[Space] News

[Rand]

LRO ha fotografato a risoluzione piena il sito dell'allunaggio dell'Apollo 11:

http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/uploads/lm_westcrater.png

Questo è un ingrandimento del LM:



Fonte

[Rand]

What Really Happened on Apollo 13?

Hear the story of what really happened on Apollo 13 from two of the astronauts who were on board, Jim Lovell and Fred Haise. Lovell provides great detail on the history of the oxygen tank and why it exploded, and both Lovell and Haise have some great stories to share about the flight, movie inaccuracies and more. Thanks to David Meerman Scott from Apollo Artifacts who took this video at the Kennedy Space Center at the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation event on November 6, 2009.

Also on Apollo Artifacts, check out a video of short speech by Neil Armstrong who gave a tribute to the Apollo 12 crew at the flight's 40th anniversary gala on November 7, 2009.

Nuovo problema per Hayabusa:

The main ion engine D has been inactive because of aging degradation since 4th NOV. The team has been trying to restart it but not succeeded yet.
http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2009/11/200...ayabusa_j.html (Japanese)

Other three main engines' status are as below:
Engine A: Inactive because of electronic instability since MAY 2003
Engine B: Disabled because of aging degradation since APR 2007
Engine C: Operable but inactive because of aging degradation

A newspaper says that Engines A/B have also been unable to be restarted. If it's true, the aged Engine C is the only operable thruster.
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/space/news/...OYT1T00774.htm (Japanese)

Pray for his safe return, please.

Fonte

[Rand]

Hubble Space Telescope + Spitzer Space Telescope + Chandra X-ray Observatory =


la versione a piena risoluzione si può trovare qui (immagine 9725 X 4862 - 8 Mb)

NASA's Great Observatories Celebrate International Year of Astronomy

A never-before-seen view of the turbulent heart of our Milky Way galaxy is being unveiled by NASA on Nov. 10. This event will commemorate the 400 years since Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609.

In celebration of this International Year of Astronomy, NASA is releasing images of the galactic center region as seen by its Great Observatories to more than 150 planetariums, museums, nature centers, libraries, and schools across the country.

The sites will unveil a giant, 6-foot-by-3-foot print of the bustling hub of our galaxy that combines a near-infrared view from the Hubble Space Telescope, an infrared view from the Spitzer Space Telescope, and an X-ray view from the Chandra X-ray Observatory into one multiwavelength picture. Experts from all three observatories carefully assembled the final image from large mosaic photo surveys taken by each telescope. This composite image provides one of the most detailed views ever of our galaxy's mysterious core.

Participating institutions also will display a matched trio of Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra images of the Milky Way's center on a second large panel measuring 3 feet by 4 feet. Each image shows the telescope's different wavelength view of the galactic center region, illustrating not only the unique science each observatory conducts, but also how far astronomy has come since Galileo.

The composite image features the spectacle of stellar evolution: from vibrant regions of star birth, to young hot stars, to old cool stars, to seething remnants of stellar death called black holes. This activity occurs against a fiery backdrop in the crowded, hostile environment of the galaxy's core, the center of which is dominated by a supermassive black hole nearly four million times more massive than our Sun. Permeating the region is a diffuse blue haze of X-ray light from gas that has been heated to millions of degrees by outflows from the supermassive black hole as well as by winds from massive stars and by stellar explosions. Infrared light reveals more than a hundred thousand stars along with glowing dust clouds that create complex structures including compact globules, long filaments, and finger-like "pillars of creation," where newborn stars are just beginning to break out of their dark, dusty cocoons.

The unveilings will take place at 152 institutions nationwide, reaching both big cities and small towns. Each institution will conduct an unveiling celebration involving the public, schools, and local media.

[jumpjack]

Non mi ricordo se qui l'ho gia' postato:

Mostra "Astri e Particelle" a Roma, fino al 14 febbraio 2010:
http://www.palazzoesposizioni.it/Med...ia.aspx?idc=18

Programma in PDF:
http://www.palazzoesposizioni.it/med...D-3DF1688764CB

Ingresso intero 12,50 euro.
Ingresso alle conferenze gratuito (ogni giovedi' alle 18.30)
Ingresso gratuito per la proiezione in 3d della stazione spaziale (qualunque cosa significhi...)
4,50 euro per ogni film della rassegna di fantascienza.


Sabato 14 novembre ore 17.00, conferenza gratuita "A cosa serve la macchina piu' grande del mondo?" (L'LHC di Ginevra)

[jumpjack]

Buchi sulla luna: è davvero fatta di formaggio?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...-the-moon.html

[:dissident:]

Come quelli su marte??

[jumpjack]

Originariamente inviato da :dissident:

Come quelli su marte??

sembra di si'.
Ci stanno studiando su. LRO ha gia' in programma di andare a ficcanasare facendo foto 10 volte piu' definite.

[jumpjack]

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA will begin transmitting commands to its Mars exploration rover Spirit on Monday as part of an escape plan to free the venerable robot from its Martian sand trap.

Lunedi', "pronti a muovere" (e che Dio ce la mandi buona).
http://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/showpo...&postcount=558

[jumpjack]

Il sorvolo di Rosetta sulla Terra, in diretta tra 10 minuti!

LIVE STREAM: Rosetta swingby event
ESA/ESOC, Darmstadt, 08:00-09:00 CET

Watch live coverage of the Rosetta Earth swingby event from ESA's European Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, 08:00-09:00 CET.

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Rosetta/index.html

Blog:
http://webservices.esa.int/blog/blog/5/

[Rand]

PEPP-Aeroshell

The unique PEPP-Aeroshell (Planetary Entry Parachute Program) was a test vehicle to test the aerodynamic properties of the parachutes for the Voyager (later renamed Viking) Mars probes. It was launched by high altitude balloon from Walker Air Force Base (Roswell Air Field). Upon reching a height of x km, the vehicle was released and the solid fueled rockets (12 Falcon or 8 Sword-1 motors) accelerated the test vehicle upwards. At burn out the aeroshell was released from the dummy payload, which then unfurled the parachutes. The 15-foot disk-shaped flight units were flown only four times: August 30, 1966; July 28, 1967; August 15, 1967; and August 22, 1967. A fifth flight of the full-scale unit was cancelled because the engineers involved felt it would be a needless expense and the program had been so successful with the first four that sufficient data had been obtained.

All the firings were conducted within the confines of the White Sands Missile Range. Aeroshells were released and rocket-propelled from the middle of a 50-mile-wide impact area, which means they could not have travelled more than 25 miles before falling to earth. The range is located about 40 miles north of El Paso and west of Alamagordo, New Mexico. The 'flying saucer' shaped vehicle is often mentioned with UFO conspiracies.

Si trovano anche diversi video su Youtube dei test.

[Rand]

Pannelli solari interessanti:





con rapporti W/Kg del genere è fattibile alimentarci applicazioni che richiedono molta energia (tipo VASIMR )

Analysis of this type of SLA/SquareRigger system led to the near-term and mid-term performance metric estimates in the table above. Note that SLA/SquareRigger enables giant space solar arrays in the 100 kW to 1 MW class, with spectacular performance metrics (300 to 500 W/kg specific power, 80 to 120 kW/m3 stowed power, and operational voltages above 1,000 V) in the near-term (2010) to mid-term (2015).

[jumpjack]

Originariamente inviato da Rand

Pannelli solari interessanti:





con rapporti W/Kg del genere è fattibile alimentarci applicazioni che richiedono molta energia (tipo VASIMR )

2kg per 1 kW???
bello, lo voglio. Ora, pero', non nel 2015.

[jumpjack]

Al via i provini per il Grande Fratello... marziano!!
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...exploring-mars

Ma sarà un po' piu' lungo del solito: 500 (cinquecento) giorni!
Per vedere se 6 persone finiranno per scannarsi o per... riprodursi!

[Rand]

BepiColombo ora ha un budget di 970 milioni di euro, che dovrebbe permettere la realizzazione della missione cosi' come pianificata:

Mercury mission clears key hurdle

Science delegations to the European Space Agency have approved a much more expensive mission to Mercury.

BepiColombo, due for launch in 2014, was supposed to have cost Esa about 665m euros (£595m; $995m).

But meeting the challenge of building a probe able to survive the torrid heat and radiation at the innermost world has pushed that price up to 970m euros.

Many researchers feared Bepi would be cancelled, but Esa's Science Programme Committee has passed the bigger budget.

"Technically it has a clean bill of health to proceed, and financially it also has a clean bill of health to proceed," Professor David Southwood, the agency's director of science and robotics, told BBC News.

BepiColombo will be one of Europe's most sophisticated scientific missions to date.

It is designed to be a joint endeavour with the Japanese. Two probes will travel jointly to Mercury, and separate when they achieve orbit (in 2020).

Europe will produce a Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) which will be equipped with 11 scientific instruments.

Flying in a polar orbit, it will study Mercury for at least a year, imaging the planet's surface, generating height profiles, and collecting data on Mercury's composition and wispy atmosphere.

Japan will be responsible for the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO). It will investigate the planet's magnetic field with its five on-board instruments.

Working at Mercury, however, is an immense undertaking.

BepiColombo will be baked directly by the Sun, receiving some 14,000 watts per square metre; about 10 times what a spacecraft in orbit around Earth would receive.

Developing the systems that can manage this environment has led to the mission getting heavier. The original solar panel design, for example, was found to be incapable of dealing with a combination of high temperatures and extreme ultraviolet light.

The panels will now have a special coating, but they will also be bigger and hence more massive.

Overall, Bepi's launch mass has grown from some three tonnes to just over four tonnes. This has necessitated the use of a larger, more expensive rocket - an Ariane 5 instead of a Soyuz.

Some critics had queried whether the extra cost of Bepi could be justified given that the Americans are already at Mercury with a sophisticated orbiter called Messenger.

"That was one of the central issues," said Professor Southwood.

"We had information given to us not only by our own scientific advisers but by the Messenger team as well. I don't think there's any doubt about it. You'd expect two spacecraft to deliver more science than one; and Bepi is a much, much bigger mission than Messenger."

Dr David Rothery, the lead scientist on Bepi's Mercury Imaging X-ray Spectrometer (MIXS), said the science case for another Mercury mission was exceptional.

"The best way I heard it expressed, very kindly by a member of the Messenger team, was that Messenger is providing the 'hors d'oeuvre' and BepiColombo will be the 'feast'.

"BepiColombo has more instruments and more capable instruments than Messenger does.

"Messenger doesn't have imaging capacity in the X-ray part of the spectrum, which is the main UK contribution to Bepi. Messenger also lacks mid-infrared capacity spectroscopy which is very important for the most diagnostic minerals on Mercury's surface."

[Rand]

Risolto (o meglio rattoppato ) per ora il problema con i motori a ioni di Hayabusa:

Hayabusa's still coming home: JAXA engineers come up with yet another creative solution

Ideally, you'd like to have a space mission that faces no problems. But in the real world, spacecraft run into trouble. Trouble has come time and again to JAXA's little Hayabusa asteroid sample return mission, yet the mission's engineers always come up with new and creative ways to solve problems.

Just last week, I reported on what seemed like a fatal blow to the mission, the failure of thruster D, one of only two still-functioning ion thrusters. With only one functioning thruster, it seemed unlikely that Hayabusa could perform the trajectory correction necessary to bring it back home.

They've solved the problem in a way I couldn't have imagined. To explain the solution, I need to explain a little bit about how ion propulsion works. In ion propulsion, a gas (usually xenon or some other noble gas) is ionized, stripped of one or more electrons, then accelerated electrically across a charged grid. This mechanism can accelerate the ions to very high speed, producing thrust more efficiently (per unit mass of propellant) than chemical thrusters, although ion engines can't match chemical thrusters for sheer thrusting power. But there's a charge balance problem here: if you ionized and then tossed away all those positively-charged atoms, you'd be building up a huge negative charge on your spacecraft, and pretty quickly your spacecraft would be attracting back all those positively charged ions (and I don't imagine an enormous negative charge would do great things for your electronics). So a key part of an ion engine is a neutralizer, which sits outside the ion engine and emits electrons that are gobbled up by the high-speed xenon cations, resulting in both propellant and spacecraft remaining neutrally charged.

The failure of thruster D was actually a failure of the neutralizer component. Thruster B failed for the same reason. Thruster C's neutralizer is on its last legs, but is still operable. Thruster A, however, has never been used; the engine was found to be "unstable" after launch.

The solution that the engineers have come up with is that they are somehow able to use the neutralizer from thruster A to neutralize the ion beam from thruster B. With this configuration, and the continued operation of thruster C, they have determined that they can maintain the schedule that has them returning to Earth in June of 2010.

Here's some further notes from the press briefing, contributed by unmannedspaceflight.com member Ishigame:

* Engines A/B/D can no longer stand alone.
* They won't use Engines A/B and C simultaneously. Engine C will be regarded as a back-up as long as possible.
* Combining two engines has never been tested on the ground but it has been working for one week [in space] (180 hours). It has been managed thanks to an emergency circuit.
* Combining two engines requires twice as much power/fuel as standards but Hayabusa has plenty resource. 5 kilograms of fuel will be required to gain 200 meters per second acceleration over 2000 hours, but Hayabusa still has 20 kilograms of fuel in reserve.
* The acceleration will continue until mid March 2010.
The situation doesn't allow premature conclusions [by which I think he means Hayabusa is not out of the woods]. If more troubles happen, e.g. Engines A/B stop before the end of the year, the team will have to consider another plan about returning in 2013.

Go Hayabusa, go!

[GioFX]

Molto interessante l'incredibile soluzione trovata!

Go Hayabusa!

[jumpjack]

Originariamente inviato da GioFX

Molto interessante l'incredibile soluzione trovata!

Go Hayabusa!

ci vorrebbe un disegno che mostra dove/come so' messi e come so' fatti questi motori!

[Rand]

Originariamente inviato da jumpjack

ci vorrebbe un disegno che mostra dove/come so' messi e come so' fatti questi motori!

Le uniche cose che ho trovato sono:


e

[jumpjack]

Originariamente inviato da Rand

Le uniche cose che ho trovato sono:


e

non si capisce molto di come sono accoppiati ionizzatori e neutralizzatori, purtroppo.

[Rand]

The Extremely Large Telescope

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is planning on building a massive – and I do mean massive – telescope in the next decade. The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) is a 42-meter telescope in its final planning stages. Weighing in at 5,000 tonnes, and made up of 984 individual mirrors, it will be able to image the discs of extrasolar planets and resolve individual stars in galaxies beyond the Local Group! By 2018 ESO hope to be using this gargantuan scope to stare so deep into space that they can actually see the Universe expanding!

The E-ELT is currently scheduled for completion around 2018 and when built it will be four times larger than anything currently looking at the sky in optical wavelengths and 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope – despite being a ground-based observatory.

With advanced adaptive optics systems, the E-ELT will use up to 6 laser guide stars to analyse the twinkling caused by the motion of the atmosphere. Computer systems move the 984 individual mirrored panels up to a thousand times a second to cancel out this blurring effect in real time. The result is an image almost as crisp as if the telescope were in space.

This combination of incredible technological power and gigantic size mean that that the E-ELT will be able to not only detect the presence of planets around other stars but also begin to make images of them. It could potentially make a direct image of a Super Earth (a rocky planet just a few times larger than Earth). It would be capable of observing planets around stars within 15-30 light years of the Earth – there are almost 400 stars within that distance!

The E-ELT will be able to resolve stars within distant galaxies and as such begin to understand the history of such galaxies. This method of using the chemical composition, age and mass of stars to unravel the history of the galaxy is sometimes called galactic archaeology and instruments like the E-ELT would lead the way in such research.

Incredibly, by measuring the redshift of distant galaxies over many years with a telescope as sensitive as the E-ELT it should be possible to detect the gradual change in their doppler shift. As such the E-ELT could allow humans to watch the Universe itself expand!

ESO has already spent millions on developing the E-ELT concept. If it is completed as planned then it will eventually cost about €1 billion. The technology required to make the E-ELT happen is being developed right now all over the world – in fact it is creating new technologies, jobs and industry as it goes along. The telescope's enclosure alone presents a huge engineering conundrum – how do you build something the size of modern sports stadium at high altitude and without any existing roads? They will need to keep 5,000 tonnes of metal and glass slewing around smoothly and easily once it's operating – as well as figuring out how to mass-produce more than 1200 1.4m hexagonal mirrors.

The E-ELT has the capacity to transform our view not only of the Universe but of telescopes and the technology to build them as well. It will be a huge leap forward in telescope engineering and for European astronomy it will be a massive 42m jewel in the crown.

In breve: