The Japanese space program is doing some cool shit in the way of interplanetary spacecraft, and I have to hand it to them. I’m primarily impressed by their sheer ambition, launching bleeding edge missions that the more conservative NASA would tend to work their way up to. With previous interplanetary experience consisting of a couple probes to Halley’s Comet in the 80s and the Nozomi Mars orbiter in the 90s, JAXA launched Hayabusa seven years ago, on a sample collection mission to asteroid Itokawa.
This was the first attempted asteroid sample return mission by any nation. It was also powered by electric ion propulsion, a still fairly new technology that provides a long (years) but light push with little fuel mass compared to chemical rockets, and could autonomously navigate. After reaching the asteroid in 2005, it commenced trying to capture a sample, but here is where things started going wrong.
There were a couple brief landings but it didn’t seem that the pellet gun fired to cause debris to be captured. Also, a separate mini-lander called MINERVA was released too far from the surface. (Again – trying a lot of new things on one mission. And the mini-lander seems straight out of some Anime plot) Due to some malfunctions, getting the probe back to Earth has taken 5 years of Apollo 13 style engineering improvisation. Failing attitude control gyros were compensated for by angling the solar panels to surf the solar wind. Intermittent functioning of the 4 ion engines required constant navigational changes and (somehow) re-routing of components from two of the engines to allow operation of one.
All this resulted in the successful re-entry of the sample return capsule on Sunday. In the great video below, the capsule is at lower right, while the rest of the spacecraft is disintegrating behind it. Now we wait to find out if there was actually any sample dust inside.
As if that we’re impressive enough, JAXA just launched a solar sail demonstrator mission called IKAROS which has unfurled it’s sail successfully. This is the first functioning solar sail to be deployed – which relies on the radiation pressure of sunlight to provide propulsion. Solar panels are integrated into the sail, as well as variable reflectance patches for steering (this is crazy). And if that’s not enough for you, IKAROS released a small camera module to grab the below image of itself, relayed back to IKAROS wirelessly.
Let me take you back to an era before computer control of all aspects of spaceflight was considered necessary. It’s the early 70s, and although additional flights after Apollo 17 were eventually canceled, there were at the time plans afoot for longer duration stays on the lunar surface. However, a longer stay entailed an increase risk that the LEM ascent engine would not ignite when the time came to return to orbit.
What would the two surface bound astronauts do? Would they wait for a rescue mission? No. They would unstow a wire-frame with small thrusters and collapsible fuel bladders from the LEM.
They would then transfer the ascent stage fuel to these bladders, and climb onto a perch on top, with life support supplied only by their space suits. They would then ignite their small rockets, and arc into the sky, guided to a rendevous with the command module only by an attitude indicator, a clock, and a list of desired pitches and times.
Once the pitch and time sequence was complete and they were in orbit, they would sit tight and pray they matched the checklist close enough that the CSM could find them before they ran out of oxygen.
It seems impossible that such a guts-only scenario would come up in the future. Imagine riding from the surface to an orbital rendezvous on essentially a jetpack, holding a joystick and a stopwatch.
I love this.
Or more accurately – it *is* water. Every exoplanet report that reaches the traditional media tends to be exaggerated to feed the desire for an exciting story, and I think the net result is that the typical dispassionate observer may have concluded several times by now that earth like planets have been found. For example, the findings that Gliese 581d and e may or may not be in the ‘habitable zone’ of their star triggered similar earth-like stories. Now this new discovery of a 6.5 Earth mass ball of hot ice is throwing similar keywords.
However my favorite part of the article is this:
<blockquote>a planet 2.7 times bigger than Earth, circling a dim red star called GJ 1214, just 40 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus.</blockquote>
Yes, it’s *only* 40 light-years away, we can just stroll over there. And how to decide whether to use the mass or radius when reporting how much “bigger” it is? Let’s use the smaller number to increase the earth-like excitement!
If you don’t have a 10-inch telescope to see LCROSS impact the moon tomorrow morning at 7:31 EST, there are some other options. NASA has a good page with links, including NASA TV and timing information. NASA should have a live feed from the trailing LCROSS shepard spacecraft. Also, SLOOH is providing a free live feed from their telescope.
This is crazy. On the last shuttle mission, a work light knob was loose and floating between the instruments and a window. On landing the shuttle contracts and it’s wedged in there now damaging the window. They can’t get it out, and they think it will take 6 months to dissassemble that section of the orbiter. Since they’re supposed to stop flying in a year, it’s not clear if they’ll bother.
A new article from space.com sheds some revealing light on the recent collision of an Iridium satellite with a defunct Soviet military satellite.
I think there was a common impression that Norad would pick up the phone and call operators if they saw an impending collision so that they could maneuver to avoid it. It seems though, that the actual state of affairs is much different.
The US Air Force publishes orbital elements, which are apparently not that accurate. In the linked article it states that the French space agency uses additional ground based radars to refine estimates if a probability looks too high. In the case of the Iridium satellite, the collision probability was 1 in 10,000 which gives an idea of the accuracy.
The Air Force does detailed analysis for human spaceflight, but for random commercial satellites, it’s up to the operator to use the orbital elements to determine a course of action.
Instead of the idea that operators are always maneuvering to avoid collisions, my new picture of the state of affairs is that a lot of satellites are pretty much flying blind and could collide at any time. The Iridium orbit, for instance is now polluted with a lot of debris that makes additional collisions more likely. The idea of a runaway chain reaction of increasing debris doesn’t seem very far fetched.
A project has been set up which monitors the astrometry tag on flickr and hashes photos to determine what in the sky is being looked at. Not only does it add annotations for notable objects to the photo, it will allow compilation of a growing set of located images. Apparently a rotation invariant hashing algorithm was used. This essentially means that the image is converted into a hash code, that will be the same no matter what rotation the image was taken in.
This has to be the coolest picture NASA has produced in awhile. It’s a shot from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter of the Phoenix lander descending toward the surface under it’s parachute. The original image that was released was a close-up, but apparently Phoenix was floating past this picturesque crater at the time. Live mission status can be had at Spaceflight Now.
The Clear Sky Clock shows overhead viewing conditions for astronomers with a unique graphical presentation of the information. Created with data from Environment Canada, time is laid out horizontally, and colored squares indicate cloud cover, transparency, and darkness through the next 48 hours. Nice, simple information design.
Galaxy Zoo is a project which is enlisting the eyes and minds of the public to help classify a large number of galaxies present in sky survey images. It’s fun for a few minutes, and would be great for kids, as they can learn about science while making a concrete contribution. Do galaxies prefer to rotate in one direction than another? Help gather the data to find out.
