Multiple media, Space Science

Video: Juno probe produces great view of the Earth-Moon system

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Here’s a cool video of the earth and moon taken by the Juno probe as it came it to get its kick to Jupiter from the earth:

NASA’s Juno Gives Starship-Like View of Earth Flyby

When NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew past Earth on Oct. 9, 2013, it received a boost in speed of more than 8,800 mph (about 7.3 kilometer per second), which set it on course for a July 4, 2016, rendezvous with Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. One of Juno’s sensors, a special kind of camera optimized to track faint stars, also had a unique view of the Earth-moon system. The result was an intriguing, low-resolution glimpse of what our world would look like to a visitor from afar.

“If Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise said, ‘Take us home, Scotty,’ this is what the crew would see,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio. “In the movie, you ride aboard Juno as it approaches Earth and then soars off into the blackness of space. No previous view of our world has ever captured the heavenly waltz of Earth and moon.”

The Juno Earth flyby movie is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CzBlSXgzqI&feature=youtu.be . The music accompaniment is an original score by Vangelis.

The cameras that took the images for the movie are located near the pointed tip of one of the spacecraft’s three solar-array arms. They are part of Juno’s Magnetic Field Investigation (MAG) and are normally used to determine the orientation of the magnetic sensors. These cameras look away from the sunlit side of the solar array, so as the spacecraft approached, the system’s four cameras pointed toward Earth. Earth and the moon came into view when Juno was about 600,000 miles (966,000 kilometers) away — about three times the Earth-moon separation.

During the flyby, timing was everything. Juno was traveling about twice as fast as a typical satellite, and the spacecraft itself was spinning at 2 rpm. To assemble a movie that wouldn’t make viewers dizzy, the star tracker had to capture a frame each time the camera was facing Earth at exactly the right instant. The frames were sent to Earth, where they were processed into video format.

“Everything we humans are and everything we do is represented in that view,” said the star tracker’s designer, John Jørgensen of the Danish Technical University, near Copenhagen.

Also during the flyby, Juno’s Waves instrument, which is tasked with measuring radio and plasma waves in Jupiter’s magnetosphere, recorded amateur radio signals. This was part of a public outreach effort involving ham radio operators from around the world. They were invited to say “HI” to Juno by coordinating radio transmissions that carried the same Morse-coded message. Operators from every continent, including Antarctica, participated.

“With the Earth flyby completed, Juno is now on course for arrival at Jupiter on July 4, 2016,” said Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

The Juno spacecraft was launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on August 5, 2011. Juno’s launch vehicle was capable of giving the spacecraft only enough energy to reach the asteroid belt, at which point the sun’s gravity pulled it back toward the inner solar system. Mission planners designed the swing by Earth as a gravity assist to increase the spacecraft’s speed relative to the sun, so that it could reach Jupiter. (The spacecraft’s speed relative to Earth before and after the flyby is unchanged.)

After Juno arrives and enters into orbit around Jupiter in 2016, the spacecraft will circle the planet 33 times, from pole to pole, and use its collection of science instruments to probe beneath the gas giant’s obscuring cloud cover. Scientists will learn about Jupiter’s origins, internal structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere.

Juno’s name comes from Greek and Roman mythology. The god Jupiter drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief from his wife, but the goddess Juno used her special powers to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter’s true nature.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The Juno mission is part of the New Frontiers Program managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

More information about Juno is online at: http://www.nasa.gov/juno and http://missionjuno.swri.edu

Mars, Multiple media, Space Science

The dynamism of Mars on display in HiRISE images from MRO spacecraft

When the first fly-by spacecraft images of Mars were seen in the 1960s, the planet looked as static and frozen in time as the Moon. However, subsequent examinations by orbiting spacecraft and landers in the past couple of decades, Mars has shown itself to be in fact very dynamic and changing.  There are dust storms and dust devils (little tornados), changes in the water icecap at the north pole and in the CO2 cap at the south pole, landslides, etc.

On Tuesday, new imagery from the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling and studying Mars since 2006, show just how much the features on Mars vary over time. In particular, there are vivid sequences of images of streaks along the sides of mountains and craters as they change throughout the year.

NASA Mars Spacecraft Reveals a More Dynamic Red Planet

Seasonal Changes in Dark Marks on an Equatorial Martian Slope
Seasonal Changes in Dark Marks on an Equatorial Martian Slope
These images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE)
camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show how the appearance of dark
markings on Martian slope changes with the seasons.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has revealed to scientists slender dark markings — possibly due to salty water – that advance seasonally down slopes surprisingly close to the Martian equator.

“The equatorial surface region of Mars has been regarded as dry, free of liquid or frozen water, but we may need to rethink that,” said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona in Tucson, principal investigator for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera.

Long, Recurring Linear Marking on Martian Slope
Long, Recurring Linear Marking on Martian Slope

Tracking how these features recur each year is one example of how the longevity of NASA orbiters observing Mars is providing insight about changes on many time scales. Researchers at the American Geophysical Union meeting Tuesday in San Francisco discussed a range of current Martian activity, from fresh craters offering glimpses of subsurface ice to multi-year patterns in the occurrence of large, regional dust storms. Watch televised news briefing.

The seasonally changing surface flows were first reported two years ago on mid-latitude southern slopes. They are finger-like features typically less than 16 feet (5 meters) wide that appear and extend down steep, rocky slopes during spring through summer, then fade in winter and return the next spring. Recently observed slopes stretch as long as 4,000 feet (1,200 meters).

McEwen and co-authors reported the equatorial flows at the conference and in a paper published online Tuesday by Nature Geoscience. Five well-monitored sites with these markings are in Valles Marineris, the largest canyon system in the solar system. At each of these sites, the features appear on both north- and south-facing walls. On the north-facing slopes, they are active during the part of the year when those slopes get the most sunshine. The counterparts on south-facing slopes start flowing when the season shifts and more sunshine hits their side.

“The explanation that fits best is salty water is flowing down the slopes when the temperature rises,” McEwen said. “We still don’t have any definite identification of water at these sites, but there’s nothing that rules it out, either.”

Icy Material Thrown from Cratering Impact on Mars
Icy Material Thrown from Cratering Impact on Mars

Dissolved salts can keep water melted at temperatures when purer water freezes, and they can slow the evaporation rate so brine can flow farther. This analysis used data from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars and the Context Camera on the MRO as well as the Thermal Emission Imaging System experiment on NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter.

Water ice has been identified in another dynamic process researchers are monitoring with MRO. Impacts of small asteroids or bits of comets dig many fresh craters on Mars every year. Twenty fresh craters have exposed bright ice previously hidden beneath the surface. Five were reported in 2009. The 15 newly reported ones are distributed over a wider range of latitudes and longitudes.

“The more we find, the more we can fill in a global map of where ice is buried,” said Colin Dundas of the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz. “We’ve now seen icy craters down to 39 degrees north, more than halfway from the pole to the equator. They tell us that either the average climate over several thousand years is wetter than present or that water vapor in the current atmosphere is concentrated near the surface. Ice could have formed under wetter conditions, with remnants from that time persisting today, but slowly disappearing.”

Mars’ modern climate becomes better known each year because of a growing set of data from a series of orbiters that have been studying Mars continually since 1997. That has been almost nine Martian years because a year on Mars is almost two years long on Earth. Earlier missions and surface landers have added insight about the dynamics of Mars’ atmosphere and its interaction with the ground.

“The dust cycle is the main driver of the climate system,” said Robert Haberle of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

One key question researchers want to answer is why dust storms encircle Mars in some years and not in others. These storms affect annual patterns of water vapor and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, freezing into polar ice caps in winter and replenishing the atmosphere in spring. Identifying significant variations in annual patterns requires many Martian years of observations.

The data emerging from long-term studies will help future human explorers of Mars know where to find resources such as water, how to prepare for hazards such as dust storms, and where to be extra careful about contamination with Earth microbes.

Locations of Ice-Exposing Fresh Craters on Mars
Locations of Ice-Exposing Fresh Craters on Mars
This map of Mars indicates locations of new craters that have excavated ice (blue)
and those that have not (red). The underlying map is based on the brightness,
or albedo, of the Martian surface.

Launched in 2005, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and its six instruments have provided more high-resolution data about the Red Planet than all other Mars orbiters combined. Data are made available for scientists worldwide to research, analyze and report their findings.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the MRO and Mars Odyssey missions for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built both orbiters. The University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory operates the HiRISE camera, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo.

For more information about NASA Mars exploration missions, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mars or http://mars.nasa.gov
For more about HiRISE, visit: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu

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Find a gallery of images also at  Science in Motion: Recurring Slope Lineae in Equatorial Regions of Mars – HiRISE

In this panel discussion, the images are narrated and explained:

Video streaming by Ustream

 

Rockets, Space Systems

NASA Morpheus vehicle flies without a tether

NASA’s Project Morpheus has moved their vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) vehicle (modeled after Armadillo Aerospace‘s quad vehicles) to Kennedy Space Center, where they can do un-tethered free flights. The first such free flight test took place today:

Space Policy

Space policy roundup – Dec.10.13 [Update]

Here is a post I wrote on NewSpace Watch that was prompted by Rand Simberg’s recent commentary about the impact on the aerospace primes by SpaceX‘s launch of the SES-8 satellite to GEO: A meteor impact on the launch industry + Inmarsat and reliability at any cost (to the taxpayer) – available to non-subscribers.

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John Strickland was interviewed recently on two episodes of the Doug Turnbull podcast show about various space development topics, particularly the problems with the SLS/Orion program (see John’s article Revisiting SLS/Orion launch costs – The Space Review):

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Rick Boozer, who has also been on the Turnbull show (here and here), has a new op-ed at Space.com: Allow NASA to Do Great Things Again – Space Policy/Space.com.

Check out Rick’s book The Plundering of NASA: an Exposé.

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More space policy/politics related links:

Update:

Events, Space Policy

“America’s Space Futures” – New space policy book to be discussed at Capitol Hill event, Dec.13th

This Friday the George C. Marshall Institute will hold an event on Capitol Hill titled:

America’s Space Futures: Defining Goals for Space Exploration

Date/Time
Date(s) – 12/13/20132:00 pm – 3:30 pm

Location
2325 Rayburn House Office Building

Despite broad popular support for NASA and the importance of America’s efforts in space, the American space program is adrift, uncertain about the future and unclear about the purposes it serves.  Policymakers in the White House and Congress have papered over the uncertainty with compromises that sometimes leave NASA working against itself and no one satisfied.

On December 13, 2013 the George C. Marshall Institute will release a new book, America’s Space Futures: Defining Goals for Space Exploration, which responds to this challenge by considering the costs, benefits and risks of different visions for the American space program. In a series of essays, the authors offer out-of-the-box thinking and analyses that lay out a space future that sets priorities to achieve a specific national goal.

The event will include discussion by the book’s authors:

  • James Vedda, Senior Policy Analyst at the Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Space Policy & Strategy
  • Scott Pace, Director of the Space Policy Institute and Professor of International Affairs, George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs.
  • William Adkins, President of Adkins Strategies LLC and former Staff Director of the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee.
  • Charles Miller, President of NexGen Space LLC and former NASA Senior Advisor for Commercial Space
  • Eric Sterner, Fellow at the George C. Marshall Institute and faculty member at Missouri State University Graduate Department of Defense and Strategic Studies.

 For reservations, call 571-970-3180 or email info@marshall.org

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Charles Miller tells me that his chapter in the book deals with

why Cheap Access to Space (CATS) should be our nation’s top strategic priority.  I also focus on how we can achieve CATS based on lessons learned from recent history and new insights from early aviation.

Everyone can participate in space