Space and Space Travel News

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Photo - Digg.com/photos




Space News: Discovery’s STS-128 mission starts with flawless night launch from Cape Canaveral.

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Space.gs

Space Shuttle Discovery Returns to Earth After Successful Mission.
By Space.News, September 12th, 2009


- Mission Coverage: http://www.space.gs/sts-127/


Space shuttle Discovery and its crew of seven astronauts ended a 14-day journey of more than 5.7 million miles with an 5:53 p.m. PDT landing Friday at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

The mission, designated STS-128, delivered two refrigerator-sized science racks to the International Space Station. One rack will be used to conduct experiments on materials such as metals, glasses and ceramics. The results from these experiments could lead to the development of better materials on Earth. The other rack will be used for fluid physics research. Understanding how fluids react in microgravity could lead to improved designs for fuel tanks, water systems and other fluid-based systems.

STS-128 Commander Rick Sturckow was joined on the mission by Pilot Kevin Ford, Mission Specialists Pat Forrester, Jose Hernandez, Danny Olivas and European Space Agency astronaut Christer Fuglesang. NASA astronaut Nicole Stott flew to the complex aboard Discovery to begin a nearly three-month mission as a station resident, replacing Tim Kopra, who returned home on Discovery. Weather concerns prevented the crew from returning to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the primary end-of-mission landing site. In 7-10 days, Discovery will be transported approximately 2,500 miles from California to Florida on the back of a modified 747 jumbo jet.

Once at Kennedy, Discovery will be separated from the aircraft to begin processing for its next flight, targeted for March 2010. A welcome ceremony for the crew’s return to Houston will be held at Ellington Field’s NASA Hangar 990 at 4 p.m. CDT on Saturday, Sept. 12. The public is invited to attend. In addition to carrying a new station crew member, Discovery and the crew also delivered a new sleeping compartment, an air purification system and a treadmill named after comedian Stephen Colbert.

The mission included three spacewalks that replaced experiments outside the European Space Agency’s Columbus laboratory and an empty ammonia storage tank. Ammonia is needed to move excess heat from inside the station to the radiators located outside. Disney’s toy astronaut Buzz Lightyear also returned from the space station aboard Discovery. He flew to the station in May 2008 on shuttle Discovery’s STS-124 mission and served as the longest tenured “crew member” in space. While on the station, Buzz supported NASA’s education outreach by creating a series of online educational outreach programs.


Space news: ESA astronaut returns to Earth with Columbus lab experiment

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Spaceflightnow.com

Space shuttle Discovery lands safely in Mojave Desert
By William Harwood, September 11, 2009


Photos: Discovery landing - Videos / Landing Video


The shuttle Discovery dropped out of orbit and swooped to a flawless California landing Friday to close out a successful space station resupply mission. Shuttle commander Frederick "C.J." Sturckow and pilot Kevin Ford fired the shuttle's twin braking rockets at 7:47:37 p.m. EDT to drop the ship out of orbit for an hourlong descent to Edwards Air Force Base. After a steep descent across the Los Angeles basin, Sturckow took over manual control at an altitude of about 50,000 feet above the Mojave Desert landing site and guided the spaceplane through a sweeping 213-degree right overhead turn to line up on runway 22. As Sturckow pulled the shuttle's nose up just before touchdown, Ford deployed the ship's three main landing gear and the spaceplane settled to a tire-smoking touchdown at 8:53:25 p.m. "Houston, Discovery, wheels stopped," Sturckow radioed a few moments later as Discovery rolled to a holt. "Copy, wheels stopped," replied astronaut Eric Boe in mission control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "Welcome home, Discovery. Congratulations on an extremely successful mission, stepping up science to a new level on the International Space Station."

Mission duration was 13 days 20 hours 53 minutes and 45 seconds for a voyage spanning 5.7 million miles and 219 complete orbits since blastoff from launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center on Aug. 28 at 11:59:37 p.m. Sturckow, Ford and four of their five crewmates - flight engineer Jose Hernandez, Patrick Forrester, John "Danny" Olivas and European Space Agency astronaut Christer Fuglesang - doffed their pressure suits for a traditional walk-around inspection about an hour-and-a-half after landing. "Well, the crew of STS-128 and the space shuttle Discovery, we're very happy to be back on land here in California," Sturckow said on the runway. "We wish we could have gone to Florida today, gotten to see our families down there, but it just didn't work out with the weather."


CBS: News Coverage of STS-128


Discovery delivered some nine tons of supplies and equipment to the International Space Station along with Kopra's replacement, astronaut Nicole Stott. Over the course of a week of docked operations, the astronauts transferred two science racks, an experiment sample freezer, a new treadmill, an astronaut sleep station, a carbon dioxide removal assembly and other supplies and equipment to the space station. In addition, the shuttle crew carried out three spacewalks to replace a massive ammonia coolant tank, retrieve two external experiments, deploy a spare parts mounting mechanism and string power and data cables needed for a new module that will be attached next year.

Reflecting on his stay in orbit during a news conference last week, Kopra said "this experience has completely exceeded anything that I thought it would be like, just the sights, the sounds, the experiences with a great crew and really being part of two shuttle missions. It's been absolutely phenomenal. "The main thing, obviously, I'm looking forward to is seeing my family again, my wife and two kids. And maybe have a sip of a beer once I get home." Kopra and his shuttle crewmates plan to fly back to Houston on Saturday for reunions with friends and family members and debriefings with mission managers and engineers.


- Photos


Discovery undocked from the station Tuesday to prepare for landing. The astronauts intended to land Thursday at the Kennedy Space Center, but stormy weather blocked both available landing opportunities and entry Flight Director Richard Jones told them to stay in orbit an extra day. More of the same developed today and after waving off the first Florida opportunity, Jones threw in the towel and diverted Sturckow and company to Edwards. It will take a week to 10 days to prepare the shuttle for a ferry flight back to Florida. "Discovery was a really great vehicle on this mission, it performed flawlessly," Sturckow said after landing. "It was a great mission, we're looking forward to getting back to Houston for the debriefs. We just want to thank everybody for their support." Next up for NASA is launch of the shuttle Atlantis around Nov. 9 on a mission to mount critical spare parts on the station as a hedge against future failures after the shuttle fleet is retired next year.

Aboard the space station, meanwhile, the Expedition 20 crew is moving into a particularly busy phase of flight. A new Japanese cargo ship, launched from Japan on Thursday, is scheduled to arrive next week. At the end of the month, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft is scheduled for launch to carry two new crew members - Jeffrey Williams and Maxim Suraev - to the station. Williams and Suraev will be joined for launch by Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte, a billionaire space tourist who is believed to have paid around $35 million for a ride to the station. Laliberte will return to Earth Oct. 11 with outgoing space station commander Gennady Padalka and flight engineer Michael Barratt. (more)


- Shuttle Discovery Lands in California


MSNBC: NASA's Mars rover might be stuck for good
- Spirit became embedded in soft soil at a site called Troy in early May


- www.spring.net

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abc news

NASA Moon Bombing: Rocket to Crash on Moon, Searching for Ice
By Ned Potter, October 8, 2009


• http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/ • News • Photos


By Friday morning, we can expect that any aliens on the moon will be really ticked off at us. But if we're really lucky, the drinks they pour to toast our demise will be, er, on the rocks. Friday is the day NASA's LCROSS mission (short for Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) sends a spent booster rocket crashing into a crater near the lunar south pole, looking to see if there is ice mixed in the soil of the crater's floor. Scientists think there may be billions of gallons of it, but so far they haven't been able to prove it.

So the LCROSS booster will go plowing into the moon's surface at 5,600 miles per hour. It is expected to send 350 tons of rock and soil flying in all directions, creating a plume several miles high. If there is ice mixed in, a small satellite, flying on the same path less than 400 miles behind the rocket, should be able to detect it before it crashes too, about four minutes later. "We can directly measure water ice, and then we can fly right through the plume," said LCROSS project manager Daniel Andrews.

The whole thing is set to happen at 7:31 a.m. ET on Friday, and telescopes on earth (plus the Hubble telescope in orbit) will be watching. At best, mission managers say, they will see a small flash at the impact point. But many will be equipped with spectrometers, instruments that measure the chemical composition of the plume. And if they see water... Continued...




Orbiting satellites report water molecules all over lunar surface. http://spacescience.arc.nasa.gov/lcross/ . The two main components of the LCROSS mission are the Shepherding Spacecraft (S-S/C) and the Centaur upper stage rocket. The Shepherding Spacecraft guides the rocket to a site selected on the moon that has a high probability of containing water. Because they have only one chance with this mission in finding water, the researchers have to be very precise where they program the Shepherding Spacecraft to guide the rocket. This crash will be so big that we on Earth may be able to view the resulting plume of material it ejects with a good amateur telescope. (more)


• Moonwatching on October 7, 2009 • http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/familynight08/

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Abc News

Refuting the Most Popular Apollo Moon Landing Hoax Theories
By Christina Caron, July 19, 2009


• Abc Video: Was Moon Mission a Stepp Forward?


It is perhaps the most iconic image of the 20th century: man landing on the moon, planting an American flag and saying those famous words: "…one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind."

It was an incredible feat. So incredible that many found it hard to believe at the time. Val Germann, president of the Central Missouri Astronomical Association, said his own grandmother was a skeptic. "It didn't resonate with her or mean that much to her. She said, 'I don't think that really happened." "I said, 'Oh they did [walk on the moon]. I know it's hard to believe but they did.'"

Germann, 59, has spent a lifetime studying space: He taught astronomy for more than 20 years at Missouri's Columbia College before retiring. For years he has fielded questions about moon landing conspiracies from curious students, but an online poll conducted earlier this month by Britain's Engineering and Technology magazine was the last straw. "That is what really made me angry. I'm going, 'This stuff is still going around?'"


• Videos: Apollo 11 Moon Landing


The poll claimed that 25 percent of British people "don't believe the Apollo 11 moon landing." Germann decided to prepare a PowerPoint presentation debunking the theories of the moonwalk naysayers and present it on Monday, the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. He's expecting more than 100 people to show up. "What's going to seal it is the new lunar reconnaissance mission," Germann said. Click HERE to learn more about the images Apollo left behind.


• Video from 1969: 'The Eagle Has Landed'


How Many Truly Believe the Moon Landing Was a Hoax?

For the majority of people in the U.S., there's no doubt that the moon landing happened. Just six percent of Americans think the government staged the Apollo moon landings according to a 1999 Gallup poll, the most recent data available. A similar poll by Time/CNN, conducted in 1995, also revealed that six percent believe the moon landings were faked.

Moonwalk conspiracy theories still live on, in large part thanks to the Internet. As the 40th anniversary of the moon landing approaches, the phrase "apollo moon landing hoax" is one of the top 10 hottest searches on Google, perhaps aided by NASA's recent announcement that they accidentally erased the original moon landing footage. Continued...

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AP

NASA to moon: Get ready, here we come
By Seth Borenstein, Oct. 9, 2009


• Oh Great: NASA Plans To Blow Up The Moon


Washington – Two NASA spacecraft are barreling toward the moon at twice the speed of a bullet, about to crash Friday into a lunar crater in a search for ice. "Everything is working so very well," NASA's Victoria Friedensen, a manager in NASA's exploration office, said minutes before the planned one-two smack into the moon's south pole.

If all continues to go well, the impact will be beamed back live to Earth. The first and much bigger crash is set for 7:31 a.m. EDT (1131 GMT). That's when an empty rocket that weighs 2.2 tons should hit the crater Cabeus and create a minicrater about half the size of an Olympic pool. It should kick up a plume of lunar debris about six miles (10 kilometers) high.

The idea is to confirm the theory that water — a key resource if people are going to go back to the moon — is hidden below the barren moonscape. Trailing behind the rocket is the lunar probe LCROSS, short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite and pronounced L-Cross, beaming back to Earth live pictures of the impact and the debris plume using color cameras. It will scour for ice, fly through the debris cloud and then just four minutes later take the fatal plunge itself, triggering a dust storm one-third the size of the first hit.

Telescopes around the world — including the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope — will aim their cameras at the big event to provide more views of the dust-up. LCROSS and its bigger rocket stage launched together last June and only separated Thursday night, the last major milestone before the big crash. The lunar minidemolition derby will be broadcast live on NASA television. Museums and observatories planned early morning events to show the crashes, which can be seen with backyard telescopes in the predawn darkness west of the Mississippi River.

But the best place to watch the lunar action will be on the Internet, scientists said. "It's going to be a muted shimmer of light," said Anthony Colaprete, an LCROSS scientist. The LCROSS probe cost $79 million and was an add-on to a bigger NASA satellite now circling the moon.
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Related News:

• SPACE.com: NASA set to dive bomb the Moon
• AP: Moon crashing probes complete major milestone
• AFP: In search of water NASA prepares to bomb the moon
• Space.com: Spacecraft's lunar crash won't hurt the Moon, NASA says
• NASA Sites: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/main/index.html - NASA's LCROSS site

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Abc

Space History on ABC News


• LRO's first pictures from the Moon


40 years after Apollo 11 went to the moon, NASA is back with a ship called Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO -- and one of its first assignments was to look for what Apollo left behind.





Each of the Apollo Lunar Modules (there were six landings in all) left behind their descent stages, including their landing legs, main rocket engine and fuel tanks. LRO, from an altitude of about 30 miles, was able to make out the Apollo 11 descent stage as a dot -- about 20 pixels in all -- with a long shadow.


- Photos


The result is this image -- not high resolution, but remember that they've picked out an object about 12 feet across, a quarter of a million miles from Earth. LRO has also found four of the five other Apollo landing sites, and you can find the pictures HERE. Look carefully at Apollo 14 and you can make out the tracks left by a wagon on which the astronauts piled their tools and rock samples.

The astronauts' discarded equipment could conceivably remain for eons, baking and freezing as the sun rises and sets, but otherwise almost undisturbed in the vacuum of space.




- Moon landing sites photographed by NASA's L.R. Orbiter. • NASA: LRO Sees Apollo 14's Rocket Booster Impact Site


NASA has chosen the final destination for the LCROSS lunar impacting probe: the crater Cabeus A, near the Moon’s south pole. So why is NASA smacking a probe into the Moon at high speed, and why there? The real reason will not be known, because this is NASA after all, so here is the 'official version':

"The idea is that over millions and billions of years, a lot of comets have hit the Moon. The water from these comets hits the surface and sublimates away… but if any settles at the bottoms of deep craters near the Moon’s poles, these permanently shadowed regions can act as a refrigerator, keeping the water from disappearing. It can stay there, locked up as ice, for a long, long time. Some estimates indicate there could be billions of tons of ice near the Moon’s south pole.

Detecting that water is tough. Radar results have been inconclusive, with some people saying there’s lots of water, and others saying there’s none at all. By impacting a probe there, any ice located at the impact site will be shot up above the lunar surface, where sunlight will break it up into O+ and OH- molecules, which can be detected. Thus, LCROSS. I have a more detailed description of all this in an earlier post about LCROSS.

The choice of Cabeus A for the impact site is a good one. It’s near the south pole, it’s a likely spot for there to be ice under the surface, it’s on the near side of the Moon, so people back here on Earth can observe it, but close enough to the limb that any ejected water can be seen. (more)

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AP

NASA probes hit moon twice; few pictures yet
By Seth Borenstein, October 9, 2009


• Video: Live Online • NASA probe slams into the Moon • RT • BBC • MSN


Washington (AP) – Take that, moon! NASA smacked two spacecraft into the lunar south pole Friday morning in a search for hidden ice. Instruments confirm that a large empty rocket hull barreled into the moon at 7:31 a.m., followed four minutes later by a probe with cameras taking pictures of the first crash.

But initial photos show that the moon didn't give the reaction to the double jabs that NASA expected.And the public definitely didn't get the live explosive views they may have anticipated from the mission called LCROSS, short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. Screens got fuzz and no immediate pictures of the crash or the six-mile plume of lunar dust that the mission was supposed to kick up for scientists to study. The public, which followed the crashes on the Internet and at observatories, seemed puzzled.

NASA officials touted loads of data from the probe and telescopes around the world and in orbit. But the crash photos and videos they offered at a morning news conference were few and showed little more than a fuzzy white flash. Still, NASA scientists were happy. "This is so cool," said Jennifer Heldmann, coordinator for NASA's observation campaign. "We're thrilled."

The first photos and videos that NASA got didn't show any plumes. They may still be coming or there may not have been much of a visible plume for the probe and Earth-bound telescopes to see, said LCROSS scientist Anthony Colaprete. "We saw a crater; we saw a flash, so something had to happen in between," Colaprete said. The crater was the aftermath of the crash and the flash was the impact itself.

The unexpected lack of pictures of a plume could be because the plume was at a different angle, hit slopes or wasn't high enough to show up, he said. Or the lunar soil could have compressed down and not tossed up as much dust as expected, he said. Colaprete played down the importance of pictures of the plume. Far more important is light spectrum measurements — taken but not yet analyzed — to show if there is water or some form of water in what was tossed up. The scientific instruments that took those measurements worked perfectly, he said. "What matters for us is: What is the nature of the stuff that was kicked up going in?" said NASA project manager Dan Andrews. "All nine instruments were working fine and we received good data."

Andrews said the science team is pouring through the information to answer the big question: Is there some form of water under the moon's surface that was dislodged? It will probably be two weeks before scientists will be certain about the answer, he said. "This is going to change the way we look at the moon," NASA chief lunar scientist Michael Wargo said at the news conference.

Expectations by the public for live plume video were probably too high and based on pre-crash animations, some of which were not by NASA, Andrews told The Associated Press Friday morning 80 minutes after impact. Another issue, one NASA thought was a good possibility going into Friday, was that the lighting was bad and work needs to be done on images to make them easier to see, Andrews said. People who got up before dawn to look for the crash at Los Angeles' Griffith Observatory threw confused looks at each other instead. They tried to watch on TV because the skies in Southern California were not clear enough, but that proved disappointing, too.

Telescope demonstrator Jim Mahon called the celestial show "anticlimactic." "I was hoping we'd see a flash or a flare, evidence of a plume," Mahon said. About 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles, 70 elementary school students at the Lewis Center for Educational Research charter school in Apple Valley capped off their weeklong "moon camp" experience by rising early to watch NASA television along with 300 members of the public.

"It was cool seeing actual pictures of the moon live," said 10-year-old Jackson Bridges, he added: "I wanted to see the debris flying out."
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On the Net:
• NASA Blog: http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/moon_missions
• NASA's LCROSS site: http://www.nasa.gov/lcross • NASA TV via Internet

Related articles:




• Curent Beta: NASA bombs the Moon looking for water
• Hindustan Times: US rocket ready to crash into moon
• New Scientist: NASA puzzles over 'invisible' moon impact • GMC: Moon "bombing" • AP News
• L.A.Times: NASA scientists find hydrogen in moon's sunlit regions • Global Media Coverage: NASA's Moon Crash

• The Star: Moonstruck: Making one giant thud for mankind - For as long as man has looked up, the moon has inspired romance, poetry and songs. Man also likes blowing things up. Now we get to do both - in the name of science. The aim of the deliberate crash of two unmanned spacecraft into the moon is to see if they can kick up some ice. It is the 20th lunar crash, most of them done on purpose, since the Russians first did it 50 years ago last month. (more)

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The Times

India’s lunar mission finds evidence of water on the Moon
From The Times, September 24, 2009





Dreams of establishing a manned Moon base could become reality within two decades after India’s first lunar mission found evidence of large quantities of water on its surface.

Data from Chandrayaan-1 also suggests that water is still being formed on the Moon. Scientists said the breakthrough — to be announced by Nasa at a press conference today — would change the face of lunar exploration. The discovery is a significant boost for India in its space race against China. Dr Mylswamy Annadurai, the mission’s project director at the Indian Space Research Organisation in Bangalore, said: “It’s very satisfying.”

The search for water was one of the mission’s main objectives, but it was a surprise nonetheless, scientists said.The unmanned craft was equipped with Nasa’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, designed specifically to search for water by picking up the electromagnetic radiation emitted by minerals. The M3 also made the unexpected discovery that water may still be forming on the surface of the Moon, according to scientists familiar with the mission. “It’s very satisfying,” said Dr Mylswamy Annadurai, the project director of Chandrayaan-1 at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in Bangalore. “This was one of the main objectives of Chandrayaan-1, to find evidence of water on the Moon,” he told The Times.

Dr Annadurai would not provide any further details before a news conference at Nasa today from Dr Carle Pieters, a planetary geologist of Brown University who oversaw the M3. Dr Pieters has not spoken about her results so far and was not available for comment last night, according to colleagues at Brown University. But her results are expected to cause a sensation, and to set the agenda for lunar exploration in the next decade. They will also provide a significant boost for India as it tries to catch up with China in what many see as a 21st-century space race. “This will create a considerable stir. It was wholly unexpected,” said one scientist also involved in Chandrayaan-1. “People thought that Chandrayaan was just lagging behind the rest but the science that’s coming out, it’s going to be agenda-setting.”

Scientists have long hoped that astronauts could be based on the Moon and use water found there to drink, extract oxygen to breathe and use hydrogen as fuel. Several studies havesuggested that there could be ice in the craters around the Moon’s poles, but scientists have been unable to confirm the suspicions. The M3, an imaging spectrometer, was designed to search for water by detecting the electromagnetic radiation given off by different minerals on and just below the surface of the Moon. Unlike previous lunar spectrometers, it was sensitive enough to detect the presence of small amounts of water. M3 was one of two Nasa instruments among 11 pieces of equipment from around the world on Chandrayaan-1, which was launched into orbit around the Moon in October last year. ISRO lost control of Chandrayaan-1 last month, and aborted the mission ahead of schedule, but not before M3 and the other instruments had beamed data back to Earth.

Another lunar scientist familiar with the findings said: “This is the most exciting breakthrough in at least a decade. And it will probably change the face of lunar exploration for the next decade.” Scientists are eagerly awaiting the results of two American unmanned lunar missions, which were both launched in June, that could also prove the existence of water on the Moon. Early results from Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) recorded temperatures as low as -238C (minus 396.4F) in polar craters on the Moon, according to the journal Nature. That makes them the coldest recorded spots in the solar system, even colder than the surface of Pluto, and could mean that ice has been trapped for billions of years, the journal said. The LRO has also detected an abundance of hydrogen, thought to be a key indicator of ice, at the poles.

The other Nasa mission, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), is due to crash a probe into a polar crater on October 9 in the hope of sending up a plume of ice that can be examined by telescope. “We are on the verge of a renaissance in our thinking about the poles of the Moon, including how water ice gets there,” Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for LCROSS, said in Nature.

• The Moon (it is thought to be) 4.6 billion years old, about the same age as the Earth
• It is thought to have formed from a giant dust cloud caused when a rogue planet collided with the Earth
• It is 238,000 miles from the Earth • Gravity on the Moon is a sixth of that on Earth

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New Scientist

NASA may abandon plans for moon base
By David Shiga, 29 April 2009


• Images: NASA's planed Moon base • Video


NASA will probably not build an outpost on the moon as originally planned, the agency's acting administrator, Chris Scolese, told lawmakers on Wednesday. His comments also hinted that the agency is open to putting more emphasis on human missions to destinations like Mars or a near-Earth asteroid.

NASA has been working towards returning astronauts to the moon by 2020 and building a permanent base there. But some space analysts and advocacy groups like the Planetary Society have urged the agency to cancel plans for a permanent moon base, carry out shorter moon missions instead, and focus on getting astronauts to Mars.

Under Scolese's predecessor, Mike Griffin, the agency held firm to its moon base plans. But the comments by Scolese, who will lead NASA until President Barack Obama nominates the next administrator, suggest a shift in the agency's direction. He spoke to the Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies of the House Committee on Appropriations. Scolese was asked repeatedly whether NASA could still make it to the moon by 2020 under the proposed 2010 budget, but failed to give a clear yes or no, and his answers suggested the agency's plans were in flux.


Short trips




"We were looking at an outpost on the moon, as the basis for that [2020] estimate and that one is being revisited," he said. "It will probably be less than an outpost on the moon, but where it fits between sorties, single trips, to the moon to various parts and an outpost is really going to be dependent on the studies that we're going to be doing."

"Recall that the Vision for Space Exploration was not just to go to the moon as it was in Apollo, it was to utilise space to go on to Mars and to go to other places," he added. "We've demonstrated over the last several years that with multiple flights we can build a very complex system reliably – the space station – involving multiple nations…and we'll need something like that if we're going to go to Mars."

Scolese's further comments hinted that the agency's plans might shift to include a greater emphasis on destinations beyond the moon. "So what I would like to see from NASA over time is an architecture that…will give us flexibility for taking humans beyond low-Earth orbit and allowing us to have options for what we can do at the moon as well as other destinations…[like] Mars or an asteroid…so that there are options on what we do in 2020," he said.

Vague answers




Scolese's vague answers on whether NASA believed it could meet its 2020 moon deadline, as well as similarly unclear answers from Doug Cooke, NASA's associate administrator for exploration systems, left the subcommittee's chair, congressman Alan Mollohan, wondering whether the agency had been given new directions.





"Does the 2010 budget request impact in any way our target – is this so complicated – our target of getting to the moon by 2020?" he asked. "Is there any consideration being given within the organisation to not attempting to meet the 2020 moon [return]…is there any reconsideration of going there? What is going on here?"

Cooke replied: "The direction that we have is to continue to pursue the 2020 date," but added that the agency was still assessing how the 2010 budget might affect that. Some clarification about any shift in NASA's goals and priorities could come in early May, when the Obama administration's detailed 2010 budget proposal for NASA is set to be released.

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• New Scientist: Blasted into space from a giant air gun
• New Scientist: 'Deep space' mission is frontrunner in NASA review
• New Scientist: Rocket company tests world's most powerful ion engine
• For similar stories from the New Scientist magazine you may visit the Spaceflight Topic Guide

• Space.com: List of the top 10 things that have impacted the lunar surface.
• NASA Video: Planning the Assault: Why Bomb the Moon?
• Video: The final 6 minutes of NASA's LCROSS mission to smash the moon's surface, in search of water ice.

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Space.gs

NASA honors President Kennedy with Ambassador of Exploration Award.
By Space News


- US President Kennedy’s speech. - Videos


On the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, NASA honored President John F. Kennedy with an Ambassador of Exploration Award for his vision and leadership in landing a man on the Moon. The Kennedy family has selected Rice University to house and publicly display the award, a lunar sample, at Fondren Library. Kennedy called for a national initiative to go to the Moon during a speech given at Rice University on Sept. 12, 1962.

Michael Coats, a former astronaut and director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, will present the Moon rock to Rice University President David Leebron on Saturday, Oct. 10, during a halftime ceremony at the Rice versus Navy football game. NASA astronauts George Zamka, a graduate of the Naval Academy, and Danny Olivas, a graduate of Rice, will serve as honorary captains for their alma maters during the game’s coin toss.

Game-day attendees can see and touch a Moon rock and learn about the space shuttle, International Space Station and future exploration programs by visiting the agency’s “Driven to Explore” exhibit. The exhibit will be open from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. CDT at the stadium’s Tailgate Owley outside Rice Stadium Gate 3. Zamka and Olivas will sign autographs from 1 to 2 p.m. at the NASA exhibit.

NASA is giving the Ambassador of Exploration Award to the first generation of explorers in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs for realizing America’s goal of going to the Moon. The award is a Moon rock encased in Lucite, mounted for public display. The rock is part of the 842 pounds of lunar samples collected during six Apollo expeditions from 1969 to 1972.

NASA Television will air a video file with highlights following the event. For NASA TV downlink, schedule and streaming video information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

Space News: LCROSS and its Centaur upper stage impact the Moon in search of water ice.

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- MIR station

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- This artist’s conception shows a nearly invisible ring around Saturn — the largest of the giant planet’s many rings. It was discovered by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The artist’s conception simulates an infrared view of the giant ring. Saturn appears as just a small dot from outside the band of ice and dust. The bulk of the ring material starts about six million kilometers (3.7 million miles) away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers (7.4 million miles). The ring’s diameter is equivalent to roughly 300 Saturns lined up side to side. The inset shows an enlarged image of Saturn, as seen by the W.M. Keck Observatory at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, in infrared light. The ring, stars and wispy clouds are an artist’s representation. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Keck

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- Sep 24, 2009: Nicole Stott, Expedition 20 flight engineer, poses for a photo near a window in the Kibo laboratory of the International Space Station. Credit: NASA