Recently in Space Category

Here's an interesting story about plans to probe the edge of our solar system by Agence France-Presse. Excerpt:

WASHINGTON -- NASA on Sunday launched a probe into orbit high above earth to study the distant edge of the solar system where hot solar winds crash into the cold outer space. The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) was launched at 1745 GMT, according to images broadcast live by the US space agency. The small probe was deployed on a Pegasus rocket which dropped from the bay doors of a Lockheed L-1011 jet flying at 12,000 meters (40,000 feet) over the southern Pacific Ocean near the Marshall Islands. "The count went really smooth... and everything appears to be going well," NASA assistant launch manager Omar Baez said shortly after the launch.

HERE'S a YouTube clip from the PBS show "NOVAscienceNOW" that sheds some light on the mysteries of dark matter.

By Allison Lopez Inquirer MANILA, Philippines--They may not see a night sky filled with stars from their homes in the city, but an amazing simulation of one inside the Planetarium in Manila certainly made kids scream and clap their hands in wonder and perhaps, in appreciation. “Ang galing (It’s great)!” said a girl from the Industrial Valley school in Marikina City as she and her classmates stared at the bright dots moving slowly on the ceiling. “It’s an exact copy of the real night sky,” said Bel Pabunan, officer in charge of the Planetarium division. “Here in Metro Manila, the kids don’t see a night sky like that because of pollution and bright lights. But with the Goto Projector, we can simulate the night sky and project the planets and other deep space objects like satellites.” The construction of a planetarium was conceived by former National Museum director Godofredo Alcasid Sr. who proposed it to former First Lady Imelda Marcos in the early 1970s. The dome-shaped building with a 300-seating capacity on Padre Burgos Street in Ermita district, a few meters away from Rizal Park, took nine months to build and was formally inaugurated on Oct. 8, 1975. Still in operation Today, the aging structure may seem like one of the city’s abandoned buildings although the Planetarium is still very much operational. Pabunan said they often draw elementary and high school students to their four daily shows that take spectators on a trip out of this world. Called “Journey to the Solar System, an interplanetary adventure,” the show kicks off with a “sunset” -- which is when the lights dim and the wonderful night sky is shown. It ends with “sunrise,” when the lights brighten, complete with roosters crowing in the background. While the star projector, a large machine in the theater’s center, is the Planetarium’s “heart,” slide projectors complement the lecture by showing stark features of the heavenly bodies, including Mercury’s craters and Saturn’s rings. Aside from the major constellations that showed the hunter Orion’s belt, the young audience was also astonished when little by little, the planets grew larger until they seemed within arm’s reach. The lecture, added Pabunan, is updated with recent scientific advances such as Pluto being classified as a dwarf planet. Sometimes, however, the visual effects drown out the narrator’s hypnotic voice. According to Pabunan, they are currently developing another feature on “The Ring Planets” which are composed of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto. “Our real purpose is to disseminate information and complement textbooks in schools, but we present it in a way that we show their real features and colors,” said the senior museum researcher. Renovation of the 32-year-old structure, she revealed, was also long overdue and will begin before December. The first rehabilitation was done in 1991 after the inner dome that served as the screen collapsed due to old age and the effects of the earthquake the year before. “We’re due for a repair of the ceiling leakages and offices, plus some repainting. More than that, we want to change the exhibits because ever since, these have not been updated,” she said, adding that the Planetarium would remain open during the restoration which would take 150 days. P4-M renovation The rehabilitation would cost around P4 million, she said, excluding the updating of the exhibits. Outside the theater, indeed, were exhibits on comets, meteorites and space explorations that featured yellowing photographs. Aside from being outdated, they hardly generated interest among the visitors. Given the funds, Pabunan said they would create more interactive exhibits and modernize the current ones with interesting tidbits. Photo displays would be part of Phase 1 while hands-on exhibits would form part of Phase 2. But for schools and other institutions whose students are unable to go to the Planetarium, a mobile version will soon be coming their way. Pabunan said that although the 4x4 meter mobile Planetarium could only accommodate 30 people at a time, it may be a cheaper alternative to hiring buses and paying the entrance fee. Lectures on outer space would also be held simultaneously with the mobile Planetarium that has reached only as far as Isabela province. Pabunan, however, hoped that even students from Visayas and Mindanao would soon experience the wonders of the universe, even through the smaller version of the Planetarium. The Planetarium is open from Tuesday to Saturday with shows at 9-10 a.m., 10:30-11:30 a.m., 1:30-2:30 p.m. and 3:30-4:30 p.m. Admission fee is P30 for students and P50 for adults. Call +632 5277889 for more details.

By Associated Press TOKYO, Japan--Japan plans to follow up its first lunar satellite orbit this month by sending an unmanned probe to land on the moon by 2015, news reports said Saturday. The Space Activities Commission of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology decided Friday to aim to land a SELENE-2 probe on the moon's surface by 2015, Japanese major daily Asahi reported Saturday. Another daily Mainichi carried a similar report. The landing would be a follow-up to the launch on Sept. 14 of the Selenological and Engineering Explorer -- or SELENE -- probe for what officials call the largest mission to the moon since the US Apollo project. The 2015 moon probe -- expected to cost about 50 billion yen (US$437 million; €304 million) -- would consist of an unmanned lander, a rover to study the lunar surface and a small satellite to transfer data, according to the reports. Officials of the ministry and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, were not available for comment Saturday. The reports follow China's successful launch Wednesday of its first lunar probe -- a leap forward in the Asian space race. India is likely to join the rivalry soon, with plans to send its own lunar probe into space in April. Last January, JAXA gave up on a mission to land on the moon's surface. The Lunar-A probe, originally scheduled to lift off in 1995, was to plant two seismic sensors on the lunar surface, but development of the penetrator probes took so long that the mission's mother ship fell into disrepair. On Oct. 5, officials said the SELENE probe had gone into orbit round the moon. Its mission involves placing a main satellite in orbit at an altitude of about 100 kilometers (60 miles) and deploying the two smaller satellites in polar orbits. Researchers will use data gathered by the probes to study the moon's origin and evolution.

By Agence France-Presse SAN FRANCISCO, California--The most far-reaching search for extra-terrestrial life ever undertaken began Thursday as an array of radio telescopes that will trawl deepest space were activated in northern California. A total of 42 radio dishes started collecting scientific data from the furthest reaches of the universe, part of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in Hat Creek, around 270 miles (432 kilometers) north of San Francisco. The dishes will be part of an eventual army of telescopes numbering around 350 that are being deployed to help advance radio astronomy, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute and the University of California, Berkeley said in a statement. "The ATA's technical capabilities exponentially increase our ability to search for intelligent signals, and may lead to the discovery of thinking beings elsewhere in the universe," said astronomer Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. "It is the first major telescope in the world built specifically for undertaking a search for extraterrestrial intelligence," he added. Shostak has compared the project to the 1997 Hollywood film "Contact", in which Jodie Foster plays a scientist based at a remote monitoring station trying to decipher signals from a distant civilization. "The Allen Telescope Array will be like 200 million Jodie Fosters sitting out there listening," Shostak said. The project is named after Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Paul G. Allen, who donated funding in 2001. Allen joined scientists from SETI and Berkeley on Thursday to launch the telescopes, which are able to monitor radio waves emitted by objects in space, allowing scientists to create a picture of astronomical bodies at distances not possible by telescopes operating at other wavelengths. "They're like souped-up, old-style TV dishes that, gathered together using state-of-the-art electronics and computing, create a very powerful and flexible radio telescope," Allen told the Seattle Post Intelligencer. "SETI is the long-shot of long shots, but we can also use this for regular radio astronomy."

By Agence France-Presse BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan--Malaysia's first astronaut was to blast off on Wednesday on a space voyage seen as breaking new boundaries for the Asian nation and for space travel by Muslims. Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor was to lift off from the Baikonur cosmodrome at 1322 GMT in a Russian Soyuz rocket headed for the International Space Station (ISS) with Russian cosmonaut Yury Malenchenko and American Peggy Whitson. He was to spend about nine days on the ISS, arriving at the orbiting station near the end of the holy month of Ramadan and staying there for the Eid festival, when he will treat the long-term crew to festive Malaysian food. Malaysian officials have described the voyage as a national milestone as their country marks 50 years of independence. Muszaphar, a 35-year-old doctor who has undergone extensive astronaut training, has said he hopes to inspire Malaysians to further space achievements and that Malaysia should have its own spacecraft by 2020. He is due to conduct scientific experiments on behalf of Malaysia's Genome Institute, including tests on cancer cells to be transported on the Soyuz. He has also said he will try to observe the fasting rules of Ramadan and that he hopes to get closer to God and share his experiences with other Muslims. He is one of very few Muslims who have traveled to space. Malaysian religious authorities have prepared guidelines adapting religious rules to life on the ISS, which circles the Earth 16 times per calendar day, meaning that without adapting the rules he would be obliged to pray 80 times in 24 hours. The guidelines say that the astronaut need only pray five times a day and that the times should follow the location from which the spacecraft blasted off. The visit has been arranged as part of a billion-dollar purchase by Malaysia of Russian fighter jets, Russia being the operator of the Baikonur cosmodrome in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan. Russia has launched about 1,800 Soyuz rockets in various adaptations and technical staff were confident the launch would pass without a hitch. This month is the 50th anniversary of the start of modern space travel, which dates from the Soviet Union's launch on Oct. 4, 1957 of the first ever satellite, Sputnik 1, from Baikonur.

By Agence France-Presse TOKYO--Japan's first lunar probe successfully entered the moon's orbit on the most extensive mission there since the US Apollo program, officials said Friday. The Kaguya probe, which was launched last month on a domestically developed rocket, appears to be functioning normally, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said. "We have confirmed that the satellite's condition is normal," it added. The lunar orbiter, aiming to collect data for research on the moon's origin and evolution, will orbit 100 kilometers (60 miles) above the moon. Japan has been expanding its space operations and has set a goal of sending an astronaut to the moon by 2020 in the hopes of restoring pride in its troubled space program. It faced an embarrassing failure in November 2003, when it had to destroy a rocket carrying a spy satellite 10 minutes after lift-off because a booster failed to separate. The setback came just a month after neighboring China became the third country to carry out a manned space mission. China is pressing ahead with a program that includes space walks and dockings. With the lunar orbiter, Japan hopes to keep the country one step ahead of China and other regional rivals like India, which are also expected to launch similar probes in coming months.

By Mira Oberman Agence France-Presse CHICAGO--Snuggled into a huge belt of warm dust, an Earth-like planet appears to be forming some 424 light years away, scientists said Wednesday. At somewhere between 10 and 16 million years old, the planet's solar system is still in its "very young adolescence," but is at the perfect age for forming Earth-like planets, said lead researcher Carey Lisse of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory. The massive dust ring surrounding one of the system's two stars is smack in the middle of the system's "habitable zone" where water could one day exist on a rocky planet. These types of dust belts rarely form around sun-like stars and the presence of an outer ice belt makes it all the more likely that water, and subsequently life, could one day reach the planet's surface. And this belt is made up of rocky compounds similar to those which form our Earth's crust and metal sulfides similar to the material found in the Earth's core. "It's just the right stuff to be making an Earth," Lisse said in a telephone interview. "It's exciting to think that this is happening." Not that Lisse will be around to see much of it. The images captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope are about 424 years old, but that's barely a blink in the eye of the young planet. It will likely be about 100 million years before the planet is fully formed and -- if our planet is anything to go by -- about a billion years before the first signs of life such as algae appear, Lisse said. The evolution of complex organisms such as dinosaurs will probably take another couple billion years if the new planet follows a pattern similar to ours, he added. "We've got a long time to go," he said. But the images captured have helped Lisse and his colleagues understand a lot about how an Earth-like planet could form. While mathematical models can be created to extrapolate what will happen to this particular system, even more can be learned if astronomers continue to probe the universe for other Earth-like planets at various stages of development. "For me, this is all part of the big story of how we got here," Lisse said. The next step in studying this particular system will be to try to capture more images of it to see if gas-like planets, such as our Jupiter and Saturn, have already formed and to get a more detailed look at the contents of the dust and ice belts. Right now, the planet in the system known as HD113766 is growing as dust grains clump together to form rocks and these rocks collide to form larger bodies, some as big as our own moon. There are no plans yet to give it a name. Lisse's findings will be presented next week at the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences and published in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal.

AS we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch, which marked the dawn of the Space Age and the start of the Space Race, it seems fitting that several nations are eyeing a return to the moon. What's also interesting is that the US, which sent men to the moon in response to the shock of seeing the USSR take the lead in the Space Race with the launch of Sputnik, is practically conceding that China might beat it back to the moon. Here's an excerpt from the Discovery Channel article:

It took years for the United States to recover from the shock of being bested in space by the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, and the flight of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin just 42 months later, but the country recovered in time to clinch the grand prize in the Cold War space race by landing a man on the moon. This time, the United States may not be so lucky. "I personally believe that China will be back on the moon before we are," NASA administrator Michael Griffin said during a luncheon speech in Washington D.C., last week. "I think when that happens, Americans will not like it, but they will just have to not like it."

Here are video clips of digitized film footage of the Sputnik launch and the Space Race courtesy of TVNETWORKS.

HERE'S a great video from ReelNASA that shows the two solid rocket boosters that power the Space Shuttle. Follow their journey from launch to splashdown.