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Already $300 million dollars over-budget, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover has been given a reprieve by NASA to move ahead toward its launching in September or October of 2009. Prior to last Friday, the choices available were to cancel, delay the mission, or to go ahead with the plans and hope for the best. With rumors abound regarding its danger of being cancellation due to lack of funding, NASA is working with Congress and the White House on this financial situation, according to Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

Presently at the cost of a billion-and-a-half dollars, preserving the agency’s MSL may force other projects to be cut within the Mars program and also the entire planetary science division. A lot of the rising costs have to do with the added weight to the rover—seven times heavier than previous rover missions—carrying 75 kg of scientific instruments which weigh over a ton. This added weight was too much on the motors that control the robotic arm of the MSL, power its drill, while also being unable to turn its wheels.

The New York company Aeroflex is needing to have the actuators working by December for the MSL, in order for NASA to test its rover in early 2009 on Mars. Every day of delay in the company’s developments will hold up other part assemblies which relay on the actuators. In November NASA will begin field tests on the systems for its MSL to launch and carry the rover through space. Not needing the actuators, the rover can still be moving forward despite the delays with the MSL officials meeting in January with Griffin to see where they are at. If a delay is needed, there will not be another launch window until 2011.

Three Chinese astronauts have been identified to be the part of the Shenzhou 7 three-day mission manned mission which will include China’s first space walk on September 25, 2008. The spacewalk will be one of the two afternoons in the mission.

The three astronauts are fighter pilots Zhai Zhigang, Liu Baiming and Jing Haipeng. Zhai Zhigang was an unsuccessful candidate for the previous two manned missions, but will be the one who carries out the 40-minute spacewalk. Preparations are done regarding major systems for the launching of the Shenzhou 7, including spacecraft testing, the space walk suits, an accompanying satellite for the flight, and the Long March 2F rocket.

Preparations and drills have been conducted, along with sea search and rescue teams to rescue the astronauts should an accident occur, with the capsule falling into the sea upon reentry. The Chinese spacecraft will carry a small satellite which will be released from the spacecraft, or released by the astronaut, which will broadcast the spacewalk live to beam footage to Earth. The released satellite will contain charge coupled device cameras (CCD), capturing images of the spacewalkers as they step out in space.

This is not the first manned mission for China into space. Their Shenzhou 5 mission launched Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei into a 14-orbit around Earth during a 21-hour flight, while the Shenzhou 6 mission was a five day flight with two astronauts. The Shenzhou spacecrafts are designed from Russia’s three-module Soyuz spacecraft, with modernization added by Chinese engineers:

· An orbital module has been included which will remain in space in order to carry out experiments, once the Chinese astronauts returns to Earth in the reentry module.

· Orbital module will be outfitted with solar arrays to supply it with power.

· The orbital module possibly will become the base for their space station, or even a docking target for the Chinese’s Space Agency’s future spacecraft.

China launches its second manned spacecraft Shenzhou-6 at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China’s Gansu Province at 9:00 a.m. local time Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2005.

This animation of wind circulation on Venus is composed of images taken by the Visual and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) on board ESA’s Venus Express between April 2006 and June 2007.

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Recognized as a terrestrial planet, Venus has the highest atmospheric density of all the terrestrial planets consisting mainly of carbon dioxide. Called the sister planet of Earth, it has been said that “it has no carbon cycle to lock carbon into rocks and surface features nor organic life to absorb it in biomass.” In April of 2006, first images of the wind circulation on Venus were composed by ESA’s Venus Express and its onboard Visual and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) in a much more photogenic viewpoint than ever before.

The VIRTIS observations provided us with 3D Venusian images showing for the first time the winds for an entire planetary hemisphere, obtained at the infrared wavelength of 1.74 micrometers. This allowed for tracking of the clouds at the cloud layer’s lower boundary during the night-side, or the red part of the globe in the above illustration. The grey part of the illustration, or its day-side, was obtained in the near-infrared and in the blue ultraviolet areas. Below are the major parts of VIRTIS as listed by ESA:

ASPERA (Analyser of Space Plasma and Energetic Atoms)

ASPERA will investigate the interaction between the solar wind and the atmosphere of Venus by measuring outflowing particles from the planet’s atmosphere and the particles making up the solar wind. It will study how the molecules and ions escape the planet.

MAG (Venus Express Magnetometer)

Venus has no detectable internal magnetic field, and the field that exists around the planet is entirely due to the interaction between the solar wind and the atmosphere. The MAG magnetometer will study this process and will help in understanding the effect this has on Venus’s atmosphere, for instance the atmospheric escape process.

PFS (Planetary Fourier Spectrometer)

PFS will be able to measure the temperature of the atmosphere between altitudes of 55–100 kilometres at a very high resolution. It will also be able to measure the surface temperature and therefore be able to search for volcanic activity. In addition to its temperature measurements, PFS will be able to make composition measurements of the atmosphere.

SPICAV/SOIR (Ultraviolet and Infrared Atmospheric Spectrometer)

SPICAV assists in the analysis of Venus’s atmosphere. In particular, it will search for the small quantities of water expected to exist in the Venusian atmosphere. It will also look for sulphur compounds and molecular oxygen in the atmosphere. It will determine the density and temperature of the atmosphere at 80–180 kilometres altitude.

VeRa (Venus Radio Science Experiment)

VeRa uses the powerful radio link between the spacecraft and Earth to investigate the conditions prevalent in the ionosphere of Venus. Scientists will also use it to study the density, temperature, and pressure of the atmosphere from 35–40 km up to 100 km from the surface, and to determine roughness and electrical properties of the surface. It will also allow investigations of the conditions of the solar wind in the inner part of the Solar System.

VIRTIS (Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer)

VIRTIS will be able to study the composition of the lower atmosphere between 40 kilometres altitude and the surface. It will track the clouds in both ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths and allow scientists to study atmospheric dynamics at different altitudes.

VMC (Venus Monitoring Camera)

VMC is a wide-angle multi-channel camera that will be able to take images of the planet in the near infrared, ultraviolet and visible wavelengths. VMC will be able to make global images and will study the cloud dynamics and image the surface. In addition it will assist in the identification of phenomena seen by other instruments.

Barack Obama is beginning to more than show his “true grit” lately, eliminating any worry in my mind and hopefully everyone else’s that he is lacking in responsibility to lead our country. This “leading” so far involves some excellent ideas for solving the financial crisis our country has been unknowingly led to, while also backing the NASA waiver that may save our shuttle fleet from being unable to access the International Space Station.

Calling on Congress to take some form of action before next Friday in order to protect our access to the ISS, Obama has condemned Bush’s administration in how they have handled NASA. With the Iran, North Korea, Syria Nonproliferation Agreement expiring between now and 2011, a key aide to NASA’s Administrator Mike Griffen has told the media, ““if we do not get the exemption on this, we are going to have to abandon the station, and that if we do this it will hurt the U.S. space program not the Russians.”

With this in mind, Obama has sent a strong-toned letter to Nancy Pelosi-House Speaker, Harry Reid-Senate Majority Leader, and listed it on his Senate September 22 web site, urging Congress to fund an additional Shuttle flight that is already authorized. He also demanded that “no further actions be taken by NASA to preclude extending the Shuttle program beyond 2010.” His letter was supported by Griffin’s internal email that had been leaked earlier in September to the media, criticizing our government leaders with Shuttle retirement and underfunding of our return to the moon.

Nominee for Democratic Vice-President Joe Biden is also the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and is the sponsor of the waiver legislation introduced last June. The waver recently passed this committee, and now must pass the Senate vote before the adjournment of Congress when NASA’s situation must compete with other “major financial crisis legislation” on the floor.

A highly critical time for NASA, Obama’s letter is a ray of hope for the space industry before it leaves for recess. When the existing waiver becomes renewed, NASA can continue purchasing the Russian Soyuz vehicles it needs—transporting U.S., Canadian, European, and Japanese astronauts to and from the ISS.

“This mission will provide the first direct measurements ever taken to address key scientific questions about Mars’ evolution,” said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The loss of Mars’ atmosphere has been an ongoing mystery. MAVEN will help us solve it.”

The choice of the University of Colorado by NASA for their $485-million-dollar Mars robotic mission has come with a very high price after a nine-month delay. A delay, mind you, which has cost NASA time they could not afford, extra money, and the loss of scientific time for the mission. The increase in price was an additional $10-million-dollars because of a two-year launch delay, with the “science-gathering mission cut in half to one year.”

The University of Colorado’s proposal was just one of 20 other ideas to study Mars, scheduled for launch late in 2013, before a serious conflict of interest was declared—which has remained a secret other than it was NOT created by NASA or the two groups involved. According to NASA, the conflict of interest had been destroyed as it could not disclose details which involved “proprietary information.”What is known is that the conflict was not with the Colorado proposal, which meant it was with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio—who could not be reached nor would comment on it.

Last December, NASA stated that a “serious conflict of interest” in one of the two proposals forced the board to disband before the winner could be picked. Meanwhile, another panel was created to give the awards. This was mainly due to that both finalists had submitted new proposals, whereas the “conflict in the original reports was irrelevant to the evaluation and the selection decision.”

Originally, the Mars Scout program has been scheduled for 2011 launching, but NASA had to postpone the mission to 2013 as Mars comes close only to Earth every 26 months. And the purpose of the mission is to focus on the Martian atmosphere, how the planet evolved and lost its water.

MAVEN is called the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, designed to provide information about the Red Planet’s atmosphere, climate history and potential habitability in high detail. The proposal chosen we to provide the best science value and lowest implementation risk from all 20 proposals that were given to NASA’s Announcement of Opportunity in August 2006.

“We are not going to be done with this before the winter shutdown, so there will be no more beam in the LHC this year,” Gillies told The Associated Press. “The winter shutdown will go according to schedule, which means that we start up the accelerator complex in the spring months.”

The latest notice from CERN states they will not restart the Large Hadron Collider until this coming spring, as this past Saturday it had been noticed that helium used to cool the collider’s delicate recording apparatus had leaked into the tunnel Saturday. CERN officials feel that the cause may be “the leak of a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator’s giant magnetic.”

Two weeks ago this Swiss-based company had sent the first proton beam throughout a full circuit, 27 kilometers long in a specially designed tunnel, which was hacked on the 9^th and 10^th of September by Greek hackers who successfully uploaded half-a-dozen files before stopped by CERN scientists. Presently, the repairs will run into what is considered normal winter shutdown hours, with experts now going into the tunnel housing to look at the damage that occurred when the electrical connection between the two magnetics melted.

“There seems to be no harm done. From what they can tell, it was someone making the point that CMS was hackable,” James Gillies, spokesman for Cern, told the Daily Telegraph. “It was quickly detected. We have several levels of network, a general access network and a much tighter network for sensitive things that operate the LHC.”

Greek hackers took on an entirely new role when they breached the CERN network one week after the physics network circulated its first beam of particles. With the monitoring system’s detector system (CMSMON) compromised, half a dozen files were able to be uploaded by Greek hackers on September 9^th and 10^t. With hackers getting into the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment (CMS), the CERN team scrambled to see how many other files were uplifted from the LHC. The area hacked monitored the CMS software system

Leaving a file which read “GST: Greek Security Team. We are 2600-don’t mess with us.”Thankfully, the hackers were unsuccessful in their ventures, and according to Yahoo were “one step away from the computer control system of one of the extra large detectors of CERNS’s LHC—a huge magnet that weighs 12,500 tons, 21 meters in length, and 15 meters wide/high.”

Even though the hacking attempt was unsuccessful, it has raised concern about the security of the largest experiment in the world, and how easily it was hacked only one week after its activation. The website which was hacked, http://www.cmsmon.cern.ch can no longer be accessed by the public due to the attempted hacking job. Scientists shut down the website as they were afraid another hack job may hack into another computer which could actually turn off parts of the detector.

The half a dozen files that were uplifted by the hackers only damaged one file of CERN, with the hacking being actively fought by the CMS team. The CMS is considered one of the four eyes of the experiment, which is necessary to analyze the fallout of the Big Bang. Approximately 2,000 scientists along with another scientific team is responsible for the entire project, with answering emails consisting of, ” “We are a very visible site,” he said, adding that of the 1.4 million emails sent to CERN yesterday, 98 per cent was spam. When the hacking attempt began, LHC was preparing to circulate its first particles, with the next day spent for the team member searching for the half-a-dozen files that had been uploaded by the Greek hackers.

]]> http://www.amarsodyssey.com/uncategorized/half-a-dozen-files-successfully-hacked-from-cern/feed/ http://www.amarsodyssey.com/uncategorized/upcoming-winter-on-mars/ http://www.amarsodyssey.com/uncategorized/upcoming-winter-on-mars/#comments Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:09:39 +0000 Nancy L. Young - Houser http://www.amarsodyssey.com/?p=1207

With the two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, and the Phoenix Lander all dependent on the solar rays for energy, the upcoming Martian winter is still being processed in the work of the rovers. Meanwhile, the Phoenix lander is still working on the Martian soil as a robotic geologist as long as it has enough energy to do so—located on the northern plain of Mars.

With the Phoenix Mission in the middle of their added one-month extension, the two rovers are finishing their winter on Mars while the lander rushes about, filling its onboard instruments with samples of Martian dirt before it runs out of solar energy.

Almost five years since its original landing, the two popular rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are still on the Martian road again with lots of travel stories to show for years of work and exhausting winters on Mars. With Opportunity leaving its year-long home—Victoria Crater—it is onto the Martian plains for another go-round’ of hard work and lots of incoming data.

Of course it needs to leave the Victoria Crater behind first, with the last couple of days being spent “trying to reach a patch of dust between two crests of ridge surrounding ‘Victoria Crater’ “. The wheels of Opportunity have developed excessive slipping once it reached the staging position.

Meanwhile, the rover Spirit is using less energy to stay warm, previously needing approximately 90 watt-hours to run its heaters whereas now it uses around 30 to 40 watt-hours. This extra energy has allowed the rover to add more images to its winter surroundings, referred to as the “Bonestell panorama.” And now the team leaders will have Spirit use its “miniature thermal emission spectrometer” for the first time in several months, since its last usage on May 21, 2008. Presently the team had the little rover calibrate the spectrometer in order to observe the sky and ground.

With so much space debris accumulating in space, the space agencies and satellite operators are beginning to work on solutions to retrieve space junk and pull it out of orbit. Statistics show that presently there are 10,000 pieces of space junk floating around in space that are larger and longer than 10-centimetres, traveling at 22,000-kilometres per hour. In addition to this, approximately 900 active satellites are involved in this dangerous situation. .

Space experts say that one piece of debris about 1-centimeter in size can depressurize a spacecraft. Not a new thing, history shows this has been going on for awhile with full knowledge that the area between the moon and Earth is filled with many types of space trash—burnt-out rocket casings, broken satellites, spacesuits, broken satellites, the debris from experiments from anti-satellite weapons, and smaller amounts of space debris. The unfortunate aspect is that this garbage will circulate Earth for many years until it hits something, which forms smaller particles of space debris.

With both China and the Unites States guilty of shooting down their own satellites before they fell to Earth for many obvious reasons, there are presently many answers being utilized for the space debris problem:

· Radar is tracking pieces of space debris which allows spacecraft to veer around them

· Tougher spacecraft can be built to survive impacts, protecting them from both space debris and meteoroid impacts

· Space faring countries have all agreed to “reduce” their numbers of derelict satellites which could hit working satellites or fall to Earth

o This is being solved by steering older satellites into useless orbits

o These older satellites are also being steered into paths that will allow them to be burnt in the Earth’s atmosphere.

It seems that the primary sources of past space debris originally were accidental and intentional breakups of the launched vehicle. Unfortunately, in the near future this will change to a massive amount of space debris caused by collisions. Space systems are being requested to limit the amount of debris during normal launching operations and minimize any potential for operational phase break-ups.

With space debris bringing about many experiments over the years, back in 2004 NewScientist came out with an article that stated ESA was teaming up with a pair of physicists who smash eggs, founded on the idea that eggshells and discarded pieces of space rockets will break up similarly. The study was begun because from 1950 to 2004, it seems as if approximately 200 explosions had occurred in space, with old rocket bodies involved in slightly under half that amount.

” More than 8500 pieces of space debris bigger than 10 centimetres across are being tracked by the world’s space agencies. In a bid to estimate the danger from fragments in the 1 to 10-centimetre range, ESA ran experiments in the early 1990s in which rocket fuel was used to blow up metal cylinders in an underground bunker. ” (ESA)

“With more commercial satellite launches and space tourism, we need a more efficient way of maintaining safety,” says Daniel Murray, an air traffic specialist at the FAA in Washington DC.

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Before embarking on the subject of trash in space, let’s look at the overload of trash on Earth that we cannot solve the problem of eliminating in a safe and efficient manner. We were given a life to live full of choices, and emptying our accumulating trash is one of those choices. Within our home, mind you. But once it leaves there, it seems to be up for grabs—newspapers which should dissolve in the overloaded landfills have been seen to be over forty-years of age and not in a deteriorative state.

Two major events has brought the subject of space trash to the forefront—the People’s Liberation Army’s destruction of an ailing Chinese weather satellite with a ballistic missile in 2007, and the destruction of a faulty U.S. spy satellite from a US warship in 2008. The purpose of the latter was to prevent the satellite’s fuel tank from crashing to Earth with its reserve of the toxic fuel hydrazine.

The issue of these two incidents, among others, is within the statement by RET News is that “an average of one of the 17,000 space debris currently in orbit makes re-entry each day, with quite a bit of toxic material involved. The problem in addition to accumulating space debris is that countries are accusing each other of militarization in space.

We all know that Styrofoam products will never dissolved in our lifetime, with holes developing in the earth’s ozone layer from their development. And now, space is rapidly being filled with our many space ventures.

Space debris is filling the mid and low orbits of Earth, which is a hazard to upcoming missions—such as the Hubble repair mission. Usually old satellites are brought to the Pacific Ocean area or parked deep in space referred to as a “graveyard orbit.” What is becoming a worry is the upcoming space tourism, along with more and more satellites being launched . The debris from old satellites that is present above Earth will collide with incoming spacecraft and cause expensive damage and to human lives.

When our spacecraft launch to space, ground controllers track the debris down to send signals to the craft. The internet space sites are aware that the International Space Station was recently shifted in order to avoid colliding with space debris. But as more and more debris accumulate, the huge volume will make this task impossible and unable to avoid accidents. “We do not have clear rules of the road,” admits Vladimir Agapov of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. “Close and sometimes dangerous operations are now common in some orbits.”

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