“It’s fantastic to see the hardware sitting on the surface, waiting for us to come back again,” Mark Robinson, chief of the camera science team, said in a news briefing in Washington, D.C.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched June 18 on a mission to map the lunar surface in preparation for the planned return of astronauts to the moon in 2020. It carries instruments designed to search for ice deposits in sunless canyons and crevices; those deposits could be a source of water and rocket fuel for future moon colonists.
The cameras started clicking away in the last few weeks, as the spacecraft settled into an orbit that brought it as close to the surface as 18 miles. Over the years, Japan, China and India have all sent probes to the moon that have focused on the old Apollo sites. But the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s images of the hardware left behind are the sharpest yet, NASA said, resolving features as small as 3 feet wide.

The reconnaissance orbiter took pictures of five of the six landing sites, missing only that of Apollo 12, which launched on Nov. 14, 1969.
Some of the best images are of the Apollo 14 landing site, where a set of scientific instruments can be seen, along with marks in the topsoil, known as regolith, left by the astronauts walking around in their spacesuits. The pictures also show the tracks of the tool cart the astronauts towed behind them, Robinson said. Apollo 14 launched on Jan. 31, 1971.
As impressed as they were by the images, NASA officials said they expect better quality after the orbiter finishes commissioning its instruments, a process similar to tuning a new musical instrument to get the best sound. Images of the Apollo 11 landing site, for one, are expected to be twice as good in the future, officials said.
Referring to conspiracy buffs who question whether the moon landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin really occurred, one reporter asked if the images show the American flag planted by the astronauts. Robinson said that would be difficult to resolve from space.
“If it’s standing, it would be very, very narrow,” he said. “We might be able to see its shadow at some point.”
But he said he believed the flag was knocked over by the exhaust from the Apollo 11 lunar module’s ascent engine as Armstrong and Aldrin lifted off for the trip home. The mission ended on July 24, 1969, when the module carrying Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins parachuted into the Pacific Ocean.
Aside from the curiosity value connected with the images, NASA said the pictures could be important to future moon colonists. Changes in the surface, in the form of new cratering, would help scientists understand how often a particular region on the moon is hit by rocks from space. That information would be important in designing habitats.
The lunar images can be viewed on the NASA website, at www.nasa.gov .

NASA orbiter offers images of moon landing sites

Astronauts aboard space shuttle Atlantis are preparing to return to Earth after an ambitious and risky mission to re-fit the Hubble telescope.

There are two chances to land on Friday: one at 1500 BST (1000 EDT) and a second at 1639 BST (1139 EDT).

If bad weather scuppers either of those opportunities, the shuttle will try to land on Saturday in Florida or at Edwards Air Force Base, California.

The mission was intended to give a new lease of life to Hubble.

The orbiting observatory is regarded as one of the most important scientific tools ever built.

The fifth and final mission to service Hubble has been hailed as a great success.

Over five spacewalks, astronauts installed new instruments and thermal blankets, repaired two existing instruments, replaced gyroscopes and batteries.

The only disappointment was the failure to restore the high resolution channel (one of three) on Hubble’s main camera – the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).

Cloudy skies and stormy weather could yet pose a problem for Friday’s landing attempts, Nasa has said.

The shuttle has enough supplies to remain in orbit until Monday.

The US space agency has cleared Atlantis for its fiery re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere following in-flight inspections of its heat shield by the crew.

The Hubble telescope was released from the shuttle’s robotic arm on Tuesday.

Atlantis ready to return to Earth

As a result, Europe will hold a scientific and technological lead over the United States in some key areas of cosmology, at least for a while.

On Monday, NASA will send a crew of astronauts to install greatly improved instruments on the 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope. Just three days later, the European Space Agency will launch two even more advanced telescopes, named Planck and Herschel.

The American and European launchings will be ”right on top of each other,” said Jon Morse, the director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division.

If all three instruments work as planned, scientists will be able to look back almost to the birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. They could detect the first stars and galaxies, and prove — or disprove — theories about what happened in the first seconds after the ”big bang,” when cosmologists think that everything began.

DIFFERENT VIEWING

Each of the three telescopes ”sees” things in a different wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum. It’s like looking through different windows on the cosmos.

Hubble sees mostly in optical light, the narrow band between infrared and ultraviolet that’s visible to human eyes. Herschel will collect photons — particles of light — in a much wider infrared wavelength. Planck detects even longer microwaves, which carry photons left over from the big bang.

The three telescopes will study ”different pieces of the universe,” said Ray Villard, Hubble’s news director. “They’re complementary.”

Herschel will have the largest mirror ever put in space, 11.5 feet across, half again as big as Hubble’s mirror. Planck will have the sharpest vision, detecting differences as small as two parts in a million. Hubble, meanwhile, is better able to study galaxies, stars and planets beyond our solar system.

To save money, ESA will launch Planck and Herschel atop a single Ariane 5 rocket from the European spaceport in French Guiana, on the coast of South America. They’ll travel separately to a point 900,000 miles away, where they’ll enter a yearlong orbit around the sun.

THREE-YEAR PERIOD

Herschel, named for British astronomer William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus, will sweep the entire sky every six months over a three-year period. It will build the most accurate map ever made of the cosmos.

Because light from very old and distant objects is stretched out toward the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum, Herschel’s infrared vision will let it see stars and galaxies as they were forming billions of years ago.

The best American infrared telescope, NASA’s 5-year-old Spitzer Space Telescope, has a much smaller mirror — 2.8 feet — and a narrower viewing range than Herschel’s.

”Herschel is big brother to Spitzer,” Villard said. “Herschel does everything Spitzer does, but does it better.”

The Planck satellite is named for Max Planck, a famed German physicist of the last century. Because it detects microwaves, Planck will study tiny ripples in the cosmic microwave background, a curtain of hot plasma shrouding what happened before the universe was 380,000 years old. Astronomers think that these irregularities formed the seeds of future galaxies.

”Planck will provide the deepest, clearest, sharpest and least obstructed view of the beginning of the universe ever seen,” said Benjamin Wandelt, a Planck scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It will be “a quantum leap in our ability to address fundamental questions about how the universe began.”

Planck is 10 times more sensitive and has three times the resolution of the best American microwave telescope, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which was launched in 2001. Planck can detect temperature differences as small as one 10-millionth of a degree.

In space, Europe gets ahead of U.S. – Sci-techs.com

A former Microsoft Corp. executive Charles Simonyi has safely returned from his 12-day “vacation” on the International Space Stati, It was the last trip on which nonastronauts could hitch a ride on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Simonyi blasted off March 26 from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with two crew members, Russian cosmonaut Gennadiy Padalka and American astronaut Michael Barratt. He took the only route available to space tourists: making a reservation for the Soyuz through US-based Space Adventures Ltd.

But the Soyuz is a one-time-use ship that can hold only three people. When the ISS crew goes up to six members from three, delivering the entire crew to the ISS will take two trips at capacity. There simply will be no seats for tourists, even those with $35 million to burn.

The seats that have been used by tourists will be taken by American astronauts. Last December, NASA signed a $141 million contract with the Russian Space Agency to send three ISS crew members on two Soyuz vehicles in 2011. And the number of seats booked by NASA probably will grow because the main transport used by US astronauts, the space shuttle, will be retired next year.

But space tourism companies are looking for ways to continue in business. Theoretically, they could purchase an entire Soyuz vehicle and send their clients to space even without docking at the ISS. This is what Space Adventurers intends to do. But such plans require building an extra Soyuz spacecraft, as all currently operating ships are contracted out for ISS expeditions.

“There is a potential to build [an extra] ship,” Aleksey Krasnov, the head of manned flights for the Russian Space Agency, said at a news conference. “But there are problems with this. This year we have a record number of flights – four – which means we need to launch four spacecrafts.

“It is necessary to consider industrial and production capacities as well as human resources when building the fifth ship,” Mr. Krasnov said. But he added that he hopes that Energiya, the company that constructs the Soyuz, will build a fifth ship.

Vitaliy Lopota, president and chief designer of Energiya, claims that it takes 2-1/2 to three years to build a spacecraft, which means tourist flights couldn’t resume until 2012-2013 at the earliest.

“But this project will require more financing,” Mr. Lapota was quoted as saying by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti. “The current conditions of financial markets are not allowing building an extra manned spacecraft.”

Private companies have started actively searching for cheaper options. A number of them are developing alternatives to Soyuz ships and carriers to get tourists to space. Competition is growing quickly.

The British firm Virgin Galactic is planning to send 500 people to space each year on its newly built SpaceShipTwo, carried by the rocket White Knight Two. It plans to send up its first tourist as soon as next year or in 2011, when all test flights are finished. A 2-1/2-hour space voyage will cost $200,000. Other companies such as Space Adventures and RocketShip Tours Inc. of Phoenix, are offering suborbital flights where tourists would fly about 37 to 68 miles high, experience weightlessness for five to 10 minutes, and return to Earth.

Space shuttle Discovery returned in good shape, after traveling more than 5 million miles and circling Earth 202 times. The 13-day flight — which ended as a Russian-launched crew was settling into the space station — was highlighted by the installation and unfurling of the station’s last pair of solar wings. The $300-million addition brought the orbiting outpost up to full power, a vital part of NASA’s plan to double the space station population and boost scientific research in a few months.

Mission Control delayed Discovery’s homecoming by about 90 minutes, or one orbit, because of windy, cloudy weather. But the wind shifted and conditions improved enough for the second and final landing opportunity of the day.

Shuttle Discovery lands in Florida – Los Angeles Times

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday on a three-year mission to find Earth’s twin, a Goldilocks planet where it’s neither too hot nor too cold, but just right for life to take hold.

The Delta II rocket, carrying the widest-field telescope ever put in space, lifted off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral at 10:49 p.m. Eastern time.

The launch vehicle headed downrange, gathering speed as its three stages ignited, one after the other, passing over the Caribbean island of Antigua and tracking stations in Australia before climbing into orbit.

Kepler will eventually settle down to scan tens of thousands of stars near the constellations Cygnus and Lyra in search of planets where water could exist on the surface in liquid form, a key condition for life as we know it.

“We have a feeling like we’re about to set sail across an ocean to discover a new world,” said project manager Jim Fanson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. “It’s sort of the same feeling Columbus or Magellan must have had.”

The $590-million Kepler mission is jointly managed by JPL and NASA’s Ames Research Center in the Bay Area. The spacecraft carries a 15-foot-long telescope with a 55-inch mirror that can scrutinize a wide star field for the telltale dimming of starlight that occurs when a planet crosses in front of it, known as a transit.

Over the last decade, scientists have employed the same technique with ground-based telescopes to discover 340 planets circling other stars. But because the optics of ground-based instruments are compromised by atmospheric interference, most of the planets found so far are Jupiter-like gas giants that orbit so close to their parent stars that any life forms would be incinerated.

The orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, whose optics are not hampered by Earth’s atmosphere, was designed to see deeply but very narrowly.

Kepler’s field of view is 33,000 times wider than Hubble’s, or about the size of a human hand held up to the sky. The Cygnus-Lyra region near the plane of the Milky Way encompasses about 4.5 million stars. But most of those are too big or hot to allow a habitable zone close enough to the star for Kepler to see a transit.

The science team has selected about 150,000 sun-like stars for Kepler to analyze. Over time, Fanson said, the number will be winnowed down to about 100,000 in three classes: G-type stars, which are similar in size and age to the sun; K- and M-type stars, which are slightly smaller and cooler; and A- and F-class stars, which are somewhat bigger.

Earth is in the center of the habitable zone around the sun, but with stars of other classes, that zone would be closer to the star or farther out.

Kepler’s telescope is outfitted with a sophisticated camera that will stare unblinkingly at the star field. The whole area will be imaged every six seconds, then stored in 30-minute chunks.

Once a month, Kepler will do a pirouette in space to download its stored data, Fanson said.

The scientists expect to find hundreds of planets during the mission, scheduled to last more than three years. But even with the telescope’s wide field of vision, it will be no easy task for Kepler to find smaller, Earth-like planets. Scientists have calculated that the change in brightness caused by such a planet transiting its star will be only about 0.008%, or about 84 parts per million. On top of that, there is less than one chance in 100 that a planet circling a far-off star will be aligned in just the right way for Kepler to spot a transit.

A final complication is that not all dimming is caused by transits. Sunspots on the surface of a star are cooler areas linked to an increase in magnetic activity. They also cause the star’s light to dim. But Kepler scientists said they think they understand the signature of sunspots well enough to deal with that problem.

For a planet to become a candidate for the first Earth-type planet around another star, Kepler must measure at least three separate transits, scientists said. If the team is uncertain about some measurements, or simply wants more observing time, the mission could be extended to six years, NASA said.

Kepler blasts off in search of Earth-like planets