Eideard

An artist’s conception shows the breakup of the Phobos-Grunt probe in the atmosphere

Russia’s botched Mars probe mission Phobos-Grunt is fast approaching a fiery death, with just one or two days remaining before it falls from space…

“The European Space Agency’s current re-entry prediction for Phobos-Grunt … points to the early evening (Central European Time) on Sunday, Jan. 15, with an uncertainty of plus/minus five orbits,” equal to plus or minus 7.5 hours, said Heiner Klinkrad, head of the space debris office at ESA’s European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany…

A statement from Russia’s Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) also pegged Sunday as the crash day for Phobos-Grunt, but went even further. According to the statement, released in Russian, the 14-ton spacecraft filled with fuel is expected to fall on Sunday and may crash in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Chile.

Russian space officials pegged the potential crash time as occurring at about 4:51 p.m. ET Sunday, although major uncertainties still remain. There is a chance the spacecraft could fall earlier in the day, or on Monday…

As Phobos-Grunt draws closer and closer to its fiery finale, a worldwide team of skywatchers is on standby alert in the hopes of spotting the fall.

“Experienced observers know that the probability of seeing any given satellite re-entry is very small, so they maintain very low expectations,” said Canada-based Ted Molczan, a leader in the citizen network of observers.

RTFA for beaucoup details.

Yes, I’m one of those people who will go outdoors and look around the expected atmosphere impact time.

Orbiting in the plane of Saturn’s rings, Saturnian moons have a perpetual ringside view of the gorgeous gas giant planet. Of course, while passing near the ring plane the Cassini spacecraft also shares their stunning perspective. The rings themselves can be seen slicing across the middle of this Cassini snapshot from May of last year. The scene features Titan, largest, and Dione, third largest moon of Saturn. Remarkably thin, the bright rings still cast arcing shadows across the planet’s cloud tops at the bottom of the frame. Pale Dione is about 1,100 kilometers across and orbits over 300,000 kilometers from the visible outer edge of the A ring. Dione is seen through Titan’s atmospheric haze. At 5,150 kilometers across, Titan is about 2.3 million kilometers from Cassini, while Dione is 3.2 million kilometers away.

Thanks, Ursarodinia

If you’d like to try a sample issue of Paws & Claws, Ursarodinia’s weekly newsletter – email her at subject line: Paws and Claws sample, ursarodinia[@]aol.com – without the brackets. I highly recommend it for humor, science, earthy sex, humor, politics – and did I mention humor?

Launch – November 9, 2011
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A Russian spacecraft that became stranded in orbit on the way to Mars last year is expected to fall back to Earth next week.

The 13.5 tonne Phobos-Grunt has been circling Earth since November when rocket boosters failed to ignite and send the spaceship on its journey to the Martian moon of Phobos. The spacecraft suffered a computer malfunction after launch and when repeated attempts to contact the rocket failed, the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, had to abandon the mission.

Officials at Roscosmos admitted that 20 to 30 fragments of Phobos-Grunt, weighing a total of 200kg, might hit the Earth. Among the most likely parts to survive are the cone-shaped sample return capsule that is protected with a heat shield. The capsule was designed to survive a crash landing without a parachute.

Any components that are not vaporised during re-entry are likely to fall into the ocean or land in sparsely populated areas.

Which is what the PR folks for every space agency always say.

The spacecraft, the largest planetary rocket ever built by Russia, was designed to return rock samples from Phobos, the first time material would have been brought back from the moon of another planet. The rocket was to deliver a Chinese Mars orbiter and carried containers of bacteria to test their survival in space.

Space agencies tracking the rocket from radar stations around the world have stepped up their monitoring to once every day. As the spacecraft nears re-entry, officials will track its descent hour by hour to improve predictions of where any debris might land…

Tracking Phobos-Grunt will allow space agencies to work out when the rocket will begin re-entry, but does little to help predict where debris might land. The spacecraft is travelling so fast it completes an orbit of Earth every 90 minutes, so even a small uncertainty in its trajectory or how it breaks up can make a difference of hundreds of miles on the Earth’s surface.

Leave a note for your lawyer in case it gets you. At least your survivors may receive some compensation. Sometimes it ain’t fun being a beta-tester for approved technology.

Click on photo twice for a very much larger image

An aerial view shows vehicles with their headlights on converging on the Soyuz TMA-02M spacecraft carrying ISS crew members, U.S. astronaut Michael Fossum, Russian cosmonaut Sergey Volkov and Japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, after the spacecraft landed near the town of Arkalyk in northern Kazakhstan…

China successfully carried out its first docking exercise on Thursday between two unmanned spacecraft, a key test of the rising power’s plans to secure a long-term manned foothold in space.

The Shenzhou 8 spacecraft joined the Tiangong (Heavenly Palace) 1 module about 340 km above Earth, in a maneuver carried live on state television in the early hours of the morning.

The 10.5 meter-long unmanned Tiangong, launched on September 29, is part of China’s preparations for a space laboratory at some point in the future…

“We believe that making this breakthrough and mastering the space docking technology is a meaningful and historic breakthrough for our country and a huge technical leap forward,” Wu Ping, spokeswoman for China’s Manned Space Engineering Programme, told a news conference.

Wu said all of the components in the docking mechanism, as well as 600 onboard instruments, were designed and manufactured by Chinese firms, mostly state-owned enterprises…

The next stage will be two similar docking exercises in 2012, with at least one expected to carry astronauts…

Beijing also plans an unmanned moon landing and deployment of a moon rover in 2012. Scientists have raised the possibility of sending a man to the moon after 2020.

Bravo! Keep building our travels into space.

 
A new video from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft takes us on a flyover journey above the surface of the giant asteroid Vesta.

The data obtained by Dawn’s framing camera, used to produce the visualizations, will help scientists determine the processes that formed Vesta’s striking features. It will also help Dawn mission fans all over the world visualize this mysterious world, which is the second most massive object in the main asteroid belt.

You’ll notice in the video that Vesta is not entirely lit up. There is no light in the high northern latitudes because, like Earth, Vesta has seasons. Currently it is northern winter on Vesta, and the northern polar region is in perpetual darkness. When we view Vesta’s rotation from above the south pole, half is in darkness simply because half of Vesta is in daylight and half is in the darkness of night .

Another distinct feature seen in the video is a massive circular structure in the south pole region. Scientists were particularly eager to see this area close-up, since NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope first detected it years ago. The circular structure, or depression, is several hundreds of kilometers wide, with cliffs that are also several miles high. One impressive mountain in the center of the depression rises approximately 15 kilometers above the base of this depression, making it one of the highest elevations on all known bodies with solid surfaces in the solar system.

Enjoy. Who knows? Your children or grandchildren may visit someday.

At approximately one billion pixels, it’s the largest digital camera ever built for a space mission. Over a five-year period, the “billion-pixel array” will be used aboard the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, to map upwards of a billion stars. While it will be focusing mainly on our own Milky Way galaxy, Gaia will also be mapping other celestial bodies, including galaxies and quasars near the edge of the observable universe.

The array is made up of 106 charge coupled devices (CCDs), which are an advanced type of image sensor. Made by the UK’s e2v Technologies, each rectangular CCD is a little smaller than a credit card in area, although thinner than a human hair in thickness. Throughout the month of May, technicians at Astrium France precisely joined the CCDs together into a 0.5 x 1-meter (1.6 x 3.3-foot) seven-row flat mosaic. While 102 of the sensors are assigned to star detection, the other four will check the image quality and angle of the Gaia spacecraft’s twin telescopes, used to obtain 3D stereoscopic images of the stars…

When launched in 2013, the Gaia spacecraft will end up parked at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, which is a spot 1.5 million kilometers behind the earth, when viewed from the sun. At that location, the earth’s orbital motion balances out gravitational forces to form a stable point in space. The spacecraft will then spin, in order to take in the view through its telescopes. Along with mapping the location of the stars, the array will also record their color, composition and intensity.

Cripes, I love this stuff. I await the photographs with beaucoup anticipation.

Humankind’s most distant emissaries are flying through a turbulent sea of magnetism as they seek to break free of our Solar System.

NASA’s Voyager probes, which were launched in 1977, are now approaching the very edge of our Sun’s influence, more than 14 billion km from Earth; and they are still returning data.

That information has allowed scientists to build a better picture of what conditions are like in the zone where matter blown out from our star pushes up against interstellar space…

Magnetic field lines carried in the “wind” of material coming off our star are breaking and reconnecting. This process is sculpting the wind into discrete bubbles that are many tens of millions of kilometres wide.

Researchers say this assessment has implications for our understanding of cosmic rays – the storm of high-energy particles that are accelerated in Earth’s direction by exploded stars, black holes and other exotic locations in the galaxy…

Researchers confess to being surprised; they thought the outskirts of our solar neighbourhood would be more sedate – that the Sun’s field lines would simply turn around and reconnect with the Sun…

It is a demonstration once again of the extraordinary capabilities of the Voyagers, which continue to excite and intrigue more than three decades on from their launch.

Bravo. RTFA. Respect the scientists who built these adventurers, remember the support for research in the space beyond the world we inhabit, knowledge to be gained beyond the petty limits of politicians, pundits and priests.

A US satellite carrying the biggest commercial antenna reflector ever put in space has been launched successfully from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. The mesh structure on the Skyterra-1 spacecraft is 22 metres across.

It will relay signals for a new 4G-LTE mobile phone and data system for North America run by Lightsquared.

Callers whose networks are tied into the system will be automatically switched to a satellite if they are out of range of a terrestrial mast.

Lightsquared is the latest effort to try to establish a hybrid satellite-terrestrial system in the US…Lightsquared has promised a different approach. It says its business will be wholesale only. It will be selling capacity to carriers who wish to offer go-anywhere connectivity to their consumers, be they phone or data users.

The system will be capable of supporting smartphone-sized devices, it says.

Under a schedule approved by the Federal Communications Commission, the company has to have a ground network of terrestrial stations in place to serve 90% of the US population by the end of 2015.

The Skyterra-1 satellite was launched from Baikonur on a Proton rocket at 2329 local time on Sunday (1729 GMT)…

The 22m-antenna on Skyterra-1 should be deployed by the end of the month. A second satellite, Skyterra-2, will follow in 2011.

Fascinating stuff. Especially for Satellite TV geeks like me who have become accustomed to following the day-by-day that leads to these launches.

There’s an amazing amount of traffic up in the sky. Including a lot of dross.