OrbitalHub

Credits: ESA – S. Corvaja

The Mars500 experiment is a cooperative project between the European Space Agency’s Directorate of Human Spaceflight and the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP).

The experiment will be conducted inside a special facility at the IBMP in Moscow.

Mars500 is essential for the preparation of human missions to Mars, as the data, knowledge, and experience accumulated during the experiment will help scientists investigate the human factors of this type of mission.

Many aspects of long duration spaceflights are targeted by this study: crew composition, the influence of isolation on sleep, mood, and mental health, the impact of different personalities, cultural background, and motivation of the crew members, and the effects of stress on health and the immune system.

There is one 150-day simulation to be conducted (that can be followed by an additional 150-day study) before the full 520-day simulation. The full simulation follows the profile of a real mission to Mars, which contains an exploration phase that has to be performed by the crew of six selected for the experiment.

During the experiments, the crews will have a diet identical to the one that the ISS crews have and communication with the outside world will involve a delay (as in the real conditions of a space mission, when the spacecraft and the mission control are millions of kilometers away from each other).

The crew will be completely isolated, and they will have to handle all of the critical situations for the duration of the experiment. The crew will speak English and Russian, and have experience in medicine, biology, and engineering.

Credits: ESA – S. Corvaja

The facility at IBMP is known as the Ground-based Experimental Complex (GEC or NEK in Russian). Besides the isolation facility (or the mockup of the habitable modules of a spacecraft), the facility also contains technical facilities, offices, and an operations room.

The isolation facility contains four interconnected modules, which are used by the crew for daily activities.

It also contains a module that will simulate the Martian landscape and it will be used for activities on the surface of Mars during the simulated landing.

The four modules are designated as the medical module, the living quarters, the Mars landing module, and the storage module. The medical module will be used for routine medical examinations, and eventually for complex medical investigations in the case of any crew member becoming ill. The living quarters module contains individual compartments for the crew members, and also a living room, and a kitchen. The control room will also be part of this module.

The Mars landing module will accommodate the landing crew during the orbiting of Mars phase of the mission. Three of the crew members will have to live and work inside this module for up to 3 months. The storage module contains a refrigerator for food storage, a storage compartment for non-perishable food, a greenhouse, a gym, a bathroom, and even a sauna.

The start of the full 520-day study is planned for late 2009, when a six-member crew will be sealed behind the entry hatch in order to live and work in the conditions of a complete Mars mission.

For more information about the Mars500 project, check out the dedicated page on the IBMP web site.

Credits: NASA

On January 3, 2004, the MER-A rover a.k.a. Spirit landed on Mars at the Gusev Crater. The second rover, MER-B a.k.a. Opportunity, followed twenty-one days later and landed at the Meridiani Planum.

They were both designed to operate for three months on the surface of Mars. Five years later, they are still operational and NASA has planned new missions for them.

Considering the harsh conditions on Mars, NASA’s twin rovers have accomplished remarkable things: they have returned a quarter-million images, driven more than thirteen miles, climbed a mountain, descended into impact craters, and survived dust storms. Using the Mars Odyssey orbiter as a communication relay, the rovers have sent more than 36 GB of scientific data back to Earth.

“These rovers are incredibly resilient considering the extreme environment the hardware experiences every day,” said John Callas, JPL project manager for Spirit and Opportunity. “We realize that a major rover component on either vehicle could fail at any time and end a mission with no advance notice, but on the other hand, we could accomplish the equivalent duration of four more prime missions on each rover in the year ahead.”

Credits: NASA

Digging into the MER mission archive, one detail caught my eye. The rovers carry plaques commemorating the crews of Columbia and Challenger, and some of the landmarks surrounding the landing sites of the rovers are dedicated to the astronauts of Apollo 1, Columbia, and Challenger.

Spirit is carrying a plaque commemorating the STS-107 Space Shuttle Columbia crew, which has been mounted on the high-gain antenna of the rover.

The names of the STS-107 crew are inscribed on the plaque: Rick D. Husband, William C. McCool, Michael P. Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David M. Brown, Laurel B. Clark, and Ilan Ramon. Their names are now looking over the Martian landscapes.

To further honor their memory, the landing site of the MER Spirit is called the Columbia Memorial Station.

Credits: NASA

Three of the hills surrounding the Columbia Memorial Station are dedicated to the Apollo 1 crew: Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chafee. Grissom Hill is located 7.5 km to the southwest of Columbia Memorial Station, White Hill is 11.2 km northwest of the landing site, and Chafee Hill is located 14.3 km south-southwest of the landing site.

The area where Opportunity landed in the Meridiani Planum is called Challenger Memorial Station, in memory of the last crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger: Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Judith A. Resnik, Ellison S. Onizuka, Ronald E. McNair, Gregory B. Jarvis, and Sharon Christa McAuliffe. I remember that Sharon Christa McAuliffe was NASA’s first teacher in space.

“The journeys have been motivated by science, but have led to something else important,” said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y. Squyres is principal investigator for the rover science instruments. “This has turned into humanity’s first overland expedition on another planet. When people look back on this period of Mars exploration decades from now, Spirit and Opportunity may be considered most significant not for the science they accomplished, but for the first time we truly went exploring across the surface of Mars.”

Credits: NASA/JPL

Carnival of Space #84 is hosted by Next Big Future.

This week you can read about space solar power, oceans on Venus, Mars rovers, the top ten astronomy pictures of 2008, the AGU Conference, and many more interesting topics.

OrbitalHub has submitted an update on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter science mission.

Credits: NASA/JPL

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has completed the first phase of its science mission. During this phase, the orbiter returned seventy-three terabits of science data to Earth, which is more than all earlier Mars missions combined. The next phase of the MRO mission will take two years.

The list of scientific discoveries and observations made by MRO is stunning. We know now that Mars has a long history of climate change and that water was present in liquid form on its surface for hundreds of millions of years.

Signatures of a variety of watery environments have been observed, so future missions will be aware of locations that might reveal evidence of past life on Mars, if it ever existed.

MRO has imaged nearly forty percent of the Martian surface at such a high resolution that house-sized objects can be seen in detail. MRO has also conducted a mineral survey of the planet, covering sixty percent of its surface. Global weather maps were assembled using the data returned by MRO, and profiles of the subsurface and the polar caps have been put together using the radar mounted on MRO.

Credits: NASA/KSC

“These observations are now at the level of detail necessary to test hypotheses about when and where water has changed Mars and where future missions will be most productive as they search for habitable regions on Mars,” said Richard Zurek, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter project scientist.

The images returned by MRO have been used by the Phoenix team to change the spacecraft’s landing site, and will help the NASA scientists select landing sites for future missions, like the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL).

Another role played by MRO was to relay commands to and to return data from the Phoenix lander during the five months the lander was operational on the Martian surface. MRO shared this task with the Mars Odyssey Orbiter.

MRO lifted off on August 12, 2005, from launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The cruise phase of the mission lasted seven months, the spacecraft reaching Mars orbit on March 10, 2006, after traveling on an outbound arc intercept trajectory.

MRO entered the final low orbit suited for science-data collection on November 2006, after slowing down in the Martian atmosphere by using aerobraking for five months. The first phase of the mission consisted in gathering information about Mars, and the remaining time left of its operational life will be dedicated mainly to using the spacecraft as a communication relay.

Credits: NASA/KSC

The declared goals of the MRO mission are: to determine whether life ever arose on Mars, to characterize the climate of Mars, to characterize the geology of Mars, and to prepare for human exploration.

The launcher of choice for the MRO mission was the Atlas V-401 launch vehicle, the smallest of the Atlas V family. This was the first launch of an Atlas V on an interplanetary mission.

The Atlas V-401 is a two-stage launch vehicle that does not use solid rocket boosters. The Atlas V-401 is fifty-seven meters tall and has a total mass at liftoff of 333,000 kg. Out of this, about 305,000 kg is fuel. In order to reach Mars orbit, MRO was accelerated to 11 km per second.

The first stage of the Atlas V, the Common Core Booster, is powered by liquid oxygen and RP-1. For the MRO mission, the first stage used a RD-180 engine. The RD-180 engine has an interesting story. It is a Russian-developed rocket engine, derived from the RD-170 used for the Zenit rockets.

Credits: NASA/JPL/KSC/Lockheed Martin Space Systems

Rights to use the RD-180 engine were acquired by General Dynamics Space Systems Division (later purchased by Lockheed Martin) in the early 1990s. The engine is co-produced by Pratt & Whitney and all production to date has been in Russia. According to Pratt & Whitney, RD-180 delivers a ten percent performance increase over current operational U.S. booster engines.

The stage weighs approximately 305,000 kg at launch and it provides about four million Newton of thrust for four minutes.

The upper stage of the Atlas V is the Centaur Upper Stage Booster. The Centaur is powered by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. In the case of the MRO mission, it provided the remaining energy necessary to send the spacecraft to Mars.

The payload fairing used for the MRO mission was four meters in diameter. The role of the payload fairing was to protect the spacecraft from the weather on the ground as well as from the dynamic pressure during the atmospheric phase of the launch.

Lockheed Martin Commercial Launch Services developed the Atlas V as part of the US Air Force Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program.

There are six science instruments, three engineering instruments, and two science-facility experiments carried by the MRO. The low orbit on which MRO is operating allowed the observation of the surface, atmosphere, and subsurface of Mars in unprecedented detail.

The science instruments are the HiRISE camera (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment), the CTX camera (Context Camera), the MARCI camera (Mars Color Imager), the CRISM spectrometer (Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars), the MCS radiometer (Mars Climate Sounder), and the SHARAD radar (SHAllow RADar).

Credits: HiRISE/MRO/LPL/NASA

The HiRISE camera provided the highest-resolution images from orbit to date, while the SHARAD can probe the subsurface using radar waves in the 15-25 MHz frequency band (these waves can penetrate the Martian crust up to one kilometer).

The engineering instruments assist the spacecraft navigation and communication. The Electra UHF Communications and Navigation Package is used as a communication relay between the Earth and landed crafts on Mars. The Optical Navigation Camera serves as a high-precision camera to guide incoming spacecrafts as they approach Mars. The Ka-band Telecommunications Experiment Package demonstrated the use of the Ka-band for power effective communications.

The science facility experiments are the Gravity Field Investigation Package, used for mapping the gravity field of Mars, and the Atmospheric Structure Investigation Accelerometers, which helped scientists understand the structure of the Martian atmosphere.

For more details on the MRO scientific payload, you can check out the dedicated page on the MRO mission web site.

The MRO was built by Lockheed Martin for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Fully loaded, the spacecraft had a mass of almost two tons. The spacecraft carried 1,149 kg of propellant for trajectory correction maneuvers and for the burns needed for the Mars capture.

Credits: NASA/JPL

The main bus of the spacecraft presents two massive solar arrays that can generate 2,000 W of power. On top, the high-gain antenna is the main means of communication with both Earth and other spacecrafts. The SHARAD antenna is the long pole behind the bus.

Other visible features are the HiRISE camera, the Electra telecommunications package, and the Context Imager (CTX).

You can visit the home page of the MRO mission on the NASA web site.

Credits: NASA

In 2002, an instrument on the Mars Odyssey spacecraft detected hydrogen under the Martian surface. This was regarded as clear evidence that there is subsurface water ice on Mars.

In 2003, NASA decided to revive a mission that was cancelled in 2001 due to the fact that a previous mission, the Mars Polar Lander, was lost in 1999. The revived mission was named Phoenix.

A Lander that could reach out and touch the ice was needed. The half-built spacecraft for the previously cancelled mission already had in place a 7.7-foot robotic arm that could do the trick.

A JPL team reviewed the data from the failed mission in 1999 and corrected the mistakes made. Every system used in the previous design was taken apart, tested, and examined. The suspected culprits were the retrorockets used during landing. More than a dozen issues that could have caused a failure of the new planned mission were found and fixed.

Credits: NASA / JPL

The Phoenix mission inherited a capable spacecraft partially built for the Mars Surveyor Program 2001. As we mentioned, the lessons learned from the Mars Polar Lander helped improve the existing systems. As for any other space mission, the conditions in which the spacecraft operates dictate the design.

In the case of the Phoenix mission, the following phases were considered: the launch, the cruise, the atmospheric entry, the touchdown, and the surface operations phase. The launch induces tremendous load forces and vibrations. The 10-month cruise to Mars exposes the spacecraft to the vacuum of space, solar radiation, and possible impacts with micrometeorites. During the atmospheric entry, the spacecraft is heated to thousands of degrees due to aero braking, and has to withstand tremendous deceleration during the parachute deployment. The extremely cold temperatures of the Martian arctic and the dust storms must be considered during the surface operations phase.

Credits: NASA / JPL

Several instruments are mounted on the Lander: the robotic arm (RA), the robotic arm camera (RAC), the thermal and evolved gas analyzer (TEGA), the Mars descent imager (MARDI), the meteorological station (MET), the surface stereo imager (SSI), and the microscopy, electrochemistry, and conductivity analyzer (MECA).

The RA was built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was designed to perform the scouting operations on Mars, such as digging trenches and scooping the soil and water ice samples. RA delivered the samples to the TEGA and the MECA. RA is 2.35 meters long, it has an elbow joint in the middle, and it is capable of digging trenches 0.5 meters deep in the Martian soil.

The University of Arizona and the Max Planck Institute in Germany built the RAC. The camera is attached to the RA, just above the scoop placed at the end of the arm. RAC provided close-up, full-color images.

Credits: NASA / JPL

TEGA was developed by the University of Arizona and University of Texas, Dallas. TEGA used eight tiny ovens to analyze eight unique ice and soil samples. By employing a process called scanning calorimetry, and by using a mass spectrometer to analyze the gas obtained in the furnaces as the temperature raised to 1000 degrees Celsius, TEGA determined the ratio of various isotopes of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen.

MARDI was built by Malin Space Science Systems. From what I could gather, the MARDI was not used by the Lander due to some integration issues.

The Canadian Space Agency (YAY Canada!) was responsible for the overall development of the meteorological station (MET). Two companies from Ontario, MD Robotics and Optech Inc., provided the instruments for the station.

The SSI served as the eyes of the Phoenix mission. SSI provided high-resolution, stereo, panoramic images of the Martian arctic. An extended mast holds the SSI, so the images were recorded from two meters above the ground.

Credits: NASA / JPL

MECA was built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The instrument was used to characterize the soil by dissolving small amounts of soil in water. MECA determined the pH, the mineral composition, as well as the concentration of dissolved oxygen and carbon dioxide in the soil samples that were collected.

We would like to highlight some of the important moments during the mission:

August 4, 2007 – Delta II rocket launch from Cape Canaveral. The three-stage Delta II rocket with nine solid rocket boosters lifted off from Cape Canaveral, carrying the Phoenix spacecraft on the first leg of its journey to Mars.

Credits: NASA / JPL -Caltech / University of Arizona

May 25, 2008 – Phoenix Mars Lander touchdown. The Phoenix entered the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 mph. It took 7 minutes for the Lander to slow down with the aid of a parachute and to land using its retrorockets. The mission team did not have to wait long before discovering ice because the blasts from the retrorockets had blown away the topsoil during landing and revealed ice patches under the lander.

November 2, 2008 – Last signal received from the Lander. On this date, communication was established for the last time with Phoenix. Due to the latitude of the landing site, not enough sunlight is available and the solar arrays are unable to collect the power necessary to charge the batteries that operate the instruments mounted on the Lander. At the landing site, the weather conditions are worsening.

November 10, 2008 – Mission declared completed. NASA declares that the Mars Phoenix Lander has completed a successful mission on the Red Planet. Phoenix Mars Lander has ceased communications after being operational for more than five months (the designed operational life of the mission was 90 days).

November 13, 2008 – Mission Honored. NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander was awarded Best of What’s New Grand Award in the aviation and space category by Popular Science magazine.

Credits: NASA / JPL

The Mars Phoenix Lander made significant contributions to the study of the Red Planet. Phoenix verified the presence of water ice under the Martian surface, and it returned thousands of pictures from Mars. Phoenix also found small concentrations of salts that could be nutrients for life, it discovered perchlorate salt, and calcium carbonate, which is a marker of effects of liquid water.

Phoenix provided a mission long weather record, with data on temperature, pressure, humidity, and wind, as well as observations on snow, haze, clouds, frost, and whirlwinds.

Principal Investigator Peter H. Smith of the University of Arizona led the Phoenix mission. The project management was done at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the development at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver. Other contributors were the Canadian Space Agency, the University of Neuchatel (Switzerland), the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), the Max Planck Institute (Germany), and the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

For more information about the Phoenix mission, check out the NASA Phoenix Mars Lander Page.

Welcome to The OrbitalHub – the place where space exploration, science, and engineering meet. My name is DJ and I will be your host for this week’s Carnival. This is not only my first time participating in the Carnival, but also my first time hosting it. I hope you will enjoy reading this week’s entries.

Stuart Atkinson at the Cumbrian Sky points out that ESA marked a successful and historic day by beginning to involve the public more in their missions. He reminds us about some past missions that ESA was very reluctant to share with the general public.

Credits: NASA

On October 10, 2008, the Space Shuttle Atlantis will lift off on a fourth service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. This sky veteran has served astronomers over the past (almost) two decades. On Astronomy at the CCSSC Rosa Williams explains why this mission is important and presents the upgrades that Hubble will undergo.

Space Shuttle flights may end in 2010. Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, an ambitious cosmic ray experiment, is completed and sitting on the ground without a ride to the Space Station. The AMS mission may coincide with Shuttle retirement. Read The Last Flight at A Babe in the Universe to find out how scientists and the US Congress strongly support an extra mission for AMS. One controversial plan would deliver AMS and retire an Orbiter in space. The AMS mission would be a dramatic end to the Shuttle era.

On Kentucky Space, we can see how The Space Systems Design Studio at Cornell has been studying some superconducting technologies that might enable the building of modular spacecrafts.

Alexander DeClama, on Potentia Tenebras Repellendi, outlines more arguments on why space exploration is justified. Many byproducts of the space industry have migrated into healthcare and other industries over the years, bringing with them increased quality and reliability.

Centauri Dreams, in Cepheid Variables: A Galactic Internet?, looks at a recent paper that speculates on how a super-civilization might be able to modulate the extremely useful (and highly visible) Cepheid variable stars to encode a signal, for broadcast as one type of interstellar beacon. Intriguingly, if such a long-shot scenario turned out to be true, we might actually have data that could confirm it in existing records about Cepheid variables. The authors suggest how we might parse that data, and how future observations could help with such studies.

Ian Musgrave at Astroblog presents an animation of a cloud floating high above the Martian surface. He used Mars Express VMC camera images that ESA has released to the general public for analysis and processing.

Inspired by an article on Centauri Dreams, Music of the Spheres does some virtual space sailing with the help of the Orbiter space flight simulator and a solar sail add-on.

On The Planetary Society Weblog, Emily Lakdawalla covers a hot topic this week in the blogosphere: the encounter of ESA’s Rosetta with asteroid Steins.

David Portree of Altair VI describes the challenges that astronauts must face living and working in microgravity and an ambitious plan for the settlement of Mars in Delivering settlers to Mars (1995). The plan was initially published in the August 1995 issue of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society by NASA Ames Research Center engineer Gary Allen.

Since the landing on Mars, the Phoenix lander has developed some odd little clumps on one of its legs, leading to speculations about their origin. Read about them on The Meridiani Journal in What is growing on Phoenix?

Even if space is a very harsh environment, it has been demonstrated that the water bears, a sea-monkey-like creature, can survive in the hard vacuum of space. Read all about it on Visual Astronomy in the article that Sean Welton has submitted for this week’s Carnival: Bears in Space?

Any old school astronomy geeks around here? Steinn Sigurdsson presents an illustration of Homeric Epicycles on Dynamics of Cats.

Credits: NASA/Pat Rawlings

Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of the future seems to be closer to reality as advances are made in separating carbon nanotubes. Read Brian Wang’s post Advance in separating carbon nanotubes brings space elevators a step closer at Next Big Future. This is a significant step towards building a space elevator and towards wider scale use of carbon nanotubes for other applications.

The future in space (and on Earth) of the next 20 years is so bright, you’ll probably need shades… Bruce Cordell of 21st Century Waves explains why in the post Why the World is Not Going to End.

It seems like the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) has an abort button! Thankfully, LHC physicists have a sense of humor about all of this doomsday mumbo-jumbo. Dave Mosher of Space Disco posted a picture of the ‘device’ in The LHC’s Abort Button.

At One Astronomer’s Noise, Nicole Gugliucci tells us about the successful attempt to resolve the super massive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Astronomers used what is called 1.3mm VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry). VLBI is a technique that allows you to create a giant virtual telescope by linking multiple telescopes across long distances.

Measuring the positron emissions of the giant black hole at the center of the universe is quite a challenge. Ethan Siegel, at Starts With A Bang!, presents measurements taken by a detector in the gamma-ray domain and why these measurements are up for debate.

On Cosmic Ray, Ray Villard explores the possibility that the satellites of a Jovian-like planet orbiting around Epsilon Eridani, a star only 10 light-years away from our solar system, could harbor the seeds of life.

Credits: MOST Science Team

David Gamey, from Mang’s Bat Page, posted three articles about MOST (Microvariability and Oscillations of Stars), the suitcase sized microsatellite designed to probe stars and extra solar planets by measuring tiny light variations undetectable from Earth. By using a computer-controlled telescope, an astronomer from Toronto was able to catch MOST on camera. The MOST also started to offer its services to the public: Canadian amateur astronomers can win time on MOST. Even though it is a small telescope, MOST can be used to detect asteroids in an exo planetary system.

If you are an amateur astronomer, Alan Dyer at What’s Up Astronomy can show you how to catch on camera a cosmic flasher. Under the right conditions, the sunlight, reflected by the solar panels of communication satellites, can be observed from Earth.

The Earth is not left out this week. Phil Plait aka The Bad Astronomer, at Bad Astronomy, presents Ten things you don’t know about the Earth. I do not want to spoil the pleasure of reading the post, but I have to mention one of them: there is a measurable effect due to the centrifugal forces caused by the spinning motion of the Earth. The Earth’s diameter measured across the Equator is ~42km bigger than the diameter measured between the poles!

That’s it for this week’s Carnival! Thanks to everyone who submitted an entry. I enjoyed reading all of the posts and getting to know some members of the community. For more details on the Carnival of Space and past editions, you can check out the Carnival page at Universe Today. Many thanks to Fraser Cain at Universe Today for inviting me to host this Carnival.