ISS: Russian Progress 59 Lost in Space

Tuesday's International Space Station Russian resupply spacecraft, Progress 59, started spinning out of control after separating from its Soyuz rocket.  The resupply mission has now been written off as a failure, which is the second in a year after the Antares rocket explosion last October (blamed on an old Soviet rocket).

Fortunately, SpaceX's Dragon resupplied the station earlier this month and will return in June with more supplies. Redundancy, and private ventures, to the rescue.

Update: Progress 59 is expected to reenter to atmosphere and burn up in the next two weeks.

60 Minutes: Space Wars

If you missed the 60 Minutes piece last Sunday on the budding space war between the United States, China, and Russia, then you missed a significant story on how Earthbound battles may draw funding and energy away from a space program that looks beyond Earth.

Most of the country's concerns involved the Chinese capabilities to reach the outermost US defense satellites, but the Russians were mentioned as well since one of their recent satellites seems to have the ability to change orbit and trail other satellites. It appears space is now fair game for all.

Of course, the U.S. is not without its own arsenal to track and protect satellites, from the Starfire Optical Range in Albuquerque, a laser that tracks satellite movement, to the Air Force's X37B unmanned space shuttle. And while China has worried the space community with a satellite kill (and troublesome debris) a few years back, the program noted that the U.S. had an earlier satellite kill and a second one more recently. Hence, we are not innocents here.

If the space race becomes a local war we all lose and go nowhere. Let's hope the goal becomes Mars instead. As with the lunar race, we need healthy competition that takes us to new places. Carl Sagan has already warned us about the lonely Pale Blue Dot.

Great Image: Chilean Volcano

As we watch volcanic activity on distant moons, we sometimes forget that we too live on a planet that is still remaking itself, as the recent eruption of the Calbuco Volcano in Chile reminded us. 

Image Credit:  David Cortes Serey/Agencia Uno/AP Photo (top) and Carlos F. Gutierrez/AP Photo (bottom)

Happy Birthday, Hubble!

This week represents the 25th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope.  Launched on April 24th, 1990, the telescope has been hard a work ever since opening our eyes to the universe around us.  NASA's video 25 Years Started Here: Kennedy and the Launch of the Hubble is a nice place to start in revisiting the history of the space telescope.  The Hubble was a significant achievement as well as an expensive piece of hardware that required five separate space shuttle missions to keep it functioning. 

You can see plenty of images, interviews, and videos at the Hubble Space Telescope channel on YouTube, or visit hubblesite.org for some of Hubble's top shots (such as the Horsehead Nebula shown here).  The Hubble allowed all of us to see an amazing universe in ways that not even the science fiction writers could imagine.  The inventory of images is awe inspiring, including the image below called "Light Echo From Star V838 Monocerotis." 

As far as the future beyond Hubble, we can look forward to the James Webb Space Telescope, expected to be launched in 2018.  In another video, NASA Astrophysicist Dr. Amber Straughn discusses both the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes.  The James Web Space Telescope will be stationed far beyond the moon and no longer in a position for future repairs, so we are entering into a new realm where we need to get everything perfect the first time.  No pressure, of course.  This additional NASA video shows the complexity of the telescope's deployment.

New Videos: SpaceX Funk and Productive Peeps

If you are looking for something a little lighter, here are a few creative videos for your entertainment:

-- SpaceX Launch You Up highlights Elon Musk and his rockets, electric car, Mars, and more. 

-- Finding The Speed Of Light With Peeps from NPR's Skunk Bear is both educational and a great way to use leftover peeps.  I see nothing wrong with making science fun.

Star Talk is Now Televised

The National Geographic Channel will start broadcasting the show Star Talk tonight. Based in the radio show of the same name, the new series will feature Neil deGrasse Tyson interviewing guests and most likely opining on many space issues.  The space community has lacked this television platform for some time, and the recent reception to the remake of Cosmos indicates an audience is out there. Let's hope this is the start of even greater things.

Space X Gets Closer

Following the successful launch of cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) earlier this week, SpaceX again attempted to land the Falcon 9 rocket onto a floating platform.  As the image above shows, it almost happened.  Unfortunately, as shown in the photo below, it was close but not close enough.  Here is the complete video.  Kudos to SpaceX for getting a coffee machine, and other supplies, to the ISS via the Dragon. 

Galaxy Quest Turns Up Empty

It seems the search of millions of galaxies has not produced any evidence of intelligent life.  Of course, the presumption was that an "advanced spacefaring civilization" would have colonized an entire galaxy and thereby provide some clues for us to detect.  NBC News reported that researchers at Penn State University reviewed data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite to determine if any of the galaxies shows signs of  such life.  And while they found about 50 galaxies they want to review in greater detail, it appears any spacefaring is probably on a smaller scale.  And who knows how many pre-spacefaring civilizations like our own are sitting on the sidelines at the moment.

Presuming galactic occupation seems like a tall order, yet a March 2013 paper by the Future of Humanity Institute in the UK discussed how our own civilization could expand into the Milky Way and other galaxies.  Here is the abstract in the paper titled "Eternity in Six Hours: Intergalactic Spreading of Intelligent Life and Sharpening the Fermi Paradox":

The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the strong likelihood of alien intelligent life emerging (under a wide variety of assumptions) and the absence of any visible evidence for such emergence. In this paper, we extend the Fermi paradox to not only life in this galaxy, but to other galaxies as well. We do this by demonstrating that travelling between galaxies – indeed even launching a colonisation project for the entire reachable universe – is a relatively simple task for a star-spanning civilisation, requiring modest amounts of energy and resources. We start by demonstrating that humanity itself could likely accomplish such a colonisation project in the foreseeable future, should we want to. Given certain technological assumptions, such as improved automation, the task of constructing Dyson spheres, designing replicating probes, and launching them at distant galaxies, become quite feasible. We extensively analyse the dynamics of such a project, including issues of deceleration and collision with particles in space. Using similar methods, there are millions of galaxies that could have reached us by now. This results in a considerable sharpening of the Fermi paradox.

This is amazing conjecture, and it is the last part that stumped the Penn State University researchers; if we can envision such a future for ourselves, where are such civilizations from other parts of the universe or even within our own galaxy?  Plenty to ponder.

Noteworthy Quote: Ancient Water in Your Tap

"Up to half the water on our planet is older than the solar system itself. Ancient water molecules assembled in the chilly confines of a gigantic gas cloud. That cloud spawned our sun and the planets that orbit it — and somehow those ancient water molecules survived the perils of the planetary birth process to end up in our oceans and, presumably, our bodies."

--  Ray Jayawardhana, a professor of physics and astronomy at York University in Toronto, in his New York Times article "Our Cosmic Selves."  He was highlighting the findings in an earlier study in Science, with the summary "The analysis suggests that all nascent planetary systems may have the same water resources that we did."

Great Image: Einstein's Ring

The Alma Observatory in Chile recently captured an image that supports Einstein's theory that gravity will bend light, or in this case what is called gravitational lensing.  While this particular set of galaxies were discovered earlier, the Alma Observatory provides the best image yet of this phenomenon. 

Here is the story from the observatory that accompanies the image above: 

Forged by the chance alignment of two distant galaxies, this striking ring-like structure is a rare and peculiar manifestation of gravitational lensing as predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity.

Gravitational lensing occurs when a massive galaxy or cluster of galaxies bends the light emitted from a more distant galaxy, forming a highly magnified, though much distorted image. In this particular case, the galaxy known as SDP.81 and an intervening galaxy line up so perfectly that the light from the more distant one forms a nearly complete circle as seen from Earth.

Discovered by the Herschel Space Observatory, SDP.81 (formally known as HATLAS J090311.6+003906) is an active star-forming galaxy nearly 12 billion light-years away, seen at a time when the Universe was only 15 percent of its current age. It is being lensed by a massive foreground galaxy that is a comparatively nearby 4 billion light-years away.

Image Credit:  LMA (NRAO/ESO/NAOJ); B. Saxton NRAO/AUI/NSF

A New Way to Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Should we be interested in what other civilizations might be out there in our galaxy and try to communicate, or should we keep to ourselves in case they want to do us harm?  In terms of the latter worry, it is something Seth Shostak discusses in a recent New York Times piece, where he writes: 

It’s a worry we never used to have. Victorian-era scientists toyed with plans to use lanterns and burning pools of oil to contact postulated Martians. In the 1970s, NASA bolted greeting cards onto spacecraft that will leave our solar system and wander the vast reaches between the stars. The Pioneer and Voyager probes carry plaques and records with information about what humans look like and where Earth is, as well as a small sampling of our culture.

This new timidness is interesting, and is more likely a product of our own understanding of our history.  Yes, the Europeans were not benevolent people when they arrived on the shores of the Americas and engaged the natives.  One can only hope for a better scenario if we encounter a significantly advanced civilization from elsewhere. 

But let's say we just want to listen for now.  Well, the University of California, San Diego has a new way to find such communications.  The near-infrared optical SETI (NIROSETI) instrument will allow astronomers can expand the search for interstallar transmissions in the form of pulses of infrared light.  This goes beyond the radio and optical methods we have today.  In a press release, the university noted: 

Because infrared light penetrates farther through gas and dust than visible light, this new search will extend to stars thousands rather than merely hundreds of light years away. And the success of the Kepler Mission, which has found habitable planets orbiting stars both like and unlike our own, has prompted the new search to look for signals from a wider variety of stars.

The NIROSETI instrument has been installed at the University of California's Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton (see image above), just east of San Jose.  It was put into service last month. Now we just need to start pointing it at specific stars to see what happens.

NASA's Continuing Search for Water Out There

NASA plans to broadcast a program next week to discuss water within and beyond our solar system.  Here is the press release information:

NASA Television will air an event from 1 – 2 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, April 7, featuring leading science and engineering experts discussing the recent discoveries of water and organics in our solar system, the role our sun plays in water-loss in neighboring planets, and our search for habitable worlds among the stars.

The event, which is open to the public, will take place in the Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters, 300 E Street SW in Washington.
The panel also will highlight the fundamental questions NASA is working to answer through its cutting-edge science research: Where do we come from? Where are we going? Are we alone?
Panel participants include:

• John Grunsfeld, astronaut and Science Mission Directorate associate administrator, NASA Headquarters, Washington
• Ellen Stofan, chief scientist, NASA Headquarters
• James Green, director of Planetary Science, NASA Headquarters
• Jeffrey Newmark, interim director of Heliophysics, NASA Headquarters
• Paul Hertz, director of Astrophysics, NASA Headquarters

 Go here for NASA TV. Hopefully, it will also be shown on the NASA channel on Youtube.

Does SpaceX Want to Build Space Stations?

Space News provided this quote by William Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations, in a speech at the Federal Aviation Administration Commercial Space Transportation Conference in February:

At some point this space station will wear out and there needs to be a follow-on space station...What we’re hoping for is that the private sector picks that up.

This was part of a larger story about Russia's interest in funding the International Space Station (ISS) through 2024 and working with the U.S. on a successor to the ISS.  Russia has been very fickle in its discussions about a space station, no doubt driven by funding worries due to a struggling economy.

 

Given SpaceX's innovative ideas and new products, it is only a matter of time before it is approached to design a new space station.  However, one wonders if Mr. Musk is more interested in bigger fish at this point, such as colonizing Mars.

And if the Russians are looking for a space station partner, the Chinese could be a good bet.  China plans to launch a second space station into orbit next year. 

Do You Have Some Free TIme to Search for Asteroids?

If you want to do something fun one evening, and maybe save the planet while you are at it, check out the new app Asteroid Data Hunter.  Brought to you by NASA and Planetary Resources, all you need to help is your own telescope.  Here is what it is about:

Protecting the Earth from the threat of asteroid impacts means first knowing where they are. NASA is harnessing the incredible potential of innovators, makers and citizen scientists by opening up the search. In an increasingly connected world, NASA recognizes the value of the public as a partner in addressing some of the country’s most pressing challenges. We need your help in identifying asteroids – and to help further this effort, we’ve built an application that enables everyone, everywhere, to help solve this global challenge.

My only question is whether Planetary Resources will share some of its mining wealth with those who detect the most profitable asteroid.  I think I already know the answer to that one.