This week we ask if the speed of space innovation is getting faster with new entrants on the scene. Will it ever reach the speed of technology innovation?
Space news topics covered this week:
* Soyuz launches Resurs P3 * Proton launches ExoMars * Soyuz launches Soyuz * ULA VP resigns after controversial comments * Space Fire * Iran planning a space launch soon * Space Clothes
TMRO is viewer supported:
TMRO Live is a crowd funded show. If you like this episode consider contributing to help us to continue to improve. Head over to http://www.patreon.com/tmro for information, goals and reward levels. Don’t forget to check out our SpacePod campaign as well over at http://www.patreon.com/spacepod
A nicely made video of highlights of UK astronaut Tim Peake’s mission on the Int. Space Station with beautiful imagery of the earth:
From the caption:
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” is the famous quote by renowned scientist Sir Isaac Newton. This is particularly apt as a title for this video summary of ESA astronaut Tim Peake’s Principia mission – named after Newton’s monumental work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia and now building on the work of previous European astronaut missions, while being supported by a huge team of scientists and engineers on the ground.
The music accompanying this video was chosen by Tim, coming from the soundtrack of one of his favourite films, the 2004 movie Layer Cake. This piece is called ‘Drive to the Boatyard’, by internationally known British film composer Ilan Eshkeri. Ilan provided a slightly extended piece specially for ESA.
Tim comments: “I’m delighted with this video, which captures the essence of human spaceflight and natural beauty of our planet from space – all put to Ilan’s inspiring soundtrack!”
The outer reaches of our Solar System are home to hundreds of thousands of small icy worlds. Their present orbits are a sculpted signature of the early migrations of the giant planets, particularly Neptune. Yet the faintness and highly eccentric orbits of most of these worlds mean only a tiny fraction of them have yet been discovered.
With the Outer Solar System Origins Survey on CFHT, we are discovering up to five hundred new outer Solar System objects, with exquisitely well-determined orbital parameters. Our complementary Large Program on Gemini North is observing the brightest of our discoveries in the optical and infrared with unprecedented precision, providing information on the ices, silicates and organic compounds on the surfaces of these small worlds.
This colourful map of the structure of the outer Solar System is providing new constraints on Neptune’s migration.
A year ago, Pluto was just a bright speck in the cameras of NASA’s approaching New Horizons spacecraft, not much different than its appearances in telescopes since Clyde Tombaugh discovered the ninth planet in 1930.
But this week, in the journal Science, New Horizons scientists published the first comprehensive set of papers describing results from last summer’s Pluto system flyby. “These five detailed papers completely transform our view of Pluto – revealing the former ‘astronomer’s planet’ to be a real world with diverse and active geology, exotic surface chemistry, a complex atmosphere, puzzling interaction with the sun and an intriguing system of small moons,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado.
After a 9.5-year, 3-billion-mile journey – launching faster and traveling farther than any spacecraft to reach its primary target – New Horizons zipped by Pluto on July 14, 2015. New Horizons’ seven science instruments collected about 50 gigabits of data on the spacecraft’s digital recorders, most of it coming over nine busy days surrounding the encounter. About half of that data has now been transmitted home – from distances where radio signals at light speed need nearly five hours to reach Earth – with all of it expected back by October.
The first close-up pictures revealed a large heart-shaped feature carved into Pluto’s surface, telling scientists that this “new” type of planet – the largest, brightest and first-explored in the mysterious, distant “third zone” of our solar system known as the Kuiper Belt – would be even more interesting and puzzling than models predicted.
“Observing Pluto and Charon up close has caused us to completely reassess thinking on what sort of geological activity can be sustained on isolated planetary bodies in this distant region of the solar system, worlds that formerly had been thought to be relics little changed since the Kuiper Belt’s formation,” said Jeff Moore, from NASA Ames Research Center, California, and lead author of the paper covering geology.
Scientists studying Pluto’s composition say the diversity of the planet’s landscape stems from eons of interaction between highly volatile and mobile methane, nitrogen and carbon monoxide ices with inert and sturdy water ice. “We see variations in the distribution of Pluto’s volatile ices that point to fascinating cycles of evaporation and condensation,” said Will Grundy, from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and lead author of the composition paper. “These cycles are a lot richer than on Earth, where there’s really only one material that condenses and evaporates – water. On Pluto, there are least three materials, and while they interact in ways we don’t yet fully understand, we definitely see their effects all across Pluto’s surface.”
Above the surface, scientists discovered Pluto’s atmosphere contains layered hazes, and is both cooler and more compact than expected. This affects how Pluto’s upper atmosphere is lost to space, and how it interacts with the stream of charged particles from the sun known as the solar wind. “We’ve discovered that pre-New Horizons estimates wildly overestimated the loss of material from Pluto’s atmosphere,” said Fran Bagenal, from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and lead author on the particles and plasma paper. “The thought was that Pluto’s atmosphere was escaping like a comet, but it is actually escaping at a rate much more like Earth’s atmosphere.”
Randy Gladstone, of SwRI, San Antonio, and the lead author of the Science paper on atmospheric findings, added, “We’ve also discovered that methane, rather than nitrogen, is Pluto’s primary escaping gas. This is pretty surprising, since near Pluto’s surface the atmosphere is more than 99-percent nitrogen.”
Scientists are also analyzing the first close-up images of Pluto’s small moons Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. Discovered between 2005 and 2012, the four moons range in diameter from about 25 miles (40 kilometers) for Nix and Hydra to about six miles (10 kilometers) for Styx and Kerberos. Mission scientists further observed that the small satellites have highly anomalous rotation rates and uniformly unusual pole orientations, as well as icy surfaces with brightness and colors distinctly different from those of Pluto and Charon.
They’ve also found evidence that some of the moons resulted from mergers of even smaller bodies, and that their surface ages date back at least 4 billion years. “These latter two results reinforce the hypothesis that the small moons formed in the aftermath of a collision that produced the Pluto-Charon binary system,” said Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, and lead author of the Science paper on Pluto’s small moons.
“This is why we explore,” said Curt Niebur, New Horizons program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The many discoveries from New Horizons represent the best of humankind and inspire us to continue the journey of exploration to the solar system and beyond.”
New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The Southwest Research Institute leads the science mission, payload operations, and encounter science planning.
Here is this week’s episode of NASA’s Space to Ground update on Int. Space Station related happenings:
Note that you can watch today’s Soyuz launch of three new crew members – NASA astronaut Jeff Williams and cosmonauts Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos – to the station via NASA TV. Liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan is at 5:26 p.m. EDT Friday, March 18 (3:26 a.m. on March 19)is : Watch NASA TV for Launch of Next Crew – Space Station –