Political India: Engaging America

To anyone who grew up on a staple diet of Asterix comics, the illustrated series about a Gaulish tribe by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, it is well known that their greatest fear was that the sky would one day fall on their heads.

Today the fears of that tiny tribe gripped the entire world as a massive but dead satellite floating on the outer edge of the earth’s atmosphere began a fiery, high-velocity descent of indeterminate terminal location.

The bus-sized Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS, launched in 1991 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is 35 feet long, 15 feet in diameter, and weighs a staggering 6,500 kilograms. It will re-enter the earth’s atmosphere sometime Friday night or early Saturday Eastern Time NASA said, noting that it was as yet too early to predict the time and location of re-entry with precision.

However the agency cautioned that it could not rule out the United States as a landing spot, saying, “There is a low probability any debris that survives re-entry will land in the United States, but the possibility cannot be discounted because of this changing rate of descent.”

Meanwhile a U.S. Air Force space operations team in California was said to be tracking the “errant satellite’s” movements. “If the satellite doesn’t incinerate when it enters Earth’s atmosphere, NASA officials expect to see 25 or 26 pieces of debris from the craft. The biggest piece is estimated to weigh 300 pounds,” Jeremy Eggers, Public Affairs Director for the operations centre, said in a statement.

If the satellite doesn’t incinerate when it enters Earth’s atmosphere, NASA officials expect to see 25 or 26 pieces of debris from the craft, the USAF said, adding that the biggest piece is estimated to weigh around 136 kilograms. It was currently estimated to be travelling at approximately 27,000 kilometres per hour.

NASA however hastened to add that the risk that “re-entering orbital debris” posed to public safety or property was “extremely small” because a significant amount of such debris does not survive the severe heating which occurs during re-entry.

“Components which do survive are most likely to fall into the oceans or other bodies of water or onto sparsely populated regions like the Canadian Tundra, the Australian Outback, or Siberia in the Russian Federation,” NASA explained, adding that during the last 50 years an average of one catalogued piece of debris fell back to Earth each day and “no serious injury or significant property damage caused by re-entering debris has been confirmed.”

Yet obviously no place on earth was entirely safe from the dead satellite’s descent – in a small footnote on its website NASA recommended: “If you find something you think may be a piece of UARS, do not touch it. Contact a local law enforcement official for assistance.” This of course assumes it missed the individual in question.

Labels: NASA, UARS, Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite

From The Hindu

The sun — like a benevolent god, it shines down upon the Earth and sustains all life, and god-like, it has also been beyond the reach of human endeavour. At least until now.

This week, the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) announced its most ambitious space exploration project yet — to send a probe to our nuclear-powered star by the year 2018.

In developing the path-breaking mission, called Solar Probe Plus, NASA said it was hoping to encounter and study the sun "closer than ever before". The unprecedented project is slated to launch no later than 2018 and will send a small car-sized spacecraft across nearly 150 million kilometres to "plunge directly into the sun’s atmosphere" four million miles above the star’s surface.

The craft would have to withstand temperatures exceeding 2550 degrees Fahrenheit and blasts of intense radiation and to do so, it would be constructed using a revolutionary carbon-composite heat shield.

If the mission succeeds, the spacecraft will have an “up close and personal view of the sun,” NASA said, and it would enable scientists to better understand, characterise and forecast the radiation environment for future space explorers.

Dick Fisher, director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division, said, “The experiments selected for Solar Probe Plus are specifically designed to solve two key questions of solar physics — why is the sun's outer atmosphere so much hotter than the sun’s visible surface and what propels the solar wind that affects Earth and our solar system?" He added that scientists had struggled with such questions for decades and this mission would finally provide answers.

In particular, NASA noted that a mission to provide such measurements was first recommended in 1958 by the National Academy of Science’s “Simpson Committee", and since then NASA had conducted several studies of possible implementations of a Solar Probe mission.

Five science investigations

To make this historic project a reality, NASA said it had selected five science investigations from a 2009 list of proposals that it had called for. The space agency said the total dollar amount for the five selected investigations was approximately $180 million for preliminary analysis, design, development and tests.

Among the selected proposals were studies that proposed to examine particles in solar wind, telescopes designed to make three dimensional images of the sun’s corona, and projects that sought to measure energy fields, radio emissions, and shock waves in the sun’s atmospheric plasma.

An Indian-American scientist on the Solar Probe Plus team, Madhulika Guhathakurta, said, "This project allows humanity's ingenuity to go where no spacecraft has ever gone before... For the very first time, we'll be able to touch, taste and smell our sun."

NASA noted that the Solar Probe Plus mission was part of its "Living with a Star" programme, designed to understand aspects of the sun’s and Earth’s space environment that affected life and society.

Labels: mission to the Sun, NASA, Solar Probe Plus

From The Hindu

U.S. President Barack Obama on Thursday set the National Aeronautical and Space Administration on a firm trajectory to a Mars landing when he said: “By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And a landing on Mars will follow.”

In a speech on space exploration in the 21st century, delivered at the John F. Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, Mr. Obama said that by 2025, he expected to see new spacecraft designed for long journeys that would allow the United States to begin “the first-ever crewed missions beyond the Moon into deep space”.

In redefining some aspects of his administration's space exploration policy, Mr. Obama said he would be providing even more funding for NASA projects in return for which he expected them to meet the challenge of the need for “breakthrough propulsion systems and other advanced technologies”

As part of this strategy the White House announced earlier this year — amidst some harsh criticism — that it would be ending parts of the older Constellation programme and instead invest more in newer programmes such as Orion project.

In this context, Mr. Obama said: “It is precisely by investing in groundbreaking research and innovative companies that we will have the potential to rapidly transform our capabilities — even as we build on the important work already completed, through projects like Orion, for future missions.”

“We start by increasing NASA's budget by $6 billion over the next five years… even as we have instituted a freeze on discretionary spending and sought to make cuts elsewhere in the budget.”

Among the space projects financed, $3 billion will be invested to conduct research on an advanced “heavy lift rocket” needed for crew capsules, propulsion systems and large quantities of supplies to reach deep space.

Mr. Obama also stressed the need for further development of the Orion crew capsule and said he had directed NASA administrator Charlie Bolden to “immediately begin developing a rescue vehicle using this technology, so we are not forced to rely on foreign providers if it becomes necessary to quickly bring our people home from the International Space Station.”

The boost to NASA finances would also be used to ramp up robotic exploration of the solar system, including a probe of the Sun's atmosphere; new scouting missions to Mars and other destinations, Mr. Obama added. There would also be focus on developing an advanced telescope to follow Hubble, “allowing us to peer deeper into the universe than ever before”.

Emphasising the job-creating benefits of his new space policy, Mr. Obama said: “Despite some reports to the contrary, my plan will add more than 2,500 jobs along the Space Coast in the next two years compared to the plan under the previous administration.”

In that regard he also sought to downplay fears some had expressed over the plan to utilise the services of private companies: “NASA has always relied on private industry to help design and build the vehicles that carry astronauts to space, from the Mercury capsule that carried John Glenn into orbit nearly 50 years ago, to the space shuttle Discovery currently orbiting overhead.”

Labels: deep space research, Mission to Mars, NASA

From The Hindu

The Discovery space shuttle blasted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, in a spectacular pre-dawn launch on Monday. Carrying a crew of seven astronauts as well as equipment and supplies, it took off on a 13-day mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

The shuttle, a multi-purpose logistics module, carries three women-mission specialists — Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Stephanie Wilson and Naoko Yamazaki. NASA said, “With three female crew members arriving on board Discovery and one already at the station, the STS-131 mission will mark the first time that four women have been in space at one time.” Astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson is already at the space station.

NASA added, “And as there is one Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut on each crew, the mission is also the first time for two JAXA astronauts to be in space at the same time.” Monday's mission follows the successful launch of the Russian Soyuz TMA-18 from Kazakhstan. The Russian mission, also headed for the ISS, carried Ms. Dyson, Russian astronaut Alexander Skvortsov and Mikhail Kornienko.

The ISS, which orbits the Earth at a height of some 400 km, is due to be finished next year and is about 90 per cent complete. The mission entails three spacewalks, unloading, transfer and installation of equipment, replacement of an ammonia tank assembly and retrieving a Japanese experiment from the station's exterior, according to NASA.

Earlier this year, NASA administrator Charlie Bolden had said President Barack Obama's new budget for space exploration would demonstrate “our commitment to extend the life of the International Space Station, likely to 2020 or beyond. This will keep a commitment to our international partners and develop the full potential of this amazing orbiting laboratory where humans regularly do things we have never done before in NASA.”

On the future plans for the ISS, Mr. Bolden said, “We're going to start by using the ISS as the national lab that it was envisioned to be… All kinds of educators, colleges, science institutions, and other government agencies, will be using the ISS for research.” The new ISS budget provided for expanded opportunities in climate change: “NASA's Earth science programme has contributed greatly to our ability to understand climate change and its impacts.”

Labels: Discovery, NASA, space programme, space station