Mars Curiosity Rover successfully launched

On Saturday at 10:02 a.m. EST an Atlas V rocket carrying its precious cargo, the Mars Science Laboratory and Curiosity rover, took off successfully from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral. A statement from NASA Project Manager Peter Theisinger confirmed that all had gone according to plan. "The spacecraft is in communication, thermally stable and power positive," he said. "We're on our way to Mars".

Through Friday and into Saturday morning meteorologists had predicated a 70 percent chance of suitable launch conditions, before a one-hour 43-minute launch window was finalized.

A series of updates from the Curiosity rover's official twitter feeddocumented the build-up to the launch, followed by take off and first stages of its 352-million-mile trip to the red planet that will take more than eight months. "It's a new dawn, it's a new day, and I'm feeeeelin' good" was the message (paraphrasing Nina Simone) as MSL reported a clean bill of health back to NASA after communications had been established six minutes into the mission.

But it wasn't all plain sailing during the mission's first hour, with the Register reporting intermittent interruptions in the reception of MSL telemetry, though the problem seemed to be resolved promptly and with no mission-critical systems affected.

The launch technology that saw Curiosity on its way is an expendable system with two distinct stages. The first, to achieve Earth orbit, utilizes the kerosene and liquid oxygen RD-180 engine of the Atlas V rocket delivering 850,000 pounds of thrust, supplemented by four solid rocket boosters each delivering an additional thrust of 306,000 pounds. After separation from the main rocket, the Centaur-3 upper stage carries the payload out of Earth orbit with the assistance of its liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen RL-10 engine providing another 22,3000 pounds of thrust. Centaur then sets its cargo on course, in this case Gale Crater, Mars, before leaving the payload to its interplanetary cruise.

The Atlas and Centaur systems have been in use, albeit with countless iterative improvements, since the 1950s and 60s and there's something almost poignant that such reliant, tried and tested technology should carry the bleeding edge Curiosity - "the world's most advanced scientific laboratory" according to NASA Administrator, Charles Bolden - into space.

We've discussed the MSL mission in some detail here at Gizmag, but to recap, the purpose of the $2.5 billion mission is, in the words of Project Scientist John Grotzinger at a post-launch briefing, to look for "ancient habitable environments." After a sky-crane enabled touchdown (MSL is too heavy to rely on airbags), Curiosity will begin its two-Earth-year/one-Mars-year mission of drilling and gathering Martian rocks and soils, and analysing them with its suite of ten instruments. Its goal is to seek evidence of life-favoring conditions in the distant past.

All being well, the Curiosity rover will touch down on August 6, 2012. "I think this mission will be a great one", said Grotzinger, "it is an important next step in NASA's overall goal to address the issue of life in the universe." Keep an eye on the Gizmag Mars tag for updates on the Curiosity rover and subsequent Mars missions such as MAVEN in the coming months. Perhaps it won't be too long now before you're reading concrete plans for a manned mission to Mars.

Source: NASA Science News.

Launch your own nanosatellites into space for a few hundred bucks

Do you wanna buy a satellite? No, really - do you? Well, Zac Manchester would like to sell you one. Not only that, but he claims that the thing could be built and launched into orbit for just a few hundred dollars. For that price, however, you're not going to be getting a big satellite. Manchester's Sprite spacecraft are actually about the size of a couple of postage stamps, but they have tiny versions of all the basic equipment that the big ones have.

Zac is a graduate student in Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, and was part of the team that originally designed the Sprites for use as space probes - the idea being that they could travel on solar winds, like cosmic dust, traveling deep into space without the need for fuel. Three of the one-square-inch spacecraft were delivered to the International Space Station this May, to see how they how well they could stand up to the rigors of outer space. They are currently still mounted on the outside of the station, and are due to be brought back to Earth in a couple of years.

Each Sprite incorporates a Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontroller, a radio transceiver, solar cells, capacitors and antenna. In their current incarnation, they can't do much more than transmit simple bits of data, but Manchester says that future versions could easily include sensors such as thermometers or cameras.

A small box-like satellite - or CubeSat - would be used to carry the Sprites into low-altitude orbit. It could contain hundreds or even thousands of spring-loaded Sprites, which would shoot out as soon as the CubeSat's lid was opened from ground control via a radio signal.

Once in orbit, the Sprites' transmitted radio signals would be monitored by a network of amateur ground-based tracking stations. The aim would be to demonstrate their communications capabilities, while also observing how long they remained in orbit, and how well they were able to perform in outer space. They should all burn up when they re-enter the earth's atmosphere, within a few days or weeks of their release.

Manchester is now raising funds for the demonstration project via the Kickstarter fund-raising website. Depending on how much money is raised, his team will either have to wait for a spot on one of several free launch programs, or be able to purchase a commercial launch of their own. If they are able to purchase a launch, he is hoping for the Sprites to be in orbit by early 2013.

Yes, but how do you get to call one of them your own? By contributing US$300 via Kickstarter, that's how. Such a donation will allow you to name one of the Sprites, specify the four-character message that it will transmit (such as your initials), and track it on the KickSat website. A donation of $1,000 or more will put an actual physical Sprite in your hands, and provide you with the source code and programming tools to write its custom flight code. Should you wish to set up your own ground station, you will also be instructed on how to receive and interpret its radio signal.

Groups are also encouraged to sponsor fleets of Sprites, each one of which will bear that group's logo on its lilliputian surface.

Initiative challenges young minds to design Space Station science experiment

YouTube and Lenovo have joined forces to launch a global initiative that challenges youngsters to design a science experiment which can be performed in space. Two winning entries chosen by a panel of scientists, astronauts and educators - including A Brief History of Time author professor Stephen Hawking - will have their experiments conducted by astronauts aboard the International Space Station and live streamed on YouTube for the world to see.

The YouTube Space Lab competition is now open to 14 to 18 year-old students around the globe, who are being asked to submit a two minute YouTube video outlining their experimental proposal to the Space Labvideo channel. Each video presentation must include the scientific question that the entrant wants answered, an educated guess at what that answer might be, an outline of the method used to conduct the experiment and the expected results. Entries can be individual or team efforts, but the latter are restricted to groups of three.

Three years of planning

The idea for the challenge came from a Google brainstorming session three years ago. To help make it a reality, YouTube and Lenovo have partnered with private space exploration company Space Adventures, and space agencies including NASA, the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Students have until December 7, 2011 to get their proposals uploaded, after which the judges will deliberate before announcing six regional finalists. These lucky youngsters will gather in Washington, D.C. next March, where they will be treated to a Lenovo IdeaPad laptop, experience aZero-G flight and awarded other prizes. One winner from the 14-16 age group and another from ages 17-18 will then get the chance to have their experiments undertaken 250 miles above the Earth.

Global winners will also get to choose a once-in-a-lifetime space experience as a prize. The lucky students can either take a tour of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency facilities and then watch their experiment blast off from Tanegashima Island, Japan, in a rocket bound for the International Space Station some time during the northern summer of 2012, or receive astronaut training (upon reaching the age of 18) at the training center for Russian cosmonauts in Star City, Russia.

NASA’s Solar Shield to mitigate damage to power grid from severe solar storms

The solar storms that cause the stunning aurora borealis and aurora australis (or northern and southern polar lights) also have the potential to knock out telecommunications equipment and navigational systems and cause blackouts of electrical grids. With the frequency of the sun’s flares following an 11-year cycle of solar activity and the next solar maximum expected around 2013, scientists are bracing for an overdue, once-in-100 year event that could cause widespread power blackouts and cripple electricity grids around the world. It sounds like an insurmountable problem but a new NASA project called “Solar Shield” is working to develop a forecasting system that can mitigate the impacts of such events and keep the electrons flowing.

In 1859 the most powerful solar storm in recorded history, known as the Solar Superstorm, or the Carrington Event, caused telegraph systems all over Europe and North America to fail. Today, the effects of severe solar storms are much more noticeable with the total length of high-voltage power lines crisscrossing North America increasing nearly tenfold since the 1950s. This has turned power grids into giant antennas for the geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) – the ground level manifestation of space weather that can overload circuits, trip breakers, and in extreme cases melt the windings of heavy-duty transformers, causing permanent damage.

Just such an event occurred in Quebec on March 13, 1989, when a geomagnetic storm much less severs than the Carrington Event knocked out power across the entire province for more than nine hours. In addition to Quebec, the storm damaged transformers in New Jersey and Great Britain and caused more than 200 power anomalies across the continental U.S.

Although many utility companies have taken steps to reinforce their grids, with demand for power growing faster than the grids themselves modern networks are stressed to the limit and vulnerable to the effects of a severe geomagnetic storms. With the possibility of long-lasting large scale blackouts a real possibility due to widespread transformer damage the Solar Shield project leader Antti Pulkkinen believes the project can “zero in on specific transformers and predict which of them are going to be hit hardest by a severe space weather event.”
How it works

When a massive burst of solar wind, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), is detected rising from the sun’s surface and headed for Earth, images from SOHO and NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft would allow a 3D model of the CME to be created and predict when it will arrive. While the CME is making its way to Earth – a trip that usually takes 24 to 48 hours (although the Carrington Event CME took just 18 hours as an earlier CME had cleared the way) – the Solar Shield team would prepare to calculate ground currents.

About 30 minutes before impact the CME would sweep past ACE, a spacecraft stationed 1.5 million km upstream from Earth. Sensors aboard ACE would make in situ measurements of the CME’s speed, density and magnetic field and transmit this data to the Solar Shield team at the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

"We quickly feed the data into CCMC computers," says Pulkkinen. "Our models predict fields and currents in Earth's upper atmosphere and propagate these currents down to the ground." With less than 30 minutes to go, Solar Shield can issue an alert to utilities with detailed information about GICs.

Solar Shield is still only experimental and hasn’t yet been field-tested during a severe geomagnetic storm. A few utility companies have installed current monitors at key locations in the power grid to help the team check their predictions but, with more data allowing the team to more quickly test and improve the system, they are hoping more power companies join the effort. A few good solar storms would help too with the sun being mostly quiet during the past year – something like the calm before the storm.