Mycrocryocooler: Satellite Cooling System Developed by Lockheed Martin

Weighing just over 11 ounces, and less than four inches long in greatest dimension, the microcryocooler is expected to have an operating life of 10 years or more.

Scientists and engineers at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center (ATC) have developed the lightest satellite cryocooler, (cooling system) ever built.

The breakthrough is seen as a game-changer in the design of affordable, advanced-technology flight systems, as it costs up to ten thousand dollars a pound for a satellite to orbit the Earth.

Known as a microcryocooler, the new cooling system weighs approximately 11 ounces, three times lighter than its predecessor, and is expected to have an operating life of at least ten years.

The microcryocooler operates like a refrigerator, drawing heat out of sensor systems and delivering highly efficient cooling to small science satellites orbiting the Earth and on missions to the outer planets.

"Temperatures as low as -320 F are required for infrared instruments and the coolers must operate with minimum power and long lifetimes," said Ted Nast, Lockheed Martin fellow at the ATC in Palo Alto.

"That is why we constantly pursue a deeper understanding of the dynamic effects of temperature on cutting-edge technology and develop new systems, like our microcryocooler, that will perform successfully within the demands and constraints presented by severe, operational thermal environments."

Lockheed Martin is the industry leader in satellite cooling systems, having successfully flown more than 25 cryocoolers in space over the past 40 years- most recently on the WISE and Gravity Probe-B NASA science satellites.

In addition to space applications, the microcryocooler can be utilized in tactical systems, such as unmanned aerial vehicles and tanks.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' Secretive Blue Origin Test-Fires Rocket Engine - Video

The secretive private spaceflight company Blue Origin founded by billionaire Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has successfully test-fired a new engine for commercial rockets that may one day help launch astronauts and cargo into orbit, NASA officials said today (Dec. 3).

A video of the recent rocket firing provides a rare peek at the company's work in progress. Little is publicly known about the space vehicles being developed by Blue Origin, which is based in Kent, Wash., and was founded by Jeff Bezos in 2000.

The Nov. 20 rocket engine test at Blue Origin's facility in Van Horn, Texas, was aimed at simulating a mission on the company's suborbital New Shepard vehicle, NASA officials said.

The spaceship — which is named in honour of Alan Shepard, the first American in space — consists of two reusable modules, one for the crew and one for the propulsion systems.

During the test, Blue Origin's so-called BE-3 engine was fired at full power for two and a half minutes to mimic a launch, producing 110,000 pounds of thrust.

After the initial burn, the hydrogen- and oxygen-fueled engine stopped for about four minutes to simulate a coast through space before a short final burn.

This last firing tested the systems intended to bring the booster back for a controlled vertical landing.

Guiding the rocket back to the ground safely would allow it to be refurbished and used again for another mission.

The BE-3 engine will also be incorporated into Blue Origin's planned Orbital Launch Vehicle, a rocket that will loft the company's cone-shaped Space Vehicle into orbit.

That spacecraft could eventually carry astronauts to the International Space Station, NASA officials said.


Blue Origin is a partner in NASA's Commercial Crew Program, along with other private companies like SpaceX and Sierra Nevada Corp.

The program aims to help the aerospace industry develop systems to ferry astronauts to the space station.

With the retirement of NASA's space shuttle fleet in 2011, the United States currently relies on Russian Soyuz vehicles to bring astronauts to the orbiting outpost.

"Working with NASA accelerated our BE-3 development by over a year in preparation for flight testing on our New Shepard suborbital system and ultimately on vehicles carrying humans to low-Earth orbit," Rob Meyerson, president and program manager of Blue Origin, said in a statement.

Rob Meyerson

"The BE-3 is a versatile, low-cost hydrogen engine applicable to NASA and commercial missions."

Phil McAlister, NASA's director of commercial spaceflight development, added that Blue Origin has made steady progress since the start of its partnership with the space agency.

USAF Mysterious X-37B Space Plane Nears One Year In Orbit

This NASA Marshall Space Flight Centre image shows on-orbit functions for the reusable X-37 space plane, now under the wing of the U.S. Air Force. 

Credit: NASA/MSFC

The U.S. Air Force's mysterious X-37B space plane is nearing a major milestone — one year of travel in Earth orbit, performing duties in support of long-term space objectives.

The unmanned X-37B spacecraft — flying a mission known as Orbital Test Vehicle 3 (OTV-3) — launched into space atop an Atlas 5 rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Dec. 11, 2012.

What payloads the space plane is toting and the overall mission goals on its confidential cruise are classified.

But it is known that the OTV-3 mission signals a milestone for the X-37B program.

This same vehicle was flown on the X-37B program's inaugural flight back in 2010.

That OTV-1 mission lasted nearly 225 days in orbit, gliding back to Earth on autopilot over the Pacific Ocean and touching down at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

An OTV-2 mission, which used a different X-37B space plane, was lofted in 2011. That vehicle flew for 469 days, more than doubling its sister ship’s space stay, concluding its mission by also making a Vandenberg landing.



Next-generation technology
According to a Boeing fact sheet, each space plane is built with lightweight composite structures, rather than traditional aluminum.

A new generation of high-temperature leading-edge tiles for the wings is utilized, distinct from the space shuttle’s carbon leading-edge segments.

The X-37B is outfitted with toughened uni-piece fibrous insulation impregnated silica tiles, which are significantly more durable than the first-generation tiles used by the space shuttle.

Advanced conformal reusable insulation blankets are used for the first time on the X-37B.

The Boeing fact sheet also points out that avionics on an X-37B are designed to automate all de-orbit and landing functions.

Additionally, there are no hydraulics onboard the winged vehicle; flight controls and brakes use electromechanical actuation.

The Giant Magellan Telescope's third primary mirror

The Giant Magellan Telescope's third primary mirror will be unveiled at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Lab on December 6, 2013.

The combined surface area of the three mirrors created to date surpasses that of any existing telescope and will help enable astronomers to peer more deeply into space than ever before once the telescope is completed.

Primary mirrors are the heart of the modern day reflecting telescope. They capture and focus photons coming from space to help construct images of the universe and collect complex spectra.

Generally, the larger the surface area of the primary mirrors, the more photons they can capture, leading to better images and improved data.

The Giant Magellan Telescope will offer the best image resolution ever seen to explore deep space.

"The Giant Magellan Telescope will be one of the most powerful tools for approaching some of society's most profound questions: where did we come from, where are we going, and are we alone in the universe?" said Patrick McCarthy, Giant Magellan Telescope Project Director.

"The technology used to design and construct the telescope is breathtaking, but the answers it may provide as to the beginnings of time itself will be staggering."

The first of a new generation of "extremely large telescopes," or "ELTs," the Giant Magellan Telescope will have a mirror array consisting of seven 27-foot- (8.4-meter-) diameter mirror segments.

The telescope is anticipated to begin operation in 2020 with four mirror segments completed, making it the largest telescope in the world.

When its final stages of construction are complete, it will have ten times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope.

A blast from its past dates the youngest neutron-star binary

The youngest member of an important class of objects in space has been found by a team that includes Penn State Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Niel Brandt. 

This composite image shows the energies streaming toward Earth from this object -- X-rays in blue and the radio emission in purple.

These energy detections have been overlaid in this image on an optical field of view from the Digitized Sky Survey. 

This discovery allows scientists to study a critical phase after a supernova and the birth of a neutron star. 

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC /Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison /S. Heinz et al; Optical: DSS; Radio: CSIRO/ATNF/ATCA

X-rays streaming toward Earth from the region near a neutron star that is cannibalizing its companion star have revealed the pair to be the youngest "X-ray binary" yet known.

The discovery by a team that includes a Penn State astronomer is being published in this week's issue of the The Astrophysical Journal.

The team discovered the age of this record-breaking pair, named Circinus X-1, by using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which revealed faint remnants of the supernova explosion that created the neutron star.

"I have been perplexed by the unusually strong evolution of the orbit of Circinus X-1 since my graduate-school days," said Niel Brandt, Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

"The discovery now of this system's youth provides a satisfying explanation for why its orbit evolves so strongly—because the system likely still is settling down after its violent birth."

The research team, which was led by Sebastian Heinz at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, determined that Circinus X-1 is less than 4,600 years old.

"X-ray binaries provide us with opportunities to study matter under extreme conditions that would be impossible to recreate in a laboratory," Heinz said.

"For the first time, we can study a newly minted neutron star in an X-ray binary system."

This is an artist's conception of the life of X-ray binary systems and the young and turbulent history of Circinus X-1, which formed in a supernova explosion less than 4,600 years ago, approximately 500 B.C.E., making it the youngest known X-ray binary. 

Credit: University of Wisconsin-Madison

X-ray binaries are star systems made up of two parts: a compact stellar remnant—either a neutron star or a black hole; and a companion star—a normal star like our Sun.

The new discovery, made in parallel with a radio telescope in Australia, provides scientists with unique insight into the formation of neutron stars and supernovas, and the effect of the supernova's explosion on a nearby companion star.

As the two objects orbit one another, the neutron star or black hole pulls in gas from the companion star, heating the gas to millions of degrees, producing intense X-ray radiation, and making these star systems some of the brightest X-ray sources in the sky.

To determine the age of Circinus X-1, the astronomers needed to examine the material around the orbiting pair of stars.

However, the overwhelming brightness of the neutron star made it too difficult for researchers to observe that interstellar gas.

The team recently caught a break, however, when they observed the neutron star in a very faint state—dim enough for scientists to detect the X-rays from the supernova shock wave that plowed through the surrounding interstellar gas.

Read the full story here

Liverpool telescope Ringo 02: Glimpsing the infrastructure of a Gamma-Ray Burst jet

Measurements of polarized light in the afterglow of GRB 120308A by the Liverpool Telescope and its RINGO2 instrument indicate the presence of a large-scale stable magnetic field linked with a young black hole, as shown in this illustration. 

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/S. Wiessinger

A new study using observations from a novel instrument provides the best look to date at magnetic fields at the heart of gamma-ray bursts, the most energetic explosions in the universe.

An international team of astronomers from Britain, Slovenia and Italy has glimpsed the infrastructure of a burst's high-speed jet.

Gamma-ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the cosmos. Most are thought to be triggered when the core of a massive star runs out of nuclear fuel, collapses under its own weight, and forms a black hole.

The black hole then drives jets of particles that drill all the way through the collapsing star and erupt into space at nearly the speed of light.

On March 8, 2012, NASA's Swift satellite detected a 100-second pulse of gamma rays from a source in the constellation Ursa Minor.

The spacecraft immediately forwarded the location of the gamma-ray burst, dubbed GRB 120308A, to observatories around the globe.

The world's largest fully autonomous robotic optical telescope, the 2-meter Liverpool Telescope located at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands, automatically responded to Swift's notification.

"Just four minutes after it received Swift's trigger, the telescope found the burst's visible afterglow and began making thousands of measurements," said lead researcher Carole Mundell, who heads the gamma-ray burst team at the Astrophysics Research Institute at Liverpool John Moores University in the U.K.

The telescope was fitted with an instrument named RINGO2, which Mundell's team designed to detect any preferred direction, called polarization, in the vibration of light waves from burst afterglows.

More information: Nature paper: "Highly polarized light from stable ordered magnetic fields in GRB 120308A," C. Mundell et al., www.nature.com/nature/journal/v504/n7478/full/nature12814.html

NASA Van Allen Probes: Mysteries of Earth's radiation belts uncovered

The twin Van Allen Probes were launched on August 30, 2012 into elliptical, near-equatorial orbits around the Earth. 

Remarkably, rather than seeing just the well-known two-belt structure, the mission found almost immediate evidence of the clear three-belt structure portrayed in green in this diagram. 

Image courtesy of Andy Kale, University of Alberta.

Just over a year since launch, NASA's Van Allen Probes mission continues to unravel longstanding mysteries of Earth's high-energy radiation belts that encircle our planet and pose hazards to orbiting satellites and astronauts.

Derived from measurements taken by a University of New Hampshire-led instrument on board the twin spacecraft, the latest discovery reveals that the high-energy particles populating the radiation belts can be accelerated to nearly the speed of light in conjunction with ultra-low frequency electromagnetic waves operating on a planetary scale.

This mode of action, as detailed in a paper recently published in the journal Nature Communications, is analogous to that of a cyclical particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

However, in this case, the Earth's vast magnetic field, or magnetosphere, which contains the Van Allen belts, revs up drifting electrons to ever-higher speeds as they circle the planet from west to east.

The recent finding comes on the heels of a related discovery—also made by the UNH-led Energetic Particle, Composition, and Thermal Plasma (ECT) instrument suite—showing similar particle acceleration but on a microscopic rather than a planetary scale.

Harlan Spence

"The acceleration we first reported operates on the scale size of an electron's gyromotion—it is a really local process, maybe only a few hundred meters in size," notes Harlan Spence, director of the UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space, principal scientist for the ECT, and coauthor on the Nature Communications paper.

"Now we're seeing this large-scale, global motion involving ultra low-frequency waves pulsing through Earth's magnetosphere and operating across vast distances up to hundreds of thousands of kilometers."

And, Spence adds, "in all likelihood both processes are occurring simultaneously to accelerate particles to relativistic speeds."

Understanding the complex dynamics of the particle acceleration will help scientists make better predictions of space weather conditions and, thus, offer better protections to orbiting satellites crucial to modern-day society.

Having twin spacecraft making simultaneous measurements in different regions of nearby space is a key part of the mission as it allows the scientists to look at data separated in both space and time.

"With the Van Allen Probes, I like to think there's no place for these particles to hide because each spacecraft is spinning and 'glimpses' the entire sky with its detector 'eyes', so we're essentially getting a 360-degree view in terms of direction, position, energy, and time," Spence says.