Voyager 1 finds unknown region at edge of solar system

From USA Today:  Voyager 1 finds unknown region at edge of solar system

8:18PM EST December 3. 2012 - The Voyager 1 spacecraft is traveling through a previously unknown region of deep space as it heads out of our solar system, which might happen soon, scientists reported Monday.
Voyage and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched in 1977 and will become the first man-made objects to exit our celestial neighborhood -- relatively soon.
"We don't know exactly how long it will take," Edward Stone, a project scientist, told reporters during a teleconference, Space.com reports. "It may take two months, it may take two years."
"We do believe this may be the very last layer between us and interstellar space," he said. "This region was not anticipated, was not predicted."
Both spacecraft, which continue to send data back to Earth, are in the heliosheath, the outermost layer of the heliosphere. That's where the force of interstellar cosmic ray particles slows the solar wind generated by the sun.
Scientists, meeting Monday in San Francisco, dubbed the new region a "magnetic highway," where charged particles from inside and outside the heliosphere flow out and in. NASA posted animations imagining what the Voyagers are experiencing, if the naked-to-the-eye ions could be seen.
The twin probes explored Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus between 1979 and 1989.

 

Malware Swipes Rocket Data From Japanese Space Agency

From RedOrbit:  Malware Swipes Rocket Data From Japanese Space Agency

Information about one of the Japanese space program’s newest rockets was stolen from a desktop computer that had been infected with malware, officials from the organization revealed on Friday.
A computer housed at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center northeast of Tokyo had been discovered compiling data and transmitting it to computers outside of the agency, according to Ars Technica’s Dan Goodin.
The computer was found to be infected and was cleaned on November 21, and no other computers were found to contain malware, Martin Fackler of the New York Times added.
JAXA officials said that it was not clear if the virus was a cyberattack, Fackler said, but Japanese defense firms had been targeted by similar information-stealing programs, including some that had been linked to China.
“The data stolen from the space agency included information about the Epsilon, a solid-fuel rocket still under development,” Fackler said. “While the Epsilon is intended to launch satellite and space probes, solid-fuel rockets of that size can also have a military use as intercontinental ballistic missiles.”
“The Epsilon, whose first launching is scheduled for next autumn, will also feature new technology that will allow it to be remotely controlled by a personal computer,” he added.
Computer-based espionage attacks have become more and more common in recent years, with a vast array of international targets – including private companies, government organizations, and human rights advocacy groups – becoming frequent targets of such cybercrime efforts, Goodin said. In many cases, evidence linking the attacks to Chinese government officials has been uncovered.
“Highly sophisticated malware dubbed Flame, which reportedly was jointly developed by the US and Israeli governments, has also been used to spy on Iran,” he added. “On Friday, researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab, published details on a targeted attack on Syria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

Astronauts Criticize US Space Program

From Voice of America:  Astronauts Criticize US Space Program

CHICAGO — NASA Astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt explored the surface of the moon during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, the last time anyone has left earth's orbit or set foot on the moon.  During a 40th anniversary celebration of Apollo 17 in Chicago, the astronauts said they had expected their mission would  start a path toward space travel, not become a history lesson.

Retired Astronaut Eugene Cernan is one of just twelve men who walked on the moon.  He currently holds the distinction of being the last man there.

"It is tremendously disappointing that I am here 40 years later and still hold that title or have that yoke on my shoulders," said Cernan.

Cernan, along with fellow Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, celebrated the 40th anniversary of the December 1972 mission with fellow astronaut Jim Lovell at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

As they returned to Earth on that long-ago December 19, Schmitt and Cernan didn't expect that 40 years later they would be commemorating it as the end of an era.

"To say that I thought it would be 40 years, or what is really going to turn out to be 50 or 60 years before Americans are back on the moon, I would not have guessed that at all," Schmitt noted.

"A half century ago, we went 250,000 miles, cracked the door open, and never walked through it into the future. The future is still out there," added Cernan.

A plan to return to the moon, which President George W. Bush proposed, was scrapped by President Barack Obama.

Amid deep budget deficits and an economy slowly recovering, U.S. lawmakers are not keen to spend more money on space exploration, something Cernan says is still only a small part of the overall U.S. budget

"We spend one half of one penny of every one of our tax dollars on space, all of space," Cernan noted.

Schmitt, once a U.S. Senator, says there is also a lack of willpower on the part of NASA.

"And from a fiscal point of view, it falls victim to being very small, and to not having a mission based on geopolitical reality, of the importance of the United States being the dominant space faring nation," Schmitt explained.

With the Space Shuttle now retired, the U.S.- based corporation Space X is developing a vehicle that can transport people to and from earth's orbit. A manned crew capsule could be ready in the next few years.

But for veterans of the Apollo program, that's not enough. They believe NASA should prioritize a return to the moon with Mars the ultimate destination. 

 

Who's Killing the Space Program?

From Space Daily: Who's Killing the Space Program?
This past August the U.S. landed a one-ton spacecraft on the surface of Mars. Sending a spacecraft to Mars is not unique in itself, since we have sent several exploration vehicles to the Red Planet over the past five decades.
The latest such mission placed Curiosity Rover on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater.
This very advanced rover system carries instruments that will look for conditions relevant to the past or present habitability of the planet. Over the next few years, Curiosity will explore its landing site while searching for evidence that Mars was once capable of supporting life. Of course, the other question is whether Mars could support life in the future.
About two weeks after Curiosity arrived at Mars, NASA selected InSight as its 12th mission in its Discovery Program. InSight (Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) will carry out a unique geophysical investigation of Mars, looking into its deep interior to see why the Red Planet evolved so differently from Earth.
The mission involves placing instruments on the Martian surface to investigate whether the core of Mars is solid or liquid, and why Mars' crust is not divided into tectonic plates that drift like those of Earth.
Knowledge gained about the interior of Mars in comparison to Earth will help scientists better understand how terrestrial planets form and evolve.
However, Curiosity is certainly far and away the most complex vehicle to reach Mars, and it may be the last of the rovers for decades to come. Given the trend in space exploration budgets and the economy in general, it is unlikely NASA will be able to afford any future missions of this scale until such time that astronauts are sent to the planet. Since there is no urgency to do this, it will be at least decades before the U.S. will mount a human expedition to Mars.
NASA does have one other Mars mission planned to occur between Curiosity and InSight. It is a modest orbiter called MAVEN, slated for launch next year to study the planet's atmosphere.
Other modest missions may be funded in the interim decades ahead, but budget cuts and ongoing indecision at NASA regarding future missions suggests it could be a decade or more before any NASA mission touches down on the Red Planet's surface beyond InSight.
NASA had agreed to work with the European Space Agency (ESA) on a joint series of missions called ExoMars. However, when the Obama administration released its fiscal year 2013 budget proposal last February, there were no funds for NASA participation in ExoMars. That decision also included a proposed 20-percent cut in NASA's overall planetary sciences program.
Surely, part of the reason for the proposed cuts is the fact that the Curiosity Rover mission saw its costs increase from initial estimates of about $1.6 billion in 2006 to $2.5 billion by 2012.
In addition the original 2009 launch slipped to 2011. NASA's science program has also been squeezed by the increasing costs of other complex missions, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which now has an estimated cost of $8 billion.
So, who is killing the space program? The answer seems to be: everyone involved. Program managers and contractors underestimate program costs. Politicians don't have a mandate to spend large amounts of money on space exploration in the current budget environment.
NASA is not creating enough public excitement and interest in these programs to demand that congress fund them. The space community is not innovating new, low-cost missions of importance. There seems to be a general malaise among the space "movers and shakers."
The simple truth seems to be that space exploration has matured to the point where public interest levels have fallen while costs have risen to extreme heights.

Project Orion: Why Space Exploration Should Go Nuclear

From Urban Times:  Project Orion: Why Space Exploration Should Go Nuclear

The Orion spacecraft. Via Wikipedia

The human race, as it has always been, is on course for extinction. The Sun will lumber through its life cycle and, in the process of this, will engulf the Earth and destroy everything on it. This isn’t exactly new information and it’s one of the reasons why the continuing development of space exploration is essential to the survival of our species (and all others bound to this planet for that matter). One day, for whatever reason, without the creation of an invulnerable shield and a way to get energy without the Sun, we will have to leave this Solar System.

A design for Orion Pulse Unit. Via Wikipedia

This idea was slightly covered in xkcd’s “What If” weekly post entitled Everybody Out. This piece attempted to answer the question of whether or not there is enough energy to remove the entire population off of Earth. After some calculations in regards to the use of chemical propulsion (ie the same technology we use now to launch satellites and spaceships), just to move the weight of all the people (not including the rocket, fuel or anything else) we would need 8 petawatt-hours, or 5% of the world’s annual energy consumption.

. One of the fundamental issues surrounding [rocket science] is the fact that rockets need to carry the weight of the fuel itself.

Rocket science, as you probably know, is not exactly simple. One of the fundamental issues surrounding it is the fact that rockets need to carry the weight of the fuel itself. This suggest the creation of a never ending loop of increasing the necessary amount of fuel to carry the increasing overall weight due to extra fuel. This problem is solved using calculations based on the fact that the weight of the ship will decrease as fuel is burnt. As you can imagine, it is not the most efficient of methods.
At the end of the “What If” piece, we are given an estimation for the amount of fuel necessary to lift the entire weight of the population (roughly 400 million tons of flesh, bones and hair) would amount to tens of trillions of tons of fuel.It would take up a huge proportion of all hydrocarbon fuels on the planet. Of course, you could suggest we could use alternative fuels, but we still have to consider the weight for the ship, water, food and anything else we’d like to bring (xkcd’s article points out that there are about a million tons of pet dog just in the US). The article sums its verdict up with this sentence, “It’s not necessarily completely impossible, but it’s certainly outside the realm of plausibility.”
Obviously, the above example is taking things to the extreme, but it highlights the point that current propulsion systems are generally not that great. In the event of a global exodus, we would have to leave a hell of a lot of people behind without some new technology or, in this case, the revival of an old one.  In my opinion, the most viable alternative is also the one that sounds the most insane. It is the idea that we should launch ourselves into space by riding the shock waves of nuclear bombs.
Led by physicists Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson, Project Orion began in 1958 and is a perfect example of how close madness and genius become. The idea of nuclear propulsion was first proposed by Stanislaw Ulam way back in 1946. A year later, Ulam and F. Reines made the first calculations. The project came to end in 1963 in response to a lack of political support due to fears of nuclear fallout and the introduction of the Partial Test Ban Treaty. Admittedly, in a world continuously in fear of all-out nuclear war, the idea of propelling spaceships with radioactive bombs was hard for people to get behind.
So how does it work? You would expect anything within the vicinity of a nuclear explosion would be destroyed, but not in this case. Project Orion designed a shield that would be able to harness the propulsion of the shockwave and thus keep itself ahead of the explosion itself. On the face of it, it is a pretty simple concept. Of course meticulous calculations had to be done to get a viable design completed. Dyson was very hopeful about this project saying, “…a Saturn V bears the same relation to an Orion ship as the majestic airships of the 1930’s bore to the Boeing 707”.
Why would an Orion spaceship be so much better? Well, it is the fact that it can combine a high exhaust velocity with massive levels of thrust, which is something rocket propulsions cannot do easily. This means a nuclear propulsion system is by far much more efficient and requires significantly less fuel as seen in this table looking at possible payload weights demonstrates:
:

As you can see, as the journey length increases the Saturn V rocket becomes more and more laughable. Of course, you might say that the Saturn V is out of date and that surely more modern rockets perform better. Well, in fact,  to this day, the Saturn V holds the record for the heaviest launch vehicle payload. If ever tested, an Orion spaceship would have blown it out of the water.

Governments should be investing more and more in viable interplanetary technology

It is a shame the project was discontinued when it was. It was clearly a visionary idea that would have revolutionised space travel for the future. What’s the problem with a bit of fallout when the Earth is going to be destroyed? Dyson managed to work out the essentials for lifting 8,000,000 tons (easily the weight of a city) into space using Orion methods. This could easily be achieved considering the stockpiles of nuclear weapons around the world. Carl Sagan himself made the point that it would be a good way to use them up.
The solution to saving mankind is the thing that came closest to ending it. Governments should be investing more and more in viable interplanetary technology and I would wager that nuclear propulsion is our best shot. Paranoid fears about radiation should be dismissed can considered in a more reasoned way. We should not be eschewing technology because of outdated Cold War fears.

The Orion spacecraft. Via Wikipedia

The human race, as it has always been, is on course for extinction. The Sun will lumber through its life cycle and, in the process of this, will engulf the Earth and destroy everything on it. This isn’t exactly new information and it’s one of the reasons why the continuing development of space exploration is essential to the survival of our species (and all others bound to this planet for that matter). One day, for whatever reason, without the creation of an invulnerable shield and a way to get energy without the Sun, we will have to leave this Solar System.

A design for Orion Pulse Unit. Via Wikipedia

This idea was slightly covered in xkcd’s “What If” weekly post entitled Everybody Out. This piece attempted to answer the question of whether or not there is enough energy to remove the entire population off of Earth. After some calculations in regards to the use of chemical propulsion (ie the same technology we use now to launch satellites and spaceships), just to move the weight of all the people (not including the rocket, fuel or anything else) we would need 8 petawatt-hours, or 5% of the world’s annual energy consumption.

. One of the fundamental issues surrounding [rocket science] is the fact that rockets need to carry the weight of the fuel itself.

Rocket science, as you probably know, is not exactly simple. One of the fundamental issues surrounding it is the fact that rockets need to carry the weight of the fuel itself. This suggest the creation of a never ending loop of increasing the necessary amount of fuel to carry the increasing overall weight due to extra fuel. This problem is solved using calculations based on the fact that the weight of the ship will decrease as fuel is burnt. As you can imagine, it is not the most efficient of methods.
At the end of the “What If” piece, we are given an estimation for the amount of fuel necessary to lift the entire weight of the population (roughly 400 million tons of flesh, bones and hair) would amount to tens of trillions of tons of fuel.It would take up a huge proportion of all hydrocarbon fuels on the planet. Of course, you could suggest we could use alternative fuels, but we still have to consider the weight for the ship, water, food and anything else we’d like to bring (xkcd’s article points out that there are about a million tons of pet dog just in the US). The article sums its verdict up with this sentence, “It’s not necessarily completely impossible, but it’s certainly outside the realm of plausibility.”
Obviously, the above example is taking things to the extreme, but it highlights the point that current propulsion systems are generally not that great. In the event of a global exodus, we would have to leave a hell of a lot of people behind without some new technology or, in this case, the revival of an old one.  In my opinion, the most viable alternative is also the one that sounds the most insane. It is the idea that we should launch ourselves into space by riding the shock waves of nuclear bombs.
Led by physicists Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson, Project Orion began in 1958 and is a perfect example of how close madness and genius become. The idea of nuclear propulsion was first proposed by Stanislaw Ulam way back in 1946. A year later, Ulam and F. Reines made the first calculations. The project came to end in 1963 in response to a lack of political support due to fears of nuclear fallout and the introduction of the Partial Test Ban Treaty. Admittedly, in a world continuously in fear of all-out nuclear war, the idea of propelling spaceships with radioactive bombs was hard for people to get behind.
So how does it work? You would expect anything within the vicinity of a nuclear explosion would be destroyed, but not in this case. Project Orion designed a shield that would be able to harness the propulsion of the shockwave and thus keep itself ahead of the explosion itself. On the face of it, it is a pretty simple concept. Of course meticulous calculations had to be done to get a viable design completed. Dyson was very hopeful about this project saying, “…a Saturn V bears the same relation to an Orion ship as the majestic airships of the 1930’s bore to the Boeing 707”.
Why would an Orion spaceship be so much better? Well, it is the fact that it can combine a high exhaust velocity with massive levels of thrust, which is something rocket propulsions cannot do easily. This means a nuclear propulsion system is by far much more efficient and requires significantly less fuel as seen in this table looking at possible payload weights demonstrates:
:

As you can see, as the journey length increases the Saturn V rocket becomes more and more laughable. Of course, you might say that the Saturn V is out of date and that surely more modern rockets perform better. Well, in fact,  to this day, the Saturn V holds the record for the heaviest launch vehicle payload. If ever tested, an Orion spaceship would have blown it out of the water.

Governments should be investing more and more in viable interplanetary technology

It is a shame the project was discontinued when it was. It was clearly a visionary idea that would have revolutionised space travel for the future. What’s the problem with a bit of fallout when the Earth is going to be destroyed? Dyson managed to work out the essentials for lifting 8,000,000 tons (easily the weight of a city) into space using Orion methods. This could easily be achieved considering the stockpiles of nuclear weapons around the world. Carl Sagan himself made the point that it would be a good way to use them up.
The solution to saving mankind is the thing that came closest to ending it. Governments should be investing more and more in viable interplanetary technology and I would wager that nuclear propulsion is our best shot. Paranoid fears about radiation should be dismissed can considered in a more reasoned way. We should not be eschewing technology because of outdated Cold War fears.

 

Dark matter detector nearing activation in SD mine

From Yahoo News:  Dark matter detector nearing activation in SD mine

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — Scientists hoping to detect dark matter deep in a former South Dakota gold mine have taken the last major step before flipping the switch on their delicate experiment and say they may be ready to begin collecting data as early as February.

What's regarded as the world's most sensitive dark matter detector was lowered earlier this month into a 70,000-gallon water tank nearly a mile beneath the earth's surface, shrouding it in enough insulation to hopefully isolate dark matter from the cosmic radiation that makes it impossible to detect above ground.

And if all goes as planned, the data that begins flowing could answer age-old questions about the universe and its origins, scientists said Monday.

"We might well uncover something fantastic," said Harry Nelson, a professor of physics at University of California, Santa Barbara and a principal investigator on the Large Underground Xenon experiment. "One thing about our field is that it's kind of brutal in that we know it's expensive and we work hard to only do experiments that are really important."

This one hasn't been cheap, at about $10 million, but like the discovery of the Higgs boson — dubbed the "God particle" by some — earlier this year in Switzerland, the detection of dark matter would be a seismic occurrence in the scientific community.

Scientists know dark matter exists by its gravitational pull but, unlike regular matter and antimatter, it's so far been undetectable. Regular matter accounts for about 4 percent of the universe's mass, and dark matter makes up about 25 percent. The rest is dark energy, which is also a mystery.

The search in South Dakota began in 2003 after the Homestake Gold Mine in the Black Hills' Lead, S.D., shuttered for good. Scientists called dibs on the site, and in July, after years of fundraising and planning, the LUX detector moved into the Sanford Underground Research Facility, 4,850 feet below the earth's surface. It took two days to ease the phone booth-sized detector down the once-filthy shaft and walkways that originally opened for mining in 1876 during the Black Hills Gold Rush.

There, the device was further insulated from cosmic radiation by being submerged in water that's run through reverse osmosis filters to deionize and clean it.
"The construction phase is winding down, and now we're starting the commissioning phase, meaning we start to operate the systems underground," said Jeremy Mock, a graduate student at the University of California, Davis who has worked on the LUX experiment for five years.
Carefully submerging the delicate detector into its final home — a water-filled vat that's 20 feet tall and 25 feet in diameter — took more than two months, Mock said.
Scientists are currently working to finish the plumbing needed to keep the xenon as clean as possible. The xenon, in both liquid and gas form, will fill the detector and be continuously circulated through a purifier that works much like a dialysis machine, pulling the substance out to remove impurities before pushing it back into the detector.
Keeping the water and xenon pristine will help remove what Nelson called "fake sources" — or stuff that scientists have seen before, such as radiation, that could serve as false alarms in their efforts to detect dark matter.
Nelson likens the experiment to Sherlock Holmes' approach to discovering the unknown by eliminating the known.

Once the data start to flow, it'll take a month or two before the detector is sensitive enough to claim the "most-sensitive" title, Nelson said.

After that, the scientists involved hope to start seeing what they covet most: something they've never seen before.

 

Lunar ‘Water Rush’: Robots May Search For Water On The Moon

From Red Orbit:  Lunar ‘Water Rush’: Robots May Search For Water On The Moon

The prospect of finding frozen water on the moon has several companies scrambling to stake a claim in “them thar lunar hills.”
“This is like the gold rush that led to the settlement of California,” said Phil Metzger, a physicist who leads the Granular Mechanics and Regolith Operations Lab, part of Kennedy Space Center’s Surface Systems Office. “This is the water rush.”
Water has already been found on asteroids and its discovery on the moon represents a top prize for NASA’s exploration plans because the resource has so many potential uses for wayfaring astronauts. Comprised of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, water can be turned into everything from rocket fuel to a source of fresh air and water.
One of the companies leading the charge to mine the moon is the Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology. The company is currently in the midst of developing a solar-powered rover designed to search and drill for the frozen water.
“Our intent is to land on the surface of the moon in October 2015 and find water,” said the president of Astrobotic, John Thornton, alluding to his company’s recent deal with SpaceX to launch a lander and rover on a Falcon 9 rocket.
Thornton added that a number of competitors have sprung up and this shows the potential for landing a robotic explorer is real.
“If we were doing something really big and no one else was trying to do it, then it might not be that big,” he said.
Human visitors to the lunar surface never found signs of frozen water as they walked along the moon’s equator between 1969 and 1972. Water has never been found in any rock or soil samples ever collected from the moon. Within the past 15 years, several probes found signs frozen water not only exists on the moon, but that it is quite pervasive.
Scientists are also curious to find out if any frozen water is in the form of a powder, like the type skiers plow through as they swish down a mountainside, or if it’s completely solid ice. Some scientists expect to find evidence of water seeping down between granules of soil and freezing to create rocks as hard as granite.
“Our best guess is it’s going to be the ice,” Thornton said. “Probably small little pieces of ice mixed in with the regolith.”
According to an official statement on the NASA website, the agency is excited about the chances to use a new resource for deep space exploration.
For its part, Astrobotic said it wants to use the robotic prospector to map where the largest deposits of water and other helpful chemicals are located. The company could then use the information to efficiently extract the materials from the moon. According to Thornton, there are no plans to send water or other lunar samples back to the Earth.
“The beauty of sending a robot is they don’t demand a return ticket,” Thornton said. “Once we know where the water is and what form it is in, we can develop systems to produce it in useable quantities. Water is a critical resource because you can drink it, breathe it and use it for rocket fuel.”