NASA's Dawn Spacecraft Begins Trek to Asteroid Belt

A NASA probe blasted into space early Thursday, kicking off an unprecedented mission to explore the two largest asteroids in the solar system.

Riding atop a Delta 2 rocket, NASA's Dawn spacecraft launched toward the asteroids Vesta and Ceres at 7:34 a.m. EDT (1134 GMT) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

"In my view, we're going to be visiting some of the last unexplored worlds in the solar system," said Marc Rayman, Dawn director of system engineering at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

Dawn's eight-year mission will carry the 2,685-pound (1,212-kilogram) probe across three billion miles (4.9 billion kilometers) on NASA's first sortie deep into the asteroid belt, a ring of space rocks that circles the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

By visiting the bright, rocky asteroid Vesta and the large, icy Ceres, researchers hope Dawn will shed new light on the formation of planets and solar system's early evolution.

Aside from a wayward ship, which delayed today's launch by 14 minutes when it encroached into the Atlantis Ocean splashdown zone for segments of Dawn's rocket, the liftoff went as planned, NASA launch director Omar Baez said.

Long journey ahead

Dawn is expected to rendezvous and orbit the 330-mile (530-kilometer) wide Vesta between August 2011 and May 2012, then move on to Texas-sized Ceres by February 2015. With its spherical shape and 585-mile (942-kilometer) diameter, Ceres is so large it is also considered a dwarf planet.

"It will be the first mission to journey to, and orbit around, two celestial bodies, and the first to visit a dwarf planet," said Dawn program manager Jim Adams, at NASA's Washington, D.C. headquarters, of the asteroid-bound flight.

Dawn carries an optical camera, gamma ray and neutron detector and a mapping spectrometer to study Vesta and Ceres. Some of those tools will get a trial run during a planned Mars flyby in 2009, researchers said.

To power those instruments, the spacecraft is also equipped with the most powerful solar arrays ever launched into deep space.

With a wingspan of nearly 65 feet (almost 20 meters), or about the distance from the pitcher's mound to home plate on a baseball field, the arrays will generate more than 10 kilowatts near Earth, though that output will decrease as the spacecraft moves further from the Sun.

NASA officials set Dawn's mission cost at $357.5 million excluding the cost of its Delta 2 rocket, according to a September update. In a July briefing, Dawn researchers said the asteroid-bound flight could cost a total of $449 million and incur an extra $25 million in overhead due to launch delays.

Attempts to launch the mission in July were thwarted first by poor weather and rocket glitches, then by difficulties arranging ship and aircraft tracking equipment in time for liftoff. NASA also canceled the mission outright in March 2006, only to reinstate the expedition a few weeks later.

"It has been quite an emotional rollercoaster," Chris Russell, Dawn's principal investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles, said of the mission. "And part of the emotional rollercoaster is the gratitude that we have for all of the people that defended Dawn in those times."

An asteroid trek on ion power

Built by Virginia-based Orbital Sciences, the Dawn spacecraft has been touted as the Prius of space probes because of the uncanny fuel efficiency of its three-engine ion drive.

Dawn carries 937 pounds (425 kilograms) of Xenon gas, to which it gives an electric charge to create ions that are then catapulted out of its engines at nearly 90,000 miles per hour (144,840 kph). Over time, the ion push builds up, and allows Dawn to change its flight path to first rendezvous, then orbit, multiple targets like Vesta and Ceres without requiring massive amounts of conventional rocket fuel.

"The first time I ever heard of ion propulsion was in a 'Star Trek' episode," said Rayman, adding that such engines are also touted to propel the TIE fighters – or Twin Ion Engine - of "Star Wars" fame. "Dawn does the TIE fighter one better because it has three ion engines."

While it will take Dawn four days to go from zero to 60 miles per hour (96 kph), the probe will gradually pick up speed as it fires its ion drive nonstop for the next six years, NASA has said, adding that the mission is the agency's first operational science expedition powered by ion propulsion.

"That would make it the longest powered flight in space history," said Keyur Patel, NASA's Dawn project manager at JPL, just before liftoff.

Each of the three ion engines weighs about 20 pounds (nine kilograms) and is about the size of a basketball.

"From such a little engine you can get this blue beam of rocket exhaust that shoots out at 89,000 miles per hour," Patel said before launch day. "It is a remarkable system."

NASA will hold a post-launch briefing on Dawn's asteroid-bound mission at 1:00 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) on NASA TV

Source : The Space

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NASA Finds Huge Gouge In Shuttle

There's new trouble for the Space Shuttle Endeavour, but we won't know how bad it is until the weekend. NASA had the crew of the rocket do an inspection Friday just before it docked with the International Space Station.

After studying the pictures from the maneuver, scientists believed they saw something wrong. So they took a closer look. Their analysis: a piece of ice that came from a fuel tank a minute after liftoff on Wednesday may have broken off and gouged the underside of the ship. Officials still aren't sure how serious the problem is or what it might mean when the crew - which includes Canadian Dave Williams - attempts a re-entry into Earth's atmosphere two weeks from now.

Astronauts will use the Canadarm to do further tests on Sunday, using lasers to gauge the size of the gash in order to determine if repairs are needed.

Even a small problem is deemed significant on the sturdy but still fragile craft. A piece of foam insulation that damaged the wing is believed responsible for the destruction of the Columbia, which broke into pieces in the skies over Texas in February 2003. At least nine other pieces of the same material are believed to have come off during this flight, and three pieces appeared to strike the craft. None is believed to have been big enough to cause critical damage.

BRUCE WEAVER/AFP/Getty Images

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NASA Paid $26.6M to Families of Columbia Disaster Astronauts

NASA reportedly paid $26.6 million to the families of the seven astronauts who died aboard space shuttle Columbia in the 2003 tragedy, according to the Orlando Sentinel. The documents, kept secret for two and a half years, were obtained through a federal Freedom of Information Act request.

The request led to the release of just seven pages, which give scarce information. The U.S. space agency apparently recruited former FBI Director William Webster, who is was also a judge, to act as a mediator between the NASA and the families.

"The members of the [survivors'] families wanted this to be a private matter," said Webster, a consulting partner in Washington with the international law firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. "They were healing, and they were ready to discuss, properly, their rights. . . . Everyone felt it had a better chance of coming together without seeing their name in lights."

"The Columbia astronauts were our friends and co-workers," NASA spokesman Allard Beute wrote to the Orlando Sentinel. "Our concern always has been with the crew's families and their loss, and as a result NASA didn't announce details of the settlement in an effort to protect the personal privacy of the Columbia families."

One survivor of a tragedy's victim told the newspaper that NASA showed deference by not allowing a lawsuit in a hard period for the astronauts' families. "We were in a state of shock," he said. "To go the lawsuit route, it's very painful and very protracted. So we settled," said Dr. Jon Clark, widower of astronaut Laurel Blair Salton Clark.

The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster occurred on February 1, 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, shortly before concluding its 28th mission, STS-107.

The loss of the Columbia was caused by damage sustained during launch when a piece of foam insulation the size of a small briefcase broke off the main propellant tank under the aerodynamic forces of launch. The debris struck the leading edge of the left wing on the number 8 reinforced-carbon-carbon (RCC) tile, damaging the Shuttle's thermal protection system (TPS). While Columbia was still in orbit, some engineers suspected damage, but NASA managers limited the investigation on the grounds that little could be done even if problems were found.

The crew of STS-107 was:

* Commander: Rick D. Husband, a US Air Force colonel and mechanical engineer, who piloted a previous shuttle during the first docking with the International Space Station (STS-96).
* Pilot: William C. McCool, a US Navy commander
* Payload Commander: Michael P. Anderson, a US Air Force lieutenant colonel and physicist who was in charge of the science mission.
* Payload Specialist: Ilan Ramon, a colonel in the Israeli Air Force and the first Israeli astronaut.
* Mission Specialist: Kalpana Chawla, an Indian-born aerospace engineer on her second space mission.
* Mission Specialist: David M. Brown, a US Navy captain trained as an aviator and flight surgeon. Brown worked on a number of scientific experiments.
* Mission Specialist: Laurel Clark, a US Navy captain and flight surgeon. Clark worked on a number of biological experiments.

On March 26 the United States House of Representatives' Science Committee approved funds for the construction of a memorial at Arlington National Cemetery for the STS-107 crew. A similar memorial was built at the cemetery for the last crew of Space Shuttle Challenger. On October 28, 2003, the names of the astronauts were added to the Astronaut Memorial at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

The landing site of the Mars rover Spirit was named Columbia Memorial Station by NASA, and a complex of hills east of the landers was dubbed the Columbia Hills. The Spirit lander included a memorial plaque to the Columbia crew mounted on the back of its high gain antenna.

(this article contains excerpts on the Columbia tragedy taken from Wikipedia) (the Orlando Sentinel article can be found here)
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