Kentucky Space

Hitching an Asteroid ride to Mars

Finishing a conference in Italy on outer solar system and deep space exploration, Paul Gilster reports on one of the many papers he pledges to blog about in the future - using near Earth objects (NEOs), asteroids in this case, as convenient transfer points:

"The idea here is that the astronauts can use the NEO as a radiation shield, digging in to its surface and exploiting its resources on the way to the red planet. Greg presented a table showing candidate objects that could fill the bill, including two — 1999YR14 and 2007EE26 — that have one Earth-Mars transit time amounting to one year or less."

See the entire post at the highly recommended blog Centauri Dreams.

Reading Paul's entry, my mind immediately wandered to the mission to the moon Phobos, which may or may not be an asteroid captured by Mars, and the Rosetta mission to orbit and land on Comet 67 P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. Rosetta has already flown past the asteroid 2867-Steins (video is available on YouTube) and will encounter 21-Lutetia at roughly this time next year.

And the artist's image of the lander, Philae, lashed to the comet (above) has to be one of my favorite space images ever. Click to enlarge.

Now for a bit of housekeeping: Kentucky Space blog will be on hold for the next week as I spend some time away from the computer monitor on vacation with my family. See you a bit later.

Wayne

Credits: ESA, image by AOES Medialab

Space prize roundup

Space Prizes has a series of posts this month on a variety of space-related competitions and awards. Check it out.

Wayne

Space

"Free Spirit" update

JPL has just posted this video on YouTube about its efforts to free a stuck Spirit on Mars using a sandbox on Earth.

Wayne

Mars

Innovative picosats to fly on Endeavor, Saturday launch scheduled

Laden with an addition to Japan's Kibo lab that will function as a kind of "space porch" for experiments that need the exposure to space and the first of four innovative missions that could culminate in the autonomous docking of picosatellites, Endeavor is now set for launch on Saturday.

Wayne

CubeSat, picosat, space shuttle

110th Carnival of Space - the Phobos-Grunt, Liberty and Pants-on-Fire edition

Thanks Fraser for giving Kentucky Space a chance to host the Carnival of Space for a third time!

Two quick updates on Kentucky Space before we get to the action. First, we just finished a week-long program at the brand new Morehead State University space sciences facility that featured guest lectures from Bob Twiggs, familiarization of a new round of competitively-selected Kentucky Space students with the technologies developed for KySat-1 and plenty of night sky viewing.

Second, we continue to fly stuff. Graduate assistant student Samir Rawashdeh sent the following information about an upcoming Wallops suborbital mission in support of KySat-1, which we hope will go to orbit early next year.

ADAMASAT is the Antenna Deployment and Mono-filament Actuator Satellite. It's a sub-orbital payload by Kentucky Space scheduled to be launched this summer. With about 8 minutes in space, it will test the KySat-1 antenna deployment mechanism and actuator circuit. The idea is to gain confidence of the antenna deployment mechanism that consists of a mono-filament wire wrapped around the satellite to hold down it's antennas, and a Nichrome cutter that burns the monofilament line to release the antennas. ADAMASAT will perform four tests of this mechanism while in space.

I'll keep you posted. You can also follow us on twitter.

Now, on to the rest of the Carnival!

At Cosmic Log, Alan Boyle pointed out Moonshots on your computer: Top 10 Apollo Web sites and asks you to get out your red glasses for a look at Space in 3-D.

21st Century Waves asks, "Was the 1960s Apollo Moon Program an Anomaly?" It's incredible - and incredibly sad - to think that no humans have ventured beyond Earth orbit since 1972. But the optimist in me says that it's only a matter of time.

For a welcome change in perspective, Lounge of the Lab Lemming shows us where Earth will appear to Martian astronomers.

And Nancy Atkinson, Senior Editor at Universe Today says that even though Spirit is stuck in loose soil and going nowhere, she's making the most of her boost in energy from a wind event that cleaned off her solar panels. This has provided enough energy to keep her "awake" with her heaters running at night to take observations of the twilight and night sky, something she did previously, back in 2005.

Now that Spirit and Opportunity have spent the majority of their existence on the Red Planet, are they the first Martians?

Long before the current LRO/LCROSS mission to the moon, David S. F. Portree writes that NASA had planned for "eight automated spacecraft to the moon by 1991, including four automated moon rovers, two of which might launch to Earth the first samples from the moon's hidden far side." Check out Portree's "LPO" history - it's a great read.

In "Crescent Moon," thespacewriter wonders how long it would have taken us to figure out that other worlds exist if we had inhabited a planet without a moon.

Though Constellation as it's currently constituted could be in some doubt, NASA is still working on Orion. At Astroengine, Ian O'Neill writes about the seat shock absorbers being developed for the crewed vehicle and posts a smashing picture.

Cheap Astronomy provides a podcast on a new Russian interplanetary mission with grunt - that's Phobos-Grunt.

David Bigwood points out that the latest issue of the Lunar and Planetary Information Bulletin is now available, and that Selenology Today now has an RSS feed.

Astronomers have discovered a young binary star system in the process of forming planets according to Phil Plait, who wonders what kind of life and view any future inhabitants of those worlds might have.

Centauri Dreams contributed "Of Technological Lifetimes and Survival" to this week's carnival. Paul Gilster speculates on the survivability of long term digital data storage. The trend of technology is not necessarily always be up - we've experienced 'dark ages' before. Let's hope we never need a Digital Rosetta Stone.

Linking to the very cool JPL small-body orbit simulator, Mang's Bat Page says "forget stars." The easiest way for amateur astronomers to name a celestial object is to discover an asteroid. Check out "Pet Rocks? Naming things in Space".

At one point, all of the normal matter in the entire Universe was just free protons, electrons and neutrons. How did we get all the elements we know and love, from Helium up through Plutonium?  From two sources, according to Ethan Siegel: the big bang and from stars.

Discovery Channel blogger and news director for the Hubble Space Telescope, Ray Villard, hands out his first Pants-on-Fire Award over video allegations that there is a hidden alien moon base, while Astroinfo has much more credible July-August Night Sky information.

And, finally, technology blog Nextbigfuture has more on space-based solar power and the concept behind a reactor with almost zero nuclear waste and unspent fuel.

That's it for the 110th Carnival of Space. If I've left anyone out, it was entirely inadvertent. Please leave a note in the comments. And please come back frequently to Kentucky Space blog for the latest on our grass roots space program!

Wayne

Astrobiology on Earth

Paul Gilster follows up on a story I first saw at MSNBC describing how microbial life can make the iciest and most inhospitable places home. Project SLIce (Signatures of Life in Ice) studies how organic material might behave on other worlds by studying here it on Earth - and it's yielded some useful information.

An early SLIce result, described at the Goldschmidt2009 geochemistry meeting in Davos last week: The best place to look for microorganisms in ice is in the layers close to the surface. That’s good to know, because a planetary rover is going to be able to sample such environments much more readily than those several meters beneath. Also helpful is the team’s discovery that cleaning the rover’s sample scoop is harder than it looks, leaving dead micro-organisms on it even after it had apparently been sterilized. New procedures have resolved the problem, ensuring we don’t inadvertently ‘discover’ Earth organisms that have found their way along for the ride.

Wayne

Four CubeSats set soon for launch on Indian PSLV

An August launch will take four more cubesats to orbit aboard an Indian PSLV, according to this news item.

Besides Rubin 9.1 and Rubin 9.2 nano satellites from Germany, the four cubesats lined up for the mission on board India's workhorse rocket Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle are: Beesat, built by Technical University Berlin, UWE-2 (University of Wuerzburg Germany), ITU-pSat (Istanbul Technical University Turkey) and SwissCube-1 (Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, Switzerland).

According to southgatearc.org, BeeSat "will demonstrate the use of coin sized micro reaction wheels for attitude control of pico satellites in orbit...." More about SwissCube may be found here. There is also some video available on YouTube, here and here.

Wayne

CubeSat

109th Carnival of Space posted

The latest Carnival of Space has been posted at Jennifer Ouelette's Discovery Channel blog, Twisted Physics.

Wayne

Space

Bob Twiggs lecturing Kentucky Space students at Morehead St. this week

The incoming class of Kentucky Space students will be at Morehead State University's brand new Space Sciences Facility for an immersive introduction to KySat ground ops and spacecraft design this week. MSU is the home of a 21-meter astrophysics and space tracking antenna.

In addition to Kentucky Space faculty and presentations from current students, Bob Twiggs will be attending and lecturing on spacecraft design.

Wayne

Incenting space technologies

Citing the potential demise of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, The Launch Pad points out that funding for NASA's Centennial Challenge program could be zeroed out.

To reduce the budget for these programs to zero would be to allow a great opportunity to pass. Each of these three programs provides an incredibly amount of value to NASA, and helps stimulate the American economy by creating or retaining high tech employment opportunities. To cite one example among many, the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, one of seven incentive prizes offered by the Centennial Challenges programs, encourages innovative American teams to develop, build, and perfect vertical takeoff and landing rocket technology of the sort that will provide tangible benefits both to NASAs return to the Moon and to a variety of other civil, commercial, and military space applications. To date, NASA has paid out $350,000; and with the X PRIZE Foundation, the Northrop Grumman Corporation, and their partners supplying the operational funding, that $350,000 is a close representation of the total cost of the program to date. For that amount of money, NASA has incentivized approximately 75,000 person hours and the equivalent of about $12,000,000 in research and development--an astonishing 35-to-1 return on each taxpayer dollar invested to date. Along the way, teams have developed impressive subsystems, helped improved our nation's regulatory regime, and generated unique data for engineers.

Jeff Foust has an update.

Wayne