India's Mars mission Q&A: what will Mangalyaan discover?

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India becomes fourth nation to celebrate reaching Mars – and the first to manage it on first attempt

India's Mars Orbiter Mission spacecraft has shared its first images of Mars after entering the red planet's orbit on its very first attempt. The country's space agency became the fourth to successfully put a satellite in orbit around Mars – and the first to manage it on its first try. Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for a national day of celebration as it began circling Mars. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) later uploaded a picture (above) of the planet on its Mars Orbiter twitter account with the caption: "The view is nice up here." The image, which was taken from a height of 7,300km, was printed out and presented to Prime Minister Modi, who had previously joked that the mission's budget was lower than the sci-fi film Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock. The Mars Orbiter Mission – known as Mangalyaanor or Mom – has been lauded for its relatively low price tag – just £45m, less than the cost of a Premier League footballer. The satellite will study the Martian atmosphere from orbit and will not land on the surface of the planet, says the Daily Telegraph. The Mars Orbiter Mission joins the US's Maven satellite in orbit around Mars. Maven, which is also studying the atmosphere, reached the red planet on Monday. Nasa's Curiosity Rover is also in residence on the Martian surface – and still active. Nasa's PR team greeted the fellow traveller with a tweet from Curiosity's 'personal' Twitter account. Namaste, @MarsOrbiter! Congratulations to @ISRO and India's first interplanetary mission upon achieving Mars orbit. — Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) September 24, 2014 ISRO replied in kind: "Howdy @MarsCuriosity? Keep in touch. I'll be around." The BBC says there was an "atmosphere of excitement and tension" early on Wednesday at ISRO's mission centre in Bangalore where the scientists "many of them women and several of them young" were tracking the craft. The first breakthrough was when the satellite fired up its liquid engine to start entering orbit. There followed an "agonising" 20 minutes when Mangalyaan passed behind Mars and was therefore out of radio contact. When it returned and was confirmed to have begun an elliptical orbit around the planet, "the scientists all rose as one, cheered, clapped, hugged each other and exchanged high fives". With the odds "stacked against us," said Modi, "we have navigated our craft through a route known to very few". He added that just as the nation celebrates its cricketing victories, so it should celebrate this "historic occasion". Only the US, Russia and Europe have successfully sent missions to Mars. Japan and China have attempted to do so but failed. Here are five key questions about the historic mission: Why is it so significant? India's space programme began 44 years ago, but this is the first time it has sent a mission "to study a celestial body outside Earth's sphere of influence", explains the Times of India. In reaching the red planet, India's space agency becomes the fourth in the world after those of the US, Russia and Europe to undertake a successful Mars mission. Some observers are viewing Mom "as the latest salvo in a burgeoning space race between the Asian powers of India, China, Japan, South Korea and others", says the BBC. What exactly is the Mars Orbiter?  The Orbiter, which is also known by the informal name of Mangalyaan (Mars-craft), is a 1,337 kilogram satellite "about the size of a small car", says Indian website Zee News. The Mom carries five scientific instruments weighing about 15 kilograms. They include a sensor that will measure the levels of methane in the Martian atmosphere, a colour camera and a thermal infrared imaging spectrometer to gauge the temperature of the planet's surface. How long did it take to reach Mars? The Mom has completed a 300-day marathon to make the 200-million-kilometre journey to Mars. That included the 20-25 days it spent in the Earth's orbit "building up the necessary velocity to break free from our planet's gravitational pull", explains Zee. What scientific evidence is the MOM hoping to collect? The search for methane in the Martian atmosphere is probably the most significant part of the Mom mission. Martian methane has been detected by sensors on Earth, but NASA's robotic rover Curiosity has failed to find the gas during its time on the planet. The Indian spacecraft will also examine the rate of loss of atmospheric gases to outer space, says the BBC. "This could provide insights into the planet's history; billions of years ago, the envelope of gases around Mars is thought to have been more substantial." How much has the mission cost? The Mom, which is seen as a demonstration of India's low-cost space technology, is costing an estimated £45m. That's "a fraction of foreign equivalents", says Zee. But the budget price hasn't stopped critics asking if a country with "one of the highest rankings for childhood malnutrition in the world" should be involved in the space race, says the BBC. Others question the scientific purpose of the mission. A spokesman for the Delhi Science Forum, said: "This is a highly suboptimal mission with limited scientific objectives". Meanwhile, the economist-activist Jean Dreze, said the mission "seems to be part of the Indian elite's delusional quest for superpower status". For further concise, balanced comment and analysis on the week's news, try The Week magazine. Subscribe today and get 6 issues completely free. Source: The Week UK

Read More........→September 26, 2014

Kepler-37 Planetary System

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered a new planetary system that is home to the smallest planet yet found around a star like our sun, approximately 210 light-years away in the constellation Lyra. The line up compares artist's concepts of the planets in the Kepler-37 system to the moon and planets in the solar system. The smallest planet, Kepler-37b, is slightly larger than our moon, measuring about one-third the size of Earth. Kepler-37c, the second planet, is slightly smaller than Venus, measuring almost three-quarters the size of Earth. Kepler-37d, the third planet, is twice the size of Earth. A "year" on these planets is very short. Kepler-37b orbits its host star every 13 days at less than one-third the distance Mercury is to the sun. The other two planets, Kepler-37c and Kepler-37d, orbit their star every 21 and 40 days. All three planets have orbits lying less than the distance Mercury is to the sun, suggesting that they are very hot, inhospitable worlds. Illustration credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech, Note: For more information, see PIA16693: A Tiny Planet (Artist's Concept) and NASA's Kepler Mission Discovers Tiny Planet System.Source: Minex

Read More........→March 03, 2013

Nasa's Sampex Mission: A Space Weather Warrior

Image above: An artist's rendition of the Solar, Anomalous, and Magnetospheric Particle Explorer or SAMPEX. Credit: NASA.

NASA's very first small explorer, the Solar, Anomalous, and Magnetospheric Particle Explorer or SAMPEX, was launched July 3, 1992 to study the zoo of particles and cosmic rays surrounding Earth. Surviving much longer than its expected mission of three years and providing invaluable observations for those who study space weather, the SAMPEX mission is now almost over. In early November, the spacecraft's orbit will decay enough that it will re-enter Earth's atmosphere, burning up completely on re-entry. When SAMPEX launched, the sun was just finishing the peak of its 11-year solar cycle and beginning to move toward solar minimum. Scientists were eager to watch what happened in near-Earth space in those first few years, as eruptions on the sun shot out energy and solar material and eventually tapered down into a period of quiet. However, those same effects were also predicted to lead to the spacecraft's demise. As the sun once again ramped up to solar maximum around 2000, the sun's output would create enough atmospheric drag that SAMPEX was expected to tumble out of its stable orbit. Contrary to such predictions, SAMPEX is still in orbit having survived that maximum and continuing in orbit long enough to see the sun move toward another solar max, currently predicted for 2013. But time is running out. As the atmosphere near Earth heats and swells in response to the sun's activity, the expansion of the uppermost atmosphere has encased SAMPEX, slowing it down. Soon the 20-year-old spacecraft will succumb to the very space weather it has helped scientists to study. Some time at the end of 2012, the orbit of the five-by-three-foot craft will spiral far enough in that SAMPEX will re-enter Earth's atmosphere, burning up completely and disappearing forever. "SAMPEX was launched on a shoe string budget," says Shri Kanekal, a space weather scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Weather Center in Greenbelt, Md. who has been involved with SAMPEX research since its launch. "It was proposed as a minimum one-year mission with a goal of three years, but it lasted for an unexpectedly long time. It has provided 20 years of high quality data, used by nearly everyone who studies near-Earth space." In its two decades, SAMPEX provided one of the main sources of data on how the radiation environment around Earth changed over time, waxing and waning in response to incoming particles from the sun and galaxy.

Image above: SAMPEX data have provided some of the most useful observations of the Van Allen Belts -- two rings of radiation around Earth. This SAMPEX data shows the belts during what's known as the Halloween Storms in October 2003, a time when the radiation belts around Earth swelled so much that they merged into a single ring. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center . 

SAMPEX confirmed earlier theories that cosmic rays streaming in from outer space were being trapped in Earth's own magnetic environment, the magnetosphere, and it helped pinpoint the location where they gathered in a belt around Earth. Another area of research has been to tease out the composition of various particle populations from high-speed and high-energy particles from the sun known as solar energetic particles, to the host of electrons in Earth's middle atmosphere. Also, SAMPEX has been one of our best eyes on the radiation belts – two giant donuts of radiation surrounding Earth that can affect satellites in orbit during their occasional bouts of swelling. Indeed, scientists are eager for SAMPEX data still, eking out the last weeks of observation time to compare with early data from the Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) mission that launched in August, 2012. When those who study the radiation belts realized how imminent was the demise of SAMPEX, they adjusted the schedule to turn on a SAMPEX-compatible instrument aboard RBSP, an instrument called Relativistic Electron Proton Telescope (REPT), earlier than planned. One of the space phenomena that SAMPEX has helped categorize is something called microbursts, an intense but short lived phase during which electrons drop out of the radiation belts. From its viewpoint under the radiation belts, SAMPEX can still record such microbursts. As part of RBSP, on the other hand, REPT can look at the electron population while traveling through the radiation belts proper. In combination, the data may help show what occurrences in the radiation belts correlate to the rain of electrons, the microbursts. "Since one of the main goals of RBSP is to understand why and how electrons rain down out of the radiation belts, this will be important science," says Kanekal. "It's made all the more impressive that we can do this kind of research despite the fact that SAMPEX's science mission officially ended in 2004." Although the spacecraft has remained in orbit, the official SAMPEX science mission ended in June 2004. New data remained available, however, thanks to The Aerospace Corporation of El Segundo, Calif., which continued to fund costs to download data, and to Bowie State University in Bowie, Md., which operated the spacecraft to maintain the download process as an educational tool for its students. Kanekal was also instrumental in getting a grant to process all the data from 2004 to 2012, so it will be usable by the science community. NASA's first small explorer had an impressive run, far outliving its planned three-year mission. It provided data crucial to understanding how the space around Earth responds to space weather from the sun and will continue to do so up until the moment it re-enters Earth's atmosphere, disappearing forever. NASA's SAMPEX Mission: http://science.nasa.gov/missions/sampex/, The SAMPEX Data Center: http://www.srl.caltech.edu/sampex/DataCenter/, Images (mentioned), Text, Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / Karen C. Fox., Greetings, Source: Orbiter.ch Space News

Read More........→November 14, 2012

Lunar orbiter captures huge crater on moon

In this handout picture released late November 14, 2008, shows the surface of the moon taken by Moon Impact Probe shortly before landing after separation from India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft.

Hindustan Times, London, ANI: NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured shots of a massive Aristarchus crater on moon, which is even visible to the naked eye. The space probe flew over the moon at just 16.2 miles up to take shots of the crater that was created when a huge comet or asteroid slammed into a plateau on the surface. Sixteen miles up is just over twice the height that jets fly on Earth. The cliffs of the Aristarchus crater are two miles high twice as deep as the Grand Canyon with layers of minerals exposed by the huge impact tumbling into the crater below, the Daily Mail reported. The archaeology of the mammoth crater almost resembles a Strip Mine on earth cutting deep into the layers of minerals on the moon. The planners of Apollo missions had placed Aristarchus crater high on their list of targets for human exploration on the moon. Aristarchus crater is situated on the southeast edge of the Aristarchus Plateau. The floor of Aristarchus crater provides explorers a unique opportunity to study a great variety of lunar rocks and geologic processes, perhaps including how lunar granite forms.Source: Hindustan Times

Read More........→October 09, 2012

Russian moonshot dream revived

Russia’s Energia Space Corporation has proposed a joint project with Kazakhstan and Ukraine to launch missions to the Moon. It says it could contribute its heavy rocket that launched the Soviet Buran space shuttle. Ukraine could contribute side boosters for this rocket, and Kazakhstan, facilities at its Baikonur spaceport.The proposed system would lift about 70 tons to low Earth orbit. Tags: Energia corporation , Sci-Tech, News, Russia, World, spacecraft, Читать далее, Source: Voice of Russia.

Read More........→October 02, 2012