved street clothes for up to two weeks. Their space suits ride on the back, attached so that moon walkers can slip in and out as needed to collect samples and snapshots from various lunar sites.

The current version of the Chariot is being field tested this weekend in Arizona, and while I couldn't make the trip to the desert, I was able to use information collected on my Houston trip to whip up a preview piece on the craft.

NASA's lead engineer for mobility, Robert Ambrose, gave me a ton of details on the vehicle and how it's being designed, including some interesting tidbits that I didn't have room for in the article.

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Stormy Saturn and Some Space Trivia

Posted on September 30, 2008 | 0 Comments

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Move over, Mars, you're not the only act in town that can show folks some extreme weather.

The orbiting Cassini spacecraft took this image, released today by NASA, of Saturn's northern latitudes, including an edge of the planet's famed atmospheric hexagon that swirls around its north pole.

saturn-storms.jpg

—Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The tight, high-resolution shot was captured on August 25 using a wide-angle camera with a spectral filter (no, ghost hunters, it's not what you think) that lets in infrared light.

Taken from about 336,000 miles (541,000 kilometers) above the planet, the shot encompasses 18 miles (29 kilometers) per pixel, which should give viewers some idea of the scale of those swirling storms.

As a gas giant, Saturn is almost all atmosphere, and it's raging winds really book it—hustling the clouds around at up to 1,100 miles (1,770 kilometers) an hour.

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Why's It so Dusty Down Here?

Posted on September 3, 2008 | 0 Comments

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Not every meteor that slams into Earth is a dino-killing whopper. Microscopic meteorites also find their way down to the planet's surface on a regular basis, but there's been some debate about where exactly they come from.

In the September 1, 2008, issue of Geology, Mathew Genge of Imperial College London reports that a massive collection of cosmic dust grains found in Antarctic ice originally came from the Koronis asteroids, an ancient family of space rocks in the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter.

ida-asteroid.jpg

Koronis family asteroid 243 Ida and its moon, Dactyl
—NASA/JPL

The minerals and chemicals inside these itteh-bitteh pieces of asteroid match what scientists had previously found in a small group within the Koronis family called the Karin asteroids. And sure enough, telescope observations of the Karin show those rocks are even now jiggling around and smashing into each other, producing dust.

According to Genge, the discovery means that some level of research into the origins and formation of the solar system can be accomplished without even leaving the ground.

planet-dust.jpg

"Out of the cosmic dust, a planet is born."
—NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC)

"The answer to so many important questions, such as why we are here and are we alone in the universe, may well lie inside a cosmic dust particle," Genge said in a university news release.

"Since they are everywhere, even inside our homes, we don't necessarily have to blast off the Earth to find those answers. Perhaps they are already next to you, right here and right now."

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About This Blog

The moon
From dwarf planets to hot Jupiters, join NatGeo News space and tech editor Victoria Jaggard in a global discussion about all things extraterrestrial.


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