NASA - Liquid Lake On Saturnian Moon

NASA Confirms Liquid Lake On Saturn Moon

This artist concept shows a mirror-smooth lake on the surface of the smoggy moon Titan. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute + Full image and caption


PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA scientists have concluded that at least one of the large lakes observed on Saturn’s moon Titan contains liquid hydrocarbons, and have positively identified the presence of ethane. This makes Titan the only body in our solar system beyond Earth known to have liquid on its surface.


Scientists made the discovery using data from an instrument aboard the Cassini spacecraft. The instrument identified chemically different materials based on the way they absorb and reflect infrared light. Before Cassini, scientists thought Titan would have global oceans of methane, ethane and other light hydrocarbons. More than 40 close flybys of Titan by Cassini show no such global oceans exist, but hundreds of dark, lake-like features are present. Until now, it was not known whether these features were liquid or simply dark, solid material.


"This is the first observation that really pins down that Titan has a surface lake filled with liquid," said Bob Brown of the University of Arizona, Tucson. Brown is the team leader of Cassini’s visual and mapping instrument. The results will be published in the July 31 issue of the journal Nature.


Ethane and several other simple hydrocarbons have been identified in Titan’s atmosphere, which consists of 95 percent nitrogen, with methane making up the other fiver percent. Ethane and other hydrocarbons are products from atmospheric chemistry caused by the breakdown of methane by sunlight.


Some of the hydrocarbons react further and form fine aerosol particles. All of these things in Titan's atmosphere make detecting and identifying materials on the surface difficult, because these particles form a ubiquitous hydrocarbon haze that hinders the view. Liquid ethane was identified using a technique that removed the interference from the atmospheric hydrocarbons.
The visual and mapping instrument observed a lake, Ontario Lacus, in Titan’s south polar region during a close Cassini flyby in December 2007. The lake is roughly 20,000 square miles (7,800 square miles) in area, slightly larger than North America's Lake Ontario.


"Detection of liquid ethane confirms a long-held idea that lakes and seas filled with methane and ethane exist on Titan," said Larry Soderblom, a Cassini interdisciplinary scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz. "The fact we could detect the ethane spectral signatures of the lake even when it was so dimly illuminated, and at a slanted viewing path through Titan's atmosphere, raises expectations for exciting future lake discoveries by our instrument."
The ethane is in a liquid solution with methane, other hydrocarbons and nitrogen. At Titan’s surface temperatures, approximately 300 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, these substances can exist as both liquid and gas. Titan shows overwhelming evidence of evaporation, rain, and fluid-carved channels draining into what, in this case, is a liquid hydrocarbon lake.


Earth has a hydrological cycle based on water and Titan has a cycle based on methane. Scientists ruled out the presence of water ice, ammonia, ammonia hydrate and carbon dioxide in Ontario Lacus. The observations also suggest the lake is evaporating. It is ringed by a dark beach, where the black lake merges with the bright shoreline. Cassini also observed a shelf and beach being exposed as the lake evaporates."During the next few years, the vast array of lakes and seas on Titan's north pole mapped with Cassini's radar instrument will emerge from polar darkness into sunlight, giving the infrared instrument rich opportunities to watch for seasonal changes of Titan's lakes," Soderblom said.

More information is available at: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/
and http://wwwvims.lpl.arizona.edu/ .

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer team is based at the University of Arizona.


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Ronald Garan, Mission Specialist - Interview

STS-124 Mission Specialist Ronald J. Garan. Photo Credit: NASA

Q: This is the STS-124 interview with Mission Specialist Ron Garan. Ron tell us a little bit about how you came to, to choose a path in life that leads to space.

A: I think I have a, a very similar story to other astronauts that are in the same age group as I am. I remember it was July 20, 1969. I think I was about 7 years old at the time and I remember watching the first moon landing. I remember it vividly and I remember distinctly thinking that’s what I want to do. When I grow up, that’s exactly what I want to do. And I think that stayed with me throughout my whole childhood. I always dreamed about becoming an astronaut. I think when I got into high school, though, I kind of lost that dream and one of the reasons why I lost that dream is, is it was post-Skylab. It was pre-shuttle and for just a kid in New York, not really keeping up with things, I didn’t even realize that we had a space program. I remember I was a sophomore in college when STS-1 landed and I distinctly remember again thinking, “Wow! This is what I want to do.” And the very next day I went to my advisors and I started taking math and science courses or enrolling in math and science courses. That’s my path to how I got to become an astronaut or that’s the start of that path. But what it also shows is how important the space program is to education and to encourage people or encourage students to pursue math and science. And at least for my own personal experience, I think that was a pretty compelling tribute to the space program.

Tell us about the academic work that you did, and then if you would transition into what kind of professional steps that you took to get here.

I was a sophomore at the time but I was in an accelerated program in business, business economics. So I had already taken all the core courses that I needed to complete my bachelor’s degree in business, but I still had the electives left. So the electives that I started taking were math and science and, you know, chemistry and pre-engineering courses. My goal, after that, was I was going to graduate from college. I actually graduated a semester early and headed down to Daytona Beach, Fla., and I enrolled in an aeronautical engineering program at Embry-Riddle University. And my plan was I was going to stay there until I either got a pilot slot in the Air Force or I ran out of money. Before I went down there, I went to the local bank and took out a student loan and jumped in my car and drove south to Florida and fortunately, both of these things happened at the same time. I was accepted into the Air Force, got a pilot slot into the Air Force about the same time I ran out of money pursuing my engineering degree. So I never finished that bachelor’s degree in engineering. But if you fast forward, I joined the Air Force, started flying F-16s, started out in Europe and then had about four or five different tours in the F-16. At one point during that, that part of my career I enrolled in the University of Florida to get a master’s degree in aerospace engineering. So that was kind of the path that led to test pilot school and then from test pilot school I was selected into the astronaut corps in 2000.

Is there anything that you can kind of pinpoint about growing up that kind of helped you, helped you become who you are?

Probably a strong work ethic. You know that if you have goals and you work really hard to achieve those goals then you, you have a chance to do it. So I think that’s one of the things I learned growing up in New York is determination and persistence. New Yorkers are, are famous for their persistence. I was told many times along the way that I was not going to be successful and I had many hurdles to get over and many disappointments along the way but I kept persisting at it and eventually I was able to be selected and selected for a space flight.

Ah, got another dream job or, or fantasy job that you could do if you…

I’m doing my fantasy job right now, my dream job. This is all I ever wanted to do and I’m really really fortunate to do that. But I, of course, think I can’t do this forever. One of the things, when I speak at different places some people ask who are my heroes. When I think about that one, some of my heroes are teachers. I really think that teachers have, a wonderful opportunity to really affect our world and affect our future and how important our kids are for, for our future. So down the road I’d probably like to, to get into some kind of teaching or coaching later in life, I think. But right now I’ve got my hands full with what I’m doing so…

If we were to ask your closest friends how they would characterize you, what do you think they would say?

I think they would say that I’m somebody that’s goal-driven, somebody who likes to have fun, somebody who loves his family deeply. I don’t want to speak for them but I think those are probably some of the big things that they would say.

Can you tell us, give us a little story about how you found out you were going to be picked for your first spaceflight and what your reaction was?

I think I was probably about 6½, 7 years training for a spaceflight before I got word that I was going to fly my first spaceflight. So I was really, you know, just over the top happy about that. This is something I’ve been waiting my entire life to do. I’ve been training, you know, for 6½, 7 years to do and finally here’s the opportunity. When I found out the crew and found out the mission that we’re doing and how important it is and how, how challenging it’s going to be and exciting it’s going to be, words just can’t describe how happy I was that I was given that opportunity.

Was there some kind of a celebration at all, or was it just at that point you were really expecting it …

Well, I wasn’t expecting it but, not, not a big celebration, no. A lot of times when you find out it’s not really official yet so you can’t get too excited because sometimes things change, until it’s, sometimes it changes after it’s official. I think it was just within my family, just celebrating with them, you know, just kind of, kind of quiet.

Could you summarize the goals for this mission?

The primary goal is to deliver and install and activate the Japanese laboratory. That’s the No. 1 thing that we’re doing and that is a very, very challenging part of the mission. We also have some space station maintenance that we’re going to be performing. We’re going to do activation/checkout of the Japanese robotic arm. So those are the really big things that we’re going to be doing.

Could you tell us a little bit about the Japanese pressurized module, what it’s for? Just kind of introduce us to it.

Well, we’ve got the U.S. lab and we’ve got the European lab and this is the latest addition to the space station, the Japanese lab. It is going to be an integral research facility up on the ISS. What kind of makes it unique, though, is the fact that it has its own robotic arm. It has its own airlock for experiments and it’s going to have an external platform where we conduct experiments externally -- astronomy, Earth observations. And so it’s really just a fabulous platform to conduct science. We talked about the JEM robotic arm.

Can you tell us a little bit more about it? How does it compare to the space station arm that’s already up there?

It’s very similar in a lot of ways but one of the big differences is, the station’s robotic arm can move to different places. It has a mobile transport that can move it up and down the truss. It can walk off, and we’re going to do that during our mission. We’re going to move it to different parts of the station. The Japanese arm is fixed and it’s for a specific purpose. Now the space station’s robotic arm can support experiments and things like that but it’s primarily designed for the construction of the station and for maintenance of the station, moving big modules, big ORUs as we call them, to support the maintenance of the station whereas the Japanese arm is primarily to support the payloads that we’re going to do, as far as the research that’s going to be conducted on it, on the laboratory.

Talk more about the specific mission activities. On flight day 2, can you give us an idea of what the key activities are on the schedule for that day?

Well, flight day 2 will be our first full day in space. Normally, on most flights, flight day 2 would be our inspection. We look at our thermal protection system. We’d look at the imagery or the ground would look at the imagery from the ascent, from the launch, see if any foam came off, if there are any other indications that there might be any other problems with the thermal protection system. In any case, we’d be out there with our OBSS, Orbiter Boom Sensor System, and we’d be looking underneath the orbiter, looking at the wing leading edges to see if there’s any damage and to evaluate it and to give a whole week or more worth of time to evaluate that data. We do not have the OBSS on board with us. The Japanese module is so big that we can’t carry that and the lab at the same time. So STS-123 has left the OBSS on the station for us. So on flight day 2, since we haven’t docked yet, we don’t have it on board. So we’re going to do an abbreviated survey with the, with the robot arm and just looking with the camera with the robot arm but it’s a really abbreviated, it’s not going to give near the data that we need to clear the vehicle for re-entry, so that will occur later after we undock. Flight day 2 is a survey but not the real detailed survey that we normally do. But we’re preparing for the rendezvous the next day which is the first really big event that we have on the mission.

What are your duties for rendezvous and docking?

Rendezvous and docking I’m basically backing up the pilot, Ken Ham. The commander, Mark Kelly, will be in the aft station flying the vehicle and Ken and I will be in the front two seats and we’re basically going down the timeline. We’ll do some of the burns or Ken will do some of the burns with me backing him up. Then we’re basically making sure everything gets done, all the housekeeping, any malfunctions that may occur. We, handle that so that the commander can do his job and do the docking at the station.

You dock to the station; but the work doesn’t stop there.

Right.

It probably increases at that point.

Yeah, flight day 3 is where we’re going to do our docking. The day that we dock and the day that we undock are going to be our two busiest days of the mission. We have to dock with the station so we have the whole rendezvous. We have the approach to docking. We have the docking. We have getting the hatches open. Then we’ll, we’ll greet our fellow crew members on the station. We’ll get a safety brief and then we’ll be off to the races basically getting ready for the spacewalk the next day. Mike Fossum and I will be going into the airlock. We’ll be transferring all of our space suits, all of our equipment, all of our tools, all of our tethers that we’ll need. They’ll all be going into the airlock and then we’re going to be going into the airlock with them and closing the hatch and depress-, depressurization to do what we call ‘camp out’ to help us get the nitrogen out of our bodies. The next day we can get out the door as fast as we can and, and start on our spacewalk.

Attired in a training version of his shuttle launch and entry suit, STS-124 Mission Specialist Ronald J. Garan awaits the start of a water survival training session in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory near Johnson Space Center, Houston. Photo Credit: NASA

Okay. Next day is the, the first spacewalk, also your first spacewalk. You probably heard a lot about what it’s like and what to expect. What are you expecting, just, just from yourself?

I have friends who have done that before. Mike Fossum who’s the EV 1, my spacewalk lead, has tried to tell me what it’s going to be like. I anticipate that it will be very overwhelming. The view, just the fact that this whole massive station is out there in front of you. We’ve trained it in the pool and but it’s just not the same. It’s very close but it’s, it’s not the same as when you step out of the airlock in the pool. The bottom of the pool is, you know, 10 feet below or five feet below you. When you step out here, you know, the Earth is 250 miles below you or above you, depending how you want to look at it. That’s going to be a little overwhelming I anticipate. But we’ve got a lot of work to do. What’s going to get me on the step is going to be to get to work real fast and just to get our job done, getting all the objectives met that we are set out to achieve. It’s a very, very challenging set of spacewalks that we’re doing.

Go down the list for me, if you would, of the, the major objectives for that day, for EVA 1?

The big objective is to get the Japanese laboratory ready to be unberthed from the payload bay and to be berthed to the station, to basically put it in its new home, to do the construction work that we need. The first thing we’re going to do, that’s the major objective but our other major objective, as we’ve talked about, we don’t have the OBSS. We don’t have the boom system yet so the first thing we’re going to do is climb to the top of the truss and basically hand off that boom to the space station’s robotic arm. The space station’s robotic arm will then hand it off to the space shuttle’s robotic arm and then we’ll be set for our post-undock inspection. So that’s the first thing that we’re going to do. It’s going to be very challenging, and a pretty interesting start of a first EVA. From that point, we translate our way down the whole length of the station, down to the payload bay. We climb down into the payload bay to the JPM, to the Japanese laboratory. We start preparing it to be unberthed from the payload bay. We have to remove covers. We have to remove cables that are keeping power to the module while it’s in, for heaters and keep-alive light power, etc. There’s a bunch of work that needs to be done for that. And then once all our work is done in the payload bay, we’re going to go back up to the truss and do some work up there. Meanwhile, the space station’s robotic arm and the space shuttle’s robotic arm are going to start maneuvering for the unberth. The unberth will actually be done by the space station’s robotic arm with the space shuttle’s arm providing some camera views. Then Mike and I are going to be replacing some antennas on the truss and doing some other maintenance work and R&R on the station. That will be the end of EVA 1.

Let’s move ahead to the following day. What items are on the to-do list for that day?

That’d be flight day 5 and the big job for us, for Mike and I, is going to be to get ready for our next EVA the following day. So we’ve got to recharge our batteries, we got to, and the spacesuits. We have to get our carbon dioxide removal systems all ready to go. We’ve got to reconfigure our tools and our tethers and review what we’re doing on the following EVA. So in addition to many other tasks the big objective for Mike and I is going to be to get ready for EVA 2 that will happen the next day. Also on that day there’s a, the JEM, the JPM will be, go through what’s called vestibule outfitting.

Can you kind of give us an idea of what that’s about?

In addition to getting ready for the next day’s spacewalk, we’re also getting the Japanese laboratory ready to be used for, what it was designed for. So the Japanese laboratory has been removed from the payload bay. It’s been mated to the station but the hatches are still closed. Now we have to run jumpers. We have to run cables. We have to get power to the lab. We have to get cooling to the lab. We have to get data to the lab and so all these things require a few hours worth of work of basically connecting cables and connecting jumpers and making sure that is not a temporary mate of the two modules but more of a permanent mate. The construction task will be almost complete once we have all those connections made. Then the hatches will be opened and, not on that day but the following day, we’ll start all the internal outfitting, removing racks from the JLP, the logistics module, and transferring them down into the pressurized module, the JPM.

Why is that particularly important for the following day’s activities, that you’re going to be transferring the RMS rack?

There’ll be a number of racks that are transferred. The RMS rack is one of them. But the Japanese lab is so big that we couldn’t put all of the racks in it and launch with it because it would have been too heavy for the, for us to carry on the shuttle. So we launched a lot of the key racks in the JLP on STS-123, the mission before us, 1J-A. So now, in order to get the Japanese laboratory fully activated, we have to move those racks in. Some of that’s for electrical outfitting to make sure we have the right number of strings of power being provided, data provided the RMS rack that you talked about. So those are some key racks that are pretty big. It barely fits through the hatch. It makes it through there but it’s a pretty big construction job going on inside and while that’s all going on, Mike Fossum and I will be outside on EVA 2. We’ll be doing the external outfitting of the, of the JPM, of the Japanese lab.

What else goes on for EVA 2? Tell me about, tell me about EVA 2.

Again the major objective of EVA 2 is to get the external outfitting completed on the JPM or as much as we can on that day. So Mike and I will be carrying very large cameras, video cameras and large stanchions. We’ll be carrying them out to the Japanese laboratory’s new home there. We’ll be on the end-cone actually and we’ll install those two cameras. I’ll install the one on the forward side. Michael will install the one on the aft side and then we will be removing launch locks. We’ll remove covers from the joints of the Japanese robotic arm and then we will be on the zenith side of the JPM, of the Japanese laboratory, and we will remove covers from the common berthing mechanism. This is so the next day we can move the Japanese logistics module over to the top of the laboratory and we obviously need to take those covers off before we do that. So those are some of the outfitting tasks that we’re going to be doing on EVA 2. In addition to that, we’re going to get ready for EVA 3. We’re going do some of the preparation tasks that we need to do for EVA 3 and we have an object called the nitrogen tank assembly. That’s something that we’re going to remove and replace with a new one and so we need to get that all ready. We need to break torques on some of the bolts, do some of the fluid line disconnects, some of the electrical disconnects and then head way out to what’s called ESB 3 which is a platform where we have the spare NTA. We need to prep that spare NTA to be ready to be moved over to where its new home will be.

Let’s move ahead to, to flight day 7. Can, can you give us an idea of, of what’s on tap for that day?

The big event of that day is the re-locate of the logistics module to the top of the Japanese laboratory and so what’ll happen is, after everything’s out that we need to get out and everything is put where it needs to be in the laboratory, the hatches will be closed. The module will be de-mated from its present home which is on top of Node 2, the zenith side of Node 2, and it will be moved over to the zenith side of the JPM, the Japanese laboratory. Karen and Aki will be doing that with the space station’s robotic arm and once that’s mated, then we will start vestibule outfitting all over again to open up those hatches and to basically have it in its permanent place where it needs to be.

What else happens that day? I guess there’s a chance that since you have the OBSS back now you, you may use it on this day.

We are scheduled also during that day for a focused inspection and if we see anything on any of our telemetry, on any of our cameras that are looking at us at ascent, if we see anything during the RPM, the maneuver where the space station crew takes pictures of us on the rendezvous, if anything looks questionable as far as our thermal protection system, then we will do a focused inspection. We will take the OBSS that we, you know, a few days prior had taken off the station and we will take a, a really good look at that just to give a head start to the guys on the ground that are looking at that data to try and clear us to come home. So that will be an opportunity that’s built into the flight plan, built into our timeline, to give us time to do that. Maybe not be necessary but probably, you know, we have a really good chance of being, of doing that on this mission since we didn’t do the inspection on flight day 2 like, like we normally do.

Let’s move ahead to flight day 9, EVA 3. You touched on it briefly, the remove and replace of the nitrogen tank assembly. Tell us about, not so much the, you know, details of that, but kind of give us an idea how that’s going to happen. You’re going to have a pretty fun part I hear.

This is going to be an absolutely spectacular EVA. What’s going to happen is I’m going up to the truss, to S-1, where the old NTA is and I’ll do the final preparations to pull it out of the truss. Meanwhile, Mike is going to translate all the way out to ESP-3 where the spare is and he’s going to make the final preparations to receive the old NTA and to get the new NTA ready to move. So when everything is all set, I’m going to get onto the end of the space station’s robotic arm and I’m going to pull the NTA out of the truss as the, the arm is backing away from the truss. And so when we get out a safe distance away from the truss, I’ll have this 550-pound box in my hand and the space station’s robotic arm, if this is the truss right here and this is me on the end of the arm, is basically going to do what we call the ‘windshield wiper maneuver’ and it’s going to go over the top over to ESP-3. So this maneuver right here takes about 20 minutes and on the top here I’ll be almost a hundred feet above the station looking straight down on the aft side of the station and the Earth 250 miles below. So it’ll be a pretty spectacular view and, and pretty spectacular ride over to ESP-3. We will stow the old nitrogen tank assembly on ESP-3. I’ll grab the new one and we’ll just do the maneuver right back to the other side where I’ll install it back on S-1. Meanwhile, Mike’s out and tying up ESP-3, making sure that that NTA is ready to come back to Earth when, when we’re ready to do that on a later mission. So that’s the big thing that we’re going to do on that mission. After that we’ve got a number of other tasks, a whole bunch of maintenance of tasks on the station. Mike’s going to go back out to the Japanese laboratory and finish some of the work on the robotic arm that we couldn’t do because on EVA 2 it was in the launch configuration and we couldn’t get at some of the covers and some of the fasteners that we needed to undo.

What’s that EVA been like in the virtual reality lab for you?

STS-124 Mission Specialist Ronald J. Garan uses virtual reality hardware in the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility at Johnson Space Center, Houston, to rehearse some of his duties on the upcoming mission to the International Space Station. Photo Credit: NASA

It’s been interesting and in the pool it’s also been interesting. We have a robotic arm in the pool that we use and Karen will be taking me for a ride on the arm there. Aki will be also helping on that so there’s a lot of choreography that goes into it. There’s a lot of teamwork that’s required. There’s a lot of things going on, not just holding the tank and moving but it’s, the reach that we need. The arm is not long enough to get there so we have to put an extension on the end of the arm just to be able to reach from S-1 over to ESP-3 where the spare is going to be. So there's a lot of coordination.

Let’s talk about flight day 11, undocking day. Tell me about what goes on then.

Well, I said flight day 3 is going to be one of our biggest days because that’s the rendezvous day. Well, flight day 11 is going to be probably even busier because a lot of things have to happen on flight day 11. We’re going to undock. We’re going to depart from the station. We’re going to do a fly around. Ken Ham is going to fly Discovery a whole 360, if we have enough prop for it, a 360 degree loop race track around the station. We’ll be doing a lot of documentation of the station, photo documentation, and then we’re going to back away even farther from the station through a set burn that we’re going to do and then we have to get into our inspection, the inspection that we normally do on flight day 2, we’re going to do on flight day 11 and, so we’ll go through that whole process which, I think, is about six hours worth of robotics work and then, after about a 13-hour day, it’s time to start getting ready for bed that day. So it’s a very long day. And the reason why we have to do it is we want to give the guys on the ground, the scientists, the engineers, time to look at all the data to make sure that they can clear us for, for re-entry and make all sure all the systems, all the thermal protection system, the tiles, the wing leading edge is all, is all good to go. So we need to do that as soon as we possibly can once we have room. We can’t really do what we need to do on the station because the station is obstructing what we need to do with the arm so as soon as we have that space that we can do it, we need to do it as soon as possible.

What’s the plan in place in case there is some suspect area found? What, if you, you’re able to return to ISS?

Well, we have a number of options. If the focused inspection turns up something that we feel is not safe to re-enter, we have the option to redock with the station. Mike and I could go out and, and fix it if it’s within the realm of things we can fix. There has been a lot of effort, a lot of time and a lot of really smart people working on ways to fix thermal protection system, EVA, so there are a lot of things that we can fix. There’s a chance that we may have to do that. Or they may say, “Well, we have some damage. We put it through all the wringers. We put it through all the tests and, and it’s still cleared to go.”

It’s my understanding that the English translation of the word Kibo which is the, the nickname of the Japanese experiment module is hope. After you’ve completed this mission, what do you hope it will have done for the larger mission of space exploration?

We understand that there’s a big hope in this mission, that this is very important for the space program. It’s very important for the Earth and we tried to represent that in our patch and the design of our patch. After this mission and after Kibo is up there we’ll have another laboratory that can do material science, that can do medical science. It can do astronomy. It can do Earth observations, so there’s many, many different types of research that can be conducted to complement the other laboratories that are on, on the station and, you know, there’s, there’s new, new materials that will be made. There’s new medicine that, that could come of this and so there is a lot of hope that we have. One of the other big things that we’re going to use the laboratory for is to learn how to go farther into space, learn how to live longer in space, learn how to work better in space. These are all key things, especially on Kibo with the external platform and external experiments. We’ll get a better understanding of the space environment. We’ll get a better understanding of how materials react, how people react, how electronics react in the vacuum of space and in the harshness of space. So I think there’s a great deal of hope. There’s a great deal of hope for the space program and there’s a great deal of hope for us on Earth, too.

We understand that there’s a big hope in this mission, that this is very important for the space program.

It’s very important for the Earth and we tried to represent that in our patch and the design of our patch. After this mission and after Kibo is up there we’ll have another laboratory that can do material science, that can do medical science. It can do astronomy. It can do Earth observations, so there’s many, many different types of research that can be conducted to complement the other laboratories that are on, on the station and, you know, there’s, there’s new, new materials that will be made. There’s new medicine that, that could come of this and so there is a lot of hope that we have. One of the other big things that we’re going to use the laboratory for is to learn how to go farther into space, learn how to live longer in space, learn how to work better in space. These are all key things, especially on Kibo with the external platform and external experiments. We’ll get a better understanding of the space environment. We’ll get a better understanding of how materials react, how people react, how electronics react in the vacuum of space and in the harshness of space. So I think there’s a great deal of hope. There’s a great deal of hope for the space program and there’s a great deal of hope for us on Earth, too.

I think probably everybody’s partial to their crew. But I really cannot imagine a better crew. This is just a wonderful group of people that all have complementary skills, that all get along really good, like to have fun together. But Mark Kelly, I can’t imagine a better commander. He is extremely competent. He has tremendous patience. Out of the seven of us on the mission, there’s only two that have flown in space before. Mike Fossum has flown once and Mark has flown twice. We have, we don’t have a big experience base to build upon. So we train really, really hard so that we make the mistakes on the ground and, and not in space. Mark has an incredible amount of patience with us and he gives us a lot of responsibility and is just a really smart guy. Ken Ham, the pilot, is just extremely sharp, extremely smart, really good pilot, a lot of fun to be around. He’s going to be great, too. Karen, MS-1 she is a wonderful person. She’s really fun to be with, really, really smart, you know. I’m in awe actually of the intelligence of the people on my crew. She’s a big asset to the crew. She’s very meticulous in what she does. She’s very disciplined. She really takes the time to, to learn her job, to learn what needs to be done and she has some really key roles, one of which is going to be moving me across, across space. There’s a great deal of trust that I and everybody else puts in her. Aki, one of the hardest working guys I’ve ever seen. Again across the board all, everybody is just a lot of fun to be with. Aki is no exception. He really knows the Japanese systems and actually we kid Aki a lot because his English is so good that we doubt that he actually speaks Japanese. The first time we went to Japan we caught him looking at a Japanese phrase book in the airport on the way over there, so we, we really suspected that. He did spend four years in New Jersey growing up as a kid. Greg Chamitoff, we’ll be leaving him on the station and picking up Garrett Reisman, again two great guys. We didn’t have the opportunity to train a lot with them because they are so busy training for their own respective missions once they get on the station. For Garrett who’s on 123, for his mission. But again, just, it’s an, an incredible group of people. And I forgot Mike Fossum. How could I forget Mike? Mike’ll be my spacewalking partner. He’s the EV1. He’s my lead. And again, incredible patience, incredible leader. He has given me a tremendous amount of responsibility and he has the confidence in his own ability to be able to let me take responsibilities and, not try and micro-manage. He gives me enough room that I can learn from my mistakes in the training. He is extremely mechanically inclined, really, really smart. I’ve been very, very fortunate to have him, to learn from and to watch him in the pool. I’ll be watching him in orbit soon and learning how he does it on spacewalks. And so it’s been really good experience being his apprentice if you will. So it’s like I said, just a really neat crew, a really fun crew and a very, very competent crew, which is important because we have a very, very challenging mission ahead of us.

You’ve been around to the different spaceflight centers during your training, to look at hardware or procedures or whatever. How would you characterize the work ethic that you’ve seen from the support personnel at those centers?

Absolutely incredible; absolutely incredible. Everybody knows that they’re doing something really important. They’re a part of a really important team that has an incredible accomplishment that is in the process of being fulfilled. The station is just probably the greatest thing that man has ever made. It is the capabilities that are built into it, the amount of forethought that went into it, the discoveries that hopefully will come from it is just incredible. So to be a part of that huge undertaking … You could just see the excitement everywhere you go, every center you go. If you go to the sub-contractors, everybody from the people that are turning the bolts and the nuts and to the people who are designing things. You could see it in their eyes. You could see how excited they are to be a part of it because really it’s an amazing accomplishment what is being achieved on the ISS through this construction.

NASA’s had a lot of practice in, in improvising, in calling audibles, if you will. How would you say that, that NASA has done in that endeavor because nothing is always going to go as planned and you’re going to have to be able to improvise?

How, how have we done? Oh, I think we’ve done incredibly and part of the reason for that is we try to think of everything that could possibly happen. We spend countless hours in every possible scenario -- OK, what happens if this happens? What are you going to do? What if that happens? But unfortunately you can’t plan for everything. You can’t think of every possible thing that can go wrong. But that creates a creativity that you can fall back upon, that the whole team can fall back upon and to say, “Well, this isn’t quite like the way we simmed it or the way we thought it might happen, but it’s similar enough that if we take a piece from this one and a piece from that one and put it together we could, we could make it work." And it’s just some of the challenges that we’ve overcome and even in the recent couple years have been really impressive. Hopefully we won’t have to do that on our mission, but if we reach a snag, if we reach something that was unforeseen I have no doubt that the big team will put together a plan and we’ll, we’ll get through it.

We are in a phase of construction of ISS where it’s nearing completion. This accomplishment is becoming, is coming to fruition but it also could mark the end of an era, in a sense. What are your thoughts on that?

Well, it will be the end of the construction era and the start of the utilization era for the station. We will really be able to look back on this era of construction in awe of what was accomplished because it really was an incredible accomplishment to build what was built on orbit. When you see the capabilities, it’s just incredible. But it’s not the end. It’s only the beginning. We’ve been utilizing up until this point but not to the extent that we need to, not to the extent that we want to. So now will come the research, the experiments, and the payloads. We’ll learn how to live and work in space more. We’ll learn what it takes to, to really separate ourselves from the Earth to live in orbit. But it will also be the start of the next era in going back to the moon and exploration of the solar system with CEV. So we’ll see that era start too. I wouldn’t say it’s bittersweet. I would say on one hand there’s this great feeling of accomplishment. On the other hand there’s this great feeling of excitement on what we’re going to do with that accomplishment and how that’s going to be the stepping stone to even bigger things.

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Astronaut job: Icing on the Cake

Spaceboosters - Becoming An Astronaut







Image above: Astronaut John D. (Danny) Olivas, mission specialist. Credit: NASA



Becoming an astronaut is hard – a lot harder than Danny Olivas ever thought it would be. But hard in a good way. “It’s hard in the way like making your favorite cake,” Olivas said. “It takes a long time, you have the ingredients all over the place and you have to clean up afterwards. But the reward justifies all the effort.”


It took Olivas nine years of applying to the astronaut program before he was accepted, and if you’d told him at the beginning of the process what he’d do in those nine years – how many technical papers he would write and experiments he would conduct along the way – he would have said you were crazy.


“For example, getting a Ph.D.,” he said. “I’d have said no way, that’s too hard.”


But somehow he did it.


“It’s like anything else,” he says now. “You don’t think about it from the standpoint of the endgame. You say, OK, what do I need to do next? You eat an elephant one bite at a time. That’s what it takes. You just figure out where you want to go and what you want to do, and you take it one step at a time.”


Olivas took his first step early. He started applying to the program before he had even finished his undergraduate degree, even though the qualifications require that you have a degree and at least three years of experience.


“Obviously I was highly unqualified for the job, but I wanted NASA to know that I was interested,” he said. “You do stupid things as a kid.”


To be fair, though, he held off longer than he might have. Olivas had been waiting to apply since he visited a museum at Johnson Space Center on a family trip when he was 7 years old. As they were getting ready to leave, his father called him over to a mock-up of a rocket engine and began explaining some of the parts. Olivas suddenly realized that his father – who at one point had worked as a machinist in California – knew the parts because he used to make some of them.




Image above: Astronaut John D. (Danny) Olivas, STS-117 mission specialist, attired in a training version of the Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) spacesuit, is about to begin a training session in the waters of the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) near the Johnson Space Center. Credit: NASA

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that’s very cool,’” Olivas said. “Then, as I looked around, I saw how many parts there were on that piece of hardware, and I realized that there were a lot of other dads and moms that were in there, also. For me, that was the first time I thought to myself, ‘It must be neat to be part of something so big.’


” So he added ‘astronaut’ to his list of things he wanted to be when he grew up – right next to ‘professional football player.’ But while his pro-ball aspirations faded over the years, he didn’t grow out of wanting to be part of the space program.


On the other hand, he was pretty sure he wasn’t smart enough for the job. Not that he was going to let that stop him.


“This sounds really strange, but I’ve always thought to myself, ‘I’m good with my hands, I can fix things,’” Olivas said. “‘I’m mechanically inclined, and maybe I’ll never be as smart as astronauts but they’re always going to need someone to fix stuff. I could be one of those guys who fix things for the astronauts.’”




So he went with that. He went to the University of Texas at El Paso and got a mechanical engineering degree. Then he went to the University of Houston and got a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. Then he went to Rice University and got a doctorate in mechanical engineering and materials science. And when he was done, he was hired for a job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, developing tools and methods for evaluating microelectronics and structural materials that have been in space. By then he had applied to the astronaut program eight times.


And on his ninth application, he was accepted.


“At the end of the road, when I was finally brought in for an interview, I turned around and looked back and saw the things that I’d accomplished along the way,” Olivas said. “I never set out to accomplish them, it just happened.”


Now he’s training to perform spacewalks on the next shuttle mission. It turns out the people who fix things for astronauts are astronauts, a circumstance that he still finds thrilling.


“I always envisioned that once I got into the office, then things would change, things would be different,” he said. “But I haven’t changed. I still love what I loved to do. I still try and contribute in any way I can. I don’t know. I’ll always see myself as being an engineer and a scientist.”


This job just has a few perks that he wouldn’t have found in most.


“I never thought I’d fly a T-38,” Olivas said. “I never thought I’d get to do a spacewalk – I never thought I’d get in the shuttle. I never thought I’d be hanging around a bunch of guys who’d been in space before. I never thought I’d be working with a bunch of moon rock scientists or engineers who designed space tools. And then, when you think about what it all does and where it all goes and what it all means, that is the best part.”

Brandi Dean Johnson Space Center, Houston


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Astronauts Earn Honors

NASA Astronauts Earn Honors


Astronauts Robert D. Cabana and Bryan D. O'Connor along with former astronauts John E. Blaha and Loren J. Shriver was added to an elite list of Astronaut Hall of Fame members that includes Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Jim Lovell, Sally Ride and John Young.


A public ceremony to commemorate the veteran astronauts was held on May 3 at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.


The 2008 inductees were selected by a committee of former NASA officials and flight controllers, journalists, historians and Hall of Fame astronauts.

Image above: Robert Cabana, John C. Stennis Space Center Director. Photo credit: NASA/SSC

With four space shuttle missions to his credit, Cabana was the commander of the first International Space Station assembly mission. Currently, he is the director of NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.




O'Connor was shuttle pilot on mission STS-61B and commander of STS-40, the first shuttle mission dedicated to life science studies. He now serves NASA as the Chief, Safety and Mission Assurance with responsibility for the safety, reliability, maintainability and quality assurance of all NASA programs.

Image above: Bryan O'Connor is NASA's Chief of Safety and Mission Assurance. Photo credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls.

Over the span of 17 years, Blaha flew on five space shuttle missions and set the American men's space record for time in space during his four months on orbit. Blaha retired from NASA in 1997 and is active in private industry.



Shriver, a veteran of three shuttle flights, commanded the STS-31 mission to deploy the Hubble Space Telescope and served at NASA's Kennedy Space Center as the Launch and Payload Processing deputy director from 1997 to 2000. This esteemed assembly is the seventh group of space shuttle astronauts named to the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame and brings the total number of inductees to 70.



See Astronaut Portraits A-J and Astronaut Portraits K-Z


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Station Reboosted; Crew Continues Kibo Outfitting

Station Reboosted; Crew Continues Kibo Outfitting









Image above: Expedition 17 Flight Engineer Greg Chamitoff works inside the International Space Station’s Kibo Laboratory. Credit: NASA TV



The engines of the “Jules Verne" Automated Transfer Vehicle fired for 20 minutes and 37 seconds at 12:18 p.m. EDT Wednesday to reboost the International Space Station.



The reboost was the second in a series of four such maneuvers, placing the complex at the correct altitude for the Sept. 10 launch of the Progress 30 cargo ship and the Oct. 12 launch of the Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft carrying the Expedition 18 crew.



Meanwhile, Flight Engineer Greg Chamitoff continued the outfitting of the Kibo module, making minor adjustments to internal cameras and reconfiguring experimentation equipment. Also, the Solar Monitoring Observatory (SOLAR) experiment was recovered Wednesday.



SOLAR is a sun observation experiment which is attached to the forward end of the Columbus module. It had been inoperable for several weeks due to a power problem.



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Spitzer Reveals 'No Organics' Zone Around Pinwheel Galaxy

Spitzer Reveals 'No Organics' Zone Around Pinwheel Galaxy






The Pinwheel galaxy, otherwise known as Messier 101, sports bright red edges in this new infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI

The Pinwheel galaxy is gussied up in infrared light in a new picture from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.



The fluffy-looking galaxy, officially named Messier 101, is dominated by a mishmash of spiral arms. In Spitzer's new view, in which infrared light is color coded, the galaxy sports a swirling blue center and a unique, coral-red outer ring.



A new paper appearing July 20 in the Astrophysical Journal explains why this outer ring stands out. According to the authors, the red color highlights a zone where organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are present throughout most of the galaxy, suddenly disappear.



Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are dusty, carbon-containing molecules found in star nurseries, and on Earth in barbeque pits, exhaust pipes and anywhere combustion reactions take place. Scientists believe this space dust has the potential to be converted into the stuff of life.



"If you were going look for life in Messier 101, you would not want to look at its edges," said Karl Gordon of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. "The organics can't survive in these regions, most likely because of high amounts of harsh radiation." To view Spitzer's Pinwheel, visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/20080721a.html



The Pinwheel galaxy is located about 27 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It has one of the highest known gradients of metals (elements heavier than helium) of all nearby galaxies in our universe. In other words, its concentrations of metals are highest at its center, and decline rapidly with distance from the center. This is because stars, which produce metals, are squeezed more tightly into the galaxy's central quarters.



Gordon and his team used Spitzer to learn about the galaxy's gradient of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The astronomers found that, like the metals, the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons decrease in concentration toward the outer portion of the galaxy. But, unlike the metals, these organic molecules quickly drop off and are no longer detected at the very outer rim.



"There's a threshold at the rim of this galaxy, where the organic material is getting destroyed," said Gordon.



The findings also provide a better understanding of the conditions under which the very first stars and galaxies arose. In the early universe, there were not a lot of metals or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons around. The outskirt of the Pinwheel galaxy therefore serves as a close-up example of what the environment might look like in a distant galaxy.



In this image, infrared light with a wavelength of 3.6 microns is colored blue; 8-micron light is green; and 24-micron light is red. All three of Spitzer instruments were used in the study: the infrared array camera, the multiband imaging photometer and the infrared spectrograph.



Other authors of the paper include Charles Engelbracht, George Rieke, Karl A. Misselt, J.D. Smith and Robert Kennicutt, Jr. of the University of Arizona, Tucson. Smith is also associated with the University of Toledo, Ohio, and Kennicutt is also associated with the University of Cambridge, England.



NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. Spitzer's infrared array camera was built by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The instrument's principal investigator is Giovanni Fazio of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Spitzer's infrared spectrograph was built by Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. Its development was led by Jim Houck of Cornell. The multiband imaging photometer for Spitzer was built by Ball Aerospace Corporation, Boulder, Colo., and the University of Arizona, Tucson. Its principal investigator is George Rieke of the University of Arizona.



For more information about Spitzer, visit http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer and http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/main/index.html .



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Apollo 11 - Looking Back.

Apollo 11 - Remember This?

It feels like an age ago now. In fact it is. It has been 39 years since the historic moonlanding of Apollo 11 and we are probably no closer to returning......c'mon world governments. Get your collective fingers out. Put billions of dollars/£/Yen into putting people on the Moon and then to Mars and beyond. It is money spent right here on Earth. It creates jobs, stimulates economies and is constructive, not destructive. It inspires, it delivers new technologies...it's the future of civilisation.

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced the goal of sending astronauts to the moon before the end of the decade.Eight years later at 9:32 a.m. EDT on July 16, 1969, that dream became a reality as the swing arms moved away and a plume of flame signaled the liftoff of the Apollo 11 carrying astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin from Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A to the moon.

Photo Credit: NASA

The first of six successful lunar missions, Apollo 11 marked the first time humans set foot on another planetary surface.This image is of the Apollo 11 crew 'suiting up' for countdown demonstration test.

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I'll Be Back, Schwarzenegger, NASA

Schwarzenegger Visits Ames Research Center

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and NASA Ames Research Center Director S. Pete Worden examine hyperwall-2, a state-of-the-art visualization system developed at Ames. Hyperwall-2 is one of the largest displays in the world and is used by scientists for data interpretation.

Schwarzenegger visited Ames July 14, 2008, for a behind-the-scenes tour and briefings about NASA's support to firefighters battling California wildfires. Ames scientists are partnering with colleagues at Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif., to send NASA¹s remotely piloted Ikhana aircraft on reconnaissance flights using sophisticated visual and thermal sensors to provide up-to-the-minute information to firefighters in the field.

Image Credit: NASA/Eric James

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Expedition 17 Spacewalk

Expedition 17 Spacewalk - Latest Photos

ISS017-E-011302 (15 July 2008) --- Russian Federal Space Agency cosmonaut Sergei Volkov, Expedition 17 commander, participates in a session of extravehicular activity (EVA) as construction and maintenance continue on the International Space Station. During the five-hour, 54-minute spacewalk, Volkov and cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko (out of frame), flight engineer, continued to outfit the station's exterior, including the installation of a docking target on the Zvezda Service Module. Photo credit: NASA

ISS017-E-011310 (15 July 2008) --- This close-up view shows reflections in the visor of Russian Federal Space Agency cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, Expedition 17 flight engineer, as he participates in a session of extravehicular activity (EVA) as construction and maintenance continue on the International Space Station. Visible in the reflections in the visor are cosmonaut Sergei Volkov, commander, and various components of the station. During the five-hour, 54-minute spacewalk, Kononenko and Volkov continued to outfit the station's exterior, including the installation of a docking target on the Zvezda Service Module. Photo credit: NASA

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NASA Spacecraft Shows Diverse, Wet Environments on Ancient Mars

Mars - Latest News & Images

WASHINGTON -- Two studies based on data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed that the Red Planet once hosted vast lakes, flowing rivers and a variety of other wet environments that had the potential to support life.

One study, published in the July 17 issue of Nature, shows that vast regions of the ancient highlands of Mars, which cover about half the planet, contain clay minerals, which can form only in the presence of water. Volcanic lavas buried the clay-rich regions during subsequent, drier periods of the planet's history, but impact craters later exposed them at thousands of locations across Mars. The data for the study derives from images taken by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, or CRISM, and other instruments on the orbiter.

A color-enhanced image of the delta in Jezero Crater, which once held a lake. Researchers report that ancient rivers ferried clay-like minerals (shown in green) into the lake, forming the delta. Clays tend to trap and preserve organic matter, making the delta a good place to look for signs of ancient life. Image credit: NASA/JPL/JHUAPL/MSSS/Brown University

"The big surprise from these new results is how pervasive and long-lasting Mars' water was, and how diverse the wet environments were," said Scott Murchie, CRISM principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.

The clay-like minerals, called phyllosilicates, preserve a record of the interaction of water with rocks dating back to what is called the Noachian period of Mars' history, approximately 4.6 billion to 3.8 billion years ago. This period corresponds to the earliest years of the solar system, when Earth, the moon and Mars sustained a cosmic bombardment by comets and asteroids. Rocks of this age have largely been destroyed on Earth by plate tectonics. They are preserved on the moon, but were never exposed to liquid water. The phyllosilicate-containing rocks on Mars preserve a unique record of liquid water environments possibly suitable for life in the early solar system.

"The minerals present in Mars' ancient crust show a variety of wet environments," said John Mustard, a member of the CRISM team from Brown University, and lead author of the Nature study. "In most locations the rocks are lightly altered by liquid water, but in a few locations they have been so altered that a great deal of water must have flushed though the rocks and soil. This is really exciting because we're finding dozens of sites where future missions can land to understand if Mars was ever habitable and if so, to look for signs of past life."

Another study, published in the June 2 issue of Nature Geosciences, finds that the wet conditions on Mars persisted for a long time. Thousands to millions of years after the clays formed, a system of river channels eroded them out of the highlands and concentrated them in a delta where the river emptied into a crater lake slightly larger than California's Lake Tahoe, approximately 25 miles in diameter.

This three-dimensional image of a trough shows a type of minerals called phyllosilicates (in magenta and blue hues) concentrated on the slopes of mesas and along canyon walls. The abundance of phyllosilicates shows that water played a sizable role in changing the minerals of a variety of terrains in the planet's early history.Image credit: NASA/JPL/JHUAPL/University of Arizona/Brown University

"The distribution of clays inside the ancient lakebed shows that standing water must have persisted for thousands of years," says Bethany Ehlmann, another member of the CRISM team from Brown. Ehlmann is lead author of the study of an ancient lake within a northern-Mars impact basin called Jezero Crater. "Clays are wonderful at trapping and preserving organic matter, so if life ever existed in this region, there's a chance of its chemistry being preserved in the delta.

" CRISM's high spatial and spectral resolutions are better than any previous spectrometer sent to Mars and reveal variations in the types and composition of the phyllosilicate minerals. By combining data from CRISM and the orbiter's Context Imager and High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, the team identified three principal classes of water-related minerals dating to the early Noachian period. The classes are aluminum-phyllosilicates, hydrated silica or opal, and the more common and widespread iron/magnesium-phyllosilicates. The variations in the minerals suggest that different processes, or different types of watery environments, created them.

"Our whole team is turning our findings into a list of sites where future missions could land to look for organic chemistry and perhaps determine whether life ever existed on Mars," said Murchie.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Applied Physics Laboratory operates the CRISM instrument in coordination with an international team of researchers from universities, government and the private sector.

For more information on the new studies, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mro

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STS-124 Crew Tours the Nation's Capital

STS-124 Crew Tours the Nation's Capital

STS-124 commander Mark E. Kelly (left) introduced his crew mates and made a presentation at NASA's Washington D.C. headquarters during the crew's tour of the Nation's capital on July 15, 2008. From left to right are Kelly, mission pilot Kenneth L. Ham, mission specialists Karen L. Nyberg and Michael E. Fossum, JAXA astronaut Akihido Hoshide and Expedition 17 flight engineer Garrett Reisman.Kelly, Nyberg and Reisman visited wounded soldiers at the National Naval Medical Center. The other crewmembers visited soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical. During the visits, the STS-124 crew presented the soldiers with American flags flown during the mission.During the visit, which will end on July 18, the crew also will visit the Naval Observatory and attend a reception on Capitol Hill.Image Credit: NASA/Paul Alers

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Vice President Meets With STS-124 Crew

Vice President Meets With STS-124 Crew

Vice President Richard B. Cheney, center, poses with astronauts from the STS-124 mission at the Vice President's residence Wednesday, July 16, 2008, in Washington, D.C. Crew members from left are: NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, mission specialists Mike Fossum, Ron Garan and Karen Nyberg, pilot Ken Ham and mission commander Mark Kelly. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

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NASA Spacecraft Shows Diverse, Wet Environments on Ancient Mars

NASA Spacecraft Shows Diverse, Wet Environments on Ancient Mars

WASHINGTON -- Two studies based on data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed that the Red Planet once hosted vast lakes, flowing rivers and a variety of other wet environments that had the potential to support life.

One study, published in the July 17 issue of Nature, shows that vast regions of the ancient highlands of Mars, which cover about half the planet, contain clay minerals, which can form only in the presence of water. Volcanic lavas buried the clay-rich regions during subsequent, drier periods of the planet's history, but impact craters later exposed them at thousands of locations across Mars.

The data for the study derives from images taken by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, or CRISM, and other instruments on the orbiter. "The big surprise from these new results is how pervasive and long-lasting Mars' water was, and how diverse the wet environments were," said Scott Murchie, CRISM principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.

The clay-like minerals, called phyllosilicates, preserve a record of the interaction of water with rocks dating back to what is called the Noachian period of Mars' history, approximately 4.6 billion to 3.8 billion years ago. This period corresponds to the earliest years of the solar system, when Earth, the moon and Mars sustained a cosmic bombardment by comets and asteroids. Rocks of this age have largely been destroyed on Earth by plate tectonics. They are preserved on the moon, but were never exposed to liquid water.

The phyllosilicate-containing rocks on Mars preserve a unique record of liquid water environments possibly suitable for life in the early solar system. "The minerals present in Mars' ancient crust show a variety of wet environments," said John Mustard, a member of the CRISM team from Brown University, and lead author of the Nature study.

"In most locations the rocks are lightly altered by liquid water, but in a few locations they have been so altered that a great deal of water must have flushed though the rocks and soil. This is really exciting because we're finding dozens of sites where future missions can land to understand if Mars was ever habitable and if so, to look for signs of past life."

Another study, published in the June 2 issue of Nature Geosciences, finds that the wet conditions on Mars persisted for a long time. Thousands to millions of years after the clays formed, a system of river channels eroded them out of the highlands and concentrated them in a delta where the river emptied into a crater lake slightly larger than California's Lake Tahoe, approximately 25 miles in diameter. "The distribution of clays inside the ancient lakebed shows that standing water must have persisted for thousands of years," says Bethany Ehlmann, another member of the CRISM team from Brown.

Ehlmann is lead author of the study of an ancient lake within a northern-Mars impact basin called Jezero Crater. "Clays are wonderful at trapping and preserving organic matter, so if life ever existed in this region, there's a chance of its chemistry being preserved in the delta." CRISM's high spatial and spectral resolutions are better than any previous spectrometer sent to Mars and reveal variations in the types and composition of the phyllosilicate minerals. By combining data from CRISM and the orbiter's Context Imager and High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, the team identified three principal classes of water-related minerals dating to the early Noachian period.

The classes are aluminum-phyllosilicates, hydrated silica or opal, and the more common and widespread iron/magnesium-phyllosilicates. The variations in the minerals suggest that different processes, or different types of watery environments, created them. "Our whole team is turning our findings into a list of sites where future missions could land to look for organic chemistry and perhaps determine whether life ever existed on Mars," said Murchie. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

The Applied Physics Laboratory operates the CRISM instrument in coordination with an international team of researchers from universities, government and the private sector.

For more information on the new studies, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mro

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Nick

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Catching a Ride to Destiny

The Story Behind the NASA Astrovan

The sight of the Astrovan's shiny silver exterior and bold NASA emblem evokes pride and excitement in those who watch it wind its way toward the launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Before each space shuttle launch, astronauts smile and wave as they board the van that will carry them to meet their fully fueled ride to space.

The STS-124 astronauts stop in front of the Astrovan to greet workers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center before getting on board for the 20-minute ride to Launch Pad 39A. Photo credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

Since 1984, each shuttle crew has travelled those nine miles, from their crew quarters to the launch pad, aboard the same vehicle. A modified Airstream motor home, the "Astrovan" as it is called has only racked up 24,000 miles in its 24 years of service. That's because it's used solely to transport the astronauts on three occasions: to the launch pad for launch dress rehearsal, on launch day and after landing.

The earlier shuttle flights had fewer crew members, so they used the Apollo-era astronaut transport van that now can be seen by tourists at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex's Apollo/Saturn V Center.

Once inside the Astrovan, crew members are seated on long, padded benches with lift-out sections to accommodate the ventilator units used to circulate cool air through their bulky orange launch and entry suits. Photo credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

The current vehicle's appeal is rooted in its tradition rather than its décor. The interior's narrow-center aisle is paralleled by long benches that sport dark-blue upholstery. The seats are equipped with lift-out sections to accommodate the ventilator units used to circulate cool air through the astronauts' bulky orange launch and entry suits. Dark-gold drapes frame the windows and dark-wood paneling lines the walls.

According to Astrovan driver Ronnie King, the astronauts like the history-filled, if somewhat dated, vehicle just fine.

"We were staged to get a new one," says the 10-year veteran driver. But, according to King, word came that the rookie astronauts wanted to keep the vehicle that was steeped in the tradition of the astronauts who traveled those nine miles to the pad before them.

Suited up for the first space shuttle launch in 1981, Astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen head for the Apollo-era astronaut transport van, which is now on display at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex's Apollo/Saturn V Center. Photo credit: NASA

Employed by space shuttle contractor United Space Alliance, King is one of five drivers called upon to pilot the Astrovan. On launch day, the vehicle is the centerpiece of a motorcade escorted by security toward the seaside launch pad, and is in constant communication with the NASA test director via radio.

When it comes to launch day "they have their game faces on," King says of the crew members. "This is serious business." As the remaining shuttle flights are flown, each successive crew of astronauts will make its way to the same shining silver van, prepared to write the next page of space history.

Cheryl L. Mansfield NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center

Bye for now,

Spaceman

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Mars Lander Sample Gathering

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander to Begin Rasping Frozen Layer

TUCSON, Ariz. -- A powered rasp on the back of the robotic arm scoop of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander is being tested for the first time on Mars in gathering sample shavings of ice.

The lander has used its arm in recent days to clear away loose soil from a subsurface layer of hard-frozen material and create a large enough area to use the motorized rasp in a trench informally named "Snow White."

The Phoenix team prepared commands early Tuesday for beginning a series of tests with the rasp later in the day. Engineers and scientists designed the tests to lead up to, in coming days, delivering a sample of icy soil into one of the lander's laboratory ovens.

"While Phoenix was in development, we added the rasp to the robotic arm design specifically to grind into very hard surface ice," said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "This is the exactly the situation we find we are facing on Mars, so we believe we have the right tool for the job. Honeybee Robotics in New York City did a heroic job of designing and delivering the rasp on a very short schedule.

" The rasp bit extends at a shallow angle out of an opening on the back of the scoop at the end of the 2.35-meter-long (7.7-foot-long) robotic arm. To use it, the back surface of the scoop is placed on the ground, and a motor rotates the rasp. The angle of the rasp is increased from nearly horizontal to slightly steeper while it is rotating, so the tool kicks shavings sideways onto a collection surface just inside the opening. After the rasp stops, a series of moves by the scoop then shifts the collected shavings from the back of the scoop, past baffles, to the front of the scoop. The baffles serve to keep material from falling out of the rasp opening when the scoop is used as a front loader.

The commands prepared for Phoenix's activities Tuesday called for rasping into the hard material at the bottom of the Snow White trench at two points about one centimeter (0.4 inch) apart. The lander's Surface Stereo Imager and robotic arm camera will be used to check the process at several steps and to monitor any resulting sample in the scoop for several hours after it is collected.

Collecting an icy sample for an oven of Phoenix's Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA) may involve gathering shavings collected at the rasp opening and scooping up additional shavings produced by the rasp. The Phoenix team has been testing this combination on simulated Martian ice with a near-replica model of Phoenix in a test facility at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith of the University of Arizona with project management at JPL and development partnership at Lockheed Martin, Denver. International contributions come from the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark; Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

For more about Phoenix, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix
and http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu.

Spaceman

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Outfitting of ISS Exterior Under Way

Russian Spacewalk to Outfit Station's Exterior Under Way

International Space Station Commander Sergei Volkov and Flight Engineer Oleg Kononenko began a spacewalk to install one experiment and retrieve another at 1:08 p.m. EDT Tuesday. It is their second spacewalk in less than a week.

Suiting Up - Attired in his Russian Orlan spacesuit, Russian Federal Space Agency cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, Expedition 17 flight engineer, prepared for the July 10 spacewalk. During the full dress rehearsal "dry run" that took place on July 8, Kononenko and fellow cosmonaut Commander Sergei Volkov tested translation capability and the status of the suits' communications gear and other systems while in the Pirs Docking Compartment of the International Space Station.Durin the 6-hour, 18-minute spacewalk, they inspected their Soyuz TMA-12 spacecraft and retrieved a pyro bolt from it. Image Credit: NASA

They also continue to outfit the station's exterior, including the installation of a docking target on the Zvezda service module. It will help with the docking of a Russian mini research module on the space-facing side of Zvezda. That module will be launched next year.

The spacewalk, in Russian Orlan suits from the Pirs docking compartment, is expected to last about 5.5 hours.

Volkov, the lead spacewalker or EV1, is wearing the suit with red stripes. Kononenko, EV2, wears the blue-striped suit.

After leaving Pirs and setting up, the first task is the docking target. Kononenko uses the boom of the Strela hand-powered crane, operated by Volkov, to move to the area at the front of Zvezda, the transfer compartment, to install the docking target.

Next they retract Strela and use an installed spacewalkers' ladder to move to the small-diameter section of Zvezda. There they inspect bolt holes to be used to place an antenna adapter, part of the Kurs automated docking system. A Kurs antenna to be installed there later will be used for the first time next year.

After moving back to Strela, they move a foot restraint from its boom to the exterior of Zvezda. They return to Pirs, get an experiment called Vsplesk and move with it to the large-diameter section of Zvezda.

There they install the experiment, which monitors seismic effects using high-energy particle streams in the near-Earth environment. Then they install cabling.

Finally, they move to the Biorisk experiment, installed by Expedition 15 spacewalkers on Zvezda, and free it from its mountings. The experiment studies the effects of the space environment on microorganisms.

With Biorisk and a tool carrier they move down the spacewalkers' ladder and to Pirs. The closing of its hatch marks the official end of the spacewalk.

As he did last week, Flight Engineer Greg Chamitoff remains in the Soyuz during the spacewalk. That is part of contingency preparations for the unlikely event the Pirs airlock cannot be repressurized.

The July 10 spacewalk by Volkov and Kononenko focused on inspection of their Soyuz TMA-12 spacecraft and retrieval of an explosive bolt, one of 10 that help separate the spacecraft's return module from its propulsion module. The bolt will be returned to Earth for examination.

Failure of those two modules to separate on time during re-entry on the most recent two Soyuz returns resulted in ballistic entries. Those steeper-than-normal entries, while safe, resulted in high-G rides for Soyuz occupants and landings several hundred miles short of the planned area.

+ Read more about Expedition 17+ View crew timelines

International Space Station CalendarFind out when the U.S. launched its first satellite and other historical tidbits with photos that highlight 50 years of NASA milestones and a decade of space station assembly.

+ Download calendar (8.6 Mb PDF)

Bye for now,
Spaceman

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Russian Spacewalk to Outfit Space Station's Exterior

Russian Spacewalk to Outfit Space Station's Exterior

International Space Station Commander Sergei Volkov and Flight Engineer Oleg Kononenko will install one experiment and retrieve another on July 15 during their second spacewalk in less than a week.

They also will continue to outfit the station's exterior, including the installation of a docking target on the Zvezda service module. It will help with the docking of a Russian mini research module on the space-facing side of Zvezda. That module will be launched next year.

The spacewalk, in Russian Orlan suits from the Pirs docking compartment, is scheduled to begin about 1:10 p.m. EDT. It is expected to last about 5.5 hours.

Volkov, the lead spacewalker or EV1, will wear the suit with red stripes. Kononenko, EV2, will wear the blue-striped suit.

After leaving Pirs and setting up, the first task is the docking target. Kononenko will use the boom of the Strela hand-powered crane, operated by Volkov, to move to the area at the front of Zvezda, the transfer compartment, to install the docking target.

Next they'll retract Strela and use an installed spacewalkers' ladder to move to the small-diameter section of Zvezda. There they will inspect some bolt holes to be used to place an antenna adapter, part of the Kurs automated docking system. A Kurs antenna to be installed there later will be used for the first time next year.

After moving back to Strela, they'll move a foot restraint from its boom to the exterior of Zvezda. They'll return to Pirs, get the Vsplesk experiment and move with it to the large-diameter section of Zvezda.

There they'll install the experiment, which monitors seismic effects using high-energy particle streams in the near-Earth environment. Then they'll install cabling.

Finally, they'll move to the Biorisk experiment, installed by Expedition 15 spacewalkers on Zvezda. The experiment studies the effects of the space environment on microorganisms.

With it and a tool carrier they'll move down the spacewalkers' ladder and to Pirs. The closing of its hatch marks the official end of the spacewalk.

As he did last week, Flight Engineer Greg Chamitoff will remain in the Soyuz during the spacewalk. That is part of contingency preparations for the unlikely event the Pirs airlock cannot be repressurized.

The July 10 spacewalk by Volkov and Kononenko focused on inspection of their Soyuz TMA-12 spacecraft and retrieval of an explosive bolt, one of 10 that help separate the spacecraft's return module from its propulsion module. The bolt will be returned to Earth for examination.

Failure of those two modules to separate on time during re-entry on the most recent two Soyuz returns resulted in ballistic entries. Those steeper-than-normal entries, while safe, resulted in high-G rides for Soyuz occupants and landings several hundred miles short of the planned area.

Bye for now,
Nick
Spaceman.

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