Great Image: Dark Barchan Dunes on Mars

Some were curious about "canals" on Mars many years back, but what would early astronomers made of the image here?  Military fortifications? Large land crabs?  Something else?  Well, here is Malin Space Science Systems' version of the story:  

This Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) image shows north polar sand dunes in the summertime. During winter and early spring, north polar dunes are covered with bright frost. When the frost sublimes away, the dunes appear darker than their surroundings. To a geologist, sand has a very specific meaning. A sand grain is defined independently of its composition; it is a particle with a size between 62.5 and 2000 microns. Two thousand microns equals 2 millimeters. The dunes are dark because they are composed of sand grains made of dark minerals and/or rock fragments. Usually, dark grains indicate the presence of unoxidized iron, for example, the dark volcanic rocks of Hawaii, Iceland, and elsewhere. This dune field is located near 71.7°N, 51.3°W. Dune slip faces indicate winds that blow from the upper left toward lower right. This picture covers an area approximately 3 km (1.9 mi) across and is illuminated by sunlight from the lower left.

 Image Credit:  NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems

SpaceX Delays Returns to the Space Station

After a delay earlier this month, SpaceX was scheduled to its third resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) on March 30th.  However, the mission, SpaceX-3 (pictured here), has been delayed again due to an electrical short in the tracking radar. According to the U.S. Air Force:

A mandatory range asset supporting the NROL-67 launch went offline, March 24, 2014. An investigation revealed a tracking radar experienced an electrical short, overheating the unit and rendering it inoperable. The outage resulted in an inability to meet minimum public safety requirements needed for flight, so the launch was postponed.

Initial assessment indicates repair of the tracking radar will take approximately three weeks. The Air Force is evaluating the feasibility of returning an inactive radar to full mission capability to resume operations sooner. The launch schedule impact is to be determined, pending resolution of the anomaly. Early indications are all launches scheduled for FY14 will be supported. More information will be provided as it becomes available.

The launch, originally schedule for March 16, will provide the ISS with a variety of needed items while also delivering and removing scientific cargo.  According to SpaceX, the Dragon cargo includes:

 ...about 4,600 pounds of supplies and payloads, including critical materials to support more than150 investigations that will occur during Expeditions 39 and 40. Dragon will carry four powered cargo payloads in its pressurized section and two in its unpressurized trunk, a first for SpaceX. Dragon will return with about 3,600 pounds of cargo, which includes crew supplies, hardware and computer resources, science experiments, biotechnology,and space station hardware.

 Science payloads include the Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science (OPALS), which will test the use of laser optics to transfer information to Earth from space; the Vegetable Production System (VEGGIE), a unit capable of producing salad-type vegetables in space; and the T-Cell Activation in Aging experiment that seeks the cause of a depression in the human immune system while astronauts are in microgravity. In addition, the High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) investigation includes four high-definition cameras to be placed on the space station’s exterior for use in streaming live video of Earth for online viewing.

Go here for the completed press kit from SpaceX.  You can also stay up to date on the mission via NASA's SpaceX Blog. 

An Expensive Miss on a Russian Rocket

Given that we are now paying the Russians about $71 million per seat to get an astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS), maybe they felt a longer ride would give us more for our money.  That seems to be the case since the most recent Russian Soyuz space capture missed its connection with the ISS and the American and Russian passengers will have to wait another 36 hours before trying again.  The good news is that they are used to this longer trip, with the shorter 6 hour trip being a pretty new development since last year.

NASA's Steve Swanson and Russians Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev are fine and everything should continue without a hitch.  The problem seems to be a software glitch that prevented a 24-second engine burn to align the capsule with the ISS.

We are lucky we still have the Russians to get passengers to the ISS until we can bring in our private sector partners.  SpaceX has another ISS resupply mission this weekend, so things are on track for the U.S. to be back in the space station transportation business.

Update:  The new ISS crew is safe and sound after a longer than expected delay.  NASA reported:

The new trio docked Thursday to the Poisk docking compartment at 7:53 p.m. EDT and opened the hatches less than two hours later to greet Commander Koichi Wakata and Flight Engineers Rick Mastracchio and Mikhail Tyurin. The sextet then gathered inside the Zvezda service module for a welcoming ceremony with words of congratulations from family members and mission officials.

33rd International Space Development Conference

If you want to learn more about the "colonization, development, and capitalization of space," the National Space Society (NSS) has a conference for you on May 14-18 in Los Angeles.  The NSS's 33rd International Space Development Conference will be held at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel.

The NSS invites members of the general public, space activists, scientists, engineers, educators, astronauts, aerospace industry leaders, and government officials to explore humanity's future in space. The conference will feature a number of speakers sharing their ideas about future space missions, including Space X CEO Elon Musk, Apollo 11 Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Orbital Sciences VP Mike Pinkston, members of the Mercury MESSENGER Team, and many others. 

The conference will also have a Space Settlement Design Contest,which is an annual contest co-sponsored by the NSS and the NASA Ames Research Center.  Any student (up to age 18) from anywhere in the world can participate. Interested parties need to submit a paper relating to orbital settlements, with the contest rules stating "Settlements may not be on a planet or moon...Settlements must be permanent, relatively self-sufficient homes, not temporary work camps."

The contest is serious work.  A six member team from Cypress Bay High School Weston, Florida, won the context in 2013 with their 126 page paper Maui.  According to the winning paper's executive summary, 

...Maui tells a story, the story of how extraterrestrial colonies may grow and develop from ramshackle frontier towns to bustling cities. Maui is the narrative of mankind’s first permanent settlement in the Saturn system, orbiting the moon Titan.

Prior conferences and speaker presentations can be found here.  Past student contest winners back to 1994 can be found here.

Image Credit and more photo information:  http://space.mike-combs.com/gallery.htm

How About Russia and Mars?

The International Space Station may still be seen as successful U.S.-Russian cooperation, what about a future Mars mission?  Dr. Robert Zubrin, President of The Mars Society, had some grim words about Russia prior to the invasion of Ukraine in Fall 2013 edition of The Mars Quarterly.  In his article, he discusses some dark comments by Putin advisor Alexander Dugin:

"Liberalism,” says Dugin, meaning the whole western consensus, “is an absolute evil....Only a global crusade against the U.S., the West, globalization and their political-ideological expression, liberalism, is capable of becoming an adequate response...The American empire should be destroyed.”

Notheless, Dr. Zubrin still believed in a joint U.S.-Russian mission to Mars, noting, "Dr. Carl Sagan proposed a similar concept to help counteract U.S.-Soviet tensions in the 1980s. It was a good idea then, but critically necessary one now"

I am not sure if the recent events in Ukraine may have changed the mind of Dr. Zubrin, but I think we need to be very careful here.  The International Space Station already hands in the balance.  Do we want more of our NASA dollars dependent on a fickle and growingly reckless Russia?  My tendency is to say no for now.

Let's put any joint Mars mission on the shelf until we know we are able to work together with Russia on this planet.

Will Ukranian Issues Impact the US-Russian Cooperation in Space?

The recent invasion of the Crimean peninsula by Russian forces does not bode well for future cooperation between the United States and Russia, and yet the International Space Station (ISS) depends on such cooperation. In fact, until the U.S. commercial sector can regularly resupply the ISS, NASA is completely dependent on the Russians to move people and cargo to and from the station.  Russia has also contributed multiple modules to the ISS, such as the Zvezda Service Module (pictured above) containing living quarters for the crew, as well as extra Soyuz crew vehicle permanently docked to the ISS in case of emergencies. 

Earlier this month, Spaceflight Now highlighted NASA Administrator Charles Bolden's statement on the issue:

"I think people lose track of the fact that we have occupied the International Space Station now for 13 consecutive years uninterrupted, and that has been through multiple international crises," he said. "I don't think it's an insignificant fact that we are starting to see a number of people with the idea that the International Space Station be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. It's not trivial."

Hopefully, the ISS can stay above the political fray, but given our restrictions on scientific cooperation with the Chinese, the Congress has shown it will put politics ahead of science.  These are the risks of such cooperation, as we saw with the Sochi Olympics as well.  When friendships fray, much hangs in the balance.

NASA's FY 2015 Budget Request: Good Ideas with Limited Resources

The White House released its budget request for NASA earlier in the week.  The good news is that NASA has a lot of good projects on the drawing board.  The bad news is that this country does not have the money or will power to adequately fund future space projects.  The White House asked for $17.5 billion for NASA in FY 2015, a drop from $17.6.  And while this does not sound like much, it is a much larger cut if you assume any level of inflation since the space agency again has to do more (or at least the same work) with less money. 

But let's look at the proposed projects listed in NASA's budget:

•  Supports the 2018 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope;
•  Continues formulation and development of Mars Rover 2020 and MOMA/ExoMars missions to Mars;
• Continues development of the robotic OSIRIS-REx mission to retrieve and return samples from an asteroid;
• Continues pre-formulation work for a potential mission to Jupiter’s moon, Europa. 
• Extends operation of the International Space Station (ISS) to at least 2024, and sustains delivery of cargo to the ISSwith U.S. developed, commercially procured space transportation elements;
• Maintains development of Space Launch System/Orion on track to send astronauts on deep space exploration missions; and
• Funds 7 launches over 24 months: Deep Space Atomic Clock (precise navigation); Green Propellant (higher-performing alternative to toxic hydrazine); Sunjammer Solar Sail (propellant-free propulsion); and four small spacecraft demos.

NASA also made a video explaining this budget, which is an interesting approach to the dry workings of budget policy. 

This is a promising list of projects.  Exploration of Europa is exciting, and one can argue that a lot of this work can still contribute to a manned space mission to Mars at some point in the future.  In fact, the budget PowerPoint notes that this budget "Aligns NASA’s activities to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars in the 2030s."

NASA's Administrator Charles Bolden expanded on this in his press release, stating:

In the coming year, we'll build on our nation's record of breathtaking and compelling scientific discoveries and achievements in space, with science missions that will reach far into our solar system, reveal unknown aspects of our universe and provide critical knowledge about our home planet.  It includes funding for missions to Mars and the formulation for a mission to Jupiter's moon, Europa. It also funds science missions already heading toward destinations such as Jupiter and Pluto and operating throughout the solar system, a mission to study our planet's magnetic system, and steady progress on the James Webb Space Telescope.

Could NASA use more funds for more extensive exploration?  Absolutely, but that is not in the cards with this Congress and in this economy.  And combined projects with other nations, such as China and now Russia, may be difficult to establish given the political situation.  That said, maybe now is a time to out-Putin Putin with a bold new mission in space?  This budget came too late for such vision, but I am hopeful. 

Bottom Image Credit:  The Washington Post.

More Earth-Like Planets Located

If you are looking for a little bit of bedtime reading, you could do worse than this 138 page paper from NASA titled "Validation of Kepler’s Multiple Planet Candidates. III: Light Curve Analysis & Announcement of Hundreds of New Multi-planet Systems."  Released on February 25th, the paper highlights the expoplanets found to date as well as a few new ones:

The Kepler mission has discovered over 2500 exoplanet candidates in the first two years of spacecraft data, with approximately 40% of them in candidate multi-planet systems. The high rate of multiplicity combined with the low rate of identified false-positives indicates that the multiplanet systems contain very few false-positive signals due to other systems not gravitationally bound to the target star (Lissauer, J. J., et al., 2012, ApJ 750, 131). False positives in the multi-planet systems are identified and removed, leaving behind a residual population of candidate multi-planet transiting systems expected to have a false-positive rate less than 1%. We present a sample of 340 planetary systems that contain 851 planets that are validated to substantially better than the 99% confidence level; the vast majority of these have not been previously verified as planets.

Among these 851 planets, the ones of particular interest are the "...768 planets across 306 systems being newly validated."  That is a nice collection of new new planets. 

For some reason, in its press release, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced 715 new planets around 305 star systems. But why quibble?  But here is the important part:

Four of these new planets are less than 2.5 times the size of Earth and orbit in their sun's habitable zone, defined as the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet may be suitable for life-giving liquid water.  One of these new habitable zone planets, called Kepler-296f, orbits a star half the size and 5 percent as bright as our sun. Kepler-296f is twice the size of Earth, but scientists do not know whether the planet is a gaseous world, with a thick hydrogen-helium envelope, or it is a water world surrounded by a deep ocean.

I expect that more research on all the data acquired in the earlier Kepler mission will continue to bring forward new findings.  And, as noted earlier, Kepler may still have some life left for new missions.  

Image Credit:  NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC-Caltech)