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Saturday, December 31, 2011
NASA GRAIL-A Goes into Moon Orbit

The first of two gravity-mapping NASA spacecraft, GRAIL-A, entered into orbit around the moon December 31st with a second, GRAIL-B, coming into a similar orbit on New Year's Day 2012 to begin an extensive mapping of the Moon's gravity field with extensive detail.

 

The data from the mission will help scientists better understand the formation of the Moon, theorized to have occurred from a crash of a Mars-like planet into Earth 4.5 billion years ago.

More than 100 scientific missions have targeted the moon since 1959.

India is working towards realizing its dream - to create a re-usable satellite launch vehicle. An engineering model of what scientists at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) call the re-usable launch vehicle, is currently housed at a secure and secret facility in Kerala, India. More tests will occur in 2012.

In parallel, India has more realistic and currently working a program for human spaceflights in 2016 with non-reusable conventional spacecraft orbital vehicle launched by non-reusable launcher GSLV. An astronaut training facility is begin created in Bangalore. The initial two-member "Gaganaut" space crew will spend a week in space, if all goes as now planned.

India's space agency is planning to launch its first robotic mission to land on the Moon in 2013. Chandrayaan-2, which literally means the second moon vehicle in the Sanskrit language, will be a collaboration with Russia. Scientists will utilize the rover to assess the presence of water, oxygen and salt - all necessary of humans are to eventually build longer-term presence on the Moon.

The Satish Dhawan Space Center on the island north of Chennai, India will serve as the launch facility for the Chandrayaan-2 Moon mission as well as the planned 2016 human orbital mission launch site. But according to a post at Parabolic Arc, the human space effort by India may be delayed.

NASA recently announced February 7, 2012, as the new target launch date for the upcoming mission to visit the International Space Station (ISS). In addition, NASA officially confirmed that SpaceX will be allowed to complete the objectives of COTS 2 and COTS 3 in a single mission....

The COTS 2 and COTS 3 objectives of the flight include approach, berthing with the ISS, astronauts opening Dragon and unloading cargo, and finally astronauts closing the spacecraft and sending it back to Earth for recovery from the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California.

The SpaceX Falcon-9 Dragon mission marks a major milestone in American spaceflight. While the first missions to the ISS will be to transport cargo, both Falcon 9 and Dragon were designed to ultimately transport astronauts - expected by mid-decade.

The Year of Space, as the Russian government hailed the coming of 2011, ended up to be the most disastrous 12 months for the Russian space industry in the post-Soviet era.

A total of four missions which left their launch pads during 2011 either never made it into space (Progress M-12M, Meridian No. 5) or ended up in wrong orbits (Geo-IK-2, Ekspress-AM4). To top it off, Russia's loudly advertised return to planetary exploration after a 15-year hiatus ended in a high-profile fiasco, when the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft got stranded in low Earth orbit almost immediately after its launch on November 9, 2011.

However, all these failures coincided with an extremely hectic launch rate, almost matching that of two other leading space nations -- US and China -- combined! Despite setbacks, Russia has succeeded in bolstering or reviving space capabilities that the nation had lacked for many years, including the launch of a major astrophysics observatory -- Spektr-R; the return to geostationary orbit with a weather satellite Elektro-L; the re-introduction of a data-relay network with Luch-5A and the beginning of flight testing of an upgraded navigation satellite -- GLONASS-K.

Last but not least, the Soyuz rocket received a brand-new launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana, which increased the capabilities of the veteran launch vehicle family in delivering commercial payloads into space.

This year, 2011, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered a new region between our solar system and interstellar space. Data obtained from Voyager over the last year reveal this new region to be a kind of cosmic purgatory. In it, the wind of charged particles streaming out from our sun has calmed, our solar system's magnetic field is piled up, and higher-energy particles from inside our solar system appear to be leaking out into interstellar space.

Although Voyager 1 is about 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from the sun, it is not yet in interstellar space. In the latest data, the direction of the magnetic field lines has not changed, indicating Voyager is still within the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles the sun blows around itself. The data do not reveal exactly when Voyager 1 will make it past the edge of the solar atmosphere into interstellar space, but suggest it will be in a few months to a few years, perhaps 2012.

Both the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft have adequate electrical power and attitude control propellant to continue operating until around 2025, after which there may not be available electrical power to support science instrument operation. At that time, science data return and spacecraft operations will cease. More from VOA.
 

Check out a pretty parade of planets this month. Venus at dusk, Jupiter overhead, Mars before midnight, Saturn near sunrise....