History > 2011 > USA > Space (I)

NASA’s Kepler Spacecraft

Discovers 2 Earth-Size Planets

December 20, 2011
The New York Times
By DENNIS OVERBYE

In what amounts to a kind of holiday gift to the cosmos, astronomers from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft announced Tuesday that they had discovered a pair of planets the size of Earth orbiting a distant star. The new planets, one about as big as Earth, the other slightly smaller than Venus, are the smallest planets yet found beyond the solar system.

Astronomers said the discovery showed that Kepler could indeed find planets as small as our own and was an encouraging sign that planet hunters would someday succeed in the goal of finding Earth-like abodes in the heavens.

Since the first Jupiter-size exoplanets, as they are known, were discovered nearly 15 years ago astronomers have been chipping away at the sky, finding smaller and smaller planets.

“We are finally there,” said David Charbonneau, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was a member of the team that made the observations, led by his colleague Francois Fressin. The team reported its results in an online news conference Tuesday and in a paper being published in the journal Nature.

Dr. Fressin said, “This demonstrates for the first time that Earth-size planets exist around other stars and that we can detect them.”

The announcement doubled the number of known Earth-size planets in the galaxy to four from two — Earth and Venus.

The next major goal in the planetary hunt, astronomers say, is to find an Earth-size planet in the so-called Goldilocks zone of a star, where conditions are temperate for water and thus life. We are not there yet. The two new planets, called Kepler 20e and Kepler 20f, are far outside the Goldilocks zone — so close to the star, termed Kepler 20, that one of them is roasting at up to 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit — and thus unlivable.

Although the milestone of an Earth-size planet had long been anticipated, astronomers on and off the Kepler team were jubilant. Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, another Kepler team member, called the new result “a watershed moment in human history.” Debra Fischer, a planet hunter from Yale, who was not part of the team, said, “This technological feat is incredibly important because it means that the detection of Earth-sized planets at larger distances is technically possible.”

Kepler 20e, the closer and hotter planet, is also the smaller — about 6,900 miles across, or slightly smaller than Venus — and it resides about 5 million miles from its star. The more distant planet, Kepler 20f, also broiling at around 800 degrees, is 10 million miles out from its star. It is 8,200 miles in diameter, about the size of Earth. The two planets are presumed to be rocky orbs that formed in the outskirts of their planetary system and then migrated inward.

Their star, which is slightly smaller and cooler than the Sun, is about 950 light years away from us. Kepler had previously found three larger Neptune-like planets around it, so the new observations bring the total to five, so far. All the planets are well inside where Mercury would be in our own solar system, presenting a bounteous system of unlivable planets.

“This is Venus and Earth in a five-planet system,” Dr. Fischer said in an e-mail. “There’s no place like home, and the Kepler data are starting to uncover some mighty familiar architectures.”

Kepler detects planets by watching for blinks when they move in front of their stars. Since it was launched in 2009, it has found 2,326 potential planets, 207 that would be Earth-size, if confirmed as the two reported Tuesday have been.

Confirmation of a planet, however, requires additional observations, usually of its star’s wobbles as it gets tugged by the planet going around. The gravitational pull of planets as small as the Earth on their parent star is too small to measure with the current spectrographs. And so the astronomers resorted to a statistical method called Blender, developed by Dr. Fressin and Guillermo Torres of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, in which millions of computer simulations of background stars try to mimic the Kepler signal. They concluded that Kepler 20e was 3,400 times more likely to be a planet than background noise, while the odds in favor Kepler 20f being real were 1,370 to 1.

Confirmed (or validated, as the Kepler team likes to say), they join the other planets already known to orbit the star. In a surprise for astronomers who thought they knew how planetary systems form, the orbits of the new planets are sandwiched between the orbits of the older bigger gassier ones, a configuration that does not occur in our own solar system. In an e-mail, Dr. Charbonneau noted, “In the solar system, rocky worlds and gas giants don’t mingle. But in the Kepler-20 system they apparently do.”

    NASA’s Kepler Spacecraft Discovers 2 Earth-Size Planets, NYT, 20.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/science/space/nasas-kepler-spacecraft-discovers-2-earth-size-planets.html

Next Big Bet for Space:

Airborne Rocket Launcher

December 13, 2011
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG

One of the richest men in the world is going to build the biggest airplane, ever.

And then he is going to use it to launch rockets.

At a news conference in Seattle on Tuesday, Paul G. Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, plans to announce that he is entering the rocket business with a concept seldom used until now: with a plane that can take off the conventional way, then, at 30,000 feet, launch a rocket to orbit.

By getting rid of the specialized launching pads used by NASA and other space agencies, officials at Mr. Allen’s new company, Stratolaunch Systems, say they will be able to reduce costs, offer more flexibility and avoid bad weather by simply flying their airborne launcher to a patch of clear sky. They hope to begin flying in five years, first taking satellites and then, perhaps, people into orbit.

“That’s certainly part of the ultimate plan,” said Gary Wentz, the chief executive of Stratolaunch and a former chief engineer at NASA.

The project reunites Mr. Allen with Burt Rutan, a legendary aerospace engineer who, among many triumphs, built Voyager, the first airplane to fly around the world without stopping or refueling. The two teamed up a decade ago to create SpaceShipOne, the first private manned rocket to reach space, in 2004. That won the $10 million Ansari X Prize, which had been offered as incentive to push innovative space technology.

Afterward, Mr. Allen dropped out of the space limelight as Mr. Rutan worked on a larger version of SpaceShipOne for Richard Branson, the Virgin Group chairman, to carry tourists to the edge of space. The first tourist flights of Mr. Branson’s Virgin Galactic, launching out of a newly built spaceport in New Mexico, could begin by late next year.

But Mr. Allen continued working quietly in the background. His new project draws in a mixture of space industry people, old and new. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, started by the co-founder of PayPal, Elon Musk, will be building the rockets that Stratolaunch will be launching. Michael D. Griffin, a former NASA administrator who has been supportive but skeptical of the emerging commercial space industry, will serve on Stratolaunch’s board of directors.

The company that Mr. Rutan founded, Scaled Composites, will build the airplane. Mr. Rutan, who retired this year, did the preliminary designs and will serve as an adviser, but said that current Scaled employees will perform the work.

Mr. Allen is the sole investor, joining the ranks of billionaires who have placed big bets on the heavens. The most prominent is Mr. Branson, whose Virgin Galactic subsidiary is planning to bring tourists to space imminently. Other big names are Mr. Musk and SpaceX, which is racking up contracts with NASA, and Jeffrey P. Bezos, the Amazon.com founder, who has an aerospace company called Blue Origin.

Mr. Allen’s new entry, Stratolaunch, aims to take the same strategy that won the X Prize, and supersize it. For the X Prize, he and Mr. Rutan took a rocket called SpaceShipOne, slung beneath a carrier airplane, and lofted it high into the sky before being launching it — with a pilot on board.

This time around, the carrier airplane will be the biggest and heaviest ever built. With wings that will stretch 385 feet — longer than a football field — it will dwarf the double-decker Airbus A380, the biggest passenger plane flying today. It will even be bigger than the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes’s gargantuan seaplane that flew just once in 1947 but that still holds the longest wingspan, 320 feet, of any aircraft in history.

Mr. Rutan said that Scaled Composites, which is tiny compared with companies like Boeing and Airbus, will able to build such a huge airplane because it is only designing and building the airframe. Other components like the engines, electronics and landing gear will be scavenged from second-hand 747s. “The things that are most difficult, we’re not developing,” he said. “We’re just bolting them in as things that have millions of hours of airline service.”

Instead of a tiny space plane like SpaceShipOne, Stratolaunch’s carrier airplane will cradle a full-size rocket, a variant of SpaceX’s Falcon 9. The plane will take the rocket to 30,000 feet, almost six miles high, and then drop it. The rocket’s engines will then ignite and the tail fins will turn the rocket’s direction upward. The airplane will then return to the airport and, in a quick turnaround, could be ready to launch another rocket by the next day.

“That’s a key capability we have in place,” Mr. Wentz said.

The payload capacity will be about 13,500 pounds to low-Earth orbit — less than the Falcon 9 and other larger rockets like the Atlas V and Delta IV.

But Mr. Wentz said Stratolaunch was aiming for smaller satellites like NASA science probes. “We predict there is a clear opportunity to get 8 to 10 launches a year,” he said.

    Next Big Bet for Space: Airborne Rocket Launcher, NYT, 13.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/science/space/paul-allens-plan-airplanes-as-launching-pads-for-rockets.html

Astronomers Find

Biggest Black Holes Yet

December 5, 2011
The New York Times
By DENNIS OVERBYE

Don’t get too close.

Astronomers are reporting that they have taken the measure of the biggest, baddest black holes yet found in the universe, abyssal yawns 10 times the size of our solar system into which billions of Suns have vanished like a guilty thought.

Such holes, they say, might be the gravitational cornerstones of galaxies and clues to the fates of violent quasars, the almost supernaturally powerful explosions in the hearts of young galaxies that dominated the early years of the universe.

One of these newly surveyed monsters, which weighs as much as 21 billion Suns, is in an egg-shaped swirl of stars known as NGC 4889, the brightest galaxy in a sprawling cloud of thousands of galaxies about 336 million light-years away in the Coma constellation.

The other black hole, a graveyard for the equivalent of 9.7 billion Suns, more or less, lurks in the center of NGC 3842, a galaxy that anchors another cluster known as Abell 1367, about 331 million light-years away in Leo.

“These are the most massive reliably measured black holes ever,” Nicholas J. McConnell, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an e-mail, referring to the new observations.

These results are more than just cool and record-setting. Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope over the years have shown that such monster black holes seem to inhabit the centers of all galaxies — the bigger the galaxy, the bigger the black hole. Researchers said the new work could shed light on the role these black holes play in the formation and evolution of galaxies.

The previous record-holder was in the galaxy M87, a member of the Virgo cluster some 54 million light-years from here, where a black hole weighed in at a mere 6.3 billion solar masses. The new black holes, however, were even larger than astronomers had predicted based on the earlier measurements, suggesting that there is something special about how the most massive galaxies are built.

“Measurements of these massive black holes will help us understand how their host galaxies were assembled, and how the holes achieved such monstrous mass,” Mr. McConnell said.

Mr. McConnell and his thesis adviser, Chung-Pei Ma, led a team of astronomers who used telescopes in Hawaii, Texas and outer space to weigh the black holes in the centers of galaxies by clocking the speeds of stars zooming around them; the faster the stars are going, the more gravity — and thus mass — is needed to keep the stars from flying away. They report their work in the journal Nature, which will be published online on Wednesday.

Martin Rees, a cosmologist at Cambridge University, called the new work “an incremental step,” noting that the study of these monsters has been a part of his life for a long time. “It’s good to learn about even bigger ones,” he said.

Black holes, regions of space where gravity is so intense that not even light can escape from it, are among the weirdest of the predictions of Albert Einstein’s curved-space theory of gravity, general relativity — so weird that Einstein himself did not believe it. He once wrote to a friend that there ought to be a law of nature forbidding such a thing.

But he was wrong. And some of his successors, like Dr. Rees and a colleague at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking, have spent their careers studying the implications for physics of objects that can wrap spacetime around themselves like a magician’s cloak and disappear.

Such is the fate, astronomers agree, of some massive stars once they run out of fuel and collapse upon themselves. Indeed the galaxy is littered with stellar-mass black holes detectable by the X-rays spit by doomed matter swirling around them like water in a drain. And there seem to be giant ones in the heart of every galaxy.

One question astronomers would like answered is how these black holes got so big, billions of times bigger than a typical dead star. Dr. Ma described it as a kind of nature-versus-nurture argument, explaining that black holes could grow by merging with other black holes as galaxies merge to get bigger — “nature” — or by swallowing gas around them — “nurture.”

“It’s a bit like asking: Are taller children produced by taller parents or by eating a lot of spinach?” Dr. Ma wrote in an e-mail. “For black holes we are not sure.”

Astronomers also think the supermassive black holes in galaxies could be the missing link between the early universe and today. In the early days of the universe, quasars, thought to be powered by giant black holes in cataclysmic feeding frenzies, were fountaining energy into space.

Where are those quasars now? The new work supports a growing suspicion that those formerly boisterous black holes are among us now, but, having stopped their boisterous growth, are sleeping.

Mr. McConnell said, “Our discovery of extremely massive black holes in the largest present-day galaxies suggests that these galaxies could be the ancient remains of voracious ancestors.”

Let’s try not to awaken them.

    Astronomers Find Biggest Black Holes Yet, NYT, 5.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/space/astronomers-find-biggest-black-holes-yet.html

NASA Launches

Super-Size Rover to Mars:

'Go, Go!'

November 26, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The world's biggest extraterrestrial explorer, NASA's Curiosity rover, rocketed toward Mars on Saturday on a search for evidence that the red planet might once have been home to itsy-bitsy life.

It will take 8½ months for Curiosity to reach Mars following a journey of 354 million miles.

An unmanned Atlas V rocket hoisted the rover, officially known as Mars Science Laboratory, into a cloudy late morning sky. A Mars frenzy gripped the launch site, with more than 13,000 guests jamming the space center for NASA's first launch to Earth's next-door neighbor in four years, and the first send-off of a Martian rover in eight years.

NASA astrobiologist Pan Conrad, whose carbon compound-seeking instrument is on the rover, had a shirt custom made for the occasion. Her bright blue, short-sleeve blouse was emblazoned with rockets, planets and the words, "Next stop Mars!"

Conrad jumped, cheered and snapped pictures as the rocket blasted off a few miles away. So did Los Alamos National Laboratory's Roger Wiens, a planetary scientist in charge of Curiosity's rock-zapping laser machine, called ChemCam.

Wiens shouted "Go, Go, Go!" as the rocket soared. "It was beautiful," he later observed, just as NASA declared the launch a full success.

The 1-ton Curiosity — as large as a car — is a mobile, nuclear-powered laboratory holding 10 science instruments that will sample Martian soil and rocks, and analyze them right on the spot. There's a drill as well as the laser-zapping device.

It's "really a rover on steroids," said NASA's Colleen Hartman, assistant associate administrator for science. "It's an order of magnitude more capable than anything we have ever launched to any planet in the solar system."

The primary goal of the $2.5 billion mission is to see whether cold, dry, barren Mars might have been hospitable for microbial life once upon a time — or might even still be conducive to life now. No actual life detectors are on board; rather, the instruments will hunt for organic compounds.

Curiosity's 7-foot arm has a jackhammer on the end to drill into the Martian red rock, and the 7-foot mast on the rover is topped with high-definition and laser cameras. No previous Martian rover has been so sophisticated or capable.

With Mars the ultimate goal for astronauts, NASA also will use Curiosity to measure radiation at the red planet. The rover also has a weather station on board that will provide temperature, wind and humidity readings; a computer software app with daily weather updates is planned.

The world has launched more than three dozen missions to the ever-alluring Mars, which is more like Earth than the other solar-system planets. Yet fewer than half those quests have succeeded.

Just two weeks ago, a Russian spacecraft ended up stuck in orbit around Earth, rather than en route to the Martian moon Phobos.

"Mars really is the Bermuda Triangle of the solar system," Hartman said. "It's the death planet, and the United States of America is the only nation in the world that has ever landed and driven robotic explorers on the surface of Mars, and now we're set to do it again."

Curiosity's arrival next August will be particularly hair-raising.

In a spacecraft first, the rover will be lowered onto the Martian surface via a jet pack and tether system similar to the sky cranes used to lower heavy equipment into remote areas on Earth.

Curiosity is too heavy to use air bags like its much smaller predecessors, Spirit and Opportunity, did in 2004. Besides, this new way should provide for a more accurate landing.

Astronauts will need to make similarly precise landings on Mars one day.

Curiosity will spend a minimum of two years roaming around Gale Crater, chosen as the landing site because it's rich in minerals. Scientists said if there is any place on Mars that might have been ripe for life, it would be there.

"I like to say it's extraterrestrial real estate appraisal," Conrad said with a chuckle earlier in the week.

The rover — 10 feet long and 9 feet wide — should be able to go farther and work harder than any previous Mars explorer because of its power source: 10.6 pounds of radioactive plutonium. The nuclear generator was encased in several protective layers in case of a launch accident.

NASA expects to put at least 12 miles on the odometer, once the rover sets down on the Martian surface.

This is the third astronomical mission to be launched from Cape Canaveral by NASA since the retirement of the venerable space shuttle fleet this summer. The Juno probe is en route to Jupiter, and twin spacecraft named Grail will arrive at Earth's moon on New Year's Eve and Day.

NASA hails this as the year of the solar system.

___

Online:

NASA: http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/

    NASA Launches Super-Size Rover to Mars: 'Go, Go!', NYT, 26.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/11/26/science/AP-US-SCI-Mars-Rover.html

On Mars Rover,

Tools to Plumb a Methane Mystery

November 22, 2011
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG

There are no cows on Mars.

Of that, planetary scientists are certain, which leaves them puzzling over what could be producing methane gas detected in the thin Martian air. Methane molecules are easily blown apart by ultraviolet light from the Sun, so any methane floating around must have been released recently.

Could the gas be burbling from something alive? Cows, after all, burp methane on Earth. Other creatures, including a class of micro-organisms that live without oxygen, also produce methane.

NASA could get some answers soon. On the launching pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida is a spacecraft, the Mars Science Laboratory, which is scheduled to lift off on Saturday and plop down on Mars next August. It will deliver an S.U.V.-size rover named Curiosity that carries an instrument that can detect methane in the air, and if it does, it will unleash a new wave of excitement about the prospect of life on Mars.

“Based on evidence, what we do have is, unequivocally, the conditions for the emergence of life were present on Mars — period, end of story,” said Michael J. Mumma, a senior scientist for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who led one of three teams that have made still-controversial claims of detecting methane in Mars’ atmosphere. “So life certainly could have arisen there.”

Because Mars is smaller than Earth, it cooled faster, and it probably would have been hospitable for life earlier. That raises the intriguing possibility that pieces of Mars containing microbes were blasted into space by asteroid impacts and later landed on Earth, seeding life here.

In other words: We could all be descendants of Martians.

The possibility of Martians has long fueled the imagination of Earthlings, from the Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom fantasy novels to the canals Percival Lowell deluded himself into seeing through his telescope to Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radio play.

Other times, the pendulum swung back the other way. Mariner 4, the first space probe to whiz past Mars, in 1965, sent back pictures not of verdant forests, but of barren rocks. And NASA’s two Viking landers in 1976, equipped with sophisticated life chemistry experiments, analyzed the soil and found it devoid of the organic building blocks of life.

Mars, it appeared in 1976, was really most sincerely dead.

“Things looked so grim for exobiology on Mars,” said Christopher F. Chyba, a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University. “We made this tremendous investment in two Viking landers. There was a backlash of the people who felt the biology was oversold and premature.”

NASA subsequently played down the notion of life on Mars and instead set out on a methodical campaign to explore the past geology and climate of Mars. Although Mars today looks dry and cold — dead — geological markings like gullies, dry lake beds and colossal canyons point to a liquid past. “Follow the water” became the mantra. NASA’s last two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, found convincing evidence of environments that were habitable in the distant past. Curiosity will go further, looking for carbon-based molecules, including methane, that are the building blocks of life.

Recent orbital images show that water might still occasionally flow on the surface of Mars. New knowledge about life on Earth and how it can thrive in seemingly hostile environments like the dark, boiling waters near ocean-bottom volcanic vents also made scientists less dismissive of the notion that life persists on Mars. In 1996, a team of NASA scientists announced they had found fossilized microbes in a Martian meteorite that had landed in Antarctica. Those claims remain at least as controversial as the methane findings.

But short of photographing a cow or some other critter ambling among the rocks, Curiosity is not going to discover life. As with every NASA probe since the Viking landers, Curiosity is not carrying experiments designed to tell whether the building blocks of life ever came together to form life. If there are microbial Martians thriving in the soil, Curiosity will not see them.

“I don’t think we’ve put down enough groundwork,” said Michael A. Meyer, NASA’s lead scientist for Mars.

That is frustrating in particular for Gilbert V. Levin, who believes his experiment on the Vikings 25 years ago, designed to detect life, did indeed detect life.

Drops of a nutrient solution containing radioactive carbon-14 were added to Martian soil, and a stream of radioactive carbon dioxide was detected rising out of the soil. That is what would be expected from micro-organisms eating the food.

To rule out the possibility that a nonbiological chemical process was generating the carbon dioxide, other samples were heated to 320 degrees Fahrenheit to sterilize them. No radioactive carbon dioxide was seen rising from those when the nutrient drops were added, fitting with the hypothesis that the heat had killed the Martian microbes. If a nonbiological process were at play, the radioactive carbon dioxide should have been seen after the sterilization as well.

But other Viking experiments had failed to measure any organic molecules, so Dr. Levin’s results — even though they matched exactly what would be expected for life — were like announcing the discovery of a brick house in the absence of bricks. The consensus was that the claim was mistaken.

A recent discovery, however, offers a possible explanation for how Dr. Levin could be right after all. In 2008, NASA’s Phoenix lander found chemicals known as perchlorates in the Martian soil. Viking’s organic molecule detector heated the soil to release organics. But heating organic molecules in the presence of perchlorates destroys them, so even if they were there, Viking’s experiment may have inadvertently missed them.

Dr. Levin said a more sophisticated version of his experiment, weighing a couple of pounds and costing a few million dollars, could definitively validate or disprove the Viking results.

“But they won’t fly it,” Dr. Levin said. “Changing a paradigm is a tough thing. We’ve run this experiment thousands of times on Earth. It’s never given a false positive. It’s never given a false negative.”

The two missions that are to follow Curiosity — collaborations between NASA and the European Space Agency — do not have a version of Dr. Levin’s experiment planned. Christopher E. Carr, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology intrigued by the possibility that life on Earth could have started on Mars, has proposed an even more ambitious experiment: Send a DNA sequencer to Mars. That, too, has yet to find a mission to fly on.

Definitive answers may have to wait until a mission that brings Mars rocks back to Earth for study.

But that may be a very long wait. The Obama administration, mindful of tight federal budgets, has yet to give the green light on the 2016 and 2018 missions and is considering canceling them. Curiosity may be the last spacecraft landing on Mars for many years.

“That would derail the whole search for life, either extinct or extant, on Mars,” Dr. Mumma said. “That would be a disaster.”

    On Mars Rover, Tools to Plumb a Methane Mystery, NYT, 22.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/science/space/aboard-mars-curiosity-rover-tools-to-plumb-a-methane-mystery.html

Russian Rocket Gives NASA

a Lift to Space Station

November 14, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

MOSCOW — A Russian Soyuz rocket blasted off amid heavy snow in Kazakhstan on Monday morning, beginning a two-day trip to ferry three astronauts to the International Space Station and opening a new era of American dependence on Russia — and eventually on commercial enterprises — for space travel.

NASA ended its space shuttle program in July. The launch Monday morning, at 10:14 a.m. from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, carrying an American, Daniel C. Burbank, and two Russians, Anton N. Shkaplerov and Anatoly A. Ivanishin, is the first trip into orbit by astronauts since the last shuttle flight.

The Soyuz TMA-22 is scheduled to dock with the space station on Wednesday, and the three astronauts will join three others who have been on board since June. Those three astronauts are scheduled to return to Earth next week and recent mishaps had raised concerns that the space station would be left empty for the first time in more than a decade.

Monday’s launch, originally scheduled for September, was delayed after the failure in August of a Russian unmanned cargo rocket similar to the one used for manned flights. NASA officials said they were confident that their Russian counterparts had identified and corrected the problem.

In a separate mishap last week, a Russian craft headed to explore a Martian moon stalled in low-Earth orbit after its engines failed to fire. The probe, which was also launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, could crash back to Earth within weeks.

On Monday morning, video from the cosmodrome showed the astronauts wearing blue parkas as they headed to board the rocket amid snowflakes swirling in a blustery wind.

The white snowscape around the televised launch pad briefly glowed bright orange as the countdown hit zero, the boosters fired and the gray rocket quickly accelerated to more than 3,000 miles per hour for a smooth trip into space.

Once safely in orbit, the crew flashed a thumbs up.

Mr. Burbank, a veteran of previous space shuttle flights, will take charge of the space station, and the current commander, Michael Fossum, an American, and two flight engineers, Satoshi Furukawa of Japan and Sergei Volkov of Russia, are scheduled to return to Earth on Nov. 22. Another crew of three astronauts is scheduled to travel to the space station on Dec. 21.

In addition to carrying out dozens of scientific experiments, the newly arrived space station team will inaugurate the new era of commercial space expeditions, including the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket, built by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation of Hawthorne, Calif., known as SpaceX, which will carry a capsule called the Dragon.

Another commercial resupply ship being built by Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., is also expected to make the trip to the station next year, according to NASA.

    Russian Rocket Gives NASA a Lift to Space Station, NYT, 14.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/world/europe/russian-rocket-gives-nasa-a-lift-to-space-station.html

Studies of Universe’s Expansion

Win Physics Nobel

October 4, 2011
The New York Times
By DENNIS OVERBYE

Three astronomers won the Nobel prize on Tuesday for discovering that the universe is apparently being blown apart by a mysterious force that cosmologists now call dark energy. They are Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., Brian P. Schmidt of the Australian National University in Weston Creek, Australia, and Adam G. Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

They were the leaders of two competing teams of astronomers who were trying to use the exploding stars known as Type 1a supernovae as cosmic lighthouses to measure the expansion of the universe. They were hoping to measure how fast the universe, which has been expanding since its fiery birth in the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, was slowing down, and thus to find out if its ultimate fate was to fall back together in what is called a Big Crunch or not. Instead, they reported in 1998, it was inexplicably speeding up, a conclusion that nobody would have accepted if not for the fact that both groups wound up with the same answer.

At the time, “We were a little scared,” Dr. Schmidt said. Subsequent cosmological measurements have confirmed that roughly 70 percent of the universe by mass or energy consists of this antigravitational dark energy.

The most likely explanation for this bizarre behavior is a fudge factor Albert Einstein introduced into his equations in 1917 to stabilize he universe against collapse and then abandoned as his greatest blunder. “Every test we have made has come out perfectly in line with Einstein’s original cosmological constant in 1917,” Dr. Schmidt said.

Quantum theory predicts that empty space should exert a repulsive force, like dark energy, but one that is 10 to the 120th power times stronger than what the astronomers have measured, leaving some physicists mumbling about multiple universes.

Lawrence M. Krauss, a cosmologist at Arizona State University said, “The discovery that the universe is dominated by the energy of empty space has changed everything in cosmology. Nothing could, literally, not be more exciting, because now we know nothing is almost everything!”

In the years since then the three astronomers have shared a number of awards.

Dr. Perlmutter, who led the Supernova Cosmology Project out of Berkeley, will get half of the prize of 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.4 million). The other half will go to Dr. Schmidt, leader of the rival High-Z Supernova Search Team, and Dr. Riess, who was the lead author of the 1998 paper in The Astronomical Journal, in which the dark energy result was first published. They will get their prizes in Stockholm on Dec. 10.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 4, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the publication in which Adam G. Riess's 1998 paper on dark energy appeared. It was The Astronomical Journal, not Science. The article also stated incorrectly the amount of the prize. It is 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.4 million).

    Studies of Universe’s Expansion Win Physics Nobel, NYT, 4.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/science/space/05nobel.html

Michael J. Drake,

Planetary Scientist,

Dies at 65

October 2, 2011
The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO

Michael J. Drake, a planetary scientist, worked on many NASA space missions in his lifetime. But he remained devoted to one idea that he proposed several times in the last decade and that NASA officials rejected twice: to send a spacecraft to an asteroid, take rock samples from the surface and bring them home for study.

The expedition finally received NASA’s approval on May 24 after a grueling two-year review process, during which Dr. Drake continued working despite receiving a diagnosis of liver cancer and undergoing liver transplant surgery.

His exhilaration about the go-ahead sustained him as his health declined in recent months, and it kept him involved in plans for the mission’s 2016 launching “to his last breath,” said his wife, Gail Georgenson. He died on Sept. 21 in Tucson. He was 65.

Dr. Drake, the head of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, was a leader in the field of extraterrestrial geology. He studied lunar rocks, meteors and the moons of Saturn. He helped map the surface of Mars and was part of a NASA team that detected the presence of ice below the Martian surface in 2002.

But Dr. Drake, like many planetary scientists, considered asteroids the most promising frontier for exploring what he described in his writing as the “big picture questions.”

In an interview shortly after NASA announced its decision to finance the asteroid mission, which is dubbed Osiris-Rex, he listed some of the questions he hoped it would help answer: “Where do we come from? How did we come to exist? What’s the origin of the organic material that provided the building blocks that led to life?” he said.

Asteroids are considered the original stuff of the solar system — leftover scraps from the cataclysmic nebula collapse in which the solar system was formed 4.5 billion years ago. They were relatively untouched by collisions and other events that might have incinerated the surfaces of larger bodies like the planets, changing the molecular structure of their original terrains. A sample from the surface of an asteroid might prove (or disprove) one of planetary science’s big emerging theories: that the Earth was scorched and barren until it was “reseeded” eons ago by asteroids.

“We already know that amino acids exist in space, and we find them in some meteorites: chipped-off asteroids that strike Earth,” Dr. Drake said. “We believe it’s the sort of stuff that came in through the Earth’s atmosphere and provided the building blocks of life.”

“The asteroid is literally a time capsule of 4.5 billion years,” he added.

Michael Julian Drake was born on July 8, 1946, in Bristol, England, to Betty Eileen Mary and Allen Drake. He graduated with a degree in geology from Victoria University in Manchester and received his Ph.D. in 1972 from the University of Oregon.

After postdoctoral studies at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., he joined the faculty of the University of Arizona in 1973. He met his wife and remained in Tucson for the rest of his life.

Besides his wife, he is survived by their two children, Matthew and Melissa; a granddaughter; and his father and sister, Lisbeth, of East Sussex, England.

Along with colleagues, Dr. Drake worked on the Cassini mission to explore Saturn; the Gamma-Ray Spectrometer aboard the Mars Odyssey Orbiter, which first detected Mars’s ice; and the Phoenix Mars Lander, which landed in 2008 in search of Martian water and microbial life.

The NASA asteroid mission, which will cost $800 million, is basically as Dr. Drake proposed it: a spacecraft will travel to an asteroid known as 1999-RQ36, a rock about the size of Grand Central Terminal somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. The trip will take about four years. Robotic devices on the spacecraft will take measurements, photographs and readings, then scoop about two ounces of material from the asteroid’s surface to be sent back to Earth in a capsule, which is scheduled to land on the floor of the Utah desert sometime in 2023.

A secondary but not insignificant goal of the mission, as Dr. Drake designed it, will be figuring out how the trajectory of an asteroid like RQ36 might be changed if it ever happened to be heading in our direction.

Two criteria were used in selecting RQ36 as the mission’s destination, Dr. Drake said. The asteroid seemed from telescope studies to be rich in carbon and other elements found in organic compounds, making it a good candidate for testing the life-came-from-a-meteor theory.

Second, the path of RQ36’s orbit put it on a course for a possible collision with Earth in 2086. (NASA calculates the chance of that as one in 1,800.) Measurements taken by the spacecraft will help determine what kind of human-sent shove or bump, in the worst-case scenario, might keep that from happening.

On the day NASA announced its plan for the Osiris-Rex mission, an elated Dr. Drake summed up its scope. It would be about nothing less than “the origin and destiny of humanity,” he said. “The ‘origin’ is ‘Where did the organics come from that led to us?’ The ‘destiny’ is ‘Will we go the way of the dinosaurs?’ ”

    Michael J. Drake, Planetary Scientist, Dies at 65, NYT, 2.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/science/space/03drake.html

Falling Satellite Could End

Where It Began, NASA Says

September 23, 2011
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG

A wayward NASA satellite may yet fall to Earth in the United States.

On Friday morning, the space agency issued an update about its defunct Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, which is dropping out of the sky more slowly than anticipated.

“Re-entry is expected late Friday, Sept. 23, or early Saturday, Sept. 24, Eastern Daylight Time,” NASA said. “The satellite’s orientation or configuration apparently has changed, and that is now slowing its descent.”

A day earlier, NASA said it expected the satellite to re-enter Friday morning.

The six-ton satellite circles the Earth on a tilted orbit, and as the planet turns each day, different locations pass underneath. The satellite’s orbit on Friday afternoon will not take it over any part of North America, but by Saturday, parts of the United States will again be in its path.

“There is a low probability any debris that survives re-entry will land in the United States, but the possibility cannot be discounted because of this changing rate of descent,” NASA said.

At least 26 pieces, the largest 330 pounds, are expected to survive the plunge and land along a path 500 miles long.

NASA has forecast a 1-in-3,200 risk that that debris from satellite could injure someone, and the risk for any individual is infinitesimal, at one in trillions. There are no known instances of anyone being injured by falling space debris. When the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry in 2003, the seven astronauts aboard perished, but no one on the ground was injured as 42.5 tons of debris showered down from West Texas to Southwest Louisiana.

NASA satellites also receive considerably more attention when they come back to Earth than other debris of similar size. About one satellite five metric tons or larger re-enters the atmosphere every year. For example, on a test flight of its Falcon 9 rocket in June 2010, the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation placed the second stage and a prototype capsule into orbit. That object, heavier than the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, came crashing back to Earth two and a half weeks later without causing a media ripple.

    Falling Satellite Could End Where It Began, NASA Says, NYT, 23.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/science/space/24satellite.html

Dead Satellite’s Fall

Becomes a Phenomenon

September 22, 2011
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG

The odds that a falling satellite will kill you on Friday are probably zero — but maybe not quite.

A dead hulk of a NASA satellite the size of a bus is skimming the top of the atmosphere, and as air molecules bounce off, its orbit is decaying until gravity finally pulls it down as a fiery meteor.

To be specific, 26 large pieces of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, the heaviest about 330 pounds, are expected to survive all the way and hit the surface. The debris will stretch along a 500-mile path.

At the same time that NASA has been spewing out bland itinerary updates — by Wednesday evening, North America had been ruled out as a crash pad — the event has turned into a bit of a media and pop culture phenomenon. Just about every major news outlet started weighing in on the impending arrival. On Facebook, people were linking to news stories and adding their own ruminations, like “Wear a hardhat” and “Should we be concerned?”

On Fox News, the anchor Shepard Smith dubbed Friday “Bus Day U.S.A.” and called the network’s coverage “the stupidest thing we’ve ever done.”

And on MSNBC.com, about 5,000 readers answered a poll about the satellite’s predicted course. Ten percent were “relieved that it’s likely to miss North America” while 34 percent were “bummed out at missing the fireworks” and 42 percent were “worried ... what about the rest of the world?”

Some concerned citizens took the opportunity to contemplate our collective plight. “Many of us are hard-wired to be paranoid about things falling from the sky,” wrote an editorialist in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Cold rain, rocks dropped by delinquents from highway overpasses and air show accidents freak us out. They awaken in us that primal fear that thunderbolts were flung from heaven.”

Still, this satellite’s impending re-entry has not generated as much concern and good-humored fun as when the Skylab space station fell to Earth in July 1979. Skylab was much bigger — about the size of a house — while the current projectile is more along the lines of a city bus. When bits of Skylab fell in Western Australia, no one was injured but the local authorities did fine NASA $400 for littering.

Back then, John Belushi appeared on Weekend Update on “Saturday Night Live,” maniacally ramming a handheld model of Skylab into a globe. People threw parties, bought Skylab “crash helmets,” and wore T-shirts with bull’s-eye targets. (The T-shirt wearers reasoned that the United States government could not hit the broad side of a barn, therefore by wearing a bull’s-eye, they were safe.)

This time, there has been little if any merchandizing. Various Web sites have tried to track the progress of the descending satellite, and Space.com has assembled a list of the “worst space debris events of all time.” Those include fallout from the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia, which rained on parts of Texas and Louisiana in 2003, and the small chunk of a Delta 2 rocket booster that fluttered onto an Oklahoma woman, Lottie Williams, in 1997 — the only person known to have been hit by space debris.

NASA has calculated a 1-in-3,200 chance of anyone on Earth being hurt by its satellite’s death plunge.

“The funny thing is that I have a better chance of getting hit by this satellite than winning the lottery,” Chanan Carroll, a Baltimore rabbi, wrote on his Facebook page

That was not true, even when there was a possibility of the satellite landing in Baltimore.

The odds of demise-by-satellite for any particular person among the world’s seven billion people are much lower, on the order of 1-in-trillions, said Nicholas L. Johnson, NASA’s expert on space debris at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

By Thursday afternoon, NASA had narrowed the time of re-entry on Friday to between noon and 6 p.m. Eastern time. The satellite circles the Earth four times in six hours, but none of the Friday afternoon orbits pass over North America. That increases the odds, still infinitesimal, for people living in areas of Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe that do lie along the trajectory.

Rabbi Carroll, for one, thought that NASA’s reticence in narrowing down the impact site to be clever disaster management.

“I think that NASA knows exactly where and when it’s coming down,” he wrote. “If they let the word out, a thousand idiots will gather at the impact site, waiting to get whacked. And their lawyers can sue NASA. ”

The science of predicting where a tumbling satellite is going to fall is tricky. The Earth’s atmosphere puffs up and deflates depending on how strongly the sun is shining on a particular day, and that phenomenon speeds or slows the rate of falling. If a calculation is off by half an hour, the falling satellite has already traveled one-third of the way around the world.

Launched in 1991 by the space shuttle Discovery, the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite was decommissioned in 2005 and placed into a lower orbit so it would not cause any problems for the International Space Station. Now, in what NASA calls an “uncontrolled” re-entry — there is no more fuel to guide it — it will plop down somewhere on Friday afternoon, give or take a few hours.

In the meantime, #UARS has turned into a popular hashtag on Twitter. “I’m selling anti-satellite-debris umbrellas for $145 each,” one user wrote.

    Dead Satellite’s Fall Becomes a Phenomenon, NYT, 22.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/science/space/23satellite.html

NASA Detects

Planet Dancing

With a Pair of Stars

September 15, 2011
The New York Times
By DENNIS OVERBYE

From double sunrise to double sunset the show goes on, always changing.

Sometimes the orange sun rises first. Sometimes it is the red one, although they are never far apart in the sky and you can see them moving each other, casting double shadows across the firmament and periodically crossing right in front of each other.

Such is life, if it were possible, on the latest addition to the pantheon of weird planets now known to exist outside the bounds of our own solar system. It is the first planet, astronomers say, that has been definitely shown to be orbiting two stars at once, circling at a distance of some 65 million miles a pair of stars that are themselves circling each other much more closely. A team of astronomers using NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft announced the discovery on Thursday in a paper published online in the journal Science and in a talk at a conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo.

The official name of the new planet is Kepler 16b, but astronomers are already referring to it informally as Tatooine, after the home planet of Luke and Anakin Skywalker in the George Lucas “Star Wars” movies, which also had two suns. Indeed, a representative from Mr. Lucas’s production company, Lucasfilm, expected to participate in a news conference at NASA’s Ames Research Laboratory in California, Kepler’s home office.

“Reality has finally caught up with science fiction,” said Alan P. Boss of the Carnegie Institution, a member of the research team.

While some double-star systems have been suspected to harbor planets, those smaller bodies have never been seen.

“This is a direct detection; it removes all doubt,” said Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who led the discovery team. “It will help those guys make their case.”

Beyond the wow factor, astronomers said the discovery — as so many discoveries of so-called exoplanets have done — had thrown a wrench into another well-received theory of how planets can and cannot form. “In other words,” said Sara Seager, a planetary expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not part of the discovery team, “people don’t really know how to form this planet.”

It was long thought, Dr. Seager said, that for its orbit to be stable, a planet belonging to two stars at once would have to be at least seven times as far from the stars as the stars were from each other. According to that, Kepler 16b would have to be twice as far out as it is to survive.

“This planet broke the rule,” she said.

Moreover, by timing all the eclipses and transits of planet and stars in the system, the astronomers have been able to measure the sizes and masses of the stars and the planet to unusually high precision, calibrating models of stellar and planetary properties.

“I believe this is the best-measured planet outside the solar system,” Dr. Doyle said. Technically, Tatooine is probably a ball of gas about the size of Saturn living in a system about 200 light-years away, in the constellation Cygnus.

If you go, pack to wear layers. Because those suns move back and forth all the time, temperatures on the planet can change by some 54 degrees over the course of a few Earth days from minus 100 to minus 150 Fahrenheit. So the weather is like “a nippy day in Antarctica at best,” as Dr. Doyle put it.

Kepler, launched in 2009, is on a three-year mission to determine the fraction of stars in the galaxy that have Earth-like planets. It scrutinizes a patch of some 155,000 stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra looking for dips in starlight when planets cross in front of their home stars.

In the case of the Kepler 16 system — home to Tatooine — there turned out to be a lot of dips. The two stars are about 20 million miles apart and produce two eclipses every 41 days as they take turns going in front of each other. One star is about two-thirds the mass of the Sun, the other about a fifth of the Sun.

In addition, there are smaller dips when the planet, which is about 65 million miles from the center of the system — about the distance of Venus from the Sun — passes in front of each of the stars in the course of its 229-day orbit.

The degree of dimming during the planetary transits — those times that a planet crosses the path of something else — usually allow Kepler astronomers to measure the size of a planet relative to the stars. As a result, uncertainties in the properties of stars propagate into uncertainties of as much as 25 percent in the mass of a planet — enough to blur the line between a rocky planet and a gaseous one.

But in the Kepler 16 system, by comparing slight variations in the timing of the transits with calculations of the positions of the stars and the gravitational nudges the bodies give one another, Dr. Doyle’s team could deduce the absolute masses and sizes of the stars and planets in the system. That is a tool, they say, that is becoming increasingly valuable for determining the masses of small planets in multiple-planet systems.

As a result, said Dr. Doyle, “it’s a laboratory for all sorts of physics and stellar evolution.”

The Tatooine laboratory will be available to a wide audience for at least a while longer. Dr. Doyle noted that amateur astronomers in northern Asia, equipped with as little as an eight-inch telescope and an off-the-shelf CCD detector (an electronic device that cameras use to capture images), would be able to record the passage of the Tatooine planet across the brighter star in its system on June 28 next year.

But enjoy it while you can. Because of variations in the planet’s orbital plane, as seen from Earth, the planet will stop crossing one of the stars as soon as 2014 and cease transiting the other, brighter one in 2018. It will be around 2042 before the show starts up again for Earthlings.

    NASA Detects Planet Dancing With a Pair of Stars, NYT, 15.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/science/space/16planet.html

NASA Unveils New Rocket Design

September 14, 2011
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG

NASA revealed on Wednesday a design for its next colossal rocket that is to serve as the backbone for exploration of the solar system for the coming decades.

The rocket would be the most powerful since the Saturn V that took Americans to the moon four decades ago. NASA expects that it could lift astronauts on deep-space missions farther than anyone has ever traveled.

“We’re investing in technologies to live and work in space, and it sets the stage for visiting asteroids and Mars,” the NASA administrator, Major General Charles F. Bolden Jr., said at a news conference.

In an effort to speed development and control costs, the design is based on pieces from the just-retired space shuttles. The first stage would essentially be an elongated shuttle fuel tank, and it would use the same rocket engines. For the initial test flights, solid rocket boosters — stretched versions of the shuttle boosters — would be strapped on to provide additional thrust.

The first unmanned test flight of the first iteration of the rocket, able to lift 70 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, could fly as early as 2017. Future versions are to be more powerful, capable of lifting up to 130 metric tons.

The cost of developing the rocket is estimated at $10 billion over the next five years. The crew capsule where the astronauts would ride would cost $6 billion and the launching pad and other ground facilities would add another $2 billion, for a total of $18 billion.

Congressional backers of NASA hailed the announcement as resolving a standoff between Congress and the White House over the future of the space agency.

“This is a day we’ve been looking forward to for a long time,” said Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. “We wish it had been sooner, of course.”

Last year, Congress passed a blueprint for the space agency calling for a rocket like the one announced Wednesday, and President Obama signed it into law. But NASA missed deadlines for announcing how it would implement the plan. In frustration, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, where Senator Hutchison serves as ranking member, even issued a subpoena to NASA demanding information.

NASA has yet to work out the details of how it could use the new rocket, and the launching schedule beyond the first test flight will depend highly on future budgets. Internal NASA documents suggest that if the space agency’s budget remains flat, providing about $41 billion between now and 2025, then the first manned flight would not occur until 2021, and the rocket would fly only once every two years, and NASA would not finish the 130 metric ton version until after 2030.

With more money — perhaps as much as $62 billion — the space agency estimated that it could fly up to two missions a year and have enough to start developing the pieces, like a deep-space habitat, that would likely be needed to for a mission to an asteroid.

    NASA Unveils New Rocket Design, NYT, 14.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/15/science/space/15nasa.html

For NASA,

Return Trip to Jupiter

in Search of Clues

to Solar System’s Origins

August 4, 2011
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG

The last time we saw Jupiter up close, it was 16 years ago, when a probe from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft took a death plunge through the cloud tops and radioed back tantalizing data that all but screamed, “To be continued...”

Now NASA is headed back to the big planet, looking for the clues to help answer pressing questions about the early days of the solar system. Because whatever was in Jupiter at the beginning — more than 4.5 billion years ago, when the solar system was formed — is still there, scientists say, hiding in a mysterious gas giant made up of dust and gas left over by the Sun.

A spacecraft named Juno (after Jupiter’s wife in Roman mythology) is scheduled to lift off Friday morning from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, embarking on a five-year trip. On July 4, 2016, as determined by planetary mechanics, not American patriotism, Juno will pull into orbit around Jupiter and spend a year there, making scientific observations of gravity, magnetic fields and the wetness of the Jovian atmosphere.

And then scientists may learn more of the secrets of Jupiter, which has twice as much mass as the rest of the planets in the solar system combined.

“Jupiter holds the history of the solar system,” said Scott Bolton, director of the space science department at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, and the principal investigator for the Juno mission. “If you want to understand that first step of how you went from forming a sun to forming the planets, you have to understand what went into Jupiter and how it was made.”

Although the wait will be long, scientists are excited enough about what they learned from Galileo — which was sent into Jupiter’s atmosphere in 2003, lest it crash into one of the moons and contaminate the environment with bacteria from Earth — that they have great expectations for Juno. The trip is costing $1.1 billion.

The biggest question is the water, because Galileo’s atmospheric probe found hardly any.

“There’s a missing piece that turns out to be important,” Dr. Bolton said.

Astronomers have the big picture of the origins of the solar system. A cloud of hydrogen, much like interstellar hydrogen clouds seen elsewhere in the galaxy, collapsed to form the Sun. As the cloud collapsed, it began to spin, like a figure skater pulling in the arms. That produced a flattened disk of leftovers orbiting the newborn Sun, and those leftovers coalesced into the planets.

What exactly was in those leftovers is not known, however, which is why many of the spacecraft crisscrossing the solar system are looking for pristine remnants in comets, asteroids and — soon — Jupiter. While scientists can explain the hydrogen and the helium, it is the smidgen of heavier elements like carbon, oxygen, iron and nitrogen that are key elements for almost everything on Earth.

“Life is in the balance here,” Dr. Bolton said, “and the things that make us up — that everything we’re looking at, breathing, touching — is all more or less unexplained.”

There are a few reasons that Jupiter holds particular interest for scientists. For one thing, it probably formed first, before the other planets. And its gravity is so strong that once anything got sucked into it during those formative years, it never got out again.

Even before the Galileo mission, astronomers had measurements indicating that Jupiter contained higher concentrations of heavier elements than the Sun — a surprising finding, because both bodies were formed out of the same hydrogen cloud. But they came up with a plausible explanation: Among the solar system leftovers, they speculated, were water ice crystals. After all, hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, oxygen is third and water molecules — two hydrogens and one oxygen — should be common. Ice traps heavier elements, and thus the icy bits that gathered into what became Jupiter could have skewed the concentrations higher.

The Galileo probe did measure enhanced concentrations, as expected, but not in the pattern predicted by the ice explanation. “In fact, in that one measurement, all the theories of how planets were made were proven wrong,” Dr. Bolton said, “and we were like, ‘Oh no, what now?’ Nature threw us a curveball.”

Even more perplexing was the paucity of water. In the post-mortem analysis, many scientists surmised that, by unlucky chance, the probe descended into a particularly hot and dry spot on Jupiter.

But that was only an educated guess. The obvious next step would have been to send more probes beneath the cloud cover of Jupiter — especially ones that could survive to greater depths and temperatures — but that would have been prohibitively expensive.

Juno is taking a different approach. The heat of Jupiter emits microwaves, and water absorbs microwaves. By simply measuring the strength of the microwaves radiating from Jupiter, scientists will be able to figure out how much water is in the clouds.

“Once we get all those ingredients, we’ll see if we can figure out how to bake the cake, so to speak,” Dr. Bolton said.

To make the measurements, Juno will travel along a squashed elliptical orbit, swooping to within 3,100 miles of the cloud tops. Over the course of 33 orbits during the mission, Juno will get a global view of the interior. Unlike Galileo’s orbit, Juno’s will pass over Jupiter’s north and south poles, allowing the first close-up looks at the bright auroras there.

To survive the intense radiation around Jupiter, its instruments are housed inside a titanium vault. Eventually, the radiation will destroy the electronics and the craft will be sent crashing into the planet.

The gravity and magnetic field measurements could provide evidence of metallic hydrogen — at the crushing pressures inside Jupiter, hydrogen is expected turn into a liquid metal — and a core of heavier elements.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Dr. Bolton revealed that Juno would be carrying a commemorative plaque of Galileo Galilei, the scientist who first looked at Jupiter through a telescope, as well as three aluminum Lego figures: of Galileo, Juno and Jupiter carrying his thunderbolts.

For NASA, Return Trip to Jupiter in Search of Clues to Solar System’s Origins,
NYT, 4.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/science/space/05jupiter.html

Atlantis Begins Last Trip Home

July 19, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A space shuttle left the International Space Station for the very last time Tuesday, heading home to end the 30-year run of a vessel that kept U.S. astronauts flying to and from orbit longer than any other rocketship.

Atlantis slipped away after performing a partial lap around the space station. Ten pairs of eyes pressed against the windows, four in the shuttle and six in the station.

All that remains of NASA's final shuttle voyage is the touchdown, targeted for the pre-dawn hours of Thursday back home in Florida.

"Get her home safely and enjoy the last couple days in space shuttle Atlantis," Mission Control told commander Christopher Ferguson and his crew.

Replied Ferguson: "It's been an incredible ride."

The voice emanating from the shuttle Mission Control Center cracked with emotion, as the lead team of controllers signed off for the very last time.

"When you walk out the door of MCC there, turn around and make a memory," urged Ferguson.

In keeping with tradition, Atlantis' departure was marked by the ringing of the naval ship's bell aboard the space station. The undocking occurred nearly 250 miles above the Pacific.

"Atlantis departing the International Space Station for the last time," space station astronaut Ronald Garan Jr. announced, ringing the bell three times. "We'll miss you guys. Godspeed."

Ferguson thanked the six station residents for their hospitality, then added:

"We'll never forget the role the space shuttle played in its creation. Like a proud parent, we anticipate great things to follow ... Farewell, ISS. Make us proud."

As a final salute, the space station rotated 90 degrees to provide never-before-seen views of the complex. Atlantis flew halfway around the outpost, cameras whirring aboard both craft to record the historic event.

Flight controllers savored the dual TV images of the shuttle — the last ever seen from orbit — and the station. Mission Control called it the second-best view on Earth.

"It must look pretty spectacular," Ferguson said.

And it did: Atlantis sailing serenely against the black void of space, its payload bay wide open, and the space station, its huge solar wings glowing golden in the sunlight.

"We just want to give you a final goodbye," Ferguson told the station crew just before Atlantis disappeared from sight.

Atlantis spent 8½ days at the space station and left behind a year's worth of supplies, insurance in the event commercial providers encounter delays in launching their own cargo ships.

It was the 37th shuttle mission, over more than 12 years, dedicated to building and maintaining the space station — the largest structure ever to orbit the planet.

All told, shuttles spent 276 days — or nearly 40 weeks — docked to the station. It's now a sprawling complex with multiple science labs — 13 rooms in all and more than 900,000 pounds of mass, most of that delivered by shuttles.

"So large that some astronauts have even momentarily gotten lost in it — you can take it from me," said Mission Control communicator Daniel Tani, a former station resident. "Of course, the ISS wouldn't be here without the space shuttle so ... we wanted to say thank you and farewell to the magnificent machines that delivered, assembled and staffed our world-class laboratory in space."

NASA and its international partners mean to keep it running until at least 2020.

With the retirement of the shuttle fleet, the space station now must rely solely on other countries for restocking, at least until the first privately funded rocket blasts off with a load. That could come by year's end.

Astronaut launches from U.S. soil, however, are three to five years away — at best. Until then, Americans will continue flying to and from the space station via Russian Soyuz capsules at a hefty price.

Before leaving, the Atlantis crew gave their station colleagues a small U.S. flag that flew on the inaugural shuttle voyage in 1981. The flag is the prize for the first rocket maker that brings Americans back to the station, launching from America.

President Barack Obama described it last week as "a capture-the-flag moment here for commercial spaceflight."

Obama wants private companies taking over Earth-to-orbit operations so NASA can concentrate on sending astronauts beyond. The goals: an asteroid by 2025 and Mars by the mid-2030s.

As for NASA's three shuttles, they will become museum displays.

Atlantis will join Discovery and Endeavour in retirement after this 13-day journey, the 135th for the shuttle program.

As it turns out, Tuesday marked the 36th anniversary of the undocking of the Apollo spacecraft from a Soviet Soyuz in the first-of-its-kind joint flight. Nearly six years passed between the end of that 1975 mission and the start of NASA's next: the space shuttle.

Mission Control said that gap — five years and nine months — is the mark to beat this time around. And it said it was starting the clock.

___

Online:

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

    Atlantis Begins Last Trip Home, NYT, 19.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/07/19/us/AP-US-Space-Shuttle.html

How’s the Weather?

June 16, 2011
The New York Times
By MADHULIKA GUHATHAKURTA
and DANIEL N. BAKER

LATELY, the Sun has been behaving a bit strangely. In 2008 and 2009, it showed the least surface activity in nearly a century. Solar flare activity stopped cold and weeks and months went by without any sunspots, or areas of intense magnetism. Quiet spells are normal for the Sun, but researchers alive today had never seen anything like that two-year hibernation.

Now that the Sun is approaching the peak of its magnetic cycle, when solar storms — blasts of electrically charged magnetic clouds — are most likely to occur, no one can predict how it will behave. Will solar activity continue to be sluggish, or will solar storms rage with renewed vigor?

Luckily, policy makers are paying attention to space weather. Late last month, President Obama and the British prime minister David Cameron announced that the United States and Britain will work together to create “a fully operational global space weather warning system.” And just last week, the United Nations pledged to upgrade its space weather forecasts.

But most people have never heard of space weather, which is a problem, because both high and low solar activity have serious effects on life on Earth.

Modern society depends on a variety of technologies that are susceptible to the extremes of space weather. Spectacular explosions on the Sun’s surface produce solar storms of intense magnetism and radiation. These events can disrupt the operation of power grids, railway signaling, magnetic surveying and drilling for oil and gas. Magnetic storms also heat the upper atmosphere, changing its density and composition and disrupting radio communications and GPS units. The storms’ charged particles can be a hazard to the health of astronauts and passengers on high altitude flights.

Severe storms in 1989 and 2003 caused blackouts in Canada and Sweden. In 1859, a solar super storm sparked fires in telegraph offices. Such storms are predicted every century or so, and perhaps we’re overdue. According to a 2008 National Academies report, a once-in-a-century solar storm could cause the financial damage of 20 Hurricane Katrinas.

A quiet Sun causes its own problems. During the two-year quiet spell, our upper atmosphere, normally heated and inflated by the Sun’s extreme ultraviolet radiation, cooled off and shrank. This altered the propagation of GPS signals and slowed the rate of decay of space debris in low Earth orbit. In addition, the cosmic rays that are normally pushed out to the fringes of the solar system by solar explosions instead surged around Earth, threatening astronauts and satellites with unusually high levels of radiation.

The more we know about solar activity, the better we can protect ourselves. The Sun is surrounded by a fleet of spacecraft that can see sunspots forming, flares crackling and a solar storm about 30 minutes before it hits Earth. NASA and the National Science Foundation have also developed sophisticated models to predict where solar storms will go once they leave the Sun, akin to National Weather Service programs that track hurricanes and tornadoes on Earth. Thanks to these sentries, it is increasingly difficult for the Sun to take us by surprise.

If alerted, Internet server hubs, telecommunications centers and financial institutions can prepare for disruptions and power plant operators can disconnect transformers.

But what good are space weather alerts if people don’t understand them and won’t react to them? Consider the following: If anyone should be familiar with the risks of space weather, it’s a pilot. During solar storms, transpolar flights are routinely diverted because the storms can disrupt the planes’ communications equipment. And yet a space weather forecaster we know at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration often tells a story of a conversation he had with a pilot:

Pilot: “What do you do for a living?”

Forecaster: “I forecast space weather.”

Pilot: “Really? What’s that?”

The point of the story is to highlight how far the scientific community and the government have to go to raise awareness about space weather and its effects.

With the sun waking up, trans-Atlantic cooperation comes at just the right time. Let us hope it is only the beginning of a worldwide effort to forecast and understand space weather.

 

Madhulika Guhathakurta is a solar physicist at NASA. Daniel N. Baker is the director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado. These views are their own.

    How’s the Weather?, NYT, 16.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/opinion/17baker.html

Shuttles, Turning Sedentary,

Leave Pieces Behind for Science

and Safety

June 1, 2011
The New York Times
By HENRY FOUNTAIN

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — NASA, it seems, is having trouble letting go.

As the agency gets its space shuttles ready to be shipped out to museums, it will not be sending them off lock, stock and barrel. The crews doing the prep work have been flooded with requests to squirrel away parts of the spacecraft for analysis. Valves, flight-control instruments, even the tires and windows — little is safe from the clutches of NASA engineers.

“I’ve got a list of hundreds of items that have to come off the ship,” said Stephanie S. Stilson, who is directing the preparation of the shuttle Discovery for delivery to the Smithsonian Institution next year in what NASA calls its “transition and retirement” program.

In April, NASA named the permanent old-age homes for its shuttles, which have been escorting astronauts to space for 30 years. The Endeavour, which completed its last mission early Wednesday with a pinpoint landing after 16 days in orbit, will bask in glory only briefly before it is groomed for delivery to the California Science Center in Los Angeles. The Atlantis, which will make its final flight next month, is destined to live at the visitors’ center here at the space center.

The Discovery made its last flight in March and now sits in a maintenance bay, enclosed by platforms that would normally be crawling with workers inspecting and maintaining its many systems — including the thousands of thermal tiles that cover its skin — to be ready for its next liftoff. These days, as the shuttle program winds down and the staff has been winnowed by layoffs, technicians work on the Discovery only when there are no more pressing tasks. And rather than sprucing it up for another trip to space, likely as not they are taking something out of it.

“We in engineering, we want to hold on to things that we could potentially use, or we want to study them, which is a smart thing to do,” Ms. Stilson said. The shuttles are the only spacecraft that have been launched into orbit multiple times — the Discovery is the most-traveled, with 39 missions — and a better understanding of how the materials and equipment have fared could help future aerospace designers.

Ms. Stilson spoke near one of the Discovery’s main landing gears, where the tires used on the last flight had been removed in favor of what NASA calls “roll-around tires” — basically a bunch of old spares. On a higher platform, workers were putting the finishing touches on replacement windows for the spacecraft, the originals having been taken out so engineers could study what effect the microdebris encountered in so many trips in space had on the glass.

While those who are to receive the shuttles say they understand the need for research, they are a little surprised by how much will be missing.

“We’re considered to be the nation’s official repository of our past,” said Valerie Neal, curator for contemporary human spaceflight at the Smithsonian, which will display the Discovery at the National Air and Space Museum’s annex near Dulles Airport. “Our point of view would be to receive an orbiter in as intact a state as possible.”

Ms. Neal said that when she first started discussing the fate of the shuttle with NASA several years ago, “I rather naïvely thought it would be intact.”

Some of the removal work is dictated by safety concerns. There are small explosive charges all around the shuttle, including one designed to blow a latch and deploy the front landing gear should the normal systems fail. Although the firing mechanism has been disabled, “We don’t want to take a chance that if it’s sitting in the Smithsonian it could somehow detonate,” Ms. Stilson said.

The thrusters near the shuttle’s nose and the podlike maneuvering engines in the rear both contain propellants that are highly toxic and corrosive, even in tiny amounts. So these components have been removed and sent to a special facility where workers in hazardous materials suits will “cut and gut” them, removing much of the insides before shipping them back. “We’ll reinstall them, and from the outside they’ll look exactly the same,” Ms. Stilson said.

The shuttle’s three main engines have been removed, in part because NASA has hopes they might be used again. In their place crews will install spare nozzles, the bell-shaped parts that the public sees protruding from the back of the spacecraft. But all the exquisitely machined pumps and plumbing that once handled thousands of gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen will essentially be replaced by an empty box. NASA, with its penchant for abbreviations, even has one for these: R.S.M.E.’s, for replica shuttle main engines.

Dan Quinn, a technician who works for a NASA contractor and has cared for shuttles for 23 years, said it was “a little bittersweet” taking out the engines for the last time, which took about two weeks. But he is still proud that the Discovery will be on display. “Basically, it will be in flight configuration as far as we’re concerned, except that it will be a simulated engine,” he said.

It is not that NASA engineers are hovering over the shuttles like mechanics at a junkyard, trying to abscond with whatever they can get their hands on. The agency has a formal vetting process for part requests, and the proposals have to include bona fide research projects. “I think that they’re trying to install some checks and balances so the vehicles don’t get totally cannibalized,” Ms. Neal said.

Jeffrey N. Rudolph, president of the California Science Center, said his organization also had some concerns, but would “try to turn it into a positive.” For example, he said, if NASA wants to reuse the main engines, “that’s a story we can tell.”

Ms. Neal, who said she had “come to peace” that the toxic elements had to be removed but was “heartbroken” to learn that the main engines were going as well, said the Smithsonian had asked NASA to document everything it was taking out.

“I appreciate the engineering needs,” she said, adding that there was a “perfectly reasonable rationale” for removing many parts.

But she noted that in the past NASA engineers had come to the Smithsonian to get inside the Apollo command module displayed there, to get a firsthand feel for the design.

“I’m thinking ahead 25, 50, 100 years,” she said. “I’m convinced there will be a need to get back inside the shuttle. People are going to want to know — how did they do it? That’s why we need to keep it as intact as possible.”

    Shuttles, Turning Sedentary, Leave Pieces Behind for Science and Safety, 1.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/science/space/02shuttle.html

Lights on Earth Impede

Arizona’s Eyes on Space

May 19, 2011
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY

MOUNT HOPKINS, Ariz. — There is no Border Patrol in space. But the very earthly cat-and-mouse game between smugglers and America’s border agents is affecting the exploration of space, lighting up the nighttime sky in southern Arizona and making astronomers strain even harder to figure out the mysteries of the universe.

Arizona is an astronomy haven with an array of prestigious observatories taking advantage of the state’s dry weather, minimal cloud cover and dark skies. But the state’s astronomers worry about a variety of threats — border enforcement among them — to the pristine conditions that have allowed them to discover new planets, gain important insights into how the universe functions and generate hundreds of millions of dollars annually in economic return.

Drug smugglers and illegal immigrants making their way north are sometimes visible to astronomers at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory here who take a break from gazing skyward to look around the rough, wooded terrain. But it is not the outlaws that affect their work as much as the authorities who are after them.

A Border Patrol helicopter shining a blinding beam on a group of suspects runs the risk of interfering with valuable machinery trained upward, like the four massive telescopes, known as Veritas or the Very Energetic Radiation Telescope Array System, that measure gamma rays. “It’s happened,” said Dan Brocious, spokesman for the observatory, which is jointly run by the Smithsonian Institution and Harvard University and has operated atop this mountaintop since 1968.

The Border Patrol says that it tries to steer its helicopters clear of observatories, but that frequent staff turnover has occasionally resulted in missteps.

The checkpoints that the Border Patrol has set up around southern Arizona, complete with high-powered beams to light them up at night, have been another sore point, prompting meetings between area astronomers and agents and a pledge from the Border Patrol to reduce the wattage. The lights are among the brightest points now visible at night in the area, astronomers say.

But even car headlights can be a problem for sensitive stargazing, which is why signs along the winding road that leads to the observatory urge drivers to use only their parking lights after dark. The nearly 50 years since the Whipple Observatory was built here in the Coronado National Forest have brought retirement communities, shopping malls and assorted other developments to the area, all of which have boosted the light levels detected by astronomers scrutinizing the sky.

Wildfires are another concern in the remote areas where the observatories are located. In 2005, a fire that was caused by a lightning strike came within less than a mile of the Whipple Observatory, which had to be evacuated until firefighters, aided by a sudden rainstorm, were able to control it.

Earlier this year, a fire west of Nogales prompted a brief closing of the MMT Observatory, which is also atop Mount Hopkins. The observatory’s large telescope, 21 feet in diameter, is the 14th largest in the world and is sought after by researchers looking into deep space. Besides less-than-optimal viewing conditions caused by the fire, operators were worried about the buildup of ash on the lens.

Well after the sun has set, from 8,500 feet up on Mount Hopkins, the second-highest peak in the Santa Rita Range, one can observe both the majestic nature of the universe and the threats to the stargazing that has long gone on here. Competing with moonlight are street lights, traffic lights, security lights and innumerable other forms of illumination. To the north is the Tucson skyline, a vast expanse of soft white and yellow light, which has been managed by municipal dark-sky restrictions and has not grown in intensity anywhere near as fast as the population.

Astronomers are a powerful lobby here when it comes to keeping the skies dark at night, and nearby Tucson is the headquarters for the International Dark-Sky Association, which attempts to press for light restrictions around the world. “Light pollution is an issue all over the world,” said Paul J. Groot, an astronomer from the Netherlands who was conducting research on the source of X-rays from other galaxies at the MMT Observatory this week. “It limits our deep observation of the night sky.”

An open-pit copper mine that is proposed for an area southeast of Tucson and would operate around the clock has alarmed dark-sky advocates, even though the Rosemont Copper Company has said it plans to abide by Pima County’s restrictions on light pollution.

“When these observatories were selected, there was hardly anyone living here,” Mr. Brocious said atop the mountain as darkness and light seemed to compete in all directions. “Tucson was a sleepy little cow town back then. There’s nothing sleepy about it now.”

    Lights on Earth Impede Arizona’s Eyes on Space, NYT, 19.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/us/20whipple.html

NASA Installs Device at Space Station

in Long-Sought Quest for Antimatter

May 19, 2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM HARWOOD

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The astronauts aboard the space shuttle Endeavour attached a $2 billion cosmic ray detector to the International Space Station on Thursday, and delighted scientists immediately began detecting “thousands and thousands” of subatomic particles from deep space.

Equipped with a powerful magnet and an intricate array of sensors, computer processors and high-speed data links, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is designed to measure tiny deflections in the trajectories of cosmic ray particles to look for the telltale signs of antimatter and the unseen dark matter believed to make up nearly 25 percent of the universe.

It also will be on the lookout for the unexpected as it sifts through torrents of passing protons, electrons and atomic nuclei for the next 10 years or longer, ideally for the remaining life of the space station.

“We immediately checked all the detectors; everything functioned properly,” Samuel Chao Chung Ting, the project’s principal investigator, told reporters. “Not a single one was broken, not a single electronic channel was malfunctioning. Right away, we began to see an enormous amount of data coming down.”

Holding up sample graphs showing the passages of an electron and a carbon nucleus, Dr. Ting said, “We’re very pleased. It took us 17 years to build this thing.” Over time, he said, the scientists on the project hope “to make an important contribution to our understanding of the origin of the universe.”

Carried aloft in Endeavour’s cargo bay, the 7 1/2-ton Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was attached to the right side of the space station’s solar power truss using the orbiter’s robot arm and a similar crane on the lab complex. After the instrument was locked in place, an umbilical carrying power and data was attached by remote control.

Within two to three hours, scientists and engineers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston were receiving a steady stream of data. “We have thousands and thousands of signatures already,” Dr. Ting said, referring to particle signatures.

It was a welcome, long-awaited milestone for a project with a history that reads like “The Perils of Pauline.”

After the 2003 explosion of the space shuttle Columbia, the project was bumped from NASA’s manifest. A lobbying campaign by Dr. Ting and his colleagues eventually won over President Obama and key lawmakers, who approved financing for an extra shuttle flight to get the particle-detecting magnet into orbit.

But a decision to extend the space station’s life from 2015 to 2020 and beyond prompted Dr. Ting’s team to give up a more powerful but short-lived superconducting magnet in favor of a less powerful version, used in a 1998 test flight, that could last the life of the station.

All told, Dr. Ting and his team — more than 600 physicists from 60 institutions in 16 countries — have spent nearly two decades designing, building, testing and redesigning the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. The payoff is finally at hand.

One of the mysteries the device was designed to explore is what happened to the antimatter that must have been created when the universe was born.

“If the universe comes from a big bang, before the big bang it is vacuum,” Dr. Ting said before Endeavour’s launching. “Nothing exists in vacuum.”

In the beginning, he said, “You have matter, you must have antimatter; otherwise we would not have come from the vacuum.

“So now the universe is 14 billion years old, you have all of us, made out of matter. The question is, where is the universe made out of antimatter?”

Another subject of study for the spectrometer is dark matter, the mysterious material believed to provide the gravitational glue that holds galaxies and clusters of galaxies together. While Dr. Ting’s creation cannot directly detect dark matter, it possibly can detect the particles that would be produced in dark matter collisions.

“To my collaborators and I, the most exciting objective of A.M.S. is to probe the unknown,” Dr. Ting said, “to search for phenomena which exist in nature, but yet we have not the tools or the imagination to find.”

Meanwhile, as NASA continued its advances in space, on Earth — in Washington — it was scolded for tardiness in deciding what it will do after the shuttles are retired in July.

Leaders of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation sent a letter to Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator, demanding documents detailing how the agency was carrying out the blueprint Congress passed last year for future space exploration. The plans called for development of a new heavy-lift rocket and spacecraft for missions beyond low-Earth orbit.

The senators said NASA had failed to provide required reports to Congress and requested that a NASA official begin briefing them every other week about the agency’s efforts.

“NASA’s current inaction and indecision in implementing this transition could impact our global standing and take many years and billions of dollars to repair,” said the letter, signed by Senators John D. Rockefeller IV, a Democrat of West Virginia who is chairman of the committee; Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, the ranking Republican member; Bill Nelson, a Democrat of Florida and chairman of the space subcommittee; and John Boozman, Republican of Arkansas.

The Obama administration has placed higher priority on financing commercial companies for developing space taxis for taking NASA astronauts to orbit.

Kenneth Chang contributed reporting from New York.

    NASA Installs Device at Space Station in Long-Sought Quest for Antimatter, NYT, 19.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/us/20shuttle.html

Endeavour Lifts Off on Its Final Flight

May 16, 2011
The New York Times
By HENRY FOUNTAIN

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — After a two-week pause to fix electrical trouble, the shuttle Endeavour lifted off Monday morning on a mission to pry a few secrets from the universe.

At 8:56 a.m. Eastern time, the spacecraft rose slowly on a pillar of fire, picking up speed as it stabbed through a layer of clouds on its way to an initial orbit 136 miles above the Earth.

Among those watching at the space center was Gabrielle Giffords, the wounded Arizona congresswoman whose husband, Capt. Mark E. Kelly, commands Endeavour’s six-man crew. Outside the space center, crowds that law-enforcement officials had estimated could reach half a million people watched the launching, the next-to-last in the 30-year shuttle program.

NASA officials said the shuttle’s three main engines performed well during the 8 1/2-minute ascent, and that the power system that had been the source of the electrical problem functioned perfectly. About 40 minutes into the flight, the crew fired other engines to alter the shuttle’s orbit so that it could meet up with the International Space Station on Wednesday, more than 200 miles above the Earth.

Once docked at the station, the astronauts will begin work on the 16-day mission’s main objective: installing the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a giant magnet designed to search for particles of the elusive “dark matter,” which is thought to pervade the universe.

This is the 25th and final flight of Endeavour, which was built after the shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after a launching in 1986, killing all seven astronauts on board. Endeavour, which first flew in 1992, is due to land on June 1, and will eventually be put on display at a science museum in Los Angeles. Only the last flight of the shuttle Atlantis, scheduled for July, is left on NASA’s calendar.

Endeavour was originally scheduled to fly on April 29, but an electrical short-circuit in the system that provides electricity for the spacecraft’s hydraulic controls forced the postponement with about four hours to go before lift-off. On Saturday, NASA officials declared that the problem was corrected and the spacecraft was good to go.

As the launching time approached on Monday, low clouds were the only concern, because NASA’s flight rules require good visibility should the shuttle have to make an emergency landing back at the space center. But the cloud cover proved to be no problem.

NASA technicians also had to make a quick repair on one of the shuttle’s fragile ceramic tiles, which was found to be damaged shortly after the crew hatch was closed at 6:45 a.m. The tiles protect the spacecraft from the extreme heat of re-entry.

In addition to Captain Kelly and the shuttle’s pilot, Greg H. Johnson, Endeavour’s passenger manifest includes four mission specialists: Mike Fincke, Drew Feustel, Greg Chamitoff and Roberto Vittori, a colonel in the Italian air force. They are all spaceflight veterans and two, Mr. Fincke and Mr. Chamitoff, have logged months on the space station. The astronauts will conduct four space walks, performing maintenance tasks at the station and delivering a crate of spare parts.

    Endeavour Lifts Off on Its Final Flight, NYT, 16.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/science/space/17shuttle.html

A Bittersweet Finale for the Discovery

March 9, 2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM HARWOOD

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The shuttle Discovery braved the hellish fire of re-entry for the last time Wednesday and glided back to Earth to close out the space plane’s 39th and final voyage, an emotion-charged milestone marking the beginning of the end for America’s shuttle program.

Dropping through a partly cloudy sky, the commander, Steven W. Lindsey, and Col. Eric A. Boe of the Air Force guided Discovery through a sweeping left overhead turn, lined up on Runway 15 and floated to a picture-perfect touchdown at 11:57 a.m. Eastern time to wrap up an extended 13-day space station assembly mission.

As it coasted to a stop under a brilliant noon sun, Discovery had logged some 5,750 orbits covering nearly 150 million miles during 39 flights spanning a full year in space — a record unrivaled in the history of manned rockets.

“And Houston, Discovery, for the final time, wheels stopped,” Mr. Lindsey radioed flight controllers in Houston.

“Discovery, Houston, great job by you and your crew,” replied Charles Hobaugh, an astronaut in mission control. “That was a great landing in tough conditions, and it was an awesome docked mission you all had.”

Mr. Lindsey and Colonel Boe were joined aboard Discovery by Benjamin Alvin Drew Jr.; Nicole P. Stott; Michael R. Barratt, a physician-astronaut; and Capt. Stephen G. Bowen of the Navy.

As support crews swarmed onto the broad runway, engineers in the nearby Vehicle Assembly Building were busy preparing the shuttle Endeavour for rollout. The target date for Endeavour’s 25th and final flight is April 19.

NASA’s remaining orbiter, the Atlantis, is scheduled for liftoff June 28 on the shuttle program’s 135th flight, the final chapter in a post-Apollo initiative that produced what is arguably the most complex, capable and costly manned rockets ever built.

”We’re seeing a program come to a close here, and to see these shuttles, these beautiful, magnificent flying machines, end their service life is obviously a little bit sad for us,” Dr. Barratt said.

“But it is about time — they’ve lived a very long time, they’ve had a fabulous success record,” he added. “We look forward to seeing them retire with dignity and bringing on the next line of spaceships.”

What sort of spaceship might ultimately replace the shuttle is an open question, and it is not yet clear how NASA will fare in the budget debate.

But between Atlantis’s landing this summer and the debut of whatever vehicle replaces it — several years from now at best — the only way for American astronauts to reach orbit will be to hitch rides aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft at $55 million a seat.

That is a bitter pill for the thousands of men and women who have worked on the shuttle fleet over the past three decades, who now face layoffs and the prospect of seeing Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis — the world’s most sophisticated spacecraft — turned into museum displays.

“We won’t do anything nearly as complex with another vehicle for a very long time,” Mr. Drew said. “Five or 10 years from now, they’re going to look back and say ‘How did we ever build a vehicle that could do all these things?’ ”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 9, 2011


An earlier version of this article misstated the military standing of the astronaut Benjamin Alvin Drew Jr. He retired from the Air Force as a colonel; he is not a captain in the Air Force.

    A Bittersweet Finale for the Discovery, NYT, 9.3.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/science/space/10shuttle.html

Discovery, Bound for Space Station,

Leaves Earth One Last Time

February 24, 2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM HARWOOD

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — With seconds to spare after a last-minute glitch, the repaired shuttle Discovery, grounded since November because of vexing fuel tank cracks, rocketed into orbit Thursday on its 39th and final flight, setting off for the International Space Station to deliver supplies, equipment and a final American storage module.

The countdown proceeded smoothly into its final hour, but trouble with an Air Force tracking system computer threw the outcome into doubt. With the countdown holding at the five-minute mark, the Air Force reported a successful repair. The countdown resumed, and Discovery blasted off at 4:53:24 p.m. Eastern time — three seconds before the end of the day’s launching window.

Discovery put on a spectacular show for area residents and tourists, who crowded nearby roads and beaches to witness the shuttle’s final climb to space.

Flight controllers were paying close attention to the view from a camera mounted on the side of the shuttle’s external tank, on the lookout for any signs of foam insulation falling away that could pose a threat to the ship’s fragile heat shield.

Extensive foam work was done as part of repairs to fix cracks in the external tank that forced NASA to ground the shuttle after the scrubbing of a planned Nov. 5 launching.

During the climb on Thursday, several large pieces of debris could be seen falling from the tank, some striking the shuttle’s heat shield, but the shedding appeared to occur well after the shuttle was out of the dense lower atmosphere, where debris impacts can cause the most damage.

No obvious impact damage could be seen in the downlink television views, but a detailed analysis will be carried out over the next few days.

In the meantime, the shuttle is on track for a docking with the International Space Station around 2:15 p.m. Saturday.

“Discovery’s a great ship,” Michael Leinbach, the launch director, told reporters Wednesday. “This is her 39th mission; we’d have quite a few left in her had the program been extended.”

On board Discovery are five men and one woman: strapped into seats on the upper flight deck are the commander, Steven W. Lindsey; Col. Eric A. Boe of the Air Force, the pilot; Capt. Benjamin Alvin Drew Jr. of the Air Force; and Nicole P. Stott, the flight engineer. On the ship’s lower deck are Michael R. Barratt, a physician and astronaut, and Capt. Stephen G. Bowen of the Navy.

Captain Bowen is a late addition. A veteran of five spacewalks, he was called in to replace the mission’s original lead spacewalker, Col. Timothy L. Kopra of the Army, who was injured in a bicycle mishap last month.

The crew change was a relatively minor snag compared with the testing and analysis required to resolve questions about potentially dangerous cracks that were found after the Nov. 5 launching was called off.

Assuming an on-time docking on Saturday, Captain Drew and Captain Bowen plan two spacewalks, Monday and Wednesday. The new storage module will be attached to the station on Tuesday. The flight plan calls for Discovery to undock from the station on March 5 and land at the Kennedy Space Center on March 7.

    Discovery, Bound for Space Station, Leaves Earth One Last Time, NYT, 24.2.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/science/space/25shuttle.html

NASA’s Second Close Encounter

With a Comet

February 13, 2011
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG

The last time NASA visited the Tempel 1 comet, it was with fireworks, on July 4, 2005. On that day, the Deep Impact spacecraft slammed an 820-pound projectile into Tempel 1, excavating a plume of ice and dust.

On Monday night — Valentine’s Day — NASA will return to Tempel 1 but will not bombard it. This time, a different spacecraft, Stardust, will zip past at more than 24,000 miles per hour, taking 72 high-resolution pictures of the comet’s surface.

Stardust will make its closest approach, within 125 miles, at 11:37 p.m. Eastern time.

Tim Larson, the mission’s project manager, said NASA was not deliberately scheduling its missions to coincide with holidays. “That’s just how the orbital mechanics worked out on these,” he said, “although it makes for great P.R.”

Tempel 1 will be the first comet to be seen at close range twice, and scientists will make a then-and-now comparison — one that they expect will reveal a change in topography and tell them more about the inner workings of comets.

“Here’s a chance where we can see what has changed, how much has changed,” said Joseph Veverka, a professor of astronomy at Cornell and the mission’s principal investigator, “so we’ll start unraveling the history of a comet’s surface."

For example, photographs taken by Deep Impact in 2005 showed areas that looked old and others that seemed much younger. But the snapshots did not tell the ages of any of them. “We have no idea whether we’re talking about things that have been there for a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years,” Dr. Veverka said.

In the five and a half years since Deep Impact’s visit, Tempel 1 — whose orbit brings it as close to the Sun as Mars and as far away as Jupiter — has completed a full orbit.

Stardust was launched in 1999 and arrived five years later at its primary destination, a comet named Wild 2, where it collected particles of dust. Stardust then looped back to Earth and released a canister containing the comet dust, which parachuted back to the ground.

The spacecraft, still operating well, continued onward, and NASA decided to use it for a return visit to Tempel 1. (Deep Impact, meanwhile, also extended its scientific journey, visiting another comet last November.)

One more puzzle that scientists may be able to solve with the second look at Tempel 1 involves depressions that look like the type of craters caused by impacts. The depressions, though, could have been caused by explosions that were a result of underground ice that converted to gas.

The scientists will now be able to compare the depressions with something they know is definitely a crater — the scar left by Deep Impact. “Simple question,” Dr. Veverka said, “direct answer.”

    NASA’s Second Close Encounter With a Comet, NYT, 13.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/science/space/14comet.html

Wounded Congresswoman’s

Husband Will Fly on Shuttle

February 4, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Cmdr. Mark E. Kelly, the husband of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, will head the space shuttle mission in April that he was assigned to command before his wife was shot, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced on Friday.

"I am looking forward to rejoining my STS-134 crew members and finishing our training for the mission," Mr. Kelly said in a statement released Friday. “I appreciate the confidence that my NASA management has in me and the rest of my space shuttle crew."

Whether Commander Kelly would fly on the two-week trip to the International Space Station in the midst of a family crisis has been a question in the background since Ms. Giffords was shot in the head and critically injured near Tucson on Jan. 8.

Commander Kelly, a Naval officer and former fighter pilot who flew 39 combat missions in the Persian Gulf War, came to the decision along with NASA officials, who must decide whether its crew members are able to fulfill their roles.

Family crises have led shuttle crew members to remove themselves from past missions. In 1997, Jeffrey S. Ashby, a retired Navy captain, was replaced on what would have been his first shuttle mission because of his wife’s cancer.

Mr. Ashby would go on to fly on three later shuttle missions. But with the space shuttle program now winding down, Commander Kelly, who has flown on three previous missions, would almost certainly have lost his last chance to command the shuttle if he had decided not to fly this time.

NASA had prepared for the possibility of having to replace Mr. Kelly by naming a backup commander, Frederick W. Sturckow. But officials made it clear that Commander Kelly was still commander of the mission, pending any contrary decision.

Last month, Commander Kelly told ABC News that he had not yet been able to discuss the matter with his wife. “I’ve flown in space three times — I don’t have to do it again,” he said in that interview. “My No. 1 goal is to make sure that my crew is safe, and that they can execute this mission safely — and that it’s successful.”

Commander Kelly’s brother, Scott, also an astronaut, is currently aboard the International Space Station, though he will be back on Earth when his brother’s mission launches. In an interview on Wednesday from the station, Scott Kelly said that fighter pilots and astronauts were trained to compartmentalize — to focus on the task at hand, whatever else might be going on around them: “When you’re in a high performance airplane, you really have to — despite what might be happening in your personal life or things with your job, or things on the ground — you really have to focus on what you’re doing right now.”

That might mean flying at low level, “dropping bombs, flying air combat or even doing an instrument approach,” he said. “You know, it’s a life-critical kind of thing .”

Ms. Giffords is recovering from her wounds in a rehabilitation program in Houston. On Tuesday, Mark Kelly issued a message to his 28,000 followers on Twitter that “today was a huge day for G.G. Lots of progress!”

    Wounded Congresswoman’s Husband Will Fly on Shuttle, NYT, 4.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/us/05kelly.html

Even More Things

in Heaven and Earth

February 3, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL BYERS

Ann Arbor, Mich.

ASTRONOMERS announced last month that, contrary to previous assumptions, the orbiting body Eris might be smaller than Pluto after all. Since it was the discovery in 2005 of Eris, an object seemingly larger than what had been considered our smallest planet, that precipitated the downgrading of Pluto from full planet to “dwarf,” some think it may be time to revisit Pluto’s status.

Most of us can’t help rooting for Pluto. We liked the idea of a ninth planet, hanging out there like a period at the end of the gorgeous sentence of the solar system. It gave us a sense of completeness. And besides, we were used to it. Pluto’s demotion caused such an outcry because it altered something we thought we knew to be true about our world.

Of course, science doesn’t, and shouldn’t, care what we learned in first grade. If Pluto’s odyssey teaches us anything, it’s that whenever we think we’ve discovered a measure of certainty about the universe, it’s often fleeting, and more often pure dumb luck. The 1930 discovery of Pluto — by Clyde Tombaugh, who coincidentally was born 105 years ago today — is a prime example, a testament not only to Tombaugh’s remarkable perseverance, but also to how a stupendously unlikely run of circumstances can lead to scientific glory.

The search for a ninth planet was led by the Harvard-trained Percival Lowell, a Boston Brahmin who was widely known for announcing the existence of a Martian civilization. Lowell’s hypotheses about a “Planet X” were based on optimistic interpretations of inconclusive data. Many had observed that the orbit of Uranus seemed to be perturbed by a gravitational influence beyond the orbit of Neptune. If the source of that pull could be determined, he speculated, a fellow could point a telescope at that source and find an undiscovered world.

So Lowell, in the Arizona observatory he had built, set out to do just that. His method was not without precedent. But in 1916, after more than a decade of exquisitely delicate mathematics and erratic searching, Lowell died, his reputation as a gifted crackpot confirmed.

Thirteen years later, Clyde Tombaugh was hired by V. M. Slipher, the director of the Lowell Observatory, to resume the search.

At 22, Tombaugh had been making his own telescopes for years in a root cellar on his father’s Kansas farm (where the air was cool and still enough to allow for the correction of microscopic flaws in the mirrors he polished by hand). The resulting telescopes were of such high quality that Tombaugh could draw the bands of weather on Jupiter, 400 million miles away. Ambitious but too poor to afford college, Tombaugh had written at random to Slipher, seeking career advice. Slipher took a look at the drawings that Tombaugh had included, and invited him to Arizona.

For months, Tombaugh used a device called a blink comparator to pore over scores of photographic plates, hunting for one moving pinprick amid millions of stars. When he finally found the moving speck in February 1930, it was very nearly where Lowell’s mathematics had predicted it would be. Headlines proclaimed Lowell’s predictions confirmed.

But there was something strange about the object. It soon became apparent that it was much too small to have exerted any effect on Uranus’s orbit. Astronomers then assumed it had to be a moon, with a larger planet nearby. But despite more searching, no larger object came to light.

They eventually had to face the fact that the discovery of a new object so near Lowell’s predicted location was nothing more than a confounding coincidence. Tombaugh’s object, soon christened Pluto, wasn’t Planet X. Instead of an example of good old American vision and know-how, the discovery was the incredibly fluky result of a baseless dream.

Decades later, this was proved doubly true. Data from the 1989 Voyager 2 flyby showed that the mass of Neptune had been inaccurately measured by about 0.5 percent all along, and that, in fact, the orbit of Uranus had never been inexplicably disturbed to begin with. Percival Lowell had been hunting a ghost. And Clyde Tombaugh, against all odds, had found one.

All of which is to say, science is imperfect. It is a human enterprise, subject to passions and whims, accidents and luck. Astronomers have since discovered dozens of other objects in our solar system approaching Pluto’s size, amounting to a whole separate class of orbiting bodies. And just this week, researchers announced that they had identified 1,235 possible planets in other star systems.

We can mourn the demotion of our favorite planet. But the best way to honor Lowell and Tombaugh is to celebrate the fact that Pluto — while never quite the world it was predicted to be — is part of a universe more complex, varied and surprising than even its discoverers could have imagined.

Of course, for those of us who grew up chanting “My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us New Pizza,” nine planets will always seem more fitting than eight. New facts are unsettling. But with the right mindset, the new glories can more than make up for the loss of the old.


Michael Byers is the author of the novel “Percival’s Planet.”

Even More Things in Heaven and Earth, NYT, 3.2.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/opinion/04byers.html