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From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: December 27, 2013 9:53:40 AM CST
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: NASA and Human Spaceflight News Dec. 27, 2013
Happy Friday everyone. Have a safe and good weekend!NASA and Human Spaceflight NewsFriday – Dec. 27, 2013International Space StationInternational Space Station Expedition 38 Commander Oleg Kotov and Flight Engineer Sergey Ryazanskiy of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) began a planned 7-hour spacewalk from the Earth-facing Pirs Docking Compartment at 8 a.m. EST.NASA Television is providing live coverage of the spacewalk at http://www.nasa.gov/nasatvHEADLINES AND LEADSISS cooling system back to normal after spacewalksJames Dean -- FLORIDA TODAYLaboratories in the U.S. portion of the International Space Station are running at full power again after a pair of spacewalks to repair a partially failed cooling system.College football helped Mike Hopkins prepare for repairing the International Space StationSally Jenkins - Washington PostThat evasive, poorly defined phrase "bringing your 'A' game" gets thrown around a lot, chattered about senselessly by all kinds of emotionally chaotic athletes, only some of whom have any idea how to bring it, much less twice in a row.Mike Hopkins knows how. Hopkins doesn't play football in 100,000-seat stadiums anymore. He belongs to a different class of doer now, and he understands more about practical, technical, repetitive excellence than he ever did as a player. Like the kind he delivered up in space this week. If you really want to learn performance under pressure, study an astronaut.Guest column:NASA's new directionCommercial space race off and runningStephen C. Smith -- Florida Today (Opinion Page)What do President Ronald Reagan, the two Presidents Bush and President Obama have in common? They all directed NASA to commercialize access to space.Russian cosmonauts to make spacewalk Dec 27ITAR-TASSMOSCOW -- Russian cosmonauts working aboard the International Space Station (ISS) - flight engineers Oleg Kotov and Sergei Ryazansky - will make the sixth spacewalk this year.They are expected to work outside the station for about seven hours, the Mission Control Centre said. Both will be working in computerised Orlan-MK spacesuits with LCD displays showing which systems need to be checked before leaving the station and in which order.NASA-JAXA Global Precipitation Satellite To Launch Feb. 27 from JapanDan Leone - Space NewsWASHINGTON — The core observatory satellite in the U.S.-Japanese Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission is now scheduled to launch Feb. 27 aboard a Japanese H-2A rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center, NASA announced Dec. 26.China Targets Moon Sample-Return Mission in 2017Leonard David – SPACE.comAs China's Chang'e 3 lander and Yutu rover mission to the moon unfolds, the country's space authorities are pushing forward on their next stage of lunar progress — gathering select samples of the moon and rocketing them back to Earth. China plans to launch the unmanned sample-return mission, known as Chang'e 5, in 2017, signaling the third stage in the country's lunar exploration plans, officials said.Moon River Yutu sleeps as night comesXinhuaBEIJING -- China's moon rover "Yutu" (Jade Rabbit) went to sleep at 5:23 a.m. Thursday Beijing Time as the first lunar night for the mission fell, the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) said.Top science and space stories of 2013Elizabeth Landau and Matt Smith -- CNNIt has been a thrilling year of discovery in many areas of science, but also a sobering time -- federal funding cuts threaten the future of innovation, and rising carbon dioxide levels foreshadow environmental and health challenges linked to climate change.This was the year we learned that Mars was habitable billions of years ago, and also that Lady Gaga reportedly intends to be the first artist to sing in outer space in 2015 (will the papa-paparazzi follow?).Eleven Great Space Moments Of 2013Alex Knapp – ForbesIt was nearly 50 years ago that Star Trek first dubbed space as "the final frontier." Today, it's still a frontier, but it's a busy one. People from dozens of nations, as well as private industry, continued to explore the stars in the year 2013, both physically and virtually through the lenses of telescopes and the cameras of robots and probes. It's an impossible task to distill everything that humans have done, seen, and learned about in space in the year 2013, but here are eleven notable stories from the final frontier that will still be remembered in the decades to come.COMPLETE STORIESISS cooling system back to normal after spacewalksJames Dean -- FLORIDA TODAYLaboratories in the U.S. portion of the International Space Station are running at full power again after a pair of spacewalks to repair a partially failed cooling system.Teams in Houston worked through Christmas Day to activate a new coolant pump installed during the second spacewalk on Tuesday, and to integrate it with equipment that transfers heat generated inside the outpost to giant radiators outside.That allowed normal operations to resume in the U.S. Destiny and Japanese Kibo labs and two connecting modules. Only the European Space Agency's Columbus lab hasn't yet been fully powered back up."Everything is working perfectly now," NASA TV commentator Kelly Humphries reported today. "Cooling Loop A is looking great."Loop "A" is one of two running outside the station. The Dec. 11 failure of a valve in an ammonia pump module that regulated the loop's temperature caused it to get too cold.That created a risk that water from the internal cooling system could freeze and expand, potentially cracking heat exchangers and allowing highly toxic ammonia inside the six-person crew's living area.Non-essential systems inside were shut down for about two weeks, while the station operated with only one of its cooling loops and more vulnerable to a second failure.NASA astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Mike Hopkins performed spacewalks on Saturday and Tuesday to remove the faulty pump and install one of three available spares.They rested on Christmas Day while the ground teams restored the second cooling loop without incident.On Friday, Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy will head outside for the year's 11th and final ISS spacewalk, a planned seven-hour excursion to update experiments and install cameras.College football helped Mike Hopkins prepare for repairing the International Space StationSally Jenkins - Washington PostThat evasive, poorly defined phrase "bringing your 'A' game" gets thrown around a lot, chattered about senselessly by all kinds of emotionally chaotic athletes, only some of whom have any idea how to bring it, much less twice in a row.Mike Hopkins knows how. Hopkins doesn't play football in 100,000-seat stadiums anymore. He belongs to a different class of doer now, and he understands more about practical, technical, repetitive excellence than he ever did as a player. Like the kind he delivered up in space this week. If you really want to learn performance under pressure, study an astronaut.The dogging question for any athlete is whether they translate in the actual world — how would they do in a situation that actually meant something? Hopkins, former captain of the University of Illinois football team, won't ever be troubled by that query. He doesn't have to ask whether he can be usefully imported to another field, because for the past week he has been repairing the International Space Station. The job requires him to hit mental and physical peaks, both at the very same time, because to replace a broken 780-pound cooling system while dangling 260 miles above Earth takes more than just a mechanical mind — you'll notice we don't just shoot pencil-necked engineers into space. Hopkins works out 21 / 2 hours a day, even in space, and can do reverse push-ups from a handstand.When Hopkins and partner Rick Mastracchio "suited up" on Christmas Eve, it was by donning 260-pound rigs, which take 45 minutes just to put on, one of which almost killed an Italian astronaut in July when a malfunction caused it to fill up with water. Hopkins then crawled outside the station at the end of a tether, hung upside down in feet clamps at the end of a robotic arm, allowed himself to be swung through space swaying like a kite on a string and did several hours of delicate mechanical work with a hand drill and other tools. To call it the most spectacular high-pressure athletic feat of the week in all of the known universe is hardly a stretch.Col. Bob Behnken, a veteran spacewalker who is NASA's chief of the Astronaut Office, says what Hopkins did was like "a biathlete trying to race from point A to point B and then stopping and getting a gunshot off at a small target," except he did it over and over with much higher consequences.That Hopkins was chosen for such duty is not surprising to people who remember him at Illinois, where he was a walk-on in 1989 but won a scholarship by flying through the air at high speeds on special teams kickoff and punt coverage. By his senior year he was a preseason all-American at safety."You can't be a great special teams player unless you got nerve," said his former defensive coordinator Lou Tepper, who's now at Buffalo.Sportswriter Will Leitch, an alum and lifelong Illini fan, recalls that Hopkins was a cult icon."Not necessarily the most talented but the one who worked harder than everyone else and everybody loved him," Leitch said. "Everybody knew Mike Hopkins. If you would have blindfolded me in 1991 and said, 'Which Illini athlete will end up an astronaut?' Mike Hopkins would have easily been my first choice."According to Tepper, becoming an astronaut was Hopkins's boyhood obsession. "He talked about it all the time. Now, a lot of people want to be astronauts. But how many of those really make it?"Answer: There were 3,564 applicants to NASA in 2009, and just nine were accepted for astronaut training, which entailed four years of simulators, being thrown into cold oceans and dragged by a parachute and a lot of scuba diving with heavy gear, submerged in tanks while manipulating 600 pounds of equipment.To perform in those circumstances, astronauts practice at a level that far surpasses the habits of professional athletes. NASA astronauts borrow from athletes the understanding that behind character is conditioning, but they take it miles further.Hopkins underwent 2,089 hours of basic space training and 192 hours of body-building just to qualify for a six-month assignment to the space station. That was just a good start. The simplest movements he performed on his spacewalk were rehearsed at a ratio of 8 to 1 — for every hour a task took, he spent eight hours rehearsing it."If you already know how to drive a car, we'd have you race it eight times on the ground before we ever let you race it in space," Behnken says.Just wearing the suit is at once physically demanding and mentally stressful. It's bulky, stiff and claustrophobic and can actually injure you if you turn the wrong way in it.Over five to seven hours working against the pressure and stiffness of the suit, Hopkins would have burned between 3,500 to 4,000 calories, with no access to food and only a quart of water to drink. He had to pace himself not unlike a marathoner and be careful not to exhaust the suit's oxygen and water."You don't want to overwork the suit and your body in the process," Behnken says.Which leads to the most intriguing and advanced aspect of astronaut training: the psycho-physiological. NASA believes the ability to manage the body through command over emotional reactions can be taught. Anyone who rides atop an exploding bomb and lives for six months on a giant fan in the sky surrounded by nothing more than crumpled foil needs the right mental makeup.Whereas a Dez Bryant, Tony Romo or Brandon Meriweather are slaves to their temperaments, astronauts learn to control even their own perspiration rates; you don't want to sweat too much in the suit. Another program teaches them how to cure their own motion sickness."We get pretty deep into the idea of managing your body response to different things, and that connection is where people can make vast strides," Behnken says. "That emotional response is the thing you can learn to control or defeat."Example: What happens if Hopkins makes a mistake? Despite all the practice, astronauts sometimes throw the wrong switch, especially when they're exhausted. But what NASA taught Hopkins is that he's allowed just three seconds of remorse. That's all because if he makes one error, he better not follow it with another one."The bottom line is that people are going to make mistakes," Behnken says. "The idea is to make one and not turn it into four interceptions. The next thing you do is even more important than the last thing you did."No other profession understands how to create repetitive excellence so well. The physical and mental training Hopkins did for football was valuable, but it was crude. The NFL borrows from NASA technology for its helmets, but it's in a relative stone age when it comes to human performance. You want to perform under pressure? Watch NASA TV instead of the NFL Network.Guest column:NASA's new directionCommercial space race off and runningStephen C. Smith -- Florida Today (Opinion Page)What do President Ronald Reagan, the two Presidents Bush and President Obama have in common?They all directed NASA to commercialize access to space.On Dec. 13, NASA announced the agency had selected SpaceX to negotiate a lease for Kennedy Space Center's historic launch pad 39A.The decision fulfilled a 30-year vision to end a government space monopoly replete with taxpayer-funded delays, overruns and inefficiencies.In 1984, the National Aeronautics and Space Act was amended to open space for the first time to the private sector:The Congress declares that the general welfare of the United States requires that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space.Another amendment in 1991 required the NASA administrator to "encourage and provide for Federal Government use of commercially provided space services and hardware."After the shuttle Columbia accident, President George W. Bush announced on Jan. 14, 2004 that the space shuttle would fly again only to complete the International Space Station, and then retire. He appointed a commission to recommend how to implement his Vision for Space Exploration, which featured a new government space vehicle program called Constellation.The commission's June 2004 report included a chapter titled, "Building a Robust Space Industry." The report called for "the breaking down of barriers to commercial and entrepreneurial activities in space, as well as a cultural shift towards encouraging and incentivizing more private sector business in space."In November 2005, NASA opened its Commercial Crew/Cargo Project Office. Administrator Michael Griffin approached entrepreneurs Elon Musk, Burt Rutan, Robert Bigelow and others, asking them to invest in what some today call "NewSpace." Musk's SpaceX signed its first NASA commercial cargo contract in 2006, and Orbital Sciences in 2008.The government Constellation program, meanwhile, fell years behind schedule and went billions over budget as had the shuttle and ISS before it.In 2009, an independent commission appointed by President Obama found that Constellation was not sustainable. The administration recommended in 2010 that Constellation be canceled, and proposed funding a crew version of the commercial cargo program.As 2013 ends, SpaceX and Orbital deliver cargo affordably to the ISS, flying robotic ships that don't risk lives to pilot them. Three commercial companies are developing 21st-century spacecraft capable of delivering seven astronauts to the ISS or private space stations, such as the Bigelow Aerospace inflatable habitats now under construction.Treatments developed in microgravity for Hepatitis-C and osteoporosis are now on the market. Here in Florida, the Jacksonville Mayo Clinic announced Dec. 18 it will send human cells to the ISS to research a potential treatment for stroke patients. A Boca Raton company, Zero Gravity Solutions, is developing plant nutrition products derived from ISS research.The gold rush is on. The gold is microgravity.NewSpace now has ventures beyond NASA, such as suborbital adventure tourism and asteroid mining. A commercial lunar company, Golden Spike, is led by former NASA executives. Apollo-era astronaut Jim Lovell recently joined its board of advisers.NewSpace works best when NASA acts as an adviser or partner, freeing the private sector to innovate. Within a decade, we may see a SpaceX Falcon heavy rocket launch a commercial lunar mission from pad 39A — long before Constellation's lunar timeline.NASA is finally on the right side of history.Smith is a member of the Florida Space Development Council chapter of the National Space Society and The Planetary Society. He is the author of the SpaceKSC.com blog.Russian cosmonauts to make spacewalk Dec 27ITAR-TASSMOSCOW -- Russian cosmonauts working aboard the International Space Station (ISS) - flight engineers Oleg Kotov and Sergei Ryazansky - will make the sixth spacewalk this year.They are expected to work outside the station for about seven hours, the Mission Control Centre said. Both will be working in computerised Orlan-MK spacesuits with LCD displays showing which systems need to be checked before leaving the station and in which order.This is Ryazansky's first mission aboard the ISS and his second spacewalk. His first one took place on November 9. Kotov has made four spacewalks and this will be his fifth one.The other ISS resident crewmembers - Mikhail Tyurin of Russia, NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins and Richard Mastracchio, and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) - will assist Kotov and Ryazansky from inside the station.NASA-JAXA Global Precipitation Satellite To Launch Feb. 27 from JapanDan Leone - Space NewsWASHINGTON — The core observatory satellite in the U.S.-Japanese Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission is now scheduled to launch Feb. 27 aboard a Japanese H-2A rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center, NASA announced Dec. 26.The GPM satellite will lift off between 1:07 p.m. and 3:07 p.m. Eastern time, according to a joint press release from NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).The satellite is launching about two weeks later than previously scheduled because of the partial U.S. government shutdown in October that kept workers locked out of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., where GPM was assembled.The GPM satellite originally was to launch in July 2013, but that date was pushed back after an earthquake struck Japan in 2011 and delayed by nine months the delivery of one of the satellite's two primary instruments, the Japanese-built Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar.The GPM core observatory will embark on a three-year mission to measure global rainfall and snowfall levels. However, the satellite is carrying enough propellant for five years of operations. It will be the heart of an ad hoc international constellation of up to nine weather and climate satellites.The 3,850-kilogram GPM core satellite is the largest spacecraft ever built at Goddard. In addition to the Japanese radar, the observatory hosts the GPM Microwave Imager, built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo.On its way to Tanegashima, which is located off Japan's southern tip, GPM was delayed by everything from fowl to foul weather.First, the spacecraft's Lockheed C-5M Super Galaxy carrier plane was late to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, where GPM began the airborne leg of its trans-Pacific journey following a short truck-trip from Goddard. Birds on a runway in Delaware — where the C-5M stopped before heading to Andrews — were responsible for the holdup, according to a timetable provided by NASA spokeswoman Rani Gran.The same day the observatory left Andrews, Nov. 21, it had to make an unscheduled refueling stop at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska; rough winds at altitude made an in-flight fill-up impossible.Takeoff from Anchorage was then postponed by icy weather, which delayed GPM's landing at Kitakyushu Airport in Fukuoka, Japan, until Nov. 24. Next, a storm delayed the satellite's ocean crossing to the Tanegashima Space Center until Nov. 26. Finally, on Nov. 27, GPM arrived at a Tanegashima clean room for final checkout.China Targets Moon Sample-Return Mission in 2017Leonard David – SPACE.comAs China's Chang'e 3 lander and Yutu rover mission to the moon unfolds, the country's space authorities are pushing forward on their next stage of lunar progress — gathering select samples of the moon and rocketing them back to Earth.China plans to launch the unmanned sample-return mission, known as Chang'e 5, in 2017, signaling the third stage in the country's lunar exploration plans, officials said."The development of Chang'e 5 is proceeding smoothly," Wu Zhijian, a spokesman for China's State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense, said in a Dec. 16 press conference.Key technologiesAs reported by China's state-run Xinhua news organization, Chang'e 4 is the backup probe for the Chang'e 3 mission, which successfully put a lander and rover down on the moon on Dec. 14. Chang'e 4 will be adapted to verify technologies for the sample-return initiative, which involves the Chang'e 5 and Chang'e 6 missions."The program's third phase will be more difficult because many breakthroughs must be made in key technologies, such as moon surface takeoff, sampling encapsulation, rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit, and high-speed Earth re-entry…which are all new to China," Wu said.Wu also said that in the next stage of the lunar program, there will be more international cooperation."Despite current progress, China still lags behind space giants like the United States and Russia in many aspects," Wu said. "We need to work harder and move faster."The state-run newspaper China Daily reported earlier this year that an experimental spacecraft will be launched before 2015 to conduct vital re-entry tests on a capsule design to be used in the Chang'e 5 mission. That work is apparently now underway within a Gobi desert test site. Engineers are apparently also using a rocket sled as part of a Chang'e 5 re-entry test program.The Chang'e 5 sample-return capsule would haul back the goods from the moon, plunging through Earth's atmosphere at a projected speed of about 25,000 mph (40,230 km/h). To date, no Chinese spacecraft has ever re-entered at that velocity, according to China Daily.Citing Hu Hao, chief designer of the lunar exploration program's third phase, said that Chinese space scientists see an experimental spacecraft test as proving that Chang'e 5 can, indeed, bring lunar material safely back to Earth, China Daily reported.Relay approachHu said that after Chang'e 5 enters lunar orbit, two modules would separate and land on the moon, with one collecting soil samples. Those specimens would be placed in an ascent module, which would blast off from the lunar surface and dock with the orbiting craft. The sample would then be transferred to the re-entry capsule for the trek back to Earth.The Chang'e 5 mission involves a "relay" approach, one that requires precision rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit, Hu said.Yan Jun, head of the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and chief scientist of the lunar exploration program, said some lunar materials would be scooped up from the moon's surface, while other material would be acquired from a depth of about 6.6 feet (2 meters).Scientific returnSample-return sites must be picked with great care to maximize scientific return, said Paul Spudis, a planetary geology and remote sensing expert at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston."Scientifically, sample-return has value only if you can relate the rocks you collect to some regional unit whose broad origins are known," Spudis told SPACE.com. Lunar samples must be collected, he said, such that their provenance and relation to a large-scale regional unit can be demonstrated.Examples include samples of the youngest lava flows on the moon or the impact melt sheet of a fresh crater, like Copernicus, Spudis said."Samples collected from a unit of ambiguous context are much less valuable," Spudis said, "as you don't know exactly what the samples are telling you since you cannot put it into certain regional or global context."Spudis listed a number of his favorite sites for a simple robotic sample-return mission, such as:Flamsteed P: Some of the youngest lava flows on the moon, possibly younger than 1 billion years.Copernicus floor: Impact melt rocks to date Copernicus impact and determine average crustal column at crater target site.Sinus Aestuum: Dark mantle deposits, regional pyroclastics, deep-origin and possible volatile resources (solar wind hydrogen).Welcome newsChina delivering new samples from the moon would be welcome news, said Carlton Allen, a planetary scientist and manager of the Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas."I salute any nation's steps into space, including China's successful landing and roving on the moon," Allen said."A successful lunar landing is a testament to the skill of scientists, engineers, technicians and planners dedicated to an important and difficult goal," Allen told SPACE.com. "Bringing samples from the moon to Earth is an even more difficult undertaking, and the hallmark of a maturing space program."Extraterrestrial samples are the "ground truth" of exploration, Allen said, solidifying scientific understanding of geologic history and its timescale."At this point, we have well-documented samples from six Apollo and three [Soviet Union] Luna landings, so additional samples from new locations are always welcome," Allen said. "If the samples are carefully collected on the lunar surface, if they are preserved and protected on Earth, and if they are studied by the best scientists in the best laboratories, these samples will open fresh insights into our moon and its environment."Moon River Yutu sleeps as night comesXinhuaBEIJING -- China's moon rover "Yutu" (Jade Rabbit) went to sleep at 5:23 a.m. Thursday Beijing Time as the first lunar night for the mission fell, the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) said.Yutu slept upon command from Beijing Aerospace Control Center. The lander had already fallen asleep at 11:00 a.m. Wednesday.One night on the Moon lasts about 14 days on Earth, during which the temperature falls below minus 180 celsius. There is no sunlight to provide power to Yutu's solar panel.Scientists said Yutu can survive the night with its thermal control system, with a radioisotope heat source.Yutu and the lander compose Chang'e-3, which soft-landed on moon on Dec. 14. Yutu later separated from the lander. The two have collected a lot of data.Scientists will study and analyze data collected by Yutu and the lander while the two sleep, SASTIND said.Top science and space stories of 2013Elizabeth Landau and Matt Smith -- CNNIt has been a thrilling year of discovery in many areas of science, but also a sobering time -- federal funding cuts threaten the future of innovation, and rising carbon dioxide levels foreshadow environmental and health challenges linked to climate change.This was the year we learned that Mars was habitable billions of years ago, and also that Lady Gaga reportedly intends to be the first artist to sing in outer space in 2015 (will the papa-paparazzi follow?).Let's take a spin around some of the major science stories from 2013:Mars is the wordIn 2012, we celebrated the spectacular acrobatic arrival of NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars.But this year, Curiosity proved its worth as an extraterrestrial scientist, bringing humanity the tantalizing knowledge that life could have once thrived on Mars.Throughout 2013, scientists announced results from the rover's analyses that revealed new secrets of the Red Planet's history. Clay formations in Mars' Yellowknife Bay indicate an environment that was once favorable to microbial life. The soil contains about 2% water by weight. We also know more about the composition of the planet's atmosphere, which is only 1% as thick as our own.Meanwhile, a company called Mars One announced its intentions to land four lucky astronauts on Mars in 2025 to begin the first human colonies there. The technology doesn't exist yet to bring anyone back, the company said, so whoever goes will have to stay. More than 200,000 prospective astronauts found this idea attractive enough to apply.A different group, the Inspiration Mars Foundation, said it wants to send a man and a woman to pass by Mars in 2018, in a round-trip flight without stopping. This made us wonder: Could you survive 501 days in space with your spouse?Buzz Aldrin, best known for his Apollo 11 moonwalk, has Mars on the mind, too. He wrote CNN that "we should direct the focus of NASA efforts on establishing a permanent human presence on Mars by the 2030 to 2040 decade."Elsewhere in spaceFurther afield, one of the biggest space milestones of the year was the crossing of Voyager 1 out of the solar system. There's no border crossing agent out there, so scientists had to figure out on their own whether the probe had truly entered uncharted territory.The probe, which launched with its twin, Voyager 2, in 1977, made history as the first human-made object to leave the heliosphere, the magnetic boundary separating the solar system's sun, planets and solar wind from the rest of the galaxy. We didn't get confirmation from scientists until well after the actual event took place, though. A study in the journal Science suggests the probe entered the interstellar medium around August 25, 2012.Also, scientists put together a picture of the universe as a baby, in greater detail than ever before. Thanks to the new data from the European Space Agency's Planck space telescope, which studies light left over from the Big Bang, scientists now believe that the universe is about 100 million years older than they thought.A space telescope with a different mission, called Kepler, gave us hope for finding distant planets with life, but also suffered serious setbacks.Three Kepler planets announced this year, located about 1,200 light-years away, are considered some of the best candidates so far for hosting life. And astronomers still have two years' worth of Kepler data to plow through, said Bill Borucki, the project's principal scientist. (Using different instruments, astronomers separately found other potentially habitable planets in the Gliese 667 system).The Kepler space telescope has led scientists to believe that most stars in our galaxy have planets circling them. But the spacecraft ran into some trouble this year: The failure of a control mechanism used to keep the device focused on distant stars with pinpoint accuracy. But NASA says it still hopes to find another role for the craft, which has confirmed the existence of more than 135 planets since its launch in 2009.In the sky, closer to homeAs we tracked the progress of machines that humanity sent out of this world, we also watched out for approaching space rocks -- and not all of them flew by gently.A whopper of an asteroid gave Earth its closest shave in recorded history. At 150 feet wide, "2012 DA14" slipped in below the moon's orbit on February 15 and squeaked by our planet just 17,200 miles from its surface.In a twist worthy of Tolstoy, as astronomers watched that well-tracked rock approach, a different asteroid plunged into Earth's atmosphere and exploded high over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.More than 1,500 people were hurt, mostly by flying glass from blown-out windows across the region. It was the biggest cosmic intrusion since the 1908 Tunguska explosion over Siberia.Scientists determined the meteor was about 60 feet (17 meters) across and packed the punch of about 30 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs when it blew up. Researchers have been collecting and studying the fragments ever since, and in October, a suspected chunk weighing 570 kilograms (1,257 pounds) was hauled out of a nearby lake for study.NASA's Near Earth Object Program keeps a close eye on the asteroids that pass the planet almost daily, but they don't catch everything. Ukrainian astronomers discovered asteroid 2013 TV135 on October 8, while NASA was closed during the government shutdown. The asteroid had already passed by Earth on September 16.Old species and newBack on Earth, the animal kingdom got several important additions this year. Some had been extinct for millions of years; some are alive now, and were just hard to find.Archicebus achilles was the name of the species represented by the oldest primate skeleton found, as described in the journal Nature in June. It is considered to be a missing link between two groups: the anthropoids and the tarsiers. The 2.8-inch-long cutie lived about 55 million years ago.Then along came a different creature that looks even more cuddly, and it's alive today. Called the olinguito, the Smithsonian described the mammal's appearance as a "a cross between a house cat and a teddy bear," even though we know the latter isn't a real animal. Such discoveries don't happen often; the olinguito is the first mammalian carnivore species to be newly identified in the Americas in 35 years, says Kristofer Helgen, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.is The Cape Melville Leaf-Tailed Gecko is also among the species discovered in 2013. This primitive-looking lizard, along with two other vertebrates and a "host of other interesting species" that may also be new to science, have been isolated in a remote mountain range in Australia for millions of years.Probing the world of ancient humansWe're also learning more about the world of our ancient relatives, although there's not enough information to use the word "ancestor."A remarkable find in Dmanisi, Georgia, gave us the most complete skull ever of an individual from the early Homo genus. It is the fifth example of an ancient hominid, a bipedal primate mammal that walked upright, at this site.Scientists involved in the discovery proposed that these individuals are members of a single evolving Homo erectus species, examples of which have been found in Africa and Asia. They also said that what have traditionally been called distinct species from this period -- Homo ergaster, Homo rudolfensis and Homo habilis -- could actually be variations on a single species, Homo erectus.That's a radical departure from how ancient human relatives are currently classified. Other experts said the skull is an important find, but disagreed with the controversial theories regarding Homo erectus membership.Another potential game-changer was the reconstruction of the nearly complete mitochondrial genome of an ancient human relative. It is the oldest DNA to be recovered from an early humanlike species, and is about 400,000 years old.The sequencing technique used in this study, said senior author Svante Paabo, "opens a possibility to now do this at many other sites, and really begin to understand earlier human evolution."It's heating up on EarthScientists are also hoping to help our own species understand the perils associated with climate change. The phenomenon raises the likelihood of severe weather events and is predicted to damage agriculture, forestry, ecosystems and human health.A key symbolic moment was when the average concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide hit 400 parts per million in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, in May. Such levels haven't been seen in about 3 million years, said J. Marshall Shepherd at the University of Georgia.ising atmospheric CO2 leads to overall warming. By 2100, the Earth will be warmer than ever, authors of a Science study said in March.The Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released in September, found increasing evidence that ice sheets are losing mass, glaciers are shrinking, Arctic sea ice and global snow cover is decreasing, and permafrost is thawing in the Northern Hemisphere. And the researchers said they were more certain than ever that humans are responsible for at least half the increases in global average temperatures seen since the 1950s.While the concept of man-made climate change remains controversial politically, the debate among scientists and governments has shifted toward what can be done to limit the carbon emissions blamed for trapping heat in the atmosphere, how to deal with the expected effects, and who should pick up the cost for the poor countries analysts say are likely to be hit the hardest.A U.N. conference on the topic struggled to reach consensus despite a dramatic plea from a representative of the typhoon-ravaged Philippines. Global emissions were on track to top a record 39 billion tons, though the United States and Europe managed to cut their carbon dioxide releases.With legislative action likely to fail in the U.S. Congress, the Obama administration took steps on its own to try to rein in emissions and beef up the defenses of vulnerable communities.Sequester, shutdown suck money out of scienceIt takes funding to do scientific research, and it's a big problem when the stream stops. The one-two punch of $85 billion in forced spending cuts and a federal government shutdown bit deeply into American science in 2013.The National Science Foundation, which supports research and education in non-medical science and engineering, said it would be awarding 1,000 fewer grants in 2013.Nearly half the recipients who get federal science funding say they've recently laid off or will lay off scientists and researchers, according to a survey by 16 scientific societies. The National Institutes of Health, the largest supporter of U.S. biomedical research, said 20,000 researchers and technicians would lose jobs as $1.6 billion was eliminated from its $31 billion budget..Then, a Republican drive to defund President Barack Obama's signature health care law led to the partial shutdown of federal offices. Hundreds of thousands of government workers were furloughed during the 16-day impasse, including 97% of NASA's employees.Fun with physicsBut science is still moving forward, sometimes even toward what looks like science fiction.Physicists said they had taken a step in the direction of making an invisibility cloak, albeit a small step. Their method can make objects "invisible" within a limited range of light waves -- specifically, microwaves.And remember the light sabers in "Star Wars"? Scientists said in September that they had made "light-matter molecules made of particles of light called photons that don't behave like traditional light.Speaking of particles, we're learning more than ever about what scientists had hoped to find with a $10 billion machine called the Large Hadron Collider. The Higgs boson explains why matter has mass. Physicists announced the discovery last year, but are even more confident now, and the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the theorists who predicted the particle.The collider is turned off for upgrades, but physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, told CNN they have a lot more data to look through. More on the "God particle" (yes, we know that's a misnomer) may be in the details.There's plenty more to find out about our universe in 2014. Let's see if there's enough money to support it.Eleven Great Space Moments Of 2013Alex Knapp – ForbesIt was nearly 50 years ago that Star Trek first dubbed space as "the final frontier." Today, it's still a frontier, but it's a busy one. People from dozens of nations, as well as private industry, continued to explore the stars in the year 2013, both physically and virtually through the lenses of telescopes and the cameras of robots and probes. It's an impossible task to distill everything that humans have done, seen, and learned about in space in the year 2013, but here are eleven notable stories from the final frontier that will still be remembered in the decades to come.1. Voyager 1 Leaves The Solar SystemOn September 12, 2013, NASA announced that the probe Voyager 1, which was launched on 1977, had become the first human-made object to enter interstellar space. By making a careful study of a coronal mass ejection from the Sun and how it impacted the space around Voyager, scientists determined that the tiny probe had crossed the "Heliopause" – the point at which the Sun's solar winds are no longer powerful enough to push back the solar wind of other stars. This boundary is considered by astronomers to be the point at where the Heliosphere – space where the dominant influence is the Sun – ends, and interstellar space begins.Despite its great distance from Earth, Voyager 1 still has power, and is expected to keep transmitting information back to Earth until sometime in the year 2020, when its batteries will finally run out. But the probe itself will keep flying – and if its ever discovered by intelligent life from another star, it contains a "Golden Record" of voices, music, pictures, and other types of information about life on Earth.2. The Olympic Torch Is Carried Into SpaceThe 2014 Winter Olympics are being held in Russia, and the country its taking its role as Olympic host seriously. As part of the celebration, the Olympic torch was taken where no Olympic torch has gone before – into space. On November 9, Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy took the Olympic torch outside of the International Space Station on a spacewalk. Two days later, Russian Cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin returned to Earth, Olympic Torch in hand, and the Torch then went on to the rest of the Torch Relay.3. India Launches A Probe To MarsIn November, the India Space Research Organization launched its Mars Orbiter Mission, which is expected to reach the orbit of Mars in September of 2014. If India's mission is successful, that will make ISRO the fourth space agency to successfully send a probe to Mars. Only the United States, Russia, and the European Space Agency have successfully sent probes to the Red Planet. India's mission is interesting in that because it didn't have a rocket capable of making a single push to Mars, the probe actually used the Earth's gravity to build up energy like a slingshot to give it the energy it needed to make its journey to the Red Planet. It left Earth's orbit about 25 days after launch. During that time, NASA launched its own Mars orbiter, MAVEN, which is also expected to reach Mars in November.Unlike MAVEN, however, India's mission was much less expensive. The total cost of India's mission to Mars is estimated to be about $69 million. The cost of MAVEN, by contrast, is expected to be about $485 million. Granted, NASA's orbiter has significantly greater capabilities than India's, but the low cost of India's mission has caught the eye of people in the space industry.India's incredible strides in space exploration are a model for all of us who believe we can and should find the means to lower the cost of space exploration, Jeffrey Manber, founder and Managing Director of space science company Nanoracks told me shortly after the launch.4. NASA Plans To Capture An AsteroidAs part of its 2014 budget proposal, NASA included an initiative to build a spaceship that would capture a small, near-Earth asteroid and then tow it into a stable Lunar orbit. That would then allow astronauts to travel to and land on the asteroid. The asteroid selected would be somewhere around 7 meters wide, and NASA has narrowed its targets down to 3 asteroids. NASA hopes to have an astronaut on that asteroid by the year 2025.You can check out a video of NASA's proposed project below:5. A Blue Planet, A Pink Planet, And A Planet That Shouldn't ExistIn July, the Hubble Space Telescope caught an image of HD 189733b, which is only 63 light years away from our solar system. That's when astronomers noticed something unusual about it – it was blue. The first blue planet so far known to exist outside the solar system. Interestingly enough, the planet isn't blue because of water, but because its atmosphere is full of silicates. Which means on this planet, it literally rains glass. Astronomers reported even more information about this planet a few weeks later, when the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM Newton Observatory were able to observe it in the X-ray spectrum.That wasn't the only unusual planet found, though. Dozens of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) were studied in 2013. Among them was the possible discovery of a planet around the star TW Hydrae. If its existence is confirmed, that planet shouldn't actually exist – at least, not according to current theories of planetary formation. That's because if current models are right, then this planet is about 200 million years old. Which poses a problem, because TW Hydrae is only about 8 million years old.And TW Hydrae isn't the only planet making astronomers second-guess planetary evolution. Also discovered this year was GJ 504b, a planet about 4 times as massive as Jupiter about 57 light years away that's colored a deep magenta. This planet is located about as far away from its star as Neptune is from the Sun. But at that distance, current models of planetary evolution say that planets shouldn't be able to become as large as Jupiter, much less become 4 times more massive.These two planets, among others, may lead to astronomers completely re-thinking how planets are born and created. That in turn may lead to other advances in astronomy and physics.6. Cassini Snaps A Picture Of The Earth And The Moon From SaturnIn November, NASA released the amazing photo above, which shows Mars, Venus, the Earth and the Moon in the background of Saturn from the Cassini spacecraft. 141 wide-angle images from the probe were stitched together to create the complete picture. Cassini was launched in 1997, and has been studying Saturn and its moons for 9 years.7. Chris Hadfield Sings BowieVeteran Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield had an amazing year in 2013. He became an internet celebrity thanks to some amazing videos on YouTube, as well as the amazing images he posted from the International Space Station to his posting breathtaking photos of Earth to his Twitter and Tumblr pages. He even helped facilitate a meeting between science fiction and science fact. In February, while still on the station, he had a fascinating phone call with Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner. But perhaps the highlight of Commander Hadfield's outer space journey was the way he capped it off: creating this amazing video of himself singing David Bowie's "Space Oddity" while on board the International Space Station. You can watch the video below:8. A Meteorite Explodes Over RussiaIn February, Russians received their own visit from outer space when a meteorite exploded in the skies over the Chelyabinsk region. The explosion injured more than 950 people and damaged several buildings. The meteor, which was probably heavier than the Eiffel Tower before it burned up, was the largest space object to enter the Earth's atmosphere in over a century. The meteorite exploded just as an asteroid, 2012 DA14, made a close flyby of Earth, although the two objects were unrelated.9 China Lands A Rover On The MoonEarlier this month, the Chinese probe Chang'e-3 landed on the Moon, along with its companion Moon rover, Yutu. This was the first probe to "soft land" on the Moon in 37 years, and made China the third country to successfully land a spacecraft on the Moon. The autonomous Yutu will spend the next three months exploring and cataloging the Lunar surface. This was a big step for China's space program, which is moving slowly but steadily in its ambition to explore space. Chang'e-3 is part of China's overall effort to put a person on the Moon in 2025. The country is also currently working on building a space station in Earth's orbit.10. Orbital Sciences Makes It To The Space StationLast year, SpaceX made headlines by being the first commercial space company to successfully send a cargo ship to the International Space Station. This year, Orbital Sciences made the delivery of cargo to the space station a competitive enterprise by being the second commercial space company to do the same.Overall, this was a very good year for the commercial space industry. It saw the beginning of new private ventures, such as Inspiration Mars and World View Enterprises. Virgin Galactic is ready to launch its first commercial flights next year, and the company started accepting Bitcoin. SpaceX used its Falcon 9 rocket to launch a commercial satellite for the first time, and Bigelow Aerospace was awarded a contract for an inflatable addition to the International Space Station. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The commercial space industry continues to grow and meet new challenges.11. Curiosity Determines That Ancient Mars Could Have Been A Home To LifeProbably the most fascinating discoveries in space came from the Curiosity rover, which celebrated its one year anniversary on Mars in August. The two-ton, nuclear-powered, laser-armed rover has as its primary mission to explore whether Mars was ever able to be home to living creatures. In March, NASA announced NASA annouinced that the rover had been able to demonstrate just that – finding evidence that billions of years ago, the conditions were right for life to have survived on Mars.The Curiosity team didn't rest on their laurels, however. As the rover continued to explore the surface of Mars, NASA announced that there is currently water present in Martian soil. And just a couple of weeks ago, NASA published evidence that the area where Curiosity now roams was once the home of a habitable lake. Even more interesting, the results of this research showed that Mars was possibly habitable for tens of millions of years longer than had been previously estimated.Although Curiosity itself isn't equipped to find signs of life on Mars, it's findings so far have provided a firm foundation that Mars once had the conditions to be a home for life. Future missions to Mars will seek to verify that there was once life on the surface of the Red Planet.ENDMore detailed space news can be found at:
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