Moon Base Over Asteroid? Lawmakers Push for Lunar Landing by 2022

Moon Base Over Asteroid? Lawmakers Push for Lunar Landing by 2022 - While NASA's proposed budget for 2014 unveiled this week reaffirms the space agency's ambitious plan to send astronauts to an asteroid, some members of Congress are pushing for a more familiar goal: a moon base by 2022.

President Barack Obama's federal budget request for 2014, released Wednesday (April 10), gives NASA $105 million to jump-start a bold plan to park an asteroid near the moon. Astronauts would then explore the space rock using the agency's Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule, with the first visit perhaps coming as early as 2021.

Buzz Aldrin salutes the U.S. flag on the surface of the moon.

The proposed "Asteroid Initiative" lines up with the manned spaceflight priorities of the Obama Administration, which three years ago cancelled NASA's moon-oriented Constellation program and directed the agency to get astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, then on to the vicinity of Mars by the mid-2030s. [How it Works; NASA's Asteroid-Capture Mission in Pictures]

But some lawmakers contend that the moon should still be NASA's immediate human spaceflight target. They have reintroduced a 2011 bill called the RE-asserting American Leadership in Space Act (or REAL Space Act for short), which asks NASA to send astronauts to the moon by 2022 with the goal of establishing a long-term settlement there.

"The moon is our nearest celestial body, taking only a matter of days to reach," Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) said in a statement Wednesday. "In order to explore deeper into space — to Mars and beyond — a moon presence offers us the ability to develop and test technologies to cope with the realities of operating on an extraterrestrial surface."

The bill would also give NASA's manned spaceflight efforts more direction, its sponsors say.

"This legislation is not just about landing another human on the moon. It is about restoring our nation’s now-defunct human spaceflight program and setting clear and achievable goals that will lead to advancements in science and technology," said Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah). "This legislation restores and clarifies NASA’s role in human spaceflight and sets the US back on course to lead exploration of the cosmos."

Astronauts have not walked on the surface of the moon since NASA's Apollo 17 mission in 1972, which marked the final lunar landing mission of the Apollo program.

In 2004, NASA unveiled its Constellation program that aimed to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 using a new family of rockets, the Ares I and Ares V, as well as new Orion space capsules and moon landers. In 2010, however, the Obama Administration replaced that program with the asteroid-oriented spaceflight goal NASA is currently pursuing.

The current space vision still includes the Orion capsules, but replaces the Ares rockets with a single mega-rocket called the Space Launch System. The first manned flight of the complete Orion-Space Launch System is expected in 2021.

NASA's focus on getting humans to a near-Earth asteroid and Mars makes an American-led manned moon mission unlikely anytime soon, agency chief Charles Bolden reportedly said earlier this month.

"NASA will not take the lead on a human lunar mission," Bolden said during a joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board on Thursday (April 4), according to a SpacePolitics.com report by Jeff Foust. "NASA is not going to the moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime. And the reason is, we can only do so many things." ( space.com )

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How Alien hunting scientists would use Twitter to tell us if aliens got in touch

How Alien hunting scientists would use Twitter to tell us if aliens got in touch - It could be anything from a simple 'hello' to disrupting the earth's nuclear fusion process.

But despite the uncertainty of how aliens could get in touch, one thing is certain for the astronomers from Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - there would not be a cover-up.

The small band of researchers around the world scan the universe for signals coming from the world's largest radio telescopes, hunting for any unusual signs.

And while conspiracy theorists argue there would be a government cover-up or global upheaval Seth Shostak, the Seti Institute's principal astronomer, told the BBC that both groups are unnecessarily panicking.

'The idea that governments would keep this quiet because otherwise the public would go nuts, is nuts. History shows that's not what happens.

Phone home? How should awe respond to aliens, if they try and call us?

'In the early 1900s, there were claims that there were canals on Mars - a vast hydraulic civilisation just 50m km from Earth. The average guy in the street said 'well, I guess there are Martians' - they didn't panic.'

If the computers flag up an interesting signal they need other telescopes to confirm it which could take days - during which time the word would quickly spread by social media.

On the lookout: The SETI Institute uses telescopes like this to hunt for clues of alien contact

News of alien contact may reach most people via a tweet from a Seti astronomer, the BBC reported.

Seti say they have no obligation to report it to an official body, and can simply inform people what they have discovered and they do not know of any formal procedure of how to deal with it.

It is this simple announcement that means people like Paul Davies of the Beyond Center at Arizona State University, who heads up the the Seti Post-detection Taskgroup, are coming up with ways of how to respond.

It could just be a beacon, saying nothing more than 'Hello, Earthlings, we are here,' says Prof Davies.

HOW SETI BEGAN TO SCAN THE SKIES

The SETI Institute is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to scientific research, education and public outreach.

The Institute comprises 3 centers, the Center for SETI Research, the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe and the Center for Education and Public Outreach.

Founded in November 1984, the SETI Institute began operations on February 1, 1985. Today it employs over 150 scientists, educators and support staff.

It uses computers using to sift through the cosmic radio traffic, flagging up to astronomers any potential attempts at contact from extraterrestrial life.

The Seti community firmly believe they should respond to whatever contact aliens may send us, but many disagree about what they should say back.

Prof Davies told the BBC that it would have to be something aliens and humans could both understand: 'The only thing that we've got in common has got to be at a mathematics and physics level.'

Some Seti scientists argue that, once we know where to direct contact too humans should send the contents of the entire internet, streamed down a laser light beam.

Aliens would then have plenty of mediums - music, art - from which to draw information about humans.

Dr Vakoch told the broadcaster that one way to show human characteristics such as helping others by showing them drawings of a person helping another up a cliff.

But any eventual message will be put together by international consensus - which will only be on the negotiating table if a signal actually shows up. ( dailymail.co.uk )

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US Navy's 'UFO-Like' Stealth Drone Takes Flight

US Navy's 'UFO-Like' Stealth Drone Takes Flight - The U.S. Navy reached a new milestone for a futuristic new stealth drone when it successfully retracted its landing gear and flew in cruise configuration for the first time, engineers announced Tuesday.

Developed by Northrop Grumman, the X-47B is a tailless, strike fighter-sized unmanned aircraft designed to take off from and land on moving aircraft carriers at sea. New images released today depict a futuristic, almost UFO-like vehicle.

The test flight, conducted at Edwards Air Force Base, helped validate hardware and software that would enable the X-47B to land with precision on a moving deck, the company said.

Developed by Northrop Grumman, the X-47B is a tailless, strike fighter-sized unmanned aircraft designed to take off from and land on moving aircraft carriers at sea.

"Last week's flight gave us our first clean look at the aerodynamic cruise performance of the X-47B air system … and it is proving out all of our predictions," said Janis Pamiljans, vice president and Navy UCAS (Unmanned Combat Air System Carrier) program manager for Northrop Grumman's Aerospace Systems division.

"Reaching this critical test point demonstrates the growing maturity of the air system, and its readiness to move to the next phase of flight testing."

The aircraft is part of the U.S. Navy’s growing fleet of drones as the military looks to shift away from manned aircraft.

Northrop Grumman hopes to have successfully demonstrated the first carrier-based launch by 2013 with autonomous in-air refueling coming one year later. ( foxnews.com )

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Possible planets without orbits

'Exciting' find: Possible planets without orbits – Are these planets without orbits? Astronomers have found 10 potential planets as massive as Jupiter wandering through a slice of the Milky Way galaxy, following either very wide orbits or no orbit at all. And scientists think they are more common than the stars.

These mysterious bodies, apparently gaseous balls like the largest planets in our solar system, may help scientists understand how planets form.

"They're finding evidence for a lot of pretty big planets," said Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who wasn't involved in the research.

If they orbit stars, their sheer number suggests every star in the galaxy has one or two of them, "which is astounding" because that's five or 10 times the number of stars scientists had thought harbored such gas-giant planets, he said.

And if instead they are wandering free, that "would be really stunning" because it's hard to explain how they formed, he said.

Artist's conception provided - This artist's conception provided by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech shows a newly discovered type of planet that wanders freely or follows very loose orbits. Astronomers have the mysterious denizens of the Milky Way are apparently as common as the stars. One expert called the discovery a huge surprise.

If that's the case, it would give a boost to some theories that say planets can be thrown out of orbit during formation, said Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, another outside expert.

Other scientists have reported free-wandering objects in star-forming regions of the cosmos, but the newfound objects appear to be different, said one author of the new study, physicist David Bennett of the University of Notre Dame.

Bennett and colleagues from Japan, New Zealand and elsewhere report the finding in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. They didn't observe the objects directly. Instead, they used the fact that massive objects bend the light of distant stars with their gravity, just as a lens does. So they looked extensively for such "microlensing" events.

They found 10, each caused by one of the newfound objects. They calculated each object has about the mass of Jupiter, and estimated how common such objects are. They also found no sign of a star near these bodies, at least not within 10 times the distance from Earth to the sun. (For comparison, within our solar system that would basically rule out an orbit closer than Saturn's.)

So the newfound objects either orbit a star more distant than that, or they don't orbit a star at all, the researchers concluded. They drew on other data to determine most of the objects don't orbit a star.

Scientists believe planets are formed when disks of dust that orbit stars form clumps, so that these clumps — the planets — remain in orbit. Maybe the newfound objects started out that way, but then got tossed out of orbit or into distant orbits by the gravitational tugs of larger planets, the researchers suggest.

The work suggests that such a tossing-out process is quite common, Bennett said.

Boss said maybe the bodies formed around a pair of stars instead, one of which supplied the gravitational tug. But even that would take some explaining to produce an object without an orbit, he said. Or maybe they somehow formed outside of any orbit. So the theoretical challenge in explaining the existence of such bodies is "exciting," he said.

Boss said he suspects most of these are in a distant orbit, and that maybe they even formed at that great distance rather than being tossed outward from a closer orbit.

Kaltenegger also said the new results can't rule out the possibility that these possible planets are in orbit, and that they may only have the mass of Saturn, about a third of Jupiter's.

But if they aren't orbiting a star, she noted, they don't fit the official definition of a planet — at least not the definition applied to objects in our own solar system.

All in all, Boss said, the new work is "pretty exciting in telling what is out there in the night sky... Lots of theories will grow in this environment." ( Associated Press )

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Smashed Asteroids May Be Related to Dinosaur Killer

Smashed Asteroids May Be Related to Dinosaur Killer - Astronomers have found a comet-like object they believe was created by the collision of two asteroids, possible siblings of the rogue rock blamed for killing the dinosaurs millions of years ago.

The object, known as P/2010 A2, was circling about 90 million miles (144 million km) from Earth in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter when it was spotted last week by the Hubble Space Telescope.

"The truth is we're still struggling to understand what this means," lead scientist David Jewitt with the University of California at Los Angeles, told Reuters on Tuesday. "It's most likely the result of a recent collision between two asteroids."

If so, he said, "It'd be the first case we've seen of an asteroid smash happening, basically caught in the act."

The object resembles a comet, but its nucleus is severed from its tail, which "has a very strange appearance, the likes of which we've never seen before," Jewitt said.

Studies of the object -- and searches for similar ones -- would improve scientists' understanding of how asteroids break apart, information that may be useful to thwart a future asteroid strike on Earth.

"The thing that we want to understand is how the asteroids smash into each other and destroy each other," Jewett said. "It might help us understand even how to destroy an asteroid and prevent one from hitting us."

Scientists believe a giant comet or asteroid that hit Earth about 65 million years ago was linked to the extinction of the dinosaurs, possibly by throwing up dust or chemical clouds that blocked the sun or by igniting global wildfires.

Calculations show the orbit of P/2010 A2 is related to the group of asteroids, known at the Flora family, that produced that asteroid.

NASA is working to catalog at least 90 percent of the estimated 1,000 objects that approach Earth and are larger across than one kilometer, about two-thirds of a mile. The agency's proposed budget for the year beginning October 1 includes a $16 million annual increase to step up that effort. (Reuters)

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NASA Should Skip Moon, Fly Elsewhere

NASA Should Skip Moon, Fly Elsewhere . NASA needs to make a major detour on its grand plans to return astronauts to the moon, a special independent panel told the White House Thursday.

Under current plans, NASA has picked the wrong destination with the wrong rocket, the panel's chairman said. A test-flight version of the rocket, the new Ares I, is on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral, awaiting liftoff later this month for its first experimental flight.

Instead, NASA should be concentrating on bigger rockets and new places to explore, the panel members said, as they issued their final 155-page report. The committee, created by the White House in May to look at NASA's troubled exploration, shuttle and space station programs, issued a summary of their findings last month, mostly urging more spending on space.

On Thursday in a news conference, panel Chairman Norman Augustine focused on fresh destinations for NASA, saying that it makes more sense to put astronauts on a nearby asteroid or one of the moons of Mars. He said that could be done sooner than returning to the moon in 15 years as NASA has outlined.

The exploration plans now under fire were pushed by then-President George W. Bush after the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster. The moon-Mars plan lacks enough money, thanks to budget diversions, the panel said in a 155-page report. Starting in 2014, NASA needs an extra $3 billion a year if astronauts are going to travel beyond Earth's orbit, the panel said.

The Augustine commission wants NASA to extend the life of the space shuttle program and the International Space Station. Space shuttles are due to retire Oct. 1, 2010, but should keep flying until sometime in 2011 because they won't get all their flights to the space station done by that date. And the space station itself - only now nearing completion - should operate until at least 2020, allowing for more scientific experiments, part of its reason for existence. NASA's timetable calls for plunging it into the ocean in 2015.

However, the overall focus of the panel's report is on where U.S. space exploration should be headed.

The White House will review the panel's analysis "and then ultimately the president will be making the final decision," White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said in an e-mail comment.

The committee outlines eight options. Three of those involve a "flexible path" to explore someplace other than the moon, eventually heading to a Mars landing far in the future. The flexible path suggests no-landing flights around the moon and Mars.

Landing on the moon and then launching back to Earth would require a lot of fuel because of the moon's gravity. Hauling fuel from Earth to the moon and then back costs money.

It would take less fuel to land and return from asteroids or comets that swing by Earth or even the Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos, Augustine said.

Eventually, Augustine said NASA could return to the moon, but as a training stepping stone, not a major destination, as the Bush plan envisioned.

Panel member Ed Crawley, a professor at MIT, said NASA should explore the inner solar system "to interest the American public in new destinations."

He noted that so many new asteroids and comets are being discovered each year that the potential first landing spot "is probably one we don't know about yet."

Augustine said landing astronauts on such a near-Earth object could occur in the early 2020s.

In a news conference to discuss their report, Crawley and Augustine said the current NASA plans were well conceived at the time, in 2005. But when money got diverted and launch dates delayed, NASA's new Ares I rocket began to look like it lost one of its major purposes: ferrying astronauts to the space station.

Crawley said the panel liked the idea of a commercially operated, more basic rocket-taxi to get astronauts into the low-Earth orbit of the space station. If NASA spent about $5 billion to help kick-start the embryonic commercial space business to do the people-carrying, then the space agency could concentrate on heavier rockets that do the real far-off exploring, he said.

Those commercial rockets should be ready in about six years, Crawley said.

NASA is slowly delaying some parts of the old moon program. It's rethinking its future annual $10 million spending on a still-unbuilt lunar lander as it awaits Obama's decision on the Augustine panel recommendations, said NASA spokesman Grey Hautaluoma.

George Washington University space scholar John Logsdon praised the report as "more comprehensive" than NASA's current program.

Syracuse University public policy professor Henry Lambright said he worries about changes that will cause a loss in momentum in NASA's exploration plans. "You've got to make a decision and you've got to stick to it if you are ever going to get to Mars."

Senator Richard Shelby, R-Ala., criticized the idea of using unproven commercial carriers instead of the Ares, which was designed in his state. He said the report was "unsatisfactory and disappointing." ( AP )

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NASA Predator Scans California Burn Areas

NASA Predator Scans California Burn Areas. An unmanned NASA Predator aircraft equipped with an infrared imaging sensor has flown over large areas burned by two California wildfires to help the Forest Service assess damage, the administration said Tuesday.

Operating from NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, the Predator flew over the 250 square miles burned by this summer's Station Fire in Angeles National Forest and the 57-square-mile area scorched by the 2008 Piute Fire in Sequoia National Forest and other federal land in Kern County.

The aircraft carried a scanner with filters to detect light in visible, infrared and thermal wavelengths.

The images were then sent by satellite to NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., and were superimposed over Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth maps before being sent to the Forest Service.

The images depict different levels of fire damage in varying hues of color.

The Predator, which NASA has given the Native American name Ikhana (ee-KAH'-nah), is part of a fleet of unmanned aircraft types developed for military purposes that Dryden is using for earth science research.

NASA said that the two burn areas were scanned Thursday in a seven-hour flight to the Piute burn area northwest of Edwards and then southeast to the Station Fire area.

The latter portion of the flight by the remotely piloted aircraft occurred in the national airspace system and required close coordination with the Federal Aviation Administration, NASA said.

The Station Fire was ignited by arson on Aug. 26 in the San Gabriel Mountains and grew into the largest fire in Los Angeles County history. Thousands of homes in suburbs on the perimeter were threatened and 89 were destroyed. Two firefighters died when their vehicle plunged off a road when flames overran a fire camp.

Authorities have warned that there could be more damage. Winter rains on the vast areas of steep slopes left bare by the fire could unleash huge flows of debris-laden water into foothill communities.

The Piute Fire in June and July 2008 destroyed or damaged six homes and 45 outbuildings.

The NASA Predator was also used to send fire commanders information on blazes burning throughout the West in 2007-08. It was ready for similar missions this fall but was not needed, said Beth Hagenauer, a Dryden spokeswoman. ( AP )

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