UK scientists designs human mission to Mars by 2021

Scientists at Imperial College London have designed a concept mission to land astronauts on Mars.

The plan envisages a three-person crew journeying to Mars aboard a small two-part craft.

The craft would rotate to generate artificial gravity and use a heat shield to protect itself against solar flares.

The crew would then return to Martian orbit in a pre-sent craft fuelled using ice from beneath the planet's surface.

The concept, developed in conjunction with the BBC, is intended to spark further debate about the technical obstacles and risks that would have to be overcome in order to put humans on Mars.

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"Every part of this mission scenario has been demonstrated one way or the other, including the in situ propellant production on the surface of Mars," said Prof Tom Pike, who led the Imperial design team.

"There are big, big jumps between a demonstration at one level and putting together the engineering systems for a mission, but they are engineering challenges. They are not fundamentally about making new discoveries."

The new Imperial concept comes amid renewed interest in the Red Planet with two private groups having proposed missions in recent months.

The Imperial team have designed a two-part craft, consisting of a Martian lander with a heat shield, inside which the crew would also ascend into Earth orbit.

Directly beneath the lander on the launch pad would be a "cruise habitat vehicle", a cylindrical craft split into three floors and measuring some 10m (30ft) in height and 4m in diameter.

Once in Earth orbit, the astronauts would move from the lander into the larger habitat vehicle before a rocket burst would propel the conjoined craft on a trajectory to Mars. The quickest journey time would be nine months when Earth and Mars are in optimum alignment.

Shortly into the journey, the lander and cruise vehicle would unwind from each other on a steel cable tether to a distance of some 60m. Short thruster bursts from both vehicles would then set them spinning around a centre of gravity.

This would create artificial gravity within the habitat vehicle similar to Earth's gravity, which the scientists believe would prevent the type of muscle and bone wastage that weightlessness would cause, which would render the astronauts unable to walk on Mars once they arrived.

Later in the mission, the spin rate could be reduced to better emulate Martian conditions, where gravity is 40% that on Earth.

"We've obviously got some real issues with a long-term mission in terms of the de-conditioning which goes on in the space environment," Ryan Robinson, the Imperial team's physiologist, told BBC News.

"Bones loss [in a weightless environment] is about 1-2% a month and if they're landing they'll be susceptible to fractures if they've got to be exerting themselves."

During the journey, the crew's health would be monitored closely with wireless sensors - but they would rely entirely on medication aboard the craft and the skills of their fellow crew members should they fall sick.

During the journey, the craft could deploy a number of measures to try to reduce the threat to the astronauts from solar and cosmic radiation, the former from the Sun, the later emanating from beyond our solar system.The long journey and confined quarters could also affect their mental health, and conflicts between the crew could arise.

Water could run within the shell of the cruise craft to absorb radiation, while the Imperial team also examined the idea of fitting superconducting magnets to the craft, which would generate a magnetosphere to deflect solar and cosmic radiation in the way the Earth's natural magnetosphere does.

The crew would also deploy emergency procedures should satellites detect a major incoming solar flare.

This would involve winding in the tether and re-directing the lander's heat shield towards the Sun to protect the astronauts in the cruise craft.

The crew would also put whatever they could find between them and the front of the vehicle to absorb the solar burst.

Artificial gravity is proposed for the craft to prevent muscle and bone loss on the journey to Mars

Even with such measures, a solar flare could still kill, or result in cancers. Cosmic radiation could also take its toll.

"We've got some great results from the Mars curiosity rover," said Imperial's Martin Archer, who specialises in solar and cosmic radiation.

"On its trip to Mars, it measured the radiation from these galactic cosmic rays and it was exposed to quite a lot - about two-thirds of the level that Nasa is prepared to risk over the whole of an astronaut's life, just on the way there and back again."

Once the craft reaches Martian orbit, it would contract together and the astronauts would pass into the lander ready for detachment and descent.

Its shield would absorb the heat of entry before being jettisoned and then multiple parachutes would deploy to slow the craft, with thrusters used to further slow and guide it through the final metres to the landing site.

The Imperial team propose a landing site near the equator, where milder conditions exist.

They would hope to land near a pre-sent Martian habitat module and rover, although the rover could be robotically controlled to travel from the habitat to the landing site if the distance was too great for a crossing on foot.

Then the Martian visit would begin - a first human landing on another planet.

The time spent on the Martian surface would be dictated by the next time Earth and Mars aligned for a speedy return home. It could be two months, or we might choose to spend more than two years on Mars, says the Imperial team.

It is during this time that the human crew could try to demonstrate why humans could still outperform robots in analysing and understanding the Martian environment.

"Some people think that the use of humans is just something that is popular and attractive from an adventure and inspirational point of view, but there are also real scientific benefits for sending humans," said Prof Mark Sephton, the team's geologist.

"Humans can data process while they're walking around, while they're looking at rocks. They're probably the most sophisticated computer, the most sophisticated robotic living organism that we can imagine."

Radiation would remain a danger during the stay, with Mars possessing no magnetosphere to shield the surface from cosmic and solar rays. Shovelling up soil from the surface during the mission and part-burying the habitat module could help, as could staying inside during a solar burst.

Then comes the return home, which would be far from simple.

The approach taken by the Imperial scientists would be to pre-send both the habitat module, rover and a return vehicle before any human launch.

The return vehicle would land at a latitude where water ice would be found in large amounts just a few centimetres beneath the surface. Robotic devices would mine the ice, which would then be split into hydrogen and oxygen using electrolysis.

These gases could be used as fuels on their own, or the hydrogen could be combined with carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere using a catalyst to produce methane, which is a more stable and energy-dense fuel than hydrogen.

As the Imperial team propose landing near the equator, a crew would have to travel by rover to a cooler latitude where the return vehicle and ice-mining devices would be waiting. Several hundreds of kilometres may have to be crossed, posing both risks and opportunities to further explore the Martian landscape.

Should they make it safely, the crew would have a narrow launch window to ensure the quickest most fuel-efficient return to Earth.

After leaving Mars, the return vehicle would dock with the orbiting cruise vehicle and replace the Martian lander as the counter-balance within the spinning tethered structure en route to Earth. Like the lander, the return vehicle would have to be fitted with a shield to protect the crew during extreme solar activity.

After at least nine months, the craft would reach Earth orbit and dock with the International Space Station before the astronauts could take a Soyuz capsule home, the team envisages.

The new Imperial concept comes amid renewed interest in the Red Planet, with two private groups having proposed missions.

Businessman and former space tourist Dennis Tito wants to send an American couple on a mission beginning in 2018 that would pass within 100 miles (160km) of Mars before using the planet's gravity to "slingshot" the craft back to Earth.

The Dutch project Mars One proposes putting a human colony on the planet beginning in 2023, while SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk has spoken of sending a private human mission to Mars within 12-15 years.

The US, Russian, European and Chinese space agencies maintain long-term plans to put humans on Mars.

Space tech cooperation on agenda

India's first Mars Orbit mission this year offers an "exciting opportunity" for Indo-US collaboration in the field of space technology.

Since the two sides are keen on increasing commercial space cooperation and create opportunities for the US and Indian companies, this would be on the agenda of discussions between the two countries when US vice-president Joe Biden begins India visit on Monday.

Building on the highly successful Chandrayaan-1 lunar mission, the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) have agreed to explore further cooperation in such fields as planetary science and heliophysics, as well as potential future missions to the moon and Mars.

Infact, Nasa is providing deep space navigation and tracking support services to the Mars mission scheduled for October-November during the non-visible period of the Indian Deep Space Network.

According to analysts, the US-India space cooperation is sure to benefit those beyond the borders of both respective nations.

"Collaboration between India and the US into the sphere of deep space exploration would fuse talented agencies and experts in both nations to a degree not previously seen. Through this partnership, new discoveries and accelerated progress are certain which will in turn serve to assist researchers in all spacefaring states," observed Boston-based foreign affairs and strategic policy expert Matthew Hoey. "US-India relations have been generally disappointing since the civil-nuclear deal. Despite the great efforts by the Bush administration, the deal did not produce tangible benefits. Cooperation on space science and exploration is one area where we can pick up the pace," observed Michael Krepon, Co-founder, The Stimson Center, Washington DC.

With the removal of Isro subordinate entities from the US Entity List at the 2011 Civil Space Joint Working Group meeting and additional measures taken since have further expanded the possibilities for trade and cooperation in civil space. The India-US space cooperation has become a signature aspect of this science, technology, and innovation cooperation, highlighting both the constancy of their mutual respect and appreciation for each other's capabilities through the decades, as well as the vast potential.

Mars program not for pride, we mean business : ISRO

As India prepares to launch its Rs 450 crore mission to Mars this year, a top space official says the country's first martian odyssey--that has attracted some criticism--is not just for pride but for undertaking "meaningful research". K Radhakrishnan, Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation(ISRO), also debunked perception in some quarters that the Mars Orbiter mission around the red planet, that's just three months away, is primarily a "feel-good" package to just pat ourselves on the back. "It's not for pride because the exploration of Mars has its own scientific value and possibly a future habitat which people are talking about...may be 20 years...30 years from now...it's possible", he told PTI here in an interview, referring to the colonisation angle. India will be the sixth country to launch a mission to Mars after the U.S., Russia, Europe, Japan and China. ISRO says the primary objectives are to demonstrate India's technological capability to send a satellite to orbit around Mars and conduct meaningful experiments such as looking for signs of life, take pictures of the red planet and study Martian environment. "What's the most interesting question on Mars? - life. So, we talk about Methane...which is of biological origin or geological origin. So, we have a methane sensor plus a thermal infrared spectrometer. These two together should be able to give some information", said Radhakrishnan, who is also Secretary in the Department of Space, said. Critics of the Indian Mars mission wondered whether the country can afford huge costs for this space voyage. The Mars satellite, which would be launched on board Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-XL), will carry compact science experiments, totalling a mass of 15 kg. There will be five instruments to study Martian surface, atmosphere and mineralogy. After leaving earth orbit in November, the spacecraft will cruise in deep space for 10 months using its own propulsion system and will reach Mars (Martian transfer trajectory) in September 2014. The 1350 kg spacecraft subsequently is planned to enter into a 372 km by 80,000 km elliptical orbit around Mars. "We want to look at environment of Mars for various elements like Deuterium-Hydrogen ratio. We also want to look at other constituents - neutral constituents", Radhakrishnan said. "There are several things which Mars will tells us, this is what the scientific community thinks about the life on Mars", he said, adding, scientists started taking interest on Mars from the 18th century itself. "Mars is a subject of interest". "Our (Mars mission) experiments are planned in such a way that you can decide when you want to put on each of these systems", Radhakrishnan said. "If we succeed (in the mission), it positions India into group of countries who will have the ability to look at Mars. In future, certainly, there will be synergy between various countries in such exploration. That's taking place. That time India will be a country to be counted", he said. ISRO is going to start the assembly of PSLV-C25, the rocket on board of which the Mars orbiter would be launched any day between October 21 and November seven, in August first week. The mission would help ISRO understand the technological challenges of such an exploration, the possible existence of life and future colonisation of Mars, which is the nearest planet which has most resemblance to earth. The PSLV-XL (PSLV-C25) will inject the spacecraft from the spaceport of Sriharikota in the 250 X 23000 km orbit. Radhakrishnan said a number of technological challenges need to be negotiated for a successful Mars mission. "Most important thing is we must have the insertion of this spacecraft in the Martian orbit", he said, noting that once the spacecraft leaves the earth orbit, propulsion system has to work after 300 days. In the case of INSAT class of satellites and Chandrayaan-1, they reached orbital slots in one and two weeks, respectively. "This is the first time we have to operate the propulsion system after 300 days. There will be some performance deterioration", he said but added that ISRO has undertaken the test and knows how it would operate. So, the robustness and reliability of propulsion system has been raised "one order higher". In Chandrayaan-1, ISRO had to deal with a distance of about four lakh kms, while in the case of Mars it's 400 million kms (4000 lakh kms).
"One of the technological challenges is to realise related deep space mission planning and communication management at a distance of nearly 400 million km", an ISRO official said.
The spacecraft has been provided with augmented radiationshielding for its prolonged exposure in the Van Allen belt. Due to the long range from Earth to Mars, there is a communication delay of 20 minutes one way itself. For this reason, ISRO has built high level of onboard autonomy within Mars orbiter. Capture of the Mars orbit or the Martian insertion is the critical event that would determine the success of this mission, ISRO officials say. On the experiments side, Lyman Alpha Photometer (LAP) is aimed at studying the escape processes of Mars upper atmosphere through Deuterium/Hydrogen, Methane Sensor for MARS (MSM) would look to detect presence of Methane while Martian Exospheric Composition Explorer (MENCA) would study the neutral composition of the Martian upper atmosphere. MARS Colour Camera (MCC) would undertake optical imaging and TIR imaging spectrometer (TIS) is targeted to map surface composition and mineralogy during India's first mission to a distant planet. With MCC, Radhakrishnan said, it would also be possible to take pictures of two satellites of Mars -- Phobos and Deimos.

World’s first-ever Moon’s South Pole mission in 2016

In a first of its kind, two private companies plan to put a telescope called International Lunar Observatory (ILO) atop a lunar mountain as early as 2016, with an aim to help the humankind understand the astrophysics better.  The plan, which is being spearheaded by the International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA), a non-profit organisation and a start-up called Moon Express, will be the world’s first-ever mission to the moon’s south pole. If all goes well with the plan, it will enable public to access the images from the moon online. 

The companies plan on installing a two-metre radio antenna along with a smaller optical telescope on the elevated rim of a crater called Malapert. From this point, both telescopes will get a clear view of our galaxy and won’t be subjected to our atmosphere’s hazy interference. The location will also not pick up any radio or electromagnetic noise created by human civilisation.  Moon Express CEO Dr. Robert Richards said: “The mission will provide a historic landing in an unexplored region of the Moon that may harbor some of the greatest resource deposits in the solar system.”  The project if carried out successfully, International Lunar Observatory (ILO) will be the first private space telescope to operate from the lunar surface where it will be available through internet to researchers, educators and general public.  It is hoped that the images taken by the observatory would be clearer than anything taken on earth or even in space, creating a new model of 'citizen science'.  The mission would cost the companies somewhere around $100 million, where it hopes to get some fund from the national space agencies and astronomical centres.   the ILOA has set its sights on building a scientific and commercial base on the moon, while Moon Express wants to become a space courier service in the next 10 years. The location also has the observational benefit of not picking up any radio or electromagnetic noise created by modern technology. The idea to place a telescope on the moon is not new. Astronomers have long thought about putting telescopes on the dark side of the moon that always faces away from Earth. It is hoped that pictures captured by such instruments would be clearer than anything taken on Earth or even in space.  But telescopes in the location would depend upon satellite relays, which would be expensive. The beauty of locating telescopes on the Moon's south pole, however, is that the telescopes would have a 'direct line to Earth,' Steve Durst, founder and director of ILOA told Wired.com. The spot on the Malpert crater also has the benefit of a slightly milder climate than the dark side of the moon. One 'day' on the moon lasts for the equivalent of an Earth month.  It has two weeks of temperatures of over 120 degrees followed by chilling 'nights' that last for another two weeks when the temperature drops to minus 170 degrees. This means engineering scientific instruments would need to be able to withstand the extreme climate and this has so far proved challenging. However, as the telescopes would be situated at the south pole, they would enjoy sunlight for 90 per cent of the moon's day and consequently a relatively stable temperature of approximately minus 50 degrees Celsius. Solar panels could therefore be used to collect energy and power the telescope, according to Mr Durst. Due to the more consistent temperature and sunlight, he believes the lunar poles are the best locations for any future human settlement on the moon. The south pole of the moon is popularly thought to be rich with resources.

Moon Express, which intends to provide the lander and engineering expertise for the telescope, has ambitions to mine metals, minerals and water on the moon. The company believes resources could be sold to humans on Earth, while the water would be needed by astronauts living on a lunar base nearby. Bob Richards, the company’s CEO, told Wired.com that during the mission, he plans on sending a small rover to explore the surface of the site. The mission, planned as soon as 2016, is ambitious as the south pole of the moon has never been explored before. Mr Richards conceded that due to the amount of finance needed - around $100 million - and pioneering engineering necessary for the mission, the schedule is tight.  However, he hopes that national and international space agencies will help to pay for the mission and that it will take place by 2018. Moon Express has not landed a probe on the moon's surface yet but aspires to land on the moon in 2015 to scoop the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize. The company is planning a mini mission to the moon to instal a shoebox-sized telescope with the aim of testing ILOA's technology on the lunar landscape. The ILO, with its 2-meter dish antenna, will be the world's first instrument to conduct international astrophysical observations and communications from the lunar surface, providing scientific research, commercial broadcasting and enabling Galaxy 21st Century education and "citizen science" on the Moon.  The announcement was made during a NASA Lunar Science Institute conference at Nasa Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. 

Mars Rover Curiosity finds out how Mars lost its atmosphere 4n years ago

A mysterious, catastrophic event tore away the atmosphere of Mars, according to the first detailed analysis of the make-up of the air on the Red Planet.

A year after the Curiosity rover landed on Mars, and having travelled a kilometre over the Martian surface, its SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) instruments have returned their first measurements, confirming the identity of the gases in the Martian atmosphere, which include argon, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.

The mixture, revealed in two parallel studies published in the journalScience, closely matches that measured by the Viking lander in 1976, but, importantly, the new results are more reliable.

"Our Curiosity measurements are – for the first time – accurate enough to make direct comparisons with measurements done on Earth on meteorites using sophisticated large instrumentation that gives high-accuracy results," said Dr Chris Webster at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, the lead author on one of the studies.

Previous attempts to measure the composition of the Martian atmosphere in-situ were made by both the Viking and Phoenix landers. However, the results did not agree, and there were large uncertainties on the Viking results.

Monica Grady, professor of planetary sciences at The Open University, who was not involved in the studies, was excited by the new results: "It's really great that two separate studies using different instruments and techniques have given the same composition. These findings reverse the results from the Phoenix mission and clear up some confusion over the composition of the Martian atmosphere."

The team believe that a catastrophic event must have torn the atmosphere apart 4bn years ago. The clues to this come in the ratio of two forms of the gas argon (one a primitive form, the other created more recently by radioactive decay) which is very different from that on Earth, suggesting that a major upheaval changed their relative amounts. Grady suggests that this could have been due to volcanic eruptions, or a massive collision that stripped the atmosphere away.

The results also show that reservoirs of carbon dioxide and water were established after this catastrophic event, and have remained little changed since.

"As Mars became a planet and its magma ocean solidified, catastrophic outgassing occurred while volatiles were delivered by impact of comets and other smaller bodies," said Dr Webster. "Solar wind, and the possible impact by a Pluto-sized body is thought to have stripped much of the initial early atmosphere from the planet, and since then the atmosphere has developed as a balance between volcanic injection and loss to space."

The new results from Curiosity will allow scientists to model the evolution of the Martian climate over time, and deduce whether the planet was warm and wet and if it might have had the right conditions for life.

"A fundamental question regarding the habitability of early Mars is how long liquid water, in the form of lakes, or even oceans, might have persisted on the surface to support microbial life that may have been present," said Dr Paul Mahaffy, at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centreand lead author on the parallel paper.

"From a practical standpoint we need to know the composition [of the atmosphere] today, and how it is changing, so that we can prepare for the eventual arrival of human explorers to the red planet," he added.

Having an accurate measurement of the Martian atmosphere also clears up some confusion over the origin of a group of meteorites on Earth, that were assumed to have originated from Mars based on measurements of trapped gases within them, but their identity could not be confirmed without the hard data provided by these results.

Dr Mahaffy said: "Our argon isotope measurements are very close to the meteorite values, which strengthens the case that these rocks came from Mars."
VIA The Guardian

Name for new Neptune's Moon to be decided soon

Now that the initial excitement over the finding of a new moon orbiting Neptune has subsided, astronomers can get to the fun business of giving the distant moon a name more interesting than S/2004 N 1. As the 14th orbiting body to be added to the cache of Neptunian moons, the satellite will eventually be named after a character in Greek or Roman mythology, specifically one that has something do to with water, as Neptune is the Roman god of the sea. (Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea, holds equal weight in the naming process.)  Mark Showalter, the astronomer and senior researcher at the SETI Institute credited with discovering the new moon, will get the final say in naming the new moon - though he may be open to suggestions. Showalter also discovered the two most recently named moons of Pluto, and instead of picking names for them himself, he opted to crowdsource the naming process. After collecting the top suggestions for new Plutonian moon names - all of which had to relate to the mythical underworld - Showalter held an online poll to choose the winning names. The winners were Keroberos, named after the three-headed dog that guards the entrance to Hades, and Styx, which is the river that separates the underworld from Earth and also the name of the goddess of the river. (The name Vulcan was the top contender, but was ruled out because it makes no reference to the mythical underworld.) It's still undecided whether a similar online effort to name the new Neptune moon will happen. Showalter told PBS he's keen on the name Polyphemus, referring to the Cyclops -- son of Thoosa, a mythical sea nymth, and Poseidon, the Greek sea god. In Homer's epic poem the Odyssey, Polyphemus traps Odysseus and 12 of his crew in a cave on the island of Cyclopes, eating several of them before the men attack the monster with a wooden spike to the eye, blinding the Cyclops and allowing the surviving men to escape. "I happen to like hideous monsters myself," Showalter said to PBS. "That's just a personal bias." S/2004 N 1, which orbits Neptune every 23 hours, is located between the orbits of the moons Larissa (named after a lover of Poseidon) and Proteus (a Greek sea god, son of Oceanus and Tethys). Visit the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature for a full list names, naming requirements and name origins of the all the bodies in the solar system. 

Space Walk aborted due to water leak in astronomers helmet

NASA aborted a spacewalk at the International Space Station on Tuesday because of a dangerous water leak in an astronaut's helmet that drenched his eyes, nose and mouth. The leak was so bad that Luca Parmitano, Italy's first spacewalker, couldn't hear or speak as the spacewalk came to an abrupt end. He asked his spacewalking partner, Christopher Cassidy, for help getting back in. "He looks miserable. But OK," Cassidy assured Mission Control in Houston. The source of the leak wasn't immediately known but a likely culprit was the helmet drink bag that astronauts sip from during spacewalks, although Parmitano later reported it didn't taste like drinking water. Before crewmates inside yanked off his helmet, Parmitano said: "It's a lot of water." NASA seldom cuts a spacewalk short. Tuesday's problem left them with no choice. Parmitano could have choked on the floating water droplets in the helmet. The trouble cropped up barely an hour into what was to be a six-hour spacewalk to perform cable work and other routine maintenance that had stacked up over the past couple years. It was the astronauts' second spacewalk in eight days. Parmitano startled everyone when he announced that he felt a lot of water on the back of his head. At first, he thought it was sweat because of all his exertion on the job. But he was repeatedly assured it was not sweat. Cassidy said it might be water from his drink bag; it looked like a half-liter of water had leaked out. The water eventually got into Parmitano's eyes. That's when NASA ordered the two men back inside. Then the water drenched his nose and mouths, and he had trouble hearing on the radio lines. Cassidy quickly cleaned up the work site once Parmitano was back in the air lock, before joining him back in the space station. The four astronauts who anxiously monitored the drama from inside hustled to remove Parmitano's helmet. They clustered around him, eight hands pulling off his helmet and using towels to mop his bald head. Balls of water floated away. Parmitano looked relatively fine on NASA TV as he gestured with his hands to show his crewmates where the water had crept over his head. Cassidy told Mission Control: "To him, the water clearly did not taste like our normal drinking water."

 A smiling Parmitano then chimed in: "Just so you know, I'm alive and I can answer those questions, too." Mission Control praised the crew for its fast effort and promptly scheduled a radio hookup with flight surgeons on the ground. Engineers, meanwhile, scrambled to determine the source of the leak. It was the fastest end to a spacewalk since 2004 when Russian and American spacewalkers were ordered back in by Mission Control outside Moscow because of spacesuit trouble. That spacewalk lasted a mere 14 minutes. Tuesday's spacewalk lasted one hour and 32 minutes. This was the second spacewalk for Parmitano, 36, a former test pilot and Italian Air Force officer. He became the first Italian to conduct a spacewalk last Tuesday, more than a month after moving into the space station. Cassidy, 43, a former Navy SEAL, is a veteran spacewalker midway through a six-month station stint.

Opportunity Mars Rover to soon surpass Lunokhod 2's distance record

Looks like the Mars rover Opportunity has a few miles more to go before it can break the record for longest off-world driving distance of any rover from Earth. Scientists usingNASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera have snapped images of the current record-holder, the Russian Lunokhod 2, and found that its meandering path was slightly longer than previous estimates. Two months ago the scrappy Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, which has been roaming the Red Planet since 2004, passed the NASA 22-mile distance record set by the Apollo 17 vehicle that astronauts drove around the moon in December 1972. But they had yet to break the international driving record, held by the unmanned Russian Lunokhod 2 rover that landed on the moon just a month after Apollo 17 and racked up an estimated 23 miles. That record has remained unbroken. But the Russians' distance estimates -- which relied on measuring the number of wheel rotations -- were fuzzy at best, leaving some room for error. And now, scientists using the camera on the NASA lunar orbiter have taken high-resolution images of the tracks and found that the actual distance driven is probably closer to about 26 miles, said the camera’s lead scientist, Mark Robinson, a geologist at Arizona State University. "It’s just really fantastic to be able to see that accomplishment as something real in front of you," Robinson said.  The finding backs an earlier estimate made by Russian scientists who were also using the NASA lunar orbiter's data -- though the estimate has yet to be refined, Robinson warned, and it's unclear exactly what acounts for the discrepancy. "One possibility is that's just a rough estimate of how far they’d driven from the starting point to the end point," he said. But the rover did not proceed in a straight line. Extra mileage on the odometer may come from the rover zigzagging back and forth, Robinson pointed out. Also, since the rover was unable to capture full panoramic images, it may have also driven in circles to take in the whole view, he said. The lunar rover had some advantages over its Martian peer -- Lunokhod 2's top speed was about 1.2 miles per hour, roughly 10 times faster than Opportunity’s estimated flat-out top speed of 0.11 miles per hour. But Opportunity could still break the record, provided the scrappy rover continues rolling along. Perhaps the odds are in its favor -- it's lasted roughly 37 times longer than its predicted three-month lifetime. This "competition" did little to enthrall Robinson, however. "What is the utility or the usefulness of the comparison of how far the Mars rover drove and the lunar rover drove?" he asked, suggesting it was better to focus on the scientific achievements of each rover. In the meantime, scientists may actually learn a thing or two about the moon’s surface using the new images of this decades-old trail, Robinson said. Light reflected by the Lunokhod 2 tracks and landing-spot halos should reveal some of the properties of the dust, soil and rock that make up the very top layer of the moon. Alexander Basilevsky always wanted to stop driving. As a planetary geologist working with the Soviet Union’s remotely controlled lunar rovers — Luno­khod 1 and Lunokhod 2 — in the early 1970s, Basilevsky was constantly asking mission chiefs to halt the rolling explorers for scientific studies, fascinated by the buffet of rocks and soil captured by the vehicles’ cameras. But the bosses in the Soviet space programme were having none of it. “It is Lunokhod, not ‘Lunostop’!” they told Basilevsky as they kept the rovers driving, intent on covering as much ground as possible. Now it seems that the second rover, Luno­khod 2, went even farther than many back then had thought. New calculations, using images from orbit that trace the rover’s 40-year-old tracks far below, show that Lunokhod 2 travelled some 42 kilo­metres in its lifetime — 5 kilo­metres more than the distance recorded in the official mission logs. And that means that NASA’s Opportunity rover, inching up to the 37-kilometre mark after nearly a decade on Mars, has a long way to go to break the record for the distance driven by a wheeled vehicle on another world  In a mid-May news release about Opportunity’s longevity, NASA cited the 37-kilo­metre distance for Lunokhod 2, and some team members speculated to the press that Opportunity would soon set a new record for driving distance off-Earth. Since then, they have pulled back from any predictions of besting the Russians, even though Opportunity’s odometer was at a tantalizing 36.75 kilometres as of 15 June. “We’re not going to talk about breaking any records” just yet, says Opportunity’s principal investigator, planetary scientist Steven Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “I’m awestruck by what the Lunokhod team managed to accomplish so many years ago, and I wouldn’t want to claim that we’ve passed their record unless we’re really sure.” Russian scientists, for their part, are quite certain about their revised 42-kilometre estimate, and have reported the findings at various planetary-science conferences over the past year. The 1.7-metre-long Lunokhod 2 rover explored the Moon’s Le Monnier Crater for about 4 months, sending back 86 panoramic pictures and more than 80,000 television images. It stopped working in the spring of 1973, possibly after a close shave involving a crater wall dumped lunar soil into its interior. The revised calculations of its journey were made by planetary mapper Irina Karachevtseva and her colleagues at the Moscow State University of Geodesy and Cartography (MIIGAiK). The team used images of the Lunokhod 2 landing site collected by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has been studying the Moon since 2009. They adjusted tiny line-of-sight distortions in those images using a three-dimensional representation of the Moon’s topography. Tracking the rover’s traverse on these adjusted images yielded the current best estimate of between 42.1 and 42.2 kilometres — very close to the distance of a marathon, the team notes. Karachevtseva says that she is not surprised that the official mission logs are some 5 kilometres off the latest estimate. Luno­khod 2’s odometer was a narrow ninth wheel that dragged behind it as it travelled, notching up distance by how much the wheel spun round. It was always thought to have had an error of 10–15%, she says — in fact, one member of the Lunokhod team who helped to drive the rover told MIIGAiK scientists that the team always thought the distances were underestimated. The MIIGAiK team also reanalysed the path of the first rover, Lunokhod 1, which explored the Moon in 1970–71. Here, surprisingly, Karachevtseva says the team found that Lunokhod 1 had stopped short of the distance shown in the official mission logs: it covered 9.93 kilometres rather than the recorded 10.54 kilometres. A paper on the Lunokhod 1 findings is in the press at Planet­ary and Space Science, and the MIIGAiK team is finalizing a publication on Lunokhod 2. It is unclear why the Lunokhod 1 distance was originally overestimated and that of Lunokhod 2 underestimated, says Phil Stooke, a planetary cartographer at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. He speculates that Lunokhod 1 might have failed to account for wheel slip, a common problem on powdery lunar soils, whereas Lunokhod 2 might have overcompensated or had some other sort of sensor error.Wheel slip continues to bedevil rovers on other worlds. Opportunity’s twin on Mars, the Spirit rover, slipped more than expected as it climbed Husband Hill, in the Gusev Crater region of Mars. However, as it went downhill, the wheels gained traction such that the total slip was close to zero when its journey was completed  Engineers working on Opportunity calibrate the distance it has covered by reconciling its wheel odometry daily with orbital images, says Ron Li, a Mars-rover mapper at Ohio State University in Columbus. Opportunity is currently leaving an area called Cape York, which it explored for 20 months, and heading towards Solander Point about 1.3 kilometres away, where it will try to keep working through the upcoming Martian winter. Lunokhod 2 may thus hold the extraterrestrial driving record for quite a bit longer. For Basilevsky, now at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, the reanalysis is a fitting end to the Lunokhod story. As a scientist, he was not supposed to be in the military’s mission control centre for Lunokhod 2. But he sneaked in to be present as the rover drivers navigated the alien terrain — and he likes to joke that he drove the machine remotely as well.

Sun's 2013 solar activity peak weakest in 100 years

Though the sun is currently in the peak year of its 11-year solar weather cycle, our closest star has been rather quiet over all, scientists say. This year's solar maximum is shaping up to be the weakest in 100 years and the next one could be even more quiescent, scientists said July 11. "It's the smallest maximum we've seen in the Space Age," David Hathaway of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., told reporters in a teleconference'It's the smallest maximum we've seen in the Space Age.' - David Hathaway of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center During a solar maximum, the number of sunspots increases. These dark temporary regions on the surface of the sun are thought to be caused by interplay between the sun's plasma and its magnetic field. Sunspots are the source of the solar flares and ejections that can send charge particles hurtling toward Earth, which can damage satellites, surge power grids, cause radio blackouts and, more benignly, produce dazzling auroras above the planet.  About every 11 years, the sun goes through a cycle defined by an increasing and then decreasing number of sunspots. Solar Cycle 24 has been underway since 2011 and its peak was expected in 2013, but there have been fewer sunspots observed this year compared with the maximums of the last several cycles. Giuliana de Toma, a scientist at the High Altitude Observatory in Colorado, said the sunspots occurring during a calm maximum have the same brightness and area as the ones observed during a more turbulent peak. "We just have fewer of them and this is normal," de Toma said during Thursday's briefing. "This is why weak cycles are weak." The quiet maximum is allowing scientists to test their knowledge of how the sun works and hone their predictions of the strength of future solar cycles. "You might think that having a small cycle is disappointing to us but it's quite the contrary," Hathaway said. North-south, or meridional, flows carry magnetic elements from sunspots to the sun's poles, building up the polar magnetic fields until they eventually flip around the time of the solar maximum, Hathaway explained. Scientists are noticing that the strength of the polar fields when a new cycle begins influences the strength of the cycle, he added. For example, weak polar fields observed in 2008 led to the current weak cycle, while strong polar fields in 1986 spawned a strong Cycle 22. The polar fields have been slowly reversing at this maximum, Hathaway said, suggesting that they are not going get much stronger during Cycle 24. This also sets the stage for an even smaller maximum during Cycle 25, scientists believe. "We're seeing fields that suggest the next sun cycle will be even weaker than this one," Hathaway said. A small Cycle 24 also fits in with a 100-year pattern of building and waning solar cycles. Scientists don't know exactly what causes this trend, but there were weak solar cycles in the beginning of the 19th and 20th centuries.

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Chinese Space Probe Reaches Record Distance from Earth

China’s space probe Chang’e-2 has flown to an outer space about 50 million km from the Earth, marking a new height in Beijing’s deep space exploration, Chinese scientists said. The probe, which is now “in good conditions”, reached the height yesterday, the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) said in a statement. Chang’e-2 will be able to travel to a distance as far as 300 million km away from Earth, according to calculations done by scientists from the Beijing Aerospace Control Center. Chang’e-2, which was launched on October 1, 2010, orbited the moon to finish a more extensive probe than its predecessor Chang’e-1. On June 9, 2011, after finishing its lunar objectives, Chang’e-2 left its lunar orbit for an extended mission to the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrangian point. Since its blast-off, Chang’e-2 has made multi-faceted achievements such as being the first to capture full coverage map of the moon with a resolution of seven metres being the first object ever to reach the L2 point directly from lunar orbit. In December last year, the probe flew by Toutatis, an asteroid about seven million km away from the Earth, making China the fourth after the United States, the European Union and Japan to be able to examine an asteroid by spacecraft, state-run Xinhua news agency reported. Chang’e-2’s extended missions, which were conducted millions of km away from Earth, have tested China’s spacecraft tracking and control network, including two newly built measuring and control stations in the northwest Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and northeast Heilongjiang province, officials said.

Neptune gets a new moon , our solar-system a new member

The recent developments have found out that a member of our solar system, Neptune has not 13 but 14 moons. The new moon, Neptune’s tiniest at just 19.3 km across, is designated S/2004 N 1. The U.S. space agency has announced the discovery of Neptune’s 14th moon. The Hubble Space Telescope captured the moon as a white dot in photos of the planet on the outskirts of our solar system. The new moon, Neptune’s tiniest at just 19.3 km across, is designated S/2004 N 1. The SETI Institute’s Mark Showalter made the discovery. He was studying the segments of rings around Neptune when the white dot popped out, 105,250 km from Neptune. He tracked its movement in more than 150 pictures taken from 2004 to 2009. The considerably bigger gas giant Jupiter has four times as many moons, with 67. “It is so small and dim that it is roughly 100 million times fainter than the faintest star that can be seen with the naked eye” said the space agency. “It even escaped detection by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, which flew past Neptune in 1989 and surveyed the planet’s system of moons and rings,” it added. “The moons and arcs orbit very quickly, so we had to devise a way to follow their motion in order to bring out the details of the system,” Mr. Showalter said. “It’s the same reason a sports photographer tracks a running athlete — the athlete stays in focus, but the background blurs,” he said. The method involved tracking the movement of a white dot that appears over and over again in more than 150 archival Neptune photographs taken by Hubble from 2004 to 2009. On a whim, Mr. Showalter looked far beyond the ring segments and noticed the white dot about 65,400 miles from Neptune, located between the orbits of the Neptunian moons Larissa and Proteus, NASA said. Estimated to be about 12 miles in diameter, the moon is located about 65,400 miles from Neptune. "We had been processing the data for quite some time and it was on a whim that I said, 'OK, let's just look out further," Showalter said. "I changed my program so that instead of stopping just outside the ring system it processed the data all the way out, walked away from my computer and waited an hour while it did all the processing for me. When I came back, I looked at the image and there was this extra dot that wasn't supposed to be there," Showalter said. Follow-up analysis of other archived Hubble images of Neptune verified the object was a moon. Showalter and colleagues are mulling over a name to propose to the International Astronomical Union, which has final say in the matter. "We haven't really gotten far with that. What I can say is that the name will be out of Roman and Greek mythology and it will have to do with characters who are related to Neptune, the god of the oceans," he said. Neptune's largest moon, Triton, was discovered in 1846, just days after the planet itself was found. Nereid, Neptune's third largest moon was found in 1949. Images taken by Nasa's Voyager 2 spacecraft unveiled the second largest moon, Proteus, and five smaller moons, Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, Galatea and Larissa. Ground-based telescopes found Halimede, Laomedeia, Sao and Nestor in 2002. Sister moon Psamathe turned up a year later. The newly found moon, designated S/2004 N 1, is located between Larissa and Proteus. It orbits Neptune in 23 hours. A paper on the discovery is pending. The July 1, 2013 discovery , 24 years after Voyager 2 swung by the icy-blue giant, expands the known retinue of circling moons to 14. Known only by its temporary designation —S/20044 N1—the tiny celestial piece of real estate measures no more than 12 miles (19 kilometers) across and appears to have escaped detection until now because of its extreme faintness and far flung orbit beyond the planet’s ring fragment system known as arcs.  “The moons and arcs orbit very quickly, so we had to devise a way to follow their motion in order to bring out the details of the system,” he said in a statement issued by NASA on Monday.  The origins of S/20044 N1 and some of its other tiny neighboring moons is still a mystery. But one theory is that Neptune’s largest moon Triton may have had something to do with it. Triton—nearly the size of Earth’s moon—is thought to be a gravitationally captured dwarf planet, which upon it’s arrival, may have broken apart the original Neptunian satellite system and created many of the small moons we see today

Some facts about Neptune’s 14th moon S/2004 N 1

• The Neptune’s 14 moon is very small and dim and is roughly 100 million times fainter than the faintest star that can be seen with the naked eye. 
• The Neptune’s 14 moon escaped detection by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, which flew past Neptune in 1989 and surveyed the planet’s system of moons and rings 
• The moon is estimated to be no more than 12 miles across and smallest known moon in the Neptunian system.
• The moons and arcs orbit very quickly, so there had to be a way to follow their motion in order to bring out the details of the system. It’s the same reason a sports photographer tracks a running athlete — the athlete stays in focus, but the background blurs.

How do astronauts urinate in space ?

When American astronaut Alan Shepard couldn't hold his pee any longer on their space mission in 1961, he was directed to do it in his suit, a new book has revealed.According to Tom Wolfe's book 'The Right Stuff,' that's what mission control said to Shepard during Mercury-Redstone 3, when the astronaut said he needed to urinate. Shepard did as he was told. The first American to reach the stars did so in a soggy space suit. Hunter Hollins, a historian at the National Air and Space Museum, was rereading Wolfe's book and was especially stunned by this incident.

He told ABC News he was really amazed and kind of incredulous that they let him urinate in his space suit.His bewilderment led him to search the NASA archives, looking for any mention of astronauts needing to relieve themselves.A couple of months before Shepard's 1961 journey to outer space, a student named Brenda Kemmerer wrote to NASA, asking where the first man in space would use the toilet.Freeman H. Quimby, from the Office of Life Science Programs at NASA, wrote back.He said that the first space man was not expected to have "to go."Shepard was only expected to be in the spacesuit for about five hours.However, due to launch delays, he endured eight hours in the suit.During those extra hours, he relieved himself.

The urine flowed into his suit and short circuited some of the electrodes that were monitoring his heart and respiration.Even though NASA expected its astronauts to not urinate, another government agency did.Engineers at the CIA that were involved with the U-2 spy plane project created an external urine collection device (UCD) back in 1955.Like its name implies, the UCD collects urine and transports it to an external compartment.Even though both the CIA and NASA are government agencies, the UCD technology was not shared between the two.

NASA was just slightly more prepared for its second flight, Mercury-Redstone 4.Gus Grissom, the astronaut for this mission, wore two pairs of rubber pants so that his urine would be contained in the reservoir between them. Though it worked, there was still room for improvement.

on urine collection."B.F. Goodrich, the company in charge of manufacturing NASA's spacesuits, had developed a prototype UCD, it failed to keep the urine fully contained.

The test subjects refused to use it because it leaked.NASA hired James McBarron to address the problem head on.McBarron and his colleagues searched for a better way to make a UCD, eventually turning to condoms for inspiration.After McBarron found a brand that met his standards, he worked with the company and modified its product.The space suit condom would have an open end that would fit snugly on an external storage container.McBarron's UCD was implemented on John Glenn's flight on the Mercury-Atlas 6 mission in 1962, and used for both the remainder of the Mercury Project, as well as through any flight that required a pressurized space suit.

The findings are published in the journal Advances in Physiology Education. (ANI) Imagine you're an astronaut. You're strapped into your seat wearing a bulky spacesuit, waiting to be blasted through the stratosphere, when the unthinkable happens: You gotta use the restroom. That nightmare scenario actually happened to Alan Shepard, who, as part of the Freedom 7 mission, became the first American to walk in fly up into space on May 5, 1961. Since his leg-crossing (and potentially dangerous) mishap, waste management has become a serious concern for NASA scientists, who have spent decades refining the technology to help prepare our brave men and women for Mother Nature's inopportune calls. Here's a brief history of taking leaks in space:

What happened to Shepard? 
After more than three hours of lying on his back due to delays, with just minutes left until takeoff, Shepard told mission control he just couldn't hold it anymore. "Man, I gotta pee," he told Gordon Cooper, who was stationed at the nearby blockhouse. (Shepard had gorged on orange juice and coffee for breakfast.) After some discussion, NASA's scientists concluded that it was probably safe for him to pee in his spacesuit once its electrics were temporarily switched off. According to Freedom 7 mission'spost-flight debriefing, Shepard managed to avoid electrocuting himself (which would have been embarrassing for NASA, to say the least), but his suit's electronic biosensors short-circuited. It probably smelled pretty bad in there, too. Why didn't scientists consider the problem beforehand?
Back in the '60s, space missions were considerably shorter. In fact, Shepard's entire flight was scheduled to last just 15 minutes before he was hit with delays. How did NASA attempt to address the issue? Scientists had a few ideas in mind. According to PhysOrg, one was to outfit space explorers with catheters, which as most people know are "extremely uncomfortable and greatly increase the risk of infection."  A somewhat sustainable solution was reached for John H. Glenn's Mercury-Atlas 6 mission on Feb. 20, 1962, when he was outfitted with a condom-like device that was connected via a tube to a storage container. Glenn used it; it worked. This modification persisted throughout theApollo missions of the late '60s, in which Neil Armstrong and Co. wore "urine and fecal containment systems" underneath their spandex trunks.

Do astronauts still use tubes?
Not anymore. Since the '80s, NASA has been outfitting its men and women with what are essentially high-tech diapers. During 1983's Challenger mission, astronauts wore Disposable Absorption Containment Trunks, or DACTs. They slide on like bike shorts, and have sodium polyacrylate powder woven into the fabric, which can absorb up to 1,000 times its own weight in water.

Today's astronauts, though, wear Maximum Absorbency Garments — MAGs for short. (Former astronaut Lisa Nowak was said to be wearing a pair when she attempted to kidnap U.S. Air Force Captain Colleen Shipman back in 2007 in order to avoid pit stops.) The official brand was called Absorbencies, although the company has since folded. NASA still owns a stockpile of a few thousand of the super-absorbent MAGs, which comes in handy during space walks that can last up to eight hours at a time. And don't forget that astronauts re-entering Earth's atmosphere are mandated to drink a half gallon of salty water in order to stay hydrated. According to the Chicago Tribute, "The body retains less water in zero gravity; if astronauts didn't replenish their fluids, they might faint when they returned to Earth's gravity."