August 9, 2002

NASA's O'Keefe to Head Homeland Defence? Bolden to Retire?

NASA was  atwitter this week with rumors that administrator Sean O'Keefe might be tapped by the White House to head the new Department of Homeland Security currently in the works. O'Keefe's name surfaced this week in a U.S. News and World Reports column suggesting that President Bush is under pressure to name someone to head the new department.

NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs said he was not aware of any plans by the administrator to leave the sapce agency.

The rumor mill started spinning even faster after word arrived at NASA headquarters that Charlie Bolden, O'Keefe's first pick for NASA deputy administrator, has decided to retire from the Marine Corps. When Bolden's nomination was withdrawn on the eve of his confirmation earlier this year, the White House said the military could not afford to give up such a seasoned military officer. Now some NASA staffers are speculating that Boldin's planned retirement is more than just mere coincidence, but the first step in a change of leadership at the top.

Marines Corps spokesman Capt. Joe Kloppel said Bolden relinquished his command of the 3rd Marine Air Wing in Miramar, Calif. on Friday and plans to retire from the service on Jan. 1.

Egg-like Space Metals Could have Earthly Applications

In the microgravity of space, a certain metal alloy forms naturally into an egg-like structure, with one metal forming the "yolk" and another the "white." If the stuff could be made on Earth, scientists expect it might be useful for automotive, electric, and industrial machinery, as well as in solder balls for modern electronics packing technology.

New research to be presented in the Aug. 9 issue of the journal Science shows the grains can be made on Earth.

Researchers at Tohoku University in Japan found that copper-iron liquid alloys can be induced to form tiny "egg-type powder" grains in a lab. The formation of the core can be explained by so-called Marangoni motion, according to the researchers, in which fluid moves in response to variations in surface tension around the surface of a droplet. We just want to know if it'll help get us to Mars or not.

August 8, 2002

Mars Global Surveyor Camera Turned Off

The Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) was turned off on July 31, 2002, and it will remain off until at least August 19, 2002. During this time, Mars is behind the Sun relative to Earth, and communication with the spacecraft is extremely limited (for several days, there will be no communication at all). MOC is off during this time because any images it might acquire could not be transmitted to Earth, and the twice-weekly targeting schedules can not be sent to the spacecraft.

Solar Conjunction is the term used to describe the period when the Sun is between Earth and Mars---from the Earth, Mars appears to move towards, and eventually merge with, the Sun. Solar Conjunction comes around about every 25 months, the first solar conjunction for MGS occurred in May 1998, the second in June/July 2000, the third in August 2002. Each time, the MOC was turned off and safely returned to service after the conjunction period ended.

With the MOC "on vacation," the MOC Operations Team can also take a short breather, having commanded over 125,000 images over the past 4-plus years. However, "short" is the operative word, as in a few days the team will be hard at work preparing for the MOC turn-on later in the month.

Orbital Gets 2004 Hubble Service Mission Contract

Orbital Sciences Corp was awarded the support contract for the next Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission tentatively set for some time in 2004.

The Dulles, Va.-based firm was awarded a $22 million cost reimbursable contract from Lockheed Martin for engineering support services. Orbital's job will be to build the hardware that will carry Hubble equipment to and from orbit inside the shuttle's cargo bay.

For this upcoming servicing mission Orbital plans to introduce the use of lightweight composite materials in manufacturing the carrier racks, which are called Space Support Equipment. Orbital has been on board for all five of Hubble's servicing missions.

"Orbital's continued involvement in the Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions is a real source of pride for all Orbital employees," said Richard Hicks, Orbital's Vice President and head of its Technical Services Division. "To play a role in maintaining one of man's greatest accomplishments in space is a very rewarding experience."

Major highlights of the mission will include the installation of the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC-3) and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS).

Claims made in April of the discovery of quark stars, object more dense than neutron stars, have been under attack by researchers who say the results were not conclusive. A new study, to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, casts further doubt.

Another group of researchers has jumped on what might eventually become an anti-Einstein bandwagon. Last August, scientists looking at how light was absorbed by metallic atoms in gas clouds some 12 billion light-years away found that the so-called fine structure constant may be changing subtly as the universe grows older. The constant, called alpha, explains how electromagnetic forces hold atoms together. The speed of light, another presumed constant, is one element in the alpha formula and so was also called into question.

August 7, 2002

Update: Shuttle Fleet Repairs to Begin Friday

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Repairs on shuttle Atlantis' cracked propellant flow liners are expected to begin on Friday, Kennedy Space Center spokesman Bruce Buckingham said Wednesday.

Officials had hoped to start the work by midweek but are taking a little more time to prepare and train for the task, which is expected to be finished on Friday as well. It will then take another few days to polish the welds and test the repairs, Buckingham said.

Installation of Atlantis' three main engines is scheduled to begin next Wednesday, Aug. 14, soon enough for NASA managers to remain optimistic about their current plans to send off the shuttle on an International Space Station assembly mission by the end of September.

"We continue on target for a launch date as early as Sept. 28," Buckingham said.

Repairs to Endeavour, meanwhile, will wait to begin until after the work is finished on Atlantis. The reason: engineers want to assess how well the first round of repairs went and consider any changes in the procedure before beginning the task on a second orbiter.

Right now the schedule has repairs beginning on Endeavour on Aug. 19, Buckingham said.

Shuttle launch operations came to a halt in June when an eagle-eyed technician discovered tiny cracks within the plumbing of Atlantis' main propulsion system. The space agency took several weeks to understand the problem and develop a plan to repair the trouble and safely resume flights.

NASA hopes to launch Atlantis first, followed by Endeavour about Nov. 2 and Columbia as early as Nov. 29 -- although that mission is likely to slip into December or even wait until after the new year.

Got NASA, aerospace or other launch-related dish? Drop Jim Banke an e-mail.

Jet Contrails Alter Temperature, Post-Sept. 11 Study Finds

Even astronauts notice the "spider web of contrails" that jet airliners put in the sky each day. But with the skies clear of airline traffic after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, scientists had an opportunity to settle a long-running debate over how contrails affect weather. The result, to be reported tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature, seems clear: Condensation trails, created when exhaust condenses around water vapor, have a "small but significant effect" on the range of daily temperatures on Earth, say University of Wisconsin's David Travis and colleagues.

Update: Bass Misses Money Deadline

Lance Bass and Co. missed an August 1 deadline for making a $1.5 million down payment to secure the available third seat on October's Soyuz flight to the international space station. But sources tell SPACE.com that the U.S. pop star remains in Star City and his representatives have not given up hope that a last minute deal can still be clinched.

The deposit and deadline were agreed to by Bass and his legal representatives on or around July 22 following more than a week of negotiations. Sources close to the Bass space flight bid said money remains the chief obstacle to clinching a binding agreement with Russian space officials to fly the 23-year-old pop star this fall. However, a source at Star City told Interfax that the Russian's are losing patience and that "the whole affair looks like a promotional stunt."

Russian Run-in with Space Debris?

Space surveillance experts at the U.S. Air Force Space Command near Colorado Springs, Colorado noticed a new object near Russia's Cosmos 539 . It appears a chunk of space junk knocked off a piece of the 30-year old spacecraft. Radar scans back in May first detected the fragment breaking free of the Russian satellite.

The busted off piece shot through space, lasting only 43 days before dropping into Earth's atmosphere. That's a hasty retreat from an orbit so high that satellite reentry normally requires thousands of years. Cosmos 539's orbit did change a tad, seemingly tied to being smacked by a small object.

Either a meteoroid or orbital debris is the likely high-speed intruder. But given the high-altitude whereabouts of the Russian satellite, the amount of small-sized orbital debris is roughly 10 times that of meteoroids. The incident is reported in a new issue of a NASA Johnson Space Center newsletter dedicated to orbital debris

Getting Sick of Getting Sick in Space

They train and train, yet 70 percent of all astronauts still get sick on their first spaceflight. Sure, there are drugs, but the leading quieter of queasiness has an undesirable side-effect for highly trained, high-paid space workers: It makes them sleepy.

"Astronauts typically take promethazine, a medication used to treat nausea," says John Dornhoffer of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute. "It's a good medicine, but it causes sedation." While sleepwalking might be in order, spacewalks are forbidden when on the medication. So Dornhoffer is doing what doctors always do when they want to solve sickness: He's testing new methods on some healthy people.

A group of 75 regular folks are testing drugs designed to treat balance disorders (lorazepam, meclizine, promethazine and scopolamine). Each drug has side effects on the central nervous system, so "we are using cognitive tests to determine which medication causes the least impairment," Dornhoffer said yesterday. Here's just one test the participants agreed to: A rotating chair spins them at ever increasing speeds up to 30 revolutions per minute while they answer questions.

"A healthy individual can do that for about 15-25 minutes before feeling sick," the Doc said. We figure a smarter person might not agree to it in the first place, but we commend the subjects for going boldly into that dreadful furniture frontier.

August 6, 2002

NASA: Eastern U.S. Smokeout in Early July Set Record

Residents of the East Coast who saw the sky grow orange on a Saturday afternoon in early July won't soon forget the eerie day the Sun disappeared. It was obscured by smoke that drifted down from Canadian forest fires. Turns out NASA was watching the event, from above and from the surface.

The AERONET (AErosol RObotic NETwork) program uses ground-based instruments to measure tiny particles called aerosols, then the data is compared to satellite images to improve understanding of the visible aspects of pollution. Canada operates a related program, called AEROCAN .

When smoke from north of Quebec City drifted as far south as Washington D.C., an instrument at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in nearby Maryland measured the highest aerosol loading ever recorded in the eastern United States.

"On Sunday, July 7th, the aerosol optical depth values, indicative of the concentration of pollutants in the air, approached a value of 6, which was never recorded before in this area," said NASA atmospheric scientist Brent Holben . An aerosol optical depth of 6 means only 0.25 percent of the direct sunlight is getting through the aerosols to the ground.

Those of us who looked up that day had no numbers in our heads, but intuitively we knew all this.

William F. Readdy Selected as NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Flight

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe today selected William F. Readdy as the agency's next Associate Administrator for Space Flight at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Readdy, a veteran Space Shuttle commander and Navy test pilot, replaces Frederick D. Gregory, who is moving into NASA's Deputy Administrator slot.

Readdy will assume his new duties after Gregory takes the oath of office and will be in charge of NASA's human exploration and development of space. Since July 1998, Readdy has served as space flight's Deputy Associate Administrator, overseeing NASA's Marshall, Kennedy, Stennis and Johnson Space Centers. He also managed top-level policy planning and management of the Space Shuttle, International Space Station, Space Communications and Space Launch Vehicles programs.

A veteran of three space flights, STS-42 in 1992, STS-51 in 1993, and STS-79 in 1996, Readdy has logged more than 672 hours in space. During STS-79, Readdy was Commander of Atlantis as it docked with the Russian space station Mir.

Remote-Control Rocket Return

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA's efforts to design a second-generation reusable launch vehicle now include studies to determine what kind of jet engine might be required to fly a spent booster rocket (these are employed to deploy space shuttles today) back to Earth after liftoff.

A variety of engine options are being considered, but the final choice must be able to maneuver a used-up booster rocket and safely fly it back to a remotely-controlled landing on a runway near the launch site. Currently the space shuttle's solid rocket boosters are dropped by parachute into the ocean, where they are recovered, refurbished and reused.

Flying a booster back would save the costs associated with maintaining the recovery ships and repairing any water-related damage. The study will determine requirements for the engine and identify costs for making the jet engines more reliable, as well as the development and production of the engines.

The study is managed by the Propulsion Office of NASA's Space Launch Initiative at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland also is involved. Industry partners include General Electric in Cincinnati and Pratt & Whitney of East Hartford, Conn.

Sir, May I Check Your Bag?

There's this toaster-sized instrument at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory that has to get to the European Space Agency's Estec research and technology center today to be mounted on the SMART-1 lunar orbiter, slated for launch next spring. Manuel Grande is in charge of getting it there. He'll take it aboard a commercial flight as carry-on luggage.

"Of course I’ll be treating it with great care," Grande says, "but I’m not too worried. Part of its testing involved vigorous shaking, designed to ensure it will survive the violent launch. A short trip in an aeroplane shouldn’t be a problem for it."

So if this is a test, why not check it through and let it rumble around in the plane's belly?

Grande isn't the first scientist to take space stuff on a plane, by the way. In the early days of rocketry, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory carried rockets aboard commercial airliners to meet deadlines for getting their machines to testing sites. Imagine getting those through security today.

Space Studies Scholarships Awarded

The Planetary Society announced yesterday it had doled out three scholarships for students pursuing stuff off Earth. 27-year-old Bojan Pecnik of Croatia will get $14,500 to attend the International Space University summer school program in Pomona, California. Hillary Cummings, 21, of Washington state, and 20-year-old Amanda Heiderman of Nevada will each get $1,000 to help further their space science educations.

August 5, 2002

"One-quarter of the magnetite crystals embedded in the carbonates in Martian meteorite ALH 84001 require the intervention of biology to explain their presence," said Kathie Thomas-Keprta of NASA's Johnson Space Center and the lead researcher on the study. These latest results were published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. A full account is available here.

From Sunderajan to Robert Roy Britt: If the Earth had really developed a bulge, it would have a reduction of rotational velocity.

Robert Roy Britt replies: You're right. Keep in mind that the Earth has always had a bulging midsection. What's news [See story] is that the bulge is apparently growing over the past four years based on measurements of Earth's gravity field (a change in the shape of Earth itself was not measured). We asked Christopher Cox, the lead author of the study you mention, what he thought about your comment.

"As the bulge increases, it will tend to cause the Earth's spin to slow down," Cox said. "This is very much like the example of the spinning skater who slows down her spin by spreading her arms. In this case, it would be a very small change -- small fractions of a second per day, but detectable. We have looked at our data in comparison with data on the spin rate. There may be a connection, as recently there has been no need for the time keeping services to insert leap seconds into our time system. These are inserted as needed to keep our clocks in synch with the Earth's rotation. It is much the same concept as the extra days in leap years."

Russian Rocket to Take Beagle-2 to Mars in 2003

MOSCOW. Aug 5 (Interfax) - Russia's Soyuz-FG rocket and the Fregat launcher will bring the Beagle-2 European Mars lander to the red planet at the end of 2003, sources in the Russian office of the European Space Agency have told Interfax.

The  launch  will  be done from the Baikonur  spaceport.  Several models  of  the  Mars lander have been designed for testing  in  Turin, Italy,  the agency sources told Interfax. The flight model of  Beagle-2 will  be  manufactured by January 15, 2003, and have a  weight  of  1.5 tonnes.

The rocket, which will deliver the lander to the departure orbit, differs  from regular Soyuz rockets by the higher thrust of  its  first stage  engines.  The Fregat launcher, made by the Lavochkin  Scientific Center, has passed flight tests. It is ready for use in the delivery of spacecraft to highly elliptical, geo-stationary, solar-synchronized and interplanetary orbits.

The Mars Express system will be launched from Baikonur in May-June 2003. The Mars lander will come to the planet at the end of next year. The Mars lander carries  equipment for  testing  the  chemical composition of soil and rocks, as well as for studying the existence of organic life forms, such as microorganisms, on the planet. It will have a  gripper  for  taking  samples of the soil and  the  atmosphere.  The vehicle  will  transmit the information to Earth.  Its  return  is  not planned.

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