The company NanoRacks has a system installed in the Japanese Kibo module on the Int. Space Station that ejects small CubeSat satellites into orbit. Over 100 satellites have now been deployed by NanoRacks. This video shows the deployment of satellites in 2014:

The image below shows two Dove earth observations satellites from the company Planet Labs shooting past the ISS solar panels during their deployment into orbit this week: CubeSats Deployed From the International Space Station – NASA

26512620163_904c1a34f8_o[1] — CubeSats fly free after leaving the NanoRacks CubeSat Deployer on the International Space Station on May 17, 2016. Seen here are two Dove satellites. The satellites are part of a constellation designed, built and operated by Planet Labs Inc. to take images of Earth from space. The images have several humanitarian and environmental applications, from monitoring deforestation and urbanization to improving natural disaster relief and agricultural yields in developing nations. A total of 17 CubeSats have been released since Monday from a small satellite deployer on the outside of the Kibo experiment module’s airlock. CubeSats are a new, low-cost tool for space science missions. Instead of the traditional space science missions that carry a significant number of custom-built, state-of-the-art instruments, CubeSats are designed to take narrowly targeted scientific observations, with only a few instruments, often built from off-the-shelf components.

One of the CubeSats deployed in the past week includes STMSat-1, which was assembled and tested by elementary students at St. Thomas More Cathedral School in Arlington, Virginia: Elementary School Students Make History with Help from Orbital ATK.

St. Thomas More Cathedral School is now the first elementary school in the world to launch a CubeSat into orbit thanks to financial and volunteer support from Orbital ATK’s Space Systems Group. Over the last three years, 400 pre-kindergarten through eighth grade students have participated in all aspects of the project, from design, to construction, to testing.

The CubeSat, officially known as St. Thomas More (STM) Sat-1, will photograph the Earth and transmit images to remote ground stations throughout the country, engaging more than 10,000 grade school students who will participate via Remote Mission Operations Centers.

CubeSat_STMSat-1[1] — *The CubeSat, STMSat-1(Credit: St. Thomas More Cathedral School)*

Joe Pellegrino, Orbital ATK engineer, NASA deputy project manager and a parent at the school, served as the team’s mission manager and led the students through all aspects of getting a mission off the ground.

“Usually these are built by universities or even grad students, so it’s quite remarkable that we’ve been able to do this with grade students,” said Pellegrino. “We taught the students about design philosophy how to do computerized design. The students also helped us with a vibration test. We even did a high altitude test in the parking lot of the school.”

Students[1] — *St. Thomas More Cathedral School students gather to watch their CubeSat deploy from the International Space Station. (Credit: St. Thomas More Cathedral School)*

The CubeSat is four inches long and weighs close to three pounds. It was carried to space on Orbital ATK’s Cygnus cargo resupply spacecraft as part of NASA’s Education Launch of Nanosatellites IX mission in December of 2015. Along with CubeSats from the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Michigan, STMSat-1 deployed from the NanoRacks CubeSat Deployer on May 16. The students expect to start receiving their first images this week.

STMSat-1_ISS[1] — *STMSat-1 (bottom right) deploys from the International Space Station on May 16, 2016. (Credit: NASA).*

Living in Space, Space Systems, SpaceCasts

Video: ‘Space to Ground’ update on ISS – May.20.2016

May 20, 2016 TopSpacer

Here is the latest NASA Space to Ground report on the past week’s Int. Space Station related activities:

Mars, Multiple media

Hubble takes a great close-up picture of Mars

May 19, 2016 TopSpacer

Orbiters around Mars can take very detailed images of the surface with far higher resolution than the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. However, Hubble is able to see a whole hemisphere at once. Below is a Hubble image of Mars taken this month when the orbits of the two planets bring them the closest distance (a mere 75.28 million kilometers or 196 times farther away than the Moon is from Earth) they have been in ten years. It shows many well-defined features of the planet including clouds.

Close-up of the Red Planet

This image shows our neighbouring planet Mars, as it was observed shortly before opposition in 2016 by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Some prominent features of the planet are clearly visible: the ancient and inactive shield volcano Syrtis Major; the bright and oval Hellas Planitia basin; the heavily eroded Arabia Terra in the centre of the image; the dark features of Sinus Sabaeous and Sinus Meridiani along the equator; and the small southern polar cap.

During May 2016 the Earth and Mars get closer to each other than at any time in the last ten years. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has exploited this special configuration to catch a new image of our red neighbour, showing some of its famous surface features. This image supplements previous Hubble observations of Mars and allows astronomers to study large-scale changes on its surface.

On 22 May Mars will come into opposition, the point at which the planet is located directly opposite the Sun in the sky. This means that the Sun, Earth and Mars line up, with Earth sitting in between the Sun and the red planet.

Opposition also marks the planet’s closest approach to Earth, so that Mars appears bigger and brighter in the sky than usual. This event allows astronomers using telescopes in space and on the ground to see more details on the Martian surface [1]. For observers using ground-based instruments the opposing planet is visible throughout the night and is also fully illuminated, making it a great opportunity for detailed studies [2].

On 12 May Hubble took advantage of this favourable alignment and turned its gaze towards Mars to take an image of our rusty-hued neighbour, adding it to the collection of previous images. From this distance the telescope could see Martian features as small as 30 kilometres across.

Hubble observed Mars using its Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). The final image shows a sharp, natural-colour view of Mars and reveals several prominent geological features, from smaller mountains and erosion channels to immense canyons and volcanoes.

The large, dark region to the far right is Syrtis Major Planitia, one of the first features identified on the surface of the planet by seventeenth century observers. Syrtis Major is an ancient, inactive shield volcano. Late-afternoon clouds surround its summit in this view. The oval feature south of Syrtis Major is the bright Hellas Planitia basin, the largest crater on Mars. About 1,800 kilometres across and eight kilometres deep, it was formed about 3.5 billion years ago by an asteroid impact.

The orange area in the centre of the image is Arabia Terra, a vast upland region. The landscape is densely cratered and heavily eroded, indicating that it could be among the oldest features on the planet.

South of Arabia Terra, running east to west along the equator, are the long dark features known as Sinus Sabaeous (to the east) and Sinus Meridiani (to the west). These darker regions are covered by bedrock from ancient lava flows and other volcanic features.

An extended blanket of clouds can be seen over the southern polar cap. The icy northern polar cap has receded to a comparatively small size because it is now late summer in the northern hemisphere.

For Mars, the average time between successive oppositions — known as the planet’s synodic period — is 780 days — so the previous time that the planet was in opposition was April 2014. Hubble has observed Mars at (or near) opposition many times, including in 1995, 1999 (twice), 2001, 2003 (twice), 2005, and 2007. For a combined view of Mars’s appearance during the 1995-2007 oppositions see here, or see more Hubble images of Mars here.

Notes

[1] The dates of opposition and closest approach differ slightly. For 2016, opposition will occur on 22 May at 11:10 UTC, while Mars’s closest approach to Earth will occur on 30 May at 21:36 UTC, when Mars will be a distance of 0.503 au, or 75.28 million kilometres, from us. Mars’s closest ever recorded oppositional approach occurred in 2003, when it passed 55.76 million kilometres from us — the closest in 60 000 years.

[2] This is enhanced by the opposition effect, where an object’s surface appears particularly bright when the Sun’s light illuminating the surface is incident from directly behind our position as observers on Earth, as it is when Mars is at opposition. Opposition is also tied to Mars’s apparent retrograde motion, where the planet periodically appears to zig-zag backwards through the sky.

Mars, Space Models

ESA uses LEGO ExoMars model in rover operations simulation

May 19, 2016 TopSpacer 1 Comment

The European Space Agency (ESA) reports that a Lego ExoMars rover model can help with visualization of a rover’s movements in simulated remote control operations:

Lego ExoMars model

This Lego model of Europe’s ExoMars rover on its lander was not built solely for fun – but is actually a tool, being used by robotics engineers in the midst of a major ‘egress’ test campaign.

Making a safe landing on Mars will be key to the success of Europe’s mobile Mars mission. Then comes the next most important step: to successfully drive the wheeled rover from the top of its lander, otherwise known as egress.

The biggest decision of all will be which direction to drive – forwards or backwards – based on the limited data that operators have to hand. The lander will have two sets of tracks for the rover to descend in case one side is blocked, for instance by rocks (one also reproduced here in Lego).

To build up experience of egress and remote rover operations, ESA’s Automation and Robotics section together with ESOC’s Advance Mission Concepts section are conducting a long-distance test campaign in collaboration with the French space agency CNES. The ExoMars project team is monitoring the ongoing activities.

A half-scale rover on a mock-up lander has been placed in the outdoor 80 x 50 m ‘Mars Yard’ at CNES Toulouse. An operations team based a thousand kilometres away at ESA’s ESTEC technical centre in the Netherlands has first to egress the rover, then move it further across the simulated Marscape to explore and accomplish various tasks.

Across a series of tests that continue throughout this week, the ESTEC team has no knowledge of the lander’s precise placing but must work with the limited camera views and sensor data the rover and lander sends back to them, with results received and telecommands sent during a limited set of communication passes.

The Lego model lets the engineers easily visualise and communicate complicated telemetry data.

This campaign follows on from a previous egress campaign that took place last autumn.

Astronomy

ESO: The beauty of a stellar ornamentation

May 18, 2016 TopSpacer

The latest report from ESO (European Souther Observatory):

A Beautiful Instance of Stellar Ornamentation

In this image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), light from blazing blue stars energises the gas left over from the stars’ recent formation. The result is a strikingly colourful emission nebula, called LHA 120-N55, in which the stars are adorned with a mantle of glowing gas. Astronomers study these beautiful displays to learn about the conditions in places where new stars develop.

LHA 120-N55, or N55 as it is usually known, is a glowing gas cloud in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located about 163 000 light-years away. N55 is situated inside a supergiant shell, or superbubble called LMC 4. Superbubbles, often hundreds of light-years across, are formed when the fierce winds from newly formed stars and shockwaves from supernova explosions work in tandem to blow away most of the gas and dust that originally surrounded them and create huge bubble-shaped cavities.

The material that became N55, however, managed to survive as a small remnant pocket of gas and dust. It is now a standalone nebula inside the superbubble and a grouping of brilliant blue and white stars — known as LH 72 — also managed to form hundreds of millions of years after the events that originally blew up the superbubble. The LH 72 stars are only a few million years old, so they did not play a role in emptying the space around N55. The stars instead represent a second round of stellar birth in the region.

This zoom sequence takes us on a journey of 160 000 light-years to one of our neighbouring galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud. In the final image, taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), light from blazing blue stars energises the gas left over from the stars’ recent formation to create a strikingly colourful emission nebula, called LHA 120-N55, in which the stars are adorned with a mantle of glowing gas. Astronomers study these beautiful displays to learn about the conditions in places where new stars develop. Credit: ESO/ Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org)/Robert Gendler (http://www.robgendlerastropics.com/). Music: Johan monell

The recent rise of a new population of stars also explains the evocative colours surrounding the stars in this image. The intense light from the powerful, blue–white stars is stripping nearby hydrogen atoms in N55 of their electrons, causing the gas to glow in a characteristic pinkish colour in visible light. Astronomers recognise this telltale signature of glowing hydrogen gas throughout galaxies as a hallmark of fresh star birth.

While things seem quiet in the star-forming region of N55 for now, major changes lie ahead. Several million years hence, some of the massive and brilliant stars in the LH 72 association will themselves go supernova, scattering N55’s contents. In effect, a bubble will be blown within a superbubble, and the cycle of starry ends and beginnings will carry on in this close neighbour of our home galaxy.

This pan video gives a close-up look at a new image of the strikingly colourful emission nebula, called LHA 120-N55 from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Light from blazing blue stars energises the gas left over from the stars’ recent formation to create a mantle of glowing gas. Astronomers study these beautiful displays to learn about the conditions in places where new stars develop. Credit: ESO. Music: Johan Monell

This new image was acquired using the FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph (FORS2) instrument attached to ESO’s VLT. It was taken as part of the ESO Cosmic Gems programme, an outreach initiative to produce images of interesting, intriguing or visually attractive objects using ESO telescopes for the purposes of education and public outreach. The programme makes use of telescope time that cannot be used for science observations. All data collected may also be suitable for scientific purposes, and are made available to astronomers through ESO’s science archive.