ESA Integral manoeuvres to improve future observations

Credit: ESA

ESA’s Integral observatory is able to detect gamma-ray bursts, the most energetic phenomena in the Universe.

Since 2002, ESA’s Integral spacecraft has been observing some of the most violent events in the Universe, including gamma-ray bursts and black holes.

While it still has years of life ahead, its fuel will certainly run out one day.

Integral, one of ESA’s longest-serving and most successful space observatories, has begun a series of four thruster burns carefully designed to balance its scientific life with a safe reentry in 2029.

That seems far off, but detailed planning and teamwork now will ensure that the satellite’s eventual entry into the atmosphere will meet the Agency’s guidelines for minimising space debris.

Making these disposal manoeuvres so early will also minimises fuel usage, allowing ESA to exploit the valuable satellite’s lifetime to the fullest.

This is the first time that a spacecraft’s orbit is being adjusted, after 12 years in space, to achieve a safe reentry 15 years in the future, while maximising valuable science return for the subsequent seven to eight years.

“Our four burns will use about half of the estimated 96 kg of fuel available,” says Richard Southworth, spacecraft operations manager at ESA’s Space Operations Centre, ESOC, in Darmstadt, Germany.

“This will influence how Integral’s orbit evolves, so that even after we run out of propellant we will still have a safe reentry in February 2029 as a result of natural orbit decay.

“No further manoeuvres are required between now and then and Integral can continue to operate.”

Debris Mitigation
The latest ESA debris guidelines require that a satellite must be disposed of in such a way that it poses no risk to other satellites in protected orbital regions for more than 25 years.

Although Integral’s early launch date, in 2002, means it is not required to stick to the guidelines, they were followed for planning the disposal.

“We have done a great deal of modelling for Integral’s reentry in 2029,” says Klaus Merz of ESA’s Space Debris Office.

“We’re confident that this month’s manoeuvres will put it on track for a future safe reentry at latitudes in the far south, reducing risk far below guideline levels.”

Without these firings, the fuel supply would run out in perhaps 12–16 more years, after other essentials such as power end Integral's working life, but the satellite would not reenter for up to 200 years, which would present a hazard to other missions.

Russia's Cosmos 2495: Fiery Fall of Russian Spy Satellite Debris

A global network of skywatching detectives has pieced together the strange story of a Russian military spy satellite that re-entered Earth's atmosphere earlier this month, the leftovers of which sparked a spectacular sky show over five U.S. states.

Observers across parts of Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico caught sight of debris from the military satellite via a fireball on Sept. 2 around 10:30 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time, reporting their observations to the American Meteor Society.

The focus of attention is Russia's Cosmos 2495, an Earth-imaging reconnaissance (Kobalt-M) satellite. It was a hefty spacecraft, in the Kobalt-M series, a family member of the Yantar chain of Russian satellites. Russia launched the satellite on its intelligence-gathering mission on May 6 of this year. [Photos: Declassified U.S. Spy Satellites]

The resulting fireball from parts of the Cosmos 2495 spysat's re-entry was not only spotted by skywatchers. It was also caught that night by a number of all-sky cameras, including the Cloudbait Observatory  here in the central Colorado Rocky Mountains.

An on-line buzz about the occurrence found a home at SeeSat-L, the mailing list for visual satellite observers, which has become an invaluable tool to study all manner of spacecraft events. So here's what happened with Cosmos 2495.

Satellite tracker Thomas Ashcraft, of Heliotown in Santa Fe, New Mexico, captured this long-exposure view of the brilliant fireball created by debris from a suspected Russian spy satellite on Sept. 2, 2014. 

Credit: Thomas Ashcraft/Heliotown

Graphic shows the actual time and track of the suspected piece of Russian Cosmos 2495 debris in relation to sightings.

Credit: Ted Molczan

Russian spysat falls from space

This multipart Cosmos 2495 consists of an equipment module, an instrument module, a camera re-entry vehicle and a large sun shade with additional antennae and sensors.

It is designed to re-enter Earth's atmosphere so that its camera canister can be retrieved by a recovery crew.

At the end of its mission on Sept. 2, the Russian spysat fired its engine to begin its return to Earth. Its fiery re-entry was witnessed and videoed from a large part of western Kazakhstan.

The module carrying the cargo of exposed film and a reusable camera separated, and is believed to have landed near the city of Orenburg in Russia. The remainder of the spacecraft, meanwhile, burned up as planned.

Now, it appears that the slow-moving fireball spotted over the U.S. on Sept. 2 — some 10 hours after Cosmos 2495's intelligence camera module had safely touched down — was due to a lingering leftover from the Soviet military spacecraft.

ESA JAXA: Japan scientists test tether to clear up space junk

This artist's impression released September 1, 2011 by the European Space Agency shows the debris field in low-Earth orbit based on current data, not items in their actual size or density

Japanese space scientists are set to trial a tether they hope will help pull junk out of orbit around Earth, clearing up tonnes of planetary clutter, they said Thursday.

Researchers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have developed what they called an electrodynamic tether made from thin wires of stainless steel and aluminium.

The idea is that one end of the strip will be attached to one of the thousands of dead satellites or bits of rocket that are jamming up space and endangering working equipment.

The electricity generated by the tether as it swings through the Earth's magnetic field is expected to have a slowing effect on the space junk, which should, scientists say, pull it into a lower and lower orbit.

Eventually the detritus will enter the Earth's atmosphere, burning up harmlessly long before it has chance to crash to the planet's surface.

"The experiment is specifically designed to contribute to developing a space debris cleaning method," said Masahiro Nohmi, associate professor at Kagawa University, who is working with JAXA on the project, told reporters.

Nohmi said a satellite developed by the university is expected to be launched into space on February 28, with the tether aboard.

Graphic on debris and defunct space hardware that currently orbit the earth

"We have two main objectives in the trial next month," he said.

"First, to extend a 300-metre (1,000-foot) tether in orbit and secondly to observe the transfer of electricity."

The actual reeling in of orbiting rubbish will be the objective of future experiments, he said.

A spokesman for JAXA said the agency also plans to conduct its own trial on a tether in 2015.

More than 20,000 bits of cast off equipment, including old satellites, pieces of rocket and other fragments are uselessly orbiting the Earth in a band 800-1,400 kilometres (500-900 miles) from the surface of the planet at terrific speed.

Their presence causes problems for space scientists who have to try to prevent them colliding with functioning kit because of the huge damage they can cause.

Ecuador NEE-02 Krysor: Second nano-satellite launched

"Krysaor," like its predecessor, is equipped with a video camera, but with a higher resolution, more advanced solar panels, and a high-speed digital broadcasting system that "can transmit data a thousand times faster" than Pegaso, Nader said.

Ecuador's Civilian Space Agency (EXA) successfully launched the second nano-satellite into space early Thursday, the government-run news agency Andes reported.

The "Krysaor" satellite was launched aboard a Russian-built Dnepr RS-20B rocket that blasted off from the Dombarovsky launch site in Russia's southeastern Orenburg region.

"Krysaor has been put into orbit. The mission is successful," EXA's director Ronnie Nader was quoted as saying.

Experts at the EXA, led by Nader, monitored the launch from a ground control station in Guayaquil in southwestern Ecuador.

In April, the South American country launched its first nano- satellite "Pegaso," a 10x10 centimeter cube weighing 2.1 kilograms, to broadcast images in real time for educational purposes.

A month later, however, "Pegaso" collided with debris from an old Russian rocket, and the EXA announced in September that the device had vanished.

"Krysaor," like its predecessor, is equipped with a video camera, but with a higher resolution, more advanced solar panels, and a high-speed digital broadcasting system that "can transmit data a thousand times faster" than Pegaso, Nader said.

Russian Satellite Hit by Debris from Chinese Anti-Satellite Test

On Jan. 22, 2013, debris from a Chinese anti-satellite program test hit a Russian satellite. CREDIT: Courtesy of Analytical Graphics, Inc.

A small Russian spacecraft in orbit appears to have been struck by Chinese space junk from a 2007 anti-satellite test, likely damaging the Russian craft, possibly severely.

The space collision appears to have occurred on Jan. 22, when a chunk of China's Fengyun 1C satellite, which was intentionally destroyed by that country in a 2007 anti-satellite demonstration, struck the Russian spacecraft, according to an analysis by the Center for Space Standards & Innovation (CSSI) in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

CSSI technical program manager T.S. Kelso reported that the collision involved the Chinese space junk and Russia's small Ball Lens In The Space (BLITS) retroreflector satellite, a 17-pound (7.5 kilograms).

The Fengyun 1C satellite debris was created during China's anti-satellite test on Jan. 11, 2007, and has posed a threat to satellites and crewed spacecraft ever since.

Infographics version

Evidence of the space junk collision was first reported on Feb. 4 by Russian scientists Vasiliy Yurasov and Andrey Nazarenko, both with the Institute for Precision Instrument Engineering (IPIE) in Moscow.

They reported a "significant change" in the orbit of the BLITS satellite to the CSSI.

It is not immediately clear whether the satellite is merely wounded or completely incapacitated.

The space collision is the second substantial in-space accident between an active spacecraft and a defunct satellite or piece of space debris.

In February 2009, a U.S. communications satellite was destroyed when it was hit by a defunct Russian military satellite, creating a vast debris cloud in orbit.
The BLITS satellite is a nanosatellite consisting of two outer hemispheres made of a low-refraction-index glass, and an inner ball lens made of a high-refraction-index glass. It was launched in 2009 as a secondary payload on a Russian rocket and tracked by the International Laser Ranging Service for precision satellite laser-ranging experiments.

In addition to noticing the satellite's change in orbit, Yurasov and Nazarenko also detected changes in the spacecraft's spin velocity and attitude.

Satellite laser ranging use short-pulse lasers and state-of-the-art optical receivers and timing electronics to measure the two-way time of flight (and hence distance) from ground stations to retroreflector arrays on Earth orbiting satellites.

Radiation Shields from Space Debris and Astronaut Junk

A disc produced by heating and compressing a sample of trash simulants. The discs are being tested for various conditions and the discs could be used in space to create radiation shields or for other tasks.

CREDIT: NASA

Humans produce trash just about everywhere they go, including space, which will pose a problem for astronauts on long voyages to other planets. But scientists have found a way to transform this space detritus into something useful: a radiation shield.

Since flinging garbage out the door is not an option, engineers at NASA are testing how a novel on-board trash compactor could give new life to discarded water bottles, clothing scraps, duct tape and other waste on deep-space missions.

The space trash compactor is not like the giant one on the Death Star that nearly squashed Luke Skywalker and the gang in the first "Star Wars" film. This one is smaller, producing circular tiles of trash 8 inches (20 centimeters) wide and a half-inch (1.3 cm) from a single day's worth of garbage. The discs then could be stowed away, or even used for radiation shielding to protect a spacecraft’s crew, NASA officials said.

"One of the ways these discs could be re-used is as a radiation shield because there's a lot of plastic packaging in the trash," Mary Hummerick, a Qinetiq North America microbiologist at Kennedy Space Center in Florida working on the project, said in a statement.

"The idea is to make these tiles, and, if the plastic components are high enough, they could actually shield radiation."

NASA LandSat: Catastrophic growth of China’s megacities and Pollution levels

In 1973, NASA and United States Geological Survey’s Landsat 3 satellite took the image above of quiet, rural land (plant-covered land is red) along China’s Pearl River Delta. 

Six years later, in 1979, the region began to grow as China set up two economic zones north of Hong Kong. 

Then, 30 years later, in 2003, Landsat 7 satellite took this dramatic shot:

Images: NASA/USGS

It’s a catastrophic urban shift, happening all over China, with an unsupportable increase in demand for natural resources and the associated suchoking rge in pollution levels.

You can see the booming urban areas in gray, a major contrast to the mostly red image from 1973.

In the image you can see part of Guangzhou, the most populous urban area in the region today with 12,700,000 people; Dongguan, an urban area with more than 8 million people; and Foshan with more than 7 million. As of 2010, the Pearl District Economic Zone had a population of 36 million.

You can see more before and after images from 10 other cities across the globe. Or, at The Atlantic Cities, check out Nate Berg’s slightly jarring animated GIF rendition of the urban shift.

Human Destruction of Habitat and Earth's Resources Accelerates!

A scavenger bobs around on a giant ocean of rubbish on one of the world's most polluted waterways.

The makeshift vessel carves a path through rubbish on the River Sentiong in Jakarta, Indonesia.

The river, which winds through the capital city, has been dubbed the 'River of Refuse'.

Picture: Sinar Sakti Images / Barcroft Media

On 6 June 2007, the city administration introduced the Waterway (officially Angkutan Sungai), a new river boat service along the Ciliwung River. 

However, because of the large amount of floating garbage which kept jamming the propeller, it is no longer in service. 

Lockheed Martin Space Fence Radar Prototype Tracking Orbiting Objects

A prototype of a new radar system developed by a Lockheed Martin-led team is now tracking orbiting space objects, bringing the U.S. Air Force's Space Fence program one step closer to revolutionizing our nation's space situational awareness.

Utilizing powerful, new ground-based radars, Space Fence will enhance the way the U.S. detects, tracks, measures and catalogs orbiting objects and space debris with improved accuracy, better timeliness and increased surveillance coverage.

Lockheed Martin's prototype radar recently met a key contract requirement during a series of demonstration events by proving it could detect these resident space objects, as they are referred to by the Air Force.

On February 29, the Air Force granted its final approval of Lockheed Martin's preliminary design for the system.

"The successful detection and tracking of resident space objects are important steps in demonstrating technology maturity, cost certainty and low program risk," said Steve Bruce, vice president of the Space Fence program at Lockheed Martin's Mission Systems and Sensors business.

"Our final system design incorporates a scalable, solid-state S-band radar, with a higher wavelength frequency capable of detecting much smaller objects than the Air Force's current system."

Space Fence will enable the decommissioning of the aging U.S.-based Air Force Space Surveillance System (AFSSS), originally installed in 1961.

With more than 60 nations operating in space today, the final frontier is much more complex than when the AFSSS first started tracking a few hundred orbiting objects.

With hundreds of thousands of objects orbiting the earth, space debris and risk of potential collisions now threaten national space assets providing critical services, including the Global Positioning System, banking and telecommunications.

Bruce added, "Space Fence will detect, track and catalogue over 200,000 orbiting objects and help transform space situational awareness from being reactive to predictive. The Air Force will have more time to anticipate events potentially impacting space assets and missions. Our net-centric design approach allows Space Fence to be easily integrated into the broader U.S. Space Surveillance Network of sensors already operated by the Air Force."

Lockheed Martin's Space Fence prototype was developed under an 18-month, $107 million contract awarded by the Air Force in January 2011.

The Air Force has said it plans to award a Space Fence production contract later in 2012. The first of several Space Fence sites is expected to reach initial operational capability in 2017.

Can Solar Storms Can Clear Earth Atnosphere of Space Debris

Intense eruptions due to solar storms may damage satellites and power infrastructures, but they can also cause the early death for many of the space debris orbiting our planet, experts say.

However, scientists predict the sun's activity in 2013 may not be as productive at the cleanup effort as in previous years, still the thermosphere will continue to expand as the sun moves toward its 2013 solar maximum, which could mean that more particles will fall back toward the planet.

According to the NASA, the energy from these intense solar eruptions, known as coronal mass ejections, will cause the atmosphere to expand and create more friction for the space junks in orbit, and the resulting drag could send these debris plummeting back to Earth.

During periods of escalated solar activity such as increases in sunspots, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections, the sun dumps more energy into Earth's atmosphere. "When the sun is more active, it ejects more energy in the direction of Earth," Nick Johnson, chief scientist for NASA's Orbital Debris Program in Houston Johnson said. "

In NASA's latest edition of its Orbital Debris Quarterly News, Johnson noted that about half of the pieces of monitored space trash from the Chinese weather satellite that re-entered the atmosphere crashed back to Earth in 2011. In addition, more space trash was added during a collision between an American and a Russian communications satellite in 2009.

NASA tracks more than 500,000 pieces of debris, or "space junk," which travel at speeds up to 17,500 mph, as they orbit the Earth. The rising population of space debris increases the potential danger to all space vehicles, but especially to the International Space Station, space shuttles and other spacecraft with humans aboard.

The threat of collisions with space debris is a serious issue and NASA has a set of guidelines on how to deal with potential collision threats. These guidelines specify evasive action or other precautions when the expected proximity of a piece of debris increases the probability of a collision to ensure the safety of the crew are needed.

In NASA's guidelines, an imaginary box about a mile deep by 30 miles across by 30 miles long, known as the "pizza box" is drawn around the space vehicle. When predictions indicate that a debris will pass close enough for concern and the quality of the tracking data is deemed sufficiently accurate, Mission Control centers in Houston and Moscow work together to develop a prudent course of action.

When these encounters are in advance, the station is ordered to move slightly, known as a "debris avoidance maneuver," to keep the debris outside of the box.

When the tracking data does not warrant such a maneuver or the close pass is not identified in time to make the maneuver, the best course of action could be to move the crew into the Soyuz spacecraft that are used to transport humans to and from the station to allow enough time to isolate those spaceships from the station.

By closing hatches in the event of a damaging collision, the crew would be able to leave the station if the collision caused a loss of pressure in the life-supporting module or damaged critical component.

Additional precautions such as closing hatches between some of the station's modules may be ordered by Mission Controls if the likelihood of a collision is great enough, according to the NASA guidelines.

If the probability of collision reaches limits set in the space shuttle and space station flight rules, debris avoidance maneuvers are planned. Based upon specific flight rules and detailed risk analysis, NASA decides if a collision avoidance maneuver is necessary.

Orbital Space debris update

The latest Orbital Debris Quarterly News has the good news that, barring another satellite collision or other debris-creating event, the number of catalogued debris should drop over the next two years.

The deliberate destruction of the Fengyun-1C satellite in January 2007 created 3,218 pieces of trackable debris, and only about 200 of those have re-entered the atmosphere.

As the solar activity increases leading up to solar maximum in 2013, more of that debris should be cleared out.

NB: Readers in the northern latitudes should look out for more auroras.

Speaking of space debris, an experiment from 1963 deliberately placed millions of tiny copper needles in medium Earth orbit.

Project West Ford created an artificial ionosphere to help the military, back in the days before communication satellites.

The needles were 0.7 inches long and less than half the diameter of human hair (17.8 micrometers).

These were the right size dipole antennas for the 8 GHz wavelength used in the study.

Most of them re-entered the atmosphere by 1970, but there are still some in orbit today.

Electric fields (blue) and magnetic fields (red) radiated by a dipole antenna.

A spacecraft from an earlier attempt in 1961 is also still in orbit. Protests over this experiment led to the addition of a consultation clause in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. 

The result was, basically, all nations should sumit controversial proposals to the group before they did something that might wreck space for the rest of us.

If they had introduced more of these orbiting dipole antennas into the Earth's atmosphere, they could have wrecked global radio and microwave telescope observations.

ESA Soyuz Tracking Phobos Grunt: Sunday update

Ballistics European clarified during the fall of the Russian station "Phobos-Grunt" to within plus or minus 1.6 hours, told RIA Novosti on Sunday, the head of the European Space Agency (ESA), Rene Pishel.

"According to the last calculated data," Phobos-Grunt "may fall in 21.32 GMT plus or minus 1.6 hours," - said Pishel.

According to him, an indication of the impact area of ​​debris will become available no earlier than one hour before entering the machine in the Earth's atmosphere.

"It is possible to calculate only during the passage of the spacecraft its final turn around the Earth" - concluded the representative of the ESA.

Data Space Agency
Federal Space Agency, according to recent estimates, expects that the plant will fall to Earth in the range between 20.41 and 01.05 GMT on Sunday GMT on Monday.

The device falls into a "strip" of 51.4 degrees north latitude to 51.4 degrees south latitude. According to 12.00 Moscow time on Sunday, "Phobos-Grunt" in Earth orbit with an apogee of 153.4 km and a perigee of 133.5 kilometers.

In this report, Russian Space Agency, as well as in the previous year, the central point is not specified timeframe, as well as the crash site, which corresponds to this point. However, the much smaller area was estimated incidence of debris.

In turn, the source in the Russian space industry told RIA Novosti that "Phobos-Grunt" may enter the atmosphere over the north-western regions of China, near the western border of Mongolia.

According to him, the central point corresponds to the location of log coordinates 41.8 degrees north latitude, 91.7 degrees east longitude.

This point is located on the territory of China, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, 404 kilometers from Urumqi.

However, the spokesman stressed that in reality, the device can enter the atmosphere far from that point.

"We have spread more than a turn in either direction, so to speak about the point is not quite correct. One turn in front of him and one after," - said the source.

Space Station to Fire Up Engine to Avoid Collision With Iridium Space Debris

The International Space Station will be firing up its engines briefly Friday to avoid a piece of debris from the private U.S. satellite Iridium.

Orbit boost for debris avoidance manoeuvre for International Space Station, 54 secs firing of Russian Zvezda engines

The soft-ball sized space debris was on a path that would have brought it about less than a mile close to the station, the NASA said.

A collision with a debris can cause a deadly puncture to the space station, thus Mission Control has told astronauts to fire the station's engine to avoid the possibility of the station colliding with it.

The problem of space junk has again caught public attention with the news of the impending re-entry of Russia's Phobos-Grunt spacecraft. Russian officials estimate that the 14.5-ton craft which became stuck in Earth orbit shortly after its Nov. 8 launch, will re-enter the atmosphere in the next few days.

NB: This the 13th time in the ISS's lifetime that a debris avoidance manoeuvre has been necessary

Phobos-Grunt's crash will be the third uncontrolled satellite re-entry in four months, following NASA's defunct UARS craft in September and the dead German ROSAT satellite in October.

According to NASA estimates, Earth's orbital debris cloud contains more than 500,000 pieces larger than a marble and more than 20,000 at least as big as a softball.

ROSAT Space telescope set to crash to Earth

As the world waits for the six-ton satellite UARS to crash to Earth this week, we can reveal that a second giant piece of space junk is set for a similar fiery demise within weeks.

It wasn’t always junk. The latest doomed craft, called ROSAT, is a German space telescope that observed in X-ray light from 1990 to 1999 in an orbit 575 km above the Earth.

Atmospheric drag has already brought ROSAT (ROentgen SATellite) to a height of less than 327 km and it has no on-board propulsion system to control its descent.

NASA experts are warning that as many as 30 fragments, weighing a total of 1.6 tons, could survive re-entry to hit the ground, including the largest chunk, the observatory’s hefty glass mirror.

It will re-enter the atmosphere at a speed of around 28,000 km per hour and disintegrate in early November. There is currently an error of plus or minus five weeks in this prediction, so the crash landing could occur in early October.

Fluctuations in solar activity which can cause variation in the density of the fringes of the atmosphere add to the uncertainty.

Most of the inhabited world lies under the track of ROSAT which flies in an orbit that carries it from 53 degrees north to 53 degrees south. Experts expect most of the debris to impact the ground in a compact region but fragments could fall within an 80 km wide path.

EURS and FEMA
With UARS, a massive dead satellite due to plunge back to Earth this week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is laying the groundwork for a fast response in case the 6 1/2-ton spacecraft falls over, or on American soil.

Texas drought exposes doomed NASA Shuttle Columbia debris

The prolonged drought in Texas has revealed what NASA says is a tank from the space shuttle Columbia, which broke apart over east Texas as it re-entered the atmosphere in 2003.

Greg Sowell, a police sergeant in the city of Nacogdoches, which is located about 160 miles (250 kilometers) northeast of Houston, said the waters of Lake Nacogdoches, which are falling due to the record drought which has gripped the state, revealed an unexpected object.

"We found a large, about four-foot-diameter, round, what appears to be a tank of some sort," Sowell said Tuesday. "We have reason to believe this may be a part of the Columbia space shuttle."

The police department sent photos of the object to NASA for review, and experts at the space agency confirmed that the object was a power reactant storage and distribution tank. Such tanks are used aboard the shuttle to store cryogenic fuel for electrical power during flight.

Lisa Malone, a spokeswoman at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, told msnbc.com that Columbia carried 18 of the tanks for its 16-day mission.

Columbia broke apart upon re-entry into the atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003, killing the seven crew members on board. Debris from the spacecraft, which disintegrated over a wide area of east Texas, has been found in about 2,000 locations across eastern Texas and western Louisiana, including in Nacogdoches.

"Due to the drought, Lake Nacogdoches is at an approximately 9-foot low," Sowell said. "There has been an unusually large area of the lake which is normally underwater which has been exposed."

Sowell noted that space shuttle debris is considered government property, and that tampering with such objects is a criminal offense.

Malone said NASA and local authorities were working out a plan for recovering the tank and bringing it to Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building, where previously recovered pieces from Columbia — including other fuel-cell tanks — are being stored under climate-controlled conditions.

NEO: Small Asteroid Flies Past Earth on June 27, 2011

Trajectory of 2011 MD projected onto the Earth's orbital plane. Note from this viewing angle, the asteroid passes underneath the Earth.


Trajectory of 2011 MD from the general direction of the Sun.

Near-Earth asteroid 2011 MD will pass only 12,300 kilometers (7,600 miles) above the Earth's surface on Monday June 27 at about 1:00 PM EDT.

The asteroid was discovered by the LINEAR near-Earth object discovery team observing from Socorro, New Mexico.

The diagram on the left shows the trajectory of 2011 MD projected onto the Earth's orbital plane over a four-day interval.

The diagram on the left gives another view from the general direction of the Sun that indicates that 2011 MD will reach its closest Earth approach point in extreme southern latitudes in fact over the southern Atlantic Ocean).

This small asteroid, only 5-20 meters in diameter, is in a very Earth-like orbit about the Sun, but an orbital analysis indicates there is no chance it will actually strike Earth on Monday.

The incoming trajectory leg passes several thousand kilometers outside the geosynchronous ring of satellites and the outgoing leg passes well inside the ring.

One would expect an object of this size to come this close to Earth about every 6 years on average.

For a brief time, it will be bright enough to be seen even with a modest-sized telescope.

SPINSTARS: the first polluters of the Universe

From the analysis of the chemical composition of some of the oldest stars in our Galaxy, an international team of astronomers led by Cristina Chiappini from the Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP) and the Instituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) presents new clues on the nature of the first stellar generations in our Universe.

“We think that the first generations of massive stars were very fast rotators – that’s why we called them spinstars”, explains Chiappini.

Their findings will be published in a Nature article on April 28, 2011.

Massive stars live fast and furious, and hence the first generations of massive stars in the Universe are already dead.

However, their chemical imprints, like fingerprints, can still be found today in the oldest stars in our Galaxy. These fossil records are thus the witnesses of the nature of the first stellar generations to pollute our Universe.

“It is like if we tried to reveal the character of a cook from the taste of his dishes”, says Prof. Georges Meynet, from the Geneva University.

How were these first stars? Were they different from the stars we observe today?

Soon after the Big Bang, the composition of the Universe was much simpler than at present as it was made of essentially only hydrogen and helium.

The chemical enrichment of the Universe with other elements had to wait around 300 million years until the fireworks started with the death of the first generations of massive stars, polluting the primordial gas with new chemical elements, which were later incorporated in the next generations of stars.

Using data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), the astronomers reanalyzed spectra of a group of very old stars in the Galactic Bulge.

These stars are so old that only very massive, short-living stars with masses larger than around ten times the mass of our Sun should have had time to die and to pollute the gas from which these fossil records then formed.

As expected, the chemical composition of the observed stars showed elements typical for enrichment by massive stars.

However, the new analysis unexpectedly also revealed elements usually thought to be produced only by stars of smaller masses. Fast-rotating massive stars on the other hand would succeed in manufacturing these elements themselves.

“Alternative scenarios cannot yet be discarded - but - we show that if the first generations of massive stars were spinstars, this would offer a very elegant explanation to this puzzle!”, says Cristina Chiappini. Team member Urs Frischknecht, a PhD student at the Basel University, is already working on extending the stellar simulations in order to further test the proposed scenario.

The impact of having had an early generation of spinstars in the Universe is manifold. Fast rotation also affects other properties of a star, such as its colour, its lifetime and its luminosity. 

Spinstars would therefore also have strongly influenced the properties and appearance of the first galaxies which were formed in the Universe.

The existence of spinstars is now also supported by recent hydrodynamic simulations of the formation of the first stars of the universe by an independent research group.

Further information:

• Original publication: Chiappini et al., Imprints of fast-rotating massive stars in the Galactic Bulge, to be published in Nature, 2011. (DOI: 10.1038/nature10000, publication date: April 28, 2011)

• Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP) - www.aip.de

NASA Mars: Trees on surface are frozen Co2

A Nasa probe has sent back photographs of what appear to be trees on the planet's surface. But it is an optical illusion - they are sand dunes coated with a thin layer of frozen CO2. The "trees" are trails of debris caused by landslides as ice melts

Picture: NASA

Meteorite or Debris Burns up over Netherlands

A meteor lor burning space debris, lights up the night sky before shattering into pieces in the atmosphere.

Hundreds of people witnessed the fireball as it shot across the sky, making a sonic boom that rattled windows.

Amateur photographer Robert Mikaelyan captured it as it passed over Groningen in the Netherlands

NASA; Debris from Ariane rocket threatens ISS Spacestation

Space Shuttle Discovery astronauts Danny Olivas and Nicole Stott exit the International Space Station's Qwest airlock at the beginning of their spacewalk in this image from NASA TV.

The U.S. space agency is tracking debris from a portion of a European Artiane 5 rocket, that was launched more than three years ago.


The debris could pass close enough to require astronauts to fire thrusters to move the station and shuttle Discovery that is docked there out of the way, NASA officials said at a briefing.

The debris posed no immediate danger to the station or the shuttle, the agency said.

The debris, which is in an oval-shaped orbit that makes it difficult to track, will make its closest approach to the station at 11:06 a.m. EDT (3:06 p.m. GMT) on Friday, NASA said.

The debris will not force NASA to delay the second of three spacewalks planned outside the station on Thursday. NASA might decide to take no action, or could "reboost" the station from its current orbit 220 miles above the Earth after astronauts complete their second space walk, it said