Fwd: NASA and Human Spaceflight News - Wednesday – Jan. 21, 2015

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From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: January 21, 2015 at 10:45:15 AM CST
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: NASA and Human Spaceflight News - Wednesday – Jan. 21, 2015

 

 

NASA and Human Spaceflight News

Wednesday – Jan. 21, 2015

HEADLINES AND LEADS

NASA Gets Two Shout Outs in State of the Union Address

Marcia S. Smith - Spacepolicyonline.com

President Obama mentioned NASA twice (and NOAA once) in his State of the Union (SOTU) address tonight. First he talked about the Orion EFT-1 flight last year and Scott Kelly's upcoming year-long mission to the International Space Station (ISS) as steppingstones to Mars. Later he turned to climate change and lauded NASA and NOAA scientists among those warning that humans are affecting the climate.

Scott Kelly's Year in Space

You think gravity wears you down? Try 12 months without it.

Guy Gugliotta - Air & Space Magazine

A year is a long time to spend as a human satellite circling Earth in zero gravity. But if astronauts didn't like it, they wouldn't sign up, right? "Don't get the idea that there was a shortage of candidates," says Scott Kelly, a short guy with a shaved head and a stocky build. "A lot of people wanted to do it."

Bolden: Hold The Line on U.S. Space Policy 

Dan Leone – Space News

 

In a sort of state-of-the-agency address here Jan. 20, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden warned against hitting the reset button on the space policies the Obama administration has set over the last six years.

Giant Asteroid Is Headed Our Way, But NASA Says No Worries
David Freeman – The Huffington Post

A ginormous asteroid is headed our way, but no need to worry. NASA says asteroid 2004 BL86--estimated to be about one-third of a mile in diameter--will zoom harmlessly by Earth later this month.

 

Supernova Mystery Found at the Bottom of the Sea

Ian O'Neill – Discovery.com

One of the least likely places you might think astronomers would learn about ancient supernovae is at the bottom of the ocean, but in new research scientists have done just that.

French Space Agency To Focus on Climate Science in 2015

Jeff Foust – Space News

 

After European ministers finalized plans for future launch vehicles in 2014, the French space agency, CNES, plans to focus in 2015 on climate science in advance of a major climate change conference in Paris late in the year.

 

Recap story: 200th Atlas-Centaur launching delivers Navy satellite

Justin Ray – Spaceflight Now

Launching for the 200th time and loaded with one of its heaviest cargoes ever, the Atlas-Centaur rocket flexed its muscle and sped away from Cape Canaveral on Tuesday night with a U.S. Navy satellite for mobile communications to the military and White House.

 

Singer Sarah Brightman answers questions before her trip to space

Sputnik International, of Russia

 

British singer Sarah Brightman talked about her future 10-day trip to space during a conference at Gagarin Research and Test Cosmonaut Training Center (GCTC) in Star City, just outside of Moscow. Video from the conference has been released by GCTC earlier today.

COMPLETE STORIES

NASA Gets Two Shout Outs in State of the Union Address

Marcia S. Smith - Spacepolicyonline.com

President Obama mentioned NASA twice (and NOAA once) in his State of the Union (SOTU) address tonight. First he talked about the Orion EFT-1 flight last year and Scott Kelly's upcoming year-long mission to the International Space Station (ISS) as steppingstones to Mars. Later he turned to climate change and lauded NASA and NOAA scientists among those warning that humans are affecting the climate.

Part of the coveted currency of Washington politics is getting mentioned in the SOTU. Agencies and interest groups jockey to get a single sentence in the typically hour-long speech to raise awareness of their issues. The actual value of that currency is questionable, but seems no less desirable as the years pass. This is not the first time Obama has mentioned NASA or the space program in an SOTU address (he did so in 2011 and 2013), but his one major space policy speech was a separate event at Kennedy Space Center in April 2010.

Thinking back over the history of when being singled out in the SOTU resulted in a significant policy change for NASA, the only one that comes to mind is President Ronald Reagan's 1984 address where he directed NASA to build a space station "within a decade" and invite other countries to join. That eventually became the ISS program, though it took two-and-a-half decades instead of one. In 1986, Reagan called for development of an "Orient Express" -- a single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) vehicle that could not only put payloads into orbit but be used as a commercial hypersonic plane to take passengers from Washington to Tokyo in two hours. The resulting National Aero-Space Plane (NASP) program did not succeed. (John F. Kennedy's May 1961 speech to Congress that began the Apollo program was not a State of the Union address, but a separate speech on Urgent National Needs.)

 

Nonetheless, NASA undoubtedly is delighted to get two mentions tonight. First was human spaceflight. Obama does not identify the Orion spacecraft or the EFT-1 mission by name, but refers to a spaceflight "last month" as part of a program to send people to Mars that can only mean that flight. He also introduced astronaut Scott Kelly, who was sitting in First Lady Michelle Obama's box. Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko will begin a year-long mission aboard ISS in March. Here is the text of that portion of the speech as published on the White House website.

"I want Americans to win the race for the kinds of discoveries that unleash new jobs – converting sunlight into liquid fuel; creating revolutionary prosthetics, so that a veteran who gave his arms for his country can play catch with his kid; pushing out into the Solar System not just to visit, but to stay. Last month, we launched a new spacecraft as part of a re-energized space program that will send American astronauts to Mars. In two months, to prepare us for those missions, Scott Kelly will begin a year-long stay in space. Good luck, Captain – and make sure to Instagram it."

Later the President spoke about climate change and mentioned both NASA and NOAA.

"2014 was the planet's warmest year on record. Now, one year doesn't make a trend, but this does – 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all fallen in the first 15 years of this century.

"I've heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they're not scientists; that we don't have enough information to act. Well, I'm not a scientist, either. But you know what – I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we'll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it."

 

Whether his words will lead to action in the form of more funding for Mars missions or climate change science should become evident on February 2 when his FY2016 budget request is submitted to Congress.

No mention was made of NASA, the space program or climate change in the much briefer Republican response to the SOTU by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA).

Scott Kelly's Year in Space

You think gravity wears you down? Try 12 months without it.

Guy Gugliotta - Air & Space Magazine

A year is a long time to spend as a human satellite circling Earth in zero gravity. But if astronauts didn't like it, they wouldn't sign up, right? "Don't get the idea that there was a shortage of candidates," says Scott Kelly, a short guy with a shaved head and a stocky build. "A lot of people wanted to do it."

And Kelly won the prize. In late March, he and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko will fly to the International Space Station, orbiting 230 miles above Earth, and remain aboard for a full year. Four Russians have already spent an uninterrupted year in space, but none since Mir in 1999. Kelly will be the first American to do it. Having logged a cumulative six months in space on three prior missions, he will return to Earth with more than 500 days in orbit.

That fame may come with a price. Backaches, bone loss, lousy sleep, loss of balance, headaches, muscle atrophy, nausea, radiation exposure, rashes: There is already a well-thumbed compendium of woes that have plagued visitors to space. Says Kelly, "You feel bad for a month, and I've never felt completely normal." For astronauts, physical discomfort is an occupational hazard scarcely worth mentioning when set alongside the unparalleled high of being in space. But when does that discomfort become too much?

NASA, its Russian counterpart Roscosmos, and the other station partners want to know what would happen to your body and mind if you were to travel to Mars—a round trip expected to take nearly three years. (That's an estimated six months' transit time in each direction, plus 18 to 20 months on Mars or orbiting it while waiting for it to realign with Earth.) A full year in space does a better job imitating the effects of so long a journey than the current six-month station sojourns. The idea is to see if people who stay in space longer get beat up worse, or if the harm occurs mainly in the early part of the mission.

Sticks and Kidney Stones

NASA has deemed some of the usual suspects to be under control, at least for six-month International Space Station missions. Two and a half hours of exercise per day appears to halt the bone loss and muscle atrophy. Drugs control nausea, and ointment helps the rashes. There are sleeping pills and pain pills.

But for a Mars mission, NASA has identified 32 "major" risks to human health and performance. These include everything from radiation poisoning, which will take a lot more than a series of year-long ISS visits to understand, to onboard fires or loss of cabin pressure, which are mostly about bad luck.

NASA's Human Research Program, based at Houston's Johnson Space Center, studies the other stuff: "Are there troubling trends out there?" asks Mark Shelhamer, the Research Program's chief scientist. (There are.) "Is there a smoking gun?" he asks. (Maybe.) NASA scientists hope Kelly's year-long ISS mission—and another five after that—will help them to find out.

First are the "pernicious" things, Shelhamer says. Some astronauts get post-flight kidney stones, and "the prevalence is troubling." The incidence was higher after six-month ISS missions than after two-week Space Shuttle deployments. Kidney stones, as anyone who has ever had one knows, are no fun.

High concentrations of calcium oxalate in the bloodstream cause stones to form in the kidneys. Bone loss might be the culprit, but NASA's current best guess is that the high level of carbon dioxide in the ISS air supply is to blame: It's 10 to 20 times what we breathe on Earth.

"CO2 is acidic," Shelhamer says. "One way your body deals with it is by buffering your bloodstream with calcium." If a limited time in space causes kidney stones, more time might make them more likely.

Also on scientists' to-do list are what Shelhamer calls "proving negatives." Have the problems of bone loss, difficulty with balance, and muscular atrophy truly been solved? Longer flights offer researchers the chance to find out.

Most important, however, are the potentially dangerous imponderables—"The things we don't feel good about," as Shelhamer puts it—whose causes and effects remain unclear. In particular, pathogens and the human immune system interact differently in microgravity. "Some pathogens increase in virulence, and some don't," Shelhamer says. "Some aspects of the immune system deteriorate, some don't." The great fear is that at some point the "lines cross": A pathogen becomes stronger as an immune response grows weaker. "We haven't seen it yet, but will we see it after eight months?"

The Vision Thing

The highest-priority problem, however, is impaired vision, a condition that returning crew members have reported with increasing frequency. One U.S. astronaut discovered during reentry that he couldn't read the checklist for landing. (Fortunately, crew members know the procedures virtually by heart.)

For years, researchers have regarded the vision problems and other microgravity effects as minor and usually reversible. On Earth, gravity pulls fluids to a person's lower body. In space, fluids float upward with a number of unpleasant effects. Anyone who has seen astronauts on TV notices their swollen faces. Fluid migration is also a likely cause of headaches. Eyesight is so often impaired that the station stocks a supply of drugstore glasses with different magnifications.

Understanding the effects of space travel is complicated by the patient population being studied. Most astronauts are between 35 and 55 years old, clustering in their early to mid-40s, the age when a person's eyesight usually heads south. For a long time, any ocular discomfort astronauts reported in orbit seemed to vanish once they came home.

And then it didn't. "Right now we have circumstantial information" from astronauts reporting vision impairment, usually farsightedness, "that has lingered," Shelhamer says. "You have it after [a stay of] six months. Maybe it's no worse after a year, but we don't know that."

Vision, in part, is what got Kelly the coveted position as America's first year-round astronaut. The candidate had to have completed a previous space station mission, had to have served as a mission commander, had to be a qualified spacewalker, and had to have been free of serious vision problems. "That cut it down to three or four people," Kelly says. "And one of them is my backup."

Kelly acknowledges that he, like most astronauts, has had "vision issues" on all three of his flights. In 1999 he was 35 and had "bad middle vision" for a while. Eight years later, when he commanded STS 118, he was already wearing reading glasses. And in 2010-2011, his eyesight "generally changed in a negative way" while he was aboard the space station, but corrected three months after his return. At present, Kelly, who turns 51 on February 21, wears glasses for distance.

Kornienko, 54, is also a space station veteran and a spacewalker with only four fewer days in orbit than his crewmate. Drafted out of high school into the Soviet army, he became a paratrooper, then served as a Moscow policeman while he went to engineering school. He joined the cosmonaut corps in 1998, the same year Kelly became an astronaut. He does not wear glasses, Kelly says, but may use contact lenses.

Since vision impairment came to the attention of researchers, scientists have floated several theories as to its cause: Bloodstream toxins might put pressure on the eye. Improper technique during exercise sessions might increase fluid pressure in the brain. And as always, radiation remains a suspect.

But NASA's working hypothesis is that when weightlessness displaces fluid surrounding the brain, some of the excess migrates down the optic nerve sheath until it presses into the back of the eye. This can have grim implications: "The bogeyman is whether [a prolonged increase in cranial pressure] is going to cause other neural impacts—to fine motor coordination, headaches, memory," Shelhamer says. If it does, "you've got a serious, serious problem."

The need for research into fluid displacement is so urgent that space agency scientists will use the Kelly-Kornienko mission to begin a "fluid shifts" study, in which several station astronauts will undergo regular testing to determine the root cause of vision impairment and whatever other health implications fluid displacement might have.

Glasnost

One welcome result of the study will be a renewal of true partnership aboard the space station. Ever since it was finished, "there's been the U.S. segment and the Russian segment," notes John B. Charles, associate manager of NASA's Human Research Program for International Science. The Americans do their experiments and the Russians do theirs. "The Canadians and the Japanese pretty much stick with us, and the Europeans go back and forth," Charles says, adding that NASA would like to see that division of labor end. The agency plans to join with Roscosmos and the other partners in astronaut health experiments that involve everyone.

But the enduring mismatch between American and Russian research techniques remains a challenge: The Russians don't measure all of the same things Americans measure, and don't use the same terms. Both nations, over the past 50 years, have changed test protocols, hardware, and software; have added or abandoned tests; and have headed off in new research directions. As a result, significant chunks of space science have fallen into a disconnected data hodgepodge.

Furthermore, to protect astronauts' privacy, the U.S. has a wall between flight doctors and researchers, forbidding scientists to use confidential clinical data in their studies and forbidding doctors from tapping scientists for information on their patients. But "on the Russian side, clinicians and researchers work side by side," Charles remarks. "Sometimes they are the same person." (Charles points out he and his colleagues are working on how to minimize that "wall" and collect more useful data, while still obeying federal laws and NASA policies protecting confidentiality.)

Finally, unlike the Americans, Russian researchers don't use what Shelhamer calls "population-based medicine": gathering data from lots of subjects, analyzing it, and drawing conclusions. Instead, he says, they do personalized medicine: "They look at each cosmonaut as a case study," Charles explains. "Their research tells them everything they need to know about that cosmonaut, but it's not the statistically based data we are accustomed to using."

Shelhamer sees the value of both methodologies. "Who's to say which is the more realistic approach?" he asks. "We try to find an average, but if we're sending six astronauts to Mars, maybe it's better to know everything about each person."

One insight into personalized medicine may come from an experiment comparing Scott Kelly to his twin brother and fellow astronaut Mark. (Mark Kelly left the corps after his wife, former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head by a would-be assassin in 2011.) NASA decided to undertake the study after Scott Kelly asked the brass what he should say if reporters asked him whether he and Mark would be compared. NASA turned the idea into what Human Research Program biochemist Craig Kundrot describes as a "pilot project" designed to get "some interesting data points" by "making Mark the control for Scott." Scientists will monitor the brothers down to the molecular level, comparing their DNA, RNA, proteins, metabolites, and gut microbiomes, among other things. They'll study macro phenomena too: fluid shifts, walking performance, jumping performance, cognition, and immune systems. Both Kellys got flu shots last fall, and both will receive frequent and comprehensive physical examinations for the duration of the mission.

In an elegant coincidence, Mark Kelly retired with 54 days in space. Scott, if all goes according to schedule, will spend 540 days, outflying Mark in space by exactly one order of magnitude.

Space Crazy

The last imponderables are the psychological stresses: long transits, physical confinement, limited contact with family, no chance for emergency evacuation. Replicating these conditions will be problematic: The mission is only a year long, the astronauts under study are exposed to a changing cast of characters, and they are in low Earth orbit, only a Soyuz ride away from home. Still, scientists see testable possibilities in a year-long mission. For the last decade, NASA astronauts have kept diaries for the "ISS journals project," and even though "touchy-feely is not a virtue" for the astronaut corps, Shelhamer says, the diarists have a lot to say about colleagues, the workload, sleeplessness, and other irritations that the public knows little about. The journal entries have helped researchers understand the importance of communal rituals such as mealtime: When one ISS crew tapped the special supplies earmarked for incoming replacements, "the new guys were furious," Shelhamer says.

And while astronauts understand they must get along with crewmates, the same is not true of mission control—a frequent focus of animosity. The story of the Skylab crew who balked at their workload in 1973 is legendary. Less widely known is the 2010-2011 experiment wherein Russia's Institute for Biomedical Problems ran a 520-day Mars mission simulation for six crew members–three Russians, two Europeans, and one Chinese. University of Pennsylvania behavioral scientist David F. Dinges ran a study using a questionnaire that captured any disagreement as perceived by the astronaut. The participants reported five times as many conflicts with mission control as with other astronauts.

Two specific areas of inquiry interest Shelhamer. So far Journals Project leader Jack Stuster has not detected an across-the-board "third-quarter effect" in the psyches of astronauts. "It's like when you're in college," Shelhamer says. "For the first two years it's new and fun, and for the last year you're focused on the finish line. Trouble comes in the third quarter, when it's 'I still have so far to go.' If we extend the mission to a year," he wonders, will disillusionment set in?

Dinges has designed a four-minute test to assess stress levels among astronauts, made up of a three-minute "psychomotor vigilance test" coupled with a one-minute "visual analog ratings" of the subject's level of stress, degree of fatigue, and quality of sleep, among other factors.

During six-month missions the results resemble "a cubic curve," Shelhamer says, with stress rising as the cube of elapsed time, "an extremely troubling trend. If there's an acceleration, we're going to have to do more research to figure out what to do about it."

Dinges says the stress ratings generally "started out low-moderate and got higher," but when he looked at individuals, he saw that only half the astronauts reported increased stress. "We've known for a long time that some people deteriorate faster than others," Dinges says. "Vulnerable people are vulnerable."

Even so, "there were correlates," Dinges says. High stress levels among ISS crew members "correlated with poor sleep quality, physical exhaustion, and the workload. This looks very physiological, not mental."

And there is a final imponderable: "Nobody understands the physiological cost of the mission," Dinges says. "You have workload creep, inadequate sleep, confinement, and isolation. But you also have nutrition issues, low oxygen, high CO2, bone and muscle atrophy." And then there are the "more occult issues" like fluid shift to the brain.

"It's unlikely that there's something metaphysical or psychological associated with this," Dinges says. "We want to know if there is a physiological trigger: Are some people coping better, or are they blessed with physical characteristics that enable them to handle it more easily?"

Space, everyone agrees, can be nasty. It will likely be nastier for a year than for six months. Multiplying that time by a factor of 2.5 or three as we reach for Mars might make all those deprivations worse.

But for astronauts, thriving amid adversity is part of the job description. "We love a challenge," Kelly says. "We love challenging environments."

An airtight can bound for Mars ought to do the trick.

Bolden: Hold The Line on U.S. Space Policy 

Dan Leone – Space News

 

In a sort of state-of-the-agency address here Jan. 20, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden warned against hitting the reset button on the space policies the Obama administration has set over the last six years.

 

"The worst thing, the absolute worst thing we could do would be to interrupt that progress and go back to the beginning again," Bolden said in a speech during a Maryland Space Business Roundtable luncheon. He spoke only hours before U.S. President Barack Obama was scheduled to deliver the annual State of the Union address.

 

Bolden touted such Obama initiatives as the commercial crew and cargo programs, saying there is now "wide consensus" these programs were "a good investment," and that the model of funding companies to build, own, and operate spacecraft with NASA as an anchor customer should be leveraged for future exploration beyond the International Space Station. Orbital Sciences Corp. and SpaceX are delivering cargo to station now, and Boeing and SpaceX could launch astronauts there as soon as 2017 under the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contracts they received in September.

 

Bolden also gave the administration credit for increasing the amount of Earth science research done aboard the ISS — a facility he said was once described as "a lousy platform" for Earth observations. Now, Bolden said, station hosts the ISS-RapidScat ocean-wind measurement system and the Cloud-Aerosol Transport System, with more Earth-facing instruments on the way.

 

Curiously, Bolden made it through his half-hour speech without once uttering the word "asteroid." He offered no clue as to whether the agency's Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) would capture a free-floating space rock or pluck boulder-sized sample of a much larger asteroid. The decision is supposedly imminent. NASA was to announce its choice in December, but punted until January instead.

 

The Asteroid Redirect Mission is the plan the White House came up with in 2013 in response to a gauntlet Obama threw down in a 2010 speech at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, when he challenged NASA to send astronauts to an asteroid rather than back to the Moon.

 

The mission, originally conceived as a rendezvous in the asteroid's native orbit, has since evolved into ARM, which would use a roughly $1.25 billion robotic spacecraft to redirect some kind of asteroid specimen to the same lunar storage orbit NASA wants to use as a staging ground for future Mars missions. NASA thinks astronauts could visit the captured asteroid sometime in the 2020s.

 

Meanwhile, Bolden acknowledged the space policy he defended in his speech was laid in place by the very thing he warned against: a wholesale change of tack that wiped out the program of record.

 

"We didn't quite go back and reset," Bolden said. "There was an attempt made to do that, but we chose not to do that. We kind of took the work that had been done prior to this administration coming in and adopted and adapted some of it."

 

Here, Bolden referred to the heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule, major elements of which were conceived as part of the Constellation moon-exploration program put in place by the administration of Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, and dismantled by the current White House in 2010.

 

That the Obama administration has stood by SLS and Orion was less a matter of choice and more a matter of congressional fiat. In authorizing legislation signed in 2010, Congress ordered NASA to build a heavy-lift rocket and spacecraft, and to use whatever Constellation hardware and contracts could be leveraged to do it.

 

SLS and Orion are now scheduled to make their first crewed flight in 2021, to the distant lunar retrograde orbit where there may or may not be an asteroid some time soon, depending on whether ARM succeeds in capturing one (NASA officials have said it may well not).

 

"The president will announce his 2016 budget for NASA in February, and we're expecting a vote of confidence in this direction, and the resources to continue our journey to Mars," Bolden said Jan. 20.

 

Meanwhile, Bolden also issued the latest official reminder that although U.S.-Russia relations remain politically rocky, ties between NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency remain tight.

 

"Our relationship with the Russian space agency is excellent. It's as good as it's ever been," Bolden said, adding that his counterpart in Moscow, Roscosmos Director General Oleg Ostapenko, is "equally anxious as I that the political leadership of the nation doesn't do anything rash."

 

However, Bolden acknowledged there may come a day when strained relations between the two senior space station partners finally begin to affect space exploration.

 

"I'm not naive enough to believe that no matter what we do, things will continue to operate as they do right now," Bolden said.

 

Just before he left the stage, Bolden made an appeal to the many contractors in the audience, enjoining them to stick with NASA, even when doing so might be frustrating.

 

"Keep working with NASA," Bolden said. "We're tough sometimes, really difficult to work with, I understand that. But I tell you, hang in there, just keep moving the ball."

Giant Asteroid Is Headed Our Way, But NASA Says No Worries
David Freeman – The Huffington Post

A ginormous asteroid is headed our way, but no need to worry. NASA says asteroid 2004 BL86--estimated to be about one-third of a mile in diameter--will zoom harmlessly by Earth later this month.

 

That's good news, of course. And get this: The asteroid's size and proximity--about 745,000 miles from Earth at the nearest point in its flyby, or about three times the distance from the Earth to the Moon--mean it should be visible with nothing more than a good pair of binoculars.

 

"Monday, January 26 will be the closest asteroid 2004 BL86 will get to Earth for at least the next 200 years," Don Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Lab, said in a written statement. "And while it poses no threat to Earth for the foreseeable future, it's a relatively close approach by a relatively large asteroid, so it provides us a unique opportunity to observe and learn more."

 

Skywatchers in the Americas, Europe, and Africa should have the best view of the asteroid on the night of Jan. 26, according to EarthSky. Weather permitting, the asteroid should be visible moving slowly across the sky in the vicinity of the constellation Cancer.

Of course, it will only look slow. The asteroid is actually streaking at about 35,000 miles an hour.

 

Yeomans said he might grab his own binoculars and have a look himself. If you'd rather stay indoors, you can catch the action online at The Virtual Telescope Project 2.0. The show starts at 2:30 p.m. EST.

 

Supernova Mystery Found at the Bottom of the Sea

Ian O'Neill – Discovery.com

One of the least likely places you might think astronomers would learn about ancient supernovae is at the bottom of the ocean, but in new research scientists have done just that.

Through the careful analysis of ocean sediment, tiny particles that originated from deep space have settled on the seabed, locking the chemical secrets to supernova processes that would have otherwise remained a mystery.

ANALYSIS: Ancient Ocean Bacteria Feasted on Supernova Dust

"Small amounts of debris from these distant explosions fall on the earth as it travels through the galaxy," said lead researcher Anton Wallner, of the Australian National University. "We've analyzed galactic dust from the last 25 million years that has settled on the ocean and found there is much less of the heavy elements such as plutonium and uranium than we expected."

Supernovae are powerful explosions triggered when massive stars reach the ends of their lives. During these powerful events, many elements are forged, including elements that are essential for life to thrive — such as iron, potassium and iodine.

ANALYSIS: Cosmic Mystery Solved by Supersized Supernova Dust

However, as pointed out by an Australian National University press release, even heavier elements like lead, gold and radioactive elements like uranium and plutonium can be created. But it appears that the formation processes for the heaviest elements are at odds with current astrophysical theory.

Wallner and his team studied samples of sediment from the bottom of a stable area at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. But when measuring the quantities of plutonium-244, a radioisotope that is produced by supernovae, they found something strange in their results — there was 100 time less plutonium-244 than predicted.

Plutonium-244 has a half-life of 81 million years, making it an excellent indicator of the number of supernovae that have exploded nearby in recent galactic history. "So any plutonium-244 that we find on earth must have been created in explosive events that have occurred more recently, in the last few hundred million years," said Wallner.

ANALYSIS: NASA Successfully Recreates Alien Dust in the Lab

But the fact that there is less recent deposition of the heaviest of elements, despite the fact that we know supernovae have erupted nearby, suggests a different formation mechanism may be responsible for plutonium-244 and elements like it.

"It seems that these heaviest elements may not be formed in standard supernovae after all," concludes Wallner. "It may require rarer and more explosive events such as the merging of two neutron stars to make them."

This research has been published in Nature Communications.

French Space Agency To Focus on Climate Science in 2015

Jeff Foust – Space News

 

After European ministers finalized plans for future launch vehicles in 2014, the French space agency, CNES, plans to focus in 2015 on climate science in advance of a major climate change conference in Paris late in the year.

 

In a speech at the French Embassy here Jan. 15, CNES President Jean-Yves Le Gall said that his space agency has adopted climate as its major theme for 2015, emphasizing the role that spacecraft play in monitoring the planet's climate.

 

"This year, we have chosen 'Space for Climate' as the CNES mantra as we seek to put climate at the center of our space policy," Le Gall said.

 

That effort, he said, will culminate in December as Paris hosts the 21st yearly session of the Conference of the Parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, also known as COP 21. Le Gall said he would use the event to emphasize the importance of space in providing data to inform policymakers.

 

"Out of the 50 or so key climate variables, 26 are being monitored from space," Le Gall said. "You can imagine just how important space-based systems are to provide data for climate models."

 

In an interview prior to his speech, Le Gall emphasized the importance climate science will have for his agency in 2015 because of the COP 21 conference. "We will insist on the fact that space is very important to understand and to monitor the climate," he said.

 

As one example of the role space plays in climate monitoring, he noted efforts to track sea-level rise that he said require the use of spacecraft. "Only satellites can provide global coverage of what's going on on planet Earth," he said. "Space, in my opinion, is at the center of climate issues."

 

One of the milestones CNES expects for climate science in 2015 is the launch of Jason-3, a joint mission with NASA to measure the height of the ocean surface. The spacecraft is scheduled for launch in mid-2015 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

 

Le Gall also cited the agreement between CNES and NASA in May 2014 to jointly develop another climate science spacecraft, the Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission, planned for launch in 2020. "Cooperation with NASA is part of the DNA of CNES, and we will continue it," Le Gall said.

 

The new CNES emphasis will be displayed in other venues as well. Le Gall said the agency's pavilion at the Paris Air Show in June will be devoted entirely to climate science.

 

CNES's climate science plan was endorsed by Gérard Araud, France's ambassador to the United States, in remarks preceding Le Gall's speech. "In 2015, climate change will be central to French space policy," he said, citing the potential of the COP 21 conference to adopt measures to address climate change. "The space community should play an active role in this transition."

 

Le Gall said 2015 will also be used to build upon two major successes of the previous year: the approval by European ministers in December of developing the Ariane 6 launch vehicle, and the arrival of the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, including the landing of the Philae spacecraft on the comet's nucleus in November.

 

"This latest decision is truly historic," Le Gall said of the decision to proceed with the Ariane 6. The modernized, simpler design of the vehicle, along with a "reshaped" role for industry in its development, should reduce launch costs by about half compared with the Ariane 5, he said.

 

Le Gall was also optimistic that Philae, which stopped transmitting shortly after landing on the comet when it exhausted its batteries, could revive this year when sunlight hits its solar panels and recharges its batteries. "By March, we will be able to turn its instruments back on," he said.

 

"After 2014, which was quite successful, I think 2015 will be as successful, but in other areas," Le Gall said. "You're not going to decide on a new launcher every year."

 

Recap story: 200th Atlas-Centaur launching delivers Navy satellite

Justin Ray – Spaceflight Now

Launching for the 200th time and loaded with one of its heaviest cargoes ever, the Atlas-Centaur rocket flexed its muscle and sped away from Cape Canaveral on Tuesday night with a U.S. Navy satellite for mobile communications to the military and White House.

Igniting at 8:04 p.m. EST (0104 GMT) at Complex 41, the 20-story rocket blasted off and quickly executed its dramatic pitch, yaw and roll manevers to obtain the proper eastward heading, arcing over the Atlantic as it flew downrange.

It was a complex ascent, featuring three separate firings by the Centaur upper stage to systematically raise the orbital altitude to deploy the third MUOS satellite into a high-perigee geosynchronous transfer orbit, tilted 19 degrees to the equator.

"The MUOS 3 spacecraft is the heaviest payload to launch atop an Atlas 5 launch vehicle. The Atlas 5 generated more than two and half million pounds of thrust at liftoff to meet the demands of lifting this nearly 7.5-ton satellite," said Jim Sponnick, ULA vice president, Atlas and Delta Programs.

"Today's launch was the 200th Atlas-Centaur launch – a very sincere congratulations to the many women and men responsible for the incredible success of the Centaur upper stage over the last 5 decades!"

The U.S. Navy's Mobile User Objective System communications network remains under construction, with one more primary satellite set to launch this August and an on-orbit spare next summer.

MUOS 1 was launched Feb. 24, 2012 aboard an Atlas 5 and serves as the Pacific Ocean satellite. MUOS 2 launched July 19, 2013 aboard another Atlas 5 and serves as the continental U.S. satellite.

The MUOS satellite No. 3, set to become the Atlantic Ocean regional satellite, takes the next step to assemble a worldwide communications system using 3G-cellular technology for ships, submarines, aircraft, land vehicles and terminals in the hands of troops.

The new system offers more bandwidth on demand, better voice quality, simultaneous voice and data and better connectivity on the move in remote locations, under weather, in urban environments than ever before.

Users will include the four branches of military, government agencies, border patrol and the president.

MUOS 3 will complete post-launch orbit shaping in about 8 days, then deploy its solar arrays and umbrella-like antenna reflectors to achieve the "flight configuration" about 12 days after launch

Then begins several months of satellite system and payload testing before builder Lockheed Martin hands over the craft to the government for additional checks in advance of setting it operational.

"Thanks to the Atlas team for the safe delivery of MUOS 3 into our geosynchronous transfer orbit," said Iris Bombelyn, vice president of Narrowband Communications at Lockheed Martin.

"We look forward to completing our on-orbit health checks and delivering this important asset to the U.S. Navy. The addition of this satellite will give the MUOS constellation coverage over more than three-quarters of the globe, further extending the reach of the advanced communications capabilities MUOS will provide our mobile warfighters."

From its eventual spot in geosynchronous orbit, a parking spot 22,300 miles up, the expansive footprint of MUOS 3 will cover nearly a third of the planet.

MUOS serves a dual-provider of both voice traffic currently routed by the Navy's existing generation, albeit aging, Ultra High Frequency Follow-On spacecraft, but it also creates a new era of mobile communications built around 3G cellular technology to relay narrowband tactical information such as calls, data messaging, file transfers and email on rates of up to 384 Kilobits per second.

This was the 52nd Atlas 5 launch, the first of the year and the 92nd ULA mission. ULA plans 9 more Atlas flights in the next 12 months:

March 12 @ Cape Canaveral: An Atlas 5 rocket will boost four identical craft into Earth orbit to study magnetic field explosions in space. Together, the quartet is NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, or MMS. The spacecraft will fly in a tetrahedron formation, coming within 6 miles of each other, while looping around Earth to image "magnetic reconnections" or explosions in the magnetic field.

May 6 @ Cape Canaveral: The next flight of the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle is planned for the mini Air Force space shuttle, boosted by an Atlas 5 rocket. After three successful missions in orbit and pinpoint landings, the orbiter returns to space for another classified flight.

June 16 @ Cape Canaveral: The launchings of navigation replacement spacecraft now switches to the Atlas 5 rocket with the GPS 2F-10 satellite. The Block 2F series forms the backbone of the GPS constellation for the next 15 years.

Aug. 13 @ Cape Canaveral: The fourth of the four primary MUOS satellites will be launched for the U.S. Navy aboard an Atlas 5 rocket. The Mobile User Objective System is made up of sophisticated spacecraft that creates a mobile communications network that will span the globe.

Aug. 27 @ Vandenberg: The year's second of two NRO launches will use an Atlas 5 rocket from the West Coast. The National Reconnaissance Office's NROL-55 mission is another clandestine satellite deployment flight.

Sept. 16 @ Cape Canaveral: The penultimate craft in the Boeing-built Global Positioning System Block 2F navigation satellite series will ride another Atlas 5 into orbit and become the GPS 2F-11 bird. The new GPS satellite launches ensures the constellation remains healthy and robust.

Oct. 20 @ Cape Canaveral: The Morelos 3 communications satellite, owned by the Mexican Ministry of Communications and Transportation, will launch on an Atlas 5 rocket. The commercial mission will use the rocket's 421 configuration, with a four-meter payload fairing, two solid rocket boosters, and a single RL10 engine on the Centaur stage. Also known as Mexsat 2, the craft will be positioned in geostationary orbit over the equator at 116.8 degrees west longitude for a 15-year service life.

Nov. 19 @ Cape Canaveral: As a gap filler for the grounded Orbital Sciences Antares rocket, the company has contracted with Atlas 5 to launch a Cygnus commercial resupply services mission to the International Space Station. The ship will carry food, spare parts and experiments to the orbital laboratory complex.

Jan. 26, 2016 @ Cape Canaveral: The final Block 2F Global Positioning System satellite is launched by an Atlas 5 rocket as the GPS 2F-12 navigation spacecraft.

Singer Sarah Brightman answers questions before her trip to space

Sputnik International, of Russia

 

British singer Sarah Brightman talked about her future 10-day trip to space during a conference at Gagarin Research and Test Cosmonaut Training Center (GCTC) in Star City, just outside of Moscow. Video from the conference has been released by GCTC earlier today.

Popular British singer and UNESCO Artist for Peace Sarah Brightman spoke about her future 10-day journey to space later this year during a press conference at Gagarin Research and Test Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Moscow Region.

"I would like to say how proud, honored and excited I am to be part of the Russian space program, and to be a cosmonaut in training. Thank you for letting me to do this." – Brightman said during a press conference on Monday. "There is nothing more beautiful than the launch, and there is nothing more beautiful than seeing cosmonauts in space".

Earlier, it was reported that Brightman arrived at the Russian Cosmonauts Training Center in Star City to start her cosmonaut training.

Brightman, 54, will become the eighth space tourist to visit the International Space Station (ISS). The singer will make her trip to space accompanied by Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov and ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen.

According to the Guardian, Brightman paid $52 million for her ticket to space.

Brightman announced her plan to fly to space back in 2012. She has already passed a number of medical tests to confirm that she meets the basic physical requirements for space travel. Before her flight, scheduled on September 1, she will have to pass another medical test.

Japanese Satoshi Takamatsu will be Brightman's backup, in case an unforeseen situation should happen and she will not be able to make the journey. Takamatsu could travel to the ISS himself in 2017-2018.

Since 2001, eight civilians have been in space. Brightman would become only the second female tourist to visit the ISS.

To view story and video, visit Singer Sarah Brightman answers questions before her trip to space (video)

 

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