Satellite to launch with air of intrigue about true mission

source:http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/09/24/tracking.satellite/

By Pam Benson, CNN National Security Producer

September 24, 2010 -- Updated 2033 GMT (0433 HKT

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• New satellite will detect and track man-made objects in space
• Of about 21,000 objects in space, most are debris
• In space, even small pieces of debris can cause serious damage
• Some suspect satellite will spy on other country's satellites

Washington (CNN) -- Getting around town with your GPS, watching your favorite program on satellite TV, tracking hurricanes in real time, communicating with the warfighter on the battlefield -- any one of those activities could be in jeopardy if a piece of the growing mass of orbital junk traveling through space at supersonic speeds smashes into a satellite.

That's why the Air Force is launching a new satellite Saturday night that officials say will have the capacity to better detect and track the more than 20,000 man-made objects in space, most of which is debris.

The managers of the Space Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) program said the satellite will help make U.S. space assets safer and more secure. SBSS commander Col. J.R. Jordan told reporters that "this satellite is going to revolutionize how we track objects in space by not being constrained by weather, the atmosphere or the time of day."

The heart of the satellite is a camera with an unobstructed view of three quarters of the sky, a valuable wide angle that avoids having to expend the time and fuel to reposition the spacecraft.

Currently, space objects are tracked by ground based systems -- radars and optical telescopes -- which can be blinded by adverse weather conditions, clouds and daylight.

The new satellite has other potential missions. It can provide a closer eye on the satellites and space objects of other nations. The Air Force officials participating in the news briefing would not discuss missions or priorities.

"There are a lot of objects out there that we have lost track on, and there are a lot of objects we think we can observe that we haven't been able to observe previously," Jordan said.

"We're going to improve the actual tracking on a daily basis," he added.

"SBSS will track the relative position of satellites and debris to enable the Joint Space Operations Center to protect the nation's assets in space," a spokesman for the Air Force Space and Missile Center said.

Brian Weeden, a former Air Force officer who worked on space operations, said the new satellite makes it feasible to observe and collect information on objects at much higher altitudes in deep space. The satellite "may very well have imagery capabilities" beyond what has been made public, said Weeden, who now is an analyst for the Secure World Foundation.

"Think Hubble," said Weeden, a reference to the space telescope which provided more detailed images of the universe at greater distances.

John Pike, who follows satellite developments for globalsecurity.org, is more conspiratorial about the satellite's mission. He maintains one of the key purposes of the new satellite is to learn more about the characteristics of debris fields in order to make satellites more stealth -- n other words, to disguise top secret U.S. satellites as debris. Pike said space junk is a concern, but ground systems are able to keep track of most of the space clutter that could impact key U.S. assets.

Weeden disagreed. He is skeptical of the feasibility of developing stealth technology based on observing debris.

Although Weeden acknowledged there may be some elements in the U.S. intelligence and military who want such research, he believes the physics is too hard. Unlike debris, satellites give off a physical signature -- heat, light and other indicators.

"If a satellite is stealth, how do you know where it is, especially if you should lose contact with it?" Weeden posited.

He said the new tracking satellite does provide a far better ability to detect, track and inspect objects in space. One of the motivations for the tracking satellite, Weeden said, is the fear that another nation might have a dormant anti-satellite device in orbit, waiting to be turned on. Although there is no indication such a device exists, Weeden said the new satellite will give the United States better situational awareness in space.

Michael Krepon, a space expert for the Stimson Center, said the new satellite provides needed additional capacity.

Within the past few years, he said, there have been "three wake up calls to say there is a huge problem," with space clutter.

Thousands of pieces of debris were generated when, in 2007, the Chinese intentionally destroyed one of its own satellites with a ballistic missile. In early 2009, a Russian satellite and a U.S. satellite collided in space, and later that year a Russian intercontinental missile blew up during a test flight.

Krepon pointed out that even a marble sized piece of debris "travels with the energy of a one-ton safe dropped from a five story building. If you get hit with that marble, you're having a really bad day," said Krepon.

The Air Force Space Command's mission is to track and chart the path of anything orbiting the earth that is 10 centimeters -- approximately the size of a baseball -- or larger. Of the approximately 21,000 objects currently being followed, 1,000 are active satellites or other payloads such as the international space station and the shuttle.

The Air Force has spent $858 million on the development and production of the new tracking satellite, which is expected to be operational for five and a half years.

Ham Radio Operator Talks To Space Station

source:http://www.ksbw.com/news/25128806/detail.html

Texas Man Shocked When He Got Reply From Astronauts

POSTED: 7:46 am PDT September 23, 2010
UPDATED: 8:29 am PDT September 23, 2010

PITTSBURG, Texas -- Trying to contact the International Space Station from home is no easy task.

But an East Texas man used his ham radio to pull off the nearly impossible feat.

Darryl Young sent out a message 250 miles away to the space station one night, and was shocked when an astronaut heard and replied.

"Out of Pittsburg we've got ya, loud and clear," the astronaut is heard saying.

Because the space station moves so fast -- about 17,000 mph -- radio operators have only a two-minute window to make contact, Young said.

"When I made contact the first time it was on top of a 20 foot pole," he said. "There's a guy that has all this fancy antenna with tracking and everything else been trying for three years."

John Yembrick with NASA said it's not uncommon for people on the ground to contact the space station and speak with crew members.

"It's bragging rights," Young said. "Hey, I talked to the space station."

Next time, Young would like the astronauts to slow down so they can carry on a conversation "and say when's the last time you played golf or something."

Copyright © 2010 CNN Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Abandon Earth or Face Extinction, Warns Stephen Hawking

source:http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/08/09/abandon-earth-face-extinction-warns-stephen-hawking/

AFP

Jan. 14: Stephen Hawking speaks via satellite during a Science Channel presentation in Pasadena, Calif.

It's time to abandon Earth, warned the world's most famous theoretical physicist.

In an interview with website Big Think, Stephen Hawking warned that the long-term future of theplanet is in outer space.

"It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet," he said.

"I see great dangers for the human race," Hawking said. "There have been a number of times in the past when its survival has been a question of touch and go. The Cuban missile crisis in 1963 was one of these. The frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future."

"But I'm an optimist. If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe, as we spread into space," he said.

That said, getting to another planet will prove a challenge, not to mention colonizing it for humanity. University of Michigan astrophysicist Katherine Freese told Big Think that "the nearest star [to Earth] is Proxima Centauri which is 4.2 light years away. That means that, if you were traveling at the speed of light the whole time, it would take 4.2 years to get there" -- or about 50,000 years using current rocket science.

Still, we need to act and act fast, Hawking stated. "It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth but to spread out into space. We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space."

Hawking has become quite outspoken in recent months. In April, he warned of the dangers of communicating with aliens, telling the Discovery Channel that extra-terrestrials are almost certain to exist -- and humanity should avoid contact with them at all cost.

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”

The answer, he suggests, is that most of alien life will be the equivalent of microbes or simple animals -- the sort of life that has dominated Earth for most of its history -- and they could pose a serious threat to us.

In May Hawking said he believed humans could travel millions of years into the future and repopulate their devastated planet. If spaceships are built that can fly faster than the speed of light, a day on board would be equivalent to a year on Earth. That's because -- according to Einstein -- as objects accelerate through space, time slows down around them.

“Time travel was once considered scientific heresy, and I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank," he said in Stephen Hawking's Universe.

"These days I’m not so cautious.”

As Space Priorities Shift, Orbiting Station Takes On a Central Role

source:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/science/space/04nasa.html

By KENNETH CHANG

Published: August 3, 2010

When a cooling-system pump on the International Space Station broke down over the weekend, NASA and the six astronauts on board responded with typical cool self-assurance. The space agency scheduled two spacewalks to repair the damage and said the astronauts, three Americans and three Russians, were in no danger.

But the incident underlined a deeper concern about the orbiting station’s long-term health. If this or any other problem should result in a need to abandon the station, the United States’ human spaceflight program would lose one of its last remaining reasons for being.

Until recently, the 12-year-old space station was an afterthought in the multiyear, multibillion-dollar effort to return people to the Moon and possibly push off to Mars. But in the shifting priorities under the Obama administration, the station has become a keystone.

Not only is it supposed to serve as a scientific laboratory and an example of successful international collaboration, the administration also wants it to provide a market to nurture a commercial space industry for launching people and cargo into orbit.

“It has a much more central role in this decade under the Obama plan than it did under the Bush plan,” said John M. Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.

NASA’s Moon program, known as Constellation, has been hamstrung. Although pieces of it could survive in bills under consideration in Congress, it remains unclear what rockets NASA is to build, what their destinations would be and how long it would take to get there.

Without the space station, NASA’s financing of commercial rockets to take crew and cargo there would almost certainly evaporate. And without government financing, companies would be unlikely to invest billions of dollars to pursue a speculative market.

“There’s no question it’s a risky business strategy,” said James A. M. Muncy, a space policy consultant who supports the Obama space policy.

Scott Pace, the current director of the Space Policy Institute, said abandoning the station might even mark the end of the human spaceflight program.

“My concern,” he said, “is without an overarching political impetus, the energy to restart a human spaceflight program would be very hard to achieve.”

A Congressional aide, who was not authorized to speak for attribution, said, “You’re in a position where we were in 1962, where you don’t have a place to go.” With the remaining space shuttles to be retired next year, he said, “you don’t even have a launch vehicle that can travel to low-Earth orbit.”

The cooling problem, which has limited research aboard the space station so equipment does not overheat, is only the latest glitch to befall it. In the past, navigation computers have crashed, a rotating joint on the solar arrays started grinding and vibrating, and the toilets have not always worked. In each case, engineers identified the problem and found a solution.

“I.S.S. is a living, breathing beast,” Michael T. Suffredini, the space station manager, said in an interview last month. “Some days everything doesn’t exactly work perfectly.”

Still, NASA officials say that over all the station is in good shape, even as its lifetime is being extended five years, to 2020.

Over the past few years, in preparation for life after the space shuttle, NASA has launched as many of the large spare parts as it could and stored them on the outside of the station. The station has four spare pumps of the type that failed Saturday, and managers said they had planned for exactly this type of failure.

Mr. Suffredini said that only a radiator was too large to fit into any spacecraft other than the shuttle, and that piece is to fly up on the next shuttle mission in November. Equipment on the station has also been lasting longer than predicted, he said, adding, “If we get thrown curveballs along the way, we have time to react to them.”

The cooling pump was an exception: Expected to last 100,000 hours (more than 11 years), it failed after only about 80,000 hours.

Without the shuttles, it will not be possible to bring parts back to Earth for diagnosis and repair. That could be significant for something like the pump. There is no room to bring the faulty pump back on the next two shuttle missions, but it could be brought back on an additional flight that is likely to be added to the schedule for next summer.

The threat of a collision with micrometeoroids is small, but not zero. Mr. Suffredini said the chances of a strike severe enough to require evacuation were about 1 in 100 over a six-month period. Over 10 years, the cumulative risk is nearly 1 in 5.

The Senate bill outlining the budgets and goals for NASA for the next three years asks the space agency to conduct a detailed study to ensure that it is prepared for operating the station until 2020.

“The recent breakdown of the station’s cooling system emphasizes how critical it is that we understand all of the equipment needs the space station will have as its service life is extended,” Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, who pushed for that provision, said in a statement. “We must assure that NASA has a plan to deliver those elements or bring parts down for analysis and repair once the space shuttle is finally retired.”

The Senate bill also calls for refurbishing an additional shuttle fuel tank, which leaves the door open for at least one more shuttle flight if it becomes necessary.

NASA, via Associated Press

The lifetime of the 12-year-old International Space Station is being extended five years, to 2020.

Solar Storm Headed for Earth Tonight; May Spawn Auroras

source:http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/07/100730-science-space-sun-solar-storm-auroras/

Brian Handwerk

for National Geographic News

Published August 3, 2010

Night owls take note: A spectacular sky show of rippling auroras may be on tap for late Tuesday through early Wednesday, according to astrophysicists, and the phenomenon may be more widely visible than normal.

On Sunday cameras aboard NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured an eruption on the sun's surface that hurled tons of plasma—charged gas—directly toward our planet in an event called a coronal mass ejection. (Seesun pictures taken by the solar observatory.)

Because it takes several days for such ionized clouds to reach Earth's atmosphere, the burst of charged particles should hit us tonight—and there's a chance it'll produce especially colorful auroras.

Auroras happen when energized particles from the sun interact with Earth's magnetic field. The particles flow down the field lines that run toward Earth's Poles, banging into atoms of atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen along the way.

The charged solar particles give Earth's atmospheric atoms an energy boost, which then gets released as light, producing the shimmering curtains of greens, reds, and other colors.

In the Northern Hemisphere, auroras are more commonly seen at high latitudes, such as the Arctic regions of Alaska, Canada, and Scandinavia.

But explosions like Sunday's can spark geomagnetic storms that bring the show to slightly lower parts of the globe. These storms can also add a rippling effect to the sometimes static auroras.

(Related: "Aurora 'Power Surges' Triggered by Magnetic Explosions.")

Still, a solar storm headed for Earth isn't a guarantee of auroras. Without more sun-watching satellites, scientists are hard-pressed to know the exact effects a coronal mass ejection will have on Earth's atmosphere.

For now, the odds of auroras lighting up tonight's northern skies are about 50-50, said Leon Golub of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

If you want to watch for them, he advised, "find a dark place and look north well after sundown or near midnight, if you can stay up that late."

Sun Probes to Issue Space Weather Alerts?

The oncoming solar storm is yet another indicator that the sun's activity is picking up after an unusually long lull, astronomers say.

Solar activity rises and falls on a regular cycle of about 11 years. The last period of peak activity ended in 2001, and it led into a long-lasting quiet spell. (See"Sun Oddly Quiet—Hints at Next 'Little Ice Age'?")

Along with a recent flurry of sunspots, Sunday's eruption seems to be a sign of the star's reawakening—good news for aurora fans, but potential trouble for satellites, astronauts, and some technologies here on Earth.

Energetic solar storms can disrupt communication and navigation systems, can knock out power grids, and can pose radiation hazards to people working in space.

This week's storm is relatively slow, which means it's unlikely to have many negative impacts—but future storms probably will, Golub said.

"One of the main reasons to have these instruments [such as the Solar Dynamics Observatory] in space is so that you can issue alerts or warnings, pretty much like you would with a hurricane," he said.

That way "people can know ahead of time when there is a possibility of an event that will have an impact on Earth."

Movie review: 'Imax Hubble 3D' reaches for the stars but ultimately fails

source:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/18/AR2010031800958.html

By Joel Achenbach

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 19, 2010

The daring mission by astronauts to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope in May 2009 is the perfect subject for a brilliant, thrilling 3-D Imax movie. Such a movie, alas, has yet to be made.

Instead, NASA, Imax and Warner Bros. have teamed up to produce a visually dazzling, entertaining, but disjointed and underachieving film, "Imax Hubble 3D," now playing at the National Air and Space Museum.

Such a film is probably the closest most of us will ever get to being in space. We see the great observatory floating above a slowly spinning planet, the 3-D footage tempting us to reach out and touch the telescope. The footage from orbit of the Hawaiian islands is worth the trip to the theater.

But director Toni Myers has crammed two different movies into a single 40-minute extravaganza. The first is an astronaut documentary, with candid shots of life in zero-G (nice work rolling that burrito, dude). The second is an astronomy movie, a tour of the cosmos that relies heavily on computer-processed imagery. Each has its charms. Paired, they get in each other's way.

The breathtaking footage in orbit has been married to a script that seems to have been purchased off the shelf at Wal-Mart. No cliche was left behind on this mission. In case we're not sufficiently impressed by the derring-do, we're told what to conclude: "Each one of these men and women is a true hero." Show, don't tell, please.

Worse, the movie somehow manages to be less dramatic than the mission many of us witnessed in real time. (I covered the repair mission for The Post.) Consider the famous incident with the stuck bolt. Astronauts John Grunsfeld and Andrew Feustel tried to remove an old camera and replace it with a new one costing upward of $100 million, but a bolt wouldn't budge. The old camera was stuck. Grunsfeld has said that this was the lowest moment of his life. Feustel had to calculate precisely how much force to put on the bolt without shearing it. He succeeded, finally, and the day was saved. Yes, it's in the movie, but the scene goes by in a flash and the viewer never fully understands why it's a big deal.

Ditto for an incident in which astronaut Mike Massimino has to rip a handle off the spacecraft, risking injury or death if a jagged edge cuts his spacesuit. The rushed pace doesn't let the moment breathe.

The computer-enhanced astronomical shots are cool, and I'm told that Hubble scientists vetted everything, but I kept wondering if the universe had undergone some cosmetic improvements. Is the Orion nebula really that colorful? When we're zooming through the galaxy, shouldn't the stars be more pointlike objects, with more empty space in between? I'm no astronomer, but I thought space had a lot more elbow room.

Sure, it's great to see the Hubble up close, in 3-D, as if you're right there in orbit. But it started to give me a headache. I sat at the end of a row in the Imax theater, in what I'm told is not the ideal place to watch, and was bothered during parts of the movie by poor registration and some ghosting in the imagery. "Blurry" is not an adjective you want applied to a movie whose key selling point is its visuals.

Maybe they can get an astronaut in there to fix that.

** G. At the National Air and Space Museum downtown. Contains nothing objectionable. 40 minutes.

How will NASA defend Earth against killer asteroids and comets?

source:http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/012210-layer8-nasa-asteroid-comet-protection.html

Report outlines NASA’s option in discovering, defending against hazards from space

By Michael Cooney, Network World
January 22, 2010 06:01 PM ET

Sponsored by:

Combinations of space- and ground-based telescopes may be the most economically palpable defenses NASA can mount against asteroids and comets heading toward Earth, but there are more advanced defenses involving spacecraft and nuclear explosions that might be plausible in the future.

Those were just some of the conclusions included in a report, “Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies,” issued today from scientists at the National Research Council on what options NASA has to detect more near-Earth objects (NEOs) -- asteroids and comets that could pose a hazard to Earth.

NASA telescopes watch cosmic violence, mysteries unravel

The same council issued a preliminary report in August saying imminent impacts (such as those with very short warning times of hours or weeks) require better current discovery capabilities. Existing surveys are not designed for this purpose; they are designed to discover more-distant NEOs and to provide years of advance notice for possible impacts. In the past, objects with short warning times have been discovered serendipitously as part of surveys having different objectives. Search strategies for discovering imminent impacts need to be considered, and current surveys may need to be changed.

No matter what though, the report says the $4 million the US currently spends annually to search for comets and asteroids is insufficient to meet a congressionally mandated requirement on NASA to detect NEOs that could threaten Earth.

The report states that while impacts by large comets or asteroids are rare, “a single impact could inflict extreme damage, raising the classic problem of how to confront a possibility that is both very rare and very important. Far more likely are those impacts that cause only moderate damage and few fatalities.”

An asteroid or comet about 10 kilometers in diameter struck the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago and caused global devastation, probably wiping out large numbers of plant and animal species including the dinosaurs, the report states.

Objects as large as that strike Earth only about once every 100 million years on average, the report notes. NASA has been highly successful at detecting and tracking objects 1 kilometer in diameter or larger, and continues to search for these large objects. The report notes that NASA has managed to accomplish some of the killer asteroids mandate with existing telescopes but with over 6,000 known objects and countless others the task is relentless.

Objects down to sizes of about 140 meters in diameter -- which NASA has been mandated to survey for -- would cause regional damage; such impacts happen on average every 30,000 years, the report says.

The report recommends that NASA monitor for smaller objects -- those down to 30 to 50 meters in diameter -- which the report says recent research suggests can be highly destructive.

The report states that detailed studies of ways to mitigate collisions are best viewed as a form of insurance. How much to spend on these insurance premiums is a decision that must be made by the nation’s policymakers.

The report goes on to say that with sufficient warning four types of mitigation could meet the threat from all NEOs, except what it called the most energetic ones:

• Civil defense (evacuation, sheltering in place, providing emergency

• infrastructure) is a cost-effective mitigation measure for saving lives from the smallest comet or asteroid hit and is a necessary part of mitigation for larger events.

• “Slow push” or “slow pull” methods use a spacecraft to exert force on the target object to gradually change its orbit to avoid collision with the Earth. This technique is practical only for small NEOs (tens of meters to roughly 100 meters in diameter) or possibly for medium-sized objects (hundreds of meters), but would likely require decades of warning. Of the slow push/pull techniques, the gravity tractor appears to be by far the closest to technological readiness.

• Kinetic methods, which fly a spacecraft into the NEO to change its orbit, could defend against moderately sized objects (many hundreds of meters to 1 kilometer in diameter), but also may require decades of warning time.

• Nuclear explosions are the only current, practical means for dealing with large objects (comets or asteroids with diameters greater than 1 kilometer) or as a backup for smaller ones if other methods were to fail.

“Although all of these methods are conceptually valid, none is now ready to implement on short notice, the report says. Civil defense and kinetic impactors are probably the closest to readiness, but even these require additional study prior to reliance on them,” the report stated.

NASA has been increasing its ability to track dangerous comets and asteroids. For example, part of the space agency’s recently launched Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft to uncover objects never seen before, including the coolest stars, the universe's most luminous galaxies and some of the darkest near-Earth asteroids and comets.

In addition, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently launched the Asteroid Watch Web site to act as a centralized source for information on objects hurtling at Earth.

All contents copyright 1995-2010 Network World, Inc. http://www.networkworld.com

NASA delays space shuttle launch until Sunday

source:http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE56A1MD20090711

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA postponed the launch of space shuttle Endeavour on Saturday to assess possible damage from lightning strikes at the launch pad overnight, a space agency official said.

The next launch attempt will be Sunday evening. Endeavour had been scheduled to lift off at 7:39 p.m. EDT Saturday on a 16-day mission to install a Japanese-built porch on the International Space Station.

(Reporting by Irene Klotz, editing by Doina Chiacu)