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Space Exploration: Unmanned

Ok we'ver had magnetic beams but now.....


Solar super-sail could reach Mars in a month


A LICK of paint could help a spacecraft powered by a solar sail get from Earth to Mars in just one month, seven times faster than the craft that took the rovers Spirit and Opportunity to the Red Planet.

Gregory Benford of the University of California, Irvine, and his brother James, who runs aerospace research firm Microwave Sciences in Lafayette, California, envisage beaming microwave energy up from Earth to boil off volatile molecules from a specially formulated paint applied to the sail. The recoil of the molecules as they streamed off the sail would give it a significant kick that would help the craft on its way. "It's a different way of thinking about propulsion," Gregory Benford says. "We leave the engine on the ground."
Solar sails are in essence nothing more than giant mirrors. Photons of light from the sun bounce off the surface, giving the sail a gentle push. It was while developing a solar sail five years ago that the brothers stumbled upon their idea for enhancing the effect.
The pair were testing a very thin carbon-mesh sail by firing microwaves at it. To their surprise, the sail experienced a force several times stronger than they expected. They eventually worked out that the heat from the microwave beam was causing carbon monoxide gas to escape from the sail's surface, and that the recoil from the emerging gas molecules was giving the sail an extra push.

In a forthcoming issue of the journal Acta Astronautica, the Benfords explain how a sail covered with a paint designed to emit gas when it is heated might propel a spacecraft to Mars in just a month. A rocket would take the craft to low-Earth orbit, 300 kilometres up. After the craft unfurls a solar sail 100 metres across, a transmitter on Earth would fire microwaves at it to heat it up. The Benfords calculate a one-hour burst of microwaves could accelerate the craft to 60 kilometres per second, faster than any interplanetary spacecraft to date.

The feat would require a 60-megawatt microwave beam with a similar diameter to the sail. It would also have to be capable of tracking the craft as it accelerated away. But this power level could not be delivered by any existing microwave transmission system. The deep-space communications network that NASA uses to communicate with Mars rovers and the Cassini probe now orbiting Saturn can only manage half a megawatt. The Benfords say the power could be ramped up in future and hope to persuade NASA to consider doing this as part of a future upgrade to the network.

A further challenge is how to formulate the evaporating paint. The ideal material would lock up large amounts of a light gas like hydrogen and only release it at very high temperature, when the high speed of the gas molecules would maximise the recoil. Ideally all the paint would boil away, leaving a micrometre-thin sail to continue the voyage to Mars.

"It's pretty cool," says Geoffrey Landis, a physicist at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. "There are obviously some details to be worked out here, but in a fundamental way the idea makes sense."


http://www.newscientist.com/channel/spa ... 524846.500
 
sjoh9 said:
A further challenge is how to formulate the evaporating paint. The ideal material would lock up large amounts of a light gas like hydrogen and only release it at very high temperature, when the high speed of the gas molecules would maximise the recoil. Ideally all the paint would boil away, leaving a micrometre-thin sail to continue the voyage to Mars.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/spa ... 524846.500
Hmm... Presumably it would still have to carry chemical rockets to get in to Mars orbit (or whatever).

A normal minimum energy transfer orbit requires the probe to accelerate to keep up with Mars, but a fast transfer orbit, like this 'sail' idea involves, might involve having to decelerate. Either way, you'd need fuel, unless you send another microwave transmitter to Mars first!
 
rynner said:
sjoh9 said:
A further challenge is how to formulate the evaporating paint. The ideal material would lock up large amounts of a light gas like hydrogen and only release it at very high temperature, when the high speed of the gas molecules would maximise the recoil. Ideally all the paint would boil away, leaving a micrometre-thin sail to continue the voyage to Mars.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/spa ... 524846.500
Hmm... Presumably it would still have to carry chemical rockets to get in to Mars orbit (or whatever).

A normal minimum energy transfer orbit requires the probe to accelerate to keep up with Mars, but a fast transfer orbit, like this 'sail' idea involves, might involve having to decelerate. Either way, you'd need fuel, unless you send another microwave transmitter to Mars first!


"It's pretty cool," says Geoffrey Landis, a physicist at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. "There are obviously some details to be worked out here, but in a fundamental way the idea makes sense."


Yup like stopping! Well i guess it would have to carry extra fuel to slow down, stop and alter direction.It could be another flyby....oh here comes Mars.....and there it goes!
 
You slow down with gravitational capture, and maybe aerobraking.

By the way, interesting to see Greg Benford involved. And the similarities between this and the solar sail used in Rocheworld by Robert L. Forward.
 
anome said:
You slow down with gravitational capture, and maybe aerobraking.
Pure gravitational capture is a very difficult trick to pull off. In the case of satellites that are thought to be captured asteroids (like those of Mars), most astronomers think a third body must have been involved.

And aerobraking in Mars thin atmosphere can be problematical, especially if you're coming in fast.
 
Posted on Wed, Jun. 22, 2005
Mission controllers may have received signal from solar sail

JOHN ANTCZAK
Associated Press


PASADENA, Calif. - Signals may have been detected from the Cosmos 1 solar sail spacecraft that lost communication during launch on a converted missile fired from a Russian submarine under the Barrents Sea, mission officials said late Tuesday night.

The news came after an all-day search for Cosmos 1, which is intended to demonstrate that a spacecraft can be propelled by the pressure of light from the sun. If it is confirmed that the signals detected by three ground stations did come from Cosmos 1, it means that the craft did achieve orbit, said mission official Jim Cantrell.

However, the craft would probably have gone into an unexpected orbit and its location in space and condition were yet to be determined, he said.

The signals were found in a review of data recorded at ground tracking stations on Russia's Kamchatka peninsula, Majuro in the Mashall Islands of the Pacific Ocean and at Panska Ves, Czech Republic.

"Good news," said Bruce Murray, a co-founder of The Planetary Society, which organized the mission. "We are very likely in orbit ... we seem to have a live spacecraft."

Cosmos 1 was launched at 12:46 p.m. PDT. There was initial data followed by silence before mission officials announced shortly before 10 p.m. that they may have picked up signals from the $4 million mission.

Data had originally stopped during a pass over a portable ground station on the Kamchatka peninsula at about the time a final rocket motor would have fired to put the craft into the proper orbit, mission officials said. There was no signal on passes over stations in the Pacific Ocean, the Czech Republic and two in Russia. None of those passes, however, were optimal for receiving signals.

The U.S. military also did not make radar sightings on the path the spacecraft was predicted to follow if it did enter orbit.

Signals were picked up during what officials had believed would be the craft's best pass, shortly before 9:30 p.m.

Funding for the project came largely from Cosmos Studios of Ithaca, N.Y., a science-based entertainment company that was founded by Ann Druyan, the widow of astronomer Carl Sagan, who also was a society co-founder. She sought to stay positive as the hours of silence wore on, and even joked, "I think I know why the mission was so affordable."

Early in the day she invoked the memory of her late husband and said she was looking forward to the sail deployment "when we really hope to light up the world with ... the reflective panels of Cosmos 1."

Then, during countdown, she sat nervously in a crowded room at the society headquarters, smiling at times and also seeming near tears, then stood and hugged her children, Sasha and Sam Sagan, and father, Harry, when word came over the phone from Moscow that the rocket was in flight.

After the succession of ground stations failed to find a signal from Cosmos 1, she said she felt a bit numb.

"When we had liftoff - and you all felt it in the room - the exhilaration was just so electrifying and ... I feel like I had an overdose of adrenaline," she said. "And now I feel curiously peaceful, relaxed. I'm curious, I really want to know what happened to it, and I really want to be involved in whatever the next mission is because I really believe in what we're doing here."

Immediately after launch, the spacecraft was supposed to deploy solar panels to charge its batteries and orbit for several days with its sails folded to allow any air in them to leak into the vacuum of space. On Saturday it was to be commanded to inflate tubes to unfurl its eight triangular Mylar sails, each nearly 50 feet long and just a quarter the thickness of a trash bag.

Controlled flight, achieved by rotating each blade to change its pitch, was scheduled to be attempted early next week.

Cosmos 1 was supposed to orbit Earth once every 101 minutes and operate for at least a month. The 100-foot-diameter disk formed by the blades would be visible from the ground as a point of light, officials said.

The non-governmental project was organized by The Planetary Society, a Pasadena-based organization founded by Sagan, Murray, who is a former Jet Propulsion Laboratory director and Friedman, also a JPL veteran.

Solar sails are seen as a means for achieving interstellar flight by using the gentle push from the continuous stream of light particles known as photons. Though gradual, the constant light pressure should allow a spacecraft to build up great speed over time, and cover great distances.

Such a craft would not have to carry chemical fuel to propel itself through space, and, according to advocates, would eventually achieve greater speed than a traditional spacecraft.

Although their control process is likened to the way sailboats tack in the wind, solar sails are not intended to rely on what is known as the solar wind - the stream of ionized particles spewing from the sun - which moves slower than light and with much less force.

Built in Russia by the Lavochkin Association and the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Science, Cosmos 1 was under the control of a mission operations center in Moscow linked to The Planetary Society's project center in a converted old barn in Pasadena.

Japan tested solar sail deployment on a suborbital flight and Russia deployed a solar sail outside its old Mir space station, but neither involved controlled flight.

---_

On the Net:

The Planetary Society: http://planetary.org

Source
 
I think this is a great idea. The sun never sets out there, now we just need to start building self sustaining solar saillike cities, so we(or how many of our kids generations, because it would take a long time) can start exploring other galaxies. I know there are a crapload of reasons why it wouldn't work, but I still think it would be cool as hell.
 
STEREO spacecraft to image solar blasts in glorious 3-D

Blasts of energetic particles from the Sun will soon be visible barrelling towards Earth in glorious 3-D, thanks to a pair of NASA spacecraft called STEREO. The mission should help researchers to predict which solar storms could endanger astronauts or damage satellites.

Both STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) spacecraft are scheduled to launch aboard the same Delta 2 rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on 26 May 2006.

Once in space, they will split up to observe the Sun from different angles, capturing images in 3-D. People gauge depth in the same way, using the slightly different perspective from each eye.

Two months after launch, both spacecraft will swing by the Moon and one - called B for "behind" - will arrive at its destination, a point about 22° behind the Earth in its orbit. Its own orbit will be farther from the Sun than Earth's, taking about 387 days to complete.

About a month after that, the other spacecraft - called A for "ahead" - will fly by the Moon again. It will then reach its intended orbit, about 22° in front of the Earth and closer to the Sun, taking 347 days to orbit.

Mass ejections
The combined observations from these two locations should allow researchers to monitor the trajectory of eruptions of charged particles from the Sun, called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). If they are on a collision course with the Earth, they can endanger space-walking astronauts, damage spacecraft and disrupt power grids on the ground.

"You'd like to know - is it going to hit Earth and cause problems," says STEREO project scientist Michael Kaiser of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US.

To view a range of video clips illustrating the mission, click here.

Each spacecraft will monitor the Sun with four instrument packages. One, called SECCHI, carries four instruments that will image the Sun at a range of wavelengths.

Two others, called IMPACT and PLASTIC, will measure the particles and their associated magnetic fields directly as they sweep over the spacecraft. The fourth package, called SWAVES, will study radio emissions produced in the shock wave as the CME particles plough into slower-moving particles from the Sun.

Space weather
Each spacecraft also carries a beacon that will transmit data in real-time to project scientists and to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association's Space Environment Center in Boulder, Colorado. Eventually, this data will be used to forecast space weather, says Kaiser.

"Everything until now has been looking right at the Sun, but all of a sudden there's data from the side," he said at a press briefing at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California. "This will be a whole big change."

Data from other orbiting spacecraft, such as SOHO, and observations from Earth will also be used to augment STEREO's vision, providing an unprecedented look at the relationship between the Sun and the Earth.

"Just like we can't measure ocean current with one - or even several - buoys, we need many observations and imaging to really understand this coupled system," says STEREO programme scientist Lika Guhathakurta of NASA.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8438
 
UK seeks role in Moon missions

UK scientists are vying to play a key role in China's plans to explore the Moon with robotic spacecraft.
British space scientists visited the country earlier this year to discuss building scientific instruments for the second phase of China's lunar missions.

China has become only the third country to successfully put a man into space, after Russia and the US.

It hopes to set up a space station within five years and eventually it wants to put an astronaut on the Moon.

John Zarnecki, Professor of Space Science at the Open University in Milton Keynes, is one of a team of academics, agency officials and space scientists that visited China earlier this year.

"The Chinese have put people in space themselves, they've got fantastic capability but in some ways they are newcomers," he told the BBC News website.

"And certainly on the space science side they are really looking to get together with us; we are very good at doing scientific instruments and we'd love the opportunities to do that sort of thing."

National pride

Beijing has attached great importance to its space ventures, viewing them as a source of national pride and international prestige.

Its space programme has grown enormously since it was set up in 1992, and now employs tens of thousands of people.

But China lacks expertise in a number of areas, including space science, and is keen to collaborate with Europe and other interested parties.

"I think they are looking for significant collaboration," said Prof Zarnecki.

"They have got good technology themselves but they will admit that they are fairly new in space science; so they don't have all of the instrument capabilities and so on."

China's first unmanned lunar mission, called Cheng'e1, a lunar orbiter, is due to launch next year.

"If that's successful, their next one (Cheng'e2), which is really ambitious, involves a soft lander, possibly with a rover," said Zarnecki.

"There've already been discussions about the UK getting together with China to provide some of those instruments.

"Those are the sort of things that we are beginning to talk about."

Technology transfer

China has already forged links with the European Space Agency (Esa) on a number of space projects, including the Galileo satellite-navigation network of satellites and earth observation programmes.

Stephen Briggs, head of Esa's Earth observation applications, said China is keen to expand its role but technology transfer is a sensitive issue.

"We are careful about becoming involved with them in the right way, in the right structures, for technology programmes," he said.

"But on the applications of the science side, we are very keen to collaborate because they have a lot to offer."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4782881.stm
 
Nasa mission first to pass Mercury in 30 years
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 12/01/2008

Scientists are eagerly awaiting new images and observations when a Nasa spacecraft flies over Mercury on Monday in the first visit in almost 33 years to the mysterious small planet.

They expect to harvest some 1,200 images and other data from instruments aboard the Messenger (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging) spacecraft that could shake up the study of the solar system.

"I think we're in for some big surprises," Faith Vilas, one of the scientists, said.

"This is raw scientific exploration and the suspense is building by the day," said Alan Stern, the associated administrator for Nasa's science mission directorate.

Messenger will measure the mineral and chemical composition of the surface, study its atmosphere and magnetosphere and collect data about the magnetic tail that sweeps behind it.

The spacecraft will fly as low as 124 miles above Mercury's cratered, rocky surface, and will use the planet's gravitational pull in this flyover.

Messenger is scheduled to fly over Mercury again in October this year and September 2009, then return for a final sweep in 2011 when it will enter the planet's orbit for a year-long study.

The fly-by will be the first since Mariner 10's visit in March 1975, when that spacecraft conducted three flights over the planet.

http://tinyurl.com/35pe9b
 
More from the beeb:

Messenger primed for Mercury pass
By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News

The first spacecraft to visit Mercury in more than 30 years passes the planet on Monday at a distance of just 200km.
The fly-by is the first of three the Messenger probe will make in the coming years as it slows itself to enter into orbit around the small world in 2011.

The US spacecraft will collect more than 1,300 images and make other observations during the encounter.

No probe has viewed Mercury up close since the Mariner 10 mission's third and final fly-by in March 1975.

"[Messenger] is lined up and ready to go; the team is ready and really pumped," said Marilyn Lindstrom, the US space agency (Nasa) mission's programme scientist.

"Mercury, here comes Messenger!"

The researcher said the entire planetary science community was impatient to get back to the nearest planet to the Sun.

The moment of closest approach is 1404 EST (1904 GMT).

'Lap times'

Lindstrom added: "[Messenger's] goal is to understand the surface, the interior, the magnetosphere and the atmosphere of this innermost planet; but in the process of doing that we hope to apply that [knowledge] to understand how all four of the terrestrial, Earth-like, planets formed."

Messenger is half-way through what will be a seven-year tour of the inner Solar System.

It is not due in orbit around Mercury until the March of 2011. To get there, it must perform a series of fly-bys and engine firings to put it on a correct course and, crucially, slow its final approach.

This week's pass, which takes place some 53 million km (33 million miles) from Sun, will reduce the spacecraft's velocity by 8,000km/h (5,000mph). Even so, it will still pass over the cratered surface at a relative speed of 25,000km/h (16,000mph).

"Messenger's orbital period around the Sun will be decreased by 11 days thus setting up a planetary car race with Mercury," explained Eric Finnegan, mission systems engineer at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

"Using its engine and future gravity assists, the spacecraft after being lapped by Mercury many times in its race around the Sun will eventually match the 88-day orbital period of the innermost planet."

Strange world

Messenger has already begun its flyby observations. The probe's instruments are expected to gather about 700GB of data in total over a period of 55 hours.

The final look will be on Tuesday at about midday EST (1700GMT), after which the probe will turn its communications equipment towards Earth to download the data treasure.

THE PLANET MERCURY

Closest planet to the Sun
Diameter: 4,800km
Mercurian year: 88 days
Has global magnetic field

Messenger is operating in an extremely harsh environment.

Its electronics and observational instruments are protected behind a shield that allows them to operate at "room temperature". The Sun-facing side of he shield, however, experiences temperatures in excess of 300C.

All the terrestrial planets are believed to have formed at the same time by common processes - but Mercury itself is a bit of an oddball.

It is so dense that more than two-thirds of it has to be of an iron-metal composition.

It so close to the Sun that the temperature variation between day and night at the equator is 1,100 degrees; and yet there may be water-ice at the poles in craters that are in permanent shadow.

Europeans to follow

"Mariner 10 showed us a surface that was so heavily crater that it looked like geological activity on Mercury ended very early in the history of the Solar System," said Sean Solomon, Messenger's principal investigator from the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

"And yet, Mercury is the only other inner planet which like Earth has a magnetic field that we believe means it must have a very dynamic molten iron core.

"So how to reconcile this ancient surface with this modern-day internal dynamic activity is one of the mysteries we hope to solve."

On Friday this week, the European Space Agency (Esa) will sign an industrial contract with EADS Astrium to build BepiColombo.

This mission will be launched to Mercury 2013. It consists of two spacecraft - an orbiter for planetary investigation, led by Esa, and one for magnetospheric studies, led by the Jaxa (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency).

The satellite duo will reach Mercury in 2019 after a six-year journey towards the inner Solar System.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7183846.stm
 
Vanguard still in space race 50 years on
Lewis Smith, Science Reporter

An experimental satellite launched in the first months of the space race is about to celebrate 50 years in orbit.

Vanguard I is the oldest surviving man-made satellite in space and was the first to provide measurements showing the Earth is slightly pear-shaped instead of perfectly round.

When the 50th anniversary of the US satellite’s launch on March 17, 1958, arrives on Monday it will have made more than 196,990 Earth orbits.

At 6in in diameter and 3lb in weight, it was dubbed “the grapefruit satellite” by Nikita Khrushchev, then the leader of the Soviet Union.

But while tiny by modern standards, and small compared to the 23in-long Sputnik 1 launched the previous October, its achievements were enormous.

It was the first to use solar power and it sent back a wealth of information on the size of the Earth, its air density and temperatures.After the humiliation of watching the Soviet Union get satellites into space first, its successful launch and deployment came as a welcome fillip to the United States and the West.

President Dwight Eisenhower publicly announced its deployment a little more than two hours after the launch and it was reported in The Times on March 18, 1958, under a headline: “Up ‘for a very long time’.”

In The Times it was recorded that scientists knew within ten minutes that it was fully operational but decided not to tell the public until the first orbit was completed.

The satellite has travelled 5.7 billion miles, the equivalent of flying from here to Neptune and back, plus a round trip to Mars. It was the second successful satellite launched by the United States but it has remained in orbit longer than any of its predecessors, all of which burnt up when they reentered the Earth’s atmosphere.

The United States suffered an embarrassing setback in December 1957 when it attempted to launch its first satellite, only to see the rocket explode on the launch pad. Only in February the following year did it succeed in getting its first satellite, Explorer I, into orbit. At the time of its launch, Vanguard I was reported to be capable of staying in orbit for five or ten years, though it later became clear that it was designed to last for 200 years.

More recent analysis suggests it will continue circling the Earth for 2,000 years unless it is knocked off course. It was launched by the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) from Cape Canaveral in Florida as part of Project Vanguard, headed by John Hagan.

Much of the technology for the project was based on Germany’s war-time V-2 rockets. One of the satellite’s most important achievements was to test solar cells in space, allowing space-craft using them to continue much longer in orbit than those with conventional batteries.

While other satellites ran out of power after about three weeks, Vanguard I’s solar power enabled it to continue transmitting information back to Earth for seven years. It finally stopped broadcasting in 1964.

Its orbit, a little over 2 hours 10 minutes, was so stable that it sent back observational data of the Earth’s surface that allowed cartographers to improve maps of a range of Pacific islands.

Placed in orbit

— About 3,000 satellites orbit the Earth

— Orbits range from 155 miles above the Earth’s surface to 22,300 miles

— There are six main types: scientific research, weather data, communications, navigation, earth observations and military

— The largest satellite is the International Space Station

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... 556160.ece
 
I've still got one of those "Books of Space" from the 1960s when I was about eight, that talks about Vanguard and how the Earth is pear-shaped. I was a science geek before they invented the word...
 
Fascinating example of 'budget' science:

Students launch first do-it-yourself space camera
American students Oliver Yeh and Justin Lee have taken images of the earth's surface using a camera bought on eBay, a weather balloon, a mobile phone, handwarmers and a drink cooler at a total cost of £90.
By Amy Willis
Published: 7:19PM BST 21 Sep 2009

The duo claim to be the first people to send a do-it-yourself space camera to the edge of the Earth's atmosphere. In the past, capturing these kind of images has been reserved for big-budget agencies like NASA.

The idea was 20-year-old Oliver Yeh's, a student studying computer science and electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in America.

To create the budget space camera, the students bought a normal camera on eBay and fastened it inside a styrofoam cooler. They then poked a hole in the side of the cooler for the camera lens. To keep track of the space camera's whereabouts they attached a mobile phone and a wireless router to send GPS coordinates back down to Earth.

They set the camera to take a photo every five seconds.

The handwarmer - the type skiers put in their gloves - was taped to the phone's battery to prevent it freezing. The whole package was strapped to a spherical weather balloon filled with helium and sent to the edge of space to take the extraordinary images.

The students calculated that after 17 miles upward, the air pressure would force the weather balloon to pop so they attached a parachute to lower it down to Earth safely. The GPS in the phone would then help them track where the camera had landed.

To avoid the balloon landing in the ocean or Boston City Centre, Yeh and Lee, looked online for the wind speed and direction. Using this information they calculated the best date, time and location to launch the balloon. In case their calculations were wrong, they attached their contact details and offered a £25 reward to anyone finding the box.

The students launched the balloon on the morning of September 2 after travelling 60 miles inland to a warehouse in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. The balloon was in the air for five hours before the air pressure forced it down.

The duo were amazed when they found the camera unharmed at a construction zone outside Worcester, Massachusetts, 25 miles away from the launch site.

Yey's partner in the project, 23-year-old mechanical engineering grad student Justin Lee, said: "We were like placing bets on whether we thought it would work or not. Early on, we were optimistic that it would work. About 4 hours after, [when] we hadn't heard any news about the device, we had sort of given up hope. We'd thought we'd lost it."

After finding the signal, Lee added: "We were so excited, we jumped right back into the car, and we drove out to Worcester, and we found it. That was a great moment.

"There's something that's fascinating about seeing the Earth from high - I can't quite put my finger on it. There's something just beautiful about seeing that."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/spac ... amera.html
 
rynner2 said:
Fascinating example of 'budget' science:

Students launch first do-it-yourself space camera
American students Oliver Yeh and Justin Lee have taken images of the earth's surface using a camera bought on eBay, a weather balloon, a mobile phone, handwarmers and a drink cooler at a total cost of £90.
Journey into space with a balloon and duct tape
Laura Pitel

It all sounds very Heath Robinson but a digital camera, a GPS device, some duct tape and a balloon were all that was needed to take some breathtaking pictures of Earth that had Nasa calling.

Robert Harrison, 38, used a collection of cheap parts costing £500 to create a balloon-mounted camera that can travel up to 21.7 miles (35km) above the surface of the Earth. The result is a series of pictures taken from a height that only a rocket or weather balloon can reach. Mr Harrison, an IT director from Highburton, West Yorkshire, has launched 12 high-altitude balloons (HABs) since 2008.

The hobby began when he tried taking aerial photos of his house using a remote control helicopter. The experiment failed and Mr Harrison began to research the possibility of using a meteorological balloon to carry a camera. The resulting photographs, which he published online , were so impressive that Nasa has been in touch.

“A guy phoned up who worked for Nasa who was interested in how we took the pictures,” Mr Harrison told The Times. “He wanted to know how the hell we did it. He thought we used a rocket. They said it would have cost them millions of dollars.” :D

The contraption comprises an ordinary Canon camera mounted on a weather balloon. Using free software downloaded from the internet, Mr Harrison reprogrammed the camera to wake up every five minutes and take eight photographs and a video before switching off for a rest.

A GPS tracker enabled him to follow the balloon’s progress to an accuracy of 10 metres (33ft) and to retrieve it upon its return to Earth. Both the camera and the GPS device are wrapped in loft insulation, which traps the heat given off by the devices and allows them to function in -60C (-76F) temperatures high in the Earth’s atmosphere.

At ground level the helium balloon has a diameter of one metre. As it rises, the air pressure drops and the balloon expands to a diameter of up to 20 metres. Eventually, it pops and the camera carried back down to earth by a small parachute.

Launching the balloon requires permission from the Civil Aviation Authority so Mr Harrison usually travels to one of two approved sites in Cambridge.

Describing his first successful launch, Mr Harrison said: “We were sat in a local pub at the time and I was gobsmacked when I got the images. Seeing the highest pictures was amazing — that’s a lifetime achievement.”

The UK Met Office sends up similar balloons every day to measure a range of weather conditions but Mr Harrison holds the record for the highest HAB flight at 22 miles (35km). He is working on his third model, which has a rotating-lens camera and a rear fixed-lens camera, as well as pressure, temperature and humidity sensors.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/s ... 074839.ece

EDIT: Just looked at the pics more carefully, and I recognised the coastline in Image 2: it is around Harwich, where the Rivers Stour and Orwell meet the North Sea. Slightly further north is the River Deben. The tide must have been in at the time! (I'm more used to those scenes from sea level!)
 
This may turn out to be non-news, but it's still Quite Interesting!

Hayabusa probe sailing towards Earth
16:29 01 April 2010 by Kelly Beatty, SkyandTelescope.com

It seems years ago – November 29, 2005, to be exact – since a Japanese spacecraft named Hayabusa touched down on a small asteroid in the hope of grabbing samples of its dusty surface and returning them to Earth. Had the mission gone according to plan, the precious bits from asteroid 25143 Itokawa would have reached waiting scientists in June 2007.

But the flight of Hayabusa, Japanese for "falcon," has been anything but nominal. In fact, it's been more of a train wreck. 8)

The craft was nearly lost during its grab-and-go encounter due to a series of malfunctions that should have doomed the spacecraft. But it hung on, despite suffering a massive fuel leak, battery failure, and being incommunicado for two months. Then its attitude-control system failed. The loss of three of its four xenon-powered engines meant it would take three extra years to get the crippled craft home, nursed every step of the way by its dedicated team of engineers.

Well, folks, Hayabusa is almost home. Late word from project manager Jun'ichiro Kawaguchi is that the sole remaining engine was commanded to shut down on March 27th, having gently accelerated the craft by 400 metres per second over the past year and nudged it onto a trajectory that will pass within several thousand kilometres of Earth. "What is left is a series of trajectory corrections," Kawaguchi explains, "and the project team is finalizing the preparations for them."

Barring an eleventh-hour setback, in mid-June a small 18-kilogram descent capsule will separate from the main spacecraft and slam into the atmosphere over south-central Australia. The larger craft will then manoeuvre to avoid Earth. Streaking through the darkness at 12.2 kilometres per second, the capsule should parachute to the ground somewhere along a target zone, measuring 100 by 15 km, in the remote Woomera Test Range.

After whisking it back to a clean room at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), scientists will carefully open the 40-cm capsule to learn, finally, whether it contains any asteroidal bits. It's hardly a sure thing – despite sitting on Itokawa's surface for 30 minutes, Hayabusa failed to fire two small tantalum pellets designed to kick surface material into a collection cone.

Hayabusa's successful return would be a big deal in Japan, and plans for the welcome-home party are well under way. Kawaguchi has been careful not to divulge the exact date publicly, pending the engine shutdown and a sign-off from Australian authorities. "It is not at the beginning of June, and it is not at the end of June," he teases. JAXA has produced an informative 21-minute video about the mission, in English, that you can view here. There's even a dramatic movie treatment: Hayabusa: Back to the Earth.

Because spacecraft rarely come down through the atmosphere so fast – Earth-orbiting satellites fall in about a third slower – there's plenty of scientific interest in the re-entry itself. The capsule should create an artificial fireball beginning at an altitude of about 200 km and hit a peak brightness of magnitude -6.7 (several times brighter than Venus) before deploying its parachute.

For the past year, meteor specialist Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute in California has been organising an international team to observe the capsule's arrival from an instrument-packed DC-8 jet flying near the recovery zone. Jenniskens mounted a similar effort for the return of the Stardust sample capsule in January 2006.

Will Hayabusa, despite all its problems, make it back to Earth? Will the capsule contain hard-won bits of asteroid Itokawa? Will Kawaguchi and his team get a ticker-tape parade through downtown Tokyo? Stay tuned for the final chapter of this remarkable mission! :D

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... earth.html
 
First spacecraft to land on an asteroid due back on Earth
The first spacecraft to land on an asteroid and collect samples from its surface is limping back to earth more than seven years after setting off on its epic journey.
By Julian Ryall in Tokyo
Published: 7:00AM BST 09 Jun 2010

Scientists are anxiously awaiting the return of Hayabusa - Japanese for "Falcon" - in the hope that the probe has successfully gathered tiny fragments of space rock, which could provide more clues about the origin of the solar system.

Hayabusa, which weighs about half a ton and is similar in size to a family car, was launched in May 2003 with the objective of intercepting an asteroid named Itokawa, gathering a sample from the surface and then returning to Earth. It has covered 1.2bn miles on its journey and is due to land in the Australian outback on Sunday night.

However, the voyage has not been plain sailing.

Hayabusa neared the 590 yard-long asteroid in September 2005 and made a successful landing. But it failed to fire a projectile into the surface of the asteroid that was designed to kick up dust which could then be collected.

Researchers are yet to learn just how much of the surface debris has been gathered by the unmanned spacecraft. But Nasa's Michael Zolensky said as little as a few grams of the dust would be a boon for scientists around the world.

Asteroids can give scientists insight into the origin and evolution of a solar system and the formation of planets.

As well as it's primary objective, Hayabusa has a second mission. Scientists hope that the craft's re-entry will teach them more about the likely trajectories of asteroids that could collide with the Earth.

"We will monitor its movements and the data will enable us to accurately predict the future paths of asteroids that are on course to come close to the Earth," said Akinori Hashimoto, a spokesman for JAXA, the Japanese space agency.

"It is very important that we develop accurate ways to predict where asteroids are going to strike because even small ones can cause a great deal of damage," said Mr Hashimoto, pointing to the devastation caused in June 1908, when a comet measuring about 60 metres in diameter exploded about seven miles above Siberia.

Authorities in southern Australia are currently making preparations for Hayabusa's return, which is predicted to take place at around 11:30pm on Sunday. Police have closed a stretch of the Stuart Highway between Cooper Pedy and Glendambo to make sure that no passersby are hit by the incoming capsule.

The craft is expected to touch down in the Woomera Prohibited Area, a weapons testing range about 250 miles north of Adelaide. Once it enters the atmosphere it will be followed by a chaser plane to help pinpoint its exact landing site. The probe will then be picked up and sent back to Japan where the samples will be examined.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/spac ... Earth.html
 
Japanese Hayabusa asteroid mission comes home
Page last updated at 15:25 GMT, Sunday, 13 June 2010 16:25 UK
By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

A capsule thought to contain the first samples grabbed from the surface of an asteroid has returned to Earth.

The Japanese Hayabusa container hit the top of the atmosphere just after 1350 GMT, producing a bright fireball over southern Australia.

It had a shield to cope with the heat of re-entry and a parachute for the final drop to the ground.

A recovery team later reported they had identified the landing zone in the Woomera Prohibited Range.

"We just had a spectacular display out over the Outback skies of South Australia," said Professor Trevor Ireland, from the Australian National University, who will get to work on the samples

"We could see the little sample-return capsule separate from the main ship and lead its way in; and [we] just had this magnificent display of the break-up of Hayabusa," he told BBC News.

The Hayabusa mission was launched to asteroid Itokawa in 2003, spending three months at the 500m-long potato-shaped space rock in 2005.

The main spacecraft, along with the sample-storage capsule, should have come back to Earth in 2007, but a succession of technical problems delayed their return by three years.

Even now, there is still some uncertainty as to whether the capsule really does contain pieces of Itokawa.

Analysis has shown the Hayabusa spacecraft's capture mechanism malfunctioned at the moment it was supposed to pick up the asteroid rock fragments.

However, Japanese space agency (Jaxa) officials remain confident of success.

They say a lot of dust would have been kicked up when Hayabusa landed on the space rock to make the grab, and some of this material must have found its way inside the probe.

On the journey home, the Hayabusa team had to work around communication drop-outs and propulsion glitches.

But each time an issue came up, the scientists and engineers working on the project managed to find an elegant solution.

Just three hours before the spacecraft began its plunge into Earth's atmosphere, it pushed the sample capsule out in front.

The main spacecraft was destroyed during the descent, accounting for most of the spectacular light show south Australians saw in the nightsky.

The container, on the other hand, was equipped with a shield made from carbon phenolic resin which is capable of enduring temperatures that were expected to reach 3,000C on the re-entry.

Radar tracking and a beacon in the container itself were used by the recovery team to locate the parachute drop-point.

The capsule will not be approached until daylight hours.

The requirement to avoid all earthly contamination means the capsule will not immediately be moved from its landing site. The mission team's safety and sterilisation protocols will not permit the capsule's evacuation and transfer to Japan for several days.

When it does leave, the container will be delivered to Jaxa's Sagamihara curation facility for analysis. It could be some months before scientists are able to say with confidence that Hayabusa did indeed capture fragments of Itokawa.

"You hope for grams of sample but you can make do with much less than that," observed Dr Michael Zolensky who worked on Nasa's Stardust comet sample-return mission.

"On Stardust, the entire sample return was on the order of thousands of nano-grams. That was thousands of grains, each of which weighed about one nano-gram; and one of those grains you could spend a year studying," he told BBC News.

Such grains would provide new insight into the early history of the Solar System and the formation of the planets more than 4.5 billion years ago.

Professor Ireland said no rocks on Earth could provide this information because they had been recycled many times.

"If we look at anything on Earth it has been thoroughly through the ringer; it's been messed up by plate-tectonic processes and geochemical processes. So if we want to look of what our Earth was made of, we have to leave Earth. That's the importance of Hayabusa and going to Itokawa."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/science_and_ ... 285973.stm
 
Anyone spotted Mercury yet? It hasn't been clear enough in the evenings here - too much high thin cloud. But here's something to think about when you do see it:

Messenger probe set to orbit Mercury
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News

Nasa's Messenger spacecraft is primed and ready to enter into orbit around Mercury - the first probe to do so.
The US space agency has uploaded commands to the robotic explorer that should initiate a 14-minute burn on its main thruster on Friday (GMT).
This is expected to slow the spacecraft sufficiently so it can be captured by the planet's gravity.

Being so close to the Sun, Mercury is a hostile place to do science. Surface temperatures would melt lead.
In this blistering environment, the probe has to carry a shield to protect it from the full glare of our star.
And even its instruments looking down at the planet have to be guarded against the intense heat coming back up off the surface.

But principal investigator Sean Solomon, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, is hoping for some remarkable discoveries in coming months.
"We started the Messenger mission as a proposal to Nasa 15 years ago," he told BBC News.

"We have been building for the orbit insertion and the observations that will follow for a decade and a half.
"To say that the science team is excited about what is to come is a huge understatement. We're really pumped."

Just getting to Mercury has proved a challenge.
Messenger has had to use six planetary flybys - one of Earth, two of Venus and three of Mercury itself - to manage its speed as it ran in closer to the Sun and its deep gravity well.
The orbit insertion burn by probe's 600-Newton engine should finally park it into a 12-hour, highly elliptical orbit about the planet.

The strategy devised by scientists and engineers is to have Messenger gather data with its seven instruments during the close approaches (some 200km from the surface) and then return that information to Earth when the probe is cooling off at maximum separation from the planet (up to 15,000km from the surface).

Mercury is often dismissed as a boring, featureless world that offers little to excite those who observe it, but planetary scientists who know it well beg to differ. It is a place of extraordinary extremes.
Mercury's proximity to the Sun means exposed equator surfaces can reach more than 600C; and yet there may be water-ice at the poles in craters that are in permanent shadow.

It is so dense for its size that more than two-thirds of the body has to be made of an iron-metal composition.
Mercury also retains a magnetic field, something which is absent on Venus and Mars.


In addition, the planet is deeply scarred, not just by impact craters and volcanic activity but through shrinkage; the whole body has reduced in size through Solar System history.

And Mercury fascinates because it may be our best guide to what some of the new planets might be like that are now being discovered around distant suns.
Many of these worlds also orbit very close in to their host stars.

"We'll be looking at the composition of the planet and how it ended up so dense, and what planetary formation processes gave rise to the high fraction of core," said Dr Solomon
"The answer to that question lies in the composition of the surface that we can sense remotely from orbit, but we need time in orbit to do that.

"We'll also be taking more images, but images at higher resolution and in optimum lighting compared with the conditions we had during the flybys."

Key to the success of the whole endeavour will be maintaining the health of Messenger in the harsh conditions it will experience.

"The sunshade is made of a ceramic material that keeps the heat on the outside of the spacecraft from getting on the inside," explained Eric Finnegan, the Messenger mission systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).

"We also had to develop thermal protection for the solar arrays. We still need to generate power but we had to make sure the solar arrays themselves wouldn't melt. So, we built a solar panel that's only populated with one-third solar cells. The other two-thirds of the panel are basically mirrors to reflect the sunlight off of the panels."

When Messenger enters orbit, it will be some 46 million km (29 million miles) from the Sun, and about 155 million km (96 million miles) from Earth.
The spacecraft is scheduled to remain in orbit for a year, allowing the probe to fly around Mercury 730 times.

If Messenger stays in good health and the funding allows, a one-year mission extension is likely to be granted.

The European and Japanese space agencies (Esa and Jaxa) are also sending a mission to Mercury this decade.
Bepi-Colombo consists of two spacecraft - an orbiter for planetary investigation, led by Esa, and one for magnetospheric studies, led by Jaxa.

Dr Solomon says there will be plenty left for the duo to do and discover when they get to the innermost planet.
"We'll be collecting global data on the surface, on the interior, on the atmosphere, on the magnetosphere - but we're not going to answer all the questions; we're going to raise new ones," he told BBC News. "There's going to be ample opportunity for follow-on missions."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12761025
 
Messenger probe enters Mercury orbit
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News

Nasa's Messenger spacecraft has successfully entered into orbit around the planet Mercury - the first probe to do so.
The robotic explorer initiated a 14-minute burn on its main thruster at 0145 GMT on Friday.
This slowed the spacecraft sufficiently to be captured by the innermost planet's gravity.

Being so close to the Sun, Mercury is a hostile place to do science. Surface temperatures would melt lead.
In this blistering environment, the probe has to carry a shield to protect it from the full glare of our star.
And even its instruments looking down at the planet have to be guarded against the intense heat coming back up off the surface.

"It was right on the money," Messenger's chief engineer, Eric Finnegan, said. "This is as close as you can possibly get to being perfect.
"Everybody was whooping and hollering; we are elated. There's a lot of work left to be done, but we are there."
:D

The spacecraft is now some 46 million km (29 million miles) from the Sun, and about 155 million km (96 million miles) from Earth.
The orbit insertion burn by the probe's 600-newton engine will have parked it into a 12-hour, highly elliptical orbit about the planet.

Principal investigator Sean Solomon, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, is hoping for some remarkable discoveries in coming months.

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12761025
 
I still haven't seen it - I'll have to make do with this instead:

Messenger captures 'historic' photographs of Mercury's surface
Nasa has received hundreds of stunning photographs from the Mercury Messenger probe at the start of its year-long mission to orbit and map the solar system's mysterious innermost planet.
7:00AM BST 31 Mar 2011

After more than six and a half years and a 4.9-billion-mile journey, the spacecraft - which stands for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging - finally entered the planet's orbit on March 17.

On Tuesday, it began unlocking the secrets of a planet where temperatures reach a mind-boggling 800 degrees Fahrenheit (427C) during the day but plummet to minus 150 degrees (-100C) at night.
"Early this morning, at 5:20 am EDT (0920 GMT), Messenger captured this historic image of Mercury," Na[sa] said. "This image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the solar system's innermost planet."

The upper part of the first image showed an unusual, dark-rayed crater called Debussy, while the lower part revealed a portion of Mercury near its south pole that has never before been witnessed by spacecraft, according to Nasa.

The spacecraft snapped 363 images over the next six hours and released more on Wednesday in conjunction with an expert press conference to discuss the findings.

"The entire MESSENGER team is thrilled that spacecraft and instrument checkout has been proceeding according to plan," said mission spokesman Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington.
"The first images from orbit and the first measurements from MESSENGER's other payload instruments are only the opening trickle of the flood of new information that we can expect over the coming year. The orbital exploration of the solar system's innermost planet has begun."

Nasa scientists aim to combine data from two earlier fly-bys and from Mariner 10, a spacecraft that made three passes of Mercury in 1974 and 1975, to map out the crater-filled surface of the planet.

MESSENGER will begin continuous mapping on April 4, orbiting the planet every 12 hours at a minimum altitude of 124 miles.

...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/spac ... rface.html
 
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Idk if this belongs here, i looked at all the other 'space' threads and couldnt find a more appropriate place, if tjere is feel free to move it

Astroscale space debris removal demo set for launch

A mission will launch to space this weekend that aims to demonstrate commercial technology to remove orbital debris, such as a defunct satellite.

The showcase is being staged by the Astroscale company and will be run from an operations centre in the UK.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56420047
 
Space debris removal demonstration launches

A Soyuz rocket has launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to put 38 different satellites in orbit.

Among the payloads was a 500kg Earth imager developed by the South Korean space agency; and a pair of spacecraft from the Tokyo-headquartered Astroscale company which will give a demonstration of how to clean up orbital debris.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56482726
 
NASA has announced 2 missions to Venus.

"Nasa has announced that it is sending two new missions to Venus in order to examine the planet's atmosphere and geological features.

The missions, which have each been awarded $500m (£352m) in funding, are due to launch between 2028 and 2030.

Nasa administrator Bill Nelson said the missions would offer the "chance to investigate a planet we haven't been to in more than 30 years".

The last probe to visit the planet was the Magellan orbiter in 1990."

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57339355
 
Skyrora have issued a challenge to find a way of retrieving 'Prospero' the UKs first and only space craft which is in orbit 1000 km above Earth.

"Edinburgh-based rocket company Skyrora is issuing a challenge to find a way to retrieve the Prospero satellite.

The object was the first and only UK spacecraft to be launched on a British rocket, from Australia in 1971.

It's defunct now, obviously, but is still circling the globe on an elliptical orbit some 1,000km up.

Skyrora, who will soon start sending up rockets from Scotland, regards the satellite as an important piece of UK space heritage."

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57758410
 
Europe's BepiColombo probe will reach Mercury soon, but it's coming in a bit hot to take up orbit.

"Europe's first mission to Mercury arrives at its destination in the coming hours.

It'll be the briefest of visits, however.
The BepiColombo probe is moving too fast to go into orbit and will fly straight by the planet.

But the diminutive world's gravity will have slowed the craft just a little, and further passes in the coming years will eventually see Bepi take up a stable station around Mercury.

That'll be late 2025; patience is required.
For this first flyby, the timing of closest approach is 23:34 GMT, Friday (00:34 BST, Saturday). The flight path will take the probe to within 200km of the planet's surface."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58754882
 
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