Mars500 ‘arrives’ in orbit around Mars

ESA - ROSCOSMOS Mission patch.

2 February 2011

The first full-duration simulation of a manned voyage to Mars has reached a major milestone: the ‘spacecraft’ yesterday ‘arrived’ at Mars after 244 days of virtual interplanetary flight. Three crewmembers will ‘land’ on Mars on 12 February and make three sorties onto simulated martian terrain.

Mars500, a pioneering international study of the complex psychological and technical issues that must be tackled for long spaceflights, has been running for more than eight months in hermetically sealed modules imitating a Mars spacecraft at the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) in Moscow.

Simulated arrival in Mars orbit

The crew of three Russians, two Europeans and one Chinese has been living and working in the facility like a real expedition to Mars. They are following a similar seven-day week, with two days off duty, to the astronauts on the International Space Station. Their work time during the ‘flight’ is filled with maintenance jobs, experiments and daily exercise.

“Mars500 is a visionary experiment,” notes Simonetta Di Pippo, ESA Director for Human Spaceflight. “Europe is getting ready to make a step further in space exploration: our technology and our science grow stronger every day.

“Mars 500 today is only an enriching simulation, but we are working to make it real.”

Mars now – but virtually

Yesterday, the craft ‘entered a circular orbit around Mars’ – as the mission scenario says.

Mars 'seen' from Mars500

(Image above) The Mars500 facility has no windows, but a laptop running Celestia, a freeware space simulation software, acts as a virtual window as the crew approached the Red Planet.

The final approach began on 24 December by shifting their imagined trajectory from interplanetary space to a spiral orbit leading down to the vicinity of the Red Planet.

The crew opened the hatch between the mothership and the mockup of a lander that, according to script, was launched separately to Mars.

In the coming days, the cargo inside the ‘lander’ will be transferred into the habitat and the lander will be prepared for ‘undocking’ and ‘landing’.

The crew will then divide: Russian Alexandr Smoleevskiy, Italian Diego Urbina and Chinese Wang Yue will enter the lander, while the rest of the crew, Romain Charles from France and Sukhrob Kamolov and Alexey Sitev from Russia ‘remain in orbit’.

The hatch between the interplanetary spacecraft and lander will be closed on 8 February. The lander will undock and ‘touch down’ on Mars on 12 February.

Going out

The first sortie onto the simulated martian surface, housed in a large hall alongside the Mars500 modules, will happen on 14 February: Alexandr Smoleevskiy and Diego Urbina will don the modified Russian Orlan spacesuits and exit the lander’s airlock.

Mars500 crew testing Orlan suits

The next sortie – by Smoleevskiy and Wang Yue – will take place on 18 February, and the last one – by Smoleevskiy and Urbina – is scheduled for 22 February.

On 23 February, the lander will be launched to ‘orbit’ and dock with the mothership on following day.

The lander crew will stay in quarantine for three days before the hatch is opened on 27 February and the astronauts are reunited.

Still more than 200 days to go

Mars surface simulator

On 28 February the lander will be loaded with rubbish and unwanted items and the vehicle will be ‘abandoned’. This will happen 1 March, just before the spacecraft spirals away from Mars by virtually firing its engines.

After that, the crew is faced with another monotonous ‘interplanetary cruise’ before arriving home in early November 2011.

Mars500 quick facts: http://www.esa.int/export/SPECIALS/Mars500/SEMGX9U889G_0.html

Mars500 crew: http://www.esa.int/export/SPECIALS/Mars500/SEMO4BU889G_0.html

Credits: ESA / ROSCOSMOS / IBMP/ Oleg Voloshin.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

ESO - A Picture-perfect Pure-disc Galaxy

ESO - European Southern Observatory logo.

2 February 2011

 Wide Field Imager view of the spiral galaxy NGC 3621

The bright galaxy NGC 3621, captured here using the Wide Field Imager on the 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, appears to be a fine example of a classical spiral. But it is in fact rather unusual: it does not have a central bulge and is therefore described as a pure-disc galaxy.

NGC 3621 is a spiral galaxy about 22 million light-years away in the constellation of Hydra (The Sea Snake). It is comparatively bright and can be seen well in moderate-sized telescopes. This picture was taken using the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The data were selected from the ESO archive by Joe DePasquale as part of the Hidden Treasures competition [1]. Joe’s picture of NGC 3621 was ranked fifth in the competition.

NGC 3621 in the constellation of Hydra

This galaxy has a flat pancake shape, indicating that it hasn’t yet come face to face with another galaxy as such a galactic collision would have disturbed the thin disc of stars, creating a small bulge in its centre. Most astronomers think that galaxies grow by merging with other galaxies, in a process called hierarchical galaxy formation. Over time, this should create large bulges in the centres of spirals. Recent research, however, has suggested that bulgeless, or pure-disc, spiral galaxies like NGC 3621 are actually fairly common.

Zooming in on the spiral galaxy NGC 3621

This galaxy is of further interest to astronomers because its relative proximity allows them to study a wide range of astronomical objects within it, including stellar nurseries, dust clouds, and pulsating stars called Cepheid variables, which astronomers use as distance markers in the Universe [2]. In the late 1990s, NGC 3621 was one of 18 galaxies selected for a Key Project of the Hubble Space Telescope: to observe Cepheid variables and measure the rate of expansion of the Universe to a higher accuracy than had been possible before. In the successful project, 69 Cepheid variables were observed in this galaxy alone.

Multiple monochrome images taken through four different colour filters were combined to make this picture. Images taken through a blue filter have been coloured blue in the final picture, images through a yellow-green filter are shown as green and images through a red filter as dark orange. In addition images taken through a filter that isolates the glow of hydrogen gas have been coloured red. The total exposure times per filter were 30, 40, 40 and 40 minutes respectively.

Panning across the spiral galaxy NGC 3621

Notes:

[1] ESO’s Hidden Treasures 2010 competition gave amateur astronomers the opportunity to search through ESO’s vast archives of astronomical data, hoping to find a well-hidden gem that needed polishing by the entrants. Participants submitted nearly 100 entries and ten skilled people were awarded some extremely attractive prizes, including an all expenses paid trip for the overall winner to ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) on Cerro Paranal, in Chile, the world’s most advanced optical telescope. The ten winners submitted a total of 20 images that were ranked as the highest entries in the competition out of the near 100 images.

[2] Cepheid variables are very luminous stars — up to 30 000 times brighter than our Sun — whose brightness varies at regular intervals over several days, weeks or months. The period of this variation in luminosity is related to the star’s true brightness, known as its absolute magnitude. By knowing the absolute magnitude of the star, and measuring how bright it appears, astronomers can easily calculate its distance from Earth. Cepheid variables are therefore vital for establishing the scale of the Universe.
More information

ESO, the European Southern Observatory, is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world’s most productive astronomical observatory. It is supported by 15 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries.

ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the world’s most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and VISTA, the world’s largest survey telescope. ESO is the European partner of a revolutionary astronomical telescope ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. ESO is currently planning a 42-metre European Extremely Large optical/near-infrared Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become “the world’s biggest eye on the sky”.

Images, Text, Credits: ESO / Joe DePasquale / IAU and Sky & Telescope / Videos: ESO,  S. Brunier and Joe DePasquale. Music: John Dyson (from the album "Moonwind").

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

NASA'S Neowise Completes Scan For Asteroids And Comets

NASA - WISE Mission patch.

Feb. 2, 2011

NASA's NEOWISE mission has completed its survey of small bodies, asteroids and comets, in our solar system. The mission's discoveries of previously unknown objects include 20 comets, more than 33,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and 134 near-Earth objects (NEOs). The NEOs are asteroids and comets with orbits that come within 28 million miles of Earth's path around the sun.

NEOWISE is an enhancement of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, mission that launched in December 2009. WISE scanned the entire celestial sky in infrared light about 1.5 times. It captured more than 2.7 million images of objects in space, ranging from faraway galaxies to asteroids and comets close to Earth.

In early October 2010, after completing its prime science mission, the spacecraft ran out of frozen coolant that keeps its instrumentation cold. However, two of its four infrared cameras remained operational. These two channels were still useful for asteroid hunting, so NASA extended the NEOWISE portion of the WISE mission by four months, with the primary purpose of hunting for more asteroids and comets, and to finish one complete scan of the main asteroid belt.

“Even just one year of observations from the NEOWISE project has significantly increased our catalog of data on NEOs and the other small bodies of the solar systems,” said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s program executive for the NEO Observation Program.
Now that NEOWISE has successfully completed a full sweep of the main asteroid belt, the WISE spacecraft will go into hibernation mode and remain in polar orbit around the Earth, where it could be called back into service in the future.

In addition to discovering new asteroids and comets, NEOWISE also confirmed the presence of objects in the main belt that already had been detected. In just one year, it observed about 153,000 rocky bodies out of approximately 500,000 known objects. Those include the 33,000 that NEOWISE discovered.

NEOWISE also observed known objects closer and farther to us than the main belt, including roughly 2,000 asteroids that orbit along with Jupiter, hundreds of NEOs and more than 100 comets.

These observations will be key to determining the objects' sizes and compositions. Visible-light data alone reveals how much sunlight reflects off an asteroid, whereas infrared data is much more directly related to the object's size. By combining visible and infrared measurements, astronomers also can learn about the compositions of the rocky bodies -- for example, whether they are solid or crumbly. The findings will lead to a much-improved picture of the various asteroid populations.

Comets WISE -- A Family Portrait

During its one-year mission, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, mapped the entire sky in infrared light. Among the multitudes of astronomical bodies that have been discovered by the NEOWISE portion of the WISE mission are 20 comets. Image credits: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA.
View WISE image gallery: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/gallery-index.html

NEOWISE took longer to survey the whole asteroid belt than WISE took to scan the entire sky because most of the asteroids are moving in the same direction around the sun as the spacecraft moves while it orbits the Earth. The spacecraft field of view had to catch up to, and lap, the movement of the asteroids in order to see them all.

"You can think of Earth and the asteroids as racehorses moving along in a track," said Amy Mainzer, the principal investigator of NEOWISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We're moving along together around the sun, but the main belt asteroids are like horses on the outer part of the track. They take longer to orbit than us, so we eventually lap them."

NEOWISE data on the asteroid and comet orbits are catalogued at the NASA-funded International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, a clearinghouse for information about all solar system bodies at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. The science team is analyzing the infrared observations now and will publish new findings in the coming months.

When combined with WISE observations, NEOWISE data will aid in the discovery of the closest dim stars, called brown dwarfs. These observations have the potential to reveal a brown dwarf even closer to us than our closest known star, Proxima Centauri, if such an object does exist. Likewise, if there is a hidden gas-giant planet in the outer reaches of our solar system, data from WISE and NEO-WISE could detect it.

The first batch of observations from the WISE mission will be available to the public and astronomical community in April. "WISE has unearthed a mother lode of amazing sources, and we're having a great time figuring out their nature," said Edward (Ned) Wright, the principal investigator of WISE at UCLA.

JPL manages WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program, which NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument, and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., built the spacecraft. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. JPL manages NEOWISE for NASA's Planetary Sciences Division. The mission's data processing also takes place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center.

For more information about WISE, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/wise

http://wise.astro.ucla.edu

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise

Images (mentioned), Text, Credit: NASA.

Cheers, Orbiter.ch

ESA - CryoSat ice data now open to all

ESA - CRYOSAT Mission logo.

1 February 2011

Scientists can now tap into a flow of new data that will help to determine exactly how Earth's ice is changing. This information from ESA's CryoSat mission is set to make a step change in our understanding of the complex relationship between ice and climate.

Considering the loss of the original CryoSat satellite during launch in 2005, scientists around the world have had a long wait for information on ice thickness – making the release even more of a milestone for the mission.

CryoSat detects leads in sea ice

ESA's CryoSat Mission Manager Tommaso Parrinello announced the release at the CryoSat Validation workshop currently taking place. He said, "We are pleased to announce this important milestone, which comes only few weeks after the end of the commissioning phase.

"As of today, the international science community will have free and easy access to all of the measurements from CryoSat. This will amount to a unique dataset to determine the impact climate change is having on Earth's ice fields."

Satellites have already revealed that the extent of sea ice in the Arctic is diminishing, but CryoSat will complete the picture by providing detailed information on how the thickness of ice, both on land and floating in the polar oceans, is changing over time.

ESA's ice mission

Together, information on ice extent and ice thickness will provide clear evidence of how the volume of ice is changing.

Launched in April last year, CryoSat and the ground processing set-up have shown to be in excellent working order.

Prof. Duncan Wingham from University College London said, "It’s great to see the data go out on general release, and it is a measure of the efforts from the ESA team that this has been achieved so soon after launch.

"We already know that the hardware is providing extremely accurate results; now we can start to see that translate into real scientific achievements."

CryoSat's orbit reaches latitudes of 88°

CryoSat carries a sophisticated radar altimeter that can measure the thickness of sea ice down to centimetres and detect changes in ice sheets, particularly around the edges where icebergs are calved from the vast ice sheets that cover Greenland and Antarctica.

It is the ability to detect minute changes in these two different types of ice that sets the CryoSat mission apart, along with the fact that the satellite's orbit takes it closer to the poles than earlier missions.

A key step towards mapping sea-ice thickness is being able to differentiate between the radar signals the satellite receives from the ice floes and those from the narrow cracks, or 'leads', of open water between the ice.

Measuring the freeboard of sea ice

The image at the top, which is an overlay of CryoSat data on top of radar imagery from ESA’s Envisat, clearly shows that echoes received by CryoSat correspond to leads in the sea ice.

Early results from the mission have also demonstrated how CryoSat data can be used to understand more about how circulation in the Arctic Ocean may change as the ice retreats.

Ocean dynamic topography from CryoSat

Thanks to the satellite reaching latitudes of 88°, gaps can now be filled in maps of 'ocean dynamic topography', which is the height of the water relative to the geoid – the shape of an imaginary global ocean in the absence of wind, tides and currents.

In depth:

CryoSat-2: http://www.esa.int/esaLP/LPcryosat.html

Access CryoSat data: http://earth.esa.int/cryosat

ESRIN: http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/ESRIN_SITE/index.html

CryoSat events:

CryoSat Validation Workshop: http://www.cryosat2011.org/

Images, Video, Text, Credits: ESA / CPOM / UCL / AOES Medialab.

Cheers, Orbiter.ch

ESA - Israel signs Cooperation Agreement

ESA logo / ISA logo.

31 January 2011

Israel signed a Cooperation Agreement with ESA on 30 January 2011. The objective of this agreement is to allow Israel and ESA to create the framework for more-intensive cooperation in ESA projects in the future.

ESA’s Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain signed the agreement in Tel Aviv with the Director General of the Israel Space Agency (ISA), Dr Zvi Kaplan, in the presence of Prof. Daniel Hershkowitz, the Israeli Minister of Science and Technology, and Menachem Greenblum, Director General of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Contacts and discussions regarding the Framework Agreement with ESA started in 2007. ESA experts together with their Israeli counterparts will now jointly identify common areas of mutual interest, notably in the area of space science and exploration.

Signing the cooperation agreement in Tel Aviv

Israel has a long aerospace tradition and has contributed to many scientific and technological space missions. In the 1970s and 1980s, Israel developed its own infrastructure needed for research and development in space exploration, including developing the Shavit launcher. In 1983, the Israel Space Agency was established as the governmental body to coordinate all Israeli space research programmes for scientific and commercial goals.

In 1988, ISA launched its first satellite, Ofeq 1, on a Shavit rocket from the Palmachim spaceport on the Mediterranean coast. This made Israel the eighth nation to gain an independent launch capability. Since then the country has developed and launched a range of sophisticated communications, Earth observation and scientific satellites.

Israeli researchers have been cooperating for many years in several European space science projects, such as Huygens, Hubble, Cluster and COROT. In 1995, Israeli students joined an international workshop organised by ESA to develop a concept for a Moon exploration probe.

Related link:

Israel Space Agency: http://www.most.gov.il/English/Units/Israel+Space+Agency/default.htm

Images, Text, Credits: ESA / ISA.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Cargo Vehicles Arrive at the ISS – Report by Dmitry Kondratiev

ISS - Expedition 26 Mission patch.

31.01.2011

In Sunday’s report in his blog in Roscosmos web, Russian cosmonaut of the International Space Station Dmitry Kondratiev tells about the operations held by the crew last week. Dmitry admits that the week was rather hard due to many operations with cargo vehicles.

Progress M-09M successfully docked to the ISS

Arrival of Japanese HTV

Japanese HTV

Japanese HTV

Russian crew observed arrival and berthing of Japanese HTV

Japanese HTV seen by ISS Cupola view

HTV

Canadarm2 captures Japan's Kounotori2 spaceship

Canadarm2 captures Japan's Kounotori2 spaceship

Canadarm2 captures Japan's Kounotori2 spaceship

 HTV interior

Cady Coleman shows the food received

Paolo Nespoli, Dmitri Kondratyev inside the HTV

Progress-M-09M docking at ISS

To remind, Progress M-08M departed from the station on Monday. On Thursday, Russian crew observed arrival and berthing of Japanese HTV. Russian cargo vehicle Progress M-09M successfully docked to the station on Sunday.

«Russian vehicles Progress are distinguished by a manual docking system which can be switched on in case of failed automatic docking sequence… This redundancy enhances reliability of the system. Neither ATV, nor HTV have similar capability”, Dmitry writes in his blog, adding that now the ISS crew is busy with unloading the cargo delivered by HTV and Progress M-09M.

Images, Video, Text, Credits: Dmitry Kondratiev / Roscosmos PAO.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

ESA - 2011 Year of launchers

Arianespace - "Launchers Speak Louder Than Words" patch.

31 January 2011

In 2011 three launchers will take off from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. Ariane 5, Europe’s heavy-lift workhorse, will be complemented by the Soyuz medium-class launcher and the new Vega small launcher.

ESA - Arianespace Launchers Family

With Soyuz and Vega due to make their first flight from French Guiana in the second half of 2011, the new European launcher family will offer a full range of services to Europe.

ESA - 2011 Year of launchers

Images, Video, Text, Credits: European Space Agency (ESA) / Arianespace.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch