Cruising to the Moon

How long does it take humans to travel to the moon? Currently, Constellation is planning for the trans-lunar coast to take no longer than 4 days, or 96 hours. Apollo's design requirement was for the coast time to range between 60 hours and 100 hours. The actual missions (Apollo 10-17) varied from 72 hours to 83 hours.

So why would it take longer on the future missions? It may not actually. At this point, Constellation is in the requirements definition and preliminary design phase for the lunar exploration portion of the program therefore requirements are set for the most stressing - maximum and minimum - types of conditions.

The trans-lunar cruise duration is a function of the energy or change in velocity (delta-V) applied at the trans-lunar injection, or TLI, burn. The energy requirements for the TLI burn will vary depending on where the planned landing site is located on the moon and when the mission is launched, among other factors. So, if a mission is launched on a more favorable opportunity, less energy will be required for the TLI burn and the trip would be quicker.

Since Constellation is planning for worst-case conditions at this point, the transfer time in the current plan minimizes the amount of propellant, and therefore the mass, required for trans-lunar injection. When Constellation flies actual missions to the moon, there will likely be the same flexibility as Apollo to shorten the duration of the flight toward the moon if it is desirable to do so.

Water Molecules Found on the Moon

NASA scientists have discovered water molecules in the polar regions of the Moon. Instruments aboard three separate spacecraft revealed water molecules in amounts that are greater than predicted, but still relatively small. Hydroxyl, a molecule consisting of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom, also was found in the lunar soil. The findings were published in Thursday's edition of the journal Science.

The observations were made by NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper, or M3 ("M-cubed"), aboard the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. NASA's Cassini spacecraft and NASA's Epoxi spacecraft have confirmed the find.

"Water ice on the Moon has been something of a holy grail for lunar scientists for a very long time," said Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington . "This surprising finding has come about through the ingenuity, perseverance and international cooperation between NASA and the India Space Research Organization."

From its perch in lunar orbit, M3's state-of-the-art spectrometer measured light reflecting off the Moon's surface at infrared wavelengths, splitting the spectral colors of the lunar surface into small enough bits to reveal a new level of detail in surface composition. When the M3 science team analyzed data from the instrument, they found the wavelengths of light being absorbed were consistent with the absorption patterns for water molecules and hydroxyl.

"When we say 'water on the Moon,' we are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles," explained Carle Pieters, M3's principal investigator from Brown University, Providence, R.I. "Water on the Moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimeters of the Moon's surface.

The M3 team found water molecules and hydroxyl at diverse areas of the sunlit region of the Moon's surface, but the water signature appeared stronger at the Moon's higher latitudes. Water molecules and hydroxyl previously were suspected in data from a Cassini flyby of the Moon in 1999, but the findings were not published until now.

"The data from Cassini's VIMS instrument and M3 closely agree," said Roger Clark, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist in Denver and member of both the VIMS and M3 teams. "We see both water and hydroxyl. While the abundances are not precisely known, as much as 1,000 water molecule parts-per-million could be in the lunar soil. To put that into perspective, if you harvested one ton of the top layer of the Moon's surface, you could get as much as 32 ounces of water."

For additional confirmation, scientists turned to the Epoxi mission while it was flying past the Moon in June 2009 on its way to a November 2010 encounter with comet Hartley 2. The spacecraft not only confirmed the VIMS and M3 findings, but also expanded on them.

"With our extended spectral range and views over the north pole, we were able to explore the distribution of both water and hydroxyl as a function of temperature, latitude, composition, and time of day," said Jessica Sunshine of the University of Maryland . Sunshine is Epoxi's deputy principal investigator and a scientist on the M3 team. "Our analysis unequivocally confirms the presence of these molecules on the Moon's surface and reveals that the entire surface appears to be hydrated during at least some portion of the lunar day."

The discovery of water molecules and hydroxyl on the Moon raises new questions about the origin of "Moon water" and its effect on lunar mineralogy. Answers to these questions will be studied and debated for years to come.

Lump of Planetary Stuff

This artist's conception shows a lump of material in a swirling, planet-forming disk. Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope found evidence that a companion to a star -- either another star or a planet -- could be pushing planetary material together, as illustrated here.

Planets are born out of spinning disks of gas and dust. They can carve out lanes or gaps in the disks as they grow bigger and bigger. Scientists used Spitzer's infrared vision to study the disk around a star called LRLL 31, located about 1,000 light-years away in the IC 348 region of the constellation Perseus. Spitzer's new infrared observations reveal that the disk has both an inner and outer gap.

What's more, the data show that infrared light from the disk is changing over as little time as one week -- a very unusual occurrence. In particular, light of different wavelengths seesawed back and forth, with short-wavelength light going up when long-wavelength light went down, and vice versa.

According to astronomers, this change could be caused by a companion to the star (illustrated as a planet in this picture). As the companion spins around, its gravity would cause the wall of the inner disk to squeeze into a lump. This lump would also spin around the star, shadowing part of the outer disk. When the bright side of the lump is on the far side of the star, and facing Earth, more infrared light at shorter wavelengths should be observed (hotter material closer to the star emits shorter wavelengths of infrared light).

In addition, the shadow of the lump should cause longer-wavelength infrared light from the outer disk to decrease. The opposite would be true when the lump is in front of the star and its bright side is hidden (shorter-wavelength light would go down, and longer-wavelength light up). This is precisely what Spitzer observed. The size of the lump and the planet have been exaggerated to better illustrate the dynamics of the system.

In Search of Dark Asteroids

In modern warfare, though, ninjas would be sitting ducks. Their black clothes may be hard to see at night with the naked eye, but their warm bodies would be clearly visible to a soldier wearing infrared goggles.

To hunt for the "ninjas" of the cosmos — dim objects that lurk in the vast dark spaces between planets and stars — scientists are building by far the most sensitive set of wide-angle infrared goggles ever, a space telescope called the Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).

WISE will scan the entire sky at infrared wavelengths, creating the most comprehensive catalog yet of dark and dim objects in the cosmos: vast dust clouds, brown dwarf stars, asteroids — even large, nearby asteroids that might pose a threat to Earth.

Surveys of nearby asteroids based on visible-light telescopes could be skewed toward asteroids with more-reflective surfaces. "If there's a significant population of asteroids nearby that are very dark, they will have been missed by these previous surveys," says Edward Wright, principal investigator for WISE and a physicist at the University of California in Los Angeles.

The full-sky infrared map produced by WISE will reveal even these darker asteroids, mapping the locations and sizes of roughly 200,000 asteroids and giving scientists a clearer idea of how many large and potentially dangerous asteroids are nearby. WISE will also help answer questions about the formation of stars and the evolution and structure of galaxies, including our own Milky Way.

School Kids Track LCROSS

On Oct. 9th, LCROSS will smash into the inky-dark shadows of a crater near the Moon's south pole in search of water. Eager youngsters are locked on to LCROSS's signal as intently as they've ever viewed a video game, and they're feeding NASA valuable data about the spacecraft's health and status.

see captionStudents attending 283 schools world-wide are participating in the Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope Project, or GAVRT -- a joint project between NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Lewis Center for Educational Research. Boys and girls control the behemoth telescope via the internet and they have been learning how to do radio astronomy just like real mission scientists.

Right: The Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope (GAVRT). Brian Day of NASA Ames Research Center explains how the students "adopted" LCROSS. "Because LCROSS has a very steeply inclined orbit, we have only a 2-hour window once every 3 days when we can check out the spacecraft using the Deep Space Network. So we decided to ask GAVRT for help. These kids help us get extra listening time for our spacecraft, and they get an incredible educational experience in return."

Lewis Center founder Rick Piercy is the visionary who sparked GAVRT's creation, making this extraordinary hookup possible. "In 1994, I heard that NASA was decommissioning a fully functional radio telescope," says Piercy. "I knew that this particular telescope had been used to communicate with the Apollo spacecraft and realized that it was something special. I wanted it for the students at our school, the Academy for Academic Excellence. I figured we could load it up in a couple of pickup trucks and bring it to the school if we could get permission."

He called California Congressman Jerry Lewis, who put him in touch with then-NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin. Piercy convinced Goldin and NASA to give the telescope to the school and make the instrument available to students nationwide.

James Webb Space Telescope Begins to Take Shape at Goddard

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is starting to come together. A major component of the telescope, the Integrated Science Instrument Module structure, recently arrived at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. for testing in the Spacecraft Systems Development and Integration Facility. The Integrated Science Instrument Module, or ISIM, is an important component of the Webb telescope. The ISIM includes the structure, four scientific instruments or cameras, electronics, harnesses, and other components.

The ISIM structure is the "backbone" of the ISIM. It is similar to the chassis of a car. Just as a car chassis provides support for the engine and holds other components, the ISIM Structure supports and holds the four Webb telescope science instruments : the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) and the Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS). Each of these instruments were created and assembled by different program partners around the world.

When fully assembled, the ISIM will be the size of a small room with the structure acting as a skeleton supporting all of the instruments. Ray Lundquist, ISIM Systems Engineer, at NASA Goddard, commented that "The ISIM structure is truly a one-of-a-kind item. There is no second ISIM being made. Before arriving at Goddard, the main ISIM structure – a state of the art, cryogenic-compatible, optical structure was designed by a team of engineers at Goddard, and assembled by Alliant Techsystems (ATK) at its Magna, Utah facility. That's the same facility where the Webb Telescope's Backplane is also being assembled.

Giant Spider Terrorist Attacks NASA

Spacecraft Talk Continued During JPL Wildfire Threat

As the flames of the raging brush fire dubbed the Station Fire threatened the northern edge of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Saturday, Aug. 29, the managers of NASA's Deep Space Network prepared for the worst. The Deep Space Operations Center at JPL is the nerve center for the Deep Space Network, an international network of antennas that send and receive information to interplanetary spacecraft. Staffed 24/7, 365 days a year, the JPL hub is constantly active connecting three major antenna sites, numerous mission operation centers run by NASA and an international group of space agencies, and more than 30 spacecraft flying throughout our solar system.

"We were more like the nervous center that weekend than the nerve center," said Wayne Sible of JPL, the network's deputy program manager for Deep Space Network development, operations and services. The Deep Space Network operations managers knew that, fire or no fire, time was critical for sending software programs to and downloading diagnostic information from several spacecraft, including the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which had an unexpected computer reboot the day the fire started on Aug. 26, and the Dawn spacecraft, on its way to the asteroid belt.

The network's antennas that send and receive information to spacecraft, located at Goldstone, in California's Mojave Desert; near Madrid, Spain; and near Canberra, Australia, were never in danger. But Sible and Jim Hodder, the network's operations manager, got word on Friday, Aug. 28, that the Station fire, which started in the San Gabriel Mountains above the Laboratory, was burning towards JPL. Emergency managers and senior JPL administrators called for JPL to be closed, except for essential personnel, on Friday evening.

A flurry of phone calls followed to the Deep Space Network team, the mission operation centers and ITT Systems Division, the contractor that provides the operators for the operations center at JPL. On a phone call with Hodder, the team decided to move network operators to a facility in Monrovia, Calif., where other support work is normally conducted for the Deep Space Network. The Monrovia building - about 15 miles from JPL offered basic access to the critical systems, though the operators would not be able to use personalized computer scripts or notes that facilitate their work.

Scientists Discover New Radiation Belt at Saturn

Scientists using the Cassini spacecraft's Magnetospheric Imaging instrument have detected a new, temporary radiation belt at Saturn, located around the orbit of its moon Dione at about 377,000 kilometers (234,000 miles) from the center of the planet.

The new belt, which has been named "the Dione belt," was detected by the instrument for only a few weeks on three separate occasions in 2005. Scientists believe that newly formed charged particles in the Dione belt were gradually absorbed by Dione itself and another nearby moon, named Tethys, which lies slightly closer to Saturn at an orbit of 295,000 kilometers (183,304 miles).

The discovery was presented at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, Germany on September 14.

Electronic Nose to Return from Space Station

Sniffing out any potential contaminants on the International Space Station where it was stationed for the last six months, the JPL-built electronic nose, or ENose, is homeward bound.

While on the space station, the ENose sampled the air with 32 sensors that can detect various odors and pinpoint which ones are dangerous to humans. The sleek, shoebox-sized ENose, the third generation of its kind, monitored the air for 10 contaminants continuously.

"Our six-month test went very well. The ENose identified formaldehyde, Freon 218, methanol and ethanol, but all of them were at harmless levels," said Amy Ryan, principal investigator of the ENose at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Ryan built the ENose at JPL and has managed the project from its early beginnings in 1996. "An instrument like this could one day remain on the Space Station and monitor air quality in real-time."

In the future, the ENose could be used in monitoring crew cabins for vehicles to the moon and other destinations or be stationed on a moon base. Other potential applications include detecting a smoldering fire before it erupts, sniffing for unexploded land mines and monitoring for chemical spills in a work area. There are also possible applications in medical diagnosis.

"A human nose is not always as sensitive to chemicals as the ENose and our noses cannot even detect some hazardous chemicals," said Ryan. "The ENose can smell trouble and give people advance warning before contamination levels cause harm."

The ENose was flown to the International Space Station by the Space Shuttle Endeavour STS-126 mission in December 2008. It is set to return home today on the Space Shuttle Discovery STS-128, after its 13-day flight.

Hubble Opens New Eyes on the Universe

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is back in business, ready to uncover new worlds, peer ever deeper into space, and even map the invisible backbone of the universe.

The first snapshots from the refurbished Hubble showcase the 19-year-old telescope's new vision. Topping the list of exciting new views are colorful multi-wavelength pictures of far- flung galaxies, a densely packed star cluster, an eerie "pillar of creation," and a "butterfly" nebula.

With the release of these images, astronomers have declared Hubble a fully rejuvenated observatory. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, D-Md., unveiled the images at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 9, 2009.

With its new imaging camera, Hubble can view galaxies, star clusters, and other objects across a wide swath of the electromagnetic spectrum, from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. A new spectrograph slices across billions of light-years to map the filamentary structure of the universe and trace the distribution of elements that are fundamental to life.

The telescope's new instruments also are more sensitive to light and can observe in ways that are significantly more efficient and require less observing time than previous generations of Hubble instruments.

NASA astronauts installed the new instruments during the space shuttle servicing mission in May 2009. Besides adding the instruments, the astronauts also completed a dizzying list of other chores that included performing unprecedented repairs on two other science instruments.

Now that Hubble has reopened for business, it will tackle a whole range of observations. Looking closer to Earth, such observations will include taking a census of the population of Kuiper Belt objects residing at the fringe of our solar system, witnessing the birth of planets around other stars, and probing the composition and structure of the atmospheres of other worlds.

Peering much farther away, astronomers have ambitious plans to use Hubble to make the deepest-ever portrait of the universe in near-infrared light. The resulting picture may reveal never-before-seen infant galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 500 million years old. Hubble also is now significantly more well-equipped to probe and further characterize the behavior of dark energy, a mysterious and little-understood repulsive force that is pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate.

Top 5 2008 Space Moments

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission

During analysis of four safe-mode events this year, engineers for NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter project have identified a vulnerability to the effects of subsequent events. They are currently developing added protection to eliminate this vulnerability while they continue analysis of the string of incidents this year in which the spacecraft has spontaneously rebooted its computer or switched to a backup computer.

The team is keeping the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in a precautionary "safe" mode, with healthy power, temperatures and communications, while continuing analysis and precautions subsequent to the latest rebooting, on Aug. 26. Science observations will likely not resume for several weeks while this preventive care is the mission's priority. The analysis identified one possible but unlikely scenario jeopardizing the spacecraft. This scenario would require two computer resets, each worse than any so far, occurring within several minutes of each other in a certain pattern.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, at Mars since 2006, has met the mission's science goals and returned more data than all other Mars missions combined. It completed its primary science phase of operations in November 2008 but remains an important contributor to science and to future landed missions. Continuing science observations are planned when the spacecraft is brought out of its current precautionary mode.

NASA Webcast Connects Students with Astronauts

WASHINGTON -- NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and space shuttle astronauts will participate in live education webcasts on Sept. 8 at 2 p.m. EDT and Sept. 10 at 1 p.m.

On Sept. 8, students will hear insights from Bolden, young agency professionals, and STS-128 mission astronauts Jose M. Hernandez and John D. Olivas about the challenges and successes of their exciting NASA careers.

On Sept. 10, Bolden will join astronauts from the STS-125 Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission to discuss the flight and newly released images from the observatory. Commander Scott Altman, Shuttle Pilot Greg (Ray J) Johnson and Program Scientist Eric Smith will participate.

Webcasts are produced free of charge by the NASA Digital Learning Network. NASA uses the network's capabilities to deliver unique content by linking students and educators with agency experts. The program provides interactive educational experiences for students and teachers from kindergarten through college across the country and around the world.

NASA Approves X-ray Space Mission

NASA recently confirmed that the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, mission will launch in August 2011. NuSTAR will carry the first high-energy X-ray focusing telescopes into orbit, providing a much deeper, clearer view of energetic phenomena such as black holes and supernova explosions than any previous instrument has provided in this region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

NuSTAR is a NASA Small Explorer mission led by Caltech, managed by JPL, and implemented by an international team of scientists and engineers. Fiona Harrison, a professor of physics and astronomy at Caltech, is the team's principal investigator. The official confirmation follows two years of detailed design and reviews that have enabled NASA to determine that the NuSTAR team is ready to build the flight hardware.

Mission to Mercury

The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced that its latest satellite, called BepiColombo, will travel to Mercury using ion-electric thrusters developed by U.K. Company QinetiQ.

The space agency already uses a smaller version of the same system--made of T5 ion thrusters--aboard its GOCE satellite, which launched previous this year to measure earth's gravitational field. BepiColombo, which is scheduled to launch in 2014, will use four T6 ion thrusters. The company says the thrusters used in both spacecraft are ten times more efficient than traditional chemical ones. ESA awarded QinetiQ a contract worth $37.4 million to build the electric propulsion system.

Though chemical propulsion systems are most commonly used in space, they are incompetent for deep-space missions to planets like Mercury because they require large amounts of fuel. Electric propulsion systems produce less thrust, but they are very efficient, making them ideal for long-distance missions.

Ion propulsion works by electrically charging, or ionizing, a gas and accelerating the resulting ions to propel a spacecraft. The concept was first conceived over 50 years ago, and the first spacecraft to use the technology was Deep Space 1 (DS1) in 1998. Since then, aside from GOCE, there have only been a few other non-commercial spacecrafts that have used ion propulsion: NASA's Dawn mission to the outer solar system, launched in 2007; the Japanese deep space asteroid sample return mission called Hayabusa, launched in 2003; and ESA's SMART-1 spacecraft, launched in 2003 and crashed on the moon in 2006. (There are many commercial communication satellites that use ion thrusters.) NASA recently finished testing a new ion-propulsion system for earth-orbiting and interplanetary spacecraft that could be ready for launch by 2013.

While the technology still needs some fine-tuning, to make these engines even more efficient, compact and economical, many experts say that for complex planetary missions that require lots of energy, ion-electric thrusters are definitely the answer.