NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Mission Passes Critical Milestone

NASA - OSIRIS-REx Mission patch.

March 31, 2015

NASA's groundbreaking science mission to retrieve a sample from an ancient space rock has moved closer to fruition. The Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission has passed a critical milestone in its path towards launch and is officially authorized to transition into its next phase.

Key Decision Point-D (KDP-D) occurs after the project has completed a series of independent reviews that cover the technical health, schedule and cost of the project. The milestone represents the official transition from the mission’s development stage to delivery of systems, testing and integration leading to launch. During this part of the mission’s life cycle, known as Phase D, the spacecraft bus, or the structure that will carry the science instruments, is completed, the instruments are integrated into the spacecraft and tested, and the spacecraft is shipped to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for integration with the rocket.

“This is an exciting time for the OSIRIS-REx team,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-Rex at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “After almost four years of intense design efforts, we are now proceeding with the start of flight system assembly. I am grateful for the hard work and team effort required to get us to this point.”

OSIRIS-REx is the first U.S. mission to return samples from an asteroid to Earth. The spacecraft will travel to a near-Earth asteroid called Bennu and bring at least a 60-gram (2.1-ounce) sample back to Earth for study. OSIRIS-REx carries five instruments that will remotely evaluate the surface of Bennu. The mission will help scientists investigate the composition of the very early solar system and the source of organic materials and water that made their way to Earth, and improve understanding of asteroids that could impact our planet.

Image above: Artist concept of OSIRIS-REx, the first U.S. mission to return samples from an asteroid to Earth. Image Credit: NASA/Goddard.

OSIRIS-REx is scheduled for launch in late 2016. The spacecraft will reach Bennu in 2018 and return a sample to Earth in 2023.

"The spacecraft structure has been integrated with the propellant tank and propulsion system and is ready to begin system integration in the Lockheed Martin highbay,” said Mike Donnelly, OSIRIS-REx project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The payload suite of cameras and sensors is well into its environmental test phase and will be delivered later this summer/fall.”

The key decision meeting was held at NASA Headquarters in Washington on March 30 and chaired by NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

On March 27, assembly, launch and test operations officially began at Lockheed Martin in Denver. These operations represent a critical stage of the program  when the spacecraft begins to take form, culminating with its launch. Over the next several months, technicians will install the subsystems on the main spacecraft structure, comprising avionics, power, telecomm, thermal systems, and guidance, navigation and control.

 Goldstone DELAY-DOPPLER image of Bennu 1999 RQ36

The next major milestone is the Mission Operations Review, scheduled for completion in June. The project will demonstrate that its navigation, planning, commanding, and science operations requirements are complete.

The mission's principal investigator is at the University of Arizona, Tucson. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will provide overall mission management, systems engineering and safety and mission assurance for OSIRIS-REx. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver will build the spacecraft. OSIRIS-REx is the third mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages New Frontiers for the agency's Science Mission Directorate.

OSIRIS-REx complements NASA's Asteroid Initiative, which aligns portions of the agency's science, space technology and human exploration capabilities in a coordinated asteroid research effort. The initiative will conduct research and analysis to better characterize and mitigate the threat these space rocks pose to our home planet.

Included in the initiative is NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), a robotic spacecraft mission that will capture a boulder from the surface of a near-Earth asteroid and move it into a stable orbit around the moon for exploration by astronauts, all in support of advancing the nation’s journey to Mars. The agency also is engaging new industrial capabilities, partnerships, open innovation and participatory exploration through the NASA Asteroid Initiative.

NASA also has made tremendous progress in the cataloging and characterization of near Earth objects over the past five years. The president's NASA budget included, and Congress authorized, $20.4 million for an expanded NASA Near-Earth Object (NEO) Observations Program, increasing the resources for this critical program from the $4 million per year it had received since the 1990s. The program was again expanded in fiscal year 2014, with a budget of $40.5 million. NASA is asking Congress for $50 million for this important work in the 2016 budget.

OSIRIS-REx Investigates Asteroid Bennu

NASA has identified more than 12,000 NEOs to date, including 96 percent of near-Earth asteroids larger than 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) in size. NASA has not detected any objects of this size that pose an impact hazard to Earth in the next 100 years. Smaller asteroids do pass near Earth, however, and some could pose an impact threat. In 2011, 893 near-Earth asteroids were found. In 2014, that number was increased to 1,472.

In addition to NASA's ongoing work detecting and cataloging asteroids, the agency has engaged the public in the hunt for these space rocks through the agency's Asteroid Grand Challenge activities, including prize competitions. During the recent South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, the agency announced the release of a software application based on an algorithm created by a NASA challenge that has the potential to increase the number of new asteroid discoveries by amateur astronomers.

For more information about the OSIRIS-REx mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/osiris-rex and http://asteroidmission.org

For more information about the ARM and NASA's Asteroid Initiative, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/asteroidinitiative

Image (mentioned), Video, Text, Credits: NASA/Dwayne Brown/Goddard Space Flight Center/Nancy Neal-Jones.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Russian Rokot launches three Gonets-M

Eurockot logo.

March 31, 2015

Rockot launch from Site 133/3 at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome

A Russian Rockot launch vehicle lifted off from Site 133/3 at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome on Tuesday at 13:48 UTC, embarking on a two-hour mission to deliver a trio of Gonets-M communications satellites to orbit. Reports of the liftoff from Russia's primary military launch site quickly emerged through news outlets and confirmation of mission success will come after the separation of the satellites.

Liftoff! Rockot carrying three Gonets-M satellites

Tuesday's launch was dedicated to the maintenance and expansion of the Gonets satellite constellation - a fleet of spacecraft orbiting 1,500 Kilometers above Earth to deliver store and forward communication services to commercial customers. This system builds the civilian counterpart to the Strela constellation that uses a similar structure but is exclusively used by the military and government.

Gonets-M satellite

Each of the Gonets-M satellites weighs around 280 Kilograms and can support 14 uplink and two downlink channels, picking up data packets that are then stored on board and later sent to a targeted ground station.

Eurockot Launch Services GmbH: http://www.eurockot.co

Images, Video, Text, Credits: Eurockot/ROSCOSMOS/Günter Space Page/Orbiter.ch Aerospace.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Herschel and Planck find missing clue to galaxy cluster formation

ESA - Herschel Mission patch / ESA - Planck Mission patch.

31 March 2015

By combining observations of the distant Universe made with ESA’s Herschel and Planck space observatories, cosmologists have discovered what could be the precursors of the vast clusters of galaxies that we see today.

Galaxies like our Milky Way with its 100 billion stars are usually not found in isolation. In the Universe today, 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, many are in dense clusters of tens, hundreds or even thousands of galaxies.

Proto-cluster candidates

However, these clusters have not always existed, and a key question in modern cosmology is how such massive structures assembled in the early Universe.

Pinpointing when and how they formed should provide insight into the process of galaxy cluster evolution, including the role played by dark matter in shaping these cosmic metropolises.

Now, using the combined strengths of Herschel and Planck, astronomers have found objects in the distant Universe, seen at a time when it was only three billion years old, which could be precursors of the clusters seen around us today. 

Planck’s main goal was to provide the most precise map of the relic radiation of the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background. To do so, it surveyed the entire sky in nine different wavelengths from the far-infrared to radio, in order to eliminate foreground emission from our galaxy and others in the Universe.

But those foreground sources can be important in other fields of astronomy, and it was in Planck’s short wavelength data that scientists were able to identify 234 bright sources with characteristics that suggested they were located in the distant, early Universe.

Herschel then observed these objects across the far-infrared to submillimetre wavelength range, but with much higher sensitivity and angular resolution.

Herschel revealed that the vast majority of the Planck-detected sources are consistent with dense concentrations of galaxies in the early Universe, vigorously forming new stars.

The history of the Universe

Each of these young galaxies is seen to be converting gas and dust into stars at a rate of a few hundred to 1500 times the mass of our Sun per year. By comparison, our own Milky Way galaxy today is producing stars at an average rate of just one solar mass per year.

While the astronomers have not yet conclusively established the ages and luminosities of many of these newly discovered distant galaxy concentrations, they are the best candidates yet found for ‘proto-clusters’ – precursors of the large, mature galaxy clusters we see in the Universe today.

“Hints of these kinds of objects had been found earlier in data from Herschel and other telescopes, but the all-sky capability of Planck revealed many more candidates for us to study,” says Hervé Dole of the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, Orsay, lead scientist of the analysis published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Herschel space observatory

“We still have a lot to learn about this new population, requiring further follow-up studies with other observatories. But we believe that they are a missing piece of cosmological structure formation.”

“We are now preparing an extended catalogue of possible proto-clusters detected by Planck, which should help us identify even more of these objects,” adds Ludovic Montier, a CNRS researcher at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie, Toulouse, who is the lead scientist of the Planck catalogue of high-redshift source candidates, which is about to be delivered to the community.

“This exciting result was possible thanks to the synergy between Herschel and Planck: rare objects could be identified from the Planck data covering the entire sky, and then Herschel was able to scrutinise them in finer detail,” says ESA’s Herschel Project Scientist, Göran Pilbratt.

Planck space observatory

“Both space observatories completed their science observations in 2013, but their rich datasets will be exploited for plentiful new insights about the cosmos for years to come.”

Notes for Editors:

“High-redshift infrared galaxy overdensity candidates and lensed sources discovered by Planck and confirmed by Herschel-SPIRE,” is authored by the Planck Collaboration.

Planck detected the sky at nine frequencies, from 30 GHz to 857 GHz. The Planck frequencies used to detect the candidate proto-clusters in this study were 857 GHz, 545 GHz and 353 GHz. The follow-up observations made by Herschel’s SPIRE instrument were at 250, 350 and 500 microns. The SPIRE 350 micron and 500 micron bands overlap with Planck’s High Frequency Instrument (HFI) at 857 GHz and 545 GHz.

The Planck Scientific Collaboration consists of all the scientists who have contributed to the development of the mission, and who participate in the scientific exploitation of the data during the proprietary period. These scientists are members of one or more of four consortia: the LFI Consortium, the HFI Consortium, the DK-Planck Consortium and ESA’s Planck Science Office. The two European-led Planck Data Processing Centres are located in Paris, France and Trieste, Italy. The LFI consortium is led by N. Mandolesi, ASI, Italy (deputy PI: M. Bersanelli, Universita’ degli Studi di Milano, Italy), and was responsible for the development and operation of LFI. The HFI consortium is led by J.L. Puget, Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay, France (deputy PI: F. Bouchet, Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, France), and was responsible for the development and operation of HFI.

For more information about Herschel space observatory, visit: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Herschel

For more information about Planck space observatory, visit: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Planck

More about...:

Herschel overview: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Herschel_overview

Planck overview: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Planck_overview

In depth:

Herschel in depth: http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=16

Planck in depth: http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=17

Images, Text, Credits: ESA and the Planck Collaboration/ H. Dole, D. Guéry & G. Hurier, IAS/University Paris-Sud/CNRS/CNES.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

India's first images of interplanetary Mars Orbiter Mission

ISRO - Mars Orbiter Mission logo.

March 31, 2015

Mars Orbiter Mission Spacecraft description

Mars Orbiter Mission is India's first interplanetary mission to planet Mars with an orbiter craft designed to orbit Mars in an elliptical orbit. The Mission is primarily technological mission considering the critical mission operations and stringent requirements on propulsion and other bus systems of spacecraft. It has been configured to carry out observation of physical features of mars and carry out limited study of Martian atmosphere with following five payloads:

Mars Orbiter Mission instruments description

- Mars Colour Camera (MCC)
- Thermal Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (TIS)
- Methane Sensor for Mars (MSM)
- Mars Exospheric Neutral Composition Analyser (MENCA)
- Lyman Alpha Photometer (LAP)

Breathtaking pictures from Mars Colour Camera (MCC) of India’s Mars Orbiter Spacecraft

Mars taken by MCC

Taken using the Mars Color Camera from an altitude of 8449 km.

 First image of the surface of Mars by MCC

Spectacular 3D view of Arsia Mons, a huge volcano on Mars

Eos Chaos area, part of the gigantic Valles Marineris Canyon of Mars

Mission Objectives

One of the main objectives of the first Indian mission to Mars is to develop the technologies required for design, planning, management and operations of an interplanetary mission. Following are the major objectives of the mission:

A. Technological Objectives:

- Design and realisation of a Mars orbiter with a capability to survive and perform Earth bound manoeuvres, cruise phase of 300 days, Mars orbit insertion / capture, and on-orbit phase around Mars.

- Deep space communication, navigation, mission planning and management.

- Incorporate autonomous features to handle contingency situations.

Artists Concept of the Mars Orbiter Mission spacecraft

B. Scientific Objectives:
- Exploration of Mars surface features, morphology, mineralogy and Martian atmosphere by indigenous scientific instruments.

For more information about Mars Orbiter Mission, visit: http://www.isro.gov.in/pslv-c25-mars-orbiter-mission

For more information about, visit: http://www.isro.gov.in/

Images, Text, Credits: Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

CERN - In pictures: X-rays probe LHC for cause of short circuit

CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research logo.

March 30, 2015

Image above: Engineers Aline Piguiet and Markus Albert take X-rays of the shorted superconducting dipole in sector 3-4 in the LHC tunnel (Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN).

Early last Saturday morning, while full-scale tests of all systems were ongoing in preparation for beam injection, an earth fault developed in the main dipole circuit of sector 3-4 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). All the protection systems worked properly and there was no harm done. The fault developed at relatively low current and was initially intermittent in nature.

Image above: Engineer Aline Piguiet carefully aligns equipment to take an X-ray of the shorted superconducting magnet in sector 3-4 of the LHC tunnel (Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN).

Measurements by system experts have located the fault to within 10 cm by injecting current locally and using the standard cold mass instrumentation, which includes voltage and current taps. Each dipole of the LHC has a diode stack situated in a box under the magnet. The diode provides a path for current in the event of a quench. The fault is located in the vertical tube that leads from the magnet enclosure to the diode box. The most probable scenario is that a small piece of metal has found its way into this tube and is making contact between the tube (earth) and one of the cables that leads to the diode.

Image above: Engineer Markus Albert checks the angle of alignment of the X-ray equipment with the shorted superconducting magnet in sector 3-4 of the LHC tunnel (Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN).

To further understand the cause of the short circuit, engineers X-rayed the affected dipole last night. Though some fragments of metal can be seen on the X-ray, the results are, as yet, inconclusive.

Image above: X-rays of the area containing the fault are as yet inconclusive (Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN).

The operations team is now exploring three main options to fix the short: inject a controlled pulse of current to try to melt the offending object; try to dislodge the object by altering the flow of helium in that region; partially warm up the sector and open the magnet interconnect concerned. Though the third option would allow direct access to the diode box, the warm-up, intervention, and subsequent cool-down would take around 6 weeks.

A careful evaluation of each option is ongoing.

See this article for a more technical account of the issue: http://home.web.cern.ch/scientists/updates/2015/03/lhc-report-x-rays-probe-cause-short-circuit

Note:

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. At CERN, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter — the fundamental particles. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.

The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.

Founded in 1954, the CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco–Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and now has 22 Member States.

Related links:

Large Hadron Collider (LHC): http://home.web.cern.ch/topics/large-hadron-collider

For more information about the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), visit: http://home.web.cern.ch/

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: CERN/Cian O'Luanaigh.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Saturn Spacecraft Returns to the Realm of Icy Moons

NASA - Cassini Mission to Saturn patch.

March 30, 2015

Image above: Cassini captured these views of Saturn's icy moon Rhea on Feb. 9. The spacecraft returned to equatorial orbits around Saturn in March after nearly two years, allowing the mission to once again have close encounters with moons other than Titan. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute.

A dual view of Saturn's icy moon Rhea marks the return of NASA's Cassini spacecraft to the realm of the planet's icy satellites. This follows nearly two years during which the spacecraft's orbits carried it high above the planet's poles. Those paths limited the mission's ability to encounter the moons, apart from regular flybys of Titan.

Cassini's orbit will remain nearly equatorial for the remainder of 2015, during which the spacecraft will have four close encounters with Titan, two with Dione and three with the geyser-moon, Enceladus.

The two views of Rhea were taken about an hour-and-a-half apart on Feb. 9, 2015, when Cassini was about 30,000 to 50,000 miles (50,000 to 80,000 kilometers) away from the moon. Cassini officially began its new set of equatorial orbits on March 16.

Cassini spacecraft. Image Credit: NASA/ESA

The views show an expanded range of colors from those visible to human eyes in order to highlight subtle color variations across Rhea's surface. In natural color, the moon's surface is fairly uniform. The image at right represents the highest-resolution color view of Rhea released to date.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages the mission for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The Cassini imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

More information about Cassini, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/cassini

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Cassini-Huygens

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/JPL/Preston Dyches.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Solar Impulse 2 end his fifth stage

SolarImpulse - Around the World patch.

March 30, 2015

 Bertrand Piccard landing at Chongqing airport

The piloted by Bertrand Piccard solar plane landed at 1:35 local time (7:35 p.m. Swiss) in Chongqing in central China, after a flight of about twenty hours from Mandalay, Burma.

Solar Impulse has completed two hours early Tuesday the fifth stage of his world tour. Piloted by Bertrand Piccard solar plane landed at 1:35 local time (7:35 p.m. Swiss) in Chongqing in central China, after a flight of about twenty hours from Mandalay, Burma.

Solar Impulse 2  landing at Chongqing airport

Video above: Bertrand Piccard landed in Chongqing Safely! Congratulations on this challenging flight!

The flight was complicated by the wind, which slowed the progress of the solar plane, said the Solar Impulse team on its website. The unit also had to reckon with a defective solar cell.

This problem, which caused a decrease of 2% of the available energy, could not be repaired before the start of Mandalay, lack of time. It is indeed not possible to change a single cell.

Solar plane took off before dawn Monday in the second city of Myanmar for this stage of 1375 km. The aircraft's crew had spent more than a week to wait until weather conditions improve in south-western China to begin one of the most difficult stages of this attempt to circumnavigate the globe.

Mountains and cold

Because of the wind and clouds, Bertrand Piccard had to fly "pretty high above the clouds and mountains," said Bertrand. At over 7300 meters, the Swiss had to wear an oxygen mask during the flight.

Bertrand Piccard has faced extreme cold with temperatures as low as -20 degrees Celsius in the cockpit and the difficulties of flying in mountainous Chinese provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan.

The adventurer also flew over an area isolated from the border area between Burma and China, where intense fighting between rebels of the Chinese Kokang ethnic majority in the Burmese army.

 Solar Impulse 2  landed at Chongqing, staff mounting the protection tent

Step Six postponed

The next step, long about 1200 km, linking Chongqing and Nanjing, in eastern China, near Shanghai. The flight, scheduled for Tuesday, but was postponed due to bad weather, said flight director Raymond Clerc, quoted by the DPA Agency.

This deferral causes organizational problems, but safety comes first. It is not known how much time will have to wait SI2. "We just need to find a new solution to Nanjing," said Mr. Clerc. The latter, however, assured to be "optimistic. Otherwise I would not be part of this team, "he joked.

Image above: Andre Borschberg & Bertrand Piccard, "I can Hardly believe we are in China with SolarImpulse" say Bertrand Piccard.

After Nanjing, SI2 will cross the Pacific toward Hawaii. This will be the most difficult part of the trip. To cross the ocean, the solar plane will stay in the air for five days and five nights. A challenge that will have to renew later while crossing the Atlantic from New York.

A journey of 35,000 kilometers

SI2, left Abu Dhabi on March 9, has to travel 35,000 kilometers in total solar energy alone flying over two oceans. This convolution take five months, including 25 days of actual flight before returning to Abu Dhabi late July / early August.

Scheduled twelve step, around the world is the result of twelve years of research conducted by Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg which in addition to scientific achievement, seek to convey a political message for the promotion of renewable energy.

For more information about Solar Impulse 2 Flight Around the World and follow it live: http://www.solarimpulse.com/leg-5-from-Mandalay-to-Chongqing

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

Best regards, Orbiter.ch