NASA Tests a Versatile Habitat for Long-Term Missions

The partially inflatable habitat could be adapted for use on the moon or Mars, or for deep space itself.

• BY KATHARINE GAMMON

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Space home: NASA tests a new habitat for astronauts in the Arizona desert.
NASA

PHOTO GALLERY:

A Deep-Space Home for Astronauts

Despite recent cuts to its manned space program, NASA continues to research ways that astronauts might live safely in space during prolonged missions. The agency recently completed tests of a prototype astronaut habitation unit in the rugged, barren, almost-Martian landscape of the Arizona desert. The habitat could be tested in space within a decade, and might one day serve as a home away from home for astronauts on the moon or Mars.

The tests, completed last month, included sending in crews for overnight stays, and running simulations of work that would be done in a single day.

The current prototype housing unit has a hard cylindrical shell, contains four rooms, two outside additions for dust mitigation and hygiene, and an inflatable component that adds a second level for sleeping and relaxing.

The inflatable loft design was part of a university competition called XHab. The researchers explain that a final design could be fully inflated, or could have a small hard shell inside an inflated exterior. Hard shells, while heavier to transport, are better at blocking dangerous radiation from space.

Inflatable space habitats have been a popular idea since the 1970s, but the new project is the most advanced to date. Inflatable units are a typical option because they offer a lot of volume for the weight of materials, so the cost of getting the housing to space is lower.

The team also tested a prototype robot that could explore the surface of Mars and be controlled by an astronaut from inside the habitation.

"It changes things if you're running that robot in close proximity, versus trying to operate it from Earth with a 50-second time delay," says Kriss Kennedy, project manager of the Habitat Demonstration Unit project. The results were presented this week at the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Space 2011 conference in Long Beach, California.

The habitation system uses embedded sensors to reduce the need for checkups by crew and ground control. "We are infusing more technologies so that crew wouldn't have to repair the unit if there were a problem. Inside the unit, the electronics can be controlled by iPads and iPhones, allowing the crew to adjust the lights and temperature.

Deep space missions are inherently risky. Radiation from galactic cosmic rays, which can cause cancer, and from solar flares, which can cause quick death, is a serious issue for long-term space habitation. Cargo bags, used to carry loads up to space, could used to change urine into water via a purification technique called forward osmosis and then help pad the walls with water to protect the crew inside.

The unit could be adapted for missions to the moon, Mars, an asteroid, or simply as a free-flying habitat in space. "Different missions require different sizes of habitation," says Tracy Gill, who works within the Space Station Utilization Division at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, because of the different items needed onboard. Within 10 years, the team plans to have a demonstration unit either flying in space or attached to the International Space Station.

Flying habitats need to be easy to repair, says Jeffrey Hoffman, a former astronaut and professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. "Unlike the International Space Station, it won't be possible to send up replacement parts, so local materials will be key," he says.

Daniel Lester, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, says a habitation like the one NASA is testing could be a useful place to house a crew servicing space telescopes, or assembling spacecraft to travel to farther-off places like Mars.

DANGER :- WORLD IS COMING TO AN END!!!

NASA predicts Worldwide Holiday on Feb 1, 2019 as the world is scheduled to end

Five of Saturn's Moons Pose Amidst a Backdrop of Planetary Rings

By Clay Dillow

From Left to Right: Janus, Pandora, Enceladus, Mimas and Rhea NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Today in pretty space pics, Cassini proves once again that it’s the spacecraft that just keeps on giving. Its mission was supposed to end in 2008 but has twice been extended, most recently out to 2017. That’s fine with us, since it keeps sending back pics like these from its wide orbit around arguably the solar system’s second-coolest planet. Represented here: Saturn’s signature rings and five of its more than 60 natural satellites--Janus, Pandora, Enceladus, Mimas and Rhea (from left to right).

NASA released the image yesterday, but it was actually captured (in visible green light) by Cassini back on July 29. To give a little perspective, Cassini was just 684,000 miles from Rhea (looming large at the far right) but 1.8 million miles from Enceladus in the center, which is actually beyond the rings. That’s Pandora hiding between the rings, second from left. And for a bit more perspective, the image scale is about 4 miles per pixel, says NASA.

Suffice it to say, that’s a pretty big panoramic right there. Cassini wanted to get the other 60 or so moons into the shot as well, but you know what a pain it is to organize group photos.

[NASA]

UARS Satellite Re-entry Crash to Earth

NASA's Kepler Discovery Confirms First Planet Orbiting Two Stars

Where the Sun Sets Twice: NASA's Kepler mission has discovered a world where two suns set over the horizon instead of just one. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Science Daily  — The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact. NASA's Kepler mission has made the first unambiguous detection of a circumbinary planet -- a planet orbiting two stars -- 200 light-years from Earth.

This discovery confirms a new class of planetary systems that could harbor life," Kepler Principal Investigator William Borucki, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., said. "Given that most stars in our galaxy are part of a binary system, this means the opportunities for life are much broader than if planets form only around single stars. This milestone discovery confirms a theory that scientists have had for decades but could not prove until now."

Unlike Star Wars' Tatooine, the planet is cold, gaseous and not thought to harbor life, but its discovery demonstrates the diversity of planets in our galaxy. Previous research has hinted at the existence of circumbinary planets, but clear confirmation proved elusive. Kepler detected such a planet, known as Kepler-16b, by observing transits, where the brightness of a parent star dims from the planet crossing in front of it.

A research team led by Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., used data from the Kepler space telescope, which measures dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, to search for transiting planets. Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or near the "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist on the surface of the orbiting planet.

Scientists detected the new planet in the Kepler-16 system, a pair of orbiting stars that eclipse each other from our vantage point on Earth. When the smaller star partially blocks the larger star, a primary eclipse occurs, and a secondary eclipse occurs when the smaller star is occulted, or completely blocked, by the larger star.

Astronomers further observed that the brightness of the system dipped even when the stars were not eclipsing one another, hinting at a third body. The additional dimming in brightness events, called the tertiary and quaternary eclipses, reappeared at irregular intervals of time, indicating the stars were in different positions in their orbit each time the third body passed. This showed the third body was circling, not just one, but both stars, in a wide circumbinary orbit.

The gravitational tug on the stars, measured by changes in their eclipse times, was a good indicator of the mass of the third body. Only a very slight gravitational pull was detected, one that only could be caused by a small mass. The findings are described in a new study published Sept. 16 in the journalScience.

"Most of what we know about the sizes of stars comes from such eclipsing binary systems, and most of what we know about the size of planets comes from transits," said Doyle, who also is the lead author and a Kepler participating scientist. "Kepler-16 combines the best of both worlds, with stellar eclipses and planetary transits in one system."

This discovery confirms that Kepler-16b is an inhospitable, cold world about the size of Saturn and thought to be made up of about half rock and half gas. The parent stars are smaller than our sun. One is 69 percent the mass of the sun and the other only 20 percent. Kepler-16b orbits around both stars every 229 days, similar to Venus' 225-day orbit, but lies outside the system's habitable zone, where liquid water could exist on the surface, because the stars are cooler than our sun.

"Working in film, we often are tasked with creating something never before seen," said visual effects supervisor John Knoll of Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., in San Francisco. "However, more often than not, scientific discoveries prove to be more spectacular than anything we dare imagine. There is no doubt these discoveries influence and inspire storytellers. Their very existence serves as cause to dream bigger and open our minds to new possibilities beyond what we think we 'know.'"

For more information about the Kepler mission, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/kepler

NASA Mars Research Helps Find Buried Water On Earth

Radar sounding technology developed to explore the subsurface of Mars may soon be used to find water buried deep beneath Earth's deserts. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Science Daily  — A NASA-led team has used radar sounding technology developed to explore the subsurface of Mars to create high-resolution maps of freshwater aquifers buried deep beneath an Earth desert, in the first use of airborne sounding radar for aquifer mapping.

An international team led by research scientist Essam Heggy of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., recently traveled to northern Kuwait to map the depth and extent of aquifers in arid environments using an airborne sounding radar prototype. The 40-megahertz, low-frequency sounding radar was provided by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena; and the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, France. Heggy's team was joined by personnel from the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR), Kuwait City.

The research may help scientists better locate and map Earth's desert aquifers, understand current and past hydrological conditions in Earth's deserts and assess how climate change is impacting them. Deserts cover roughly 20 percent of Earth's land surface, including highly populated regions in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, west and central Asia and the southwestern United States.

For two weeks, the team flew a helicopter equipped with the radar on 12 low-altitude passes (1,000 feet, or 305 meters) over two well-known freshwater aquifers, probing the desert subsurface down to the water table at depths ranging from 66 to 213 feet (20 to 65 meters). The researchers successfully demonstrated that the radar could locate subsurface aquifers, probe variations in the depth of the water table, and identify locations where water flowed into and out of the aquifers.

"This demonstration is a critical first step that will hopefully lead to large-scale mapping of aquifers, not only improving our ability to quantify groundwater processes, but also helping water managers drill more accurately," said Muhammad Al-Rashed, director of KISR's Division of Water Resources.

The radar is sensitive to changes in electrical characteristics of subsurface rock, sediments and water- saturated soils. Water-saturated zones are highly reflective and mirror the low-frequency radar signal. The returned radar echoes explored the thick mixture of gravel, sand and silt that covers most of Kuwait's northern desert and lies above its water table.

The team created high-resolution cross sections of the subsurface, showing variations in the fresh groundwater table in the two aquifers studied. The radar results were validated with ground measurements performed by KISR.

"This research will help scientists better understand Earth's fossil aquifer systems, the approximate number, occurrence and distribution of which remain largely unknown," said Heggy. "Much of the evidence for climate change in Earth's deserts lies beneath the surface and is reflected in its groundwater. By mapping desert aquifers with this technology, we can detect layers deposited by ancient geological processes and trace back paleoclimatic conditions that existed thousands of years ago, when many of today's deserts were wet."

Heggy said most recent observations, scientific interest and data analyses of global warming have concentrated on Earth's polar regions and forests, which provide direct measurable evidence of large-scale environmental changes. Arid and semi-arid environments, which represent a substantial portion of Earth's surface, have remained poorly studied. Yet water scarcity and salt content, changes in rainfall, flash floods, high rates of aquifer exploitation and growth of desert regions are all signs that suggest climate change and human activities are also affecting these arid and semi-arid zones.

The radar sounding prototype shares similar characteristics with two instruments flying on Mars-orbiting spacecraft: Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS), on the European Space Agency's Mars Express, and Shallow Radar (SHARAD), on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. MARSIS, jointly developed by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, probes the Martian subsurface sediments and polar ice caps to a maximum depth of about 1.9 miles (3 kilometers). SHARAD, also built by the Italian Space Agency, looks for liquid or frozen water in the first few hundred feet of Mars' crust and probes Mars' polar caps. Both instruments have found evidence of ice in the Martian subsurface, but have not yet detected liquid water. The Kuwait results may lead to revised interpretations of data from these two instruments.

The research follows earlier work by JPL scientists to probe the subsurface of the Sahara desert using higher-frequency Synthetic Aperture Radar instruments flown onboard three space shuttle missions in 1981, 1984 and 1994. That work located shallow drainage networks and large dry basins, suggesting the Sahara has had extensive surface water activity in its recent geological past. Kuwait's well-mapped shallow aquifers and flat surface provided the team with an ideal test location. Extreme dryness, such as that present in this region of Kuwait, is necessary to allow the radar's waves to penetrate deep into the surface and reflect on water-saturated layers beneath. Kuwait's flat topography and low radio noise also reduced clutter and improved the radar signal's return.

"Results of this study pave the way for potential airborne mapping of aquifers in hyper-arid regions such as the Sahara and Arabian Peninsula, and can be applied to design concepts for a possible future satellite mission to map Earth's desert aquifers," said Craig Dobson, program officer for Geodetic Imaging and Airborne Instrument Technology Transition programs at NASA Headquarters, Washington. The work is a pathfinder for the Orbiting Arid Subsurface and Ice Sheet Sounder (OASIS), a NASA spacecraft mission concept designed to map shallow aquifers in Earth's most arid desert regions and measure ice sheet volume, thickness, basal topography and discharge rates.

The study was co-funded by the California Institute of Technology's Keck Institute for Space Studies and KISR. The Kuwaiti Police Air Force provided technical support for the flight tests.

JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

NASA Launches Mission to Study Moon From Crust to Core

NASA's GRAIL spacecraft successfully launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., at 9:08 EDT (6:08 PDT) on Sept. 10, 2011. As depicted in the artist's concept on the right, the twin spacecraft, GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B will work in tandem to study the lunar interior, from crust to core, and to advance understanding of the thermal evolution of the moon. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Thom Baur, United Launch Alliance)

Science Daily — NASA's twin lunar Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 9:08 a.m. EDT (6:08 a.m. PDT) Saturday, Sept. 10, to study the moon in unprecedented detail.

"If there was ever any doubt that Florida's Space Coast would continue to be open for business, that thought was drowned out by the roar of today's GRAIL launch," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "GRAIL and many other exciting upcoming missions make clear that NASA is taking its next big leap into deep space exploration, and the space industry continues to provide the jobs and workers needed to support this critical effort."

GRAIL-A is scheduled to reach the moon on New Year's Eve 2011, while GRAIL-B will arrive New Year's Day 2012. The two solar-powered spacecraft will fly in tandem orbits around the moon to measure its gravity field. GRAIL will answer longstanding questions about the moon and give scientists a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed.

The spacecraft were launched aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket. GRAIL mission controllers acquired a signal from GRAIL-A at 10:29 a.m. EDT (7:29 a.m. PDT). GRAIL-B's signal was received eight minutes later. The telemetry downlinked from both spacecraft indicates they have deployed their solar panels and are operating as expected.

"Our GRAIL twins have Earth in their rearview mirrors and the moon in their sights," said David Lehman, GRAIL project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The mission team is ready to test, analyze and fine-tune our spacecraft over the next three-and-a-half months on our journey to lunar orbit."

The straight-line distance from Earth to the moon is approximately 250,000 miles (402,336 kilometers). NASA's Apollo moon crews needed approximately three days to cover that distance. However, each spacecraft will take approximately 3.5 months and cover more than 2.5 million miles (4 million kilometers) to arrive. This low-energy trajectory results in the longer travel time. The size of the launch vehicle allows more time for spacecraft check-out and time to update plans for lunar operations. The science collection phase for GRAIL is expected to last 82 days.

"Since the earliest humans looked skyward, they have been fascinated by the moon," said GRAIL principal investigator Maria Zuber from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "GRAIL will take lunar exploration to a new level, providing an unprecedented characterization of the moon's interior that will advance understanding of how the moon formed and evolved."

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the GRAIL mission. It is part of the Discovery Program managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft. Launch management for the mission is the responsibility of NASA's Launch Services Program at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida

For more information about GRAIL, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/grail and http://grail.nasa.gov

Tomorrow, NASA Heads Back to the Moon, to Uncover Its Origins and to Inspire A New Generation

The GRAIL mission launches Thursday at 8:37 ET

By Rebecca Boyle

NASA's Grail Mission Twin spacecraft will orbit in tandem, measuring tiny changes in the distance between them to map the moon's gravitational field. NASA/JPL

NASA is going back to the moon once again, sending a pair of spacecraft on a quest to learn the origins of our closest companion by studying its interior and its gravitational field. But beyond new lunar science, the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, GRAIL, will also help cement NASA’s legacy of lunar exploration in the public imagination.

GRAIL A and its twin GRAIL B are set to launch Thursday morning aboard a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The launch window opens at 8:37 a.m. EDT, although weather looks pretty iffy for the next couple days, according to NASA. Once they arrive at the moon, the two washing machine-sized probes will fly in formation, with instruments sensitive enough to detect a hair’s breadth separation. Along with those gravity-mapping instruments, GRAIL will carry something called MoonKAM — “Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students.”

Logging in from schools around the country, students will be able to virtually coast a few miles above the surface of the moon, scanning the pallid dirt for craters or perhaps an open plain that might someday make a nice lunar homestead. Students can select target areas by studying topographic maps on the MoonKAM website, and send them to NASA’s MoonKAM operations center. The images will be fairly high-resolution, but they won’t approach the abilities of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which took the snapshots we saw this week of Apollo landing sites. But that’s not the point, said Maria Zuber, a professor of geophysics at MIT and the mission’s lead investigator.

“If a student takes an image of the surface, it’s really a transformative experience. You can bet that a smart kid will take the time to sit down and figure out how to use this software,” she said in an interview.

Each spacecraft will carry a digital camera setup with four camera heads, one pointed ahead, two pointed below and one pointed behind the spacecraft’s trajectory. They can capture video and still images up to 30 fps, and downlink them to the project’s control center at the University of California-San Diego. The program is a partnership with Sally Ride Science, a company founded by Ride, the first American woman in space.

Zuber and the other mission scientists, many of whom have kids and grandkids, hope the moon images will inspire a new generation of lunar scientists — who will understand, as they have, that the history of the moon is crucial for understanding the history of Earth.

With its perennially unchanging mountains and craters, the moon is a good proxy for the early Earth, Zuber said. Understanding how it formed could shed some light on the geologic processes behind Earth’s formation, and that of the other terrestrial planets. Just last month, researchers from the University of California-Santa Cruz said the moon may have once had asmaller sibling that it absorbed after a collision. Grail will shed some light on this question, as well as explain whether the moon has a molten core, which will provide some more information about how it coalesced.

Zuber said Grail will solve a few pieces of the larger lunar puzzle.

“If you think about your family and friends and the people you know best, if you just see what they’re like on the outside, you don’t really know them,” she said. “If you really want to know them, you want to understand what’s inside of them, and that tells you what they’re all about.”

Grail Launch Preparations: Lockheed Martin technicians verify that NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory-A (GRAIL-A) lunar probe is in position and ready to be secured to the spacecraft adapter ring. GRAIL-B is secured to the ring, at left.  NASA/Jim Grossmann

Grail has several unique characteristics that will help it pull this off. The spacecraft are based on a classified military satellite called XSS-11, built to demonstrate satellite rendezvous maneuvers, which helped mission planners design a system that could work well in tandem. Its avionics are modeled after the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a successful mapping mission that is still sending back data. Previous gravity mapping missions, including the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment, also helped inform some of the project's goals, Zuber said.

Grail’s instruments are sensitive enough to measure changes of a few tenths of a micron every second, infinitesimally small differences that result from changing topographic features. But such small differences can also be caused by other phenomena, like solar wind and fuel sloshing around in the spacecraft’s tanks, for instance. Grail scientists had to account for that, too, so they are sending Grail A and B on a lengthy, circuitous course so they burn as much fuel as possible before entering orbit.

The probes will arrive at the moon as 2012 dawns, with one arriving Dec. 31 and one arriving Jan. 1. They will spend about two months synchronizing their orbits, and once everything is in alignment, the probes will spend three months making their gravity measurements. The whole mission will be done by next June, Zuber said. The spacecraft will crash into the lunar surface shortly thereafter — but not before sending photos back to schoolchildren.

Although the main mission is to map the moon’s gravity field, Grail will accomplish much more than that, Zuber said.

“It’s very hard to get a gravity mission funded. You definitely have to have the big picture in mind,” Zuber said. And for NASA, that can mean much more than just science.

New NASA Photos Show Footprints on the Moon

By Paul Adams

Footprints on the Moon NASA/LRO

In new photographs taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we can see the landing sites of some lunar craft, as well as the tracks left by those who flew in them. What creatures left these prints? A semi-dormant species known as the Earth astronaut; to be precise, Alan Bean and Pete Conrad, the crew of the Apollo 12 mission in 1969.

The windless moon preserves tracks in dust pretty nicely. In addition to this Apollo 12 shot (click to see it with labels), NASA has released images of the Apollo 14 and Apollo 17 landing sites.

[NASA]