BY STEPHEN CLARK

NASA says they heard no signals from the Phoenix lander this week during 30 communications passes over the probe’s icy landing site, an expected outcome because the craft was never designed to survive the dark and cold Martian winter.

The HiRISE high-resolution camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped this enhanced color image of the Phoenix landing site on Jan. 6, 2010. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

The Odyssey orbiter circling Mars listened for potential radio signals from Phoenix 30 times over three days this week. NASA announced late Thursday that Odyssey did not detect any communications from Phoenix.

“After all their tries so far, they haven’t recovered it yet,” said Peter Smith, the Phoenix mission’s principal investigator at the University of Arizona.

Officials cautioned the odds of hearing anything from Phoenix were very slim because the lander was not designed to weather the bone-chilling temperatures and months of darkness during winter on Mars’ northern polar plains.

NASA last communicated with Phoenix in November 2008, when the lander’s solar panels stopped producing enough electricity to power communications and scientific equipment.

Images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show Phoenix encased in a dry ice field. The ice is now retreating as spring arrives at the landing site.

“That picture shows the reason we’re not seeing it yet,” Smith said in an interview on Thursday.

Artist’s concept of Phoenix on the Martian surface. Credit: University of Arizona

Odyssey’s antenna will again turn toward Phoenix in February and March for more communications attempts. The sun will be higher in the sky by then, increasing the odds the lost spacecraft could receive enough sunlight for electricity.

“We think the odds are very low that Phoenix has survived the winter environment,” said Chad Edwards, chief telecommunications engineer for Mars prorgrams at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “But if it has, the available energy to it will be increasing over the next few months.”

Phoenix will be in constant sunlight by April, but NASA says the lander will still be unlikely to wake up then.

If Phoenix is alive, it would transmit UHF radio signals on two antennas for two hours each day, according to Edwards.

The probe landed on Mars in May 2008 and operated on the ground for about five months, two months longer than originally planned. Phoenix verified the existence water ice just below the surface at the landing site.

Smith said the Phoenix science team is no longer receiving funding, but researchers are seeking money from NASA research programs and government grants to restart data analysis.

“We went through it as much as we were able to do before we lost funding, Smith said.

Phoenix also returned more than 25,000 pictures from the Red Planet, ranging from panoramic stereo images to snapshots with a microscopic camera.

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1001/21phoenix/

By Todd Halvorson, Florida Today — The Atlantis astronauts plan a high-flying arrival at the International Space Station today after a two-day trip from Kennedy Space Center.

With mission commander Charlie Hobaugh at the controls, Atlantis is scheduled to dock at the outpost just before noon and then join six researchers aboard the lab two hours later.

“Congratulations on a beautiful, flawless launch, Atlantis,” Mission Control told the crew in a message Tuesday. “Now, the fun begins.”

FLAME TRENCH BLOG: The latest shuttle updates from Florida Today.

Atlantis and six astronauts blasted off at 2:28 p.m. Monday in a launch precisely timed to put the shuttle on course for a link-up at the station at 11:53 a.m. today.

On its final approach, Atlantis will fly a 360-degree, nose-over-tail back flip — an eight-minute maneuver aimed at pointing the belly of the shuttle at the station.

Astronauts on the station will take high-resolution photos of the fragile thermal tiles that line the underside of the orbiter.

The idea is to spot any damage that might endanger the spaceship during atmospheric re-entry.

The maneuver has been standard operating procedure since NASA returned the shuttle fleet to service after the 2003 Columbia accident. Wing damage that went undetected led to that catastrophe.

The astronauts completed another post-Columbia safety measure Tuesday: inspecting the Atlantis wing panels and nose cap with a sensor-laden boom. No obvious damage was spotted.

The high-resolution photos, inspection data and launch imagery all will be examined by engineers on the ground before Atlantis is cleared to return to Earth.

Atlantis is delivering 27,000 pounds of large spare parts to the station.

Another special delivery: The wife of Atlantis astronaut Randy Bresnik, Rebecca, will give birth to the couple’s second child — a daughter — on Friday. A space-to-ground video link-up will serve as the next best thing to being there.

Bresnik and his crewmates are due back at Kennedy Space Center Nov. 27.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2009-11-18-space-shuttle_N.htm

Space shuttle set to deliver critical spare parts to International Space Station

Computerworld – NASA’s space shuttle Atlantis is loaded and ready for takeoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this afternoon.

The six-man crew is set to launch at 2:28 p.m. EST today. They’re scheduled to deliver equipment, including two gyroscopes, to the International Space Station. NASA is focused on building up a reserve of spare parts on the space station in anticipation of the retirement of the space shuttle fleet.

“You’ll see this theme in some of the flights that are going to come after ours as well,” said Brian Smith, the lead space station flight director for the mission, in a statement. “This flight is all about spares. Basically, we’re getting them up there while we still can.”

The equipment is considered highly critical to the operation of the space station, according to NASA. At this point, there are only six flights left for the space shuttles before they’re scheduled to be retired. The equipment that needs to go up is being delivered in order of highest priority. Since this is the first mission to deliver what scientists hope will turn into a trove of spare parts, they’re taking up the most important pieces.

The astronauts are expected to make three space walks during the 11-day mission.

The astronauts will work with the robotic arms onboard the shuttle and the space station to move two platforms loaded with spare parts out of the shuttle’s cargo bay to where they’ll be attached on either side of the station’s truss or backbone.

The equipment being delivered includes two pump modules, two gyroscopes, two nitrogen tank assemblies, an ammonia tank assembly and a high-pressure gas tank. Parts going up for the robotic systems onboard the station include a latching end effector for the station’s robotic arm and a trailing umbilical system reel assembly for the railroad cart that allows the arm to move along the station’s truss system.

NASA reports there are 27,250 pounds worth of parts being delivered in this mission.

As of 10:30 a.m., a NASA inspection team was studying the exterior of Atlantis, its solid rocket boosters and the external tank for ice or other debris.

Space agency crews also have loaded the shuttle’s external tank with about 535,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, which will power the shuttle’s three main engines during launch.

NASA forecasts a 70% chance of weather good enough for a launch this afternoon.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9140938/NASA_Shuttle_i_Atlantis_i_loaded_and_ready_for_launch_today

The mission that plunged a rocket into the moon’s surface last month detected about 25 gallons of water in the form of vapor and ice. ‘The moon is alive,’ a mission scientist says.

By John Johnson Jr..

Declaring “this is not your father’s moon,” NASA scientists said today that last month’s mission to punch a hole in the lunar surface found significant amounts of water in a permanently shadowed crater at the moon’s south pole.

“The moon is alive,” declared Anthony Colaprete, the chief scientist for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission.

According to Colaprete and other researchers, the mission measured about 25 gallons of water in the form of vapor and ice after punching a hole about 100 feet across in the surface of the moon. While that’s not enough to fill a bathtub, it could be evidence there is enough water at the poles for future astronauts to use to live off the land. And it’s far more than anyone expected following the Apollo missions of the 1960s and ’70s, which pronounced the moon a dead, forbidding world.

“This is painting a surprising new picture of the moon,” said Greg Delory, a space scientist at UC Berkeley.

The $79-million lunar crater mission was launched in June to try to uncover the source of large quantities of hydrogen that had been measured by other spacecraft in lunar craters at the poles. If there was water on the moon, scientists reasoned, it would be in these shadowed craters, which haven’t seen sunlight in billions of years.

Because those craters were hidden from view, scientists decided the best way to find out what was in them was to go there. Early on the morning of Oct. 9, the lunar crater satellite targeted the Cabeus crater at the south pole, first steering its companion Centaur rocket into the surface. The satellite then flew through the cloud of debris and dust kicked up by the Centaur, using its near-infrared and visible light spectrometers, along with other instruments, to taste the contents of the debris cloud. Spectrometers identify compounds by analyzing the light they emit or absorb.

No cloud showed up at first, causing some scientists to worry that the Centaur had hit rock. But the scientific team became excited when they started looking at the data transmitted back to Earth just before the satellite itself crashed a short distance from the Centaur.

The “eureka” moment came in recent weeks when the team realized a strong signature for water was picked up in more than one instrument. “It’s a pretty tight fit for water vapor and ice,” Colaprete said in a briefing at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., which managed the mission.

“What’s really exciting is we’ve only hit one spot,” said Peter Schultz, a geology professor at Brown University and a co-investigator on the mission. “It’s kind of like when you’re drilling for oil. Once you find it in one place, there’s a greater chance you’ll find more nearby.”

This is not the first discovery of water on the moon. Several weeks ago, India’s Chandrayan spacecraft found clear signs of a microscopic film of water mixed in with lunar soils, or regolith, over large areas of the moon. But those amounts were so insignificant that it is unlikely the water would be of use to future colonists. This latest discovery, however, is a potentially significant source of water, the scientists said.

It’s unlikely the water, at least at this one site, is in the form of an ice sheet, Colaprete said. It’s more likely to be mixed in with the soil.

The question now is, where did it come from? Possible sources include comets and asteroids, which are considered a likely source of the water on Earth. It’s also possible the hydrogen was delivered by solar wind to the lunar surface, where it is converted to water and travels to the shadowed craters. There, the water could be stored in the form of ice for billions of years. Polar craters on the moon are some of the coldest places in the solar system, with temperatures dipping below minus-360 degrees Fahrenheit.

The scientists hinted that other surprises may be coming in the next few months, as they continue studying the data from the mission, dubbed the LCROSS. “The full understanding of the LCROSS data may take some time. The data is that rich,” Colaprete said.

This new picture of a dynamic moon comes as the Obama administration is reconsidering the future of the human spaceflight program. The Vision for Space Exploration announced by the Bush administration in 2004 called for a return to the moon by 2020 and the eventual colonization of Mars.

But the Augustine Commission, appointed by the president to review those plans, reported just weeks ago that NASA will not get back to the moon any time soon unless it gets a lot more money, at least $3 billion a year. The commission also questioned whether the moon is a worthy goal, citing the “been there, done that” factor.

These new discoveries could be game-changers, since they raise the prospect that a colony on the moon could be virtually self-sustaining.

Water is not only useful for drinking, but it could be broken down into oxygen for breathing. Hydrogen and oxygen are also potent sources of rocket fuel, raising the prospect that the moon could serve as a low-gravity launching pad for missions further out into the solar system.

john.johnson@latimes.com

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-moon14-2009nov14,0,2036369.story

by William Harwood

After months of tests and analysis, engineers plan to beam commands to NASA’s Spirit Mars rover Monday, kicking off a long-awaited attempt to free the hardy craft from the talcum powder-like soil of a hidden crater that trapped it last April.

“Spirit’s facing the most challenging situation it’s seen yet on the surface of Mars,” Doug McCuistion, director of NASA’s Mars exploration program, said Thursday. “We know a lot of people around the world…view Spirit with great affection, exploring the Red Planet along with it, experiencing the excitement, seeing new and exciting vistas, seeing new landscapes, uncovering some incredible new knowledge about our sister planet.

The view from the Spirit rover looking north, back along its path, from the point where it got trapped last April. The rover is believed to be straddling the rim of a hidden crater. Note the front-left wheel, nearly buried in powdery soil.
(Credit: NASA)

“I’d like everybody to be hopeful, but I’d also like them to be realistic,” he said. “If Spirit cannot make the great escape from this sand trap, it’s likely that this lonely spot, straddling the edge of this crater, might be where Spirit ends its adventures on Mars.”

Designed to operate for just three months on the frigid surface of Mars, Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, have been exploring opposite sides of the planet since early 2004, collecting data in concert with orbiting spacecraft to help scientists understand the role of water in the Martian environment.

Chalking up a steady stream of discoveries over the past five years, the unexpectedly long-lived rovers are held in high esteem by the scientists and engineers who drive them across the surface of Mars and eagerly await the data they send back.

“In many ways, we think of these rovers kind of as our children that we’ve sent off into the world way too early,” said Ashley Stroupe, a rover driver at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “And like most parents, when their kids go off to college, we can’t reach out to help them every time they really need us. So it really is a bond, not just between us and the rover, but also the team has become a very close family as well.”

Last April 23, the six-wheel Spirit was slowly rolling backward on the western side of a feature known as “Home Plate,” heading toward the south and a pair of volcanic structures that scientists wanted to examine. The rover was driving backward because its right front wheel stopped working in 2006.

The ground to the south of Spirit looked normal, but as it rolled along, its wheels broke through an upper-crust-like layer of soil and into a softer, unseen material.

“Essentially, the rover was driving on what we call a dirt crust,” said John Callas, the project manager of the Mars exploration rovers at JPL. “It was a hard surface that we broke through, and underneath this material, camouflaged underneath, was this loose, fine material where the rover is challenged right now.”

Scientists later determined that Spirit’s path was straddling the rim of an ancient, 26-foot-wide crater just beneath the surface. The crater was filled in with sulfate sands that formed layers with different compositions.

Initial attempts to drive out in a crablike fashion by turning the front and back wheels in the same direction only made matters worse.

Pictures from navigation cameras on the rover show its forward and rear wheels almost buried in the soil, their treads caked with a powdery coating that reduces traction. Even worse, photographs show a pyramid-shape rock sticking up from the soil directly below Spirit’s body that threatens to rub against the belly, possibly lodging in an indentation. If the rock ends up bearing any of the weight of the rover, traction could be reduced even more.

A view under the Spirit rover showing a pyramid-shape rock close to the belly of the robot.
(Credit: NASA)

NASA managers decided to halt any additional attempts to free Spirit until engineers could complete a thorough analysis using a full-scale mockup and simulated Martian soil.

“Unfortunately, Spirit may have met its match in this one,” McCuistion said. “We will see if we can get it out of this talcum powder-type soil that laid beneath a seemingly innocuous surface crust that we broke through…The rover teams have been working very hard since April, they’ve been testing, strategizing, analyzing, and modeling to figure a way out. We even called experts in soil mechanics and mechanical systems in to try to help us understand the environment. But there’s only so much you can do on Earth to simulate Mars.”

Late Monday, commands will be uplinked to Spirit in an attempt to drive north, back along the furrows its wheels dug as the rover moved into the sand trap last April. Engineers will find out how the move went on Tuesday. No one expects a quick extraction, and engineers said it likely will take weeks or months to either free the rover or determine that it can’t be done.

A mockup of the Spirit rover in a “sand box” at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where engineers have been testing techniques for driving the vehicle out of loose soil.
(Credit: NASA)

“Our best plan at this point is to try to drive forward, retracing our steps as we drove in,” Stroupe said. “And we believe this is our best plan for several reasons. One is that we believe this softer material may be easier to plow through than trying to break through the crust and cut new tracks. So if we follow our old tracks out, we may be able to make better progress.

“We have very little ground clearance under the vehicle. Wheel turns cause us to sink further into this material, and there is no guarantee that any plan we come up with will succeed in extricating the vehicle,” she said. “This is going to clearly be a very long process, to either get to extrication or perhaps even to determine if extraction is going to work.”

The team’s progress will be assessed in February. Depending on the success or failure of the work at that point, NASA could opt to continue with additional attempts or decide to call it off. Even in that worst-case scenario, scientists could still use Spirit’s instruments to study nearby rocks and soil, and to monitor the martian weather.

But Stroupe hopes it won’t come to that.

“I think a lot of us, while we’re waiting for that plan to execute (Monday), will not get a lot of sleep,” she said. “But regardless of the outcome, none of us can have anything but primarily positive emotions about this mission. It’s been such an incredible experience, we’ve come so far beyond what we thought we would accomplish…We’re so proud of them, and we’re so thrilled to have been part of this project. It will be sad to see them go. But we’re not ready to let go yet, and we don’t plan to let go yet. We still have a lot of work to do.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-19514_3-10396634-239.html?tag=mncol;txt

The team is one of four competing for $2 million in prizes in the New Mexico desert. NASA sees private space companies playing a role in future missions.
Space race

The Masten Space Systems rocket lifts off from the launchpad Friday. The effort appeared to move Masten into the lead of the $2-million Northrop Grumman Lunar Landing Challenge. (Mike Massee / October 30, 2009)

By John Johnson Jr.

October 31, 2009

On Friday, only days after NASA tested its next big-ticket rocket, a ragtag group of space junkies in the Mojave Desert flew a bargain-basement rocket ship that could be the real future of spaceflight in the 21st century.

Masten Space Systems sent its 10-foot-tall Xoie (pronounced Zoey) rocket soaring over a patch of scrub desert that stood in for the moon, a move that appeared to vault the company into the lead in the $2-million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

The contest is sponsored by NASA as part of its long-range effort to give a boost to private companies in the hope that they will someday take on such routine space tasks as delivering cargo to the International Space Station. Four teams registered for a total of six prize-winning attempts.

The potential savings to taxpayers is significant: NASA’s next-generation rocket, the Ares 1X, which was test-launched Tuesday, has cost tens of millions of dollars. Xoie and her predecessors have cost about $2 million.

Company owner Dave Masten, 41, who is unqualified to be an astronaut because he smokes, has a more ambitious, and personal, agenda than simply hauling cargo: He wants to travel in space on his own ship.

“Solar system domination,” he joked in an interview this week at the Mojave Air and Space Port, site of the competition. “Nothing less will do.”

The Lunar Lander Challenge requires competitors to launch unmanned rockets from a pad, fly to a different pad and land, then repeat the process, all within a specified period of time.

There are four prizes in all, totaling $2 million.

With just minutes to spare of the allotted two hours and 15 minutes, the rocket touched down on its return flight, settling only inches from the center of the landing pad.

That appeared to move Masten into first place ahead of Armadillo Aerospace, operated by video game developer John Carmack of Dallas.

The competition isn’t over. The deadline is today, with one more team, Unreasonable Rocket, set to try for prize money.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-rocket31-2009oct31,0,1355726.story

by  William Harwood

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.–A preliminary look at data from NASA’s Ares I-X test flight Wednesday shows the towering rocket performed as well or better than computer modeling predicted during the climb out of the dense lower atmosphere, a senior NASA manager said Friday.

One of three huge parachutes failed to inflate during the spent booster’s descent to the Atlantic Ocean and a second chute only inflated halfway, resulting in a hard splash down that caused the rocket’s case to buckle.

NASA’s Ares I-X rocket blasts off from pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center. Engineers say data from the test flight shows the booster met or exceeded predictions from computer modeling.
(Credit: NASA)

But Mission Manager Bob Ess said the parachute system, flying for the first time, was designed for NASA’s planned Ares 1 rocket, which is 15 percent lighter than the test version, and that engineers will have plenty of time to correct whatever went wrong.

“No one is concerned about it,” Ess said. “In fact, the parachute guys were ecstatic, was their words, (about) the information they got from this flight. They really wanted to test this out.”

The Ares I-X rocket was designed to match the characteristics of NASA’s planned shuttle replacement, the more powerful Ares I. The test version featured a four-segment shuttle booster, a dummy fifth segment housing guidance and control equipment and an unpowered mockup of the rocket’s upper stage and crew capsule.

The 327-foot-tall test rocket was launched Wednesday from shuttle complex 39B at the Kennedy Space Center. The major goals of the unmanned six-minute flight were to collect engineering data on how the tall, slender rocket flew through the lower atmosphere, how the structure responded to aerodynamic and acoustic forces and how the new parachute system, scaled for the planned Ares I, performed.

During the initial seconds of flight, the rocket’s nozzle moved 1 degree as planned to help the booster “walk off” the pad, preventing its hot exhaust plume from hitting the upper sections of the shuttle service gantry. As expected, the plume caused minor damage to the lower sections of the gantry, but Ess said that would not be a problem for the new service tower that will be used for Ares rockets.

Six seconds after liftoff, the vehicle rose above the gantry and the rocket’s roll control system fired to rotate the booster about its vertical axis, ensuring that antennas relaying telemetry would remain in line of sight with ground stations throughout the flight.

The 5-degree-per-second roll maneuver went off with out a hitch and Ess said the rocket remained “very, very stable” after that. The booster experienced a maximum aerodynamic pressure of about 900 pounds per square foot just after it accelerated through the sound barrier.

“The booster guys have been looking at all the data,” Ess said. “Everything looked great. This was the oldest booster we’ve ever flown, it looked just like a shuttle flight. All the parameters were right in the middle, there were no dispersions, all the pressures, the oscillations were what we typically see for a shuttle flight.”

One major concern early in the development of the Ares system was a phenomenon known as thrust oscillation, which can cause unwanted vibrations toward the end of powered flight as the booster exhausts its load of solid propellant. Data from a few test firings early in the shuttle program indicated potentially excessive vibrations, but data from recent shuttle flights and ground firings, including one using a five-segment Ares I booster, show only minor disturbances.

Based on a quick look at the Ares I-X data, “the oscillations look very small, similar to what we see for shuttle data or that one test firing we did,” Ess said. “So we didn’t see anything unusual. … It was very benign, there was very little there. Again, we’ll get the data back from the recorder, which is high-speed data, and we’ll verify that. But at this point, there’s nothing to indicate thrust oscillation was even a factor.”

The shuttle Atlantis sits atop pad 39A awaiting launch November 16 as the Ares I-X rocket blasts off in the background.
(Credit: NASA)

The first stage lofted Ares I-X to an altitude of about 24 miles and a velocity of 4.6 times the speed of sound in two minutes of powered flight. Explosive charges then fired, separating the spent first stage from the dummy second stage. An instant later, small upward-facing rockets fired to pull the first stage away.

“The rates of the vehicle at separation were supposed to be within 2 degrees per second in pitch and yaw and 3 degrees per second in roll,” Ess said. “And indications we had are those were all within less than half a degree per second. So the flight control (system) kept the vehicle very, very stable, it wasn’t rotating at all during the separation, so it was very solid.”

In what appeared to be a surprise at the time, the upper stage went into a slow, flat spin instead of continuing upward on a nose-forward trajectory. Ess said Friday engineers, in fact, expected that behavior and had seen it in scores of computer simulations.

“Two days ago at the (post-flight) press conference I used the phrase “a little different,” Ess said, describing the upper stage tumble. “We went back and looked at all the (computer simulations) we ran and we found thousands of them that matched what we saw. So my comments were incorrect when I said ‘a little different.’”

The upper stage was loaded with 30,000 pounds of ballast near the bottom to simulate a full load of liquid oxygen rocket propellant and another 30,000 pounds higher up to simulate liquid hydrogen fuel.

“So the center of gravity is very far aft in this thing once it’s by itself and the center of pressure is more towards the middle, so it’s inherently unstable,” Ess said. “With about 90 or so pounds per square foot of dynamic pressure (at that altitude) and an unstable vehicle, it’s no wonder the simulations showed just what we saw, that when you separated there’s nothing to control it.

“As a reminder, for Ares I there’s an attitude control system on it. So as soon as you separate, there are attitude control motors that will keep the upper stage where it needs to be and then the J2 engine will kick off as well and we’ll have active control. So that is something that’s very, very different between I-X and Ares I.”

After separation, small rockets at the base of the first stage fired to put the booster in a flat spin of its own to prevent a nose-down descent that might interfere with parachute deployment.

Ess said a pilot chute deployed as planned, pulling out a larger drogue parachute to slow and stabilize the rocket. The three main parachutes then were pulled out, each one initially inflating to about 50 percent of their full 150-foot width as planned to ease the shock on the system.

“The parachutes came out in the reefed position and they all inflated, all three of them,” Ess said. “So that was good. Soon thereafter, one of the parachutes failed. It’s tough to tell exactly from the video, we’re hoping to look at the parachutes sometime over the weekend, or Monday or Tuesday. It appears the suspension lines themselves may have failed as opposed to the parachute material.

“So we had two parachutes then in the reefed position, one was just kind of trailing, it wasn’t open. Then as we went and disreefed to the fully open position, a second chute appeared to have some damage. It was still pretty much intact, but part of it, it seemed like the riser lines or suspension lines seemed to get fouled or cut, and so part of the parachute was not inflated.

“So we had one good one, one completely failed one and then one was probably about halfway (inflated),” Ess said. “So that caused the booster to hit the water at a higher speed than expected, it was a pretty hard impact. We think because this one parachute was partially inflated, we got a little more horizontal velocity than nominal. … What that caused was a hard impact and the vehicle slapped down pretty hard in the water. So that caused some damage on the booster.”

The impact apparently damaged the nozzle steering actuators and caused one of the booster’s fuel segments to buckle.

Ess said the damage was of no immediate consequence because NASA had no plans to reuse any of the hardware. As for the test, he said the parachutes were subjected to a heavier load than what is expected for the actual Ares I.

“I-X empty is about 15 percent heavier than Ares I empty,” he said. “That’s because of the fifth segment simulator, our dummy simulator, is full of electronics and avionics. We also added a bunch of ballast in the back end of it to make it more stable. So this was an overtest of the Ares I chutes. Again, there’s 15 percent more weight it had to carry than it would for Ares I. And so, therefore, there’s a whole lot more load on the chutes.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-19514_3-10387561-239.html

By Alexis Madrigal

The first test flight for NASA’s next-generation rocket rumbled closer when the Ares I-X rocket took a ride to its launch spot aboard a massive Apollo-era crawler Tuesday morning.

The test rocket, which incorporates most of the core components of the Ares I, which will actually be used for missions in the future, reached Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center at 9:17 a.m. Eastern after a 4.2 mile trip that took nearly eight hours.

The Ares I-X test rocket has more than 700 sensors that will allow NASA to ground-truth some of its calculations about the safety and performance of the rocket. Some critics have argued that the Ares I-X is too different from the real Ares I, though, to provide meaningful data. The Ares I-X is powered by a four-segment solid rocket booster, while the real deal will have five.

The Ares I-X is scheduled to launch October 27th, and NASA officials hailed its arrival at the launch pad as a major milestone for the Constellation program, which was former NASA administrator Michael Griffin’s plan to execute President George W. Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration. Bush laid out an ambitious plan to return to the moon and then continue on to Mars. NASA’s funding levels, though, never matched the grand scheme.

Constellation and the ideas that inspired it have come under heavy criticism over the last five years. Some have questioned technical decisions made by Michael Griffin and the chief architect of the Ares rocket, Scott “Doc” Horowitz, who left the agency in 2007. Commercial space companies like SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace have argued for a larger role for private industry in providing human launch services to low-earth orbit. And some scientists, especially, have wondered why we’re sending humans to space at all.

In an effort to address at least some of these concerns, President Obama asked for a special, independent panel to review NASA’s plans for human spaceflight. Chaired by Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin, that commission will release its final report on Thursday.

In a preliminary summary report, the Augustine panel made it clear that NASA does not have enough money to carry out a human spaceflight program and its other science programs. They presented a series of alternatives to Constellation that would send humans to different destinations and use different rockets.

Their original report came under withering attacks when it was presented in the House, but its ultimate audience is President Obama and the head of the Office for Science and Technology Policy, John Holdren. Rumors abound that they might be cooking up major changes to Constellation.

While NASA employees wait to hear if their agency will get a new direction, they’ve soldiered on with the Constellation program, assembling and preparing to test the Ares I-X rocket. In trying to return to the moon, NASA has often echoed Apollo, the most popular space program ever. In this case, the Ares I-X took a ride on one of two crawlers built to carry around the Saturn V rockets that sent astronauts to the moon.

When they were first completed in 1966, they were technical marvels — and they remain so today. Weighing in at 5.5 million pounds each, the vehicles’ carrying decks are large enough to fit a baseball diamond. The crawlers are powered by twin 2,750 horsepower diesel engines and sit atop enormous tank-like treads.

They’ve been kept running by a crack team at Kennedy Space Center, allowing the old machines to keep on trucking all the way through the Space Shuttle-era. These relics from Apollo are a reminder that while many things have changed at the agency, some haven’t had to.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/ares-launch-apollo-crawle/

WALLOPS ISLAND, Va. — A successful NASA flight test has shown that a spacecraft returning to Earth can use an inflatable heat shield to slow and protect itself as it enters the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds. This was the first time anyone has successfully flown an inflatable reentry capsule, according to engineers at NASA’s Langley Research Center.

The Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiment, or IRVE, was vacuum-packed into a 15-inch diameter payload “shroud” and launched on a small sounding rocket from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va. Nitrogen inflated the 10-foot (3 m) diameter heat shield, made of several layers of silicone-coated industrial fabric, to a mushroom shape in space several minutes after liftoff.

“This was a huge success,” said Mary Beth Wusk, IRVE project manager, based at Langley. “IRVE was a small-scale demonstrator. Now that we’ve proven the concept, we’d like to build more advanced aeroshells capable of handling higher heat rates.”

The Black Brant 9 rocket took about four minutes to lift the experiment to an altitude of 131 miles (211 km). Less than a minute later it was released from its cover and started inflating on schedule at 124 miles (199.5 km) up. The inflation of the shield took less than 90 seconds.

“Everything performed well even into the subsonic range where we weren’t sure what to expect,” said Neil Cheatwood, IRVE principal investigator and chief scientist for the Hypersonics Project of NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate’s Fundamental Aeronautics Program. “The telemetry looks good. The inflatable bladder held up well.”

Inflatable heat shields hold promise for future planetary missions, according to researchers. To land more mass on Mars at higher surface elevations, for instance, mission planners need to maximize the drag area of the entry system. The larger the diameter of the aeroshell, the bigger the payload can be.

Inflatable aircraft are not a new idea. Hot air balloons have been around for more than two centuries and blimps are a common sight over many sports stadiums. But it’s hard to imagine an inflatable spacecraft.

NASA engineers check out the Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiment (IRVE) in the lab. Credit: NASA/Sean Smith

› IRVE Fact Sheet (pdf)

Researchers from NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., are working to develop a new kind of lightweight inflatable spacecraft outer shell to slow and protect reentry vehicles as they blaze through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds.

They will test a technology demonstrator from a small sounding rocket to be launched at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility at Wallops Island, Va. The launch is scheduled for Aug. 17.

The Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiment, or IRVE, looks like a giant mushroom when it’s inflated. For the test, the silicon-coated Kevlar aeroshell is vacuum-packed inside a 16-inch (40.6 cm) diameter cylinder, but once it unfurls and is pumped full of nitrogen it is almost 10 feet (3 m) wide.

Engineers say the concept could help land bigger objects on Mars. “We’d like to be able to land more mass on Mars,” said Neil Cheatwood, IRVE’s principal investigator and chief scientist of the Hypersonics Project within NASA’s Fundamental Aeronautics Program. “To land more mass you have to have more drag. We need to maximize the drag area of the entry system. We want to make it as big as we can, but the limitation has been the launch vehicle diameter.”

According to Cheatwood, the idea of inflatable decelerators has been around for 40 years, but there were technical issues, including concerns about whether materials could withstand the heat of re-entry. Since then materials have advanced and because of numerous Mars missions, including rovers, landers and orbiters, there’s more understanding of the Martian atmosphere.

That means researchers can now test a subscale model of a compact inflatable heat shield with the help of a small two-stage rocket. The vehicle is a 50-foot Black Brant 9 that will lift IRVE outside the atmosphere to an altitude of about 130 miles (209 km). Engineers want to find out what the re-entry vehicle will do on the way down.

“The whole flight will be over in less than 20 minutes,” said Mary Beth Wusk, IRVE project manager. “We separate from the rocket 90 seconds after launch and we begin inflation about three-and-a-half-minutes after that. Our critical data period after it inflates and re-enters through the atmosphere is only about 30 seconds long.”

Cameras and sensors on board will document the inflation and high-speed free fall and send information to researchers on the ground.

After its brief flight IRVE will fall into the Atlantic Ocean about 90 miles down range from Wallops. No efforts will be made to retrieve the experiment or the sounding rocket.

The Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiment is an example of how NASA is using its aeronautics expertise to support the development of future spacecraft. NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate in Washington funded the flight experiment as part of its hypersonics research effort.

On the day of the launch the Wallops Flight facility plans to use the Internet to update the countdown status at:

› http://twitter.com/NASA_Wallops

A webcast the event will be featured at:

› http://www.nasa.gov/centers/wallops/events/index.html

Kathy Barnstorff
NASA Langley Research Center

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/aeronautics/features/irve.html

NASA scrubbed the second launch attempt of the space shuttle Discovery Aug. 26 when a liquid hydrogen valve developed problems during tanking operations. An Aug. 25 launch was scratched when thunderstorms struck the Cape Canaveral area.

The space agency tentatively rescheduled the launch for Aug. 28 at 12:22 a.m. with a second launch window at 11:59 p.m. NASA has set Aug. 30 as the latest launch date for Discovery before standing down due to a conflict with other scheduled missions by Russia and Japan. Mission managers said if Discovery is forced to stand down in August, the next opportunity for a shot at the ISS (International Space Station) will be in October.

The Aug. 26 launch delay occurred when NASA commanded the liquid hydrogen valve to close and did not receive a closed indication. NASA is concerned that the valve is either open or partially open, but the situation needs to be evaluated for confirmation.

“Prudence does dictate that we take a look at it,” said Pete Nickolenko, NASA’s launch director. Detailed test data about the valve will be examined before Discovery’s fuel tank is loaded with propellant ahead of Friday morning’s launch attempt.

Unlike previous missions, which have focused on the ongoing construction of the ISS, the Discovery mission is primarily focused on delivering more than seven tons of supplies, science racks and equipment, as well as additional environmental hardware to sustain six crew members on the orbital outpost.

Commanded by veteran astronaut Rick “C.J.” Sturckow, the Discovery crew will deliver refrigerator-sized racks full of scientific equipment. When the good are delivered, NASA says it will be a “quantum leap” in the scientific capability of the orbital laboratory.

The Discovery’s payload includes the Materials Science Research Rack (MSRR-1), the Minus Eighty Degree Laboratory Freezer for ISS (MELFI) and the Fluids Integration Rack (FIR).

MSRR-1 will be used for basic materials research related to metals, alloys, polymers, semiconductors, ceramics, crystals and glasses in the microgravity environment. MELFI will be used for long-term storage of experiment samples that are to be returned to Earth for detailed analysis. The FIR is a fluid physics research facility designed to host investigations in areas such as colloids, gels, bubbles, wetting and capillary action, and phase changes, including boiling and cooling.

Discovery’s cargo bay also includes the COLBERT (Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill) treadmill, an exercise device named after comedian Stephen Colbert.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Green-IT/Discovery-Finds-No-Launch-Luck-396493/