In an odd bit of timing, scientists are asking the public for help with finding a polar lander that disappeared at Mars eight years ago just as NASA is attempting to land a similar spacecraft on the planet’s pole.
Scientists at the University of Arizona have released high-resolution images of the landing area where the Mars Polar Lander was to have touched down on December 3, 1999. NASA lost contact with the spacecraft after it entered the atmosphere; officials believe the lander smashed into the planet at high speed because of a design flaw in its landing system.
The loss of the spacecraft was the low-point of NASA’s otherwise highly successful effort to explore the Red Planet. Ten weeks earlier, the agency had lost the Mars Climate Orbiter as it was attempting a tricky aerobraking maneuver in the planet’s upper atmosphere. Investigators found that both metric and Imperial units were used in control software, causing the orbiter to burn up in the atmosphere.
The search for the missing lander comes as NASA is preparing to place its Mars Phoenix Lander at the north pole on May 25. The spacecraft, which was proposed by the University of Arizona, makes use of several backup instruments built for the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander program. The main lander was originally built for a 2001 mission that NASA canceled in the wake of its twin failures in 1999.
The Financial Express has an interesting Q&A with Indian Space Research Organisation Chairman G. Madhavan Nair, in which he discusses India’s plans to explore the moon and to grab a piece of the global satellite launch market.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) made history on April 28 by placing a record ten satellites in their respective orbits in a single launch. It was a day in the sun for Indian space science and Isro chairman G Madhavan Nair, who says the mission launcher—the polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV)—has now found a place in the global market. With his focus firmly on the upcoming Moon mission, Chandrayaan, slated for the year-end, Nair is aiming for a 10% slice of the $2-billion global launch business.
The Canadian government has reaffirmed its rejection of MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates plans to sell its space division to American defense contractor Alliant Technosystems (ATK).
Ottawa rejected the $1.3 billion sale last month as not being of net benefit to Canada. MDA had 30 days to convince Industry Minister Jim Prentice to reverse the decision. That period expired on Thursday.
Prentice did announce a four-year, $109-million contract between the Canadian Space Agency and MDA. However, company officials said this was merely a renewal of a long-standing contract that did nothing to provide direction to a drifting Canadian space program, the Vancouver Sun reported.
“The space file in Canada has been neglected for quite a while,” said Mag Iskander, MDA’s executive vice-president for information systems. “In real terms, government expenditures in this space have been declining. We are hoping with this new resurgence of interest by the minister and the government they will engage in a serious long-term space plan, similar to what we had in the past.
“I am not talking about handouts. I’m talking about contracts that meet the needs of Canadians,” Iskander said.
Space.com reports that law schools have now crossed over into the last frontier: space.
A student at the University of Mississippi will leap into the final frontier of the legal system Saturday when he receives the first-ever space law certificate in the United States.
Michael Dodge of Long Beach, Calif., earned the special distinction along with his law degree through the National Center for Remote Sensing, Air and Space Law at the university’s law school.
Two-time space shuttle astronaut Ronald A. Parise passed away last week at his home in Silver Spring, Md., after a three-year battle with brain cancer. He was 56.
The Ohio native flew as a payload specialist aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1990 and the Endeavour in 1995. He made ultraviolet and x-ray astronomical observations as part of the ASTRO-1 and ASTRO-2 missions. Parise also spoke with hundreds of ham radio operators around the world during his flights.
Frank H. Bauer, chairman of the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station International program, was saddened to hear of Parise’s passing.
“Ron Parise was — and continues to be — an inspiration to countless students, ham radio operators, and friends the world over,” Bauer told Vindy.com. “While he certainly did some truly extraordinary things in his lifetime, Ron Parise is best known and cherished for keeping family and friends first … and for this, we will miss him most.”
Parise is survived by his wife, the former Cecilia Sokol, whom he met while both were students at Youngstown State University. They married in 1973. The couple’s son, Nicholas, is in the U.S. Air Force. Their daughter, Katherine, lives in Silver Spring, Md.
The family requests that contributions be made to the Youngstown State University Foundation, Dr. Ronald A. Parise Scholarship Fund.
NASA’s preliminary design review (PDR) for its new Orion spacecraft has slipped two months as engineers continue to work through one minor little problem: the capsule is too heavy for the Ares I rocket to launch to orbit.
NASA Space Flight reports that engineers are hoping to deal with the system’s negative-mass-to-orbit problem in order to conduct the PDR in November. Weight and performance problems have long dogged the agency’s Apollo-style capsule and shuttle-derived booster.
Quoting an internal NASA document, the website says that the slip in the PDR will ripple through Orion’s schedule. The Critical Design Review will slip more than six months from September 25, 2009 to April 2, 2010. However, the agency expects the Design Certification Review to slip only two months from mid-January to March 2013.
NASA Spaceflight also reports that engineers are trying to work out scenarios for astronauts to survive up to 36 hours should Orion land in the ocean far from assistance.
A Mars Odyssey blog has an intriguing post on a possible mission by NASA to send a team of astronauts to asteroid 2000SG344 - which will pass near the Earth in 2030.
The plan involves sending astronauts for a six-month round trip to the giant space rock. They would spend a several weeks on the surface, conducting experiments and testing out new technologies.
Clearly, this mission lies beyond NASA’s plans to land humans back on the moon by 2020. However, it could be a stepping stone to a longer Mars mission. The mission also would help us better understand the composition of asteroids, which could make it easier to deflect one that is on a collision course with Earth.
Aviation Week’s Craig Covault also takes a look at China’s efforts at international cooperation, which will be limited until the country learns to open up.
“China’s secrecy-bound space program, increasingly capable of advanced operations, risks becoming an impediment to international, cooperative lunar and planetary exploration unless it becomes far more open, say top international space policy managers meeting with their Chinese counterparts here.
“Control by the People’s Liberation Army of virtually all Chinese space development will be a counterproductive factor ‘as the center of gravity for space exploration is beginning to move from the Atlantic to the Pacific,’ according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).”
NASA PRESS RELEASE
WASHINGTON — NASA has scheduled a media teleconference Wednesday, May 14, at 1 p.m. EDT, to announce the discovery of an object in our galaxy astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years. This finding was made by combining data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory with ground-based observations.
To participate in the teleconference, reporters must contact the Chandra Press Office at 617-496-7998 or e-mail mwatzke@cfa.harvard.edu. Live audio of the teleconference will be streamed online at: http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio
A video file about the discovery will air on NASA Television on May 14. NASA TV is carried on an MPEG-2 digital signal accessed via satellite AMC-6, at 72 degrees west longitude, transponder 17C, 4040 MHz, vertical polarization. NASA TV is available in Alaska and Hawaii on AMC-7 at 137 degrees west longitude, transponder 18C, at 4060 MHz, horizontal polarization.
