Orion Launch Abort System Jettison Motor Test

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

NASA successfully tested the Launch Abort System jettison motor, the first full-scale test for the Constellation Program's Orion crew exploration vehicle. The jettison motor is a solid rocket motor designed to separate the Launch Abort System from the crew module on a normal launch and to safely propel the abort system away from the crew module during an emergency.

The static test firing was conducted by Aerojet Corporation in Sacramento, Calif. NASA has partnered with Lockheed Martin Corporation, Orbital Sciences Corporation, and Aerojet Corporation to supply the jettison motor.

"This was a major success for the Orion Launch Abort System team," said Mark Cooper, NASA's integrated product team lead for LAS Propulsion at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. "The test provided valuable data on motor performance that will allow design and analytical refinements by our contactor team. The test is the culmination of intense and focused work by the entire jettison motor team."

Demonstrating the jettison motor performance is critical to the development of the crew module's launch abort system, which will offer a safe escape in the event of an emergency on the launch pad or during the climb to a low Earth orbit. The jettison motor test was a critical demonstration milestone in the Orion Project's preparations for the first of a series of flight tests of the Launch Abort System currently scheduled for late 2008.

NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., manages the launch abort system design and development effort with partners and team members from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala. Langley’s Launch Abort System Office performs this function as part of the Orion Project Office located at NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston. The abort system is a key element in NASA's continuing efforts to improve safety as the agency develops the next generation of spacecraft to return humans to the moon.

Image Caption: Orion Launch Abort System jettison motor test.

Image Credit: AeroJet

Source: NASA

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Time Stamp: 4/16/2008 at 8:50:56 AM CST

NASA Team Demonstrates Robot Technology For Moon Exploration

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

During the 3rd Space Exploration Conference Feb. 26-28 in Denver, NASA will exhibit a robot rover equipped with a drill designed to find water and oxygen-rich soil on the moon.

"Resources are the key to sustainable outposts on the moon and Mars," said Bill Larson, deputy manager of the In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) project. "It's too expensive to bring everything from Earth. This is the first step toward understanding the potential for lunar resources and developing the knowledge needed to extract them economically."

The engineering challenge was daunting. A robot rover designed for prospecting within lunar craters has to operate in continual darkness at extremely cold temperatures with little power. The moon has one-sixth the gravity of Earth, so a lightweight rover will have a difficult job resisting drilling forces and remaining stable. Lunar soil, known as regolith, is abrasive and compact, so if a drill strikes ice, it likely will have the consistency of concrete.

Meeting these challenges in one system took ingenuity and teamwork. Engineers demonstrated a drill capable of digging samples of regolith in Pittsburgh last December. The demonstration used a laser light camera to select a site for drilling then commanded the four-wheeled rover to lower the drill and collect three-foot samples of soil and rock.

"These are tasks that have never been done and are really difficult to do on the moon," said John Caruso, demonstration integration lead for ISRU and Human Robotics Systems at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

In 2008, the team plans to equip the rover with ISRU's Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatile Extraction experiment, known as RESOLVE. Led by engineers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla., the RESOLVE experiment package will add the ability to crush a regolith sample into small, uniform pieces and heat them.

The process will release gases deposited on the moon's surface during billions of years of exposure to the solar wind and bombardment by asteroids and comets. Hydrogen is used to draw oxygen out of iron oxides in the regolith to form water. The water then can be electrolyzed to split it back into pure hydrogen and oxygen, a process tested earlier this year by engineers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

"We're taking hardware from two different technology programs within NASA and combining them to demonstrate a capability that might be used on the moon," said Gerald Sanders, manager of the ISRU project. "And even if the exact technologies are not used on the moon, the lessons learned and the relationships formed will influence the next generation of hardware."

Engineers participated in the ground-based rover concept demonstration from four NASA centers, the Canadian Space Agency, the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology in Sudbury, Ontario, and Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh.

Carnegie Mellon was responsible for the robot's design and testing, and the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology built the drilling system. Glenn contributed the rover's power management system. NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., built a system that navigates the rover in the dark. The Canadian Space Agency funded a Neptec camera that builds three-dimensional images of terrain using laser light.

All the elements together represent a collaboration of the Human Robotic Systems and ISRU projects at Johnson. These projects are part of the Exploration Technology Development Program, which is managed by NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

Image Caption 1: While designing the lunar truck, JSC engineers threw out some traditional assumptions on what a vehicle needs -- for instance, doors and seats -- and added interesting new capabilities such as active suspension, six-wheel drive with independent steering for each wheel.

Image Credit 1: NASA

Image Caption 2: This robot shares some features with the lunar truck, but is equipped with a drill designed to find water and oxygen-rich soil on the moon.

Image Credit 2: Carnegie Mellon University

Source: NASA

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Time Stamp: 2/27/2008 at 12:08:15 PM CST

NASA Unveils $17.6 Billion Budget

Monday, February 4, 2008

NASA announced a $17.6 billion budget for fiscal year 2009 to continue exploring the solar system, building the International Space Station, studying Earth from space and conducting aeronautics research.

NASA Deputy Administrator Shana Dale said the increase for NASA's 2009 budget demonstrates President Bush's commitment to the agency's missions. With the increase, NASA still accounts for less than 1 percent of the federal budget.

The NASA budget includes $5.78 billion for the space shuttle and space station programs, $4.44 billion for science, $3.5 billion for development of new manned spacecraft systems and $447 million for aeronautics research.

Dale noted steady progress with NASA's missions, with three successful space shuttle launches last year and up to six planned for this year, including a flight to service the Hubble Space Telescope. The agency also is making progress in developing the Orion spacecraft and Ares launch vehicles to replace the aging shuttle fleet and prepare for journeys to the moon and destinations beyond.

NASA has 55 science missions currently in space, about half involving international partnerships, with 15 additional missions scheduled for launch by the end of 2009.

"In Earth science, NASA's investments in measuring the forces and effects of climate change are allowing policymakers and the public to better understand its implications to our home planet," Dale said.

A recently completed decadal survey for Earth science includes views of the scientific community that will help the agency set priorities for new missions to add to humanity's knowledge of Earth and its climate and ecosystems. NASA will dedicate $910 million during the next five years to develop new missions to add to our Earth-observing fleet of spacecraft.

The budget also includes funding for lunar science to further scientific understanding of the moon and for planetary science and astrophysics to continue exploring worlds beyond Earth and to study dark energy and other mysteries of the cosmos.

In aeronautics, NASA is helping address fundamental research needs facing the Next Generation Air Transportation System, aimed at making U.S. air travel safer, more efficient and environmentally friendly.

As the International Space Station nears completion, the NASA budget provides funding to help spur development of commercial space transportation services to send cargo and possibly crews to the station after the shuttles retire in 2010. Without commercial providers, the United States will depend on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to carry astronauts between Earth and the space station.

"The development of space simply cannot be 'all government all the time,' " Dale said. "NASA's budget for FY 2009 provides $173 million for entrepreneurs - from big companies or small ones - to develop commercial transport capabilities to support the International Space Station. NASA is designating $500 million toward the development of this commercial space capability.

"With over $2.6 billion in NASA funds available over the next five years to purchase cargo and crew services to support ISS operations, we would much rather be using this money to purchase cargo and crew services from American commercial companies than foreign entities," she added.

Source: NASA

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Time Stamp: 2/4/2008 at 2:16:40 PM CST

NASA Concludes Successful Fuse Mission

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

After an eight-year run that gave astronomers a completely new perspective on the universe, NASA has concluded the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer mission. The satellite, known as FUSE, became inoperable in July when the satellite lost its ability to point accurately and steadily at areas of interest. NASA will terminate the mission Oct. 18.

"FUSE accomplished all of its mission goals and more," said Alan Stern, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, Washington. "FUSE vastly increased our understanding of our galaxy's evolution and many exotic phenomena and left a strong legacy on which to build the next generation of investigations and missions."

Launched in 1999, FUSE helped scientists answer important questions about the conditions in the universe immediately following the Big Bang, how chemicals disperse throughout galaxies, and the composition of interstellar gas clouds that form stars and solar systems.

"FUSE helped pioneer low-cost, principal investigator-led astronomy missions," said Jon Morse, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters.

Examples of the many successes FUSE achieved during its mission are:

- By measuring abundances of molecular hydrogen (made of two hydrogen atoms), FUSE showed that a large amount of water has escaped from Mars, enough to form a global ocean 100 feet deep.

- FUSE observed a debris disk that is surprisingly rich in carbon gas orbiting the young star Beta Pictoris. The carbon overabundance indicates either the star is forming planets that could end up as exotic, carbon-rich worlds of graphite and methane, or Beta Pictoris is revealing an unsuspected phenomenon that also occurred in the early solar system.

- FUSE discovered far more deuterium, a form of hydrogen with a proton and a neutron instead of just one proton, in the Milky Way galaxy than astronomers had expected. Deuterium was produced in the early universe, but this isotope is destroyed easily in stellar nuclear reactions. "FUSE showed that less deuterium has been burned in stars over cosmic time, in agreement with modern models for the evolution of the galaxy and the recent Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe results," said Warren Moos, FUSE principal investigator, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

- FUSE saw that an atmosphere of very hot gas surrounds the Milky Way. The ubiquity of hot gas around our galaxy demonstrates the galaxy is even more dynamic than expected.

- By detecting highly ionized oxygen atoms in intergalactic space, FUSE showed that about 10 percent of matter in the local universe consists of million-degree gas floating between the galaxies. This discovery might help resolve the long-standing mystery of the universe's "missing baryons." Baryons are subatomic particles, often protons and neutrons. Calculations of how many baryons were produced in the very early universe predict about twice as many baryons as astronomers have observed. The rest of the missing baryons might exist as even hotter gas, which could be observed by future X-ray observatories such as NASA's Constellation-X.

"FUSE collected quality science data for eight years, longer than its five-year goal. By any measure, FUSE was a success," said George Sonneborn, FUSE project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Although FUSE's mission has ended, NASA's ultraviolet study of the universe continues. In 2008, NASA will conduct a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope to install a new ultraviolet spectrograph on the telescope and repair another. The new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, or COS, is designed to study remote galaxies and nearby stars in the ultraviolet. Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph also will be repaired. That instrument had ultraviolet capabilities complementary to the COS and was used in conjunction with FUSE when both were operational. The spectrograph failed due to an electronic short in August 2004 after more than seven years of in-orbit operations.

FUSE was a joint mission of NASA, the Canadian Space Agency and the French Space Agency, the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales. The Johns Hopkins University built the telescope and managed the mission. The University of Colorado, Boulder, built FUSE's spectrograph. The University of California, Berkeley, made the detectors.

Image Caption: Background image is the Carina Nebula, as viewed by a ground-based telescope.

Image Credit: JHU FUSE Project

Source: NASA

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Time Stamp: 10/17/2007 at 2:37:34 PM CST

NASA Spacecraft to Carry Russian Science Instruments

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos have agreed to fly two Russian scientific instruments on NASA spacecraft that will conduct unprecedented robotic missions to the moon and Mars.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin and Roscosmos head Anatoly Perminov signed agreements in Moscow on Oct. 3 to add the instruments to two future missions: the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, scheduled to launch in October 2008, and the Mars Science Laboratory, an advanced robotic rover scheduled to launch in 2009.

Russia's Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will search for evidence of water ice and help understand astronauts' exposure to radiation during future trips to the moon. The instrument will map concentrations of hydrogen that may be found on and just beneath the lunar surface.

Roscosmos’ Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons instrument on the Mars Science Laboratory will measure hydrogen to analyze neutrons interacting with the Martian surface. The principal investigator for both instruments is Igor Mitrofanov of the Institute for Space Research of the Russian Academy of Science.

"Russia's contribution to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Science Laboratory missions continues a rich and long-standing tradition of cooperation between NASA and Russia for scientific research in space," Griffin said. "The Institute for Space Research has a track record of delivering excellent instrumentation, and we are delighted to have international participation on these missions to explore the moon and send a robotic laboratory to Mars."

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will circle the moon for at least a year, obtaining measurements necessary to identify future robotic and human landing sites. It also will look for potential lunar resources and document aspects of the lunar radiation environment.

The Mars Science Laboratory rover is a mobile research platform that will explore a local region of the Martian surface as a potential habitat for past or present life. The rover will carry a suite of highly capable analytic and remote sensing instruments to investigate planetary processes that influence habitability, including the role of water.

Source: NASA

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Time Stamp: 10/3/2007 at 12:01:53 PM CST