Russian Luna-25 Mission to the Moon - Target Sample retrieval

The Luna-25 program will be carried out mostly as part of the Russian Federal Space Program for 2016-2025.

The Luna-25 exploration mission will cost tens of billions of rubles, an official from Russian Federal Space Agency said Friday.

"Let's say, we are talking tens of billions of rubles because it's a resource-heavy project, complex in terms of technical feasibility," Roscosmos' strategic planning chief Yuri Makarov said at a press conference in Moscow.

Russia will go back to the moon by the end of the next decade with the moon missions, or Luna-Glob project, Luna-25, 26, 27, 28 and Luna-29, missions aimed at further exploring the moon.

A mission to the moon has become one of Russia's top priorities in space. Russia plans to launch three lunar spacecraft - two to the moon's surface and one into orbit - by the end of the decade.

In September, Russian space agency Roscosmos reported that it was planning to launch a full-scale moon exploration program.

The program will be carried out mostly as part of the Russian Federal Space Program for 2016-2025. Russia is also looking at developing space exploration plans for 2050 and beyond.

Beyond LUNA-25
A Russian aerospace company official reported on Friday that new samples of lunar soil will be delivered to Earth in 2023-2025.

"The program currently has four missions: the first demonstration landing in 2025, an orbiter, which is needed to support all landing missions, then, the full landing mission Luna-27, and, around 2023-2025, there will be a project to deliver substance samples to Earth from areas near the [Lunar] south pole," Maksim Martynov, Deputy Designer General of Russia's NPO Lavochkin told reporters.

According to Martynov, the soil is to be delivered in its initial state, without experiencing any temperature changes and while preserving all its particles.

NASA, partners target megacities carbon emissions

Artist's concept of the LA Megacities Carbon Project observing system. 

Ground sensors atop towers and buildings measure carbon dioxide, methane and carbon monoxide. 

An instrument atop Mt. Wilson scans the basin multiple times daily. 

Aircraft, mobile laboratories and satellites round out the network. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Driving down busy Interstate 5 in Los Angeles in a nondescript blue Toyota Prius, Riley Duren of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, is a man on a mission as he surveys the vast urban jungle sprawled around him.

In his trunk, a luggage-sized air-sampling instrument sniffs the outside air through a small tube to measure the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane.

While not a very efficient way to study urban emissions, the ground data being collected are helping Duren and his team build confidence in greenhouse gas measurements taken from aircraft and satellites, which can cover large areas more effectively.

At the next exit, Duren pulls over to admire a scene most Angelenos would try to ignore: a large landfill stretched alongside the freeway.

The instrument in the trunk quickly detects a large plume of methane emanating from the landfill.

A NASA aircraft soon appears overhead, carrying a prototype satellite instrument that records high-resolution images of methane that scientists can use to identify gas plumes.

The pilot buzzes the landfill several times to capture images of the invisible gas, then the plane departs and Duren heads off to his next study area.

The instruments in the Prius and airplane are just two of many elements of the Megacities Carbon Project, an international, multi-agency pilot initiative to develop and test ways to monitor greenhouse gas emissions in megacities: metropolitan areas of at least 10 million people.

Cities and their power plants are the largest sources of human-produced greenhouse gas emissions and are the largest human contributors to climate change.

Duren is principal investigator for the LA component of the Megacities Carbon Project.

He hopes to work with international partners to deploy a global urban carbon monitoring system that will eventually allow local policymakers to fully account for the many sources and sinks, or storage sites, of carbon and how they change over time.

Preliminary estimate of annual on-road carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 for the five counties of the LA megacity, based on annual average weekly traffic data and modeled annual carbon dioxide emissions for different road types. 

A close-up view of southern LA County is at lower left. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State University

Los Angeles and Paris are pilot cities in the initiative. Efforts are underway to add other cities around the world.

When fully established in late 2014, the LA network will consist of 15 monitoring stations around the LA basin.

Most will use commercially available high-precision greenhouse gas analyzers to continuously sample local air.

The LA network encompasses the portions of the South Coast Air Basin that produce the most intense greenhouse gas emissions in California.

Megacities scientists will also periodically take to the road and to the skies to collect mobile measurements of the local atmosphere to better define individual emissions sources and environmental conditions.

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ESA Rosetta Comet Chaser catches up with comet 67/P today

After an epic, decade-long trek across the solar system, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft will finally catch up to its target comet early Wednesday (Aug. 6). If all goes according to plan, Rosetta will become the first probe ever to orbit a comet, and you can watch the historic rendezvous live online.

Rosetta is expected to meet up with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko at 4:45 a.m. EDT (0845 GMT) Wednesday, with a crucial 6.5-minute-long engine burn propelling the spacecraft into the comet's orbit.

You can watch a live webcast of all the action at ESA.int beginning at 4 a.m. EDT (0800 GMT), courtesy of the European Space Agency (ESA).

Once Rosetta is in the gravitational grip of the comet, the spacecraft will execute a series of triangular loops around the comet.

Each loop will be about 62 miles (100 kilometers) long and take a few days to complete, mission officials said.



Rosetta blasted off from French Guiana in March 2004. During its 4-billion-mile (6.4-billion-kilometer) chase, the spacecraft zoomed around Earth three times and Mars once for "gravity assists" that helped the spacecraft pick up speed. Rosetta also got up close and personal with two asteroids during its travels.

When Rosetta reached Jupiter's orbit in 2011, ESA engineers put the spacecraft into a deep-space slumber that lasted more than 2.5 years.

Rosetta woke up in January this year for the final phase of its journey to Comet 67P, which is about 2.5 miles (4 km) wide and takes roughly 6.5 years to complete one lap around the sun.

Rosetta has since performed a series of complex maneuvers to slow down and match the comet's pace.

Now, the probe is poised to enter the comet's orbit and travel with it around the sun. Rosetta is also carrying a lander called Philae that's expected to touch down on the comet in November to take samples and study the comet's surface and composition.

ESA Rosetta: Comet chaser nears its target - Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

This artist's impression shows the Rosetta orbiter at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The image is not to scale. 

Credit: ESA/ATG Medialab

After a decade-long quest spanning six billion kilometres (3.75 billion miles), the European probe Rosetta, will come face to face Wednesday with a comet, one of the Solar System's enigmatic wanderers.

The moment will mark a key phase of the most ambitious project ever undertaken by the European Space Agency (ESA), a 1.3 billion euro ($1.76 billion) bid to get to know these timeless space rovers.

More than 400 million km from where it was launched in March 2004, the spacecraft Rosetta will finally meet up with its prey, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

To get there, Rosetta has had to make four flybys of Mars and Earth, using their gravitational force as a slingshot to build up speed, and then entering a 31-month hibernation as light from the distant Sun became too weak for its solar panels.

It was awakened in January.

After braking manoeuvres, the three-tonne craft should on Wednesday be about 100 km from the comet—a navigational feat that, if all goes well, will be followed by glittering scientific rewards.

"It's taken more than 10 years to get here," said Sylvain Lodiot, spacecraft operations manager.

"Now we have to learn how to dock with the comet, and stay with it for the months ahead."

Halley's Comet (1P/Halleys)

Blazing across the sky as they loop around the Sun, comets have long been considered portents of wonderful or terrible events, the birth and death of kings, bountiful harvests or famines, floods or earthquakes.

Astrophysicists, though, see them rather differently.

Comets, they believe, are clusters of the oldest dust and ice in the Solar System, the rubble left from the formation of the planets 4.6 billion years ago.

These so-called dirty snowballs could be the key to understanding how the planets coalesced after the Sun flared into life, say some.

Indeed, one theory, the "pan-spermia" hypothesis, is that comets, by bombarding the fledgling Earth, helped kickstart life here by bringing water and organic molecules.

Until now, though, explorations of comets have been rare and mainly entailed flybys by probes on unrelated missions snatching pictures from thousands of kilometres away.

Exceptions were the US probe Stardust, which brought home dust snatched from a comet's wake, while Europe's Giotto ventured to within 200 km of a comet's surface.

On November 11, the plan is for Rosetta to inch to within a few kilometres of the comet to send down a 100-kilogramme (220-pound) refrigerator-sized robot laboratory, Philae.

ESA Rosetta's Lander, Philae

Anchored to the surface, Philae will carry out experiments in cometary chemistry and texture for up to six months.

After the lander expires, Rosetta will accompany Comet 67P (C-G) as it passes around the Sun and heads out towards the orbit of Jupiter.

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Search for extraterrestrial intelligence targeting alien polluters

In this artist's conception, the atmosphere of an Earth-like planet displays a brownish haze; the result of widespread pollution. 

New research shows that the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) potentially could detect certain pollutants, specifically CFCs, in the atmospheres of Earth-sized planets orbiting white dwarf stars. 

Credit: Christine Pulliam (CfA)

Humanity is on the threshold of being able to detect signs of alien life on other worlds.

By studying exoplanet atmospheres, we can look for gases like oxygen and methane that only coexist if replenished by life but those gases come from simple life forms like microbes. What about advanced civilizations? Would they leave any detectable signs?

They might, if they spew industrial pollution into the atmosphere. New research by theorists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) shows that we could spot the fingerprints of certain pollutants under ideal conditions. This would offer a new approach in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

"We consider industrial pollution as a sign of intelligent life, but perhaps civilizations more advanced than us, with their own SETI programs, will consider pollution as a sign of unintelligent life since it's not smart to contaminate your own air," says Harvard student and lead author Henry Lin.

"People often refer to ETs as 'little green men,' but the ETs detectable by this method should not be labeled 'green' since they are environmentally unfriendly," adds Harvard co-author Prof Avi Loeb.

The team, which also includes Smithsonian scientist Gonzalo Gonzalez Abad, finds that the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) should be able to detect two kinds of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs); ozone-destroying chemicals used in solvents and aerosols.

They calculated that JWST could tease out the signal of CFCs if atmospheric levels were 10 times those on Earth.

A particularly advanced civilization might intentionally pollute the atmosphere to high levels and globally warm a planet that is otherwise too cold for life.

There is one big caveat to this work. JWST can only detect pollutants on an Earth-like planet circling a white dwarf star, which is what remains when a star like our Sun dies.

That scenario would maximize the atmospheric signal. Finding pollution on an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star would require an instrument beyond JWST; a next-next-generation telescope.

The team notes that a white dwarf might be a better place to look for life than previously thought, since recent observations found planets in similar environments.

Those planets could have survived the bloating of a dying star during its red giant phase, or have formed from the material shed during the star's death throes.

While searching for CFCs could ferret out an existing alien civilization, it also could detect the remnants of a civilization that annihilated itself.

Some pollutants last for 50,000 years in Earth's atmosphere while others last only 10 years. Detecting molecules from the long-lived category but none in the short-lived category would show that the sources are gone.

"In that case, we could speculate that the aliens wised up and cleaned up their act. Or in a darker scenario, it would serve as a warning sign of the dangers of not being good stewards of our own planet," says Loeb.

Raytheon EKV CE-II missile defense system strikes target in test

The Boeing-managed ground-based system intended to shield the continental United States successfully intercepted a simulated incoming missile over the Pacific Ocean for the first time Sunday, the Pentagon said.

The Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, with a $40 billion price tag, aims to protect against long-range ballistic missiles from so-called rogue states such as North Korea and Iran. But government records show it has failed a series of tests.

President Barack Obama's administration has announced it plans to spend about $1.3 billion on 14 more interceptors, but only if the closely-watched test was successful.

The interceptor missile was fired from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and struck a dummy intermediate-range ballistic missile launched from the US Army's Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

"This is a very important step in our continuing efforts to improve and increase the reliability of our homeland ballistic missile defense system," Missile Defense Agency chief Vice Admiral James Syring said in a statement.

The successful test followed the system's failure to hit a simulated missile in five of eight previous tests since president George W. Bush's administration launched the program in 2004.

The latest version of the warhead flown for the test contained hardware and software upgrades, according to manufacturer Raytheon.

It was the first successful intercept by Raytheon's Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle Capability Enhancement II, or EKV CE-II, which failed in both previous tests conducted in 2010.

"We made the fixes needed to be made from the last test, which was back in December of 2010," Pentagon spokesman Admiral John Kirby told reporters on Friday.

He compared the test to "hitting a BB with a BB... It's pretty significant if it works."

"Testing is critically important to ensuring the advancement of reliable kill vehicles for the protection of the US and its allies," Raytheon Missile Systems president Taylor Lawrence said.

Overall, the test marked the 65th successful intercept out of 81 attempts since 2001 for the Ballistic Missile Defense System, according to the Pentagon.

"This mission met several complex test objectives, including a long-duration flight time for the ground-based interceptor and high velocity closing speeds for intercept," a "proud" Boeing said.

Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA): CHEC a cutting-edge camera

This colourful piece of electronics is a photomultiplier module for the CHEC camera undergoing testing. 

Credit: Fabricio Sousa/SLAC

Key components for a new type of camera that will collect only the faintest, fastest flashes of light in the night sky are being assembled and tested now at SLAC.

Their eventual destination: the first Compact High-energy Camera (CHEC), which will be installed in a prototype telescope for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA).

The CTA is a ground-based gamma-ray observatory currently under development by an international consortium with more than 1000 members from 27 countries.

The CTA will detect ultra-high-energy gamma rays, which are beyond even the reach of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

Current plans call for the observatory to comprise two separate arrays, one in the Northern Hemisphere and one in the Southern Hemisphere, totaling more than 100 telescopes of three different sizes.

The telescopes are now under development. Researchers at SLAC are testing modules of electronic components for the first CHEC camera, which will be installed on a prototype telescope later this year.

But most gamma rays from cosmic sources are blocked by the Earth's atmosphere. What will the camera be looking at?

'Seeing' Gamma Rays
Gamma rays are the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation – energetic enough they cause showers of secondary particles when they hit the atmosphere.

The particles race toward the ground so fast they break the speed of light in our atmosphere.

This is considerably slower than the speed of light in a vacuum, but still speedy enough to cause them to emit a form of radiation called Cherenkov radiation.

All 32 of the photomultiplier modules for the CHEC camera. 

Credit: Tobias Jogler/SLAC

"It's really just light – bluish light," said Stefan Funk, an astrophysicist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), a joint SLAC-Stanford institute.

Its a faint blue light that flashes on and off in about five nanoseconds: "If we had nanosecond eyes, we could see it," he said.

Unfortunately we don't have nanosecond eyes, and neither do CCD cameras, which are the type of camera generally used at observatories to collect light. That's where the CHEC camera comes in.

Nanosecond Eyes
Each CHEC camera contains modules of customized electronic components, beginning with photomultipliers.

A photomultiplier can capture a single photon, or particle of light, and amplify its signal for a detector to read.

But the real heart of each module is a special integrated circuit chip called a TARGET chip, developed at the University of Hawaii in collaboration with SLAC researchers.

Each TARGET chip can read the signals from 16 individual pixels on a photomultipliers one billion times a second, fast enough to capture the flashes of Cherenkov light.

"The prototype camera we're building uses 32 modules, each with a 64-pixel photomultiplier and four TARGET chips," said KIPAC postdoctoral researcher Luigi Tibaldo.

"It will be installed on a prototype of the smallest telescope," which represents the majority of instruments needed for the arrays; the TARGET chips are also under consideration for some of the mid-sized telescopes under development.

This adds up to around 60 telescopes to equip, making cost an important factor in the design.

Luigi Tibaldo of SLAC (center) and collaborators Shigeki Hirose of the University of Nagoya (left) and Mark Bryan of the University of Amsterdam (right) in Building 84, where they're testing the photomultiplier modules for the CHEC camera. 

Credit: Fabricio Sousa/SLAC

To address this issue, the modules can easily be mass-produced, Funk said.

Their colleague Gary Varner of the University of Hawaii works with industry partners to create the TARGET chips and the photomultipliers are supplied by Hamamatsu Photonics, a Japanese firm.