The Mars One project that aims to put a human colony on the Red Planet by the 2020s will hold a press conference on Dec. 10 to discuss plans for an unmanned mission in the 2016 time frame. Lockheed Martin and Surrey Satellite will participate in the event: Mars One planning December 10 announcement about robotic Mars mission – NewSpace Journal
The Chinese are expected to launch the Chang’e 3 lunar lander this Sunday, December 1st. This would be the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the Moon since the Soviet Union did it with the Luna 24 rover in 1976.
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Here’s a map of the Moon showing where the landing is expected to occur.
The Chinese space agency held a public contest to name the rover and Yutu or Jade Rabbit was the winner. Yutu was the “legendary companion of the goddess Chang’e”.
More about Yutu at
Another collection of space policy/politics related items:
Update:
Here is a SETI Institute Google Hangout discussion about the Kepler Story | California Academy of Sciences.
The work is described as follows:
As a one-man performance with dramatic supporting music and full dome visuals, the Morrison Planetarium in collaboration with Motion Institute presents The Kepler Story – an innovative, immersive performance piece about the life and story of 17th-century astronomer and mystic Johannes Kepler. The story of his life, including his discovery of the three laws of planetary motion which removed Earth once and for all from its position at the center of the Universe, took an even more dramatic turn when his mother was arrested for witchcraft and Kepler was forced to defend her. On the way to her trial, reading Galileo’s father’s book on harmony, Kepler experienced one of his greatest epiphanies about the harmony of the universe.
History, religion, passion and science intersect in this remarkable individual’s life with a performance in the Academy’s planetarium that has the capacity to elicit moments of transcendence as it enlivens your senses and stimulates your mind. We will explore Kepler’s unique capacity to integrate a worldview steeped in mysticism with a rigorous scientific perspective based on observation and experimentation.
The Kepler Story is produced by Motion Institute, a Bay Area nonprofit theater production company that offers audiences a singular view of current issues, presented in ways that are contemporary, unpredictable, and embedded in the narratives of their own lives. Written and directed by Nina Wise and performed by Norbert Weisser, a veteran film and stage actor, The Kepler Story integrates spectacular visuals developed by the Morrison Planetarium visualization studio and Toshi Anders Hoo, deeply moving music by composer and cellist Zoë Keating and sound design by Emmy Award winner Christopher Hedge.
Earlier this year the Kepler orbiting observatory lost the ability to point its telescope with the precision necessary to continue its search for exoplanets as it has done since 2009. With just two reaction wheels working, it was thought that the science with the spacecraft would be extremely limited and probably not involving exoplanets.
However, the Kepler team has come up with Plan B that looks very promising:
A Sunny Outlook for NASA Kepler’s Second Light
You may have thought that NASA’s Kepler spacecraft was finished. Well, think again. A repurposed Kepler Space telescope may soon start searching the sky again.
A new mission concept, dubbed K2, would continue Kepler’s search for other worlds, and introduce new opportunities to observe star clusters, young and old stars, active galaxies and supernovae.
In May, the Kepler spacecraft lost the second of four gyroscope-like reaction wheels, which are used to precisely point the spacecraft, ending new data collection for the original mission. The spacecraft required three functioning wheels to maintain the precision pointing necessary to detect the signal of small Earth-sized exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system, orbiting stars like our sun in what’s known as the habitable zone — the range of distances from a star where the surface temperature of a planet might be suitable for liquid water.
With the failure of a second reaction wheel, the spacecraft can no longer precisely point at the mission’s original field of view. The culprit is none other than our own sun.
The very body that provides Kepler with its energy needs also pushes the spacecraft around by the pressure exerted when the photons of sunlight strike the spacecraft. Without a third wheel to help counteract the solar pressure, the spacecraft’s ultra-precise pointing capability cannot be controlled in all directions.
However, Kepler mission and Ball Aerospace engineers have developed an innovative way of recovering pointing stability by maneuvering the spacecraft so that the solar pressure is evenly distributed across the surfaces of the spacecraft.
To achieve this level of stability, the orientation of the spacecraft must be nearly parallel to its orbital path around the sun, which is slightly offset from the ecliptic, the orbital plane of Earth. The ecliptic plane defines the band of sky in which lie the constellations of the zodiac.
This technique of using the sun as the ‘third wheel’ to control pointing is currently being tested on the spacecraft and early results are already coming in. During a pointing performance test in late October, a full frame image of the space telescope’s full field of view was captured showing part of the constellation Sagittarius.
Photons of light from a distant star field were collected over a 30-minute period and produced an image quality within five percent of the primary mission image quality, which used four reaction wheels to control pointing stability. Additional testing is underway to demonstrate the ability to maintain this level of pointing control for days and weeks.
To capture the telltale signature of a distant planet as it crosses the face of its host star and temporarily blocks the amount of starlight collected by Kepler, the spacecraft must maintain pointing stability over these longer periods.
“This ‘second light’ image provides a successful first step in a process that may yet result in new observations and continued discoveries from the Kepler space telescope,” said Charlie Sobeck, Kepler deputy project manager at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA.
The K2 mission concept has been presented to NASA Headquarters. A decision to proceed to the 2014 Senior Review – a biannual assessment of operating missions – and propose for budget to fly K2 is expected by the end of 2013.
Kepler’s original mission, which is still in progress to fully process the wealth of data collected, is to determine what percentage of stars like the sun harbor small planets the approximate size and surface temperature of Earth. For four years, the space telescope simultaneously and continuously monitored the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, recording a measurement every 30 minutes.
More than a year of the data collected by Kepler remains to be fully reviewed and analyzed.
