SpaceX launch aborted after issue with tracking system

CAPE CANAVERAL — SpaceX and the Air Force hope to try again Monday to launch a space weather satellite from Cape Canaveral, after fixing a tracking radar that scrubbed today's first launch attempt.

Launch of a Falcon 9 rocket and the $340 million Deep Space Climate Observatory mission, or DSCOVR, is tentatively targeted for 6:07 p.m. Monday.

There's a 40% chance of acceptable weather for the instantaneous launch window at Launch Complex 40.

The weather was perfect Sunday, but the radar issue forced the Air Force to say it was "no go" about two-and-a-half minutes before the planned 6:10 p.m. liftoff.

With an instantaneous launch window, there was no more time available to troubleshoot the problem, resulting in the scrub.

The radar was required to track the Falcon 9 rocket during its flight from the Cape, part of the 45th Space Wing's responsibility for public safety during launches from the Eastern Range.

"The radar was not going to be able to come back up online and be ready to support the flight in time," SpaceX's John Insprucker said during the company's Webcast. "So with that we had to call a hold."

"Prob good though," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said later on Twitter.

Musk tweeted that SpaceX could now replace a balky video transmitter on the rocket's first stage. He said the transmitter was not necessary for the launch, "but nice to have."

The DSCOVR mission will send a satellite a million miles from Earth to monitor solar storms that can damage satellites, power grids and infrastructure on the ground.

The mission was first proposed in the late 1990s by then-Vice President Al Gore, who was at Kennedy Space Center to watch the launch and met briefly with reporters.
"It's very exciting for me," said Gore.

The mission, originally named Triana, ran into political opposition that bumped it from a planned 2000 launch on the space shuttle Columbia, then forced it into storage in a clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

"This has been a long time coming," said Stephen Volz, assistant administrator of the NOAA Satellite and Information Service in Silver Spring, Md.

The satellite still carries two NASA Earth-observing instruments, including the camera Gore envisioned. Called EPIC, the camera will produce images of the full, sunlit Earth from 1 million miles away. Gore thought a continuous picture of the Earth available on the Internet would help raise environmental awareness.

NOAA determined it would meet the agency's needs for space weather forecasting, replacing the NASA research satellite known as ACE that has operated for 17 years, far longer than planned.

After the launch, SpaceX will make its second attempt to land the Falcon 9's first-stage booster on a platform roughly 370 miles down range. A first attempt at the experimental landing last month hit the platform too hard after steering fins ran out of hydraulic fluid too soon.

Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of mission assurance at Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX, put the odds of success again at 50-50.

Because the satellite launch requires more fuel, the booster will return with a more aggressive trajectory and perform only two braking engine burns instead of three.

NASA video shows the dark side of the moon

A new video from NASA is shedding light on the dark side of the moon.
The nearly two-minute animated video released on Feb.4 shows what the moon looks like on the side that's not visible from Earth.

Instead of the dark spots that make up the near side, the less-familiar "dark side" is covered in "craters of all sizes," according to a statement from NASA.

The animated video was created using mapping data collected from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite.

White House budget would fund NASA's Europa, Mars missions

The White House budget request for 2016 has proposed to give NASA $18.5 billion, including funding for the Mars 2020 rover and a mission to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.

But while the overall budget is nearly half a billion dollars more than the 2015 budget that Congress adopted, it misses a few key marks, said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), whose district includes NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.
“I think the administration’s moving in the right direction, but still has a long way to go,” Schiff said.

The White House proposal would set aside $1.361 billion for planetary science, which is about $76 million less than Congress allotted the division in 2015.
“It’s a better budget in many respects than what the administration has proposed in the past, although it’s still not at the level that the Congress approved even last year,” Schiff said.

A long-proposed mission to Europa had received $100 million from Congress for 2015. Europa is one of the few icy water-worlds in the solar system (including Saturn’s moon Enceladus and the dwarf planet Ceres) that could be hiding a potential life-friendly environment beneath its frozen surface. But in the 2016 budget request, the White House allotted only $30 million. That’s twice the administration’s 2015 request of $15 million, but it pales in comparison with what Congress ultimately authorized.

“I think we're going to do better than that to keep that mission proceeding forward. That's one of the very exciting new missions for NASA and JPL,” Schiff said. The White House number, he said, “doesn’t reflect the seriousness with which Congress is really devoted to this mission.”
The White House plan also keeps the Mars 2020 rover on track by hiking its funding up to $228 million – more than twice the $100 million Congress gave the mission for 2015. Schiff called it “a high point in the administration’s proposal.”

But the administration has zeroed out future funding for the plucky Mars rover Opportunity, which has been roaming the Red Planet for more than a decade and is still delivering fresh scientific discoveries that complement the findings from the bigger, more high-tech Curiosity. Opportunity requires relatively little funding to keep operating, compared with newer missions; it received $14 million in 2014.

“I think that's a real shame, and I find it a bit inexplicable,” Schiff said. Opportunity, he added, “is still producing good science, and we ought to keep it going.”
Follow @aminawrite for more science news. 

Rocks on Mars look like ‘Black Beauty’ meteorite

 The bulk of rocks on the surface of Mars look similar to the ‘Black Beauty’ meteorite found a few years ago in the Moroccan desert, a new study suggests.

The meteorite NWA 7034 has been shown to be a 4.4 billion-year-old chunk of the Martian crust.

Spectroscopic measurements of the meteorite are a spot-on match with orbital measurements of the Martian dark plains, areas where the planet’s coating of red dust is thin and the rocks beneath are exposed, researchers said.

The findings suggest that the meteorite, nicknamed Black Beauty, is representative of the “bulk background” of rocks on the Martian surface, said Kevin Cannon, a Brown University graduate student and lead author of the new paper.

When scientists started analysing Black Beauty in 2011, they knew they had something special. Its chemical makeup confirmed that it was a castaway from Mars, but it was unlike any Martian meteorite ever found.

Before Black Beauty, all the Martian rocks found on Earth were classified as SNC meteorites (shergottites, nakhlites, or chassignites).

They’re mainly igneous rocks made of cooled volcanic material. But Black Beauty is a breccia, a mashup of different rock types welded together in a basaltic matrix.

It contains sedimentary components that match the chemical makeup of rocks analysed by the Mars rovers.

Scientists concluded that it is a piece of Martian crust - the first such sample to make it to Earth.

Cannon and co-author Jack Mustard from Brown thought Black Beauty might help to clear up a longstanding enigma: the spectral signal from SNC meteorites never quite match with remotely sensed spectra from the Martian surface.

After acquiring a chip of Black Beauty from Carl Agee from the University of New Mexico, Cannon and Mustard used a variety of spectroscopic techniques to analyse it.

“What we wanted to do was get an average for the entire sample. That overall measurement was what ended up matching the orbital data,” said Mr. Cannon.

Researchers said the spectral match helps put a face on the dark plains, suggesting that the regions are dominated by brecciated rocks similar to Black Beauty.

Because the dark plains are dust-poor regions, they’re thought to be representative of what hides beneath the red dust on much of the rest of the planet.

“Mars is punctured by over 400,000 impact craters greater than 1 km in diameter. Because brecciation is a natural consequence of impacts, it is expected that material similar to NWA 7034 has accumulated on Mars over time,” they said.

In other words, Mustard said, the bulk of rocks on the surface of Mars probably look a lot like Black Beauty: “dark, messy and beautiful.” 

Planned Space Telescope will Improve Photo Quality by 1,000 X

(Photo : NASA) The Aragoscope can be used to achieve the diffraction limit based on the size of the low cost disk, rather than the high cost telescope mirror.

Astronomers from the University of Colorado Boulder have proposed a new space observatory that will take high resolution photos 1,000 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope.

This new orbiting observatory will capture images of space and beyond that are sharper and clearer as opposed to those taken by the Hubble since 1990.




Called the Aragoscope, the space telescope will consist of a telescope placed behind an opaque disk measuing half a mile in diameter. This special disk will be built from a material similar to plastic and will be unfolded in space.

Light from a distant target will be filtered around the disk which will form a diffracted image focusing on a central point. The result is a high resolution image.

Aragoscope, which will be quite light in weight, also presents opportunities to launch observatories into space at a much lower cost. The planned James Webb Telescope is poised to be the successor to the Hubble space observatory and will be launched in October 2018. This system, however, is considerably heavier than the Aragoscope.

According to Anthony Harness from the University of Colorado, a lighter telescope and a bigger structure can produce higher resolutions. The Aragoscope is the revolutionary step towards bigger space telescopes.

The project to build Aragoscope has been granted US$100,000 funding by NASA. The Aragoscope team, however, is now seeking an additional US$500,000 from NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program.

The Aragoscope was named after French physicist Dominique François Jean Arago who first identified the process of diffracted light waves bending around a disk.


If the proposed project gets its funding, the Aragoscope will be able to capture images of the event horizon, which is a point in black holes where nothing, not even light, can return.

NASA launches its Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite

US space agency NASA launched an Earth-observing satellite - the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite - from Vandenberg Air Force Base on California's central coast, shortly before sunrise on Saturday. The satellite was lifted off in the United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket.
The rocket was initially scheduled to fly earlier this week, but the launch was postponed due to high winds and technical issues.

The SMAP satellite launched by NASA is on a three-year mission, during which it will transmit data that will help forecast climate, track drought, and monitor climate change. The data transmitted by the satellite will chiefly help the world prepare better to deal with floods and droughts.


Since the SMAP satellite will essentially track the amount of water locked in soil, it is equipped with instruments which will measure moisture in the soil every several days for producing high-resolution global maps. The instruments will be checked by engineers for two weeks when the satellite reaches the desired orbit 430 miles high.


With NASA describing the glitch-free launch of the SMAP satellite as a "terrific ride into space," Geoffery Yoder - NASA's deputy associate administrator for programs - said that the data transmitted by the satellite will "benefit not only scientists seeking a better understanding of our planet, climate and environment . it's a boon for emergency planners and policy makers."

Grav wave tsunami NOT caused by Big Bang – boffins

Claims that a gravitational wave tsunami swept the universe from the Big Bang have turned to dust.
Late last year, the smart money was already backing the idea that the signal didn't come from the early universe and, on Friday, scientists agreed that the "gravitational waves remain elusive."

No conclusive evidence could be found to support what many had hoped was a breakthrough discovery in March 2014, after a team of astrophysicists reported a sighting of gravitational waves – formed in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the universe as we know it blinked into existence about 13.8 billion years ago.

The European Space Agency brought that claim back down to Earth yesterday, however.
It said that a joint analysis of data from ESA's Planck satellite and the gorund-based BICEP2 and Keck Array experiments showed that the origin of the signal had not be detected after all.

This pic shows dust emission from the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
Image credit: ESA/Planck Collaboration

“Searching for this unique record of the very early Universe is as difficult as it is exciting, since this subtle signal is hidden in the polarisation of the CMB [Cosmic Microwave Background – the legacy of light emitted only 380,000 years after the Big Bang], which itself only represents only a feeble few per cent of the total light,” said Jan Tauber, ESA project science for Planck.


The ESA added that while boffins had presented evidence that suggested the siginal originated in primordial gravitational waves, interstellar dust in our Milky Way Galaxy could conjure up a similar effect. ®

Massive Asteroid 2004 BL86 to Pass Within 745,000 Miles of Earth

 A massive asteroid is set to safely pass Earth Monday. According to NASA scientists, the asteroid 2004 BL86 is approximately 1,500 feet across and will come closest to Earth at 11:19 a.m. ET.

The asteroid will be approximately 745,000 miles away - about three times the distance between the earth and the moon.

Experts at NASA's Near Earth Object Program believe the asteroid will not be visible to the naked eye. The asteroid is expected to be visible through small telescopes and strong binoculars.

The asteroid was discovered in 2004, and Monday's pass is believed to be the closest the asteroid will come to Earth for the next 200 years.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

NASA wants helicopter drones to lead the way for Mars rovers

Rovers have a tough time getting across Mars' vast, unforgiving landscape. They can't see very far ahead, and the crew back home can only offer so much help by looking at orbital imagery. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory may have a clever solution to that problem, though: an aerial robot scout.

Its proposed Mars Helicopter drone would fly ahead of rovers and give operators a much better view of the Martian terrain, helping them plot the quickest route to interesting locales. It could even find a safe spot to deposit samples that future rovers would pick up.

The robotic chopper currently exists as just a tech demo, and it'll take some testing to prove that this small automaton (it's 3.6 feet from blade to blade) is ready for the Red Planet. If it makes the cut, though, it could let Mars rovers cover much more ground than they have so far -- JPL estimates that these machines could travel three times further in a given day. The project could easily be worthwhile if it means both completing missions faster and discovering things about Mars that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Spacecraft captures historic new close-ups of Pluto

Nothing much is known for certain about the celestial body we call Pluto. Finally, after a nine-year journey across 3 billion miles of space, the aptly named New Horizons spacecraft is almost ready to send back the first high-resolution images of the planetoid’s surface.

No one quite knows what to expect from the encounter, although the new information promises to be exciting. The spacecraft has already begun studying Pluto’s environmental makeup, extracting detailed measurements of dust and charged particles. The closest approach to the dwarf planet will occur on July 14, when New Horizons will come within 7,700 miles of its surface.

While Pluto will be sure to contain plenty of ice and snow, its landscape could come in many different forms: sheer ice cliffs, mountains and ravines, and maybe even rings of ice particles similar to Saturn’s or Neptune’s.

Until now, the only available images of Pluto have been a few grainy photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope over 10 years ago. New Horizons will capture multiple high-resolution images not only of the dwarf planet, but also of its moons. The new information may even reveal evidence that its largest moon, Charon, was once home to an ocean beneath its frozen crust.

The spacecraft was launched on its mission in 2006, only months before the International Astronomical Union decided that Pluto did not meet the standard definition of a planet, and demoted it to dwarf planet status instead. However, Pluto remains the largest object in the Kuiper Belt, a band of cosmic odds and ends that circles the solar system beyond Neptune. Pluto was demoted because its gravitational pull was not large enough to prevent bodies of a comparable size and mass forming in its orbit.


Even though many people still tend to think of the downgraded planet as being on the furthest edge of the solar system, scientists are already thinking about extending the mission even further. They have already identified at least two objects about a billion miles further away that New Horizons would be able to reach by 2019. If approved, the deep space mission could give humanity the unique opportunity to observe objects that have frozen since the first formation of the solar system.

Scientists: Solar system inside a searing gas bubble

Ever feel like you live in a bubble?

You do. We all do.

Our whole solar system appears to, say space scientists, who published work last month corroborating its existence.

And, oh, what a bubble it is: About 300 light years long (about 1,764,000,000,000,000 miles), and its walls are made of hot gas. How hot? About a million degrees.

It's called the "Local Bubble" or "local hot bubble" and is shaped a little like a peanut.

Scientists believe it was formed by supernovas, the largest explosions in space, as NASA calls them, that occur when a large star blows up.

One supernova blasts out more energy in less than a second than our sun gives off in a million years, NASA says. A single explosion can outshine an entire galaxy.

'Like popcorn'

They usually occur about twice a century in the Milky Way Galaxy. But about 10 million years ago, a slew of them exploded right near our solar system.

"Supernovas went off like popcorn," NASA says.

In a universe about 13.8 billion years old, that's a recent event. Humans did not yet walk the Earth 10 million years ago, but monkeys did.

Those supernovas may have sent our evolutionary ancestors running scared, but they weren't enough to annihilate them.

Galactic hole

Fast forward 10 million years to the 1970s and 80s, when humans first began noticing what they'd later postulate was the bubble.

They were aiming more advanced telescopes at what's called the interstellar medium.

Between the planets and the stars of our galaxy is not just empty space. There are gasses, dust, ions -- and more -- sweeping around.

When astronomers poked around in our solar system for it, they found little to nothing. It was like we were living in a virtually empty hole, one that has only a single atom per every liter of space.

Around the same time, sensors launched outside of Earth's atmosphere revealed an abundance of something else coming from all directions -- x-ray radiation.

The idea that we live in a bubble was born:

So much interstellar medium was gone, because the exploding supernovas have blown it away, and and left us surrounded with their remnants of radiating gas.

Doubt, corroboration

But some scientists, in recent years, cast doubt on the Local Bubble model, saying the radiation could be the result of "charge exchange" -- passing solar winds stealing electrons and thereby emitting x-ray radiation.

Scientists from the University of Miami in Coral Gables picked up the gauntlet and developed a sensor to measure charge exchange radiation and fired it out of Earth's atmosphere atop a small NASA rocket two years ago.

It only took about five minutes for the detector to take a reading. Analyzing the data, the scientists determined that only 40% of the background x-ray emanates from within our solar system.

The rest of the glow, they say, must come from the searing gaseous walls of a big bubble we live in.

Close encounter with distant Pluto getting under way

 (CNN)NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is closing in on Pluto and its five moons. Soon we will see what no one has ever seen before: Crisp, clear pictures of the tiny, icy world.

"The pictures are what we're all waiting for," Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, told CNN.

Up until now, the best images of Pluto have been a few pixels shot by the Hubble Space Telescope. The images, released in 2010, took four years and 20 computers operating continuously and simultaneously to produce, according to Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

They show what NASA called an "icy and dark molasses-colored, mottled world that is undergoing seasonal changes in its surface color and brightness."

That's not a very glamorous description, but NASA said the images confirmed Pluto is a "dynamic world that undergoes dramatic atmospheric changes, not simply a ball of ice and rock."

New Horizons is aiming its Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) telescope at Pluto to help navigate the final 135 million miles (220 kilometers) of its 3 billion mile journey. Besides LORRI, the space probe is packed with cameras and other instruments. By mid-May, we should get "better than Hubble" photos. We'll also see Pluto's five moons: Charon, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx.

Stern expects new "optical navigation images" to arrive any day now.

"I think of Pluto as a kind of a Christmas present that's been sitting under the tree" waiting to be unwrapped, Stern said. "I just can't wait to see what's there."

New Horizons was launched on January 19, 2006. It will arrive at Pluto on July 14, 2015. The probe is 27 inches (0.7 meters) tall, 83 inches (2.1 meters) long and 108 inches (2.7 meters) wide. It weighed 1,054 pounds (478 kilograms) at launch.

New Horizons was launched before the big debate started over whether it's a planet. For the scientists on the New Horizons team, Pluto is very much a planet -- just a new kind of planet. 

"New Horizons is on a journey to a new class of planets we've never seen, in a place we've never been before," says New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver of APL. "For decades, we thought Pluto was this odd little body on the planetary outskirts; now we know it's really a gateway to an entire region of new worlds in the Kuiper Belt, and New Horizons is going to provide the first close-up look at them."

Some interesting tidbits about Pluto:

-- Pluto is classified by NASA as a dwarf planet.

-- It has five known moons: Charon, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx.

-- Pluto is about two-thirds the diameter of Earth's moon.

-- It probably has a rocky core surrounded by ice.

-- It's one of a group of objects that orbit beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt.

-- Pluto is about 20 times as massive than Ceres, the dwarf planet between Mars and Jupiter that will be explored by the Dawn spacecraft on March 6, 2015.

-- Pluto has a 248-year-long elliptical orbit around the sun.

-- From 1979 to 1999, Pluto was actually closer to the sun than Neptune.

-- Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.

-- It was named by 11-year-old Venetia Burney of Oxford, England.