The unpiloted ISS Progress 45 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station at 5:10 p.m. (EST) on Jan. 23, 2012. Filled with trash and discarded items, Progress 45 was later deorbited, subsequently burning up in Earth’s atmosphere. The departure of Progress 45 clears the way for the next unpiloted supply ship, Progress 46, which is set to launch at 6:06 p.m. (EST) on Jan. 25 (5:06 a.m. Baikonur time Jan. 26) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan bringing 2.9 tons of food, fuel and supplies for the residents of the space station. … (SpaceRef)

Six months before the space shuttle Challenger exploded over Florida on Jan. 28, 1986, Roger Boisjoly wrote a portentous memo. He warned that if the weather was too cold, seals connecting sections of the shuttle’s huge rocket boosters could fail.

“The result could be a catastrophe of the highest order, loss of human life,” he wrote.

The memo was meant to jolt Morton Thiokol, the company that made the boosters and employed Mr. Boisjoly. In July 1985, a task force had been formed, partly on Mr. Boisjoly’s recommendation, to examine the effect of cold on the boosters. The effort, however, had become mired in paperwork, procurement delays and a rush to launch the shuttle, according to later investigations.

Meanwhile, his apprehensions only grew. The night before the Challenger’s liftoff, the temperature dipped below freezing. Unusual for Florida, the cold was unprecedented for a shuttle launching, and it prompted Mr. Boisjoly and other engineers to plead that the flight be postponed. Their bosses, under pressure from NASA, rejected the advice.

The shuttle exploded 73 seconds after launching, killing its seven crew members, including Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher from Concord, N.H.

Mr. Boisjoly’s memo was soon made public. He became widely known as a whistle-blower in a federal investigation of the disaster. And though he was hailed for his action by many, he was also made to suffer for it. … (New York Times)

Mars may have been arid for more than 600 million years, making it too hostile for any life to survive on the planet’s surface, according to researchers who have been carrying out the painstaking task of analysing individual particles of Martian soil. Dr Tom Pike, from Imperial College London, will discuss the team’s analysis at a European Space Agency (ESA) meeting on 7 February 2012. The researchers have spent three years analysing data on Martian soil that was collected during the 2008 NASA Phoenix mission to Mars. Phoenix touched down in the northern arctic region of the planet to search for signs that it was habitable and to analyse ice and soil on the surface.

The results of the soil analysis at the Phoenix site suggest the surface of Mars has been arid for hundreds of millions of years, despite the presence of ice and the fact that previous research has shown that Mars may have had a warmer and wetter period in its earlier history more than three billion years ago. The team also estimated that the soil on Mars had been exposed to liquid water for at most 5,000 years since its formation billions of years ago. They also found that Martian and Moon soil is being formed under the same extremely dry conditions. …(SpaceRef)

A potentially habitable alien planet — one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface — has been found around a nearby star.

The planet is located in the habitable zone of its host star, which is a narrow circumstellar region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet’s surface.

“It’s the Holy Grail of exoplanet research to find a planet around a star orbiting at the right distance so it’s not too close where it would lose all its water and boil away, and not too far where it would all freeze,” Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told SPACE.com. “It’s right smack in the habitable zone — there’s no question or discussion about it. It’s not on the edge, it’s right in there.” … (SciAm)

A particle-gobbling probe has snared some alien travelers: tiny particles from interstellar space that, after being born from the ashes of an exploding star, breached a protective bubble blown by the sun and sailed into the jaws of the awaiting spacecraft.

“These are some first observations of interstellar material, really alien matter,” Dave McComas, a principal investigator for NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer spacecraft, or IBEX, said January 31 in a NASA press conference announcing the findings. “This alien interstellar material is really the stuff that stars and planets and people — all of us — are made of,” said McComas, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. …(ScienceNews)

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A “theory of everything” from a scientist at Case Western Reserve University got a lot of attention for positing that inanimate objects, from planets and water to strands of DNA, are alive. Not only is the assertion bunk, but the scientific and media phenomena surrounding the study reveals how sometimes crackpot ideas can get traction. … (SPACE.com)

NASA unveiled its first online space trivia game today (Jan. 30), a Facebook app that allows multiple players to compete for cosmic bragging rights.

The free game, called “Space Race Blastoff,” is a mix of Space Camp and “Jeopardy!” that pits players against one another in a quiz on NASA and space exploration history. Players with enough correct answers can earn award badges emblazoned with NASA astronauts, spaceships or astronomical objects, NASA game designers said. …  (SPACE.com)

NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered 11 new planetary systems hosting 26 confirmed planets. These discoveries nearly double the number of verified planets and triple the number of stars known to have more than one planet that transits, or passes in front of, the star. Such systems will help astronomers better understand how planets form.

The planets orbit close to their host stars and range in size from 1.5 times the radius of Earth to larger than Jupiter. Fifteen are between Earth and Neptune in size. Further observations will be required to determine which are rocky like Earth and which have thick gaseous atmospheres like Neptune. The planets orbit their host star once every six to 143 days. All are closer to their host star than Venus is to our sun. … (NASA)

ESA’s new Vega rocket is now fully assembled on its launch pad. Final preparations are in full swing for the rocket’s inaugural flight from Europe’s Spaceport. The launch window opens on 9 February…. (ESA)

Though generally thought to be quite dry, roughly half of the giant asteroid Vesta is expected to be so cold and to receive so little sunlight that water ice could have survived there for billions of years, according to the first published models of Vesta’s average global temperatures and illumination by the sun.

“Near the north and south poles, the conditions appear to be favorable for water ice to exist beneath the surface,” says Timothy Stubbs of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Stubbs and Yongli Wang of the Goddard Planetary Heliophysics Institute at the University of Maryland published the models in the January 2012 issue of the journal Icarus. The models are based on information from telescopes including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. …(NASA)

NASA’s chief climate scientist James E. Hansen built his career studying Earth’s atmosphere and modeling humans’ potential impacts on climate. Then he realized that laboratory work wasn’t enough. Hansen never thought his decision to study atmospheric models would lead to his arrest. But there he was in handcuffs this summer, protesting at the White House against a pipeline that would carry crude oil from Alberta’s oil sands to the Gulf of Mexico.

It wasn’t the first arrest, either. Hansen, who has directed NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies for 31 years, earned the sobriquet “father of global warming” after testifying before Congress in 1988 on the dangers of global warming. He appeared again in 1989. Then he quietly returned to his work, turning aside television and media requests for the next 15 years because, as he said, “you have no time to do the science if you’re talking to the media.” … (Universe Today)

To continue a tradition I always look up the evening sky at the moment I was born. Mars and the Moon were high in the sky, in first quarter (51% to be precise). Now Jupiter is high in the sky and the Moon is new (actually 11 hours and 46 minutes after new Moon).

Below you can see both vistas. Click on them to see a larger version.

Up to the next birthday.

Monday, January 23, 20.15 (in 1961)

Monday, January 23, 20.15 (today)

Space debris includes discarded man-made objects such as defunct satellites, which have exceeded their life times or malfunctioned, and rockets that have finished their missions.
Space debris is inevitably created during satellite operations. For example, solar array paddles are folded and tied with wires for launch, and when the paddles were deployed, the wire was discarded into space. Camera lens caps were also thrown away in space.
A vast number of fragments are created from either explosions or collisions. Most space debris is a result of the break-ups caused by these events. Satellites are launched on rockets that carry extra amounts of fuel. After a rocket has injected its satellite into the orbit, its remaining fuel can trigger an explosion, if its fuel tanks are heated by sunlight and highly pressurized. Satellites also carry fuel so they can keep the right orbit and attitude, so explosions can also happen if the fuel tanks of post-mission satellites get heated enough by sunlight. There have been about 200 such explosions confirmed to date.
And today there are also more collisions, as Earth’s orbit gets more crowded. The collision probability is becoming higher and higher. …. (JAXA)

Generally, solar flares are bad news for stuff orbiting the Earth. The impact of intense solar radiation on sensitive electronics can render the most sophisticated space technologies useless. Also, heating and expansion of the Earth’s upper atmosphere by peaking solar activity can increase drag on satellites, slowing them down, causing them to drop from orbit.

How could this negative situation be turned into a positive? What’s bad for operational satellites has the wonderful side effect of helping mankind with an increasingly pressing problem: the specter of space junk…. (Discovery)

ESO’s VISTA telescope, at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, has captured a striking new image of the Helix Nebula. This picture, taken in infrared light, reveals strands of cold nebular gas that are invisible in images taken in visible light, as well as bringing to light a rich background of stars and galaxies. (ESO)

Craig Hogan believes that the world is fuzzy. This is not a metaphor. Hogan, a physicist at the University of Chicago and director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center near Batavia, Ill., thinks that if we were to peer down at the tiniest subdivisions of space and time, we would find a universe filled with an intrinsic jitter, the busy hum of static. This hum comes not from particles bouncing in and out of being or other kinds of quantum froth that physicists have argued about in the past. Rather Hogan’s noise would come about if space was not, as we have long assumed, smooth and continuous, a glassy backdrop to the dance of fields and particles. Hogan’s noise arises if space is made of chunks. Blocks. Bits. Hogan’s noise would imply that the universe is digital. (SciAm)

Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have solved a longstanding mystery on the type of star, or so-called progenitor, that caused a supernova in a nearby galaxy. The finding yields new observational data for pinpointing one of several scenarios that could trigger such outbursts.

Based on previous observations from ground-based telescopes, astronomers knew that a kind of supernova called a Type Ia created a remnant named SNR 0509-67.5, which lies 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy. The type of system that leads to this kind of supernova explosion has long been a high importance problem with various proposed solutions but no decisive answer. All these solutions involve a white dwarf star that somehow increases in mass to the highest limit. Astronomers failed to find any companion star near the center of the remnant, and this rules out all but one solution, so the only remaining possibility is that this one Type Ia supernova came from a pair of white dwarfs in close orbit. (HubbleSite)

The High Frequency Instrument on ESA’s Planck mission has completed its survey of the remnant light from the Big Bang. The sensor ran out of coolant on Saturday as expected, ending its ability to detect this faint energy.

“Planck has been a wonderful mission; spacecraft and instruments have been performing outstandingly well, creating a treasure trove of scientific data for us to work with,” said Jan Tauber, ESA’s Planck Project Scientist.

Less than half a million years after the Universe was created in the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, the fireball cooled to temperatures of about 4000 °C, filling the sky with bright, visible light. (ESA)

New maps produced by the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) reveal features at the Moon’s north and south poles in regions that lie in perpetual darkness. Developed by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), the LAMP instrument is sensitive on dim “starlight,” specifically the band of electro-magnetic frequencies emitted when hydrogen (which usually travels in pairs) is reduced to a single atom, usually when encountering other forms of radiation.
This Ly-α (Lyman-alpha) spectral line is peculiar to neutral hydrogen, the most basic and abundant element in the universe, is produced by light with a wavelength of 121.4 nm, a frequency below the narrow band of optical frequencies visible to the naked eye. By gathering data revealed by this all-pervasive indirect starlight LAMP can peer into so-called “permanently shadowed regions” (PSRs).
In repeated passes over the lunar poles using this method researchers have able to determine the presence of very fine structure, such as the likely porosity of lunar surface rock or the most likely textures of water frost in super-cold volatile traps, in permanent shadow from the Sun, and only in those places on the Moon not overwhelmed by direct or immediately indirect sunlight. (Lunar Pioneer)

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PASADENA, Calif. — Engineers with NASA’s Cassini mission are conducting diagnostic testing on a part of the spacecraft’s radio system after its signal was not detected on Earth during a tracking pass in late December. The spacecraft has been communicating with Earth using a backup part.

The issue occurred with the ultra-stable oscillator, which is used for one type of radio science experiment and also as a means of sending data back to Earth. The spacecraft is currently using an auxiliary oscillator, whose frequency stability is adequate for transmitting data from the spacecraft to Earth. Tests later this month will help mission managers decide whether it will be possible to bring the ultra-stable oscillator back into service.

Some of the data collected for the radio science experiment using the auxiliary oscillator will be of lesser quality than that from the ultra-stable oscillator. Signals used for occultation experiments – where scientists analyze how radio signals are affected as they travel through Saturn’s rings or the atmospheres of Saturn and its moons back to Earth – will be of lesser quality. A second kind of radio science investigation using gravity measurements to probe the internal structure of Saturn or its moons will not be affected. Cassini carries 12 science experiments.

The cause is still under investigation, but age may be a factor. The spacecraft launched in 1997 and has orbited Saturn since 2004. Cassini completed its prime mission in 2008 and has had two additional mission extensions. This is the first time its ultra-stable oscillator has had an issue.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena manages the mission for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about the mission, visit:http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini. (JPL)

These three images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveal the emergence of an exploding star, called a supernova.

Nicknamed SN Primo, the exploding star belongs to a special class called Type Ia supernovae, which are distance markers used for studying dark energy and the expansion rate of the universe. Type Ia supernovae most likely arise when white dwarf stars — the burned-out cores of normal stars — siphon too much material from their companion stars and explode. … (HubbleSite)

NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft successfully refined its flight path Wednesday with the biggest maneuver planned for the mission’s journey between Earth and Mars.

“We’ve completed a big step toward our encounter with Mars,” said Brian Portock of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., deputy mission manager for the cruise phase of the mission. “The telemetry from the spacecraft and the Doppler data show that the maneuver was completed as planned.”

The Mars Science Laboratory mission will use its car-size rover, Curiosity, to investigate whether the selected region on Mars inside Gale Crater has offered environmental conditions favorable for supporting microbial life and favorable for preserving clues about whether life existed.

Engineers had planned today’s three-hour series of thruster-engine firings to accomplish two aims: to put the spacecraft’s trajectory about 25,000 miles (about 40,000 kilometers) closer to encountering Mars and to advance the time of the encounter by about 14 hours, compared with the trajectory following the mission’s Nov. 26, 2011, launch.

“The timing of the encounter is important for arriving at Mars just when the planet’s rotation puts Gale Crater in the right place,” said JPL’s Tomas Martin-Mur, chief navigator for the mission. …  (NASA)

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PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

• The Milky Way is redder than most spiral galaxies, but when combined with its blue arms, its overall color is white.
• Our galaxy is very typical in terms of the type and number of its stars, research shows.
• The Milky Way’s overall color is about the shade of white halfway between an incandescent light bulb and the standard spectrum white on a TV.

Turns out the Milky Way is aptly named, with the overall color of our galaxy resembling the shade of fine-grained spring snow in early morning light.

Splitting the light into its component wavelengths, however, reveals a redder-than-average color for the Milky Way’s core, and sky-blue spiral arms.

The portrait, pieced together from 1,000 similar galaxies culled from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, shows the Milky Way as it would appear from perspective of another galaxy, albeit one whose inhabitants have vision similar to humans. …(Discovery)

A star shooting matter in a jet stretching over 400 trillion km has been found in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy to Earth.

The star jet covers about 10 times the distance between our Solar System’s Sun and nearest neighbouring star proxima Centauri, and is more than 70,000 times the distance between Pluto and the Sun.

“What’s interesting here is that we found a huge structure,” said astronomer Francesco Di Mille from the Australian Astronomical Observatory in Sydney, and co-author of the study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “We don’t know if there are other jets like this in the galaxy, so we’re just at the beginning of this exciting discovery.” … (Cosmos)

Unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere are disrupting normal patterns of glaciation, according to a study co-authored by a University of Florida researcher and published online Jan. 8 in Nature Geoscience.

The Earth’s current warm period that began about 11,000 years ago should give way to another ice age within about 1,500 years, according to accepted astronomical models.

However, current levels of carbon dioxide are trapping too much heat in the atmosphere to allow the Earth to cool as it has in its prehistoric past in response to changes in Earth’s orbital pattern. The research team, a collaboration among University College London, University of Cambridge and UF, said their data indicate that the next ice age will likely be delayed by tens of thousands of years.

That may sound like good news, but it probably isn’t, said Jim Channell, distinguished professor of geology at UF and co-author.

“Ice sheets like those in western Antarctica are already The furutrdestabilized by global warming,” said Channell. “When they eventually slough off and become a part of the ocean’s volume, it will have a dramatic effect on sea level.” Ice sheets will continue to melt until the next phase of cooling begins in earnest. … (TerraDaily)

During their third and final EVA, the last walk the Moon on December 13, 1972, Cernan and Schmitt had the opportunity to sample “Tracy’s Rock,” or ‘Split Rock’, a hefty boulder that had, at some point in the relatively recent past, rolled down the south-facing wall of North Massif where it partly broke apart near the valley floor. It offered an opportunity to analyze and sample part of the high mountains imaged almost four decades later from LRO. … (Lunar Pioneer)