Comparison of ground-based and space-based light curves for hot exoplanet HAT P7b (Image credit: NASA Ames Research Center)

This is the morning of Kepler. I’m currently sitting in a the Marriot Ballroom watching the speaker, William J Borucki (NASA/Ames) gear up to announcing planets.

This amazing mission has been imaging the same rich stellar field over and over looking for planetary transits: the slight dimming of light from a star that comes from an orbiting planet passing between us and that distance star.

After 20 minutes of gearing up, he announced 5 new planets with orbital periods between 3.2 and 4.9 days orbiting stars larger than the sun at orbital distances 4.31 to 18.8 times the size of the Earth’s orbit. Because the stars are bigger than the Sun (by an amount not shown in the table), this is hard to quantify – they could be very near the stellar surfaces! – He referred to them as icy giants, but their surfaces are all hotter than 1500 Kelvin, with surfaces in 2 cases hotter than molten lead! These are large hot planets.

4 of these planets are all more massive than Jupiter, and one is smaller but still larger than Earth. There is a great table coming in a paper on Astro-PH going up later today (link to come)

In addition to these stars, they have also discovered several neat variable stars: binaries, oscillating stars, pulsating variables, and more. This is one of the great things about this mission: While it was designed to find earth-sized planets orbiting other stars (given more time – they require data over more time than Jupiter-sized planets), it also collects data on variable stars in the field that is of amazing quality. This means that Kepler’s throw away data is somebody else’s science.

Okay he just said something weird I’m going to have to look up. They have found small – Jupiter-ish sized in radius – that are hotter than the star they are orbiting. These look like tiny hot stars orbiting cooler stars BUT the hot object is too big to be a white dwarf and too hot to be anything else. He said there are more than one in the field and no one knows what they are.

The Kepler Press conference is coming up soon, and hopefully we’ll get more info there.

Launch of STS-129 (from Sci-Fi Laura)

It feels like a lifetime has passed since the Shuttle Launch, but I need to finish telling that story before I can move onto something new. That November the shuttle Atlantis launched flawlessly.

It is all a mosaic of moments: the shuttle astronauts drove past and waved; we all piled out for a group picture; speakers came and went and media came and went and we listened and we didn’t and we were interviewed and we laughed. I paused in the middle to record Astronomy Cast – a 10 minute bit for 365 Days of Astronomy actually – and I paused in the middle to work on a grant. There is no escape from real life even when you stand at the edge of the looking glass.

At about 2:15pm we went out and staked out our places in the grass. We fussed with cameras and we laughed and we got lost in the sun, and the clouds, and the water, and we got lost in the moment.

And then we heard “We have Main Engine Ignition. 6! 5! 4! …”

We’d been sitting, Laura, Mark and I, in the grass in front of the tripods, in front of the crowds, in front of the clock. Nothing was between us and the Shuttle except water and wood. We missed the start of the count down to the noise of the crowd, and as we looked up from our cameras and iPhones, we saw the clouds of steam starting to billow up.

The countdown was counting down, and we screamed out with the NASA announcer, one voice blended from so many.

“3! 2! 1! We have launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis”

There was more he said, but we were lost; Mark and I were lost in our binoculars, and Laura watched and fliked photos with her amazing camera. Through my Nikons, the flames caused pain and I had to look away, but I could only take the lenses away for a moment because I wanted to see everything. We traced the Shuttle’s path skyward, watching it pivot belly up to the sky. It climbed, and through the eyepieces I saw the solid rocket boosters drop away as the Shuttle disappeared into the clouds.

And then it was over, the wind whiping away the clouds created by the engines’ combustion. It was over, and it was another day. But it was a day we’d seen the Shuttle launch.

We had seen something special as we watched those men launch themselves into space. The image is burned into my retinas and rumbled into my chest, not to be forgotten.The world moved on, and we moved on with it, but we were changed.

@MarkSands and I in front of Countdown Clock

We’re here. We’re actually here.

It is launch day for STS-129, the next to last launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis. We settled into our seats at T-3 hours and holding, waiting for the crew to head out the vehicle and load up and get locked in (a new meaning for load & lock?)

It is a fair day here in Cape Canaveral, with partial clouds, 4-5 ft seas, and low wind. Chances of launch are currently 70%, but in this room of 101 people from 21 US states, and 4 additional nations (Morocco, New Zealand, UK, and Canada), we are going to keep on believing this-is-happening-right-now until someone makes us stop.

As a little girl, one of my earliest memories is watching the shuttle contrails from landings at Edwards Air Force base. From our California home, we could just make out this white dot in the sky, and I remember running back and force from the TV, where chase jet images showed the shuttle in detail, and the backyard, where I could only imagine what it was so high up in the sky.

Now, an adult who set aside my dreams of being part of NASA HSF (Human Space Flight) to instead focus on my NASA SMD (Space Mission Directorate) reality, it is amazing to still find my way to a launch, and to find myself so close – able to reach out and touch the launch clock. It is an odd way to bookend a life. I was 7-years old when Columbia first flew, and if the last launch goes as planned in September 2010, I’ll be 36 when the program ends.

A lifetime of dreaming of flying on the wings of great white bird must replaced with a reformulation of my parents and grandparents more encapsulated dreams. With Constellation, the next generation of astronauts – my generation turned astronaut – will buckle back in to capsules.

But while Constellation moves NASA in a new direction, the commercial space program is continuing to imagine new things never thought of in the days of Glenn and Aldrain. With SpaceShipTwo and Virgin Galactic, we’re looking at new ways fly white winged birds into the inky black of space.

We are at T minus less than 3 hours and counting. There are two more holds. And there are 101 hearts willing away the clouds and wishing for clear check lists and smooth skies.

We are at T minus less than 3 hours and counting, and if all goes well in 3 real hours we’ll be watching Space Shuttle Atlantis launch into a clear blue sky.

STS-129 Tweetup

It’s morning and none of us have had enough coffee, but the approximately 100 of us in a conference room in the Rocket part are wide awake. Jon Cowart, Ares 1X deputy mission director, is currently going from table to table asking us to identify mystery items in a run morning mixer.

Earlier this morning (which at 8:18am is a scary concept), after checking in and getting badges and goody bags (and taking the goody bags back to the car), we all invaded a large conference room that NASA has tricked out in perfect fashion for a room full of New Media Addicts. Ahead of time they had sent us the SSID and password for the private network. They set up a power strip on each table (with more outlets than chairs per table!). On the screens, they’re displaying the live feed (using the very cool http://www.twitterfall.com) of the #NASAtweetup tag, and slowly we’re trending and we can watch it and the speaker all at once while creating content on our own computers and phones. They got us all the little stuff we needed. And that really does matter. Thanks NASA (and remember – this was all done as a volunteer effort on top of normal job responsibilities. When I say thanks, I mean it!)

Tweetup Geekery

As we came in and plugged in, NASA folks walked around leaving random mission bits on every table. Our table has external tank foam (woohoo? Maybe, woohoo? Ok, not so much. It’s foam). Other tables have hydrazine sensors, compressor valves, aerogel, mysterious chunky substances, what look like vibration dampeners, and all sorts of wonderful random stuff which encouraged us to get out of our nice safe seats, and get out from behind our nice safe keyboards, and to wander around looking at the weird and wonderful bits on other tables.

And, they got the day going by talking about these random items, and using them to transition into a discussion by John Cowart (@Rocky_Sci) STS assembly, moving the Shuttle to the pad, and the moments leading up to the launch of the shuttle.

A lot of what was said is the standard schpell that anyone can read, but he peppered his story with pieces that aren’t usually mentioned and that center around Kennedy Space Center being a nature giant nature preserve. There are nests of Bald Eagles (I think he said 5 nests). Roughly 1/3 of Florida’s manatees live here at Kennedy. There are 4000-6000 alligators scattered around the facility (and I really want to see one). This last bit I had actually known because I went to Space Camp / Space Academy in high school, and back in the late 80′s / early 90s, the end of the simulation showed an alligator on the run way. In real life, NASA has a crew responsible for clearing the runway of sunning reptiles.

There are many weird jobs at NASA: There is the guy who drives the porta potty behind the crawler to the launch pad, their are gator wranglers, and for today at least their are twitter herders.

From @Rocky_Sci, the podium was handed over to Wayne Hale (strategic program planning manager), who explained a lot of the technical details in analogies suited for non-technical types. One thing that seriously surprised me is how this is clearly a room full of people who live online, but who aren’t in careers related to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Wayne had us do a quick show of hands – “Who works in…?” and my guess is less than 30% of the hands went up.

It was evidence that today’s world requires everyone to be techno literate.

From Wayne we transitioned to Mike Massimino (@Astro_Mike). It is all going to fast to type, so I’m going to sit back and enjoy.

And soon they’re releasing us to go play… (Join me on twitter @starstryder for picts in real time).

Kennedy Space Flight Center

A few weeks ago one of my students pointed out, OMG THE NASA TWEETUP PAGE WENT UP EARLY! While most of us in the room had alarms set off to go off at noon to register for this special event, it wasn’t yet noon, and in a rush of adrenaline and typing we went to the sign in page and used are various autocomplete software to fill out the sign up page as soon as possible. We were all chasing one thing: The chance to attend one of the last 6 scheduled space shuttle launches.

Now, I have to admit, I signed up without checking the launch date, without checking the cost of going, without checking with my husband (my poor husband). I just registered on instinct.

And now I’m here, sitting in a Holiday Inn, waiting to attend a special 2-day event NASA is hosting for folks who interact with NASA via twitter.

Originally, a whole group of us were selected for what was supposed to be a Sunday launch, but with a one day delay and exam season upon, in the end it turned out only Mark Sands and I could come. And I have to give massive Kudos (with a capital K) to the dean of engineering at SIUE for funding all of Mark’s trip. As some of you may have seen, our university (along with all other Illinois state schools) is experiencing a massive funding crisis. With all accounts frozen, approval for this trip had to come from the vice chancellor, and the chair of computer science and dean of engineering went to bat for us to make this happen.

We left Edwardsville this morning on separate flights (just how we kept costs down, oddly) and I spent my day flying (and working on grant – bleh) and then driving with Mark out to the Cape. We reached Cape Canaveral just as sunset hit on a glorious Florida fall day. It was an odd and wonderful experience.

Evacuate through the KSC?

Flamingos fly in Formation

Did you know the hurricane evacuation route goes past the visitor center?

And did you know Flamingoes fly in V shaped formations?

These were just two of the things I learned today.

Tomorrow I expect to learn more substantial information. The mission we are here to see lift off, STS-129, is the next to last flight of the Space Shuttle Atlantis. This is a bit stressful in the same way that starting a really long car ride 5000 miles after you should have had your oil changed is stressful. The Atlantis was due several years ago for a complete overhaul, and was scheduled to be pulled from service pulled from service in 2008. It’s now 2009 and the shuttle should get them there and back again, but it is showing its age. Specifically, the Composite Overwrap Pressure Vesselswere designed to last 10 years, recertified after the fact as good for 20 years, but have actually been in service for 22 years and there is concern they may randomly opt to leak or explode while under full pressure (see this Space.com story). Just like I have successfully driven the 5 hours to and from Chicago in a 10 year old car well past due for an oil change and been fine, I fully expect everything to go great this weekend, and I suspect that NASA will tell us about how they have learned to retrofit the shuttles and redesign around these age issues.

I also expect to learn more about the missions goals. This is one of the rare construction missions that also carries science. One of the experiments it is carrying, MISSE, will be exposing a bunch of different “building” materials to the rigors of space – UV radiation, cosmic radiation, x-rays, extremes of temperature, etc, etc – to see what of today’s new materials are best suited to construct tomorrow’s space vehicles and bases.

Also carried up are spare parts (otherwise known as ExPRESS Logistics Carriers 1 & 2), and two communications systems (S-Band Antenna Sub-Assembly (SASA) package and COTS UHF communication unit). The later of these two will be needed when SpaceX takes over carrying US supplies to the ISS after the shuttle retires.

For now though, it’s off to bed.

More to come from Kennedy Space Center.

Dr. William Keel of the University of Alabama Department of Physics and Astronomy will be at the local Buffalo Wild Wings watching NASA TV on the big screens with colleagues and students. Together they’ll take in the EVAs and perhaps even raise a Wild Wing in salute of the astronauts achievements.

While this idea started in Tuscaloosa, there is no reason for it to end there. Many restaurants and bars have cable television packages that include NASA TV. Next week, grab a friend and grab a beverage and ask the guy behind the bar to tune the TV into the greastest high risk game of all: It’s Man versus the Machine as Mike Massimino and the STS-125 team of astronauts upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope.

Find out more about STS-125 on the mission website and check out the NASA TV schedule here.

Last week I received one of these emails and it is actually a request that is really cool, and that isn’t usually true – it’s usually the programs that are funded that are cool.

In Solicitation Number NNH08ZDA005L NASA’s Science Mission Directorate is requesting community input on how spacecraft can get repurposed and duly purposed beyond their original mission program.

Specifically, they write, “With input from responses to this RFI, NASA intends to consider (i) whether there are science opportunities for new uses of existing spacecraft and (ii) whether a solicitation for proposals is warranted to enable such opportunities.”

Based on community input, NASA may decide to offer people the opportunity to propose new uses for all manner of space craft. Projects like EPOXI mission (which reuses the Deep Impact mission) could become common place.

“NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) currently sponsors approximately 85 flight missions, involving over 90 spacecraft,” and these missions and space craft all offer opportunities for the creative mind to do something unexpected. For instance, in the past a guide camera on a broken satellite (whose name I’ve forgotten) was used for precision measurements of star brightnesses. The astronomy community is large and rich and I feel certain that their input on this request for information will suggest a wealth of ways NASA can broaden the science it is able to do with existing programs and existing dollars.

Interested in giving your own input? Check out this link. (Registration required – You’ll have to jump through some NASA hoops if you aren’t already in NSPIRES.

[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/starstryder/StarStryder-080311-DustCotton.mp3]

Here is a link to her science: Paper

Jim Green, Director of Planetary Science Division at NASA
State of the State of NASA Planetary Science Division (PSD)

18 months ago PSD had these problems:

• The Reserarch and Analysis budget had been cut 15%. This below life support levels! With this level of cuts, professors began telling students not to go into Planetary Science.
• Astrobiology had been cut 50%. This got people asking if Astrobiology can survive? NASA is the parent of the astrobiology field and considers astrobiology very valuable. The field has the important mission to determine if there is life in the solar system. Somehow, in one year it’s budget saw $30 disappear!
• New Frontiers mission “Juno” was being considered for. Project was being delayed, with $300 million knocked from its budget in 3 consecutives years. The delays ended up increasing final project cost to over $1 Billion, when it had been promised to Congress as as a sub-billion dollar project. The Jun mission is now scheduled for 2011.
• All Near Earth Object activities were moved into Earth Science Mission Directorate (ESMD). The NEO activities are a very small, but political football. Things are still being worked out , and these problems are leading to attrition of PSD scientists to ESMD.
• There was basically no science planned to/from/on the Moon. The LSSO program was the only activity and it was a token at best.
• There was no Discovery selection
• There was no Outer Planets Flagship mission, and the outer solar system community was forced to survive within dwindling Research and Analysis budget
• PSD was grossly understaffed with low morale.

“These are not our problems anymore! We do have challenges however. This is really a team effort and many thanks are due to Alan [Stern’s] effort – there has been a lot of work and support to make this happen.”
R&A today: Total planetary budget (from larger table)

• Spent in 07: $141508
• Planned to be spent in 08: $200581
• Requested in 09: $219235

“This increase is a testament to all the people who have worked to bring PSD back.”
The Lunar had the largest increases (07: $3800, 08: $18,000, 09: $25000) Astrobio also had large increases, bringing it back up to $49Million projected in 09

Announcements – Discovery and Mars Scout Mission Capability Enhancements: Programs were solicited for small planetary missions that require ASRG power source – Two Stirling Engines with ~140 Watts each. These engins have better efficiencies hen current engines, and are better than some radioactive power sources. They need to be flight tested though, and NASA is using Discovery/Scout missions to get this space qualification. Each of these missions has a 6 month duration. Of 40 proposals, 9 were selected.

• JPL to Venus, Arial Vehicle
• LANL to Moon, Lander
• Washington U to Moon, Rover
• APL to Asteroid, Lander
• JPL to Mars , lander
• Proxemy Research to Outer Planets, Lander
• U Arizona to Outer Planets, Lander
• NASA Ames to Comet, Sample Return
• U Maryland to Comet, Lander

Lunar Participating Researcher program had 55 proposals, 24 selected

• Up to 4 years, $80k/yr
• Participating Scientist will be considered part of the science team

Scientists asked to stand. One looked like a grad student age woman – way cool to see!
Lunar Advanced Science & Exploration Research – cofunded by ESMD – winners announced end of March. 160 proposals. Estimate will pick 50 proposals

Opening New Frontiers in Space: Choices for the Next New Frontiers AO guided by input from National Academy. Recommendations, state NASA Should
1) Emphasis science objectives,
2) Expand the list of candidate missions,
3) limit to the list of topics below unless compelling science

Topics NRC endorses:

• Asteroid Rover/ Sample Returnn
• Comet Surface Sample Return
• Ganymede Observer *new*
• Io Observer *new*
• Jupiter Polar Orbiter with Probes
• Kuiper Belt/Pluto
• Lunar South Aitken Basin Sample Return
• Mars Network Science *new*
• Trojan/Centaur Reconnaissance *new*
• Venus In-Situ Explorer

Stern will use financial realism and feasibility as primary criteria. Translation: you can’t do everything – be realistic. But there’s a twist – the idea of limiting to these topics, but sometimes allowing compelling science to trump guidelines. What does this mean? Consider Geysers on Enceladus – great new discoveries worth missions can lead to new opportunities that guidelines can’t anticipate.

New Frontier will be open to any Solar System target accept the Sun and Earth. Proposed missions must also be consistent with the unavailability of radioisotope power sources.
Although missions to any target can be proposed, priority will be given to the NRC report list
(Due dates: Draft July 2008, AO October 2008). The hope is to be able to use these newly developed sterling engines.

All mission of opportunity proposals pulled from this call and all future calls.

PI qualifications: “Stern is hard over on all PI qualifications.” Important to note that he has backed off on how high the bar is for new New Frontiers calls. The qualifications are on a PI Qualifications Matrix, and there is a web form to check your qualifications. If you don’t meet the qualifications, the proposal won’t even be read! Some loosening has occurred, but it’s still very strict

Perspective of why: “It really has to do with how we’ve been doing missions over the years. Big things assigned to centers, and we say “give us your best project manager – the one who is over qualified who could do it in his sleep – who can bring it in on-time on-budget in his sleep. … As time goes, when that guy screws up, we fire him and get a new one.” For a number of projects the project manager changed a number of times. Some were good in some stages but not all. “Stern is saying we need to have a modicum of standards in selecting PIs – experience matters.”

SALMON Solicitation Development <– this is where all new missions of opportunity will go. Current release date is Friday! Proposals will be due August 2008 and selections will be announced Feb 09 (nominally). Call for proposals should be released yearly. Very much like ROSES. Form has “boiler plate in front, appendices in back, and we can add to this with time.” Call is open to all divisions: Heliophysics, Astrophysics, etc, etc… This allows everyone to see how they can participate. This is a new approach.

What SALMON includes:

• Traditional Misions of Opportunity for non-NASA launched space missions: instrument, tech, hardware, etc
• US PI – Co-Investigator for non-hardware projects for a science or technology experiment to be built and flown by an agency other than NASA
• New Science Missions using Existing Spacecraft – Investigations that propose a new scientific use of existing NASA spacecraft (ie. NExT, EPOXI …)
• Small Complete Missions – Science invesrtufations that can be realied within the specified cost cap – includes all phases from access to space through data pub – gateway to PI qualification
• Focused Opportunities – Investigations that address a specific, NASA-identified opportunity
• This is great set of new opportunities that hope will be out on a regula bases to lead to more open and participatory space community

LRO and LCROSS launch later this year (October 2008): Data will flow into Planetary Data system and the system is getting updated to handle flux of data. PSD funds LRO extended missions.

GRAIL is a new mission – a gravity mission and a new discovery mission

Lunar Atmosphere & Dust Environment Explorer (LASER)- $80M ARC/GSFC new mission with 2 instruments (Dust Counter and Nuetral Mass Spectrometer) It is well grounded in NRC Scientific Context for Exploration of the Moon. It will measure the atmosphere/exosphere before it is perturbed by human activity.

International Lunar Network: The ILN is designed to emplace 6-8 stations on the lunar surface – fixed and mobile. Each ILN station has a core set of instrument types (seismic, laser retro-reflector, heat flow, could also include additional instruments as desired by the sponsoring space agency. Could also include additional passive/active experiments. Two nodes supplied by NASA on 2013/2014 time scale. May have 2 more nodes in 2016/17 time frame. Nodes will first be placed on poles, and others elsewhere. NASA is studying option of a lunar communications relay orbiter to enable lunar far-side access for ILN nodes. Expect international participation for the other network nodes. “This opportunity offers the opportunity for very important partnerships that will be a model for partnerships to come.”

Moon Mineralogy Mapper also coming

The NASA Lunar Science Institute (lunarscience.arc.nasa.gov)

• Objective: Help lead the agency’s research activities for future lunar science missions related to NASA’s exploration goals
• Member teams (4-6) chosen form initial CAN
• $1-2M per team per year
• Modeleed after NASA Astrobiology Institute
• Has science focus

Of the Moon: Investigations of the nature and history of the Moon.
On the Moon: science for human exploration.
From the Moon: the moon as an observational platform

Andrew Thomas – Astronaut Office, ESMD
Lunar Surface Archituecture: The tools and structure that will be used to allow human return to the moon.

Started in 2006 – starting point – Decided we need an Outpost
In 2007, considered implementation – Explored merits of 5 implementations: min-hub, large habitate, mobile habitat, 2 nuclear power cases. Recommended mid size habitat with early mobility, building to long range capability, and possible relocation of habitat units. Essential that you could have mobility. Without mobility, in a very short period they’ll learn everything about the area within walking distance of hab and they are no longer necessary. Vision of “Winnabago Mode” of surface exploration, allowing large ranging and large science returns.

Constellation Architecture Lunar (CxAT Lunar), 2007-08 discussion. Exploring three implementation: mid-size hab, early delivery of 2 pressurized, or 2 unpressurized rovers. Want to have early mobility. You have all these surface elements. Need to deliver them in the right order: A good architecture is one that uses the proper synergistic mix of surface elements.

(the images look like bugs, with solar panels on antanee – low g makes fascinating geometries possible!)

Mobility key to successful exploration. Trying prototypes. One has 6 axle, 12 wheel, full suspension system. Basic mode – chariot mode. Explore in suits. Can also be used to move habitation modules around, allowing pressured shell to eventually be added, giving us a pressurized capsul for possible future exploration.

Another concept looks rather like a port-a-potty on legs. It is a ring of 6 legs with wheels that can basically go up and down stairs or boulders – it can work like a fork lift to carry around a pressurized habitate (that’s thing both Rebecca an I think looks like a port-a-potty). The legs can actually also work like arms. A pair can work together to move stuff around. These can be used autonomously, driven by astronauts, or driven by folks on the Earth. Tools can also be mounted – pinchers, drills, etc. Here it is:

The Challenge: You can take all the things together and find creative approaches to building up surface infrastructures, but what is the rational basis to guide decisions? You need to be able to do this within proper boundaries of risk and cost. There is more then one solution. 1 role the science community can provide is their feedback on what ordering of priorities will help. NASA needs metrics to support science. The current metrics maximize: Crew surface time, delivered/returned science mass, exploration range. This doesn’t help us rank how each effects the power of the science coming out.

Considering landing sites using Goldstone Lunar Radar Topography to add determination. Poles often mentioned as sites for scientific and operational reasons. The shapley crater for instance, and Shackleton Rim Area. There are challenges – You have 4-5 kilometers of altitude change, and slopes are 30 degrees or more in many cases – how do you land on this? This is very Non-Apollo like terrain with significant altitude variations. (think rocky mountains but worse!)

But there is a really cool video – which causes powerpoint to crash – CntrlAlt End Process… Wheeee
“This is why we don’t want Bill Gates to take us to the Moon”

Here’s the video.

This is another cool video

Operationally, it is interesting because of the extended periods of daylight experienced on peaks. If you are relying on solar power, you’ll be limited – this is a big challenge. Because of this lighting, when you are flying in to land, you won’t have visual contact with the ground – you’ll have to onboard characteristizing abilities, and cargo craft will need to be fully automated.

It’s worth checking out the constellation mission webpages.

Three quotes – which do you think comes from Mad Magazine, and which comes from NASA?
The problem of landing on the lunar dark side is that the terrain is usually dark
Washout: high light angles do not allow reflected light to reach the eye
Although the Moon is 1/49th the size of the Earth, it is farther away.

The SELENE image gallary can be found here. One of the more visually interesting things they are doing is taking images with a Hi-Def Video camera. (image credit: 2007 JAXA/SELENE, click image above for hi res image)

In addition to the scientifically not so useful (but public attracting) hi-def camera there are roughly a data taking dozen instruments ranging from a Laser Ranging system (that is conceptually similar to the Mars and Mercury Laser ranging instruments), a stereographic imaging system that has produced 3-D movies (see image 3/3 on the TC tab of the gallery), a radar sounder, and much much more (see wiki page)

So far 4.8 million shots have been fired with their Laser, with cross path resolution of 15 km as of Feb. 29.  This is very preliminary results. The laser’s first shot was fired Nov. 25, 2007 and everything is still being calibrated. While the MESSENGER Mercury data is even younger,  they had a chance to calibrate when they went past Venus.

With the Lunar Radar System (LRS) they are mapping subsurface boundaries. They are finding subsurface layers that weren’t detected by Apollo 17′s ALSE radar that worked at the same wavelength. The newly detected layers are “nearly a factor of 2 shallower.” This raises the question of “Um, Why?” Well, in the Q&A the answer appears to be, we don’t know, but it’s probably a mistake in someone’s analysis. The SELENE LRS data is much higher resolution and much higher quality, and the suspicion is the factor of two comes out of mis-interpretation of the Apollo data (an example of a factor of two occuring somewhere else was mentioned). Again – all preliminary, and all very tantalizing.

From the gravity experiment (RSAT), the are filling in holes in previous data sets and they are mapping out the internal mass distribution of the Moon. Data taken from Oct 20, 07 to Feb 20, 08, they have covered almost half the planet. In general they are matching previous data fairly well, but they just showed a fascinating image where holes and hills in gravity field show up like craters and hills in the data. Their data is sensitive enough to detect all these small features through their pulls (and lack off pull) on the space craft. They don’t have image on their website, but there is a (not as dramatically colored as what they just showed) image in their paper here. After matching their map with surface features they are still finding several anomalies that hadn’t been previously mapped, but overall the agreement is extremely good. This is a neat piece of work. The basically said – hill here+extra gravity here =correlation, but in a mathematically rigorous way. The remaining anomalies are likely caused by variation is the elasticity of the moon’s thick crust or rapid cooling of far side of the moon causing areas of anomalous density that isn’t reflected in topography.

This mission is doing neat things fast, and the Japanese are working hard to analyze everything their new toy is giving them. Just like MESSENGER data is embargoed for 6 months in some cases, the SELENE data is embargoed, in this case until (if I heard right) 6 months after the end of the mission. I can almost hear the US scientists drooling over what we are seeing, but we get to sit on our collective hands for a few years while we wait for the data to go public. Until then, we have to satiate ourselves with the published papers the project is sure to produce.

We invite you to join us, and ask you to please announce the Astronomy Cast Live Feed on your blog if you have one. This is going to be a Spring Break AstroFest like no other. While you won’t be seeing any bikini clad astro babes, we may bring you some naked facts and uncover some planetary surfaces along the way.

Enjoy!

Anyway, all fan chicking aside,  Emily has some really good insights on the status of women in some NASA and planetary science programs and today she posted a great blog post about how the Mars Rovers tactical operations center has often, by accident, been almost entirely filled with women, and on Feb 22 the puppet masters orchestrated a day of women running the show.

While this is exceedingly cool, it is also a bittersweet moment for women in science. We shouldn’t have days orchestrated to be all women. And the reasons (go read Emily’s story) that so many women have these jobs leaves me a bit sad (basically the powerhouse men decided they had better things to do, and young women could fill in). I dream of the day when powerhouse women lead a project.

Interestingly, the IYA New Media working group is majority women (and yes, Emily is part of it.) More on the IYA New Media stuff tomorrow.

Today NASA is telling us how the plan to keep Hubble imaging into the next several years and keep this amazing telescope creating iconic images until James Webb is ready to replace her. After Servicing mission 4, scheduled for roughly August 2008 (I suspect we’ll see delays), Hubble will have 90 times its original sensitivity.

While capable of unparalleled imaging, Hubble has always been a troubled little telescope with great potential. Hubble was “born” in April of 1990, with a stigma that was corrected with the first Hubble Servicing Mission in 1993. It has suffered from gyroscope failures, making steering hard, and its instrument NICMOS ran out of coolant that was replaced on servicing mission 3. It seems that every talk I’ve ever heard about about the Hubble Space Telescope involved a discussion of “Hubble will be so much better after the next servicing mission.” That is true today, as NASA and the astronomical community holds its breath waiting for the forth-servicing mission.

Today, Hubble is surviving on one gyroscope, old batteries, and instruments that need tune-ups. Technology has also been improved, and we can the ability to do things with digital detectors today that weren’t imagined in 1990.

Space Shuttle willing (or at least Space Shuttle safety board willing), the Hubble’s forth servicing mission is scheduled for 2009. With this mission, Hubble will get all new gyroscopes, new batteries, a new wide field camera, he Advanced Camera (ACS), STIS and COS will all get redone, and the Fine Guidance System will be re-tuned as well. These new cameras will allow Hubble to see fainter objects, obtain better spectra (that can do things like discover black holes in the cores of distant galaxies), and can better measure the cosmic web of structure: light, dark, and gravitationally shaping our future.

This is going to be one of the most experienced shuttle crews to date, and they are doing what astronauts do best – construction, repair, re-engineering and doing things that no robot can do. Specifically, they’ll be climbing around (and inside!) Hubble like creative ants, pulling out tiny screws that a little robot can’t grab and remove.

And they’ll be risking their lives – there are sharp edges, ways to get snagged, ways to get caught, and a lot of risk involved in making repairs that Hubble really wasn’t designed to have done while it is in space!

This raises the question: Why keep Hubble and not just build and launch another? Because Hubble really can’t be replaced.

Problem 1) Congress really wouldn’t go for it. The astronomical community has successfully sold congress on a suite of great observatories: Hubble, Chandra, GLAST, Spitzer and now James Webb. Another optical telescope was not part of that sell. We have Hubble, and we promised we’d give it up if they would only (please, please, please) give us James Webb. That was the deal. Money is scarce. If we want to move on to the new questions, we have to eventually move away from Hubble. It will get one more tuneup, and after that, when it dies, it dies.

Problem 2) Committees. If we tried to build another Hubble I’m sure people would demand the design get upgraded. It would take FOREVER (okay, maybe not that long) to get it from concept to flight. Today, Hubble is living on 1 gyroscope. When that goes, she can’t be steered any more. We don’t have time to wait while a committee agrees on what a new Hubble needs to look like and gets around to getting to building it.

There are more problems. But these are the big 2. We made a promise, and we’re running out of time.

Now, this doesn’t answer the question of why shouldn’t we give up on Hubble and focus on the Very Large Telescope and other earth-based behemoths. Again, there are basically two reasons. 1) The wavelengths available only from space, and 2) With the adaptive optics that large telescopes use to correct for atmospheric effects you lose track of exactly where each photon came from. You can rearrange the light to look right based on stars, but it’s an imperfect system and if you really want to know where a given photon started, you just can’t get there. So we need Hubble.

Period.

We need our beloved little space telescope that can, and these men and women are going to make this little space telescope work into the future. It’s close date is nominally set by bureaucrats and budget writers, but I suspect we will keep observing until Hubble is no longer safe to fly (may it’s gyroscopes last for a long long time . . .)

Somehow, bathrooms/toilet rooms, and underware just kept coming up as topics.

For instance at lunch… We’d wandered onto a nauseating topic, so I mentioned, to distract things, that my husband and I spent the weekend tiling our bathroom (we’re still repairing from this*), and somehow this lead to much discussion involving Thomas Crapper, his (it turns out non-)discovery of the flush toilet, and how while toilets have been around since the 1730s, my 1893 house wasn’t built with any bathrooms (leading to much weirdness in design, since three were subsequently added). It is a curious mystery as to how the first US patent for a flush toilet was granted in 1857, but the technology somehow took decades to make it into new homes. Our house was constructed with a cistern and running water in the kitchen and in a sink in an upstairs bedroom. The two largest bedrooms have closets which are constructed in a way to lead me to believe they once held chamber pots. So, it had running water, but not bathrooms. It is all a huge mystery.

This was followed by an evening of working on re- constructing one of the said retrofit bathrooms.

And tonight, as I settled into my email, I found underware. Now, this wasn’t smutty spam mail, or anything crude. Rather, in my Astronomy Cast email, I had a friendly email from a school teacher asking what astronauts do with their dirty underwear and other dirty cloths. I have to say, this was one of the best questions anyone has asked me in ages.

And I honestly had no idea of the answer. No space station design that I’ve seen has included a washing machine, and as all resources are scarce, I couldn’t imagine how they’d build one that worked effectively while not eating up electricity, wasting water, or just vibrating the nuts and bolts out of everything. BUT . . . Astronauts are up there for months!  I know that one of the chief complaints about the ISS is that it smells terrible, but …

But there is Google to the rescue.

According to one 2003 story, ISS astronauts get to change their underwear sometimes every 3 or so days. Another story said underwear gets changed every other day, but undershirts must last for 10 days! They simply don’t have the space to carry up enough clothing to do better than that.

This raised a fascinating question – what happens when they get stranded in space by hiccups in the space shuttle launch schedule, delaying the arrival of fresh clothing. We’ve all at one point had an “Oh S**t, I have no clean pants,” moment that has lead to wearing blue jeans or similiar that probably needed washed, but had only been worn a couple times. Now, imagine instead, having to reach for dirty underwear and then asking yourself, “To I wear this 5 times already? I guess they’re good for another go…”

Problems with no clean cloths aren’t new to astronauts. Soldiers have been dealing with them forever. Today’s soldier goes into combat with a lot of hopes, prayers and bullets backing him up, but generally not with clean underwear to enjoy on the other side of the battle. Over the summer I remember reading that the military is working to develop biological underwear that is infused with chemicals that naturally break down biologicals, allowing owners to wear them for days. Hopefully this fabric will be on NASA’s must-by list for the ISS. The one and perhaps only bonus soldiers have over astronauts is wind to blow away the stink. On the ISS, the astronauts just can’t get away from the dirty, smelly cloths. The whole station is one giant locker room. It is a temperature controlled, not-a-lot-of-reason-to-sweat, environment, but still.

The ISS does have cool toilet at least.  Each astronaut even has his/her own hose to pee into.

Just think, if you go to the ISS you can (must) wear your underwear for indefinite periods of time (defined by the frequency of supply ships), and pee into a hose. Isn’t that how you always imagined 21st century space travel would be?

I just want my flying car…

*While the fire only destroyed the wainscoting, my husband gutted the bathroom to the studs and removed all fixtures.

Hopefully I won’t be able to say that for too much longer. Several different nations are gearing up to make manned assaults on the surface of the Moon.

Before the people, there is a wave of explorer bots. (The good kind, not the bad spam bots like I regularly war upon.) On September 14, 2007  Japan launched the SELENE mission, which is an imaging mission. On October 24, 2007 the Chinese launched the Chang’e-1 lunar orbiter mission. And in April, India will follow up with its own mission.

The next phase, human landings, may begin in 2012 with a Russian manned mission and a NASA manned mission is planned for no later than 2020.

I have to admit, I’ll believe it when I see it, but…

But it’s a start. I’ve been giving talks on astronomy and the space program since 1988, and since 1988 I’ve been very depressingly standing in front of audiences consistently explaining that, well, NASA no longer has the ability to  put people on the moon.  I’ve explained that we can get men up to about 340 km above the surface of the Earth, but the moon is, well, roughly 360,000 km above the surface of the Earth.

That’s a factor of 1000x farther than we have the technology to get to right now.

Now, every single time I’ve given a talk and made that point someone (usually someone older than my father ) has asked,”How is it that Apollo could get there when I was a kid, but now we can’t there?” The tone of voice has variably implied I’m crazy, that I’m lying, or that I’m just mis-informed. But, well, as crazy it may sound, really, if we wanted go to the moon next year, NASA couldn’t do it.

Here’s how to think about it. I have a degree in astronomy and have taken classes on programming, electronics, and all sorts of other useful stuff.  In theory, I have the skills and intellect necessary to  write a space craft’s graphical user interface (in theory, but right now I could only do it in XView). Given enough time, I’m fairly certain I could do it, but there would be false starts, moments of mental brain freeze, and time spent redoing things that I realize could be done better (and this definitely isn’t something one programmer should try and do on their own!)

NASA has the skills and the ability to build the technology necessary to get someone to the moon, but just as my XView skills could get the job done in an antiquated way, their Apollo experience would get the job done in an antiquated way – and the parts may not even be available! If I were asked to write a useful GUI, I’d need to learn new skills – new languages and libraries – and NASA also will need to develope new technologies that take advantage of today’s processors and controllers. I won’t learn new GUI-writing skills unless someone pays me to do it (I just don’t have the time to learn somethings without financial incentives) and NASA can’t spend time developing manned missions to the Moon unless someone throws money at them. So – in theory I could write a GUI, but I never will – I have classes and podcasts and variable stars to attend to. But NASA… Well…

For about 20 years, I stood before audiences and  explained NASA doesn’t have the money to develop plans to go to the Moon, and no one else has plans to do it either.

But suddenly, NASA has a mandate (although probably not enough money) to get people to the moon by 2020, and other nations are trying to get there too. It has started with the Japanese and Chinese launches.

The race is on. Maybe, before those men my father’s age stop filling my audiences, I’ll be able to give a talk on how humans went to the moon in my lifetime.

Maybe.

2020 is 54 years after the first moon landing. How many lives will never have seen man walk on the moon…

This primarily Italian and Russian collaboration in space exploration was the first satellite designed specifically to look for cosmic rays, including the anti-particles positrons and antiprotons. The cosmic rays they are studying have both local and non-local origins – The Sun produces protons, electrons, positrons, and neutrons while Jupiter flings the positron., Jupiter flings electrons our direction.

Now, a little over a year after launch, they are able to show their equipment is working, and they are detecting particles successfully. Specifically, they are mapping the trapped particles in the Van Allen Radiation Belts, and can see an increase in particle rates as they go through the geomagnetic poles.All is as it should be, and in a couple years we should have a good ideas of what types of particles and antiparticles are zipping around in the nearby parts of the solar system.

On Tuesday NASA announced they will be recycling the probes Deep Impact and Stardust by giving them each a new mission that allows existing hardware to continue to be used to get useful information. According to Alan Stern, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, “These mission extensions are as exciting as it gets. They will allow us to revisit a comet for the first time, add another to the list of comets explored and make a search for small planets around stars with known large planets. And by using existing spacecraft in flight, we can accomplish all of this for only about 15 percent of the cost of starting a new mission from scratch.”

For Deep Impact, the new plan involves both using its excellent imaging capabilities to observe transits of exoplanets around distant stars and redirecting the space craft to Comet Boethin for a December 2008. This mission will allow Deep Impact to fill the exploration gap left when the CONTOUR mission failed. What many people don’t realize is people’s jobs (and sometimes degrees!) are directly tied to the success and failure of these missions. When these satellites fail, years of planning can instantly become wasted effort and funding can get pulled, putting people in the unemployment line. By redirecting Deep Impact to this comet that had been a possible target for CONTOUR, some of the planning can get reused, and money should become re-available for research.

The second recycled probe, Stardust, is going to go back to Deep Impact’s old friend Comet Temple I. On the 4th of July, 2005 Deep Impact dropped an impactor in front of the comet, and then orbited away to take some good images. With Stardust’s revisitation of Temple I, scientists will for the first time have images of a comet before and after it passes near the Sun.

In the press release, NASA makes a big deal about these new missions only costing about 15% of what it would have cost to start new missions with new spacecraft. While I am all for mission extensions, spacecraft reuse, and otherwise finding every possible way to stretch the NASA dollar, I only hope this doesn’t become an excuse not to fund anything new. A dollar saved is not a dollar earned. It’s just a dollar doing nothing. NASA needs to be able to introduce new technologies and let new generations of researchers have their day in space (or more reasonably, have their space crafts’ day in space). Investing in satellites is really a way on investing in dreams.

Interesting closing note: NASA also announced they are buying a new toilet for the ISS. The new toilet costs $19 million. This is more than the cost of the 9.2-m Hobby-Eberly telescope in Texas (cost $13.4 million + unlisted over runs). Can the toilet do science? Here’s a crazy idea – let’s do a national college contest to design space toilets. I’m betting some MIT, Carngie Mellon, or U-[insert state] students could find a great, cheaper way to flush. This seems far healthier than challenging them to design the better way to wage urban warfare.

People on Earth have been trying to launch things to Mars since 1960. Of the 44 missions listed in wikipedia (yes, I can be just that lazy), only 17 have been complete successes. This failure to land (or orbitally insert) has caused more than a few editorial cartoons and even some random NASA humor as things ranging from a Mars curse to a Galactic Ghoul to aliens of every imagining have been blamed (mostly with tongue in check). The Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, had seemly put the curse thoroughly in NASA’s past. Launched in 2003, these twin 6 wheeled explorers landed on what was expected to be a 90 day mission way back in January of 2004. Now, roughly 1100 days after bounce down, the rovers are still working, but they are seriously struggling for the first time.

The rovers are powered by solar panels. The initial 90 day life expectancy was based in part on how long NASA engineers believed it would take for dust to accumulate on the panels and cause the computers to shut down. What hadn’t been correctly accounted for was the wind. While dust on the solar panels has caused the rovers to have periodic decreases in power, the wind has consistently blown the dust off the panels, bringing the rovers back up to satisfactory power levels. This year’s storm, however, is not only directly effecting the storms, but it is also so thick that it is blocking 99% of the Sun’s light. If the batteries on the rovers drain entirely, the rovers will not be able to turn back on. Still, its been a good ride and the scientists and engineers who have spent the past couple years monitoring what was supposed to be a three-month mission are to be commended for their dedication (and their spouses deserve a special science-spouse medal!)

But, as one pair of rovers may be facing the end of their mission, another mars explorer is preparing to launch. The Phoenix lander is getting set to launch at the beginning of August. The next launch window for Mars missions opens August 3 and 5:35am EDT. These specific launch windows are set by when the orbits of Mars and Earth are aligned. It takes 2.135 years for the Mars, Earth and Sun to return to the same configuration. In other years, when Mars and Earth are aligned with one another, but not at the same position relative to the Sun, their orbits and their inclinations aren’t optimally aligned for missions to make it from Earth to Mars with minimal fuel. The extreme costs of the journey cause NASA, ESA and other agencies to generally wait for the optimal years.

The Phoenix lander should launch in August, and hopefully land in May of 2008. Unlike NASA’s last three landers that used airbags to safely land, Phoenix will use a parachute to slow and make it’s final approach to the Martian surface using thrusters to slow its descent. Set to land on polar ice, this lander will set itself up to dig and run careful tests on the soil and ice that it finds within reach of its almost 8 ft long arm. This arm will be used to dig through the surface to find and sample stuff below.

Like the Mars rovers, Phoenix is also powered by solar arrays. This mission will last one Martian summer. Just like the Earth’s arctic and antarctic region, during its winter the Martian pole experiences no Sun-light. Thus, with the coming of Martian winter, Phoenix will die. Unlike the mythical animal, it will not be able to resurrect itself, but rather it shall become a part of the Martian ice caps: An artifact of 21st century terrestrial life that will be preserved potentially for eons in the ice of another world.