Antares rocket makes its maiden voyage into space

Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket had its first successful launch today, carrying a mock cargo ship into orbit before the rocket burned up in the atmosphere. It comes after two delays, for both weather and mechanical failure, but resulted in a strong showing for the Antares' two-stage booster engine, which utilizes a combination of liquid and solid fuels. Once testing is complete, the rocket is expected to take over resupply and crew launches to the International Space Station. The dummy cargo ship, which weighed over four tons, included three small Phonesat satellites as part of a NASA research experiment, as well as a larger Dove-1 satellite carried on behalf of telecom company Cosmogia.

It's part of a longterm shift at NASA from public missions to private contracts, which has also seen billion-dollar contracts for Elon Musk's SpaceX project project and a gradual phase-out of NASA's own space shuttle project. As one Nasa administrator told Space.com, "This is the culmination of a plan that we've been on for several years." With this successful launch behind them, Orbital Sciences is planning subsequent launches every three to six months, with two more scheduled for 2013 and at least one more mock-launch before they start ferrying actual cargo.

Russia’s Progress Cargo Spacecraft to Be ‘Buried’ in Pacific

MOSCOW, April 21 (RIA Novosti) - The Progress M-17M cargo spacecraft, which undocked from the International Space Station on April 15, will be "buried" in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday, Russia's Mission Control said. “Progress’s engines will switch to the braking mode at 6:07 p.m. Moscow time [02:07 p.m. GMT] on April 21. The space freighter’s fragments that will not burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere will splash down at 6:58 p.m. Moscow time in the Pacific Ocean far from navigation routes,” Mission Control said.

The Progress M-17M arrived at the orbital station on October 31 last year. It was the second spacecraft in the history of the world orbiter’s operation that performed an accelerated docking with the ISS just under six hours after liftoff from the Baikonur Space Center in Kazakhstan. The first accelerated docking was performed by the M-16M space freighter in August 2012. The Progress M-17M space freighter undocked from the Zvezda module of the Russian segment on the ISS on April 15 and operated in an autonomous mode in the next six days, conducting a series of scientific experiments under the Radar-Progress project.

The departure of Progress M-17M clears a docking port on the Zvezda module for the next Russian resupply vehicle, Progress M-19M, which will blast off aboard a Soyuz-U carrier rocket from the Baikonur space center on April 24. With a record of more than 130 launches since 1972, Progress-family freighters remain the backbone of the Russian space cargo fleet. In addition to their main mission as cargo spacecraft, they are used to adjust the space station’s orbit and conduct scientific experiments.

U.S. Orbital to launch space rocket Sunday

WASHINGTON, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Orbital Sciences Corp., one of two private companies that currently hold a contract with U.S. space agency NASA to fly unmanned cargo missions to the International Space Station, has rescheduled the test flight of its Antares rocket to Sunday.

"Today's Antares launch has been scrubbed due to upper wind conditions," said NASA via its official Twitter ajgn%3Dc6e next launch attempt will be Sunday, April 21 at 5 p.m. EDT ( 2100 GMT)." A Wednesday attempt to launch the rocket from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia, was called off due to "a premature separation of an umbilical connection on the second stage". The Virginia-based Orbital signed a 1.9-billion-U.S.-dollar deal with NASA to fly eight unmanned supply missions using the Antares and Cygnus cargo delivery system.

Another U.S. company, California-based SpaceX, made history when its Dragon spacecraft became the first commercial vehicle in history to successfully attach to the space station in a May 2012 test flight. Dragon has already made three trips to the space station and it still needs to complete another ten to fulfill its 1.6-billion- dollar contract with NASA. The next SpaceX cargo run is scheduled for September.

NASA sees distant planets that seem ideal for life

AP Science Writer= WASHINGTON (AP) — NASA's planet-hunting telescope has discovered two planets that seem like ideal places for some sort of life to flourish. And they are just the right size and in just the right place. One is toasty, the other nippy.

The distant duo are the best candidates for habitable planets that astronomers have found so far, said William Borucki, the chief scientist for NASA's Kepler telescope. And it's got astronomers thinking that similar planets that are just about right for life — "Goldilocks planets" — might be common in the universe. The discoveries, published online Thursday in the journal Science, mark a milestone in the search for planets where life could exist. In the four years that Kepler has been trailing Earth's orbit, the telescope has found 122 exoplanets — planets outside our solar system. In the past, those planets haven't fit all the criteria that would make them right for life of any kind from microbes to man. Many planets aren't in the habitable zone — where it's not too hot and not too cold for liquid water. And until now, the few found in that ideal zone, were just too big. Those are likely to be gas balls like Neptune and that's not suitable for life. Similarly, any Earth-size planets weren't in the right place near their stars, Borucki said. In the Goldilocks game of looking for other planets like ours, the new discoveries, called Kepler-62-e and Kepler-62-f are just right. And they are fraternal twins. They circle the same star, an orange dwarf, and are next to each other — closer together than Earth and its neighbor Mars.

The planets are slightly wider than Earth, but not too big. Kepler-62-e is a bit balmy, like a Hawaiian world and Kepler-62-f is a bit frosty, more Alaskan, Borucki said. The pair is 1,200 light-years away; a light-year is almost 6 trillion miles. "This is the first one where I'm thinking 'Huh, Kepler-62-f really might have life on it'," said study co-author David Charbonneau of Harvard. "This is a very important barrier that's been crossed. Why wouldn't it have life?"

To make it warm enough for life the planet would need greenhouse gas trapping its star's heat because the star only gives off one-fifth the energy of our sun, but that's something that is likely to happen, Borucki said. Both planets are tantalizing. The dozens of researchers who co-authored the study disagree on which one is better suited to life. Lisa Kaltenegger of the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy in Germany likes Kepler-62-e more because it's closer to the star and is warmer. She said it is probably "like Washington in May." That planet is so close it may need clouds to cool off and it's more likely to be an all-water world, unlike any other in our solar system, Kaltenegger said. Astronomers cannot confirm that either planet has water, but based on other research, it's a good assumption, she said. The planets circle a star that is 7 billion years old — about 2.5 billion years older than our sun. Kepler spots the planets as they go between Earth and their star ever so slightly, reducing the light from the star.

"If there's life at all on those planets, it must be very advanced" evolutionarily because the planets are so old, said Borucki. On a watery planet, oceans are prime spots for life, including flying fish that could evolve into birds, Borucki said. And on the rocky planet, with a heavier gravity than Earth, life might look a tad different, he said. In another study also published by some of the same authors in Astrophysical Journal, the astronomers found a different set of planets that are slightly bigger, but probably not gas giants, and circle a star that more resembles our sun. One of those planets is on edge of the habitable zone — maybe in, maybe out — and could be considered a potential third good place for a habitable zone, said Thomas Barclay of NASA's Ames Research Center, which runs the Kepler telescope.

All told, researchers announced seven new exoplanets on Thursday, upping the grand total found so far by Kepler and Earth-bound telescopes to about 850, according to NASA. Pennsylvania State University professor James Kasting called the findings "a big discovery." Kasting and Sara Seager of MIT, who weren't part of the research, pointed out that Kepler's job is to look at one distant corner of the sky and to find what fraction of stars seemed to have the right sized planets in the habitable zone. "This is HUGE," Seager wrote in an email. "Do you realize that as soon as Kepler could find close-to-Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars, Kepler found it. Goldilocks planets must be everywhere."

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Online:

Science: http://www.sciencemag.org

Is there an atmosphere on the Moon?

What is the moon's atmosphere made of? We have some clues. The Apollo 17 mission deployed an instrument called the Lunar Atmospheric Composition Experiment (LACE) on the moon's surface. It detected small amounts of a number of atoms and molecules including helium, argon, and possibly neon, ammonia, methane and carbon dioxide. From here on Earth, researchers using special telescopes that block light from the moon's surface have been able to make images of the glow from sodium and potassium atoms in the moon's atmosphere as they are energized by the sun. Still, we only have a partial list of what makes up the lunar atmosphere. Many other species are expected.

We think that there are several sources for gases in the moon's atmosphere. These include high energy photons and solar wind particles knocking atoms from the lunar surface, chemical reactions between the solar wind and lunar surface material, evaporation of surface material, material released from the impacts of comets and meteoroids, and out-gassing from the moon's interior. But which of these sources and processes are important on the moon? We still don't know.

With the discovery of significant ice deposits at the moon's poles by NASA's Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) missions, and the discovery of a thin scattering of water molecules in the lunar soil by the Chandrayaan X-ray Observatory, another fascinating possibility has captured researchers' interest. The moon's atmosphere may play a key role in a potential lunar water cycle, facilitating the transport of water molecules between polar and lower latitude areas. The moon may not only be wetter than we once thought, but also more dynamic.

Survey Finds Sexual Harassment in Anthropology

Fieldwork is a rite of passage for anthropologists. It gives the initiate firsthand knowledge of a culture, along with a feeling of camaraderie with colleagues, often in remote and rugged locations. But for women there is also a dark side—a risk of sexual harassment and rape, according to a survey of fieldwork experiences released today. Anthropologist Kathryn Clancy, who authored the study, found a disturbingly high incidence of physical sexual harassment among respondents: More than 20% of female bioanthropologists who took part said that she had experienced "physical sexual harassment or unwanted sexual contact." Most of these victims are female, and most of the perpetrators were colleagues of superior professional status, sometimes the victim's own fieldwork mentor.

The idea for the survey took shape in 2011 when Clancy, a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, was talking to a friend, a female bioanthropologist like herself. The friend was traumatized, Clancy says: She had been raped in the field by a colleague, and her mentor convinced her to keep quiet for the sake of her career.

"It was like a slap in the face to learn that this was happening to my friends," Clancy says. In contrast, she describes her own Ph.D. fieldwork as "paradise." It took place in Poland and, just by chance, all the anthropologists at the site were female.

NASA Wallops rolls out the Antares for next week's test launch

WALLOPS ISLAND — The fully integrated Antares rocket was rolled out over the weekend to prepare for next week's long-awaited launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at NASA Wallops Flight Facility on the Eastern Shore. A 135-foot, medium-lift rocket, the Antares will be the largest ever to launch out of Wallops since the flight facility was established in 1945. The launch is set for 5 p.m. Wednesday, April 17, but NASA officials say the larger launch window is 5 to 8 p.m. that day through April 21.

The Antares and its Cygnus cargo spacecraft were developed and built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, a space transportation company based in Dulles, as part of its $1.9 billion contract with NASA to resupply the International Space Station through 2016. According to Orbital, the Antares is capable of lifting about 11,000 pounds of payload such as crew supplies and scientific experiments into low-earth orbit. "In layman's terms, a small-lift is a pickup truck, medium-lift is a semi and heavy-lift would be a train," said Dale K. Nash, executive director of the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority that oversees MARS. "That's a fairly significant step into that market," Nash said, "and resupplying the International Space Station is a very critical, very challenging mission."

According to Wallops Flight Facility spokesman Keith Koehler, about 100 media representatives, including social media and three international new organizations, have been credentialed so far to view the launch from Wallops. If it's successful, a mission later this year will launch the Cygnus to demonstrate it can rendezvous with the space station. If that succeeds, Orbital will conduct eight resupply missions out of MARS. State leaders hope having Orbital as a key customer will establish its spaceport as a major hub for the emerging commercial space industry, attract other commercial customers and bring investment and jobs to the state and region.

Orbital has said Antares launches will be visible throughout Hampton Roads, but the NASA Wallops website indicates two primary viewing locations for launches. One is at the Wallops Visitors Center along Virginia Highway 175, and the other is the beach on the Virginia side of Assateague Island, although capacity is based on such factors as the time of year and the state of the beach.

Russia must catch up in space exploration, says Putin

Moscow: Russia must catch up with other space powers in deep space exploration, and higher priority should be given to applied projects in space research, President Vladimir Putin said. Until now, priority has been given to manned space flight, which consumes around half the space programme's total budget, often at the expense of other fields, Putin said at a conference on the development of the space industry. 

"We are behind in a number of areas. For example, in remote earth-sensing systems, personal satellite communication systems, and detection and rescue of objects in distress," Putin said. "Of course, we should preserve everything that has been achieved in piloted programmes, but there is a pressing need to bring other areas up to scratch," he said. Putin also called for an increase in Russia's satellite grouping in orbit, development of new carrier rockets and manufacturing of more powerful rocket engines. 

Moon's radiation damaging for humans, electronics

Washington: The radiation environment near the Moon could be damaging to humans and electronics on future missions, it has been revealed. To characterize this potentially hazardous environment, the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER) on board the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, which orbits at 50 kilometers (31 miles) above the Moon's surface, measures the radiation that would be absorbed by either electronic parts or human tissue behind the shielding of a spacecraft. 

CRaTER has measured the lunar radiation environment since 2009, during the recent solar minimum. The solar wind is less turbulent during solar minima and thus presents less of a barrier to incoming galactic cosmic rays, so cosmic rays were at a high during that time period. Cosmic rays include various high energy particles, and they create a shower of secondary radiation upon impact with the Moon or a spacecraft's shielding. Looper et al. ran simulations that model the response of the CRaTER sensor to various energetic particles.

The simulations enabled the researchers to extract observations about the radiation environment from observations specific to the sensor. Looking at contributions from galactic cosmic rays, secondary particles, and sensor background, they were able to derive energy spectra for the radiation dose that humans or instruments would absorb in the lunar environment.

Saturn's rings found to produce rain

The rings of the planet Saturn produce their own rain that falls onto the planet beneath, astronomers have discovered. Electrically charged water droplets have been tracked falling from Saturn's rings onto its atmosphere Photo: ALAMY 9:00PM BST 10 Apr 2013 Comments The rain may fall mainly from the rings of Saturn. While it does not have the same ring to the phrase repeated by Eliza in My Fair Lady as she learned the importance of pronunciation, scientists have discovered that water is raining onto Saturn from its own distinctive rings. 

The finding may help to explain where water seen in Saturn's upper atmosphere is coming from. Observations taken by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii have shown that electrically charged droplets of rain are showering onto the planet from the rings 120,000 miles overhead. James O'Donoghue, the lead author of the study at Leicester University, said: "“Saturn is the first planet to show significant interaction between its atmosphere and ring system.

US not going to make another manned moon landing: NASA

Washington, April 09: NASA chief Charles Bolden has said that the space agency is not sending astronauts to the moon any time soon. Bolden's remarks came during a joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board in Washington last week. According to a report by SpacePolitics.com, Bolden said the focus would remain on human missions to asteroids and to Mars.

Last week, Russia rekindled its plans for a robotic moon exploration program, unveiling its first new moon mission since the Soviet Union launched Luna 24 in 1976. Russian space scientists are scripting a new plan to reconnect with the moon, one scientist explained. Igor Mitrofanov of the Institute for Space Research said that exploration of the moon is an important part of the program. Russia is a spacefaring country not only with the robotic but also manned flight, he added.