Advanced Russian Communications Satellite Lost in Rocket Failure - Video

An advanced Russian communications satellite was destroyed Thursday (May 15) when its Proton rocket booster failed minutes after liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The Express AM4R spacecraft, worth approximately $200 million and built by EADS Astrium, was supposed to begin a 15-year mission beaming radio, television, broadband Internet and telephone services across Russia and neighbouring countries.

But a few minutes after the 12,720-pound (5,770-kilogram) Express AM4R satellite launched from Baikonur, Russia's primary space base, its Proton rocket ran into a problem.

The failure occurred during the third stage of the Proton's ascent into orbit, according to a statement by the Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center, the Moscow-based manufacturer of the Proton launcher.

An announcer declared an emergency during a live webcast of the launch, and Khrunichev's statement also described the incident as an "emergency situation."

Khrunichev said experts were analyzing telemetry to determine the cause of the failure.

A report by Interfax said debris from the rocket may have fallen in the Altai or Amur regions of Russia's Far East.

Spewing a brilliant flame of blue exhaust, the 19-story Proton rocket lifted off at 2142 GMT (5:42 p.m. EDT) to start a nine-hour flight to deploy the powerful European-built Express AM4R telecommunications satellite for Russian government and commercial customers.

The launch was at 3:42 a.m. local time at Baikonur.

The hydrazine-fueled rocket disappeared from the view of a ground-based tracking camera a few minutes later, with no visible signs of any trouble.

But a problem occurred about 545 seconds, or about 9 minutes, after liftoff, according to a report by the semi-official Itar-Tass news agency.

Another report by the Interfax media service said the time of the failure was about 500 seconds after launch.

Both of the times reported for the anomaly occurred during the firing of the Proton rocket's third stage, which is powered by an RD-0213 main engine generating 131,000 pounds of thrust.

A four-nozzle vernier steering engine is also mounted on the third stage to keep the rocket pointed in the right direction.

The rocket's guidance, navigation and control system is a triple-redundant digital avionics package on the third stage.

NASA Maven: Looking for Mars' missing atmosphere - Video

NASA's MAVEN satellite will measure the process affecting the remaining atmosphere on Mars. 

These include incoming Solar Energetic Particles (SEPs), escape on a molecule-by-molecule basis (Jeans Escape), the effect of Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) and extreme solar ultraviolent radiation (EUVs). 

Credit: The Lunar and Planetary Institute and LASP

Ninety kilometers over our heads, the sky is glowing. During the day, the Sun turns the top of our sky into a sea of electrons.

They flow over one another without friction, creating plasma. Radio waves that hit these electrons bounce back to Earth, allowing transmissions to literally turns corners and circle the globe.

The free electron layer conducts current and responds to magnetic fields. As a result, during solar storms this part of the atmosphere lights up, creating undulating auroras.

While liberated, the electrons devise visual spectacles and technical challenges, but the atoms they leave behind must content themselves with being ions.

For this reason, this part of our atmosphere is known as the ionosphere. It's the largest part of our atmosphere, and does a commensurately big job.

It absorbs x-rays that would otherwise destroy life on Earth. If it weren't for our atmosphere, Earth might look a good deal more like Mars.


Why Mars doesn't look more like Earth is the subject of ongoing study. The loss of most of the atmosphere is believed to have been a major factor in Mars turning away from the path of water, warmth and habitability.

Uncovering where that atmosphere went, when and why is the mission of the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) satellite.

Scheduled to arrive in September, MAVEN carries with it two instruments designed to probe the remaining ionosphere for clues about the past four billion years, and what will happen going forward.

Our first direct glimpse at ions in the upper atmosphere will be courtesy of the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS). Mass spectrometers like NGIMS are ubiquitous in the world of physical science.

They function like the ionosphere itself: by bombarding specimens with electrons and creating ions. This process allows mass spectrometers to divine the contents of a liquid, solid or gas.

Small and durable, as well as extremely useful, mass spectrometers have been placed on dozens of satellites and rovers, including NASA's Mars rover Curiosity.

To find Mars' missing atmosphere, NGIMS will search for certain elements and molecules in the Martian ionosphere: helium, argon, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide.

It will note how often each occurs in its neutral and ionized states over 170 miles of sky. It will also count the abundance of heavy and light versions of atoms, also known as isotopes.

Counting isotopes may hold the key to atmospheric loss. The Earth, the Sun and Jupiter have balanced amounts of heavy and light argon isotopes.

These bodies have also retained their atmospheres over time. Mars has too much heavy argon and almost no atmosphere. The heavy argon left behind likely represents the original volume of the atmosphere; light argon reflects the lost air.

"The lighter atom in an isotope pair is able to leave the upper atmosphere just a bit faster than the heavier atom," said NGIMS principle investigator Paul Mahaffey.

"Our direct measurement of the vertical distribution of these isotope pairs will let us understand the physics of escape better and ultimately understand how much of the atmosphere has been lost in the past several billions of years."

22kg IUVS instrument. Credit: LASP, Colorado

As NGIMS tries to catch light argon in the act of leaving the planet, it will also watch space weather and dust storms change the composition of the atmosphere: mixing up molecules near the bottom of the ionosphere and sending others on one-way trips into deep space.

While NGIMS picks out particles one by one, the UltraViolet Spectrograph (IUVS) will be making sweeping, planetary-wide maps.

"IUVS and NGIMS are backups for each other," said IUVS Principle investigator Nick Schneider, "They both measure the composition & structure of the atmosphere.

Nick Schneider

And we're complementary in measuring different isotopes. IUVS measures the [ratio of heavy to light hydrogen] and NGIMS measures isotopes of heavier elements."

As the most powerful ultraviolent spectrograph to ever be sent to another planet, IUVS is exquisitely sensitive to composition and temperature variations of entire upper atmosphere.

The temperature and composition of Mars' atmosphere varies dramatically, not only by altitude, but also by orbit.

At perihelion, when Mars is closest to the Sun, it is 40 million miles closer than at aphelion, when it is farthest away.

The difference in distance means that much more of the Sun's energy will be reaching Mars during certain times of year. As a result, we expect ultraviolet readings at perihelion and aphelion to vary widely.

"But we anticipate seeing changes from other causes too: solar storms like flares and Coronal Mass Ejections (CME's), and dust storms on Mars too," said Schneider.

"These each have the potential to control atmospheric escape on Mars, so we'll be watching them all."

NGIMS instrument, just prior to integration with into the MAVEN spacecraft. Credit: NASA/Goddard

Hubble images reveal Neptune's 'lost' inner moon

Naiad is the encircled point of light just to the left of Neptune.

Neptune's tiny, innermost moon, Naiad, has now been seen for the first time since it was discovered by Voyager's cameras in 1989.

Dr. Mark Showalter, a senior research scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, announced the result today in Denver, Colorado, at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society.

He and collaborators Dr. Jack Lissauer of the NASA Ames Research Center, Dr. Imke de Pater of UC Berkeley, and Robert French of the SETI Institute, also released a dramatic new image of Neptune's puzzling rings and ring-arcs, which were first imaged by Voyager.

Mark Showalter

"Naiad has been an elusive target ever since Voyager left the Neptune system," said Dr. Showalter. From Earth, Neptune is 2 million times brighter than Naiad, andthetwo are separated by only one arcsecond.

"This is equivalent to the width of a human hair from 50 feet away," noted collaborator Lissauer. The team of astronomers needed to develop new techniques to suppress Neptune's glare.

Naiad was finally revealed, moving across a sequence of eight images taken during December 2004.

Strangely, Naiad appears to have veered significantly off course. The astronomers are puzzled by the fact that Naiad is now far ahead of its predicted orbital position.

They wonder whether gravitational interactions with one of Neptune's other moons may have caused it to speed up, although the details remain mysterious.

Further observations will be needed in order to understand Naiad's motion.

In addition to its moons, Neptune hosts a family faint rings and ring-arcs. The arcs have been changing slowly in the years since their discovery.

Whereas Voyager saw a set of four closely-spaced arcs, the leading two arcs have been fading away, and are completely absent from the newest images.

The trailing arcs, however, are essentially unchanged. This system of arcs is probably confined by the gravitational effects of the nearby moon Galatea, but the reason for the long-term changes is unknown.

Dr. de Pater has also been following the ongoing evolution of the arcs from the 10-meter W. M. Keck telescope in Hawaii.

NASA Deep Impact: Contact With Comet-Hunting Spacecraft Lost

An artist's conception show's a close-up look at NASA's comet-hunting Deep Impact spacecraft.

Credit: Nasa

NASA's veteran Deep Impact probe may have chased its last comet.

The spacecraft's handlers lost contact with Deep Impact — which slammed an impactor into Comet Tempel 1 in 2005, made a close flyby of Comet Hartley 2 in 2010 and recently observed ISON, a "comet of the century" candidate — sometime between Aug. 11 and Aug. 14, mission team members announced last Tuesday (Sept. 3).

"The last communication was on August 8. After considerable effort, the team on August 30 determined the cause of the problem," principal investigator Mike A'Hearn of the University of Maryland wrote in a brief mission update Tuesday.

"The team is now trying to determine how best to try to recover communication."



The issue stems from a software glitch that reset Deep Impact's computer, A'Hearn told reporters at prestigious scientific journal Nature.

Things are serious, he added: Deep Impact is apparently spinning out of control after recent attempts to put the probe into hibernation mode were unsuccessful.

It's unclear how much time the mission team has to bring Deep Impact back in line. Depending on how the probe's solar panels are oriented, Deep Impact's batteries could run out of juice in a matter of days or keep going for several months.

"How long we have depends on the state the spacecraft is in, and we don't yet know that," A'Hearn told reporters. "Could be that it is too late already — could be we have another month or more."

Deep Impact launched in January 2005 on a mission to rendezvous with Comet Tempel 1. In July of that year, the spacecraft sucessfully smashed an impactor into Tempel 1, allowing scientists to study the icy object's composition.

NASA WISE Finds Lost Asteroid Family Members

This artist's conception shows how families of asteroids are created.

Over the history of our solar system, catastrophic collisions between asteroids located in the belt between Mars and Jupiter have formed families of objects on similar orbits around the sun. 

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have led to a new and improved family tree for asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Astronomers used millions of infrared snapshots from the asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE all-sky survey, called NEOWISE, to identify 28 new asteroid families.

The snapshots also helped place thousands of previously hidden and uncategorized asteroids into families for the first time.

The findings are a critical step in understanding the origins of asteroid families, and the collisions thought to have created these rocky clans.

"NEOWISE has given us the data for a much more detailed look at the evolution of asteroids throughout the solar system," said Lindley Johnson, the program executive for the Near-Earth Object Observation Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

"This will help us trace the NEOs back to their sources and understand how some of them have migrated to orbits hazardous to the Earth."

The main asteroid belt is a major source of near-Earth objects (NEOs), which are those asteroids and comets that come within 28 million miles (45 million kilometers) of Earth's path around the sun.

Some near-Earth objects start out in stable orbits in the main asteroid belt, until a collision or gravitational disturbance flings them inward like flippers in a game of pinball.

The NEOWISE team looked at about 120,000 main belt asteroids out of the approximately 600,000 known.

They found that about 38,000 of these objects, roughly one third of the observed population, could be assigned to 76 families, 28 of which are new. In addition, some asteroids thought to belong to a particular family were reclassified.

NASA LRO Searches Lunar Landscape for Lost Moon Probes

The moon is the final resting ground for scads of landed and crashed spacecraft, many of which have been pinpointed recently by sleuthing scientists.

Using observations by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, for example, researchers have located and imaged Apollo moon landing leftovers, old Soviet-era spacecraft and, more recently, the impact locales of NASA’s twin Grail spacecraft that were deliberately driven into a mountain near the moon’s north pole.

But the search is ongoing to find the exact location of several pioneering moon landers.

"We are still looking for [the Soviet Union’s] Luna 9 and 13," said Jeff Plescia, a space scientist at the The Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.

"Those were the small 'beach ball' shaped spacecraft," Plescia told reporters "The beach ball might be hard to find, but it made a descent on a larger vehicle which then popped the beach ball off."

Plescia said he had assumed that it would be possible to find the landing sites of Luna 9 and 13 by spotting albedo marks — a change in the lunar surface brightness made by their descent engines.

Plescia is joined in the hunt by Mark Robinson of Arizona State University, principal investigator for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC.

"We’ve both looked, but no luck so far." Plescia said.

Yet another search involves the impact sites of Apollo lunar module ascent stages, hardware discarded once moonwalking crews were snug within their respective command modules.

Ascent stages were intentionally impacted into the surface as part of the Apollo Passive Seismic Experiment that studied the propagation of seismic waves through the moon to yield a detailed look at the body's internal structure.

"Given that we have found the impact sites from Grail, you would think we could find those craters, but, again, no luck so far," Plescia said.

These, like the craters made by the third stage of NASA's Saturn V moon rocket, "are important to locate to understand how large a crater was made and to have precise coordinates so that the old Apollo era crustal velocity measurements can be reanalyzed," he said.