Results tagged “space”

Seil Collins, reporter
(Image: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University)
 
This is the most complete view of the far side of the moon's topography that we have ever had.
 
The mosaic image is made up of 15,000 Wide Angle Camera frames taken between November 2009 and February 2011 by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). The frames were collected when the sun was at an angle - low on the moon's horizon - that results in light conditions that favour topographical interpretations.

Images were also captured at varying latitudes and longitudes around the moon, creating a complete picture of its surface, including the far side. Other mosaic images have mapped specific features such as the steepness and roughness of the terrain, important information for surface operations.
 
"All these global maps and other data are available at a very high resolution -- that's what makes this release exciting," said John Keller, the LRO deputy project scientist. "Researchers worldwide are getting the best view of the moon they have ever had."

Caitlin Stier, contributor


(Image: NASA/ESA)

NASA has been regularly checking in on the leggy Tarantula Nebula since a supernova contained within it -  the closest ever to be glimpsed by a telescope - was spotted in 1987. Now  the agency's Hubble telescope offers this latest close-up of the nebula's crossed tendrils.
 
While some stars in the nebula are on the decline, clusters of young stars feed off the Tarantula's hydrogen, glowing bright red as their intense UV light ionizes the gas. The result is a star community vibrant enough to be seen by the naked eye on a dark night.

The spidery nebula is also home to the heaviest recorded star, RMC 136a1. This hefty object is heavier than astronomers thought possible for a star and so challenges theories of star formation.

The Tarantula Nebula holds many wonders but it's not the only galactic spider: a Black Widow Nebula is also spinning through space.

Michael Marshall, environment reporter

Climate researchers could be forgiven for thinking that space doesn't like them. Yet another of their custom-made satellites has fallen out of the sky.

The latest casualty is Glory, a NASA satellite designed to monitor the effects of aerosol particles on the climate. We need to know, because aerosols have a range of effects on the climate, and sorting out what is going on would improve our climate predictions significantly.

NASA's Gavin Schmidt calls the failed satellite launch "one of the most important in ages" and explains:

[Glory's] uniqueness lies in its ability to distinguish what kind of aerosols it is seeing. [...] Sea salt comes from sea spray over the oceans, dust from dry desert areas, black carbon from burning of forests and fossil fuels, sulphates derive from ocean plankton and burning coal, nitrates derive from fertiliser use, car exhausts and lightning, and secondary organics come from the stew of volatile organic compounds from industrial and natural sources alike. There are also pollen and fat particles from outdoor cooking, etc. Because we can't easily distinguish what's what from space, we don't have good global coverage of exactly how much of the aerosol is anthropogenic, and how much is natural

Unfortunately, the satellite's launch earlier today went badly wrong. The BBC reports:

About three minutes into the flight, telemetry indicated a problem. It appears the fairing - the part of the rocket which covers the satellite on top of the launcher - did not separate properly. This would have made the rocket too heavy and therefore too slow to achieve its intended 700-kilometre orbit. It would probably have fallen into the ocean near the Antarctic, but this still has to be confirmed

Almost exactly two years ago, NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) also plummeted into the sea - after being launched on the same type of rocket, a Taurus XL. OCO was designed to monitor where and when carbon dioxide is being emitted and absorbed. Some said its data could be used to police greenhouse gas emissions - or at least help eliminate issues of mistrust between nations that self-report their emissions.

Japan's GOSAT, which did launch successfully, is taking similar measurements.

Seil Collins, reporter



(Image: Rob Bullen)

Equipped with nothing more than a mid-range digital camera and a 20-year-old telescope, photographer Rob Bullen captured this view of NASA's Discovery space shuttle closing in on the International Space Station.

Last Saturday was generally cloudy in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, UK. But then the clouds parted, allowing Bullen, an astronomy enthusiast, to snag a shot of the ISS and Discovery as they passed over.

"I could not believe the timing was so fortuitous to show the shuttle closing in on the station," said Bullen. He described the result as "a once-in-a-lifetime image".

Not bad for an evening of star-gazing.

Dave Stock, online multimedia researcher


(Image:JAXA/ESA)

The European Space Agency (ESA) is fanning the Valentine's day flames by releasing this image of what might be the most romantic destination in the world.

The heart-shaped island of Galešnjak was originally mapped by nautical surveyer Charles-François Beautemps-Beaupré in the 19th century. However, it became popular recently thanks to Google Maps. The 500-metre-wide Croatian island is a dream destination for amorous couples. It even has its own website where lovers can declare their feelings for each other.

The image was caught using the Advanced Visible and Near Infrared Radiometer type-2 (AVNIR-2) instrument on board the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS).  

Rachel Courtland, reporter

Astronaut Mark Kelly, husband of injured congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, has announced that he will resume training on Monday in preparation for the last flight of the space shuttle Endeavour in April.

It has been unclear whether Kelly - who is slated to command the two-week mission to the International Space Station - would fly. Kelly has been on leave from NASA since 8 January, when Giffords was shot in the head during an attack in Tucson, Arizona, that killed six people. She has been recovering in Houston, Texas, for the past two weeks.

Endeavour, which is slated to launch on 19 April, will deliver hardware and a long-awaited cosmic ray telescope called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the station.

Cian O'Luanaigh, reporter

(Image: Multi-national LOFAR commissioning teams led by Olaf Wucknitz (Argelander Institut für Astronomie, University of Bonn, Germany) and Reinout van Weeren (Leiden Observatory, University of Leiden).

This image of the patch of sky surrounding the 3C196 quasar - a black hole in a distant galaxy 6.9 billion light years away - is the sharpest yet to be produced by the International LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) Telescope.

To create the image, the LOFAR team connected operational radio telescopes in the Netherlands, Germany, France and most recently the UK, forming the largest ever physically connected network of radio telescopes. LOFAR is operated centrally from ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, and utilises a dedicated BlueGene/P supercomputer to process its results.

The network is designed to "listen" to the sky at the lowest radio frequencies accessible from the surface of the Earth (10-250 MHz), gathering information that will help astronomers understand how the first stars formed.

Jessica Griggs, careers editor
(Image: NASA, ESA, W. Keel (University of Alabama) and the Galaxy Zoo Team)

Cian O'Luanaigh, reporter

This "illumination map" was constructed using over 1700 photographs of the same area of the moon's south pole taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) over a six month period.

Because the moon's rotational axis is tilted by only 1.54 degrees (compared to Earth's 23.5 degrees), some areas near its poles are left in permanent shadow, while nearby regions remain sunlit for most of the year.

Each image taken by the LROC was projected onto a map of the area and converted to a binary image: if the ground was illuminated that pixel of the map was set to one, and if shadowed zero. Researchers then stacked all the binary images and calculated the percentage of the time each pixel was illuminated over the six month period.

The resulting "illumination map" is shown above. Areas that were never illuminated appear black, areas that were always illuminated are white, and areas that were sometimes illuminated and sometimes in shadow appear as varying shades of grey.

The Shackleton crater, 19 kilometres in diameter and 4 kilometres deep, can be seen at the centre of the image. The south pole is at approximately 9 o'clock on its rim.

The LROC is making daily (which is about 28 Earth days) and yearly illumination maps for both poles in preparation for future lunar missions.

Olivier Dessibourg, contributor

(Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

On its journey around Saturn and its moons, the Cassini mission - jointly run by NASA and the European Space Agency - has made another breathtaking discovery. The findings, published in Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1198366), show that Rhea, the second biggest moon of the giant planet, has an atmosphere that is 70 per cent oxygen and 30 per cent carbon dioxide. This adds to the picture of Rhea that Cassini has already provided by imaging its craters and discovering its rings.

"This really is the first time that we've seen oxygen directly in the atmosphere of another world", Andrew Coates, from University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory, told The Guardian. Layers containing oxygen had already been detected around the Jovian moons Europa and Ganymede in the 1990s, but only from a distance using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

This time, Cassini's instrument had the chance to "smell" that oxygen, as it flew through it over Rhea's north pole, just 97 kilometres above the surface, according to the details given on Space.com. This layer - with an oxygen density probably about 5 trillion times less than on Earth - was "too thin to be remotely detected", said Ben Teolis of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

Cian O'Luanaigh, reporter
(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD)

This is the first ever close-up picture of comet Hartley 2. It was taken by the Medium-Resolution Instrument onboard NASA's Deep Impact space probe as it flew past the comet's icy nucleus at 7am Pacific Daylight Time today.

The probe transmitted several pictures, which were taken at a distance of 700 kilometres from the comet, back 37 million kilometres to NASA's Deep Space Network antennas in Goldstone, California.

Hartley 2 was discovered in 1986 at the Schmidt Telescope Unit in Siding Spring, Australia, and can be seen from Earth every six years. This young dwarf comet has a nucleus only 1.5 kilometres across.

Deep Impact photographed Comet Tempel 1 in 2005, and its orbit was adjusted for today's Hartley 2 flyby as part of the EPOXI dual mission to investigate extrasolar stars and comets.

It is the fifth time in history a spacecraft has visited a comet nucleus. 

Cian O'Luanaigh, reporter

(Image: SDO/NASA)

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded its first lunar transit when the moon passed directly between the spacecraft and the sun.

In this newly released image, the dark edge of the moon forms a partial eclipse of the sun. This sharp edge can be used to help calculate the effects of light diffraction on the telescope's optics, allowing operators to correct for this effect.

Onboard the SDO is the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager instrument. This measures magnetic fields, as well as visible ripples on the surface of the sun caused by the sun's convection zone. This data helps researchers understand our star's influence on Earth and near-Earth space.

The spacecraft was launched on board Atlas V from Cape Canaveral on the 11th of February 2010.

Paul Marks, chief technology correspondent

(Image: Virgin Galactic)

SpaceShipTwo, the craft in which Virgin Galactic hopes to fly more than 370 paying space tourists to suborbital altitudes, made its first solo unpowered flight on 10 October - in a flight test designed to assess its performance when returning to Earth.

Slung between the twin fuselages of the carbon-fibre, four-engined WhiteKnightTwo mothership, SpaceShipTwo - named the VSS Enterprise - was carried to an altitude of 13.7 kilometres (45,000 feet). Then, using a novel release mechanism developed by Mojave, California based Scaled Composites, the maker of both the aircraft and the spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo was released to fly alone for the first time.

Video footage shows a smooth release and a seemingly trouble-free glide back to a landing at Mojave Air and Space Port in California. Much post-flight analysis remains to be performed, but Virgin and Scaled Composites say the release mechanism, handling, and flight controls appear to have worked as they were designed and simulated to.

Colin Barras, technology reporter

In the week that marked the 44th anniversary of Star Trek's first TV broadcast, the web has been buzzing with news of a real-world tractor beam.

The device, designed by physicists at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, can shift nanoparticles from one end of a lab bench to the other - 150 centimetres away - using nothing more than a couple of laser beams.

If that sounds far-fetched, a quick hunt through the New Scientist story archive shows that similar technology has been with us for some time - although confined to two dimensions.

"I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do" (Image: MGM)

Cian O'Luanaigh, contributor

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) should focus on signals created by sentient machines rather than biological life forms, says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

In his paper "What ET will look like and why we should care", recently published in Acta Astonautica, Shostak argues that the artificially intelligent machines created by an alien life form may be easier to detect than the alien life forms themselves.

As we are more likely to stumble upon civilisations that have been sending signals into space for a long time, those we do find will probably be technologically more advanced than our own, reasons Shostak, and therefore may conceivably have created sentient machines.

What's more, Shostak writes that machine intelligence will be more prolific and long-lived than its biological predecessors. "Making this assumption, we can conclude simply on the basis of technological lifetimes that the aliens - at least, any we hear - will be machines."

You've won a place at astronaut school, you've survived the training programme, you've faced up to the possibility of sudden, unpleasant death - and you've made it to space. A universe of wonders awaits, but so do some gritty realities.

Bad taste

Space missions can last for months, and the nearest supermarket is a long way off. That means food has to last for the duration. Most fresh food, such as fruit and vegetables, is in any case frowned upon for other reasons: it can decompose and produce persistent, unwelcome odours. Bananas are out of the question. But dry food can be problematic, too: crumbs can get into delicate instruments, or even into the lungs of our intrepid space explorers.

Jamie Condliffe, reporter

Yesterday, we looked at how you could join the elite ranks of those who've visited outer space. But are you sure you want to?

We've all heard about the wonders of space flight - from the sensation of weightlessness to the sight of planet Earth. But it's fraught with peril too; the risks astronauts run have long cast a shadow over the prospects of humans in space.

And this isn't just doom-mongering: the fatality rate for astronauts is a worrying 5 per cent. That's 50 times the death rate for sea fishermen, considered to be the most dangerous Earthbound job.

Read on to find out more about the risks you'll face as a trained astronaut.

Failure to launch

As the famous quip goes, the scariest thing about space flight is the realisation, as you prepare for blast-off, that you're sitting on top of tonnes of explosive fuel and millions of parts, all of which have to work perfectly and all of which have been built by the lowest bidder. Despite endless safety checks and multiple fail-safes, things can still go wrong.

The Challenger space shuttle flew for just 73 seconds before disintegrating, after a seal failed under the stress of launch. Columbia broke up when re-entering the atmosphere - but it, too, was doomed by a failure during its launch phase: a chunk of insulation that broke off its external tank damaged its left wing, leading to uncontrollable build-up of heat as it prepared to land.

The Shuttle's vulnerability to launch accidents was an important factor in NASA's decision to go back to more conventional rockets, which are easier to evacuate. Crew capsules can also be fitted with rocket-powered abort systems that will pull them to safety. These have proved their worth in the past, saving two cosmonauts from a fiery death in 1983 and work is continuing apace to improve their design.

Fragile protection

Once in orbit, there's only a thin skin between you and the vacuum of space. So it's small wonder that astronauts and spacecraft designers worry about the possibility of that skin being pierced by a meteorite or, increasingly, by space junk deposited in orbit by careless humans.That's a very real threat.

The Hubble telescope has racked up over 500 hits from space debris, leaving centimetre-sized craters in its exterior - but it's not just satellites that are at risk. NASA plans Shuttle missions so that they avoid high-risk areas, but its records show that the craft was nonetheless struck no less than 1951 times during 54 missions. Most of those impacts were of little consequence, but a significant number required windows to be replaced, or penetrated the shuttle's radiator.

The obvious risk is that such impacts damaging crucial components, rendering the craft unusable, or expose its passengers to the vacuum of space by piercing the hull. The unhappy fate of three Soviet cosmonauts, who died in 1971 after a mechanical failure depressurised their landing craft, demonstrated what happens next : we'd black out pretty quickly, due to suffocation and oxygen starvation. That's probably a mercy, given that the low pressures would quickly cause nitrogen bubbles to form in our blood and boil our bodily fluids.

Invisible enemies

We can barely see the kinds of debris that could cause catastrophe - and there are other perils we can't see at all.

Chief amongst these for astronauts are cosmic rays. These streams of protons, radioactive particles and high-energy photons pose a huge barrier to space travel: some estimates suggest that they would give 1 in 10 astronauts cancer over the course of a mission to Mars - odds that could put off even the keenest of space explorers. Fortunately, there may be ways to guard against this threat, using that old science-fiction staple: the force-field.

Space travel, at least using today's technology, is still a dangerous business. But that doesn't seem to put people off - and nor do the more mundane downsides of space travel: the boredom, isolation and terrible food. We'll take a look at these tomorrow.

Jamie Condliffe, reporter

Yesterday, we described how tough it is to get into astronaut school. But it's tougher still to graduate.

Learning to love free fall

One of the most attractive aspects of space travel has to be zero or micro-gravity: something that is, obviously, difficult to prepare for on Earth. But astronaut training programmes do their best.

To get used to the dizzying feeling of weightlessness, astronauts spend a considerable chunk of time in water. The initial test is to swim three lengths of a 25-metre pool without stopping. That might sound easy, but candidates must then do it again, and also tread water for 10 minutes... in a spacesuit. As if that's not enough, each astronaut has to undergo a military water survival training course and become fully scuba qualified to start getting used to the exciting - but risky - sensation of being in space.

Wannabe astronauts get a more authentic taste of weightlessness as passengers in the so-called Vomit Comet - a converted C-9 jet aircraft that performs parabolic manoeuvres to produce periods of weightlessness that last about 20 seconds. Though that might seem fun as a one-off - even Stephen Hawking volunteered for it - prepare to feel queasy: the process is repeated up to 40 times in a day for trainees.

Going back to school

Budding astronauts have to demonstrate more than just physical endurance: they must also go through a year of intensive training in the theoretical and practical skills they'll need to control the spacecraft's systems, recognise malfunctions, and understand how to fix problems and make repairs.

If you have always dreamed of piloting a space ship, the odds are that you should dream on. Only one or two astronauts on any particular flight are fully trained as pilots, and they will have clocked up 1000 hours at the controls of a jet aircraft - and a substantial chunk of those are very likely to have been spent testing new and experimental aircraft.

It's more likely that you'll be given the standard training and then charged with specific duties once assigned to a particular mission, such as conducting medical or scientific research or testing new ways of working in space. You might learn how to conduct experiments in zero gravity, for example, how to space walk, or how to repair equipment already in orbit.

Buying your way to orbit    

The space shuttle has also carried "payload specialists". Some of these have been technical experts who have trained as astronauts so that they can apply their knowledge to a commercial or scientific satellite launch.

Others, however, have been politicians or "guests" from other countries - a rare opportunity to bypass some of the usual application requirements, though if anything it's even more daunting than the usual route.

Not all of these "specialists" have covered themselves in glory: US congressman Jake Garn fared so poorly that he gave his name to the unofficial unit of space sickness. In any case, NASA doesn't envisage that any more such opportunities will arise before the shuttle programme ends next year.

The other option is to pay your own way. So far, seven multimillionaires have stumped up their hard-earned cash to make it into space. Each paid at least a cool $20 million to spend time on the International Space Station, having ridden up on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Space tourism is clearly the preserve of the super-rich right now, but the dawn of commercial space flight should make it achievable by those who are merely very rich indeed.

So right now, it seems as though becoming a bona fide space agency astronaut will remain a fantasy for most people. Even those who complete astronaut training have no guarantee that they'll make it into space. Such boring realities as funding cuts and technical glitches stop many space explorers in their tracks.

But maybe you shouldn't be too upset about this quashing of your dreams. Today's spacecraft are extremely sophisticated, but astronauts still face an array of cosmic perils. We'll explore some of those tomorrow.

Jamie Condliffe, reporter

Ever wanted to be an astronaut? You're in good company: for many people, space represents the unexplored, a place free from boundaries. And space flight represents the extreme of human experience.

So it's not surprising that many of us harbour a burning passion to boldly go where few have gone before. But the selection process is extremely tough - there are thousands of applicants for every training place, and even if you make it onto a programme you're far from guaranteed a ticket to orbit.

Still, some make it - here's our beginner's guide to joining them.

Cian O'Luanaigh, reporter

A cooling system failure on the International Space Station over the weekend has left parts of the structure in danger of overheating.

The ISS crew were woken by alarms late on Saturday night after a circuit breaker tripped in an ammonia cooling pump. The failed pump was one of two ammonia cooling lines on the station that keep electronic equipment from overheating.

The ISS cooling system is similar to a car radiator. Water is used to cool the habitable areas, but pure ammonia, though toxic, is more efficient for cooling the outside.