History > 2006 > USA > Space (V)

ISS014-E-09786 (14 Dec. 2006) ---

European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Christer Fuglesang, STS-116 mission specialist,

participates in the mission's second of three planned sessions of extravehicular activity (EVA)

as construction resumes on the International Space Station.

Astronaut Robert L. Curbeam, Jr. (out of frame), mission specialist, also participated in the spacewalk.

The station's Canadarm2 end effector is at left.

NASA

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/165354main_iss014e09786_hires.jpg
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts116/multimedia/fd6/fd6_gallery.html

Space Shuttle Touches Down in Florida

December 23, 2006
The New York Times
By STEFANO S. COLEDAN and JOHN SCHWARTZ

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Dec. 22 — The shuttle Discovery returned to Earth at 5:32 p.m. Friday in a gentle sunset landing at the Kennedy Space Center here.

“Wheels stop,” said the shuttle commander, Mark L. Polansky, as the Discovery rolled to a stop on the 15,000-foot runway. After returning a greeting from mission managers, he said, “It’s going to be a great holiday.”

For much of the day — which concluded a 13-day mission to rewire the International Space Station — the astronauts were not sure where they were headed.

Managers at mission control, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, wrestled for days with the choice of a landing site. The weather rules are strict. There cannot be rain within 30 nautical miles of the runway, because of the risk of lightning and the damage that rain can cause to the shuttle’s delicate thermal tiles at high speeds. Visibility has to be good so the commander and the pilot can see the runway, and winds must be at safe levels.

The favorite landing place is the Kennedy Space Center, where the shuttle fleet is maintained and readied for new missions. But clouds and rain at the runway violated NASA’s rules for a safe landing at the first opportunity to prepare for a landing around 2 p.m., so managers had to take a close look at the two backup landing strips.

The first, at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert of California, has been the runway of choice for 50 of the 117 previous shuttle flights. It requires the shuttle to be brought back to Florida atop a specially fitted Boeing 747, which can add weeks to the turnaround time for its next mission.

The final site, at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, has been used only once, in 1982. With little equipment on the site for maintaining the shuttle after it lands and preparing it for transport back to Florida, it was a distant third choice. It would have taken six weeks or more before the Discovery could have returned to Florida had it landed at White Sands.

High winds across the runway at Edwards took it out of the running for the first opportunity to order a landing there, around 4 p.m. Eastern time, and managers took another look at Florida, where weather conditions were improving somewhat.

At 4:20, mission managers gave the order to prepare for a landing at the Kennedy Space Center with a “de-orbit burn,” in which the shuttle fires its rockets to tip it out of orbit and back into the atmosphere.

Kenneth Ham, an astronaut at mission control communicating with the shuttle crew, called up to say: “Believe it or not, we’re going to offer you a ‘go’ for the de-orbit burn. We’re pretty confident we’re going to keep you clear of clouds and rain.”

Mission commanders had already told the astronauts to begin “fluid loading,” in which they would drink up to 32 ounces to replenish fluid lost from their body when they entered space.

The Discovery followed a re-entry path from the west-southwest, cutting across Mexico and West Texas and passing north of Houston and along the curve of the Gulf Coast.

The mission was complex and ambitious. Spacewalking astronauts rewired the International Space Station so it could draw power from a new array of solar panels that was brought up on the previous mission of the shuttle Atlantis.

The rewiring changed the main source of power for the orbiting laboratory, from a temporary configuration that used an old array atop the station; the new power network will allow the addition of more arrays, and the repositioning of the old array so the station will have the power it needs to support modules to be added in the next few years.

The mission’s first spacewalk involved adding a short truss to the station’s structure. The rewiring required two spacewalks, in which half of the station’s power was turned off. Both went smoothly. But things were not as simple in an effort to retract half of the old solar array. It had to be folded back into its container to make way for the new array, which rotates to face the Sun.

But the array proved balky after six years of being extended and exposed to the harsh temperature extremes of space. The first effort to retract it by remote control got the panels folded up only about halfway. So mission managers ordered a fourth spacewalk, and two astronauts — Capt. Robert L. Curbeam Jr. of the Navy and Christer Fuglesang of the European Space Agency — poked, prodded and shook the arrays to help the process along.

That set a record for Captain Curbeam, who became the first American to take part in four spacewalks on a single mission.

The mission also delivered a new astronaut for the space station’s three-member crew. Cmdr. Sunita L. Williams of the Navy succeeded Thomas Reiter of the European Space Agency, who rode back on the Discovery; she is to spend six months at the station.

Stefano S. Coledan reported from Cape Canaveral, Fla., and John Schwartz from New York. Andrew Pollack contributed reporting from Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.

    Space Shuttle Touches Down in Florida, NYT, 23.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/23/science/space/23shuttle.html?hp&ex=1166936400&en=4538c99549021375&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Astronauts close space shuttle's doors for landing

Fri Dec 22, 2006 1:00 PM ET
Reuters
By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery closed their ship's cargo bay doors on Friday in preparation for a return to Earth but the landing site remained undetermined.

NASA continued to aim for a 3:56 p.m. EST (2056 GMT) touchdown at the shuttle's home base at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The weather, however, remained a concern.

Meteorologists predicted a chance of low clouds, which could block the pilots' view of the runway, and possible rain in the area. Forecasters also were looking at higher-than-expected winds.

"There's very little change," astronaut Ken Ham, from Mission Control in Houston, told Discovery commander Mark Polansky. "It still looks certainly possible for today and we're going to continue to march toward that."

NASA's next choice would be to divert Discovery to California's Mojave Desert site for landing, but high winds may scuttle that plan as well.

"It's going to be a dynamic day for you guys," Polansky said to ground controllers.

The first opportunity for a touchdown at the Edwards Air Force Base in California is at 5:27 p.m. EST (2227 GMT).

That will leave flight director Norman Knight with just one final option: to land Discovery at a rarely used backup site in New Mexico, where the weather is forecast to be good for landing. The first opportunity for landing at the Northrup Strip at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico is also 5:27 p.m. EST (2227 GMT).

If Florida's weather improves, NASA also could choose to land Discovery at the Kennedy Space Center at 5:32 p.m. EST (2232 GMT). NASA will have three more opportunities for landing in California or New Mexico through the afternoon and evening.

Usually, NASA would keep the shuttle in orbit an extra day if the weather in Florida or California was not suitable for touchdown. But flight directors used one of Discovery's landing contingency days to stay at the International Space Station to fix a jammed solar wing panel.

The shuttle blasted off on December 9.

REWIRE GRID

The astronauts successfully completed their primary job to rewire the station's power grid and to install a new piece of the outpost's metal exterior truss.

The shuttle also delivered a new crew member to the station, NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, who replaced Germany's Thomas Reiter.

Reiter is returning with the Discovery crew after nearly six months in orbit.

NASA has used its New Mexico landing site just once in the shuttle's 26-year history. Columbia touched down at White Sands after its third spaceflight in March 1982.

Because the site lacks key equipment to prepare the shuttle for transport back to Florida, a landing in New Mexico would delay the shuttle's next mission.

That flight, currently targeted for October, is to deliver Europe's long-delayed Columbus research module to the station.

The delay would add pressure on NASA's already tight schedule to finish building the space station by 2010 when the shuttle fleet is due to be retired. At least 13 more missions are needed to finish station assembly.

NASA's next flight is slated for March aboard shuttle Atlantis, which is expected to deliver a third set of power-producing solar wing panels to the station.

    Astronauts close space shuttle's doors for landing, R, 22.12.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-12-22T175727Z_01_N19207251_RTRUKOC_0_US-SPACE-SHUTTLE.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-2

Shuttle Set to Leave Space Station

December 19, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:48 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- Fresh from the success of an impromptu spacewalk, shuttle Discovery's astronauts awoke Tuesday to the strains of ''Zamboni'' by the Gear Daddies and got ready to undock from the international space station.

''We can't offer you a Zamboni to drive today,'' said Mission Control astronaut Shannon Lucid, referring to the ice rink machine immortalized in the Minnesota band's country rock song. ''But if you look at today's flight plan, you will see that we are offering you the opportunity to fly the shuttle for half a lap flyaround. That's not a bad tradeoff.''

Space shuttle Discovery's astronauts, who are due to return to Earth later this week, rewired the space station, managed four spacewalks, and on Monday completed the most difficult task of their mission: getting a stubborn, accordion-like solar panel array folded up.

The extra, 6 1/2-hour spacewalk -- completed with none of the ground training the crew had for scheduled spacewalks -- delayed Discovery's undocking by a day and pushed back the shuttle's return to Earth to Friday from Thursday. Because of supply limits, Discovery needs to be on the ground by Saturday.

U.S. astronaut Robert Curbeam and Swedish astronaut Christer Fuglesang of the European Space Agency worked for more than five hours to get the last section of a 115-foot-long solar array folded up into a box at the international space station.

''You guys are super heroes!'' astronaut Megan McArthur in Mission Control told Discovery commander Mark Polansky and his crew.

The spacewalking pair used a scraper to try to get the array unstuck, shook the panel and used pliers to tighten the wire that folds it up. It was a stop-and-go process with the spacewalkers fiddling with the equipment and then astronauts inside the space station sending remote-controlled commands to fold up the array with the words, ''Ready, ready, retract.''

Curbeam worked from the end of the space station's robotic arm. His fourth trip outside the station during Discovery's visit set a record for the most spacewalks in a single shuttle mission. His spacewalk also moved him up to fifth place on the list of astronauts and cosmonauts with the most time spacewalking.

Workers in Mission Control applauded when the final section fell into the box, although a wire loop hung out. Curbeam worked about half an hour longer to get it rolled back in and the box latched.

''There's just no replacing eyeballs and hands in space,'' said flight director John Curry. ''It's another great day in space.''

The array was part of the space station's temporary power source. The space agency had to retract it to make room for a newly installed array that will be part of the space station's permanent power source.

During their 13-day mission, Discovery's astronauts also rewired the station, installed a 2-ton, $11 million addition to the orbiting space lab and replaced space station crew member Thomas Reiter of Germany with American astronaut Sunita Williams, who will spend the next six months in orbit.

------

On the Net:

NASA: http://www.spaceflight.nasa.gov

    Shuttle Set to Leave Space Station, NYT, 19.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Space-Shuttle.html

NASA OKs fourth spacewalk, if needed

Updated 12/16/2006 10:29 PM ET
AP
USA Today

HOUSTON (AP) — A pair of spacewalkers manually shaking a stubborn solar array managed to free some stuck grommets Saturday, but others got stuck and stalled the array's folding.

The array was 56% retracted when astronauts Robert Curbeam and Sunita Williams headed over to it after completing their main spacewalk tasks. After scores of shakes and remote control commands to retract, the array folded another 9 percentage points, to 65%.

"We really commend you for a tremendous effort, an Olympian effort of our two shaking EVA members," Mission Control radioed to the astronauts, using the technical acronym for spacewalk. The duo clocked a marathon 7 hour, 31 minute-spacewalk, the last two hours of which was spent working on the array.

Curbeam and Williams made progress on a problem that has vexed NASA since Wednesday. Earlier in the day, the space agency approved conducting a fourth, unplanned spacewalk if astronauts were unable to get the accordion-like array to fold up into a box properly. The pair pushed on the box, shaking the 115-foot array in an attempt to loosen wire tension and free stuck grommets.

It's unclear whether NASA will go forth with that additional spacewalk. If carried out on Monday, it would delay space shuttle Discovery's landing at the Kennedy Space Center by a day to Friday, and push back other activities such as undocking and a late inspection of the shuttle's heat shield.

The partially retracted solar wing was part of the space station's temporary power system. A primary goal of Discovery's visit to the station was to rewire the lab and hook a new set of solar wings delivered in September onto the permanent electricity grid. To do that, NASA needed to retract the old solar panel so that the new ones had room to rotate with the movement of the sun to maximize the amount of electricity generated.

The old solar panel retracted enough to give the new ones clearance, but it did not fold all the way as NASA wanted.

The spacewalkers headed over to the array after completing the main task of their spacewalk. It was Curbeam's third spacewalk in a week and Sunita Williams' first ever.

Williams joined an elite group of eight other female spacewalkers. Only seven other U.S. women and a single Russian woman have participated in the 281 spacewalks taken since 1965.

About half of the lights, a fire alarm, some ventilation ducts and some communication on the U.S. section of the space station were powered down as a safety precaution to the spacewalking electricians who unhooked and plugged back in connecting hoses to half of the lab's electrical system. The astronauts reconnected the space station's electrical system to a permanent power source from a temporary one.

Less than two hours into the spacewalk, the rewired electrical system was powered back up, and Mission Control reported that it was operating without problems.

NASA had to race to get the space station's ammonia cooling system operating before the equipment overheated. The ammonia flowed without trouble, earning a sigh of relief from Curbeam.

"Excellent. That is awesome news," said Curbeam, whose spacesuit was inadvertently contaminated by a leaking coolant line during a similar spacewalk in 2001.

The spacewalk tasks were almost repeats of those done Thursday by Curbeam and Swedish astronaut Christer Fuglesang, who finished their spacewalk an hour ahead of schedule.

Other spacewalk tasks included rewiring power feeds to the Russian side of the space station and relocating protective panels which stacked together are known as "the Christmas tree."

NASA can keep the partially retracted array in its current position until April, leaving open the possibility that the next shuttle crew in March or even the current station crew could fix the problem during a spacewalk. In a worst-case scenario, the array could be jettisoned.

Space shuttle Discovery's astronauts were heading into the home stretch of their 12-day mission, which includes seven days at the space station. Discovery delivered a 2-ton, $11-million space station addition which was installed during the first spacewalk and planned to rotate out a station crewmember upon undocking Monday.

    NASA OKs fourth spacewalk, if needed, UT, 16.12.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2006-12-16-spacestation_x.htm

A Toxic Leak Haunts the Shuttle Crew

December 16, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

As he leads his third spacewalk on the shuttle Discovery’s mission to the International Space Station, one word is likely to be on Capt. Robert L. Curbeam Jr.’s mind today: ammonia.

The foul-smelling chemical is used in the space station’s cooling systems because its low freezing point is well suited to the chill of space.

But ammonia is also highly toxic, and it was at the center of a frightening 2001 incident in which ammonia leaked from a cooling line and coated Captain Curbeam’s spacesuit.

It is a little-told story of cool competence and quick reaction under pressure, and also a reminder, as the nation plans to return astronauts to the Moon, that space is a tough neighborhood.

Captain Curbeam could have to deal with ammonia once again if there are problems with today’s spacewalk that require the replacement of a cooling pump.

The spacewalk will be devoted to rewiring the electrical system of the space station so it can begin drawing power from solar arrays installed on the previous mission.

Once the power starts coursing through its new path, electrical components along the way will begin to heat up. Cooling pumps will keep the components from overheating.

Mission planners have fretted that either of the two pumps, which have gone unused for four years, might not start up. In a similar spacewalk on Thursday, the first pump started up without a problem. If the second pump fails to start today, Captain Curbeam will have to replace it in an additional spacewalk. And that would require him to disconnect and reconnect ammonia lines.

In a briefing with reporters last month, Captain Curbeam said that would not be a happy moment.

“It’s something I’m probably a little more worried about” than the electrical work that is the main purpose of the spacewalks, he said with a mirthless laugh.

The 2001 incident was generally described as a minor mishap in the shuttle Atlantis’s mission to complete the space station’s Destiny science module. Today, however, everyone involved recalls it as a stunning moment, rife with danger and soul-searching.

The scene was described grippingly by Thomas D. Jones, Captain Curbeam’s partner in that spacewalk, in his book “Sky Walking: An Astronaut’s Memoir” (Smithsonian Books, 2006).

Mr. Jones wrote that he recalled hearing something that nobody wants to hear in space: “Uh-oh.”

Referring to Captain Curbeam by his nickname, Mr. Jones wrote: “It was Beamer, his voice flat and matter-of-fact. ‘Um, I think I’ve got a leak here.’ ”

His voice was so level that Mr. Jones did not worry at first. But when he looked up, he wrote, he saw “a silvery, fluttering stream of snowflakes jetting out from Beamer’s work area.”

“The flakes were being driven outward by wisps of a faintly visible vapor, like a fine sea spray caught in a gust of wind,” the memoir continued. “Sunlight sparkled off of the fat flakes as they tumbled outward to form an expanding cloud on the station’s starboard side; they swirled and darted in the gas stream, glowing fireflies in the inky void. It’s beautiful! But even as my eyes marveled at the sight, my stomach knotted with anxiety.”

The ammonia, he knew, was essential to the new $1.4 billion lab. “Worst case: we might not have enough cooling capacity for lab activation,” Mr. Jones wrote. “Our crew would have delivered a billion-dollar cripple” requiring another mission to fix.

Captain Curbeam moved quickly to cut off the flow by pulling on a locking device known as a bailer bar. But he found that it was frozen in place. After straining against it for three minutes, he was able to shut off the flow.

“It basically took all the strength that I had,” Captain Curbeam said last month in an interview during premission briefings for reporters. He strained so hard against the bar and the button that should have freed it that he flexed the metal foot restraint he was standing on, he said.

And then came the second-guessing. “I sat there and said, ‘Oh, my gosh — what did I do wrong?’ ” In the perfectionist culture of the astronaut corps, he was certain he had made a grievous mistake.

Just a week and a half before the 2001 flight, the crew had received a briefing on shutting off ammonia lines during spacewalks. The session was tucked into the schedule during a delay in launching; NASA’s experts believed a leak was so unlikely that the procedures were not included in the formal training. Captain Curbeam said the briefer had told the astronauts, “I really sincerely doubt you’ll have a leaky valve, and I can tell you for sure you won’t have a male Q.D. leak” — that is, a leak from the protruding part of the quick-disconnect plug and socket used to join lines.

The ammonia, however, was gushing out of a male quick-disconnect connector.

Before Captain Curbeam could find out whether he had caused the leak, he had to deal with a suit now covered with a toxic chemical. The problem, he recalled, was “pretty severe,” since “people die in industrial accidents with anhydrous ammonia.”

In an interview, Mr. Jones said, “He was this Frosty the Snowman figure” with ice crystals an inch thick on his helmet and suit.

Mission controllers instructed Mr. Jones to get a brush out of a tool kit and brush away as much of the frost as he could. They then had Captain Curbeam remain outside the shuttle for an entire orbit of Earth to let the heat of the Sun evaporate the remaining ammonia.

For most astronauts, time spent outside of the craft without having work to distract from the view is one of the great gifts of spaceflight. But Captain Curbeam said it was torture.

“I’m just sitting there, you know, sun tanning,” he recalled, and “I didn’t have anything to keep my brain busy anymore.”

Mr. Jones said Captain Curbeam later told him he worried that it was his last spacewalk: “Oh, great. I’m a marked man” who had lost NASA’s trust.

The pilot on that 2001 flight, Mark L. Polansky, is the commander of the current Discovery flight. In an interview, he, too, recalled the 2001 spacewalk as tense.

“It’s something I hope never to repeat,” Mr. Polansky said.

The potential for contamination affected the entire crew, Mr. Polansky recalled. “Once we open up the hatch,” he said, “we’re going to be exposed to it.”

After Captain Curbeam and Mr. Jones were back inside, they pressurized and then vented and repressurized the air lock to purge ammonia, and the crew wore oxygen masks for about 20 minutes while the life-support systems filtered poisons from the air.

Five hours after the spill began, Captain Curbeam received word that the problem resided in the valve; he had done nothing wrong. And he also learned that only 5 percent of the ammonia had escaped from the system before he closed the valve, leaving enough for the lab to operate normally.

“That was a pretty good feeling,” he said.

Panel Inspection Is Scheduled

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Dec. 15 (AP) — Several efforts to coax a solar array on the space station to fold properly failed on Friday, and NASA officials now plan to send two Discovery spacewalkers to examine it close up on Saturday and may add another spacewalk if needed.

“We’re currently envisioning this as an inspection task,” Steve Robinson, a Mission Control astronaut, radioed up to the Discovery crew.

    A Toxic Leak Haunts the Shuttle Crew, 16.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/16/science/space/16shuttle.html

Researchers Find Surprise in Makeup of a Comet

December 15, 2006
The New York Times
By WARREN E. LEARY

WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 — Comets are not all made of interstellar dust and ice, but instead may contain material shot from the heart of the solar system during its tumultuous birth, scientists reported Thursday after examining pristine particles of a comet that were brought back by the Stardust spacecraft.

The evidence suggests that comets did not form in isolation in the outer parts of the solar system as it coalesced from a swirling mass of primal material, the researchers said. Instead, they said, some of the hot material that formed planets around the Sun seems to have spewed off into distant areas and become a component of distant comets.

“Many people imagined that comets formed in total isolation from the rest of the solar system; we have shown that’s not true,” said Donald Brownlee, a University of Washington astronomer who is the lead scientist for the Stardust mission.

“As the solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago,” Dr. Brownlee said, “material moved from the innermost part to the outermost part. I think of it as the solar system partially turning itself inside out.”

The first results of Stardust, appearing in seven reports published in the Dec. 15 issue of the journal Science, were reported in San Francisco on Thursday at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

NASA launched Stardust in 1999, and the robot spacecraft met comet Wild 2 beyond the orbit of Mars in January 2004. The craft flew within 150 miles of the comet’s nucleus and trapped particles spewing from the body in a light, porous foam called aerogel. After a 2.88-billion-mile journey, Stardust returned to Earth last January with a payload of thousands of tiny particles from Wild 2.

The comet formed more than 4.5 billion years ago and had remained preserved in the frozen reaches of the outer solar system until 1974, when a close encounter with Jupiter shifted its orbit to a path between Jupiter and Mars.

More than 180 scientists from around the world examined some of the samples with specialized equipment to determine what makes up the icy, dusty comets that largely populate a vast area beyond the orbits of Pluto and Neptune.

“Comet dust seems to be a real zoo of things; we see all kinds of particles that are clearly formed at different places, possibly at different times and certainly under different conditions,” said Scott Sandford of the NASA Ames Research Center in California, who was the lead author of one of the papers.

Dr. Sandford said results of Stardust studies so far “all indicate that when the solar system was forming, there was a whole lot of mixing going on.”

Dr. Brownlee estimates that as much as 10 percent of the material in comets came from the inner solar system. “That’s a real surprise,” he said, “because the common expectation was that comets would be made of interstellar dust and ice.”

“It’s not just dust and particles,” he said. “We are working on rocks — some of them igneous rocks, formed by heating and melting. We want to know how these rocks were formed and how they became parts of comets that were formed far out on the edge of the solar system.”

Material from comet Wild 2 has mineral characteristics that appear to be different from those observed in comet Tempel 1. In that case, involving a spacecraft called Deep Impact, a probe crashed into Tempel 1’s surface in July 2005, and the properties of the resulting dust were analyzed by the spacecraft and distant telescope observations. Dr. Brownlee noted that whereas Tempel 1 had been examined from a distance, Stardust had returned actual samples for scientists to study.

“The comets may be different from each other,” he said, “or different observations could simply be a result of the different techniques used to examine them. It is a challenge for us to understand how they are different, and why.”

Michael F. A’Hearn, chief scientist for the Deep Impact mission, said it was too early to say whether there were significantly different classes of comets or whether Wild 2 and Tempel 1 reflected different stages of cometary evolution. Tempel 1 has traversed the inner solar system for hundreds of years, while Wild 2 is a new arrival, Dr. A’Hearn said, and Stardust gathered surface material while Deep Impact blasted out part of the interior.

“We need more analysis of the data we already have,” he said, “and we certainly need more comet sample missions to fully understand these bodies.”

    Researchers Find Surprise in Makeup of a Comet, NYT, 15.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/15/science/space/15comet.html

NASA Tries to Fix Station's Solar Panel

December 15, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:38 p.m. ET
The New York Times

HOUSTON (AP) -- When wiggling a solar array by remote control didn't manage to make it fold up, NASA had an astronaut jostle the space station Friday by exercising vigorously in an effort to fix the half-retracted wing.

German astronaut Thomas Reiter of the European Space Agency was told to do 30 seconds of robust exercise on a bungee-bar machine called the Interim Resistive Exercise Device.

NASA hopes the problem can be fixed from inside the international space station so astronauts don't have to take a fourth, unplanned spacewalk.

Reiter tried it once, but his exercise didn't appear to change the solar array.

''I'm very sorry to hear that,'' said Reiter, who has been at the space station since July. ''I was training for it for a half year.''

Mission Control radioed back, ''We'll give you a silver medal for that.''

Earlier in the day, flight controllers jiggled the solar array 10 degrees to either side by remote control to try to relieve tension in a wire system that is preventing it from folding up like an accordion, as designed.

''The hope is that we will relieve the friction in the guide wire system,'' said Joel Montalbano, a space station flight director.

After five busy days in space and two successful spacewalks, astronauts aboard the space shuttle planned to take things easy Friday. They awoke to a recording of ''Low Rider'' by War.

But with the solar array halfway retracted and NASA managers willing to try several creative potential fixes, the day may end up being busier than expected.

The solar panel is part of an interim power system the international space station was using. One of the main goals of the Discovery mission was to rewire the station and hook a new set of panels onto the permanent electricity grid.

The panels rotate with the movement of the sun to maximize the amount of solar energy produced, but in order for the new panels to rotate, the old panel had to be retracted.

While it was folded far enough to give clearance to the new panels, the old one got stuck after retracting halfway. NASA had wanted it to retract fully.

The problem lies in a guidewire that is stuck in one of the eyelets, causing the array to billow. In tests of the array on Earth, NASA saw the issue arise, but gravity helped fix it. That's not the case in space.

NASA will try helping it along by jiggling the array in hopes that will push the wire through the hole.

Flight controllers thought exercising might fix the solar array problem based on previous experience. NASA officials recalled an incident where the space agency saw an array shaking and found the cause was astronaut Leroy Chiao working the device hard in his squats and lifts.

NASA may also try different methods of retracting the accordion-like 115-foot array using a remote control.

A final resort would be a fourth spacewalk, where astronauts could manually help the array along. If that were to happen during the Discovery mission, it would take place on Sunday or Monday.

U.S. astronaut Robert Curbeam and Swedish astronaut Christer Fuglesang -- who have performed both of the spacewalks -- would likely take on the task. It could also be performed later on by one of the space station residents.

In its first two spacewalks, the Discovery crew installed a 2-ton, $11-million addition to the space station and rewired half of the orbiting space lab. A third spacewalk is scheduled for Saturday to rewire the other half.

Astronauts on the 12-day mission are due to return to Earth on Thursday.

------

On the Net:

NASA: http://www.spaceflight.nasa.gov

    NASA Tries to Fix Station's Solar Panel, NYT, 15.12.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Space-Shuttle.html?hp&ex=1166245200&en=3e225ae574540568&ei=5094&partner=homepage

2 Spacewalkers Are Successful in Tricky Rewiring of the Space Station

December 15, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

At the midpoint of the 12-day mission of the shuttle Discovery, two astronauts took a complex six-hour spacewalk yesterday to rewire the International Space Station.

The spacewalkers, Capt. Robert L. Curbeam Jr. of the Navy and Christer Fuglesang of the European Space Agency, completed the tricky electrical work in just two hours and moved on to more mundane tasks before ending the spacewalk at 7:41 p.m., an hour ahead of schedule. They completed the first half of the rewiring, with a second spacewalk planned for Saturday to finish the job.

For the past six years, the station has been running on a temporary configuration of its power system, drawing electricity from an array of solar panels atop the station. The rewiring will bring the station to its permanent arrangement, drawing power from a new array that rotates to face the sun during orbit. That array was carried to the station on the shuttle Atlantis’s flight in September; more arrays may be added later.

The work involved a fair amount of unplugging and plugging cables in the harsh environment of space. The power cables the astronauts handled were not live; half the power network was turned off for each spacewalk. Mission managers spent much of the morning turning off equipment that was not essential — including half the lights in the orbiting laboratory — so critical equipment could remain in operation, receiving power from the other half of the network.

By 4:45 p.m., the rewiring was complete and Stephen Robinson, an astronaut at mission control who communicates with the crew in orbit, radioed with what he called “good news from Houston.” And then he corrected himself: “It’s not good news, it’s great news.”

The components of the power system that had been connected were functioning properly, and none of the equipment would need to be replaced.

“Ex-cellent,” Captain Curbeam responded, stretching the word with pleasure.

The spacewalk, which included a moment of awed appreciation of the northern lights seen from above, came after a frustrating day on Wednesday, as astronauts tried to get the old solar array to fold back into its storage box to provide clearance for the new array to rotate.

The old array, which has been open for six years, stubbornly refused to retract all the way, developing kinks and jams as Cmdr. Sunita L. Williams of the Navy ran the motorized unit to retract it with more than 50 stop-and-start operations. Commander Williams was able to get the array retracted by 40 percent of its length, which was enough to allow the new array free movement, so mission managers decided to move on to yesterday’s spacewalk and try to fully retract the array later.

Mission managers, who have been discussing options since Wednesday night, appear to be leaning toward adding a spacewalk before the end of this mission to try to coax the solar array panels back into their container by hand.

Earlier yesterday, as Captain Curbeam and Mr. Fuglesang prepared for their spacewalk, the video feed on NASA TV showed the shuttle team floating around the cabin, reveling in weightlessness as they performed their tasks. But the spacewalk itself was conducted without the usual live video for much of the spacewalk, because the site was too close to the antenna required for video transmission, and mission managers did not want to expose Captain Curbeam and Mr. Fuglesang to additional electromagnetic radiation from the antenna.

Radiation from the sun has also been a concern on this mission. A solar flare on Wednesday caused what the National Weather Service Space Environment Center called a “moderate solar radiation storm.” The storm has affected some radio transmissions on Earth, and has led mission managers to order the shuttle and station crews to sleep in protected areas of their craft, where there is more shielding from radiation.

With the rewiring complete, mission controllers turned on the cooling system so the power grid equipment would not overheat. If a problem had developed with the pumps that circulate cooling ammonia through the power network, managers would have had to order the two spacewalkers to undo all of their previous electrical work and return to the old configuration until the pump problem could be resolved — potentially in an additional spacewalk to replace one of the 1,500-pound pumps.

But by 5:19 p.m., Mr. Robinson let the astronauts know that the pump, which had been on the station for four years without being used, kicked on without trouble.

“Excellent,” Captain Curbeam said again.

    2 Spacewalkers Are Successful in Tricky Rewiring of the Space Station, NYT, 15.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/15/science/space/15shuttle.html

S116-E-06275 (14 Dec. 2006) --- With his feet secured on the Canadarm2, European Space Agency astronaut Christer Fuglesang, STS-116 mission specialist,
works to relocate one of the two Crew Equipment Translation Aid (CETA) carts during EVA 2 on Dec. 14. Astronaut Robert L. Curbeam Jr., who is sharing two spacewalks with Fuglesang on this flight, is out of frame.

NASA
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/165423main_s116e06275.jpg
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts116/multimedia/fd6/fd6_gallery.html

Shuttle Crew Meets Obstacle in Rewiring

December 14, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

A balky array of solar panels that stubbornly refused to fold back into their box threatened yesterday to derail the ambitious attempt by NASA to rewire the International Space Station.

The 12-day mission of the shuttle Discovery involves a complex and highly choreographed effort to alter the electrical system of the station from its current configuration, with power being drawn from a set of solar arrays atop the station, to a new arrangement that will draw power from an array that was taken up on the previous mission.

That new array will rotate like a paddlewheel so its panels continuously face the sun as the station orbits Earth. But the older solar panels block the rotation of the new one, so they must be retracted before the astronauts can proceed to the next steps of the mission.

Mission managers hoped to get the 115-foot-long array to fold itself back into its original container. As a fallback, they said, it could be folded by 40 percent of its original length, which would get it out of the way of the new array with about 10 feet of clearance and allow the new one to rotate and for rewiring to proceed.

The operation began just before 1:30 p.m. Eastern time and was to have been completed quickly. Instead, it stretched on through several orbits and hours of stop-and-start operations, with the panels shimmering golden and rippling in the sunlight.

The work was a mix of tense and tedious. The astronauts were able to squeeze about 17 of the 31.5 sections, or bays, back into the box before hitting a snag. But mission managers pressed forward, since the array might eventually hinder station operations in its partly folded state.

The trouble was not unexpected; managers had fretted about being able to get an array to fold neatly after having been exposed to the harsh temperature extremes of space for so long. In briefings with reporters last month, John Curry, the lead flight director for the station during the mission, said the problem was like “when you buy a map and it was originally all nice and compressed, and now we try to compress it back” to its original form.

“I will be pleasantly surprised if that all works without a hitch,” he said.

Yesterday afternoon, mission managers could be seen on NASA television (www.nasa.gov) discussing the issue intently, and the astronauts tried variation after variation to make the panels come together.

“We didn’t get any joy on that last motion,” the station commander, Capt. Michael E. Lopez-Alegria of the Navy, said at one point.

By 6 p.m., Cmdr. Sunita L. Williams of the Navy, the astronaut who operated the motorized mast, was trying to retract the array a bit at a time, calling out “Ready... ready... now” before each movement, and “Abort” at the end of each. That incremental approach got them down to just fewer than 17 bays, “well within the safety restrictions,” said Kyle Herring, a NASA public affairs officer for the space station.

As hopes of getting the array fully retracted faded, managers decided to leave it in its partly retracted state for the moment so they could start the rotating array and prepare for the scheduled spacewalk today to carry out the rewiring process.

    Shuttle Crew Meets Obstacle in Rewiring, NYT, 14.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/science/space/14shuttle.html

Spacewalkers add 2-ton girder to space station

Updated 12/13/2006 9:32 AM ET
USA Today
By Traci Watson

Two spacewalking astronauts and a 58-foot robotic arm carefully slid a new piece of the International Space Station into place Tuesday. The task was considered by NASA officials to be one of the most nerve-racking moments of a seven-day building blitz at the station.

Two astronauts in the station used the station's robotic arm like a construction crane to hoist a 2-ton girder into position, squeezing it past an electronics box less than 3 inches away. If the two objects had collided, the box would have fallen apart.

NASA's flight rules normally require the arm and its cargo to stay at least 5 feet from station structures. By comparison, 3 inches is "extremely tight," arm operator Joan Higginbotham said beforehand.

Making the task more difficult, the robot-arm operators did not have windows or good camera views to watch the arm at work. So as they gingerly inched the girder to the right spot, they relied on advice from spacewalkers Robert Curbeam and Christer Fuglesang, who were hovering nearby and acting as spotters.

With the spacewalkers' help, the arm operators nudged the girder home at 5:16 p.m. ET.

"We don't want to scream over the (communication) loops, but we're very happy," Higginbotham said after it was over.

"You're not the only ones," Curbeam replied.

The crew is expected to spend much of today preparing to rewiring the space station. One of the station's solar panels needs to be retracted to make room for another panel that will begin rotating for the first time after the rewiring takes place. The panels follow the sun's movement to maximize the amount of power they can generate for the orbiting space lab.

But retracting a solar array isn't easy: it can lose its original flatness, just like a once-crisply folded map after it's been spread out on a car's dashboard. NASA managers are wary about putting too much pressure on the array while trying to get it back in its box.

"A map never goes back to the way you bought it. It just doesn't," said John Curry, NASA's lead flight director for the space station.

Tuesday's precise directions from Curbeam, nicknamed Beamer, drew his crewmate's praise.

"Your eyes are calibrated like nobody else's, Beamer," Higginbotham said as Curbeam issued a stream of instructions for aligning the arm.

In return, he admired the arm maneuvers by Sunita Williams, who was working with Higginbotham. Williams is on her first shuttle flight.

"Thank you to Suni. She's doing the good flying," Curbeam said.

Despite the spectacular views of the Earth 220 miles below them, Curbeam and Fuglesang worked steadily and made almost no comments about the scenery. The schedule for their six-hour spacewalk was packed with chores in addition to the girder attachment.

The arm operators and spacewalkers arrived at the station Monday aboard space shuttle Discovery. During the remaining five days they will spend at the station, they will upgrade the orbiting laboratory's power and temperature-control systems.

Before Discovery's Dec. 9 launch, space-station flight director John Curry had called the positioning of the girder one of two "nail-biter" steps during the shuttle's visit.

The $11 million girder extends the aluminum framework of the space station and provides a place for power cables and coolant pipes. Officially called the P5 truss, it was nicknamed "Puny" by the crew because it is shorter than most of the station's other girders.

Partway through the spacewalk, Discovery commander Mark Polansky was told that the heat shield of his vehicle is in good shape. The crew spent more than five hours inspecting their ship's exterior Sunday, then sent the data to engineers on the ground for analysis.

The Discovery astronauts also performed an unplanned inspection Monday after sensors detected what may have been a slight nick to the left wing from space rocks or junk.

"I have good news for you," astronaut Kevin Ford said from Mission Control in Houston. "No (extra) inspection is required, and the (heat shield) is not suspect."

"That's outstanding news," Polansky said.

NASA has taken special care to assure the shuttle's heat shield is intact since the loss of shuttle Columbia in 2003. Components of the spacecraft melted during re-entry, leading to the disintegration of the ship and the death of the seven crewmembers.

Contributing: The Associated Press.

    Spacewalkers add 2-ton girder to space station, UT, 13.12.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2006-12-12-spacewalk-complete_x.htm

Shuttle docks at space station, crew prepares for robotic-arm pas de deux

Posted 12/11/2006 11:00 PM ET
USA Today
By Traci Watson

Space shuttle Discovery parked at the front door of the International Space Station on Monday, bearing a new piece of the orbiting laboratory's framework and a crew of astronaut-electricians that will rewire its power system.

Astronaut Mark Polansky, making his first flight as a shuttle commander, fired Discovery's thrusters to nudge the shuttle toward the station at less than 1 mph during the final approach. The docking mechanisms on both spacecrafts latched onto each other at 5:12 p.m. ET as they flew 220 miles above Southeast Asia.

"Welcome aboard," space station commander Michael Lopez-Alegria said as Discovery docked.

Upon arriving, crews prepared to examine the shuttle's left wing. "Overnight, one of those sensors detected an impact, albeit very low," NASA spokesman Kyle Herring said. "The timeline permits for an early look in that particular area, so that's the desire and the decision by the teams here on the ground," he said.

An hour before docking, Polansky fired Discovery's thrusters to send the huge spacecraft — which is bigger than many commercial jetliners — into a slow back flip. As the shuttle rotated, the crew of the station snapped photos so Mission Control can determine whether Discovery's belly was nicked during Saturday's nighttime blastoff.

The flip was added to the mission schedule after shuttle Columbia crumbled during re-entry in 2003, killing the crew. An investigation revealed that the ship had suffered fatal but undetected damage during liftoff.

The accident prompted NASA to require several inspections of the shuttle in orbit and to film liftoff.

Later Monday, the astronauts were scheduled to command Discovery's robotic arm to reach into the shuttle's cargo bay and pull out an $11 million aluminum girder.

The girder is so wide that it barely fits in the cargo bay. The crewmembers driving the arm will have to take care not to bash the girder into the shuttle, which could inflict catastrophic damage.

The astronauts also will hand the girder to the station's robotic arm so it can be bolted onto the station during a spacewalk tonight.

Known officially as the P5 truss, the girder is nicknamed "Puny" because even though it's wide, it's shorter than many of the other girders on the station. Its main job is to support power and data cables and coolant pipes.

The shuttle is the only space vehicle in the world powerful enough to hoist the heavy pieces of the station into orbit. NASA plans to retire the shuttle fleet in 2010, putting pressure on the shuttle team to finish building the station before that.

In addition to delivering the girder, Discovery is also dropping off a new resident of the space station. Astronaut Sunita Williams will be the first woman to live on the station since late 2002. Williams, 41, flew helicopters for the Navy before joining the astronaut corps.

As Discovery closed in on the station, Williams, who is making her first trip to space, caught a glimpse of the spacecraft that will be her home for six months.

"It's beautiful. The solar arrays are golden," she said.

Discovery's seven-person crew will stay at the station for six days, making the orbiting laboratory noisier and more bustling than it has been since the last shuttle visit in September. It will be a big change of pace for the three-man station crew, but Lopez-Alegria offered words of welcome Monday.

"We've got a resident and six house guests ready to come aboard," Polansky said as Discovery closed in on the station.

"You guys won't even have to wipe your feet when you come in," Lopez-Alegria promised.

Contributing: The Associated Press

    Shuttle docks at space station, crew prepares for robotic-arm pas de deux, UT, 11.12.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2006-12-11-shuttle-docks_x.htm

Discovery Takes Off on a Complex Mission

December 10, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Dec. 9 — Night became day on Saturday as the shuttle Discovery muscled its way off of the launching pad with a shuddering roar on a mission to rewire the International Space Station.

With a blinding streak of yellow flame that left a mark on the retina and a lump in the throat, the shuttle and its crew of seven astronauts lifted off at 8:47 p.m. in the program’s first nighttime launching in more than four years.

It was the second launching attempt for the Discovery. Weather concerns forced mission managers to scrub on Thursday, and on Friday the forecast was even worse. Early Saturday, there were high crosswinds here at the John F. Kennedy Space Center landing strip.

But the winds died and the weather improved as the evening progressed, and the mission management team ultimately gave approval for launching.

Just before beginning the final countdown, the shuttle launching director, Michael D. Leinbach, polled his team and then called to the Discovery’s commander, Mark L. Polansky, using his nickname.

“O.K., Roman, 48 hours makes a tremendous difference,” Mr. Leinbach said. “The weather is outstanding, the vehicle is in great shape, so we wish you all good luck, Godspeed, and we’ll see you back here in 12 days.”

After liftoff, the firing room erupted in cheers and applause, and Mr. Leinbach said, “Calm down now, we’ve got eight minutes to orbit.”

Those eight minutes passed with exceeding smoothness. The crew and the launching team calmly communicated the milestones of reaching orbit: the “go at throttle up” call about a minute into flight as the shuttle passed through the zone of maximum turbulence; the separation of the solid rocket boosters; the main engine cutoff; and the separation of the external tank. Discovery was well on its way to catching up with the space station on Monday.

Since the loss of the shuttle Columbia in 2003, liftoffs have taken place during the day so NASA analysts can look for the kind of liftoff debris that doomed that shuttle and its crew. This nighttime launching made it harder to make out any debris in the images from the camera on the shuttle’s external fuel tank, but those images and data from radar and other sensors will be scrutinized for signs of damage to the craft. “We’ll have lots of looks at it,” said LeRoy Cain, the head of the launching mission management team.

The 12-day mission promises to be one of the most complex in the history of the shuttle program. The astronauts are to install a stubby extension to the station’s structure and reconfigure its electrical system to receive power from new solar arrays.

The mission also includes a tricky effort to coax a solar array that has been standing atop the station for six years to fold itself into a more compact form, out of the way so that the new array can rotate to face the sun continuously.

The work will prepare the station to generate the power it will need for the next rounds of construction and expansion, and to meet the needs of a crew that will eventually double to six from three. Spacewalkers will unplug and reattach 112 power connectors in the process.

The rewiring is risky. Half of the space station’s electrical system will be powered down as its wiring is reconfigured, and then brought up again. Then, in another spacewalk, the astronauts will shut down the other half of the station’s electrical system. Crucial systems will remain online, since they can receive power from either power network. But some lights, communications systems and other components will be turned off during each of the two rewiring spacewalks, and mission managers have fretted about what might happen if those do not come back online.

Then, after the power procedure is complete, the astronauts must start cooling pumps that will control the temperature of the circuit control boxes. The pumps have not been used in four years, and that, too, has managers sweating.

Just two members of the Discovery’s crew — Commander Polansky, a former Air Force test pilot, and Capt. Robert L. Curbeam Jr. of the Navy — have been to space before. The rest of the crew members will be taking their first trip, including the pilot, Cmdr. William A. Oefelein of the Navy; Cmdr. Sunita L. Williams of the Navy; Nicholas J. M. Patrick; Joan E. Higginbotham; and Christer Fuglesang, the first Swedish astronaut and a representative of the European Space Agency.

Commander Williams will remain on the space station for six-months, and Thomas Reiter of the European Space Agency, who has been living on the station, will climb aboard the shuttle for his ride back to earth.

In the post-liftoff briefing on Saturday night, the NASA administrator, Michael D. Griffin, said the shuttle and the station were now part of a larger effort to return to the work of sending humans to explore the Moon and the planets.

“We have to learn to live on other planetary surfaces,” Mr. Griffin said, “and use what we find there and bend it to our will — just as the pilgrims did when they came to what is now New England.”

It is part of what it takes “to become a space-faring nation,” he said, adding that it is up to NASA to make that happen.

“Sometimes we stumble,” Mr. Griffin said. “Today, we didn’t stumble.”

    Discovery Takes Off on a Complex Mission, NYT, 10.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/science/space/10shuttle.html?hp&ex=1165813200&en=c8aeb12cc05dd736&ei=5094&partner=homepage

NASA Official Questions Agency’s Focus on the Shuttle

December 9, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Dec. 8 — NASA’s administrator, Michael D. Griffin, says the current period of space exploration will come to be seen as a mistake.

“Viewed from the point of history several decades out,” he said in an interview, “the period where the United States retreated from the Moon and quite deliberately focused only on low Earth orbit will be seen, to me, a mistake.”

Mr. Griffin has made similar comments before, notably a year ago in an interview with USA Today. This time, his remarks came as he waited for Thursday’s down-to-the-wire effort to launch the shuttle on a 12-day mission to rewire the International Space Station. The liftoff was scrubbed at the last minute because of weather concerns.

Mission managers decided not to try to launch on Friday, when weather conditions were predicted to be too cloudy and windy for a safe launching. They expect to try again at 8:47 p.m. on Saturday, though the decision about whether to proceed will not be made until weather officers give their prediction early that morning.

Launching opportunities extend to Dec. 26, though space agency officials hope to get the shuttle to orbit long before then.

Mr. Griffin was appointed to head the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 2005, a year after President Bush announced his “vision for space exploration,” which calls for returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020 and then moving on to send humans to Mars. Mr. Griffin has from the start been an enthusiastic proponent of that plan.

But it has put him in a delicate situation, as he has shifted NASA financing to the Moon initiative, while moving to complete the space station and shut down the shuttle program by 2010, and cutting back on its science activities. And in doing so, he has occasionally expressed doubts about the wisdom underlying the nation’s decision to build the shuttle and the station.

After his remarks a year ago, he issued an apologetic memorandum to NASA employees.

But if there was any discomfort in expressing such opinions once again at the Kennedy Space Center in the midst of preparations for launching, Mr. Griffin showed none. He said in the interview that his comments had been broadly misconstrued as a slap against the people who build and maintain the shuttle and space station, and emphasized that he admired the people of NASA who took on enormous challenges to create the shuttle and station.

The fault is not NASA’s, he said, adding: “The space shuttle is a response to a policy mistake — it isn’t the mistake. The mistake was tearing up all the infrastructure that we built for Apollo and saying, ‘let’s just focus on low Earth orbit.’ ”

The plan to return to the Moon by 2020 has been met with some skepticism, especially among those who doubt that the space agency can take on such a daunting project within its $17 billion annual budget. Dr. Griffin said that NASA could do the job — and could reach the moon even more quickly, with more money.

“I’m tempted to say, ‘Why the skepticism?’ ” he said, adding, “but in fairness, NASA’s recent history has not had the on-time, on-budget performance characteristic of the Apollo era. And I’m trying to restore that.”

The fact that Democrats won the majority of seats in Congress in the November election, and other political changes that will occur over time, should have little effect on the plan, he said.

“Unless you believe that a future U.S. president or a future U.S. Congress actually wants to cancel the U.S. spaceflight program, then I actually do not perceive a big threat from changing administrations and changing Congresses,” he said. “I think the country wants to have a manned spaceflight program, and a substantial one.”

Roger D. Launius, the chairman of the division of space history at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, expressed surprise that Mr. Griffin would repeat his statement about the judgment of history after the controversy that erupted a year ago.

“Here we’ve got a guy who speaks his mind,” Mr. Launius said. “That’s not always the case, certainly in Washington, and it certainly hasn’t been the case at NASA.”

Still, while some of the criticism is justified, Mr. Launius said, the shuttle “turned out better than it had any right to,” and stands today as something of an engineering marvel.

Representative Bart Gordon, Democrat of Tennessee and the incoming head of the House Committee on Science, declined to address Mr. Griffin’s comments about the history of the space effort, saying through a spokeswoman: “I would rather focus on where we go from here. I support human exploration beyond low Earth orbit. However, it’s got to be paid for.”

    NASA Official Questions Agency’s Focus on the Shuttle, NYT, 9.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/09/science/space/09nasa.html

Mars Spacecraft Finds Evidence of Water

December 6, 2006
By REUTERS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Images taken by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft suggest the presence of liquid water on the Martian surface, a tantalizing find for scientists wondering if the Red Planet ever has harbored life.

The orbiting U.S. spacecraft allowed scientists to detect changes in the walls of two Martian craters that may have been caused by the recent flow of water, a team of researchers said in a paper appearing on Wednesday in the journal Science.

Scientists previously had established that two forms of water -- ice at the poles and water vapor -- exist on Mars, but liquid water is crucial to nurture life.

The scientists compared images of the Martian surface taken seven years apart and found the existence of 20 newly formed craters caused by impact from space debris as well as the evidence suggesting liquid water trickling down crater walls.

"These observations give the strongest evidence to date that water still flows occasionally on the surface of Mars," Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program, said in a statement.

The paper said water seemed to have flowed down two gullies in the past few years, even though liquid water cannot remain long on the planet's frigid, nearly airless surface because it would rapidly freeze or evaporate. This seemed to support the notion that liquid water may exist close enough to the planet's surface in some places that it can seep out from time to time.

The scientists proposed that water could remain in liquid form long enough on the surface to transport debris downslope before freezing. The two bright new deposits are each several hundred meters or yards long.

They cited a possible alternative explanation that these features were caused by movement of dry dust down a slope.

Scientists long have wondered whether life ever existed on Mars. Liquid water is an important part of the equation. On Earth, all forms of life require water to survive.

Among the planets in our solar system, only Earth has a more hospitable climate than Mars, and some scientists suspect Mars once sheltered primitive, bacteria-like organisms.

Previous missions found evidence that the Red Planet at one time boasted ample quantities of water, and the question is whether liquid water is still present.

"As with many discoveries, the possibility that liquid water may be coming to the surface of Mars today poses many questions," the scientists wrote. "Where is the water coming from? How is it being maintained in liquid form given the present and most likely past environments? How widespread is the water?"

They also wondered whether the water could be used as a resource for future missions to explore Mars.

The two sites are inside craters in the Terra Sirenum and the Centauri Montes regions of southern Mars.

"The shapes of these deposits are what you would expect to see if the material were carried by flowing water," added Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, lead author of the paper. "They have finger-like branches at the downhill end and easily diverted around small obstacles."

The researchers first reported the discovery of the gullies in 2000, but this is the first time they have revealed the presence of newly deposited material seemingly carried by liquid water.

Last month, NASA said the Mars Global Surveyor mission appeared to be at an end, saying it had lost contact after a decade-long mission in which it mapped the surface of Mars, tracked its climate and searched for evidence of water.

    Mars Spacecraft Finds Evidence of Water, NYT, 6.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/06/science/07marscnd.html?hp&ex=1165467600&en=f7a408f3b452a005&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Shuttle Set for Complex Trip to the Station

December 6, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Dec. 5 — The space shuttle Discovery is to begin a complex 12-day round trip to the International Space Station as early as Thursday night, lighting up the skies in the first nighttime launching in four years.

If the weather and technology cooperate, the shuttle and its crew of seven astronauts will be launched just before 9:36 p.m. The fiery blastoff should be visible along much of the Eastern Seaboard; weather permitting, even New Yorkers will be able to see it along the south-southwest horizon about seven minutes after liftoff.

“It will appear as a very bright, pulsating, fast-moving star, shining with a yellowish-orange glow,” about as bright as Jupiter, which is often visible in city skies, said Joe Rao, an associate and guest lecturer at the Hayden Planetarium in New York, in an e-mail message.

No technical problems that would necessarily delay the mission have been announced, and the likelihood of favorable weather is 60 percent.

At an evening news briefing, NASA mission managers said that their teams continued to work through remaining issues leading up to the launching, including a power surge detected at the launching pad, said LeRoy Cain, NASA’s launching integration director. Nonetheless, he added, "We’re on track, and on target for Thursday."

The last nighttime launching was in November 2002, two months before the ill-fated mission of the shuttle Columbia. Foam debris shed during the Columbia’s liftoff punched a hole in a wing, allowing superheated gases to enter the craft and break it apart when it re-entered earth’s atmosphere 16 days later.

Since then, shuttles have been launched in daylight so cameras can capture detailed images of any liftoff debris. Now, NASA managers say they are confident that they have learned enough from those images and that other sensors will provide them with any data they need.

Only two members of the Discovery’s crew — the commander, Mark L. Polansky, a former Air Force test pilot, and Capt. Robert L. Curbeam Jr. of the Navy — have been to space before. It will be the first trip to space for the rest of the crew: Cmdr. William A. Oefelein of the Navy, the pilot; Cmdr. Sunita L. Williams of the Navy; Nicholas J. M. Patrick; Joan E. Higginbotham; and Christer Fuglesang, the first Swedish astronaut and a representative of the European Space Agency.

The shuttle will leave Commander Williams on the space station for a six-month stay and bring Thomas Reiter of the European Space Agency back to earth.

This 20th mission to the station involves significant challenges, mission managers say. Astronauts will add a small structural truss to the orbiting laboratory and reconfigure the station’s electrical system to begin drawing power from solar panels added on the last mission.

They will have to retract a set of solar arrays that have been sitting atop the station for about six years so the new arrays can turn on their axis like a paddlewheel and continuously face the sun as the station orbits.

Mission managers acknowledge that the panels may not automatically refurl into their holders. John Curry, the lead flight director for the station during this mission, used this analogy in a briefing last month: “When you buy a map and it was originally all nice and compressed, and now we try to compress it back” to its original form.

“I will be pleasantly surprised if that all works without a hitch,” he said.

If necessary, there are backup plans to retract the arrays manually.

Managers also fret over the complications involved in powering down half of the station at a time for the rewiring work; they say the question of whether everything will smoothly power up again is a nail-biter.

But of course, the biggest concern is the one that never goes away. Commander Polansky said last month that the space agency had learned from the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew in 2003.

“I have a lot of confidence that the program has done everything they possibly can to make the vehicle as safe as it could be,” he said. “That’s how I go to sleep at night, and how I look my family in the eye.”

    Shuttle Set for Complex Trip to the Station, NYT, 6.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/06/science/space/06shuttle.html

 NASA Plans Permanent Moon Base        NYT        5.12.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/05/science/space/05nasa.html?hp&ex=
1165381200&en=8eeeaf2e5d0334ce&ei=5094&partner=homepage

NASA Plans Permanent Moon Base

December 5, 2006
The New York Times
By WARREN E. LEARY

WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 — NASA announced plans on Monday for a permanent base on the Moon, to be started soon after astronauts return there around 2020.

The agency’s deputy administrator, Shana Dale, said the United States would develop rockets and spacecraft to get people to the Moon and establish a rudimentary base. There, other countries and commercial enterprises could expand the outpost to develop scientific and other interests, Ms. Dale said.

Ms. Dale and other officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the agency envisioned a base at one of the lunar poles, to take advantage of the near-constant sunlight for solar power generation. It would have an “open architecture” design to which others could add the capabilities they want.

Scott Horowitz, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration, said crews of four astronauts would make weeklong missions to the Moon starting around 2020.

As more equipment was set up, human stays would eventually grow to 180 days, and become permanent by 2024. By 2027, officials said, a pressurized roving vehicle on the surface would take people on expeditions far from the base.

NASA gave no cost estimate for the program and no design details for the base. Ms. Dale said all plans assumed that the agency would continue operating from a fixed budget of about $17 billion a year.

The space shuttle fleet is to be retired by 2010, and the United States plans to scale back its involvement in the International Space Station. The station is still under construction, with a mission by the shuttle Discovery to lift off on Thursday. Ms. Dale said money would be shifted to the lunar exploration program from the shuttle and the station.

While the Bush administration and NASA have spoken in general terms about plans for a return to the Moon, followed by human spaceflight to Mars, the lunar outpost plan is the first time officials have proposed a permanent presence.

”We’re going for a base on the Moon,” Mr. Horowitz said. “It’s a very, very big decision.”

Many gaps in the plan remain to be filled in. NASA called Monday’s announcement a baseline concept.

In a televised news conference from the Johnson Space Center in Houston on the eve of an international conference there on space exploration, Ms. Dale said the plan was developed after consultation with space agencies representing 14 countries and more than 1,000 experts in space science and commerce.

“The door is open for international and commercial interests,” she said.

The lunar base plan is part of a larger effort to develop an international exploration strategy, one that explains why and how humans are returning to the Moon and what they plan to do when they get there, NASA officials said.

The planning includes an international conference early next year on setting scientific goals for returning to the Moon, including those that private interests might want to pursue.

Doug Cooke, the agency official who led the lunar study group, said the plan called for putting a lander craft down near a polar crater and later adding solar-power generating units and living quarters to establish a base.

A site near the lunar South Pole, like the Shackleton Crater, would provide enough sunlight for power generation. It is also near possible deposits of valuable minerals.

From this site, Mr. Cooke said, other nations could add scientific laboratories or observatories, and commercial concerns might want to process rocket fuel and other products from water and other materials that might be found in the ground nearby.

Mr. Horowitz said having a base did not mean that humans would go there after every lunar landing. The option remains open for some missions to go to equatorial regions, as the Apollo project landers did in the 1970s, or even to the other side of the Moon.

Getting to the Moon and establishing a base will require a versatile, general-purpose lander that could land anywhere and be the core of an outpost, he said.

“The nickname I use for the lander is, it’s a pickup truck,” Mr. Horowitz said. “You can put whatever you want in the back. You can take it to wherever you want. So you can deliver cargo, crew, do it robotically, do it with humans on board. These are the types of things we’re looking for in this system.”

Ms. Dale said she and other NASA officials would spend part of next year visiting potential partners in the lunar project, like the space agencies of Europe, Russia and Japan, to see what they might want to contribute. Different aspects of a lunar base might come from many agreements between the United States and other nations, she said, rather than following the model of the space station of having many partners signing one agreement.

While there have been preliminary talks about cooperation in space with China, a growing space power which along with the United States and Russia has the ability to launch humans, it is too early to tell whether the two nations will agree to work together on human space flight projects such as the lunar base, she said.

Howard McCurdy, a NASA expert who is a professor at the school of public affairs at American University in Washington, expressed some skepticism about whether the space agency could make the ambitious plan fit in its budget, even with the winding down of the shuttle program and “throwing the keys to the International Space Station” to the other nations that helped to build it.

By relying on some of the ideas and technologies developed during the Apollo program and beyond, Mr. McCurdy said, NASA planners expect to be able to get back to the Moon for 40 percent to 60 percent of the original cost. There would be savings, too, in not having to reinvent technologies for protecting spacecraft from the heat of re-entry into the atmosphere, and not having to develop new launching facilities from scratch.

But he said he was concerned that the technology for lunar exploration “won’t get us beyond the Moon” and on to Mars.

“The fear is that the Moon, which is now viewed as a means to get beyond the Moon, will become its own destination, for hundreds of years,” he said. “The easy way to go to the Moon is the hard way to go to Mars.”

While NASA has yet to design the permanent camp, last July officials at the Johnson Space Center took reporters on a tour of possible lunar habitats to come.

The mock-ups were built of plywood and plastic, and had the crowded feel of a FEMA trailer. They addressed problems that NASA engineers expected astronauts living on the Moon to encounter.

Dust, for example, is not just untidy. On the Moon, the particles tend to be jagged and sticky, and so the engineers have designed an airlock to allow dust removal after any trip outside.

John Schwartz contributed reporting from New York.

    NASA Plans Permanent Moon Base, NYT, 5.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/05/science/space/05nasa.html?hp&ex=1165381200&en=8eeeaf2e5d0334ce&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Aging Craft Orbiting Mars Appears to Have Succumbed

November 22, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

In words and somber tones usually associated with a death in the family, engineers and scientists said yesterday that the Mars Global Surveyor, the most durable spacecraft ever to orbit that planet, had fallen silent and was given little chance of revival.

The 10-year-old spacecraft — which mapped the Martian surface, recorded seasonal and annual climate changes, and gathered evidence of water in the planet’s past — has not communicated with flight controllers since Nov. 2. A disabled solar power array is the prime suspect.

“We may have lost a dear old friend and teacher,” said Michael Meyer, chief scientist for Mars exploration at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Dr. Meyer spoke at a news teleconference from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where the mission is being directed.

Fuk K. Li, the laboratory’s Mars program manager, said the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the newest spacecraft to explore the planet, drew blanks in several attempts on Friday and Monday to make a photographic inspection of the Global Surveyor. Given that failure, mission officials said yesterday that they had exhausted the most likely means of re-establishing radio communications.

The two spacecraft regularly passed within 60 miles of each other. But in the last three weeks, ground antennas have not been able to track the Global Surveyor’s orbit to fix its probable position, which could have been altered by the malfunction.

“While we have not exhausted everything we have to do,” Dr. Li said, “we believe the prospect of recovery of Mars Global Surveyor is not looking very good at all.”

Engineers said they planned a long-shot effort to communicate with the spacecraft through one of the two roving vehicles still operating on the Martian surface. This week, flight controllers will radio a command for the Global Surveyor to use its transmitter to send signals that could be picked up by the rover Opportunity. Any message would be relayed to Earth through yet another spacecraft, the Mars Odyssey.

Traffic at Mars is fairly heavy these days. The United States has three orbiters and two surface rovers, and the European Space Agency has an orbiter, the Mars Express.

But the oldest of these was the Global Surveyor, which was launched on Nov. 7, 1996, and reached Mars orbit the next September. The craft was designed to operate for a minimum of one Mars year, or 25 Earth months. It kept going for almost five Mars years.

Tom Thorpe, the Global Surveyor manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the spacecraft had cost $156 million to build and launch and $20 million annually to operate the first few years, then about $6 million in each recent year. NASA recently agreed to extend mission operations another two years.

“It is an extraordinary machine that has done things the designers never envisioned,” Mr. Thorpe said, noting that it had overcome many handicaps: a broken solar panel soon after launching and failure of some navigation components.

Through it all, Dr. Meyer said, the Global Surveyor “changed our concept of Mars.”

The spacecraft’s cameras and scientific instruments discovered many fresh gullies etching the planet’s surface, presumably evidence of relatively recent erosion by liquid water. An infrared detector found concentrations of hematite, a mineral that often forms under wet conditions.

Other instruments mapped elevations of the rugged topography of canyons and craters, found remnants of the planet’s ancient global magnetic field and recorded yearly changes in its cold, arid climate. Scientists said they had hoped to collect weather data through one more Martian year.

    Aging Craft Orbiting Mars Appears to Have Succumbed, NYT, 22.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/science/space/22mars.html

9 Billion-Year-Old ‘Dark Energy’ Reported

November 17, 2006
The New York Times
By DENNIS OVERBYE

A strange thing happened to the universe five billion years ago. As if God had turned on an antigravity machine, the expansion of the cosmos speeded up, and galaxies began moving away from one another at an ever faster pace.

Now a group of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that billions of years before this mysterious antigravity overcame cosmic gravity and sent the galaxies scooting apart like muscle cars departing a tollbooth, it was already present in space, affecting the evolution of the cosmos.

“We see it doing its thing, starting to fight against ordinary gravity,” Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute said about the antigravity force, known as dark energy. He is the leader of a team of “dark energy prospectors,” as he calls them, who peered back nine billion years with the Hubble and were able to discern the nascent effects of antigravity. The group reported their observations at a news conference yesterday and in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The results, Dr. Riess and others said, provide clues and place new limits on the nature of dark energy, a mystery that has thrown physics and cosmology into turmoil over the last decade.

“It gives us the ability to look at changes in dark energy,” he said in an interview. “Previously, we knew nothing about that. That’s really exciting.”

The data suggest that, in fact, dark energy has changed little, if at all, over the course of cosmic history. Though hardly conclusive, that finding lends more support to what has become the conventional theory, that the source of cosmic antigravity is the cosmological constant, a sort of fudge factor that Einstein inserted into his cosmological equations in 1917 to represent a cosmic repulsion embedded in space.

Although Einstein later abandoned the cosmological constant, calling it a blunder, it would not go away. It is the one theorized form of dark energy that does not change with time.

Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology who was not on the team, said: “Had they found the evolution was not constant, that would have been an incredibly earthshaking discovery. They looked where no one had been able to look before.”

The paper by Dr. Riess and his colleagues represents a sort of progress report from the dark side, where astrophysicists have found themselves more and more as they try to understand what is happening to the universe.

This encounter with the invisible began eight years ago, when two competing teams of astronomers were using exploding stars known as Type 1a supernovas as cosmic distance markers to determine the fate of the universe.

Ever since the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, the galaxies and the rest of the universe have been flying apart like a handful of pebbles tossed in the air. Astronomers reasoned that gravity would be slowing the expansion, and the teams were trying to find out by how much and, thus, determine whether all would collapse one day into a “big crunch” or expand forever.

Instead, to their surprise, the two teams, one led by Saul Perlmutter of the University of California, Berkeley, and the other by Brian Schmidt of the Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories in Australia, found that the universe was speeding up instead of slowing down.

But the ground-based telescopes that the two teams used could track supernovas to distances of just seven billion light-years, corresponding to half the age of the universe, and the effect could have been mimicked by dust or a slight change in the nature of the supernova explosions.

Since then, Dr. Riess, who was a member of Dr. Schmidt’s team, and his colleagues have used the Hubble telescope to prospect for supernovas and dark energy farther out in space or back in time.

The new results are based on observations of 23 supernovas that are more than eight billion years in the past, before dark energy came to dominate the cosmos. The spectra of those distant supernovas, Dr. Riess reported, appear to be identical to those closer and more recent examples. By combining the supernova results with data from other experiments like the NASA Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, Dr. Riess and his colleagues could begin to address the evolution of dark energy.

“That’s one of the $64,000 questions,” he said. “Is dark energy changing?”

So far, he said, the results are consistent with the cosmological constant, but other answers are also possible. The possibility that it is the cosmological constant is a mixed blessing. Physicists concede that they do not understand it.

Dr. Carroll of Caltech said, “Dark energy makes us nervous.”

Einstein invented his constant to explain why the universe does not collapse. After he abandoned it, the theory was resuscitated by quantum mechanics, which showed that empty space should be bubbling with staggering amounts of repulsive energy. The possibility that it really exists in the tiny amounts measured by the astronomers has flummoxed physicists and string theorists.

Because it is a property of empty space, the overall force of Einstein’s constant grows in proportion as the universe expands, until it overwhelms everything. Other theories of dark energy like strange force fields called quintessence or modifications to Einstein’s theory of gravity can change in more complicated ways, rising, falling or reversing effects.

Astronomers characterize the versions of dark energy by their so-called equation of state, the ratio of pressure to density, denoted by the letter w. For the cosmological constant, w is minus one.

Dr. Riess and his group used their data to make the first crude measurement of this quantity as it stood nine billion years ago. The answer, he said, was minus one — the magic number — plus or minus about 50 percent. By comparison for more recent times, with many more supernovas observable and thus more data, the value is minus one with an uncertainty of about 10 percent.

“If at one point in history it’s not minus one,” Dr. Riess said, “then we have killed the very best explanation.”

Getting to the precision needed to kill or confirm Einstein’s constant, however, will be very difficult, he conceded. One of the biggest sources of uncertainty is the fact that the Type 1a explosions are not completely uniform, introducing scatter into the observations.

The Hubble is the sole telescope that can pursue supernova explosions deeply enough to chart the early days of dark energy. The recent announcement that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will send astronauts to maintain and refurbish the Hubble once again, enabling it to keep performing well into the next decade, is a lift for Dr. Riess’s project. A new camera could extend observations to 11 billion or 12 billion years back.

    9 Billion-Year-Old ‘Dark Energy’ Reported, NYT, 17.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/17/science/space/17dark.html?em&ex=1163998800&en=f02de71136ca5dd5&ei=5087%0A

Shuttle Takes Step Toward Launching

November 10, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Nov. 9 (AP) — The space shuttle Discovery was moved to the launching pad on Thursday to await a liftoff that could be as early as Dec. 7, an effort to avoid potential New Year’s Eve computer glitches.

The worry is that shuttle computers are not designed to make the change from the 365th day of the old year to the first day of the new one while in flight. NASA has never had a shuttle in space on Dec. 31 or Jan. 1.

“We’ve just never had the computers up and going when we’ve transitioned from one year to another,” said Joan E. Higginbotham, a Discovery astronaut. “We’re not really sure how they’re going to operate.”

Launching opportunities would be available from Dec. 7 to as late as Dec. 17 or 18, for a 12-day mission.

But NASA was quick to say that procedures could be devised to make a transition if necessary.

“If we have an ‘Oh my God,’ and we have to be up there, I am sure we would figure out a way to operate the vehicle safely,” said Steve Oswald, a vice president for Boeing, the parent company of the builders and designers of the shuttles.

    Shuttle Takes Step Toward Launching, NYT, 10.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/10/science/space/10shuttle.html

Essay

Hubble, NASA’s Comeback Kid, Survives to See a New Dawn

November 7, 2006
The New York Times
By DENNIS OVERBYE

The last time the Hubble Space Telescope was in the news, it had been figuratively tied to the railroad tracks and left for dead by Sean O’Keefe, then the NASA administrator.

After the wreck of the space shuttle Columbia, Mr. O’Keefe, who even had a mustache suitable for diabolical twirling, declared an end to the astronaut service calls that had kept the Hubble eye alive and on its game, all but ensuring that its string of matchless cosmic postcards would cease by the end of the decade.

Indeed, night was already falling. A main instrument, a spectrograph, stopped operating two years ago. The main camera stopped working for two weeks this fall. The telescope has been limping along on two of the six gyroscopes that provide pointing and stability in an effort to harbor reserves for the long years ahead.

Last week, Mr. O’Keefe’s successor, Michael D. Griffin, sprung the Hubble from the rails, announcing that he would send an astronaut crew in spring 2008 to rejuvenate the telescope one more time.

The decision ensures that if all goes well, the Hubble will continue to send back those postcards long after the space shuttles that launched and nurtured it have been trucked to the bone yards and the museums.

The shuttles are scheduled to be retired in 2010 to make way for the Crew Exploration Vehicle that will take people back to the Moon and onward to Mars. But with refurbishing, the telescope will work until at least 2013, astronomers say, and will remain in orbit until 2021 or beyond.

It is appropriate that the telescope will be the last robot standing in what has been a long and tense marriage between science and the space truck.

Long before the shuttle was a glean in NASA’s eye — long before NASA even existed — there was the idea of a space telescope.

The late Princeton astronomer Lyman Spitzer proposed way back in 1946 that a telescope in space would free astronomers from the curse of looking through air, which distorts and blurs images and blocks many forms of radiation from the heavens.

The telescope has endured a Perils of Pauline existence. In the early 1970s, advocates of the telescope hooked their dreams to the planned space shuttle, designing the Hubble to be launched into a relatively low orbit that the shuttle could reach and to be serviced by astronauts and even retrieved back to the ground, a demonstration of the glories of the new era in manned spaceflight.

This plan was not popular among many scientists who thought that the shuttle was a boondoggle, that the telescope should be higher so that the Earth would not block so much of its view and that it would be cheaper to build if it did not have to be repaired by someone wearing boxing gloves.

But it was clear, said John Bahcall, the late Princeton astrophysicist who was deeply involved in the telescope his whole life, that if the telescope did not go on the shuttle, the telescope would not go at all.

“It was an imperfect marriage,” he said in an interview two years ago. “The shuttle was the only bride available.”

The result was a Catch-22 in which NASA justified the shuttle by its ability to support scientific projects like the telescope and then justified cutting the science budget to pay for the shuttle. The telescope was nearly canceled several times in the ’70s.

Like every Big Science project in recent memory, the telescope was oversold and underfinanced, and so its manufacturer, Perkin-Elmer, skipped an expensive and risky test that would have revealed that the telescope could not be focused because its main mirror was polished to the wrong shape.

By the time of the telescope’s launching in April 1990, 14 years after Congress approved it, it had cost $2 billion. The NASA public relations machine, which had been gearing up for years for that moment, called it “the greatest advance in astronomy since Galileo.”

A few months later, when the blur was discovered, the telescope was a national joke. Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, who is a staunch space supporter from Maryland — home of the Goddard Space Flight Center and the Space Telescope Science Institute — called it a “techno turkey.”

In a do-or-die 11-day mission in December 1993, spacewalking astronauts from the shuttle Endeavour corrected the vision of the telescope. Their achievment, which vindicated the idea of astronaut maintenance, and the construction of the space station, as well, was probably the high point of the space shuttle program.

Since then, astronauts have visited the Hubble three more times, replacing the precious gyroscopes as they failed and installing a succession of more and more sensitive instruments, and the Hubble has gradually begun living up to its original hype.

It has recorded the deepest telescopic image made, showing galaxies as they existed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The instrument has shown the presence of monstrous black holes in the milky hearts of galaxies and discerned the first push of dark energy beginning to accelerate the universe five billion years ago.

Does this make the Hubble a more important instrument than the Hooker Telescope on Mount Wilson, which Edwin Hubble used to discover the expansion of the universe, or the 200-inch Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain, with which astronomers discovered quasars and began to gauge the scale and fate of the universe? I don’t know. For sure, the Hubble is the first big space telescope and the first celebrity telescope of the Internet age.

Speaking of the Hubble and its amazing images, Sandra Faber, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, said a few years ago, “We’re addicted.”

Indeed, NASA’s then administrator Daniel S. Goldin warned astronomers in 1999 to stop “hugging Hubble,” lest their affection and the expense of keeping it aloft and well interfered with developing new telescopes and new missions.

The public is also addicted, not least because of a group of astronomers known as the Hubble Heritage Project, who have applied artistic principles to process the Hubble images into romantic spacescapes. In the best of their work, like “Pillars of Creation,” showing star-forming clouds in the Eagle nebula, space takes on the majesty of Western landscapes by artists like Albert Bierstadt.

Along the way, the Hubble became the people’s telescope.

Mr. O’Keefe tried to walk away from the telescope two years ago, saying it was too risky to send astronauts anywhere but the space station. He later conceded to Steven Dick, a NASA historian, that he had never conducted a formal risk analysis. To Mr. O’Keefe’s surprise, the public and Congress would not let him abandon the Hubble. Schoolchildren volunteered to send their pennies to NASA to help pay for a service mission.

NASA’s public relations machine had done its work too well.

Mr. O’Keefe then considered sending a robot to repair the Hubble, only to find that many astronomers were wary of a machine tending their telescope. They wanted astronauts, and the National Academy of Sciences concurred. The idea died, seemingly dooming the Hubble. But then Mr. O’Keefe stepped down a year and a half ago to become the chancellor at Louisiana State University.

Dr. Griffin, who took over as administrator, is a real rocket scientist — Mr. O’Keefe had been a business professor and management expert — and had said from the beginning that he was willing to reconsider the fate of the telescope. But he has been under fire from the scientific community lately for his willingness to cut and delay science missions to finish the space station and start President Bush’s Moon Mars program. In September in a typically blunt speech at the Goddard Space Center, Dr. Griffin scolded scientists for expecting to have too much of a say over what the space agency does, and even accused them of having a conflict of interest. Last week at the same center, however, the scientists gave him a standing ovation.

Once again, the Hubble has returned from the brink. At least one more time, the astronauts will return in their homely patched-up chariot. Like ghosts of a Christmas future that never quite jelled — none of the three subsequent “Great Observatories” were designed for astronaut servicing — the astronomer knights of the shuttle will ride the robot arm, lugging their Buck Rogers wrenches, and clamber up the shiny flanks of the telescope; they will literally hug the Hubble.

    Hubble, NASA’s Comeback Kid, Survives to See a New Dawn, NYT, 8.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/07/science/space/07hubb.html

Editorial

The Amazing Hubble Telescope

November 1, 2006
The New York Times

The space agency’s finest scientific instrument escaped a death sentence yesterday when Michael Griffin, the NASA administrator, approved a shuttle mission to service and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope. It was a brave call, since repairing the Hubble will put the shuttle at greater risk than a typical mission to the International Space Station. It was also a welcome sign that NASA is willing to go the extra orbital mile to support superb science, even while it squanders large sums on completing the space station to perform research that can’t begin to compare with the Hubble’s in importance.

For a decade and a half, the Hubble has made discoveries that have helped revolutionize our understanding of the universe. Its typical role is to pick up a hint from ground-based telescopes and then use its unparalleled vantage point above the atmosphere to probe deeply into some puzzling phenomenon. The Hubble has peered farther into space and farther back in time than any other instrument. It has discovered more than 500 proto-galaxies that emitted light when the universe was in its formative stages, confirmed the jaw-dropping discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and helped establish the rate of expansion and the age of the universe.

A panel of distinguished astronomers judged that the Hubble “has arguably had a greater impact on astronomy than any instrument since the original astronomical telescope of Galileo.” And what made all of this possible was NASA’s willingness to refurbish the Hubble every few years to replace depleted batteries and gyroscopes and install new equipment. Many experts believe that when the Hubble gets two state-of-the-art instruments on the next servicing mission in 2008 it will be more capable than ever, ready to peer farther back into a time when galaxies were forming and the universe was emerging from darkness into light.

The threat to the Hubble’s future came unexpectedly from NASA itself in early 2004. In a decision that can only be described as myopic, Sean O’Keefe, the administrator at the time, unexpectedly canceled the next servicing mission, ostensibly because of safety concerns after the Columbia disaster. But the underlying reason was almost certainly that a Hubble mission would be a diversion from the administration’s priorities to complete the space station and then send astronauts back to the Moon and eventually Mars. Only intervention by Congress and the National Academy of Sciences kept the death sentence at bay.

Now Mr. Griffin has concluded that the mission can be conducted safely, especially since NASA has developed new inspection and orbital repair techniques, and that the mission will not interfere with other space priorities. A Hubble mission may be marginally more risky than a flight to the space station, but that risk is surely worth taking for the scientific payoff.

    The Amazing Hubble Telescope, 1.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/opinion/01wed1.html

NASA Plans Manned Flight to Fix Telescope

November 1, 2006
The New York Times
By WARREN E. LEARY

GREENBELT, Md., Oct. 31 — NASA announced Tuesday that it would send space shuttle astronauts in 2008 to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope, extending the life of one of its most valuable spacecraft on a mission once thought too risky to try.

Announcing the decision here at the Goddard Space Flight Center, a Hubble command post, the NASA administrator, Michael D. Griffin, said the benefits of saving the celebrated telescope were worth the risks of sending astronauts to do the job.

The 11-day mission, expected to cost about $900 million, is to lift off sometime between the spring and fall of 2008. A crew of seven, led by Scott D. Altman, who commanded the last Hubble repair mission in 2002, will capture the observatory in its 380-mile-high orbit and conduct five spacewalks to replace its aging batteries and stabilizing gyroscopes.

Without the repairs, the telescope would die in orbit in two or three years. With them, it should continue operating until at least 2013.

“While there is an inherent risk in all spaceflight activities,” Dr. Griffin said, “the desire to preserve a truly international asset like the Hubble Space Telescope makes doing this mission the right course of action.”

His predecessor, Sean O’Keefe, provoked an outcry from scientists, politicians and the public in 2004 by canceling a scheduled fifth and final repair mission in the wake of the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its crew. Mr. O’Keefe cited the risk to astronauts and the need to use the remaining shuttle flights to finish the International Space Station.

The Hubble telescope has been one of the most productive astronomical observatories ever built and the flagship of NASA’s exploration of the universe. Orbiting far above Earth’s obscuring atmosphere, it has sent back the clearest and deepest images of the universe ever seen. Those images have helped astronomers confirm the existence of black holes, determine the true age of the universe and spot dim galaxies born within the first billion years of the Big Bang.

Responding to criticism of Mr. O’Keefe’s decision, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration investigated using a robot to service the telescope. But a National Academy of Sciences advisory panel said that the chance of completing such a mission in time to save the observatory was remote and that a manned mission had a better chance of success. The committee also said the risks of a shuttle mission to the telescope were not significantly greater than those of a mission to the space station.

Still, the station could serve as a refuge for the crew of a damaged shuttle. The telescope offers no such haven. So Dr. Griffin said that during the repair mission, a second shuttle would be ready to rescue the astronauts if needed.

Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat who led the fight in Congress to save the telescope, was at the announcement and praised the decision.

Ms. Mikulski said the initial decision to abandon a repair mission was made at a time of grief, fear and indecision. She praised NASA for stepping back and getting a “second opinion” on canceling the mission.

Dr. John M. Logsdon, head of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University and a member of a panel that investigated the Columbia accident, said the next repair mission should be safer than the previous four.

“NASA is flying the shuttle with more care and has a greater capability to identify and fix problems than before,” Dr. Logsdon said.

Roger D. Launius, a historian with the National Air and Space Museum who closely follows NASA issues, said the decision could help improve Dr. Griffin’s relations with scientists who have criticized him for reducing long-term spending on science programs to pay for new human space flight initiatives.

“In this case, he’s shown a willingness to go to bat for science,” Mr. Launius said.

Dr. Griffin worked on the space telescope earlier in his career and recently described it as “one of the great scientific instruments of all time.” Before his confirmation as NASA administrator a year and a half ago, he expressed a willingness to explore repairing the orbiting observatory, which is operated by the Goddard center and the Space Science Telescope Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

The two most serious issues facing the telescope are its batteries and gyroscopes. The gyroscopes help it turn and lock onto targets; the six batteries, which have never been replaced, keep it alive.

NASA has flown three shuttle missions since the Columbia accident to test new safety modifications and resume building the space station, and agency officials said about a half dozen more flights would occur before the Hubble mission. Crews now routinely inspect the shuttle while in flight for the kind of damage that doomed the Columbia, and they carry rudimentary repair kits for fixing many heat shield problems that could bring down a shuttle.

    NASA Plans Manned Flight to Fix Telescope, NYT, 1.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/science/space/01hubble.html