Russia back in 'Space Race' with Mars moon lander

Russia hopes to end a humiliating two-decade absence from deep space with the launch on Wednesday of an ambitious three-year mission to bring back a soil sample from Mars' moon Phobos russian scientists have dreamed of probing the Red Planet's potato-shaped satellite since the 1960s heyday of pioneering Soviet forays into space.

Dust from Phobos, they say, will hold clues to the genesis of the solar system's planets and help clarify Mars' enduring mysteries, including whether it is or ever was suited for life but the USD $163 million Phobos-Grunt mission is haunted by memories of past failures in Moscow's efforts to explore Mars and its moons.

"Mars has always been an inhospitable planet for Russia. The United States has had much more success there," said Maxim Martynov, the project's chief designer at NPO Lavochkin, the major Russian aerospace company that made the Phobos-Grunt Russia kept rocketing cosmonauts into orbit though the purse-pinched 1990s and is now the only country whose craft now carry crews to the international space station.

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Russian Space objectives

Russia plans to carry out an unmanned lunar flight before 2050, head of the Russian Federal Space Agency Vladimir Popovkin said. Speaking at a State Duma session, he emphasized that further research will be primarily aimed at exploring planets of the Solar System, particularly Mars and the Moon.

Present-day cosmonautics is on the threshold of a new stage in its development - the exploration of the most remote edges of the universe. A landmark move along this track will be made as early as in autumn this year, says Vladimir Popovkin:

"November will see the launch of the Phobos-Grunt interplanetary automatic research station aimed at delivering samples of the Martian natural satellite's soil to Earth. Yes, we will send a 700-ton spaceship for just 50 grams of soil. Do you realize how difficult it will be to send a human to Mars?"

Over the 11 months of its operation, the spacecraft will reach the Martian orbit alongside a Chinese scientific micro-satellite, undock from the interplanetary station and engage in studying the Red Planet's magnetic field. The next few months will witness a distanced examination of Mars and procedures to choose a landing site for Phobos.

The latter will actually have a number of passengers on board - a collection of microorganisms and insect larva that will come back to Earth to help scientists find out more about the Solar System's ongoing processes. For the time being, Roscosmos is engaged in building the most capacious and comfortable manned spacecraft to replace Soyuz ships, Vladimir Popovkin goes on to say:
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NASA Wants Internet Access In Space

NASA hopes to extend the use of the Internet across the solar system as one of a host of key enabling technologies to help achieve future goals for human space exploration.

The space agency recently published the Global Exploration Roadmap, the result of collaboration between multiple space agencies around the globe, to find "feasible and sustainable exploration pathways to the Moon, near-Earth asteroids, and Mars," according to the document.

Now that NASA has ended its space shuttle program, the agency is turning its attention to developing a new space-launch system and crew vehicle that can carry astronauts beyond near-Earth orbit and deeper into space, among other technologies. The rpadmap identifies two mission key goals, Asteroid Next and Moon Next, and outlines some of the technologies that will be needed to facilitate them and other future space missions.


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An Austrian Scientists Use LASER & iPhone To Detect Microbes On Mars Space Suit

Finding out life on other planets has always been a human endeavor. Many missions have been planned and sent to outer space in search of some alien life. However the possibility that microorganisms clinging to the space suit of astronauts who are out on the mission to find aliens cannot be neglected. It may lead to confusion whether the organisms are from earth or other planets. Well it may be a tricky aspect but it has been solved by scientists for astronauts going to mars.
he program of developing foolproof techniques for detection of microbes on space suit is a part of Austrian Space Forum’s PolAres mission. Austrian scientists are taking use of the laser-induced-fluorescence emission (L.I.F.E) technique which was also earlier used in detection of microbes in Antarctica. The technique may sound difficult one but it is actually simple. It requires only a LASER pointer and an iPhone. The LASER pointer is directed towards the space suit and if it contains any microbe, it emits a fluorescent glow. The glow is then processed with digital photography and laptops. If the microbe is any known one, it takes only a few seconds. The scientists want to be sure for the samples being brought from Mars to be genuine. The technique is designed for both forward and reverse contamination. While returning to earth, there may be contamination from microbes, if present on mars.

The development of new techniques is not only limited to detection alone. Austrian scientists are also developing techniques to shake away the organisms. The team of scientists led by Gernot Groemer, president of the Austrian Space Forum has designed an electromagnetic method for the same. For that all the astronauts have to do is that to attach the space suit to high voltage electric charge which would make the dust particle and micro organisms to levitate away from the space suit. The dust particles can then be blown away with the help of a stream of air. Earlier, vibration techniques were used for the purpose; however they are not as effective as this one. As per the simulations conducted by scientists, it is found that around 60 to 405 bacteria can cling within minutes of cleaning the suit.

The techniques developed are expected to be the part of The ExoMars rover to be launched in 2018. The current research and studies are conducted in the desert of San Rafael, Utah. The technology developed would increase the credibility of samples from mars. It will be a step ahead in human search for Alien life.

Race to Space, Through the Lens of Time

It was the spring of 1961. President John F. Kennedy, speaking of new frontiers and projecting the vigor of youth, had been in office barely four months, and April had been the cruelest.

On the 12th, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth — one more space triumph for the Soviet Union. Though the flight was not unexpected, it was nonetheless deflating; it would be more than a month before Alan Shepard became the first American in space, and that was on a 15-minute suborbital flight. On the 17th, a force of anti-Castro exiles, trained by the C.I.A., invaded communist Cuba at the Bay of Pigs — a fiasco within 36 hours. Mr. Kennedy’s close aide Theodore Sorensen described him on the 19th as “anguished and fatigued” and “in the most emotional, self-critical state I had ever seen him.”

At one meeting, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general, “turned on everybody,” it was reported, saying: “All you bright fellows. You got the president into this.

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50 years after Yuri, India still on its slow climb

At a time when the world is set to raise a toast to Yuri Gagarin on the 50th anniversary of his trail-blazing flight into space, Indian cosmonaut Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma has one lament: a holdup in the indigenous human spaceflight programme.

The cosmonaut, is disappointed with what he described as a “cooling off” of the programme after its launch in 2007. “The reverses must be addressed and the rocket should be man-rated (certified safe for humans) by Isro,” he told Deccan Chronicle.

His disappointment with the slow progress of the programme comes at a time when China is stepping up its space missions with an orbiting space lab, to be launched later this year. Weighing nearly 19,000 lbs, the unmanned Tiangong 1 module will be launched aboard a Long March 2F rocket from Jiuquan space centre in the Gobi desert.

As space buffs across the world celebrate the 50th year of Yuri Gagarin's trail-blazing flight into space, scientists and cosmonauts are set to chant the icon’s call “Poyekhali,” or “here we go” and advance from an era of voyages of discovery, to voyages of profit.

Their ambitions are soaring beyond the Moon and Mars — not merely for science, symbolism and glamour — but for the benefit of humankind. Energy from space, efficient methods of identification and management of water resources, and fail-safe security systems for every nation, will be within reach. For once, sci-fi writers could be proved right, albeit through a joint effort, circa 2030.

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Soviet feat in 1961 started race to moon

STAR CITY, Russia - It was the Soviet Union's own giant leap for mankind, one that would spur a humiliated America to race for the moon. It happened 50 years ago Tuesday, when an air force pilot named Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.

The 27-year-old cosmonaut's mission lasted just 108 minutes and was fraught with drama: a break in data transmission, glitches involving antennas, a retrorocket and the separation of modules. And there was an overarching question that science had yet to answer: What would weightlessness do to a human being?

"There were all kinds of wild fears that a man could lose his mind in zero gravity, lose his ability to make rational decisions," recalls Oleg Ivanovsky, who oversaw the construction and launch of the Vostok spacecraft that carried Gagarin.

The flight went off safely, and the handsome Russian with the big smile became a poster boy for the communist world, still a national idol 43 years after his death in a jet training accident, and remembered with affection by the last surviving pioneers of the Soviet space program.

From chief designer Sergei Korolyov to young nurses and rank-and-file launch pad workers, "people loved, really loved him," Ivanovsky said in a telephone interview.

Gagarin's rocket lifted off as scheduled on April 12, 1961, at 9:07 a.m. Moscow time.

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Hubble Opens New Eyes on the space

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is back in business, ready to uncover new worlds, peer ever deeper into space, and even map the invisible backbone of the universe.

The first snapshots from the refurbished Hubble showcase the 19-year-old telescope's new vision. Topping the list of exciting new views are colorful multi-wavelength pictures of far- flung galaxies, a densely packed star cluster, an eerie "pillar of creation," and a "butterfly" nebula.

With the release of these images, astronomers have declared Hubble a fully rejuvenated observatory. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, D-Md., unveiled the images at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 9, 2009.

With its new imaging camera, Hubble can view galaxies, star clusters, and other objects across a wide swath of the electromagnetic spectrum, from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. A new spectrograph slices across billions of light-years to map the filamentary structure of the universe and trace the distribution of elements that are fundamental to life.

The telescope's new instruments also are more sensitive to light and can observe in ways that are significantly more efficient and require less observing time than previous generations of Hubble instruments.

NASA astronauts installed the new instruments during the space shuttle servicing mission in May 2009. Besides adding the instruments, the astronauts also completed a dizzying list of other chores that included performing unprecedented repairs on two other science instruments.

Now that Hubble has reopened for business, it will tackle a whole range of observations. Looking closer to Earth, such observations will include taking a census of the population of Kuiper Belt objects residing at the fringe of our solar system, witnessing the birth of planets around other stars, and probing the composition and structure of the atmospheres of other worlds.

Peering much farther away, astronomers have ambitious plans to use Hubble to make the deepest-ever portrait of the universe in near-infrared light. The resulting picture may reveal never-before-seen infant galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 500 million years old. Hubble also is now significantly more well-equipped to probe and further characterize the behavior of dark energy, a mysterious and little-understood repulsive force that is pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate.