NEEMO 16 mission scheduled for June: Asteroid underwater training

The next NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) mission is being scheduled for June, with teams already preparing for a recon trip ahead of the exercise.

The underwater training exercises are staged at the Aquarius underwater habitat in Key Largo, Florida – simulating the conditions and protocols for a real Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) mission.

NEEMO 15 was the first real full scale operation – even including Mission Operations Directorate (MOD) teams – continuing the trend of testing equipment and operations required for exploration of Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs).

The mission treated the underwater environment like a giant Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL), allowing for specialist divers to simulate working on a NEA, communicating – with time delays – with mission control and practising the use of tools to work on an asteroid.

The October NEEMO 15 mission was led by NASA astronaut and former International Space Station (ISS) crew member Shannon Walker.

The crew included Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi and Canadian Space Agency astronaut David Saint-Jacques from the 2009 NASA astronaut class.

Steven Squyres of Cornell University and scientific principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover Project, joined James Talacek and Nate Bender of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington – who are both professional aquanauts.

NASA astronauts Stan Love, Richard Arnold and Mike Gernhardt, all veteran spacewalkers, participated in the NEEMO mission from the DeepWorker submersible, which they piloted.

The submersible is a key element of simulating a NEA mission, acting as an underwater stand-in for the Multi Mission Space Exploration Vehicle (MMSEV), which is currently the leading concept to be the main NEA exploration vehicle at the site at the asteroid, utilizing its robotic arms and crew airlock.

Aquarius acts as the Deep Space Hab (DSH) for these missions, a large element of hardware that would arrive at the NEA after being launched from Earth on the Space Launch System (SLS) – likely the 105mt Block 1A Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle (HLV).

NEEMO 15 worked on three major elements of a NEA mission, such as how to anchor to the surface via the “excursion lines”; how to move around; and how best to collect data and materials.

Read More about NEEMO here

ESA’s blogging astronauts on the road to space - images

Alexander Gerst, ESA astronaut, training for spacewalks. 

Here he is in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab at NASA's Sonny Carter Training Facility, near Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. 

Alexander preparing for his mission to the International Space Station in 2014, as a flight engineer for Expeditions 40 and 41.

Alexander Gerst was born in Künzelsau, Germany, in 1976. 

He studied at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, where he received a diploma in geophysics. 

He also studied Earth Science at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, where he was awarded a Master of Science. 

He has been working as a researcher since 2001. In his spare time he enjoys mountaineering, diving, climbing and skydiving.

Credits: NASA

NASA: JAXA HTV-2 International Space Station - Research Going Strong

Backdropped by a cloud-covered part of Earth, the unpiloted Japanese Kounotori2 H-II Transfer Vehicle, or HTV2, approaches the International Space Station.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, launched HTV2 aboard an H-IIB rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan at 12:37 a.m. EST; Jan. 22, 2011.

HTV2 is the second unpiloted cargo ship launched by JAXA to the station and delivered more than four tons of food and supplies to the space station and its crew members. (NASA)

Ultra-fast Outflows Help Monster Black Holes Shape Their Galaxies

The supermassive black holes in active galaxies can produce narrow particle jets (orange) and wider streams of gas (blue-gray) known as ultra-fast outflows, which are powerful enough to regulate both star formation in the wider galaxy and the growth of the black hole.

Inset: A close-up of the black hole and its accretion disk. (Artist concept credit: ESA/AOES Medialab)

A curious correlation between the mass of a galaxy's central black hole and the velocity of stars in a vast, roughly spherical structure known as its bulge has puzzled astronomers for years.

An international team led by Francesco Tombesi at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., now has identified a new type of black-hole-driven outflow that appears to be both powerful enough and common enough to explain this link.

Most big galaxies contain a central black hole weighing millions of times the sun's mass, but galaxies hosting more massive black holes also possess bulges that contain, on average, faster-moving stars.

This link suggested some sort of feedback mechanism between a galaxy's black hole and its star-formation processes.

Yet there was no adequate explanation for how a monster black hole's activity, which strongly affects a region several times larger than our solar system, could influence a galaxy's bulge, which encompasses regions roughly a million times larger.

"This was a real conundrum. Everything was pointing to supermassive black holes as somehow driving this connection, but only now are we beginning to understand how they do it," Tombesi said.

Active black holes acquire their power by gradually accreting -- or "feeding" on -- million-degree gas stored in a vast surrounding disk. This hot disk lies within a corona of energetic particles, and while both are strong X-ray sources, this emission cannot account for galaxy-wide properties.

Near the inner edge of the disk, a fraction of the matter orbiting a black hole often is redirected into an outward particle jet. Although these jets can hurl matter at half the speed of light, computer simulations show that they remain narrow and deposit most of their energy far beyond the galaxy's star-forming regions.

Astronomers suspected they were missing something. Over the last decade, evidence for a new type of black-hole-driven outflow has emerged.

At the centers of some active galaxies, X-ray observations at wavelengths corresponding to those of fluorescent iron show that this radiation is being absorbed.

This means that clouds of cooler gas must lie in front of the X-ray source. What's more, these absorbed spectral lines are displaced from their normal positions to shorter wavelengths that is, blueshifted, which indicates that the clouds are moving toward us.

GJ1214b, New Planet in Milky Way contains mainly Steam and Ice

The Picture shows a comparison between our Earth and GJ1214b.

Astronomers have discovered a new planet in our galaxy that is unlike any other found so far: Both the planet and its atmosphere are mostly water, though none of it is liquid.

The planet, GJ1214b, has a diameter 2.7 times that of Earth, and it weighs seven times as much.

It probably has much more water than Earth, in the form of steam and a peculiar high-temperature ice that exists at extremely high pressures and far less rock.

“There’s probably nothing too special about this planet itself,” said Zachory K. Berta, an astronomer at Harvard University who was involved with the research. The main thing, he added, is that “we have the opportunity to really see the density of the planet.”

He and his colleagues report their findings in The Astrophysical Journal.

To estimate the density and diameter, they measured the colour of the light from the star that shines through the planet’s atmosphere.

“We’re observing the sunset on this planet,” he said.

Though the planet was discovered with a ground-based telescope, the data that allowed Mr. Berta and his colleagues to estimate the planet’s mass and density was gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Looking ahead, the researchers have two goals. The first is to learn more about the planet.

“We’re going to study this atmosphere,” Mr. Berta said, “and work on the details so we can really try to understand what’s going on.” The second goal is to find more planets.

Using the same techniques, the astronomers can study the atmosphere of other planets in detail, and Mr. Berta said a slightly smaller, slightly cooler planet might be capable of supporting life.

Markarian Chain: A stretch of galaxies in the Virgo cluster

Credit: Larry Van VleetThis stunning image by skywatcher Larry Van Vleet is of Markarian's Chain, a stretch of galaxies in the Virgo cluster.

The galaxies are said to be in a smooth, curved line making them appear to be connected in a chain.

Located about 70 million light-years away, the Virgo cluster is a large collection of some 2,000 galaxies that dominate our part of the universe.

A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, or about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).

MUOS-1 Satellite Launched on Atlas 5 Rocket

Credit: Pat Corkery, United Launch Alliance

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket blasts off from Space Launch Complex-41 at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Feb. 24, 2012, with the U.S. Navy’s Mobile User Objective System-1 (MUOS-1) satellite.

At nearly 15,000 pounds, MUOS-1 marks the heaviest satellite launched to date by an Atlas launch vehicle.