Google+ SpaceTravelFoundation: 2014-09-21

September 26, 2014

Soyuz TMA-14M arrives safely at ISS despite solar array issue

Dear readers and followers,


Expedition 41, the current human increment aboard ISS, has expanded from three to six members, with last night’s safe arrival of Soyuz TMA-14M and its crew of Russian cosmonauts Aleksandr Samokutyayev and Yelena Serova, together with U.S. astronaut Barry Wilmore. 
“That little red streak, hidden behind the Dragon solar array is the Soyuz launching.” A remarkable image of the Soyuz TMA-14M ascent, captured by the astronaut Reid Wiseman.


Credit image: NASA

The trio launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Friday, September 26th (local time) (4:25 p.m. EDT Thursday, September 25th), embarking on a six-hour, four-orbit “fast rendezvous” profile to dock with the ISS at 8:11 a.m. Baikonur time Friday (10:11 p.m. EDT Thursday). However, all did not go entirely to plan, following the failure of one of Soyuz TMA-14M’s electricity-generating solar arrays to deploy properly.
The Soyuz TMA-14M crew Barry Wilmore, Aleksandr Samokutyayev and Yelena Serova will spend 168 days in space, forming the second half of Expedition 41 and the core of Expedition 42. 


Credit image: NASA

Source: NASA


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MAVEN delivered the first observations of Mars atmosphere

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the NASA’s spacecraft called MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) has obtained its first observations of the extended upper atmosphere surrounding Mars. Piling on to the good news from Mars this week, the US spacecraft Maven sent home its first ultraviolet images from Mars. While they may not be flashy, these images will help determine the composition and variability of the upper atmosphere, and investigate the mystery when the water escaped.
The Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS) instrument obtained these false-color images eight hours after the successful completion of Mars orbit insertion by the spacecraft at 10:24 p.m. (EDT) on Sunday, September 21th. 

Credit image: NASA

The MAVEN spacecraft has been sent with success by the space rocket Atlas 5 last November 2013. Its travel to Mars took 10 months.
The image shows the planet from an altitude of 36500 km in three ultraviolet wavelength bands:
  • Blue shows the ultraviolet light from the sun scattered from atomic hydrogen gas in an extended cloud that goes to thousands of kilometers above the planet’s surface.
  • Green shows a different wavelength of ultraviolet light that is primarily sunlight reflected off of atomic oxygen, showing the smaller oxygen cloud. 
  • Red shows ultraviolet sunlight reflected from the planet’s surface; the bright spot in the lower right is light reflected either from polar ice or clouds.

The oxygen gas is held close to the planet by Mars’ gravity, while lighter hydrogen gas is present to higher altitudes and extends past the edges of the image. These gases derive from the breakdown of water and carbon dioxide in Mars’ atmosphere. Over the course of its one-Earth-year primary science mission, MAVEN observations like these will be used to determine the loss rate of hydrogen and oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. 


Tracking the spacial and temporal variation of these gases, along with carbon, nitrogen, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and ionized carbon dioxide, will help scientists better understand what processes are driving the atmosphere's composition. The particularly interesting part for the water history of the planet involves measuring the ratio between light water and heavy water: hydrogen (121.567 nm) and deuterium (121.533 nm). 
That's a task that requires a high level of precision, and has been successfully accomplished for the lower atmosphere on Mars before, but never for the upper atmosphere where gas loss is actually taking place. These observations will allow us to determine the amount of water that has escaped from the planet over time.

Source: NASA

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September 25, 2014

First picture of the Indian Mars orbiter

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yesterday, India announced the successful of its first mission to mars. Today the ISRO's Mars Orbiter Mission captures its first image of the red planet. The picture has been taken from a height of 7300 km of altitude with a 376 m spatial resolution by the Mangalyaan probe.


Credit image: ISRO

India's 1,350 kg orbiter will now circle the planet for at least six months, with five solar-powered instruments gathering scientific data that may shed light on Martian weather systems as well as what happened to the water that is believed to have existed once on Mars in large quantities.


Source: Indian Space and Research Organization

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September 24, 2014

India successfully puts spacecraft in Mars' orbit

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after the mission sent by +European Space Agency, ESA, Mars Express, and after the mission sent by +NASA, curiosity, and the missions Mars2 and Mars3 sent by Russia, India is the fourth country to send a mission to the red planet. This was in November 2013 !
Today, India triumphed in its first interplanetary mission, placing a satellite into orbit around Mars on Wednesday morning and catapulting the country into an elite club of deep-space explorers. The Mangalyaan probe is a spacecraft powered by solar arrays and packed with five instruments to study the surface and atmosphere of Mars. 


Credit image: Indian Space and Research Organization


Scientists broke into wild cheers as the orbiter's engines completed 24 minutes of burn time to maneuver the spacecraft into its designated place around the red planet. "We have gone beyond the boundaries of human enterprise and innovation," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, standing alongside scientists with the Indian Space and Research Organisation at the command center in the southern tech hub of Bangalore. "We have navigated our craft through a route known to very few," Modi said, congratulating the scientists and "all my fellow Indians on this historic occasion." Scientists described the final stages of the Mars Orbiter Mission, affectionately nicknamed MOM, as flawless. The success marks a milestone for the space program in demonstrating that it can conduct complex missions and act as a global launch pad for commercial, navigational and research satellites.

It's also a major feat for the developing country of 1.2 billion people, most of whom are poor. At the same time, India has a robust scientific and technical educational system that has produced millions of software programmers, engineers and doctors, propelling many into the middle class. 

Getting a spaceship successfully into orbit around Mars is no easy task. More than half the world's previous attempts, 23 out of 41 missions, have failed, including one by Japan in 1999.

USA had its first success with a 1964 flyby by a spacecraft called Mariner 4, returning 21 images of the surface of the planet. The former Soviet Union reached the planet in 1971, and the European Space Agency in 2003. NASA congratulated India in a Twitter message welcoming MOM to studying the red planet. On Sunday, NASA achieved its own success in placing its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, or Maven, in position. The U.S. has two more satellites circling the planet at the moment, as well as two rovers rolling across the rocky Martian surface. The European Space Agency's Mars Express, launched over a decade ago, is still operating as well.


India was particularly proud that MOM was developed with homegrown technology and for a bargain price of about $75 million, a cost that Modi quipped was lower than many Hollywood film budgets. By comparison, NASA's much larger Maven mission cost nearly 10 times as much at $671 million.

India's 1,350 kg orbiter will now circle the planet for at least six months, with five solar-powered instruments gathering scientific data that may shed light on Martian weather systems as well as what happened to the water that is believed to have existed once on Mars in large quantities.

It also will search Mars for methane, a key chemical in life processes on Earth that could also come from geological processes. None of the instruments will send back enough data to answer these questions definitively, but experts say the data will help them better understand how planets form, what conditions might make life possible and where else in the universe it might exist India wanted the spacecraft - also called Mangalyaan, meaning "Mars craft" in Hindi -to show the world its ability to design, plan, manage and operate a difficult, deep-space mission. India has already conducted dozens of successful satellite launches, including sending up the Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, which discovered key evidence of water on the Moon in 2008.

The country's space scientists are already planning new missions, including putting a rover on the Moon. But space agency chief K. Radhakrishnan said their main focus would be to continue developing technologies for commercial and navigational satellite applications.





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SpaceX will get its own space launch site

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Monday morning, the September 22th, SpaceX broke ground at the site near Boca Chica beach in Cameron County, Texas, where it plans to build a commercial rocket launch pad. As SpaceX founder Elon Musk lifted a shovel of dirt, his ultimate goal of developing technology to enable trips to Mars took a step forward. “This feels great. It feels like the future,” Musk said. Governor Rick Perry and other dignitaries were also at this event. "This announcement represents a huge step forward for our state and continues our nation's proud legacy of scientific advancement," Perry said. "It builds upon our pioneer heritage, our tradition of thinking bigger, dreaming bolder, and daring to do the impossible. SpaceX is the latest in a long line of forward-thinking companies that have made Texas home, and I couldn't be prouder to help break ground on this revolutionary new facility." The Boca Chica site will be the world’s first commercial orbital space port.




Musk said he wants the company’s new commercial orbital rocket launch site to be operational as soon as possible. That means the paved launch site near the end of U.S. Highway 4 at Boca Chica should be complete in about nine months, with the first rocket launch taking place as early as late 2016. The rocket launch site will be located about three miles north of the Mexican border and about five miles south of Port Isabel and South Padre Island.


SpaceX intends to build a vertical launch area and control center to support 12 commercial launches per year. The vehicles launched include the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and smaller reusable, suborbital launch vehicles. Musk revealed that he expects “thousands of launches.” Furthermore, “when we start doing commercial crew activities, I would expect us to launch a crew from here,” he said. Moreover, he added "What’s important is to have a truly commercial launch site, just like we have commercial airports. Every sort of structure has its primary focus and I think it’s important that the world have a truly commercial orbital spaceport,”.

Rep. Filemon Vela, who introduced Musk and Perry, predicted that the “benefit from an educational and economic standpoint that SpaceX will bring to this region is something that many of us never dreamed of.” In addition, Perry said that “Over the course of the last 13, almost 14 years, we have looked for major projects of which we can make a really big impact on South Texas,” “I noticed the sign behind me that says ‘pavement ends in 1,000 feet.’ But the future of South Texas takes off right behind me. And that’s what today’s really all about.”

Perry also announced an investment of $9 million from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund and The University of Texas System to establish STARGATE to develop and support commercial phased-array technology for satellite and space vehicle communication. The city of Brownsville, through the Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation will contribute $500,000 to the project.


Monday's groundbreaking is the result of years of cooperation between Texas and SpaceX. The idea for a commercial spaceport in Texas was first discussed on a TexasOne trip to California in 2011. Since then, Gov. Perry has met with Elon Musk and written letters to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to help secure clearance for the facility. Also, several members of the Governor's staff have appeared in front of the FAA to help bring the facility to Texas.

Source: Space X


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