NASA Plans a Probe to the Sun

NASA is sending the Solar Probe Plus spacecraft to within 4 million miles of the sun in 2018. And the agency is taking every precaution to keep the craft from melting.

NASA plans to launch the Solar Probe Plus mission to the sun. Earth is about 93 million miles  from the sun, and Solar Probe Plus is slated to get within 4 million miles of the blazing star. 

For complete article, select HERE

Cassini's Final Year Will Not Be Idle

Did you know that NASA's Cassini has been working diligently in the Saturn system for 13 years!

Cassini will also end it's mission Sept. 2017 when it will dive straight into Saturn. 

This last year will hardly be idle.  Cassini still needs to complete projects like a flyby of Titan, Saturn's largest moon of which it has made over 125 close passes.

For more information, please press HERE

The ESA's comet lander Philae is probably dead.

Philae arrived at the surface of comet 67P, (also known as Churyumov-Gerasimenko) in 2014 - delivered there by ESA's Rosetta probe.

Philae and Rosetta communicated for 57 hours after-which Philae became sporadic and finally silent.


ESA has sent a "last-ditch" message to the lander in hopes of triggering a response-the bad news is that it seems to have failed.

click here for complete Wired Article

  

NASA's Dawn Spacecraft Makes Final Approach to Ceres

NASA's space probe Dawn was launched in 2007, its mission, to study the two most-massive objects of the asteroid belt: the proto-planet Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres.  Dawn probe is scheduled to arrive at rdgf March 6.

Dawn is the first spacecraft to visit Vesta, entering orbit on July 16, 2011. Dawn then successfully completed its 14-month survey of Vesta  in late 2012. Should its entire mission succeed, it will also be the first spacecraft to visit Ceres and to orbit two separate extraterrestrial bodies.

Previous multi-destination missions were hampered by the use of conventional drives, such as the Voyager program. Since conventional engines have a weight penalty, they were restricted to flybys.

The Dawn mission is the first NASA exploratory mission to use ion propulsion to enter and leave orbit, as well as course corrections.

Top photo the asteroid Vesta taken by Dawn
Middle is an artist's representation of Dawn
Bottom is Ceres                                  

Confirmed: Voyager 1 Has Left the Solar System!!

Professor of physics at the University of Iowa, Donald A. Gurnett, confirmed Thursday that Voyager 1, launched in 1977, has left the solar system.

At present, Voyager 1 is 11.7 billion miles from Earth and traveling at 38,000 miles per hour which makes it one of the fastest spacecraft ever flown.

But the point of contention has been has it or will it soon break through the heliosphere which is made up of particles from the sun that surround the whole solar system.  However Gurnett's paper in the journal Science states categorically that the event happened Aug. 25, 2012.

Read the complete NewYork Times article HERE   and a Multimedia file HERE

Russian Grunt to Fall into the Ocean Sometime Between Saturday and Monday

In a recent Daily Galaxy blog article details the last few moments of the failed Russian Mars Phobos probe and its' projected impact in the Indian Ocean sometime between January 14 and January 16th.

The probe, which was launched on  Nov. 9, was to explore one of Mars’ two moons, Phobos, but became stranded after its  launch, still in Earth orbit, after it failed to respond to engineers in Russia and the European Space Agency, never igniting the stage that was to propel the spacecraft toward its target.

Phobos-Grunt weighs 14.6 tons, which includes 12 tons of highly toxic fuel,  all of which is projected to burn up before impacting the ocean.

Russian Grunt Update

From the Daily Galaxy Blog:

• The European Space Agency (ESA) announced that they will attempt to contact the stranded Russian Phobos-Grunt spacecraft that became stuck at a low-Earth orbit due to engine failure that followed its launch on November 9.....

One of the problems, according to the blog article is that:

• The Russians could not decipher the information from the ESA’s Australian station
• 
  The telemetry showed that the radio equipment in Phobos was in operational and was exchanging information with the main flight computer and the on-board control system. Observations from Earth have indicated that the orbit of Phobos-Grunt had become more stable

Manfred Warhaut, ESA's Head of Mission Operations at the European Space Operations Center has said that "This could mean that the spacecraft's attitude, or orientation, is also now stable, which could help in regaining contact because we'd be able to predict where its two antennas are pointing,"

More on the ESA's attempt here

Image is of the purposed Phobos landing site of the Grunt probe

Russian Failed Mars Mission Could Mean Charges?

Russia's failed Mars exploratory rover mission failure mean that scientists and engineers behind the Phobos-Grunt mission could face criminal prosecution - This directly from the country's president, Dmitry Medvedev.

Another highly visible failures consists of the botched Russian cargo shipment, intended for the International Space Station, that came crashing to Earth minutes after blastoff back in August.

According to IO9 punishment could take the form of either financial or, disciplinary or even criminal punishment.

It seems that Medvedev's comments were more directed toward Lavochkin, the company that built the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft.

More at the IO9 article site

Russian Phobos Grunt - Off the Mark, Possibly Finished?

According to BBC news online via The Daily Galaxy blog, Russian space agency reports that shortly after launch, the Phobos Grunt probe failed to fire its' mains to launch it towards Mars and is now:

• stuck in an Earth orbit and that engineers have two weeks to correct the fault before the probe's batteries run out.

The probe's mission was to collect rock and dust samples from Mars' moon Phobos and bring them back for study in labs on Earth.

• The venture is also significant because it is carrying China's first Mars satellite. Yinghuo-1 is riding piggyback on Phobos-Grunt.

Possible reason for the failure to fire may be due to the probe not being able to:

• orientate itself in space using the stars, failed to pick them up and therefore did not execute the firings as planned.

BBC news article here

New Horizons spacecraft sets new milestone

From Wired is a report on the status of the New Horizons probe. The craft is now closer to Pluto than it is to Earth, plus it reached that historic point in less than four years.

New Horizons is the fastest space-craft ever built. At present it is traveling at 31,000 miles an hour and is located about 1.527 billion miles from Earth.

From the article:

• The spacecraft will be the first to flyby Pluto and on to the other objects lurking in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of the solar system.

New Horizons is not an orbiter. It will do a flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015. In the nine day period as the probe approaches, flies by and continues on, it is planned to acquire almost 5 gigabytes of data that will take months to transmit back to Earth. Due to the extreme distances it takes a signal over four hours to reach Earth from Pluto.

read complete Wired article here

Sun light caused mysterious blemishes on Iapetus

From the NewScientist online magazine

Blame the Sun for the mysterious dark blemishes on Saturn's moon Iapetus. New photos from the Cassini spacecraft reveal the splotches are mainly found on the sunward-facing slopes of craters and mountains, suggesting a runaway heating process is tainting portions of the moon. Cassini's imaging team members found that there are sharp-edged dark spots all over the surface, even on the moon's bright trailing hemisphere. Careful analysis revealed that these isolated spots are preferentially located on the sunward facing slopes of craters. That suggests that as the slopes get slightly warmer, ice there starts to evaporate. That exposes more dark stuff in the ice, which is then ready to retain even more solar heat.

thanks to Shaun Saunders for the update

Saturn's Iapetus showing strange mottled features

NASA's Cassini spacecraft flew within 1000 kilometres of the moon on 10 September, it saw much some complicated patterns on the surface of the moon Iapetus. Previous to this flyby, Iapetus was thought to have the strange feature of one bright side and one dark side. Not just from lighting, but composed of different materials on each side. Now the Cassini probe shows that the strange features are even more complex. Iapetus has a landscape unlike anything else in the solar system: sharp-edged islands of dark material within pale regions, and patches of white ice on the dark mountainsides. The coating of dark material is a puzzle. "We think it's thin, probably no more than a few metres, because we see an impact that's not very big but has punched through to show the bright material beneath," says Carolyn Porco. ( head of the Cassini imaging team at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, US.) "But that's about all we know right now." She suspects that the dark stuff was swept up from space by the leading hemisphere of Iapetus. "Where that material came from is still a mystery," Porco told New Scientist. "Maybe from a moon further out, maybe a pre-existing body that got disrupted?"

Thanks to Shaun A. Saunders for the post
(Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

The Pioneer anomaly

Here is something I didn't know....hell didn't even suspect!

Launched in the early 1970s, NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft are drifting out of the solar system in opposite directions, gradually slowing down as the Sun's gravity pulls back on them.

Ok, that is clear enough. Though to be honest, I was under the impression that they were safely on a track and trajectory that would eject them from the Solar System and onward to the great beyond! Common sense now tells me that ummm duh gravity will slow them down some. Well that being said, the spacecraft are indeed slowing down, but the really spooky thing is that they are not slowing down as expected, or for that matter traveling in exactly the direction that was plotted. Something is causing the Pioneer space probes, both of them, to slow in odd and unexpected ways. Very strange. Click the article title for more or

click here for more

Thanks to Shaun Saunders for disrupting my day!

China's 1st lunar probe ready for launch

China has finished assembling its first lunar satellite probe after three years of research and development, Luan Enjie, chief commander of the country's lunar exploration program, told Xinhua Tuesday. The carrier rocket, a Long March 3-A, which will be used to push the orbiter, Chang'e I, into the outer space, is currently under testing," Luan said on the sidelines of the annual session of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), China's top advisory body. The orbiter will provide 3D images of the moon's surface, probe the distribution of 14 usable elements on the moon, study lunar microwaves and estimate the thickness of the moon's soil.

posted by Shaun a. Saunders