ESA's ATV-5 for launch by Arianespace begins its pre-flight checkout

The Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) "Georges Lemaitre" has begun pre-flight checkout in the Spaceport's clean room facilities, following its arrival in French Guiana for a scheduled Ariane 5 flight next year.

As the fifth and final ATV to be launched by Arianespace under current arrangements with the European Space Agency, this spacecraft's Integrated Cargo Carrier (ICC) has now been removed from its special shipping container in the S5C preparation hall.

The ICC makes up 60 percent of the Automated Transfer Vehicle's total volume, with the capacity of ferrying up to 6.6 metric tons of cargo - both dry and fluid - on the spacecraft's servicing mission to the International Space Station (ISS).

Incorporating a two-part design, the Integrated Cargo Carrier includes a pressurized module for docking to the space station, where all dry materials are contained.

Up to two ISS astronauts can access this section while the spacecraft is attached to the orbital facility, working to unload supplies or conduct experiments.

Fluid cargo - such as propellant for refueling of the International Space Station - is stored in the ICC's non-pressurized area and transferred to the space station through pipes or manually operated hoses.

Prior to Georges Lemaitre's ESA-targeted launch date in 2014, final assembly of the spacecraft will be carried out at the Spaceport, including the Integrated Cargo Carrier, the Service Module solar panels and the Separation and Distancing Module (SDM) that links the ATV to its Ariane 5 vehicle.

Designated Georges Lemaitre after the Belgian physicist and father of the Big Bang theory, the fifth Automated Transfer Vehicle will resupply the International Space Station, as well as perform maneuvers to maintain this manned facility's nominal orbit.

An Astrium-led industry consortium is responsible for producing this series of resupply spacecraft under the European Space Agency-managed program.

To date all four Automated Transfer Vehicles have been orbited by Ariane 5 ES launchers, beginning with "Jules Verne" in March 2008, which was followed by "Johannes Kepler" in February 2011, "Edoardo Amaldi" in March 2012, and this June's flight with "Albert Einstein."

Crashing rockets could lead to novel sample-return technology - Video

An artist’s conception shows a sampling rocket, with a tether linking a return capsule inside the rocket to a recovery craft. 

Credit: Chad Truitt / UW

During spring break the last five years, a University of Washington class has headed to the Nevada desert to launch rockets and learn more about the science and engineering involved.

Sometimes, the launch would fail and a rocket smacked hard into the ground.

This year, the session included launches from a balloon that were deliberately directed into a dry lakebed.

Far from being failures, these were early tests of a concept that in the future could be used to collect and return samples from forbidding environments – an erupting volcano, a melting nuclear reactor or even an asteroid in space.

"We're trying to figure out what the maximum speed is that a rocket can survive a hard impact," said Robert Winglee, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences, who heads that department and leads the annual trek to the desert.

The idea for a project called "Sample Return Systems for Extreme Environments" is that the rocket will hit the surface and, as it burrows in a short distance, ports on either side of the nose will collect a sample and funnel it to an interior capsule.

That capsule will be attached by tether to a balloon or a spacecraft, which would immediately reel in the capsule to recover the sample.

"The novel thing about this is that it developed out of our student rocket class. It's been a successful class, but there were a significant number of rockets that went ballistically into the ground. We learned a lot of physics from those crashes," Winglee said.

The technology, which recently received $500,000 over two years from NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, could have a number of applications, he said.



UW Earth and space sciences faculty and students used a kite to hoist a rocket high above the Nevada desert in March 2013, then fired the rocket directly into a dry lakebed.

On Earth, it would allow scientists a relatively safe way of recovering samples in areas of high contamination, such as Japan's Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant and the Chernobyl nuclear power facility in Ukraine, both of which suffered catastrophic failures.

Or it could collect samples from an erupting volcano to give Earth scientists a better understanding of the processes at work during one of nature's most violent shows.

In either case, the tethered sample-return capsule could be hauled in by a balloon or a plane.

Crab Nebula's Strange Pulsar Heart Slowly Going Off-Kilter

A composite image of the Crab Nebula showing the X-ray (blue), and optical (red) images superimposed. 

The size of the X-ray image is smaller because the higher energy X-ray emitting electrons radiate away their energy more quickly than the lower energy optically emitting electrons as they move.

Credit: NASA/HST/ASU/J. Hester et al. X-Ray: NASA/CXC/ASU/J. Hester

For the first time, astronomers have tracked the evolution of a pulsar's magnetic field over time, watching as it slowly tilts toward the dead star's equator.

The new observations of the pulsar, located in the Crab Nebula, could offer clues to the long-standing problem of what slows pulsars' rotation.

Andrew Lyne

"Most pulsars are millions or tens of millions of years old," said Andrew Lyne, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Manchester in the U.K., who led the study, which appears in the Nov. 1 issue of the journal Science.

"So we don't expect to see significant changes. But we have been looking at this for a substantial portion of its lifetime, some 40 out of 1,000 years."

The supernova that birthed the pulsar in the Crab Nebula occurred in A.D. 1054. Chinese and Arab astronomers both noted it.

"It's a result we've waited 30 years for," said Vasily Beskin, an astrophysicist at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Beskin, who was not involved in the study, and his colleagues predicted that pulsar magnetic fields would move to their equators in the 1980s.

The new data also gave other insights. "Normally, magnetic fields don't move through superconductors," Lyne said. "This magnetic field is moving, which suggests the superconductor in the neutron star is not perfect."

It's not likely that astronomers will run across another like the Crab pulsar, because to see one at all, the radio beam has to sweep across the Earth, and the odds of one being in precisely the right orientation are small.

On top of that, the supernova that made the pulsar would have to be less than a few thousand years old, scientists say.

There are several supernovas of the correct age, but they aren't all the right type to produce pulsars, and even if they were, they aren't pointed the right way.

It still isn't completely clear why pulsars' magnetic fields look as they do. "I wouldn't class it as being a simple problem," Lyne said. "We're trying to understand why it should evolve in this way."

ESA DLR 3D Mars Video Brings Red Planet to Life

A newly released video, created by stitching together with images taken by a veteran Mars spacecraft, provides a richly detailed, three-dimensional view of the Red Planet.

The European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft has orbited the Red Planet nearly 12,000 times, capturing images of Martian valleys, canyons and lava flows that have provided unprecedented views of planet's terrain.

Ralf Jaumann

Researchers pieced together the individual images into a video that shows a eye-popping video of Mars in 3D.

"For the first time, we can see Mars spatially — in three dimensions," Ralf Jaumann, project manager for the Mars Express mission at the German Aerospace Center, said in a statement.

The first image of the Martian surface taken by the stereo camera aboard the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft. Credit: DLR

Mars Express has covered 37 million square miles (97 million square kilometers) of Mars' surface (out of 56 million square miles or 145 million square kilometers) in high resolution.

Researchers around the world combine data from Mars Express with other NASA missions at the Red Planet, to better understand the foreign world.

"This has enabled the creation of the most comprehensive data set that has ever been acquired by a German instrument designed to study our solar system," Jaumann said.

A colour-coded elevation model of Olympus Mons from the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft. Credit: DLR

Nine light-sensitive detectors aboard Mars Express sweep across the surface of the planet, capturing images in sequence from nine different angles.

This data is then processed into three-dimensional images by planetary researchers at the German Aerospace Center.

"We can see the entire topography almost as well as if we were standing on Mars ourselves," Jaumann said.

3C353: Giant Plumes of Radiation

Jets generated by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies can transport huge amounts of energy across great distances. 

3C353 is a wide, double-lobed source where the galaxy is the tiny point in the center and giant plumes of radiation can be seen in X-rays from Chandra (purple) and radio data from the Very Large Array (orange). 

Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Tokyo Institute of Technology/J.Kataoka et al, Radio: NRAO/VLA

ISS Astronauts take Soyuz capsule for spin around ISS

A close-up view of the International Space Station on March 7, 2011

An international trio of astronauts on Thursday took a Soyuz space capsule on a rare trip around the International Space Station in preparation for the arrival of a new crew next week.

Russian flight commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and engineers Karen Nyberg of NASA and Luca Parmitano of Italy undocked their Soyuz TMA-09M spacecraft from the Rassvet module on the Earth-facing side of the station and carefully manuevered it to the Zvezda module's aft end.

The fly-around—which NASA said was last performed in July 2010—sets the stage for the arrival on November 7 of a new crew which will bring along one of the torches Russia is using in its relay for the February 7-23 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.

The addition of the new team—comprised of NASA's Rick Mastracchio and Japan's Koichi Wakata as well as Russian Soyuz commander Mikhail Tyurin—will take the number of people on board the station to nine for the first time.

Space officials said cosmonauts Kotov and Ryazansky will take the Olympic torch for a symbolic spacewalk on November 9.

The Soyuz capsule is used by crew members to dock to the orbiting lab and remains attached to the station for return missions to Earth.

Milky Way supernova should be visible from Earth in next 50 years

Barred Spiral Milky Way. Illustration Credit: R. Hurt (SSC), JPL-Caltech, NASA

Astronomers at Ohio State University have calculated the odds that, sometime during the next 50 years, a supernova occurring in our home galaxy will be visible from Earth.

The good news: they've calculated the odds to be nearly 100 percent that such a supernova would be visible to telescopes in the form of infrared radiation.

The bad news: the odds are much lower—dipping to 20 percent or less—that the shining stellar spectacle would be visible to the naked eye in the nighttime sky.

Yet, all this is great news to astronomers, who, unlike the rest of us, have high-powered infrared cameras to point at the sky at a moment's notice.

For them, this study suggests that they have a solid chance of doing something that's never been done before: detect a supernova fast enough to witness what happens at the very beginning of a star's demise.

A massive star "goes supernova" at the moment when it's used up all its nuclear fuel and its core collapses, just before it explodes violently and throws off most of its mass into space.

Chris Kochanek

"We see all these stars go supernova in other galaxies, and we don't fully understand how it happens. We think we know, we say we know, but that's not actually 100 percent true," said Christopher Kochanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State and the Ohio Eminent Scholar in Observational Cosmology.

"Today, technologies have advanced to the point that we can learn enormously more about supernovae if we can catch the next one in our galaxy and study it with all our available tools."

The results will appear in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

First through calculations and then through computer models, generations of astronomers have worked out the physics of supernovae based on all available data, and today's best models appear to match what they see in the skies.

But actually witnessing a supernova—that is, for instance, actually measuring the changes in infrared radiation from start to finish while one was happening—could prove or disprove those ideas.

Kochanek explained how technology is making the study of Milky Way supernovae possible.

Astronomers now have sensitive detectors for neutrinos (particles emitted from the core of a collapsing star) and gravitational waves (created by the vibrations of the star's core) which can find any supernova occurring in our galaxy.

The question is whether we can actually see light from the supernova because we live in a galaxy filled with dust—soot particles that Kochanek likened to those seen in diesel truck exhaust—that absorb the light and might hide a supernova from our view.

"Every few days, we have the chance to observe supernovae happening outside of our galaxy," said doctoral student Scott Adams.

"But there's only so much you can learn from those, whereas a galactic supernova would show us so much more. Our neutrino detectors and gravitational wave detectors are only sensitive enough to take measurements inside our galaxy, where we believe that a supernova happens only once or twice a century."

Adams continued: "Despite the ease with which astronomers find supernovae occurring outside our galaxy, it wasn't obvious before that it would be possible to get complete observations of a supernova occurring within our galaxy."

"Soot dims the optical light from stars near the center of the galaxy by a factor of nearly a trillion by the time it gets to us. Fortunately, infrared light is not affected by this soot as much and is only dimmed by a factor of 20."

By balancing all these factors, the astronomers determined that they have nearly a 100 percent chance of catching a prized Milky Way supernova during the next 50 years. Adams summarized the findings in a video:



More information: arxiv.org/abs/1306.0559