11 Things Americans Will Be Doing in Space in 2011
From private spaceflights to NASA missions to the moon, Mars and beyond, the next year promises to be a busy one for Americans in space. Here's a preview of just some of the coming attractions for U.S. spaceflight in 2011.
1.
Banking on private space planes
The
year 2011 could be the time space tourism finally makes it big. In October
2010, the privately developed space plane SpaceShipTwo
detached from its mother ship for the first time and glided safely to Earth
from a height of more than 45,000 feet (13,700 meters), landing at the Mojave
Air and Space Port in New Mexico. Two additional test runs followed shortly
thereafter.
Sir
Richard Branson's space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, is banking on SpaceShipTwo
to carry up to six passengers at a time on a 2 1 /2-hour trip to the edge of
outer space, where they will experience a few minutes of weightlessness.
According to the company, more than 370 wannabe astronauts have put down
deposits toward the $200,000 ticket to secure a seat on a future flight.
Although
Virgin hasn't committed to a fixed schedule yet, SpaceShipTwo's
successful test glides paved the way for a series of powered test flights in
early 2011. Designer Burt Rutan
has said that 50 to 100 such flights will be needed before Virgin can begin
accepting paid passengers.
2.
Roving and spying on Mars
While
one of NASA's twin Mars rovers lies dormant, the other looks set to keep
on trucking in 2011, marking the seventh straight year of activity since
the rovers landed on the Red Planet in 2004.
The
Spirit rover, stationary since getting stuck in deep sand in April 2009,
finally went silent in March 2010 and is thought to be hibernating. Meanwhile,
Opportunity remains on course to visit the 13.7-mile-wide impact crater
Endeavor.
NASA's
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted evidence of clay minerals along
Endeavor's rim. If Opportunity can make it there, the rover would be able to
conduct the first up-close inspections of Martian clays, which are believed to
have formed in the presence of water.
Look
forward to a year full of electronic picture postcards as Opportunity continues
its 11.8-mile journey, begun from Victoria Crater in late 2008. As of
September, the rover had covered half the distance to Endeavor. The trip was
originally estimated to take two years.
3.
Testing private orbital spaceships
Some
new players in transport to the International Space Station (ISS) could come
online in 2011. Hawthorne, Calif.-based company SpaceX
conducted the first
successful launch
In
2006, NASA chose SpaceX
to develop a cargo launch system for the ISS. The company came up with Dragon,
an Apollo-like capsule designed to carry up to seven people, or a mix of cargo
and people. NASA's agreement with SpaceX calls for three progressively more
complex test flights, but with the success of the initial flight, the company
said it might combine the second and third flights and send Dragon directly to
the ISS as soon as next year.
A
second recipient of a NASA contract — Dulles, Va.-based Orbital Sciences
— was scheduled to launch its Cygnus spacecraft in late 2010 aboard a
Taurus II rocket, but the test was postponed until mid-2011.
4.
Arriving at a comet
The
early months of 2011 should see NASA missions make contact with a pair of
previously visited celestial bodies — one small, one large.
First
up is the Stardust-NExT
mission, scheduled to fly within 200 kilometers (120 miles) of comet Tempel
1 on Valentine's Day. In 2005, the Deep Impact spacecraft slammed an impactor
probe into Tempel
1, leaving a crater 100 meters wide and 30 meters deep.
Stardust-NExT
(for Next Exploration of Tempel)
will concentrate on taking high-resolution images of the comet's surface,
including the crater, as well as measuring the comet's composition and the size
distribution and flux of its dust grains.
The
following month, NASA plans to insert the MESSENGER
spacecraft into an elliptical, 12-hour orbit around Mercury, the solar
system's innermost planet.
MESSENGER
(short for MErcury
Surface, Space ENvironment,
GEochemistry,
and Ranging) has already flown past Mercury three times in a series of breaking
maneuvers, sending back the first up-close views of the planet since the
mid-1970s and taking measurements of its magnetic field.
Once
in orbit around the planet, MESSENGER will study its magnetic field in greater
detail and examine Mercury's surface for evidence of volcanic processes.
5. Retiring the space shuttle fleet
On
April 12, 1981 — 20 years to the day after the former Soviet Union put
the first person in space — NASA inaugurated the space shuttle program
with the maiden voyage of the Columbia orbiter. In 2011, the shuttle program is
set to come to a close.
In
its 30 years of service, the space
shuttle fleet deployed the Hubble Space Telescope and did the heavy lifting
for assembly of the International Space Station. The shuttle was originally scheduled to be
mothballed in 2010, to be replaced by a new spacecraft called
Orion, part of the Constellation program initiated by the Bush administration.
But President Obama reversed course, and Congress canceled Constellation in
October.
Russia's
Soyuz spacecraft or future commercial spacecraft are now set to take over
duties of ferrying astronauts to and from the space station. At least two, and
possibly three, final space shuttle flights are scheduled for 2011.
6.
Marking 50 Years of human spaceflight
Humanity
will celebrate its 50th year in space on April 12, 2011. On that date in 1961,
27-year-old Yuri Gagarin became the first person to reach space, orbiting Earth
for 108 minutes in Vostok
1.
The
space race took off 23 days after Gagarin's epoch-making flight, when the
United States put its own astronaut into space — 38-year-old Alan
Shepard, piloting the Mercury capsule Freedom 7. Since then, the only other
country to launch a human into space has been China, although more than 30
countries have contributed crewmembers to space flights.
Along
the way, a series of ever-larger space stations has maintained a human presence
in space, culminating in the ISS, which has been continuously inhabited for the
past 10 years.
7.
Completing the International Space Station
NASA
plans to put the finishing touches on the International
Space Station in the coming year.
The
last remaining shuttle
missions will help do the job by hauling up large spare parts. In February,
Discovery will take up a spare room for storage and a humanoid robot called Robonaut
2.
In
April, Endeavor will carry a $1.5 billion astrophysics experiment, the Alpha
Magnetic Spectrometer, to look for signs of antimatter, dark matter and cosmic
rays beyond the Milky Way.
And
in June, a proposed mission of the shuttle Atlantis could bring up a cargo bay
full of spare parts and supplies. Together, the missions will end more than 10
years of construction for the $100 billion space station, the longest
continuously inhabited and operating station in space.
8.
Visiting an asteroid
NASA
is making preparations for a rendezvous with an asteroid in August 2011. In
February, the Hubble Space Telescope acquired new views of Vesta, a 329-mile-long
space rock between Mars and Jupiter, to aid in the arrival of the Dawn
spacecraft next August.
Launched
in 2007, Dawn is on an eight-year, 3 billion-mile trip to explore Vesta
and Ceres, the two largest known asteroids in the solar system. Dawn's mission
is to better understand the formation of the solar system. Because asteroids
are left-over
material from planet formation, scientists expect to learn something from them
about what the early solar system was like.
The
spacecraft's instruments are designed to hunt for water-bearing minerals and to
measure the shape, surface topography, tectonic history, and elemental and
mineral composition of both its targets. It is also expected to measure their
masses and gravity fields.
Powered by a xenon ion engine, Dawn received a speed boost in February 2009 when it performed a slingshot maneuver around Mars.
9. Heading for Jupiter
The
controlled plunge of the Galileo probe into Jupiter's atmosphere in 2003 put an
end to the first dedicated mission to the solar system's largest planet. Now
the time has come for a return visit.
In
April 2010, NASA engineers and technicians began testing and launch
preparations for Juno, Galileo's successor. Set to launch in August 2011, the
solar-powered probe will reach Jupiter in 2016, where it will enter a highly
elliptical orbit and use nine science instruments to begin studying the
planet's deep structure, atmosphere and magnetic field.
On
the mission checklist: investigating whether Jupiter has a solid core, mapping
its intense magnetic field, measuring the amount of water and ammonia in its
deep atmosphere, and observing the planet's auroras.
10.
Returning to the moon
The
mysteries of moon dust and lunar gravity are in NASA's crosshairs for 2011, as
a pair of new probes gets set to launch aboard an unmanned Delta 2 rocket in
September. Packed together will be the $80 million LADEE probe and the $375
million GRAIL spacecraft.
LADEE,
short for Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, is an orbiter
designed for a 100-day mission to study the moon's atmosphere and clingy dust,
both of which may figure into future manned returns to the moon. LADEE is
expected to carry a spectrometer to probe the atmosphere and a dust detector
for examining samples of the moon's gritty regolith that have wafted into
space. (Regolith is a blanket of loose soil, rocks and dust that covers some
celestial bodies.)
Its
partner mission, GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory), consists of
a pair of spacecraft that will orbit in tandem to map the moon's gravity in
high detail, which will give scientists a better idea of its subsurface
structure and internal history.
The
two missions will separate only after they are en route to the moon, with LADEE
expected to take about five months to enter orbit and check its systems.
11.
Sending a new mission to Mars
Over
the past six years, NASA's Mars landers have studied the geology of the Red
Planet and discovered water ice at its north pole. The space agency is set to
take the next step in its Mars program in 2011 with the launch of the $2.3
billion Mars Science Laboratory.
Nicknamed
Curiosity,
the new rover is twice as long and four times as heavy as its predecessors
Spirit and Opportunity, or about the size of a Mini Cooper, and comes equipped
with a laser for vaporizing samples of rock. The goal of the mission is to
determine whether Mars was ever hospitable to microbial life.
Engineers were busy this year putting Curiosity through its paces. In September, they attached and flexed the rover's jointed, 7.5-foot titanium arm, which will eventually sport a camera and a spectrometer to examine samples of rock and soil where they lie. They have also been maneuvering the six-wheeled rover over a series of ramps in a clean room to test its mobility.
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