Solar Impulse: "This is a fabulous moment"

SolarImpulse - Around The World patch.

June 30, 2015

Japan-Hawaii - André Borschberg is now completely "in the ocean challenge," according to organizers. The flight is going "very well".

The Solar Impulse 2 aircraft continued to fly calmly above the Pacific on the night of Monday 29 to Tuesday, June 30, almost 30 hours after takeoff from Japan towards Hawaii, according to information given by the organizers of this challenge .

Tuesday at 07.30 Japan time (23:30 Switzerland), the aircraft was above the ocean at an altitude of 8350 meters, flying over a thick layer of clouds, according to images broadcast online.

Solar Impulse 2 above the ocean at an altitude of 8350 meters, flying over a thick layer of clouds

The pilot, André Borschberg, then quietly conversed with the engineers in the control center located in Monaco. "This is a fabulous time, the flight is going very well," he assured his cockpit since.

"Completely in the ocean challenge"

He then traveled 1,720 km since leaving Nagoya (Central Japan) on the night of Sunday to Monday.

His aerial crossing of trafficking alone, over a distance of 7,900 km to Hawaii, should last about 120 hours or 5 days and 5 nights.

"20% of the journey has already been made. André Borschberg is now fully in the ocean challenge, "the organizers said.

"Many critical moments take place before the arrival in Hawaii," warned one of the leaders of the Solar Impulse communication in a video.

"The kind of moment I dreamed"

"This is the kind of times I dreamed see that plane flying as long without burning fuel," rejoiced over internet Bertrand Piccard, project designer and second pilot alternately.

"I have no shower, but we have enough means to make life possible in the cockpit several days and in these conditions," stated André Borschberg.

Image above: This is the second attempt at crossing the Pacific; the first, a month ago, had to be aborted when the weather got much worse. Shown is a map of the approximate route that will be taken.

The driver is subjected to temperature conditions ranging from about -20 degrees Celsius to +30 degrees Celsius.

The ground crew supervising the behavior of the aircraft when the pilot sits for periods of 20 minutes. He uses techniques of yoga and meditation to relax.

Blocked a month in Japan

Solar Impulse 2 departure from Nagoya

Solar Impulse 2, whose wings are covered with photovoltaic cells, had been blocked for nearly a month in Japan by bad weather, but ended up finding a favorable time window to take off Monday before dawn and launch to conquer the Pacific.

The plane, which had also had to wait before a month in China, was away on March 9 Abu Dhabi to a world tour of 35,000 kilometers to promote the use of renewable energy, particularly solar energy.

For more information about Solar Impulse Around The World, visit: http://www.solarimpulse.com/

Images, Text, Credits: SolarImpulse/AFP/Orbiter.ch Aerospace.

Cheers, Orbiter.ch

NASA Missions Monitor a Waking Black Hole

NASA - Swift Mission patch.

June 30, 2015

NASA's Swift satellite detected a rising tide of high-energy X-rays from the constellation Cygnus on June 15, just before 2:23 p.m. EDT. About 10 minutes later, the Japanese experiment on the International Space Station called the Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) also picked up the flare.

The outburst came from V404 Cygni, a binary system located about 8,000 light-years away that contains a black hole. Every couple of decades the black hole fires up in an outburst of high-energy light, becoming an X-ray nova. Until the Swift detection, it had been slumbering since 1989.

Flaring Black Hole Accretion Disk in the Binary System V404 Cygni

Video above: On June 15, NASA's Swift caught the onset of a rare X-ray outburst from a stellar-mass black hole in the binary system V404 Cygni. Astronomers around the world are watching the event. In this system, a stream of gas from a star much like the sun flows toward a 10 solar mass black hole. Instead of spiraling toward the black hole, the gas accumulates in an accretion disk around it. Every couple of decades, the disk switches into a state that sends the gas rushing inward, starting a new outburst. Video Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

An X-ray nova is a bright, short-lived X-ray source that reaches peak intensity in a few days and then fades out over a period of weeks or months. The outburst occurs when stored gas abruptly rushes toward a neutron star or black hole. By studying the patterns of the X-rays produced, astronomers can determine the kind of object at the heart of the eruption.

"Relative to the lifetime of space observatories, these black hole eruptions are quite rare," said Neil Gehrels, Swift's principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "So when we see one of them flare up, we try to throw everything we have at it, monitoring across the spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays."

Astronomers classify this type of system as a low-mass X-ray binary. In V404 Cygni, a star slightly smaller than the sun orbits a black hole 10 times its mass in only 6.5 days. The close orbit and strong gravity of the black hole produce tidal forces that pull a stream of gas from its partner. The gas travels to a storage disk around the black hole and heats up to millions of degrees, producing a steady stream of X-rays as it falls inward.

But the disk flips between two dramatically different conditions. In its cooler state, the gas resists inward flow and just collects in the outer part of the disk like water behind a dam. Inevitably the build-up of gas overwhelms the dam, and a tsunami of hot bright gas rushes toward the black hole.

Flaring Black Hole Accretion Disk

Astronomers relish the opportunity to collect simultaneous multiwavelength data on black hole binaries, especially one as close as V404 Cygni. In 1938 and 1956, astronomers caught V404 Cygni undergoing outbursts in visible light. During its eruption in 1989, the system was observed by Ginga, an X-ray satellite operated by Japan, and instruments aboard Russia's Mir space station.

"Right now, V404 Cygni shows exceptional variation at all wavelengths, offering us a rare chance to add to this unique data set," said Eleonora Troja, a Swift team member at Goddard.

Ongoing or planned satellite observations of the outburst involve NASA’s Swift satellite, Chandra X-ray Observatory and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, as well as Japan’s MAXI, the European Space Agency's INTEGRAL satellite, and the Italian Space Agency's AGILE gamma-ray mission. Ground-based facilities following the eruption include the 10.4-meter Gran Telescopio Canarias operated by Spain in the Canary Islands, the University of Leicester's 0.5-meter telescope in Oadby, U.K., the Nasu radio telescope at Waseda University in Japan, and amateur observatories.

V404 Cygni has flared many times since the eruption began, with activity ranging from minutes to hours. "It repeatedly becomes the brightest object in the X-ray sky -- up to 50 times brighter than the Crab Nebula, which is normally one of the brightest sources," said Erik Kuulkers, the INTEGRAL project scientist at ESA's European Space Astronomy Centre in Madrid. "It is definitely a 'once in a professional lifetime' opportunity."

Swift spacecraft

In a single week, flares from V404 Cygni generated more than 70 "triggers" of the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) aboard Fermi. This is more than five times the number of triggers seen from all objects in the sky in a typical week. The GBM triggers when it detects a gamma-ray flare, then it sends numerous emails containing increasingly refined information about the event to scientists on duty.

Every time the GBM recovered from one trigger, V404 Cygni set it off again, resulting in a torrent of emails. The event prompted David Yu, a GBM scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, to comment on social media: "Achievement Unlocked: Mailbox spammed by a blackhole."

Related article:

Monster black hole wakes up after 26 years: http://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.ch/2015/06/monster-black-hole-wakes-up-after-26.html

For more information about Swift mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/main/index.html

Related Links:

Swift detects the V404 Cygni outburst
http://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn/gcn3/17929.gcn3

Alert notice from the American Association of Variable Star Observers
http://www.aavso.org/aavso-alert-notice-520

NASA's Swift Satellite Discovers a New Black Hole in our Galaxy
http://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.ch/2012/10/nasas-swift-satellite-discovers-new.html

Images, Video (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Francis Reddy/Karl Hille.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Crew Looks Ahead to Russian Resupply Mission

ISS - Expedition 44 Mission patch.

June 29, 2015

The Expedition 44 trio will not see the SpaceX Dragon cargo craft arrive Tuesday after the Falcon 9 rocket was lost about 139 seconds after launch Sunday morning. The crew now turns its attention to another resupply mission, ongoing science activities and routine orbital maintenance.

Image above: The ISS Progress 60 spacecraft is seen in its processing facility at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan being prepared for launch July 3. Image Credit: RSC-Energia.

The International Space Station is well stocked with plenty of supplies and consumables through October. Meanwhile, a Russian resupply ship is getting ready for its launch Friday at 12:55 a.m. EDT. The ISS Progress 60 will deliver more than 3 tons of food, fuel and supplies to the crew and dock to the Pirs docking compartment after a two-day ride.

The three orbiting residents Commander Gennady Padalka and One-Year crew members Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko are also getting ready for another set of crew members due to arrive at the end of July. On the ground, Soyuz Commander Oleg Kononenko and Flight Engineers Kjell Lindgren and Kimiya Yui are in Russia training ahead of their July 22 launch in a Soyuz TMA-17M spacecraft.

Related article:

SpaceX Falcon 9 explodes in flight: http://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.ch/2015/06/spacex-falcon-9-explodes-in-flight.html

Related links:

Expedition 44: https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/category/expedition-44/

One-Year Crew: https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/category/one-year-crew-2/

International Space Station (ISS): http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Image (mentioned), Text, Credit: NASA.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Saturn - Spirals in the D Ring

NASA & ESA - Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn & Titan patch.

June 29, 2015

 Spirals in the D Ring

Image above: Although the D ring of Saturn is so thin that it's barely noticeable compared to the rest of the ring system, it still displays structures seen in other Saturnian rings. Here the spiral structures in the D ring are on display.

The D ring spirals, discovered in Cassini images, are believed to be due to a warp in the ring created in the early 1980s. The precise mechanism remains the subject of scientific debate.  Over the course of the Cassini mission, scientists have been able to observe the spiral winding ever more tightly as it evolves. For more about the spiral.

(The bright specks and faint vertical streaks are merely image artifacts.  The processes typically employed to remove these artifacts would also have degraded the exquisite details of the D ring which are visible here.)

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 22 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 6, 2013.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 350,000 miles (563,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 131  degrees. Image scale is 2.1 miles (3.4 kilometers) per pixel.

Tilting Saturn's Rings

Animation above: This animated graphic shows in a series of three images how Saturn's rings, after they became tilted relative to Saturn's equatorial plane, would have transformed into a corrugated ring.

Images taken after Saturn's August 2009 equinox from NASA's Cassini spacecraft revealed alternating light and dark bands extending from Saturn's D ring, completely across the C ring, and right up to the inner B ring edge. These brightness variations are almost certainly caused by the changing slopes in the rippled ring plane, much like the corrugations of a tin roof.

This series of images shows how such a vertical corrugation can be produced from an initially inclined ring by the natural tendency for inclined orbits to wobble systematically and slowly at different rates, depending on their distance from Saturn. The top image shows a simple inclined ring (the central planet is omitted for clarity), while the lower two images show the same ring at two later times, where the ring particles' wobbling orbits have sheared this inclined sheet into an increasingly tightly-wound spiral corrugation.

Cassini images show the corrugation extends for 19,000 kilometers (12,000 miles). Based on detailed studies of this structure, scientists conclude that a broad swath of the rings became suddenly tilted in the early 1980s, likely because cometary debris crashed into the rings. The corrugation's radial extent implies that the impacting material was a dispersed cloud of debris instead of a single object. The corrugation's amplitude of 2 to 20 meters (7 to 60 feet) indicates that the debris' total mass was around 1 trillion kilograms (or one billion metric tons).

A Twisted Tale

Original Caption Released with Image:

Figure 1

Images above: Saturn's D ring--the innermost of the planet's rings -- sports an intriguing structure that appears to be a wavy, or "vertically corrugated," spiral. This continuously changing ring structure provides circumstantial evidence for a possible recent collision event in the rings.

Support for this idea comes from the appearance of a structure in the outer D-ring that looks, upon close examination, like a series of bright ringlets with a regularly spaced interval of about 30 kilometers (19 miles). When viewed along a line of sight nearly in the ringplane, a pattern of brightness reversals is observed: a part of the ring that appears bright on the far side of the rings appears dark on the near side of the rings, and vice versa (see Image bellow).

D Ring Sight Lines

Image above: A vertical corrugation in Saturn's almost transparent D ring can give rise to brightness variations.

In this graphic representation, the diagonal lines (or arrows) correspond to lines of sight through the corrugated ring. The grayscale plot along the bottom shows the ring's total optical depth (a measure of opacity) and brightness as seen by the observer.

This phenomenon would occur if the region contains a sheet of fine material that is vertically corrugated, like a tin roof. In this case, variations in brightness would correspond to changing slopes in the rippled ring material (see figure 1).

An observation made with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 also saw a periodic structure in the outer D ring, but its wavelength was then 60 kilometers (37 miles). There were insufficient observations to discern the spiral nature of the feature. Thus, it appears the wavelength of the wavy structure has been decreasing: that is, this feature has been winding up like a spring over time.

The rate at which the pattern appears to be winding up is quite close to the rate scientists would expect for a vertically corrugated spiraling sheet of material at this location in the rings that is responding to gravitational forcing from Saturn.

Cassini passing over the Saturn rings

As Cassini imaging scientists extrapolated the spiraling trend backward in time, they found that it completely unwound in 1984, leaving only an inclined, or tilted, sheet of material. The researchers speculate such an inclined sheet may have been produced around that time by the impact of a comet or meteoroid into the D ring which kicked out a cloud of fine particles that ultimately inherited some of the tilt of the impactor's trajectory as it slammed into the rings. Another possibility is that the impactor struck an already inclined moonlet, shattered it to bits and the debris remained in an inclined orbit.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org and http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Cassini-Huygens

Images, Text, Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Cornell.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Sentinel-2 delivers first images

ESA - Sentinel-2 Mission logo.

29 June 2015

 Sentinel-2A satellite

Just four days after being lofted into orbit, Europe’s Sentinel-2A satellite delivered its first images of Earth, offering a glimpse of the ‘colour vision’ that it will provide for the Copernicus environmental monitoring programme.

With a swath width of 290 km, the satellite’s first acquisition began in Sweden and made a strip-like observation through central Europe and the Mediterranean, ending in Algeria.

First image from Sentinel-2A

The data were relayed in real time to Italy’s Matera ground station, where teams eagerly awaited their arrival for processing.

While northern and central Europe were mostly cloudy, Italy’s typical sunny weather allowed the teams to get their first glimpse of the multispectral instrument’s capabilities over the northwestern part of the country and the French Riviera – and they were excited by what they saw. With a ground resolution of 10 m per pixel, the images show individual buildings in Milan, agricultural plots along the Po River, and ports along the southern French coast.

“This new satellite will be a game changer in Earth observation for Europe and for the European Copernicus programme,” said Philippe Brunet, Director for Space Policy, Copernicus and Defence at the European Commission.

Milan, Italy

The Director of ESA’s Earth Observation Programmes, Volker Liebig, commented, “Sentinel-2 will enable us to provide data for the programme’s land monitoring services and will be the base for a wide spectrum of applications reaching from agriculture to forestry, environmental monitoring to urban planning.”

The multispectral imager is being calibrated during the commissioning phase – which will take about three months to complete – but the quality of these first images already exceeds expectations.

 French Riviera

In addition to demonstrating the imager’s high resolution, these initial data also foreshadow the mission’s land-monitoring applications in areas such as agriculture, inland and coastal waters and land-cover mapping.

The imager’s 13 spectral bands, from the visible and the near infrared to the shortwave infrared at different spatial resolutions, take land monitoring to an unprecedented level. In fact, Sentinel-2 is the first optical Earth observation mission of its kind to include three bands in the ‘red edge’, which provide key information on the state of vegetation.

 Po Valley, Italy

This weekend’s activities also demonstrated that the operational processor works flawlessly, paving the way for the mission’s systematic data generation to come.

Sentinel-2A is the second satellite for Europe’s Copernicus programme, following the Sentinel-1A radar satellite launched last year.

Designed as a two-satellite mission, Sentinel-2 will provide optical imagery on a five-day revisit cycle once its twin, Sentinel-2B, is launched in 2016.

Related links:

Copernicus: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus

Sentinel-2: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-2

Sentinel data access & technical information: https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/home

European Commission Copernicus site: http://www.copernicus.eu/

Airbus Defence and Space: http://airbusdefenceandspace.com/

Images, Text, Credits: ESA/Copernicus data (2015).

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Solar Impulse 2 take off from Nagoya to Hawaii

SolarImpulse - Around The World patch.

June 28, 2015

The revolutionary solar plane, stuck in Japan since June 2 due to weather, took off on Monday morning (Japan time) to fly over the Pacific Ocean.

Solar Impulse 2 attempt flight to Hawaii

Immobilized for nearly a month in central Japan, Solar Impulse 2 resumed its journey towards Hawaii. Solar plane piloted by André Borschberg Vaudois took off from Nagoya, announced a spokesman.

The aircraft left the runway Nagoya to fly over the Pacific Ocean 03:00 Monday local time (GMT 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. Switzerland Sunday). His journey to reach Hawaii should last 120 hours.

The solar plane was stuck in Nagoya since June 2 because of the rainy season in Japan. It had taken off from Nanjing (Eastern China) toward Hawaii but had to give up to continue the flight due to impassable cloudy forehead.

André Borschberg pilot of this flight

Since then, no lasting thinning was not presented, although the team has hoped to take off again several times. André Borschberg had also declared able to wait two months if necessary.

Solar Impulse 2 began its journey on March 9 in Abu Dhabi. After Hawaii, the device must stopover in Phoenix and New York before crossing the Atlantic and reach southern Europe or North Africa. His world tour of 35,000 kilometers is intended to promote the use of renewable energy, particularly solar energy.

For more information about Solar Impulse Around The World, visit: http://www.solarimpulse.com/

Images, Text, Credits: SolarImpulse/ATS/AFP/Orbiter.ch Aerospace.

Cheers, Orbiter.ch

SpaceX Falcon 9 explodes in flight

SpaceX - CRS-7 Mission patch.

June 28, 2015

The Falcon 9 rocket company SpaceX of exploded two minutes after Sunday's launch, NASA announced.

"The rocket has exploded," said the commentator of television of NASA, which was broadcasting live the launch, while pieces of the rocket fell to the ground. "It appears that we have a failure of the rocket (...) but at this stage we do not know exactly what happened," he added. Liftoff was at 10:21 a.m. EST.

Falcon 9 rocket launch on June 28, 2015,  just a few seconds before explosion

Shortly after one commentator SpaceX said the Falcon 9 with video transmission was interrupted. "There was an anomaly in the first part of the flight," he said while noting that new motors of the first stage of the rocket had both turned on and the vehicle had reached supersonic speed.

Pressure too high

"It seems that there was a problem with the first stage of the rocket" before parting with the rest of the launcher, he said. On Twitter, the boss of SpaceX Elon Musk spoke "too much pressure in the liquid oxygen tank from the last stage of the rocket."

SpaceX - CRS-7 Launch explosion

The Dragon capsule was carrying almost two tons of equipment and supplies for NASA, including food and clothing for the crew as well as equipment for scientific experiments. She should have arrived early Tuesday to the ISS where it was to be anchored by two of the three current crew members who find late July its normal complement of six.

This was the seventh ISS resupply mission by SpaceX on behalf of the US space agency over the twelve planned under a contract of $ 1.6 billion. The six previous missions had all been a success.

Dragon, which was in 2012 the first private spacecraft to dock with the space station during a demonstration flight, is the only capsule in the world capable of bringing cargo to Earth.

More transport

NASA has concluded supply contracts ISS with two private firms, SpaceX and Orbital Science. The latter has already made two supply flights to the ISS, but suffered an accident during the launch of his third mission on October 29, due to the failure of a Russian engines of its Antares launcher.

After the explosion Sunday Falcon 9, NASA no longer means, at least for a while, transport to supply the orbital outpost. For the Russian cargo ship Progress has also been a failure in late April. It remains a Japanese cargo ship.

Example of SpaceX Dragon cargo lost in the explosion

After two failures in less than two months to supply the ISS, the question is how many reservations has the orbital outpost for the crew.

A Progress vehicle is ready to launch July 3, followed in August by a Japanese HTV flight. Orbital ATK, our other commercial cargo partner, is moving ahead with plans for its next launch later this year.

Two of its members, an American and a Russian, began in March stay unprecedented one year to study the effects on humans of long stays in weightlessness, in preparation for a manned mission to Mars in horiron 2030.

Images, Video, Text, Credits: SpaceX/ATS/NASA/Orbiter.ch Aerospace.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch