Fwd: NASA and Human Spaceflight News - Friday – December 12, 2014

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From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: December 12, 2014 at 11:09:00 AM CST
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: NASA and Human Spaceflight News - Friday – December 12, 2014

Happy Friday and have a safe and great weekend everyone.  One more loss added since yesterdays update

RETIREMENT

JSC

BR111

FTP

ANUMELE, MATRENIA

02/03/15

 

NASA and Human Spaceflight News

Friday – December 12, 2014

HEADLINES AND LEADS

House Narrowly Passes FY2015 Funding Bill and Two-Day CR

Marcia S. Smith - Spacepolicyonline.com

The House approved the FY2015 "cromnibus" spending package tonight by a vote of 219-206. The Senate still must act on the measure so the House also passed another Continuing Resolution (CR) to extend government funding for two more days, through midnight Saturday. The Senate quickly passed the two-day CR, averting a government shutdown tonight.

Launch of SpaceX's CRS-5 mission to ISS slips to no-earlier-than Dec. 19

Jason Rhian – Spaceflight Insider

The planned Dec. 16, 2014 launch of a Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX ) Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket and its Dragon spacecraft – has been delayed three days - to no-earlier-than Dec. 19, 2014. NASA has stated the cause for this most recent delay was caused to ensure that everything possible was done while the booster was on the ground to ensure success and that at present both the falcon 9 and Dragon cargo vessel were in good health. This latest slip was noted on the website for the United States Air Force's 45th Space Wing.

The Times on Mars

David Corcoran – The New York Times

On Tuesday, the Science desk published a special section about Mars. David Corcoran, the editor of the Science Times section, describes how the section came together.

NASA To Weigh Several Factors in Decision on Asteroid Mission Option

Jeff Foust – Space News

 

NASA will weigh several factors when it makes a Dec. 16 decision on a plan for its Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), including how well each option supports later human missions to Mars, according to the agency official who will make that decision.

 

Tested, tempered, triumphant – Orion begins the long journey home

Jason Rhian – Spaceflight Insider

NASA's Orion spacecraft, fresh off the heels of its successful first flight on Dec. 5 – is on its way back to the space agency's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Engineers have already started to look at the capsule-shaped craft's heat shield – and the precious information within its data recorders. Exploration Flight Test 1 or "EFT-1" – was touted as a mission flown to teach those working on the spacecraft how it would behave in the extreme environment of space. As noted, technicians have removed samples from the heat shield so as to study its ablation rates and in so doing marked the spacecraft's second voyage - home - as well as efforts by those working on Orion to learn the important lessons taught by the flight of EFT-1.

NASA's Chief Scientist: The Future of Space Exploration Is International Partnerships

Ariel Bogle - Slate.com

Ellen Stofan, NASA's chief scientist, saw her first rocket launch at age 4, thanks to her father's job at NASA as an engineer. But at a Future Tense film screening of The Dish in Washington, D.C., last week, Stofan said that for many people she meets, what first sparked a space obsession was the Apollo program—President John F. Kennedy's audacious commitment in 1961 to putting Americans on the moon before the end of the decade.

 

The Age of Asteroids

Jonathan Blitzer – The New Yorker

Brian May, the longtime guitarist of the rock band Queen, is also an astrophysicist. He started his career, in 1970, as a Ph.D. student at Imperial College, London, but four years later, after Queen released its second album, he put his studies on hold. In 2008, he finally finished his doctorate, with a thesis on zodiacal light, the faint patch of interstellar radiance that's sometimes visible on the horizon at night. Last Wednesday, May joined Lord Martin Rees, the U.K.'s Astronomer Royal, at London's Science Museum to discuss asteroids and the threats they pose to life on Earth.

Are Habitable Binary Planets Possible?

Ian O'Neill - Space.com

As we seek-out planets orbiting stars inside their habitable zones, astronomical techniques are becoming so sophisticated that, one day, we may be able to probe the atmosphere of a distant exo-Earth — i.e. a rocky exoplanet possessing liquid water on its surface with potential biosignatures in its atmosphere.

Could Ancient Mars Have Supported Life? Water Isn't the Only Key

Mike Wall - Space.com

Ancient Mars featured flowing rivers and sizable lakes — but that doesn't mean the Red Planet definitely could have supported life, one prominent researcher stresses.

Soggy space rocks brought water to young moon

Jeff Hecht - New Scientist

 

The moon is thought to have formed when a Mars-sized object smashed into the early Earth about 20 to 100 million years after the solar system coalesced. The heat from this impact should have left the moon drier than a bone, so Alberto Saal at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and his colleagues were surprised when they found 50 parts per million of water trapped inside tiny spheres of lunar volcanic glass in 2008.

COMPLETE STORIES

House Narrowly Passes FY2015 Funding Bill and Two-Day CR

Marcia S. Smith - Spacepolicyonline.com

The House approved the FY2015 "cromnibus" spending package tonight by a vote of 219-206. The Senate still must act on the measure so the House also passed another Continuing Resolution (CR) to extend government funding for two more days, through midnight Saturday. The Senate quickly passed the two-day CR, averting a government shutdown tonight.

The cromnibus is a mix of a CR and an omnibus appropriations bill. A CR provides funding for a short period of time at the previous year's level. An omnibus consolidates several regular full-year appropriations bills into a single legislative package. This bill combines full year appropriations for departments and agencies in 11 of the 12 regular appropriations bills (including NASA, NOAA and DOD) with a short term CR for the 12th (the Department of Homeland Security-DHS). Funding DHS only through February 27, 2015, is intended to signal Republican dissatisfaction with President Obama's executive order on immigration. Immigration is part of DHS.

The battle over the cromnibus was intense and at times its passage seemed in jeopardy. The final vote was 219-206. Voting in favor were 162 Republicans and 57 Democrats. Voting against were 67 Republicans and 139 Democrats. Five members from each party did not vote.

The rancor was over provisions agreed to by House and Senate negotiators endeavoring to reach a compromise. The end result clearly does not please everyone. Conservative Republicans reportedly want a stronger reaction against the President's immigration executive order, liberal Democrats and some Republicans object to a provision weakening the Dodd-Frank financial regulations, and liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans object to changes to the campaign finance law.

The White House supported passage, but House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the House was being "blackmailed" into voting for it.

The battle now moves to the Senate. With passage of the new two-day CR, it has until midnight Saturday to act.

The bill contains a significant budget boost for NASA -- an increase of $549 million above the President's request for a total of $18.010 billion. NOAA's satellite programs also fare well.

 

Launch of SpaceX's CRS-5 mission to ISS slips to no-earlier-than Dec. 19

Jason Rhian – Spaceflight Insider

The planned Dec. 16, 2014 launch of a Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX ) Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket and its Dragon spacecraft – has been delayed three days - to no-earlier-than Dec. 19, 2014. NASA has stated the cause for this most recent delay was caused to ensure that everything possible was done while the booster was on the ground to ensure success and that at present both the falcon 9 and Dragon cargo vessel were in good health. This latest slip was noted on the website for the United States Air Force's 45th Space Wing.

The flight will mark the sixth time that one of the Hawthorne, California-based company's Dragon spacecraft has been sent to the International Space Station. The mission is being carried out under the $1.6 billion Commercial Resupply Services contract. SpaceX has to deliver 20,000 kilograms of cargo to the outpost – by 2016.

The earlier delay from Dec. 9 to Dec. 16 - was conducted so as to allow a reshuffling of the cargo manifest after the Orb-3 failure. On Oct. 28, a Orbital Sciences Corporation Antares rocket encountered a failure with one of the turbopumps in one of the two Aerojet Rocketdyne AJ-26 engines in its first stage. The issue forced the range safety officer at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility to activate the Flight Termination Software on the rocket – resulting in a massive explosion.

At present, the company is well on its way to accomplishing this and has begun looking at developing new technologies to help lower the cost to orbit. One of these is the company's efforts to have the Falcon 9′s first stage actually fly back to the launch site. SpaceX has taken a step-by-step approach.

The firm has already carried out two landing attempts out in the Atlantic Ocean and has now opted to move on to the next level – having the booster's first stage land on a barge positioned out in the Atlantic. SpaceX CEO and Founder Elon Musk tweeted an image of this craft along with the following statement.

"Autonomous spaceport drone ship. Thrusters repurposed from deep sea oil rigs hold position within 3m even in a storm."

It now appears that SpaceX will carry out this landing during the Dec. 19 launch attempt. The platform measures some 300 x 100 feet ( 90 x 35 meters) and is currently being built by the NewSpace firm in Louisiana.

If successful, this will be the first time that a rocket's stage has conducted a solid-surface landing during an actual mission.

The Times on Mars

David Corcoran – The New York Times

On Tuesday, the Science desk published a special section about Mars. David Corcoran, the editor of the Science Times section, describes how the section came together.

The idea for our special issue "On Mars" came to me over (of course) lunch. Marc Kaufman, a freelancer and the main author of the new National Geographic book "Mars Up Close," had emailed in October to pitch a curtain-raiser story about a conference in mid-December at which scientists were planning to present many new papers on Mars. His sources told him that findings from the NASA Curiosity rover's 28-month crawl across the planet's surface would take us closer to solving mysteries that have tantalized scientists for years — in particular, the holy-grail question of whether, when and how life might have existed on Mars.

On Oct. 31, I invited Marc and our space-beat reporter, Ken Chang, to join me in the cafeteria to talk about how we might cover the Mars findings. Ken had been interviewing many of the same scientists, and the more the two reporters talked, the more excited they sounded — and the more excited I got. It sounded as if they could each write a substantial story looking ahead to the release of the new papers — Marc focusing on the question of life and Ken doing a broader story on the rover's overall mission.

But why stop there? Mars has long been a favorite topic of Times readers. Even routine developments regularly soar to the top of the "most emailed" list. Jonathan Corum's continuing interactive graphic feature tracking Curiosity's progress has been especially popular. And there's so much more to say about our nearest planetary neighbor that it wouldn't be hard for our deep bench of writers to come up with enough contributions for a special issue of Science Times.

So I put out a call for ideas. Natalie Angier, our Basics columnist, wanted to write about people who yearn to make the 34-million-mile voyage to Mars; turns out there are thousands of them. Dennis Overbye, our expert on all things cosmic, offered a story on what he likes to call "the mother of all climate change": the cataclysmic disappearance of Mars's atmosphere some four billion years ago. Could the same thing someday happen on our own planet? John Noble Wilford, who has covered space exploration for more than 50 years, recalled how his career was changed by an assignment from Time magazine to write about the first Mars probe, that of Mariner 4 in 1965. (Until then, he'd wanted to write about politics.)

We didn't have much time — a little more than a month. Jonathan agreed to do a major graphic, both in print and interactive, on where the rover has been and what it has found. Susan Beachy in research eagerly accepted an assignment to round up writings and quotes about Mars from all walks of life and literature — fact and fiction, politics and poetry, comedy and cartoons. It all came together in a hurry. And no surprise, it got plenty of love on "most emailed," not to mention Twitter and Facebook.

NASA To Weigh Several Factors in Decision on Asteroid Mission Option

Jeff Foust – Space News

 

NASA will weigh several factors when it makes a Dec. 16 decision on a plan for its Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), including how well each option supports later human missions to Mars, according to the agency official who will make that decision.

 

In an interview here Dec. 1, NASA Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot said he will use a "matrix" of variables when deciding between two options for carrying out the robotic portion of ARM.

 

In one approach, called simply Option A by NASA, a robotic spacecraft would shift the orbit of a small near-Earth asteroid, up to ten meters in diameter, into an orbit around the Moon. The alternative, Option B, would use a robotic spacecraft to grab a boulder a few meters across from a larger asteroid and move that into lunar orbit.

 

"One of the main things I'm looking for is the extensibility to a martian mission," Lightfoot said. Hardware proposed for ARM under each option should also be applicable for missions to the moons of Mars or even the martian surface itself, he said. "I want to build as little 'one-offs' as we can."

 

Another factor will be potential commercial partnership opportunities for the mission. That would include, Lightfoot said, "commercial entities coming in to either help us do this or even take advantage of it once we've done it." Other major factors he said he will consider are the technical and budgetary risks of each option.

 

Polling Three Gs

On Dec. 16, Lightfoot said he will receive briefings from the teams working on the two options. Also in attendance at the NASA headquarters meeting will be William Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator for human exploration and operations; John Grunsfeld, the associate administrator for science, and Michael Gazarik, the associate administrator for space technology.

 

"Those guys are my advisers as we make these decisions and move forward," Lightfoot said of the three associate administrators, who he dubbed the "Three G's" in the interview. "Every one of them has a piece of this mission."

 

The ultimate decision, though, belongs to Lightfoot. "I'm actually the decision guy for this one," he said, but added he would inform NASA Administrator Charles Bolden before making a public announcement. "I want to let Charlie know what we've done."

 

Lightfoot said a public announcement of which option NASA will pursue could come the same day as the decision, or could slip to Dec. 17, depending on when during the day the decision is made and when Bolden is briefed. "It may not be that afternoon," he said of the announcement's timing. "It may be the next morning."

 

Once Lightfoot selects an option, NASA will integrate that into planning for the overall ARM concept. The agency has scheduled a mission concept review for ARM in February 2015. That review will examine, among other factors, the budget and schedule for the mission.

 

Lightfoot said they still had a goal of keeping the robotic mission's cost at about half of the $2.6 billion estimate from a 2012 report by California Institute of Technology's Keck Institute for Space Studies that served as the genesis of the ARM mission concept. "We're pretty sure we can do it for that price," he said.

 

The mission concept review will also be used to assign ARM to a single NASA mission directorate. Currently, work on the mission is split among the human exploration and operations, science and space technology mission directorates. "Right now, the budget is put into each mission directorate. It's spread across all three, so that gets a little complex," he said.

 

Assigning ARM to one mission directorate will simplify budgeting, Lightfoot said, and also make things easier for him. "They don't want me, at my level, leading this and having a weekly meeting on this mission from here on out when I've got people perfectly capable of doing this," he said.

 

Tested, tempered, triumphant – Orion begins the long journey home

Jason Rhian – Spaceflight Insider

NASA's Orion spacecraft, fresh off the heels of its successful first flight on Dec. 5 – is on its way back to the space agency's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Engineers have already started to look at the capsule-shaped craft's heat shield – and the precious information within its data recorders. Exploration Flight Test 1 or "EFT-1" – was touted as a mission flown to teach those working on the spacecraft how it would behave in the extreme environment of space. As noted, technicians have removed samples from the heat shield so as to study its ablation rates and in so doing marked the spacecraft's second voyage - home - as well as efforts by those working on Orion to learn the important lessons taught by the flight of EFT-1.

Those samples, along with some of Orion's data recorders were transported to Lockheed Martin (the spacecraft's manufacturer) facilities located in California for processing.

A truck will now transport Orion back to KSC, upon arriving there it will be poured over by engineers with NASA and Lockheed Martin. They will carefully examine what the spacecraft is telling them via its instruments, onboard computers – even how its structure responded to the 4.5 hour-long mission.

"Part of the reason that this mission is exciting – is that it was a difficult mission, it's a tough environment to fly through, it's tough objectives that we set for this flight – but it appears that Orion and the Delta IV Heavy were nearly flawless…," said NASA's Orion Program Manager Mark Geyer during a press conference held after Orion splashed down off the Coast of San Diego, California.

Lockheed Martin is contractually obligated to provide a complete data analysis report to NASA as to how Orion performed during EFT-1. Key information as to how well the spacecraft handled the mission as well as suggestions of what the next steps in the spacecraft's development should be – will now be passed on to the Space Agency.

After taking to the early-morning Florida skies at 7:05 a.m. EST on Dec. 5, atop a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket – the spacecraft carried out two orbits above our world. The highest of these took Orion out some 3,600 miles (5,800 km) – further than any crew-rated vessel has flown since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972 and more than 10 times further than the International Space Station currently orbits.

This high-apogee orbit meant that the spacecraft would incur speeds upon reentering the Earth's atmosphere which reached approximately 20,000 miles (32,000 km/h; 8,900 m/s) per hour.

With the heat shield coming into contact with Earth's atmosphere at these speeds – it should come as little surprise that the temperatures that this critical section of the spacecraft saw temperatures that reached approximately 4,000 °F (2,200 °C).

The Orion that carried out the EFT-1 mission lacked an actual Service Module and, as it lacked the propulsive elements that the SM would have provided, relied on the upper stage of its Delta IV launch vehicle for the thrust it required to carry out its mission. The spacecraft would stay attached to the upper stage up until it reentered the atmosphere.

Moreover, as Orion lacked the solar arrays that a crewed version would have, it relied on batteries for power. Finally, as the spacecraft would not carry crew, the craft only had the jettison motor element of the Launch Abort System (LAS) active during this flight (all other elements were inert). With EFT-1 successfully behind it – this particular Orion's job – is still not done.

The Orion that carried out EFT-1 will now be processed in preparation for Ascent Abort 2, a test of the LAS. At present, this is slated to take place in 2018 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Space Launch Complex 46 in Florida. NASA has procured a Peacekeeper missile's upper stage, which will launch Orion, so that the LAS can be tested. Orion's LAS is equipped with three powerful motors capable of pulling the craft and its precious astronaut cargo – up to a mile and a half away from an emergency on the launch pad. It has been estimated by ATK's (the manufacturer of the LAS) Brian Duffy – that if this were activated – astronauts would experience up to 15 Gs (fifteen times the force of gravity).

Although the periods between events relating to Orion are, at present, about 3-4 years apart – Lockheed Martin is already gathering the components and building the infrastructure required for the first flight of the craft atop NASA's new heavy-lift booster – the Space Launch System or "SLS." This mission, dubbed Exploration Mission 1 or "EM-1" – is currently set to take place in 2018.

"The 1,200 on-board sensors will provide us an ocean of information about everything from the effects of space radiation on our avionics to the environment inside the crew cabin," said Lockheed Martin's Vice President and Orion Program Manager Mike Hawes. "What we learn from this flight will improve Orion's designs and technology, and help us make future vehicles the best they can be."

The mission was a boost for NASA, one that a NASA official noted as the agency and its contractors presented the results of the spacecraft's arrival back to Earth.

"I don't think I have ever been in a press event where you applauded when we were coming in – you're usually sharpening your pencils and scowling at me with grimaces on your face," said NASA's Associate Administrator for Human Exploration & Operations William Gerstenmaier. "Thank you for catching that spirit that I think we all feel as human beings that, we as a species, are meant to push human presence into the solar system and this is a first step in starting to do that."

NASA's Chief Scientist: The Future of Space Exploration Is International Partnerships

Ariel Bogle - Slate.com

Ellen Stofan, NASA's chief scientist, saw her first rocket launch at age 4, thanks to her father's job at NASA as an engineer. But at a Future Tense film screening of The Dish in Washington, D.C., last week, Stofan said that for many people she meets, what first sparked a space obsession was the Apollo program—President John F. Kennedy's audacious commitment in 1961 to putting Americans on the moon before the end of the decade.

 

Today, NASA's goal to put astronauts on Mars by the 2030s could be a similarly unifying project. And not only in the United States. Exploration in the 21^st century is likely to be a far more globally collaborative project than it was during the fierce Cold War Space Race between the United States and Soviet Union.

 

Why has the idea of reaching Mars captured the world? A trip to Mars is a priority for many scientific reasons—some believe it's the planet that most resembles our own, and one that could answer the age-old question of whether we're alone in the universe. But, as Stofan noted, there's also been a long popular fascination with the planet. Ever since Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli first observed the canali on Mars in the 1800s or when H.G. Wells wrote about aliens from Mars in his 1898 science fiction novel, The War of the Worlds, the planet has loomed large in the public's imagination.

 

And perhaps it's this historic obsession that partly explains the more international effort: The U.S. is hardly the only country dreaming of deep space—and a trip to Mars—these days. India has plans to put astronauts in the sky, Japan just launched a spacecraft to collect asteroid samples, and of course, the European Space Agency had the recent Rosetta mission and Philae lander. It seems that what Apollo did for America's imagination and spirit of invention, foreign space programs can also do domestically. "You see countries like India really investing in their space program because they see it as inspirational and good for their economy," Stofan told the audience.

 

The truth is, as Stofan put it, "When we go to explore, we do it as a globe." In a conversation outside the event, she recounted the stories of some of the astronauts featured in the 2007 documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon, who travelled the world after they returned from the Apollo missions of the 1960s and '70s. People from all sorts of countries welcomed them, not just as Americans, but as "our astronauts."

 

"People see space as a place where you go and cooperate," she told me.

 

This spirit of trans-border ownership and investment seems set to continue. One key part of this is the Global Exploration Roadmap, an effort between space agencies like NASA, France's Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, the Canadian Space Agency, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, among many others. The partnership is intended to aid joint projects from the International Space Station to expeditions to the Moon and near-Earth asteroids—and of course, to reach Mars. On a recent trip to India's space agency, Stofan recounted to me, she met with many Indian engineers who were just as excited as the Americans to get scientists up there, not only to explore, but also to begin nailing down the question of whether there was ever life on the red planet.

 

It's also clear that the next stage of space exploration will not only be more global, but will equally involve greater private and public partnerships. Companies like Space X and Boeing are increasingly involved in NASA's day–to-day operations, including a joint project that could carry astronauts into space in 2017. NASA's view is to turn over to the private sector those projects that in a sense have become routine, Stofan suggested, and let NASA focus its resources on getting to Mars.

 

This environment feels a lot different from the secretive and adversarial Space Race days, when the U.S. and Soviet Union battled to reach the moon first. The Cold War is over, of course, but with it, the funding commitment may also be missing this time around. Stofan mentioned, in response to an audience question, that at the time of the Apollo missions, NASA received up to about 4 percent of the federal budget, while now it's only around 0.4 percent. Between its peak in 1966 and 2014, the "space flight, research, and supporting activities" section of the budget has contracted significantly, according to Adam Rosenberg, a policy analyst with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. In 2014 dollars, the budget declined from $43.2 billion in 1966 to $16.6 billion in 2014, while overall spending has more than tripled.

 

The dollars are still large, of course, but perhaps increased international and private cooperation can be seen as an efficient, clever way to do more with less.

 

So, what does the future hold? NASA is extremely focused on how to get to Mars and back again safely, Stofan told the audience. But the fun role of science fiction, she suggested, is to start envisioning what the steps after that might be. For example, what it might be like to live on Mars? After all, science often gets its inspiration from the creative world. Just look at how similar mobile phones are to the communicators from Star Trek, she pointed out, or the fact that MIT students made a real-life version of the robotic sphere that Luke Skywalker trains with in Star Wars. "Stories are a great counterpoint to science."

 

What would Stofan like to see on the big screen next? "The Martian. I think it's being made into a movie in already. And I wish someone would redo Dune."

 

The Age of Asteroids

Jonathan Blitzer – The New Yorker

Brian May, the longtime guitarist of the rock band Queen, is also an astrophysicist. He started his career, in 1970, as a Ph.D. student at Imperial College, London, but four years later, after Queen released its second album, he put his studies on hold. In 2008, he finally finished his doctorate, with a thesis on zodiacal light, the faint patch of interstellar radiance that's sometimes visible on the horizon at night. Last Wednesday, May joined Lord Martin Rees, the U.K.'s Astronomer Royal, at London's Science Museum to discuss asteroids and the threats they pose to life on Earth.

"The more we learn about asteroid impacts, the clearer it becomes that the human race has been living on borrowed time," May said. About a million near-Earth asteroids are thought to be on a possible collision course with our planet, but only ten thousand or so have actually been charted. May and Rees were among a hundred scientists, astronauts, artists, and technologists calling for a worldwide campaign to identify, and eventually deflect, these asteroids. "In astronomical terms, this is very down home, very much on our back doorstep," Rees said. The advocacy campaign is united around what is known as the 100x Declaration, which aims to persuade governments and the private sector to discover and track a hundred thousand asteroids each year over the next decade. The declaration calls for the adoption of a global Asteroid Day on June 30, 2015, the hundred and seventh anniversary of the Tunguska event, in which a small asteroid exploded over Siberia, destroying eight hundred square miles of remote forest and releasing a hundred and eighty-five times as much energy as the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

The timing of the press conference was fittingly premature; May and Rees were promoting a ceremonial date—not even an event—that was itself many months away. Space exploration, with its vast distances and time lags, is an exercise in delayed gratification. The night before the Science Museum summit, to great fanfare, Japan launched the Hayabusa 2, a spacecraft that will land on an asteroid, deploy three exploratory rovers, and return samples to Earth for study. It won't enter asteroid orbit until 2018, and isn't due back until 2020.

Puny and remote as they might seem, asteroids are commanding increasing attention on Earth, not only as threats but also as destinations. Asteroids are the solar system's most veteran castaways: rocky bodies, in orbit around the sun, left over from the formation of the solar system. Too small to be planets, too big to be ignored, they can reveal a great deal about our primordial history. Asteroids are also thought to be rich in water and metals such as nickel, platinum, and cobalt. Private companies with names like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries are attempting to mine some of these objects as they career through space. Their plan is to send out surveyors—small automated spacecraft—followed by multi-ton extractors, which will harvest material and secure it for processing. (Water, for example, could be broken down into its component elements of hydrogen and oxygen and used to fuel rockets.) Some experts say that mining could be a reality within the next decade or so. In this vision, asteroids may serve as way stations of sorts, supplying fuel and other resources for missions deeper into space. "Think of asteroid mining this way: it's the Internet in 1986," Rosanna Sattler, a space-law expert based in Boston, told me.

Asteroids also fill an existential void. For much of the time since the United States first entered space, we have been at a loss for what, exactly, to do up there. The moon has lost its lustre and is costly to reach, and a manned mission to Mars—the only remotely habitable destination in our solar system—is decades away, at best. Shortly after President Obama took office, in 2009, he sought to eliminate projects that relied on expensive, heavy-lift rockets; this included the Constellation program, which had, as one of its goals, a human landing on the moon by the twenty-twenties. The political blowback was even fiercer than expected. Senators in Florida and Texas clamored to save jobs at plants that risked being shuttered. Stalwarts at NASA and the State Department smarted, as did the international community, which had long focussed on returning to the moon. The Administration was politically exposed: in nixing plans to visit the moon, it couldn't immediately point to a new destination for government-led space travel. Recognizing his vulnerability, Obama asked the Office of Science and Technology Policy, his advisers on science and space matters, to identify another place for the agency to go.

The answer, in short order: asteroids. On April 15, 2010, Obama delivered an address at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, to make the case. "I just have to say pretty bluntly here: we've been there before," the President said, of the moon. "We'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history." Last year, NASA announced the creation of the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), which aims to identify a near-Earth asteroid, capture it, bring it into steady orbit around the moon, and then send astronauts to explore and analyze it. (The capturing phase is due to launch around 2019.) David Gump, the vice-chairman of Deep Space Industries, which was recently awarded two contracts to consult on how to complement ARM with "private-sector initiatives," sees the program as critical to another of Obama's proposals—getting a manned orbital mission to Mars within the next two decades. "It's extremely costly—and unwieldy—to pack a giant rocket with enough fuel to get to Mars," he told me in an e-mail. If NASA could use fuel that's already in space—mined from or stored on an asteroid—its Mars program would stand a better chance of sticking to its budget.

"Those who say we've got to go back to the moon, instead of an asteroid, well, show me the money," Senator Bill Nelson, the chairman of the Senate's space-science subcommittee, told the Times last year. "With the money that's being allocated, you've got to do what you can with the resources that you have." The asteroid mission is meant, in part, to help train NASA in handling heavy objects in space, which could also entail warding off asteroids.

Still, the fate of the asteroid program is as precarious as ever, particularly after last month's midterm elections. In the past, NASA's most ambitious plans have generally evinced bipartisan support and healthy budget allocations, but in January Nelson will be succeeded by Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican whose reputation precedes him; his allies have roundly dismissed NASA's asteroid program as a "costly distraction." By contrast, Nelson, a former astronaut, has gone further even than NASA in touting the benefits of asteroid hunting. If the specimen that NASA corrals under the auspices of ARM ends up being interesting, he told the Times, "then we've got the possibility of the science of mining an asteroid."

For now, asteroid mining is strictly the province of private companies such as Planetary Resources, whose investors include Ross Perot, Jr., Richard Branson, and Google's Eric Schmidt and Larry Page. "Planetary Resources is the new Dutch East India Company," Sattler said. Chris Lewicki, the president and chief engineer of Planetary Resources, likens asteroid mining to the California gold rush and the exploration of the American West. Now, as then, government ability lags behind that of the pioneers. "We can adopt newer approaches than NASA," he told me. "NASA is a large, bureaucratic government entity—it couldn't do this." Lewicki pointed out that the NASA computer running Curiosity, the two-and-a-half-billion-dollar rover on Mars, is more than twenty years old. "My cell phone has more computing power," he said. Planetary Resources was on the verge of starting its long-term mining mission with the launch of Arkyd 3, a satellite about the size of a loaf of bread, which was to conduct preliminary flight tests and beam back results before burning up on reëntry into Earth's atmosphere. But, on October 28th, the satellite was lost when the Antares rocket that it was aboard exploded shortly after takeoff. The company is retooling, and is optimistic about sending off another satellite by next year, a company spokesperson told me, though the loss was draining. There's a saying about private enterprise in space: the fastest way to become a millionaire is to invest a billion dollars.

Last fall, a piece of legislation called the American Space Technology for Exploring Resource Opportunities in Deep Space (ASTEROIDS) Act floated through the House but stalled in committee. Its aim was to create a legal framework in space so that private companies could mine asteroids without worrying about having to relinquish the stuff they harvest. (Existing laws are essentially silent on private-property rights so far from home.) The act was seen less as a serious legal proposal than as an overture to the private sector. "For years, asteroids have been the orphans of outer space," Gump, of Deep Space Industries, told me. At last, they're being claimed—in name, if not yet in body. Martin Rees, the British astronomer, is dubious about the prospect of mining asteroids ("It's rather shaky economics," he said at the Science Museum), although he does want to "find common cause" with private ventures if it means charting more asteroids. "We've got to find the asteroids first," Brian May said—before they find us.

Are Habitable Binary Planets Possible?

Ian O'Neill - Space.com

As we seek-out planets orbiting stars inside their habitable zones, astronomical techniques are becoming so sophisticated that, one day, we may be able to probe the atmosphere of a distant exo-Earth — i.e. a rocky exoplanet possessing liquid water on its surface with potential biosignatures in its atmosphere.

But let's take this idea one step further.

If there's one thing we are beginning to realize with exoplanetary studies, it's that there is a huge variety of alien worlds out there and, of the billions of stars in our galaxy, just about every conceivable configuration of exoplanet size and orbit should be possible.

In a new study presented at the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Tucson, Ariz., earlier this month, researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) discussed the possibility of habitable binary planets; a configuration that, if the conditions are right, life could take root on both bodies orbiting inside the habitable zone of their star.

Probably the most familiar example of what could be considered to be a binary planet is that of the Pluto-Charon system. Although Charon is officially recognized as the biggest moon of Pluto and not a binary partner, in a recent Discovery News article I argued the case for making dwarf planet Pluto and satellite Charon a binary planet. Although this possibility was discussed in 2006 when the International Astronomical Union debated Pluto's planetary status, eventually, the "dwarf planet" designation was (controversially) settled on.

In the case of Pluto and Charon, their barycenter (the point in space at which both masses orbit) is well above Pluto's surface. The gravitational tugging of Charon is substantial, shifting their orbital focal point into the space between the two worlds. As observed by the fast-approaching NASA News Horizons spacecraft (that will flyby Pluto and its system of moons in July 2015), the two masses have a very distinctive wobble. In comparison, Earth's moon does tug on Earth, but the Earth-moon system's wobble creates a barycenter deep inside our planet near the Earth's core.

But say if, somewhere in the Milky Way, there are two worlds of approximately equal mass, in a binary dance like Pluto and Charon, orbiting their star at a distance where the temperature conditions are right for liquid water to persist on their surfaces?

As discussed by Caltech undergraduate student Keegan Ryan, graduate student Miki Nakajima and planetary scientist David Stevenson, this scenario isn't that far fetched. During the formation of rocky planetary bodies around a star, it's possible that two large masses may drift close enough to begin to gravitationally interact. This interaction can result in the merging of both masses to form a larger planet. Alternatively, the two masses may collide energetically, kicking up vast quantities of debris.

Scientists believe the latter scenario led to the formation of Earth's only natural satellite; when another planetary body smashed into our young Earth, the debris produced coalesced to form the moon. The colliding body careened away from the Earth and was likely ejected from the solar system.

But say if there's another collision scenario where two like-mass worlds interacted with one another, but did not merge or collide, instead becoming locked in a stable orbit around one another for billions of years.

NEWS: Billions of Habitable Worlds in Our Galaxy?

"There is a good reason to believe terrestrial binary planetary systems may be possible," writes a Caltech press release. "In a grazing collision the angular momentum is too high to be contained within a single rotating body (it would fission) and if the bodies barely touch then they could retain their identity. However, it requires an encounter where the bodies are initially approaching each other at low enough velocity."

Through the use of a computer model utilizing a method called Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), a collection of tens of thousands of interacting particles could be simulated. The method can be used to simulate the agglomeration of protoplanetary bodies and the formation and evolution of moons. But the researchers ran the simulation for a huge variety of initial conditions. Sure enough, though both masses undergo huge tidal distortions, planetary binaries of approximate Earth-like masses are possible. From this model, the possible exoplanetary binary configuration can be characterized and astronomers can begin hunting for observational evidence of their existence.

Due to their close proximity, these planetary binaries will be tidally locked, where one side of each world will continuously face one another. We are familiar with this scenario with Earth's moon — the moon is tidally locked with Earth, showing only one hemisphere, the moon's near-side.

Though only imagined in science fiction to date, this Caltech simulation proves that, in exoplanetary studies where any configuration seems possible, a scenario where two bona fide Earth-like exoplanets could be locked in a stable binary system, potentially within their star's habitable zone.

One can imagine looking up from one of those worlds where the second planet is constantly high in the sky, and as the binary system rotates, orbiting their star, the planet above progresses through its phases, much like the moon does around the Earth. Depending on how the binary is aligned relative to the star, there may even be periodic eclipse events where one world is cast into darkness by its binary twin blocking star light.

And what if alien life evolved on one or both of these worlds? And what if they became technologically advanced enough to travel between both planets? Though these musings are purely hypothetical, it does make you think that having a second habitable (or, at least, potentially habitable) world in a binary orbit with your own planet could motivate a fevered space race that would dwarf our space race of the 1960s. That could be the genesis of a powerful and sustained space-faring alien race.

Could Ancient Mars Have Supported Life? Water Isn't the Only Key

Mike Wall - Space.com

Ancient Mars featured flowing rivers and sizable lakes — but that doesn't mean the Red Planet definitely could have supported life, one prominent researcher stresses.

The presence of liquid water is just one of many factors that researchers need to take into account when investigating the past or present habitability of Mars or any other cosmic body, astrobiologist and mineralogist Pamela Conrad wrote in a "Perspectives" piece published online today (Dec. 11) in the journal Science.

"The things that make a place livable are numerous, and sometimes, there's a showstopper you didn't think of," Conrad, deputy principal investigator for the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument aboard NASA's Curiosity rover, told Space.com. "So it's important to take a poll of the diversity of attributes that could contribute to making an environment livable or not."

One such attribute is the presence of a global magnetic field, produced by an internal dynamo, which would help shield surface life from ionizing radiation, she wrote in the Science piece. Another key characteristic is a thick atmosphere, which would moderate temperatures and provide a barrier against ultraviolet radiation from the sun.

While modern Mars lacks these characteristics, it possessed both of them about 4 billion years ago. A thorough understanding of Martian habitability would seek to determine whether the magnetic field, thick atmosphere and liquid water all occurred simultaneously, said Conrad, who's based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

"It is a matter of timing: The emergence and sustenance of both life and its habitat require a convergence of the right chemicals and physical conditions in the right place at the same time," she wrote in Science.

Assessing the physical conditions that prevailed in the distant past is challenging but not impossible, Conrad said. For example, NASA's MAVEN spacecraft (short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) is currently studying the rate at which gas is escaping from the Martian atmosphere, gathering data that should allow researchers to extrapolate this process backward in time.

Conrad stressed that she's not trying to throw cold water on the Curiosity rover's recent discoveries, which suggest that Mars could have supported microbial life billions of years ago. Indeed, she's a Curiosity team member and played a key role in analyzing and interpreting the rover's results.

Rather, she just wants to make sure that scientists keep their eyes open.

"I think it's very important for us to bring every argument to the table when you have a complex problem under discussion," she told Space.com. "It's very dangerous to make assumptions in such definitive terms, because there could be a 'gotcha.'"

It makes sense for habitability discussions and research to focus on Mars, which is close to Earth and looms as a target for human exploration down the road, Conrad said. But Mars also serves as a laboratory of sorts, she added.

"Everything we learn about Mars is a lesson in how to learn about other planets, and those lessons are key to enabling us to explore them," Conrad said.

Soggy space rocks brought water to young moon

Jeff Hecht - New Scientist

 

The moon is thought to have formed when a Mars-sized object smashed into the early Earth about 20 to 100 million years after the solar system coalesced. The heat from this impact should have left the moon drier than a bone, so Alberto Saal at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and his colleagues were surprised when they found 50 parts per million of water trapped inside tiny spheres of lunar volcanic glass in 2008.

Then in 2011, Erik Hauri of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and his team analysed rocks that were ejected from the moon's interior. Within the rocks were "melt inclusions" – tiny globules of once-molten rock trapped inside crystals – which contained 615 to 1410 parts per million of water, comparable to the levels of water in the Earth's upper mantle.

Now Hauri, Saal and their colleagues have analysed the levels of other volatile materials, such as lead and sulphur, in lunar rocks brought back on the Apollo missions. These materials should have also been lost in the moon-forming impact, so whatever the moon contains today must have been added by meteorites later. They estimate that meteorites equivalent to just 0.001 to 0.004 lunar masses could have brought water to the molten moon when it was 100 million years old.

Molten mixing bowl

"Anything that crashed into the moon at that point got mixed in wholesale," says Hauri. The moon remained molten for millions of years, perhaps even a hundred million years: long enough for the magma ocean that solidified into the lunar mantle to soak up enough soggy space rocks.

Not everyone is convinced, however. "It is physically possible to add water to the moon by later [small] impacts, but being possible is different from being required," says David Stevenson of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

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