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IMAGES OF CHANDRAYAN-1

Photo Gallary of Chandrayaan-1 and PSLV-C11

 

 

	Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft undergoing pre-launch tests
	Moon Impact Probe integration with Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft
	Moon Impact Probe
	Readying Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft for Thermovac test
	Fully integrated Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft (left) and loading it to Thermovac Chamber (right)

PSLV-C11 Liftoff

	PSLV-C11 Liftoff
	PSLV-C11 Liftoff
	PSLV-C11 Lift0ff

PSLV-C11 On Launch Pad

	PSLV-C11 on Launch Pad
	PSLV-C11 on its way to launchpad
	PSLV-C11 on its way to launchpad from Vehicle Assembly Building
	PSLV-C11 comming out from Vehicle Assembly Building
	PSLV-C11 at Vehicle Assembly Building

PSLV-C11 Third and Fourth Stages

	Close-up view of PSLV-C11 fourth stage
	PSLV-C11 Vehicle stacked up to fourth stage
	Hoisting of third and fourth stages of PSLV-C11

PSLV-C11 Second Stage

	Hoisting of PSLV-C11 Second Stage
	PSLV-C11 Second Stage with its VIKAS engine

PSLV-C11 First Stage

	Loading of PSLV-C11 First Stage Nozzle End Segment
	PSLV-C11 First Stage Nozzle End Segment on its way to Vehicle Assembly Building
	Positioning of PSLV-C11 First Stage Nozzle End Segment over launch pedestal

PSLV-C11 Strap-on

	Unloading a PSLV-C11 strap-on from transporter at Vehicle Assembly Building
	Fully Assembled First Stage surrounded by strap-ons of PSLV-C11

 

 

 

source: www.isro.org

CHANDRAYAN-1 LAUNCHED

BANGALORE, India – Five years after being formally approved and following a series of late delays, India’s first-ever planetary mission is on track to launch the morning of Oct. 22 Local Time, with arrival in lunar orbit scheduled to occur 17 days later.

The Chandrayaan-1 moon mission, featuring Indian, European and U.S. instruments, had been scheduled to launch in April but suffered setbacks including late-arriving payloads and integration issues. But officials with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), who unveiled plans for the orbiter in 2000 with a target launch date of 2008, are confident those issues are behind them.

“The spacecraft reached the launch site Sept. 30 after completing thermal vacuum, vibration and acoustic testing in Bangalore,” ISRO spokesman S. Satish said Oct. 15. Integration with the launcher was completed Oct. 14 and at press time the rocket was slated to be moved to the launch pad Oct. 18, he said.

“The Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft after successfully completing [thermal vacuum], vibration and acoustic tests, has reached the launch site,” ISRO spokesman S. Satish told SPACE.com sister publication Space News Oct. 8. “All the operations are going on satisfactorily.”

If all goes well, Chandrayaan – which means moon vehicle in Hindi – will join two other spacecraft that reached lunar orbit roughly one year ago: Japan’s large Kaguya, or Selene, mission, which launched in September 2007, and China’s Chang’e 1, which launched in October 2007. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is slated to launch in February, meaning that four spacecraft, each built by a different country, could be in lunar orbit simultaneously.

Built at a cost to ISRO of some $87 million, the fully fueled Chandrayaan-1 will weigh 2,874 pounds (1,304 kg) when it lifts off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on Sriharikota Island off India’s east coast. After a countdown lasting 52 hours, the probe will lift off tomorrow at 6:20 a.m. Local Time (Tuesday evening Oct. 21 EDT) aboard a modified version of ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, or PSLV.

The probe will be India’s first to leave Earth orbit, something that will be accomplished not by a direct transfer typical of lunar missions but rather through a series of Earth orbit-raising maneuvers. In direct transfer missions, a spacecraft is placed into a parking orbit around Earth before on board propulsion systems give it a substantial velocity boost to place it into a lunar transfer orbit with an apogee of 238,550 miles (384,400 km) – roughly the moon’s average distance from the Earth.

“Direct transfer would have required an additional stage to PSLV,” said V. Adimurthy, a scientist at ISRO’s Vikram Space Science Centre, where the rocket was built.

Satish said the PSLV will inject Chandrayaan-1 into an elliptical orbit around the Earth with a perigee of 155 miles (250 km) and an apogee of 14,291 miles (23,000 km). The spacecraft will reach lunar orbit by firing its liquid-fueled apogee motor several times. The first firing will put the spacecraft in a 186- by 22,990-mile (300- by 37,000-km) Earth orbit. Successive firings will raise the apogee to 45,360 miles (73,000 km) and then to the lunar transfer trajectory orbit of 186 by 240,470 miles (300 by 387,000 km).

“It takes about 11 days after launch to establish the lunar transfer trajectory,” Satish said.

Further firings will insert Chandrayaan-1 into a 310- by 3,106-mile (500- by 5,000-km) orbit around the moon. The orbit will then will be lowered to 62 by 3,106 miles (100 by 5,000 km) and finally to the desired 62-mile (100-km) circular orbit, which will take the spacecraft over the Moon’s poles once every 118 minutes.

“If the launch takes place on Oct. 22, the spacecraft is expected to enter the 100-kilometer lunar orbit on Nov. 8,” Satish said.

The Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft itself is relatively small, measuring about 5 feet (1.5 meters) on a side with a dry mass of only 1,153 pounds (523 kg). It carries 11 scientific payloads, including six provided by other nations: two from the United States, and one each from Britain, Sweden, Germany and Bulgaria.

“The real challenge was in accommodating different payloads in specific locations and orientations in a small spacecraft,” Mylswamy Annadurai, Chandrayaan-1 project director, told Space News.

The Indian-built payloads are: the Terrain Mapping Camera; Lunar Laser Ranging Instrument; Hyperspectral Imager; High Energy X-Ray Spectrometer; and the Moon Impact Probe.

The 64-pound (29-kg) impact probe will be released from the orbiter over a selected site once the spacecraft enters its final orbit, Satish said. During its 18-minute descent, the impact probe – with India’s national flag painted on its shell – will take images of the lunar surface. Its impact will kick up a cloud of dust that will be observed and analyzed by the instruments on the orbiter.

Among the international payloads, India collaborated on two: the X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometer with Britain’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory; and the Sub-keV Atom Reflecting Analyzer with the Swedish Institute of Space Physics. The other international payloads are: a Mini Synthetic Aperture Radar built by the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory of Laurel, Md.; Moon Mineralogical Mapper supplied by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Brown University; Near Infrared Spectrometer from Germany’s Max Planck Institute; and Radiation Dose Monitor supplied by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

In addition to mapping lunar surface features and topography, the instrument suite will study the Moon’s elemental and mineralogical composition – in part by measuring reflectance from solar flares that are expected to rise in frequency and intensity over the next few years. “Water-ice, if present, can be detected by several of these instruments,” ISRO said on its Web site.

In response to questions, Narendra Bhandari, who until recently headed ISRO’s planetary exploration division, listed four main Chandrayaan-1 objectives:

• Study how volatile elements and compounds – possibly including water – get transported to the poles from the hot lunar surface during the day.

• Produce a digital elevation map with 5-meter resolution both vertically and horizontally. This will enable scientists to select potential sites for a future base.

• Produce chemical and mineral maps of the moon. The mineral spectrometer will measure signals up to 3 microns in the near-infra red portion of the electromagnetic spectrum – data that has not previously been collected – giving scientists new information about water and possible organic compounds at the poles.

• Map subsurface features on the Moon using a synthetic aperture radar.

“Simultaneous photo-geological, mineralogical, and chemical mapping will enable us to identify different geological units, which will test the early evolutionary history of the Moon,” Bhandari said.

He added that the simultaneous presence of four Moon probes will enable coordinated study. For example, he said, one mission may benefit from data collected by another; or one probe could observe as another crashes into the surface after completing its mission.

Intel,now on storage devices

 Microprocessor major Intel on Friday evening announced it has started shipping out its fastest solid-state flash drives – the X-25E E
xtreme Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) – targeted at servers, workstations and storage devices. 

Unlike mechanical hard disk drives, the solid-state drives (SSDs) do not contain any moving parts and instead feature 50nm single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory technology. They are more expensive, but faster and efficient.

Interestingly, Intel stressed that the systems equipped with these drives typically do not suffer from the performance bottlenecks associated with conventional drives. “By reducing the total infrastructure, cooling and energy costs, SSDs can lower total cost of ownership for enterprise applications by more than five times,” Intel’s statement claimed. The SSD business will obviously pitchfork Intel into direct competition with established HDD-based storage players for businesses like data centres on one hand, and for workstations and devices on the other. 

Given the migration towards ultra-portability in laptops, flash drives are ideally suited to this form factor and is beginning to be preferred over spinning hard drives in some other devices as a more reliable storage solution. However, Intel’s new flash drive comes in a 32GB capacity, and is priced at $695 for customers who buy at least 1,000 pieces, thus making it quite an expensive proposition. 

A 64GB drive is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2009. Intel had earlier announced 80GB and 160GB flash drives for laptop and desktop computers. 

Intel had entered a tie-up with Micron Technology a few months ago to develop NAND flash memory five times faster than the conventional NAND. Taking the initiative further, Intel has also sewn up a deal with Sun Microsystems. 

Sun has committed to deliver a number of storage products using Intel’s SSDs, which it says are designed for computing operations requiring a high rate of input/output operations per second (IOPS), today’s key storage performance metric. These will be pitched to enterprise data centres. Sun has already been working on offering flash drives as an alternative in its servers. 

“Solid-state drive technology will change the economics of enterprise data centers,” said John Fowler, executive vice-president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. “SSDs, along with our systems and Solaris ZFS with hybrid storage pools, are important components of the Open Storage initiative. Sun expects to offer enterprise storage solutions that will exploit the breakthrough performance of Intel’s High Performance Solid-State Drives and deliver significant performance gains while consuming a fraction of the energy of traditional spinning disk arrays.” 

Intel claims its X25-E SSD is more efficient and up to 100 times faster over HDDs as measured in IOPS. A storage model which includes SSDs can also lower energy costs by up to five times, an added benefit for businesses focused on electricity savings, the company claims. 

“Hard disk drive performance has not kept pace with Moore’s Law,” said Kirk Skaugen, general manager, Intel Server Platforms group. “Intel’s high-performance SSDs unleash the full performance of the latest Intel Xeon processor-based systems while increasing reliability and lowering the total cost of ownership for a broad range of server and storage workloads.”

An Introduction to CHANDRYAN-1

 

An Introduction to CHANRDYAN-1

Scientific Objectives
 
The Chandrayaan-1 mission is aimed at high-resolution remote sensing of the moon in visible, near infrared(NIR), low energy X-rays and high-energy X-ray regions. Specifically the objectives will be
 

To prepare a three-dimensional atlas (with a high spatial and altitude resolution of 5-10m) of both near and far side of the moon.

 To conduct chemical and mineralogical mapping of the entire lunar surface for distribution of elements such as Magnesium, Aluminum, Silicon, Calcium, Iron and Titanium with a spatial resolution of about 25 km and high atomic number elements such as Radon, Uranium & Thorium with a spatial resolution of about 20 km.
 
Simultaneous photo geological and chemical mapping will enable identification of different geological units, which will test the early evolutionary history of the moon and help in determining the nature and stratigraphy of the lunar crust.

  Mission Objectives

 To realise the mission goal of harnessing the science payloads, lunar craft and the launch vehicle with suitable ground support systems including DSN station.

  To realise the integration and testing, launching and achieving lunar polar orbit of about 100 km, in-orbit operation of experiments, communication/ telecommand, telemetry data reception, quick look data and archival for scientific utilization by identified group of scientists.

 Mission Sequence

 The spacecraft would be launched by PSLV-C11 in a highly elliptical transfer orbit with perigee of about 240 km and an apogee of about 24,000 km. Later, the spacecraft would be raised to moon rendezvous orbit by multiple in-plane perigee maneuvers. These maneuvers would help to achieve the required 3,86,000 km apogee of the Lunar Transfer Trajectory (LTT).

After a quick estimate of the achieved LTT a mid-course correction will be imparted at the earliest opportunity. The spacecraft coasts for about five and a half days in this trajectory prior to the lunar encounter. The major maneuver of the mission, called Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI) that leads to lunar capture, would be carried out at the peri-selene (nearest point in lunar orbit) leading to successful lunar capture in a polar, near circular 1000 km-altitude orbit.

 After successful capture and health checks, the altitude is planned to be lowered through a series of in-plane corrections to achieve the target altitude of 100 km circular polar orbit.

The Spacecraft

      ·         Spacecraft for lunar mission is :

·         Cuboid in shape of approximately 1.50 m side.

·         Weighing 1304 kg at launch and 590 kg at lunar orbit.

·         Accommodates eleven science payloads.

·         3-axis stabilized spacecraft using two star sensors, gyros and four reaction wheels.

·         The power generation would be through a canted single-sided solar array to provide required power during all phases of the mission. This deployable solar array consisting of a single panel generates 700W of peak power. Solar array along with yoke would be stowed on the south deck of the spacecraft in the launch phase. During eclipse spacecraft will be powered by Lithium ion (Li-Ion) batteries.

·         After deployment the solar panel plane is canted by 30º to the spacecraft pitch axis.

·         The spacecraft employs a X-band, 0.7m diameter parabolic antenna for payload data transmission. The antenna employs a dual gimbal mechanism to track the earth station when the spacecraft is in lunar orbit.

·         The spacecraft uses a bipropellant integrated propulsion system to reach lunar orbit as well as orbit and attitude maintenance while orbiting the moon.

·         The propulsion system carries required propellant for a mission life of 2 years, with adequate margin.

·         The Telemetry, Tracking & Command (TTC) communication is in S-band frequency.

·         The scientific payload data transmission is in X-band frequency.

·         The spacecraft has three Solid State Recorders (SSRs) on board to record data from various payloads.

·         SSR-1 will store science payload data and has capability of storing 32Gb data

·         SSR-2 will store science payload data along with spacecraft attitude information (gyro and star sensor), satellite house keeping and other auxiliary data. The storing capacity of SSR-2 is 8Gb.

·         M3 (Moon Mineralogy Mapper) payload has an independent SSR with 10Gb capacity.

 GROUND SEGMENT FOR CHANDRAYAAN-1 MISSION

 Ground Segment for Chandrayaan-1 comprises three major elements viz. Deep Space Station (DSN), Spacecraft Control Center (SCC) and Indian Space Science Data Center (ISSDC). This trio of ground facility ensures the success of the mission by providing to and fro conduit of communication, securing good health of the spacecraft, maintaining the orbit and attitude to the requirements of the mission and conducting payload operations.The ground segment is also responsible for making the science data available for the Technologists / Scientists along with auxiliary information, in addition to storage of payload and spacecraft data.

SCINTEFIC PAYLOAD

Chandrayaan-1 is an Indian Mission to the Moon. The indigenously developed payload/ experiments are:

 TMC

 Terrain Mapping stereo Camera (TMC) in the panchromatic band, having 5 m spatial resolution and 20 km swath

 HySI

Hyper Spectral Imaging camera (HYSI) operating in 400-950nm band with a spectral resolution of 15nm and spatial resolution of 80m with a swath of 20km.

 LLRI

 Lunar Laser Ranging Instrument (LLRI) with height resolution of about 10m

HEX

High Energy X-ray spectrometer (HEX) using Cadmium-Zinc-Telluride (CdZnTe) detector in the 30-250 keV energy region with spatial resolution of 40km

MIP

Moon Impact Probe (MIP) as piggyback on the main orbiter of the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft which will impact on the surface of the moon

Apart from the above indigenous payloads/experiments, ISRO solicited proposals through an Announcement of Opportunity (AO) from     International and Indian Scientific Community for participating in the mission by providing suitable scientific payloads complementing the Chandrayaan-1 objectives. Out of the proposals received, six experiments were finally selected for inclusion in Chandrayaan-1 mission. The AO payloads on-board Chandrayaan-1 are:

C1XS
Chandrayaan-1 X-ray Spectrometer (C1XS) through ESA -a collaboration between Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK and ISRO Satellite Centre, ISRO. Part of this payload is redesigned by ISRO to suit Chandrayaan-1 scientific objectives.

 SIR-2

 Near Infra Red spectrometer (SIR-2) from Max Plank Institute, Lindau, Germany through ESA

SARA

 Sub KeV Atom Reflecting Analyser (SARA) through ESA, from Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Sweden and Space Physics Laboratory, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, ISRO. The Data Processing Unit of this payload/ experiment is designed and developed by ISRO, while Swedish Institute of Space Physics develops the payload.

RADOM

 Radiation Dose Monitor Experiment (RADOM) from Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

 MiniSAR

 Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar (MiniSAR) from Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University and Naval Air Warfare Centre, USA through NASA

M3

Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) from Brown University and Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USA through NASA

LAUNCH VEHICLE

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) built its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) in the early 90s. The 45 m tall PSLV with a lift-off mass of 295 tonne, had its maiden success on October 15, 1994 when it launched India’s IRS-P2 remote sensing satellite into a Polar Sun Synchronous Orbit (SSO) of 820 km. Between 1996 and 2005, it has launched six more Indian Remote Sensing satellites as well as HAMSAT, a micro satellite built by ISRO for amateur radio communications into polar SSOs, one Indian meteorological satellite into Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO). During this period, PSLV has also launched four satellites from abroad (TUBSAT and DLR-Bird from Germany, Proba from Belgium and KITSAT from Republic of Korea) as piggyback payloads into polar SSOs. Thus, PSLV has emerged as ISRO’s workhorse launch vehicle and proved its reliability and versatility by scoring eight consecutive successes between 1994-2005 periods in launching multiple payloads to both SSO as well as GTO.

The first Indian moon mission is proposed to be a lunar polar orbiter at an altitude of about 100 km from the lunar surface.

 Considering the maturity of Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) demonstrated through PSLV-C4/KALPANA-1 mission, PSLV is chosen for the first lunar mission. The upgraded version of PSLV viz., PSLV-C11 which has a liftoff weight of 316 tonnes, will be used to inject 1304 kg mass spacecraft at 240 x 24,000 km orbit and the corresponding spacecraft mass is 590kg when the target lunar orbit of 100 km is achieved.

 

CHANDRAYAAN-1 “INDIA’s MOON mission”

SRIHARIKOTA: On November 10 or 11, the national flag will be hoisted on the Moon. When the Moon Impact Probe (MIP), bearing the Tricolour, ejects from the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft and crashlands on the lunar surface, it will mark India’s leap into the club of countries aiming for the Moon.“A small Indian flag (4 inches by six inches) has been painted on the moon impact probe. This is a matter of pride and honour, and when the MIP lands on the Moon, it will signal India’s entry into one of the intriguing aspects of the universe,’’ ISRO officials told TOI. 
The 29-kg MIP, which was not part of the project initially, was inducted into the spacecraft at the insistence of former President A P J Abdul Kalam. The payload developed by the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre at Thiruvananthapuram will help identify future landing sites on the Moon and will also aid scientific exploration of the lunar surface. When the MIP crash-lands on the Moon, it will kick up dust. The mass spectrometer on the payload will gather scientific details from the dust and send them back to the earth. The MIP is one of the 11 payloads on Chandrayaan-I and one of the five instruments indigenously designed anddeveloped in India. 

On October 22, the PSLVC 11, also called PSLV-XL because of the increased weight of the six strap-on motors, will soar into the sky from the second launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota . It will travel to the vicinity of the Moon by following the lunar transfer trajectory (LTT). 

When the spacecraft reaches the vicinity of the Moon, it will be slowed down through a process to enable the gravity of the Moon to capture it into its elliptical orbit. 

When the orbital height of Chandrayaan-I is lowered to its intended 100-km height from the lunar surface , the MIP will be ejected from Chandrayaan-I at the earliest on to the lunar surface in a chosen area. “About 20 days from the date of launch, Chandrayaan-I will be in the required Moon orbit. So we are looking at November 8, around noon,’’ SSDC director M C Dathan said. 

The spacecraft, which is being readied at another building , will be moved to the vehicle building by October 14, following which another four days of work will be carried out to couple Chandrayaan-1 with the launch vehicle. On October 18, the vehicle with the payloads will be moved to the launch pad. 

Dathan allayed fears of the launch not taking place on October 22 because of rains. “Only if a cyclone occurs will there be a problem. Otherwise, even with rains, the launch will take place,’’ he said.

 

 

Polymer electric storage

The proliferation of solar, wind and even tidal electric generation and the rapid emergence of hybrid electric automobiles demands flexible and reliable methods of high-capacity electrical storage. Now a team of Penn State materials scientists is developing ferroelectric polymer-based capacitors that can deliver power more rapidly and are much lighter than conventional batteries

 ”Electrical energy storage is very important for all electrical and electronic systems,” says Qing Wang, associate professor of materials science and engineering. “Even renewable energy systems like solar cells need somewhere to store excess energy to be used at night.” Wang and his research team report today (Aug. 20) at the 236th national American Chemical Society meeting in Philadelphia in two papers, on the development of power density tunable polymers and polymer ceramic nanocomposites as electric storage materials for capacitors. Currently, power conditioning is carried out by capacitors, but Wang believes that eventually properly tuned polymer capacitors could replace batteries. 

“Traditional materials are ceramic materials which have high weight and are very fragile,” says Wang. “Mobile electronics need light weight electrical energy storage.” 

See full-size image. .

The researchers, who include Wang, Yingying Lu, postdoctoral fellow, and Jason Claude, Junjun Li, graduate students in materials science and engineering, developed a polymer of poly(vinylidene fluoride) and trifluoroethylene which, with the addition of chlorotrifluoroethylene had a very high dielectric permittivity at room temperature. Permittivity is a measure of how much charge is stored in a material for a given electric field and is an indicator of how effective a material will be when storing energy in a capacitor. They found that by altering the amounts of the various chemical components of the polymer, they could tune the dielectric property and energy density. 

Hybrid cars are a good target for ferroelectric polymer capacitors because they convert mechanical energy generated when, for example coasting downhill, convert it to electricity and charge batteries for use at other times. Conventional batteries are often heavy, and may not be able to deliver the power amounts needed for quick acceleration. 

Wang and Li, report on a further modification of this ferroelectric polymer by adding nanoparticulate ceramics to further improve the energy density. Because ceramics often have higher permittivities than the polymers, they believed that combining polymers with high breakdown strength with ceramics of high permittivity would produce a composite material with a large energy storage capacity. Breakdown strength is a measure of the maximum electric field that an insulating material can withstand before it begins to conduct electricity. The higher the breakdown strength, the better a material is for a capacitor. 

Unfortunately mixing nano particles of ceramic with polymers is not a simple action. The ceramic particles tend to clump and aggregate. If the two materials are not matched for electrical properties, their interface will breakdown at high electric fields and the ability of the composite to store energy will decrease, rather than increase. Wang and his team fine-tuned the dielectric particles to the polymer matrix by adding functionalized groups to the materials to match them. They also tried to control the mixing so that uniformly dispersed particles are spread through the matrix. 

“Matching the permittivity and uniformly dispersing the ceramic nanoparticles is not easy,” says Wang. “Both problems have to be tackled and solved at the same time for the material to have the desired characteristics.” 

Dielectric polymers like the ones Wang creates cannot only be used as capacitors, but could also substitute for the dielectric silicon dioxide layer currently used in computers. Because polymers are processed at room temperature, they are easily fabricated and they are extremely flexible. Their use would open the way for flexible electronics applications, such as foldable screens and computers

Russian spaceship blasts off with U.S. tourist

Enlarge Photo U.S. space tourist Richard Garriott gives a thumbs-up after donning his spacesuit at Baikonur cosmodrome…Sun, Oct 12 12:34 PM

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (Reuters) – A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying a U.S. space tourist blasted off on Sunday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome to the International Space Station.

The Soyuz TMA-13 spaceship lifted off from the Kazakh steppe as planned at 1:03 p.m. (0703 GMT).

Richard Garriott, a video game developer from Texas, paid $35 million to fly into space alongside U.S. astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov.

Mars ROVER to roam the planet.

NASA on Friday said it will move forward with a super-sized rover to Mars next year. The space agency plans to work on a Mars Science Laboratory to roam the planet. The rover will be nuclear powered.

The new six-wheel rover is the size of an SUV. It is powered by nuclear energy. However, the space agency needs more funding to complete the $2 billion project. Mission specialists hope to begin the first mission for the new rover to Mars next fall.

NASA on Friday said it will move forward with a super-sized rover to Mars next year. The space agency plans to work on a Mars Science Laboratory to roam the planet. The rover will be nuclear powered. The new six-wheel rover is the size of an SUV. It is powered by nuclear energy. However, the space agency needs more funding to complete the $2 billion project. Mission specialists hope to begin the first mission for the new rover to Mars next fall. By: Sara Smith Oct 11, 2008 11:48 AM GMT NASA on Friday announced that it needs more funding to resolve problems with its next Mars mission. The planned mission will launch next year. The space agency hopes that the U.S. Congress will find the extra funds needed. “If we’re going to launch in 2009 or 2011, additional budget resources are going to be necessary,” Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA headquarters, said in a statement. The mission will launch a Mars Science Laboratory to Mars. The new super-sized rover is nuclear-powered. NASA managers are already meeting to go over the progress of the mission. There are budget concerns over the new mission as the project’s costs continue to escalate. NASA has poured $1.5 billion into the project so far. The space agency says the final price tag is expected to be $2 billion. NASA’s Mars Science Lab will roam the Martian planet and study rocks. The study will determine if the Red Planet could support microbial life. The new rover will have a cargo of instruments that can probe rocks and soil. It has the technology to study rocks in finer detail than previous missions including a laser that can zap boulders from a distance. The new rover has six wheels and is the size of an average SUV.

Phoenix Lander Gathers Martian Snow

 

NASA scientists say that snow is falling on Mars. The Phoenix Lander collected data presented the findings. Phoenix is now on its fifth month of space exploration on Mars.

The Mars Phoenix Lander has detected snow from the Martian atmosphere. The snow fell from clouds about 3 miles above the lander’s ground position. Scientists say the snow is melting before it hits the ground
Sep 30, 2008 15:25 PM GMT

NASA scientists say that the Phoenix Lander has captured snow falling from the Martian clouds. However, the snow vaporizes before reaching the Martian soil. The new findings were presented at a press conference on Monday.

“In the second half of the mission we saw frost, ground fog, and clouds. This is now occurring every night,” Jim Whiteway, lead scientist for the Phoenix Meteorological Station, said.

Whiteway said instruments on the spacecraft recorded rising temperatures and humidity in the two months leading up to the Martian summer in July. The temperatures have been falling ever since.

The recent discovery is another indication that water is on Mars. The team used laser instruments to study the Martian atmosphere. During the mission, the instruments detected snow. The snow was nearly 3 miles above the current Phoenix position.

Phoenix will now search for signs of snow on the ground. The lander is now on its fifth month of space exploration on Mars. It first arrived on the Martian surface on May 25. Several missions have found signs of water-ice in the soil.

The lander is currently on the planet’s northern polar region. It has collected and analyzed soil samples that unveil snow minerals.