The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is giving us Earthbound folks a chance to send a Moon message aboard the agency’s lunar orbiter Selene. But you better act fast, today’s your last chance. 

The mission is slated to launch atop a Japanese H-2A rocket this summer to study how our planet’s only natural satellite formed [image].  To commemorate the flight, JAXA has staged the SELENE “Wish upon the Moon!” Campaign, which comes with a guarantee that the orbiter “will deliver you name and message to the Moon.” JAXA is working with the Planetary Societies of Japan and the U.S. on the project.

Click here to submit the name of yourself or your cat (up to 20 English letters or 10 Japanese characters) and a short note (40 English letters or 20 Japanese characters) to let the Moon know you care.

It’s free, so don’t bother to ask for a refund in the event of a launch delay. 

The real test will be whether Selene finds any Selenites, those pesky Moon people that perturbed the protagonists of H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon.

Astronomers are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the appearance of Supernova 1987A this week. 

As I write this, they’ve just cut the cake at a hundred-scientist commemoration of the event in Aspen, Co, and space agencies have posted gorgeous portraits of the remains of the mighty star on the WWW.  NASA’s image from the Hubble Space Telescope, is at

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/10

And ESA’s image, from the XMM-Newton X-ray telescope, can be seen at http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMPE0CE8YE_index_0.html

The talk at the Aspen conference is mostly on  knowledge gained from SN 1987A, the brightest supernova since the invention of the telescope and the first visible to the naked eye in four centuries. 

But for me, the anniversary triggers memories of crazy things that went on shortly after February 24, 1987, when the exploding star was discovered in Chile and all Hell broke out at science agencies and university centers as astronomers and physicists scrambled to observe the once-in-many-lifetimes event like fighter pilots alerted to a radar bogey approaching the continental US during the Cold War.  The physicists were galvanized by the discovery of neutrinos from the stellar collapse that triggered the explosion.  The neutrinos were detected in underground labs on February 23, before light from the supernova arrived.

Supernova Memories

I first heard of Supernova 1987A when a crowd gathered around the soda machine just outside my then-office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.  Word of the discovery had just come in, and I overheard them passing the news around.   

Later, after I had flown to Chile, met the young Canadian discoverer of the supernova and seen it myself from a hotel balcony, I wrote an account for Smithsonian magazine, which sent me there.  This was all done on vacation time and on nights and weekends, with written approval from the Space Agency for such “outside activity” of a business nature.

The magazine is published and before you know it a NASA lawyer calls me.  “You used inside information in Smithsonian magazine,” he accused (or words to that effect).  I couldn’t imagine what he meant — I hadn’t divulged the slightest secret, I didn’t even know any secret.   It turned out that my offense consisted of mentioning in the magazine that I learned of the supernova by overhearing a crowd at the Coke machine. 

According to the legal eagle, if I didn’t work for NASA, I wouldn’t have overheard the office gossip and thus couldn’t have told the anecdote in print.  Allegedly, I was improperly profiting from “information gained in an official capacity.”  Nowadays, NASA lawyers have more to worry about.  At least they didn’t transfer me to the tracking station on Guam, force me to deny the Big Bang and Global Warming, or refer my case to the Federal courts.

Meanwhile, astronomers from such places as Penn State, Columbia University, NASA Goddard and what was then West Germany were cobbling together payloads and heading to test ranges in the Australian outback, to launch sounding rockets in search of X-rays from the supernova and balloon instruments to detect gamma rays.  Some experiments were successful, but there were problems, as I was told by a young Pennsylvania physicist who participated.  There are all kinds of kangaroos around, he said, and they’re not on the NASA team.  The worst were a certain species of little ones.  At night you didn’t see them until they hopped in front of your speeding car on a dark desert road and burst apart on impact like a bomb.  It was much more distressing than the average encounter with a deer or a skunk while driving in the USA – especially for the kangaroos.

One fellow who went down to launch an instrument on short notice was accustomed to eating Kosher food.   Since you might not find a wide selection of that fine cuisine near the Woomera rocket range, he brought along a big package of New York corned beef to tide him over.  I think it was packed in dry ice and in any case it was in his carry-on luggage all the way from the eastern United States to landfall in Australia. All this while, the dry ice would have been dwindling away.  Once in Australia, the traveler had to proceed toward Woomera in a very small commercial plane that made intermediate stops on the desert, like a puddle jumper without many puddles.  There’s just no carry-on luggage possible in this little plane – everything must be checked.  You’ve guessed the rest- the corned beef was inadvertently unloaded at an intermediate stop and its loss not discovered until the traveler reached his destination.  Whether he actually asked the airline “Where’s the beef?” is unknown.  The rocket payload may have been successful, but one of the operators probably lost his appetite for foreign travel.

Those weren’t the only problems.  In early July, 1987, the Sydney correspondent of Nature magazine, Charles Morgan, filed a story headlined “Aborigines halt Woomer teams’ supernova observations.”  According to Charles, the Maralinga Tjarutja people were denying access to part of the land where payloads might land, which could prevent scientists from recovering their equipment after a rocket flight.  I think that blew over, because lots of good measurements were made. 

I haven’t even gotten to the once-famous and now largely forgotten Mystery Spot that seemed to shoot out of  Supernova 1987A, nor how the historic audio tapes of the Spot’s discovery were lost forever in checked baggage on an airline.  (Doesn’t anyone ever learn?  Shouldn’t they heave learned from the case of the missing corned beef?)  And some day we must tell the tale of the pulsar in the supernova that has been “discovered” more than once and “disproved” each time it was “found.”  They are going to look for it with the Hubble Space Telescope after a new camera is installed in the next servicing mission, and I hope that whether they find it or not, everyone agrees on the results.  We’ll save all this for a future blog, if you want to hear it.

Meanwhile, if you want to learn more about Supernova 1987A, I recommend Laurence Marschall’s “The Supernova Story,” now out in paperback, which is as close as we’ve got to an authorized biography. 
 

If it was good enough for Mercury astronaut John Glenn back in 1962, it must be good to go to hurl tourists into Earth orbit and beyond.

That was the one-two punch delivered at the recent Space Technology & Applications International Forum (STAIF) held February 11-15 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Jeff Patton of the Business Development & Advanced Programs of the newly formed United Launch Alliance (ULA) spotlighted that a “potential new market for construction, crew and cargo delivery to low Earth orbit” can be serviced by the Atlas V 401 booster.

ULA’s Patton detailed a capsule-based passenger transfer vehicle that sits nicely atop the Atlas - a craft based on the design work and reentry technology used in the Genesis, Stardust and several Mars missions.

NASA has identified a term that is used for human flight called “Black Zones” Patton said, a phrase that defines any period of flight when an abort would be unsafe for the passengers.

A great deal of effort was spent during work on the Orbital Space Plane - a precursor design to the current Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle - an exercise that identified potential Black Zones and eliminating them by modifying the Atlas Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV).

Patton’s bottom line: Atlas V 401/402 boosters are well suited for low Earth orbit human spaceflight and taking on a roster of commerical human spaceflight needs.

Also at STAIF, Michael Holguin of Lockheed Martin Space Systems Corporation pointed to using the Atlas and the Centaur upper stage to propel people, habitats and hardware to the Moon and Mars, calling it a reliable, robust, and safe approach to space colonization.

SpaceX lead rocketeer, Elon Musk, may not have got his Falcon 1 booster up and operating as yet, but he’s got a spark of an idea when it comes to electric cars.

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson announced February 19 that Musk is planting a new Tesla Motors automobile assembly facility in Albuquerque.

Musk’s Tesla Motors, based out of San Carlos, California, will use the plant to produce its “WhiteStar” car - a four door, five passenger sports sedan which is 100 percent electric.

The first cars will roll off the assembly line in the fall of 2009, and Tesla will produce at least 10,000 cars each year. The vehicle will cost $50,000 for the standard model or $65,000 for a preminum model with greater performance and range.

Tesla begins production of its first vehicle later this year, a zero-emission two-seat Roadster at a facility in England owned by Lotus Cars.

A new study finds that women with the astrological sign Virgo are more likely to vomit when pregnant, and Libras are at greater risk for a fractured pelvises.

The conclusions are hogwash, it’s lead researcher will tell you.

“Scientists take pains to make sure their clinical studies are conducted accurately,” explains Peter Austin of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto, “but sometimes erroneous conclusions will be obtained solely due to chance.”

At this week’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Austin used his flawed research to illustrate why it’s dangerous to base scientific decisions on the results of one study. The conclusions in his study are an example of the statistical chance that allows for erroneous associations. What makes for solid conclusions is when a study’s results can be replicated by other researchers and other methods.

“Replace astrological signs with another characteristic such as gender or age, and immediately your mind starts to form explanations for the observed associations,” Austin said. “Then we leap to conclusions, constructing reasons for why we saw the results we did. We did this study to prove a larger pointóthe more we look for patterns, the more likely we are to find them, particularly when we donít begin with a particular question”

Other studies (if you can believe them) say a third of all medical studies are wrong, and even when the scientists get it right, the media omits basic facts in medical stories.

Let’s face it. The heavily cratered Moon already looks like a beat-up and blasted world.

So how about using the Nevada Test Site — established in 1951 to provide a venue for evaluating nuclear weapons explosions — as a nifty locale for shaking out NASA’s lunar outpost plans?

That’s the suggestion from Sheldon Freid of National Security Technologies (NSTec), Homeland Security Technologies, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The Nevada Test Site spans 1,350 square miles - a secure site currently operated by NSTec for the U.S. Department of Energy. Three areas with a variety of elevation and geological traits were used for bomb testing, but the Yucca Flat region was the scene of the largest number of blasts.

The Yucca Flat area is some 5 miles wide and 20 miles long and roughly 460 subsidence craters resulted from testing in this area. For example, the Sedan crater there displaced approximately 12 million tons of earth - making it the largest of these craters at 1,280 feet across and 320 feet deep.

Freid notes that the profiles of Sedan and the other craters offer a wide variety of shapes and depths that are ideally suited for lunar analog testing of gear, astronaut duties and procedures.

Talk about a blastoff for the space agency’s return to the Moon schemes!

Just as the groundswell of gossip-mongering, prurience and plain old media exploitation reached its histrionic crescendo surrounding astronaut Lisa Nowak’s tragic fall-from-grace, along came the untimely (inevitable?) death of Anna Nicole Smith, a woman truly famous for doing absolutely nothing.

For the families of all involved in what appeared to be an ill-fated romance among NASA’s astronaut corps it can only be a relief that Smith, a beauty of Amazonian proportions who married well, widowed ugly and parlayed the ensuing media circus into reality-TV stardom shuffled off this mortal coil just in time for the 5 o’clock news Thursday evening. Talk about timing! People always dissed Smith for her “dumb blond” persona, but it appears that, even in death, she could play the press. In many ways Smith was heir to Marilyn Monroe’s legacy or–for those too young to remember–Smith was Jessica Simpson “dumb” before Simpson’s father packaged it for MTV.

For someone like Smith, the relentless, 24/7 coverage of her self-created trials and trevails was the business that she was in. She was truly a late-20th Century media creation, a “celebrity” custom-built for red carpet openings, boozy breakdowns and lamentable trysts in romantic locales, bringing Andy Warhol’s “famous for 15-minutes” maxim to its obvious, ignorant conclusion.

Then there’s Nowak, who prior to Monday’s very public breakdown, arrest and arraignment, lived her life like the rest of the nation’s astronaut corps in a kind of noble obscurity, trotted out for photo ops and interviews when it came time for NASA to promote visibility for its ongoing manned space program, specifically last July’s mission to the International Space Station.

A quick Google search this morning captured about 2.5 million references for Anna Nicole Smith, while Nowak came in with a paltry 890,000. That said, a bulk of the Nowak references, almost 50 percent of the search pages, referenced the awful events of the last five days of her life. In fact, it’s safe to say that the media has printed more column inches in the last four days on Nowak’s personal tragedy than it did over the last year on the fact that she risked her life as a member of the STS-121 space shuttle Discovery crew.

It’s nice to know where the media’s priorities lie. So you can imagine my surprise last night when I saw People magazine’s latest issue at the local pharmacy with Nowak, her alleged intended victim and her alleged paramour plastered on the cover. On the other hand, just imagine how surprised People’s editor’s were today, realizing that when they put the issue to bed Wednesday, in less than 24 hours, a “real celebrity” would do something really worthy of a cover story? Tragic, really.

A recent report from Russia picked up by various news services had the International Space Station (ISS) in collision avoidance mode to dodge fragments from China’s anti-satellite (ASAT) test last month.

Word now is that the facts got lost in translation or was a botched bit of misinterpretation.

According to NASA over the weekend, no collision avoidance maneuver has yet been performed by ISS due to debris from Fengyun-1C - an old Chinese weather satellite used by China for ASAT target practice on January 11.

The ISS will normally consider a maneuver if the risk of collision exceeds 1 in 10,000.

But there’s still need to keep an eye on all that space clutter generated by China - upwards of 900 bits of refuse strewn in Earth orbit at last count. The busting up of the weather satellite is being called the most prolific and serious fragmentation in the course of 50 years of space operations.

Meanwhile, some military space watching groups are turning their attention to another twist to the China ASAT event.

Just how much did U.S. intelligence sources know ahead of time that the test was in the works? And given past early whistle blowing by the U.S. of provocative actions taken by Iran and North Korea - why no pre-ASAT public spotlighting of China’s intentions?

Stay tuned….

Today marks the fourth anniversary of NASA’s Columbia accident and the loss of the shuttle’s STS-107 astronaut crew.

But for the first time since that accident, NASA’s shuttle fleet is back in full swing and construction of the International Space Station (ISS) is back underway.

NASA held an agency-wide Day of Remembrance Monday to commemorate the loss of Columbia and its seven-astronaut crew, as well as honor the memories of those lost in the 1986 Challenger accident and Apollo 1 fire among others. But Columbia remains fresh in NASA’s collective conscience, the space agency’s chief said recently.

“We lost Columbia, that was as tragic as it gets in this business,” Griffin told space agency employees in a recent update. “It called into question our ability to fly the shuttle safely, and it called into question our ability to complete the space station. And that’s a program which now has, you know, two decades of commitment behind it.”

But Griffin says that NASA’s three successful shuttle missions – STS-121, STS-115 and STS-116 – laid those questions to rest, and the last two shuttle flights in particular returned the U.S. space agency back on the road to fulfill its ISS construction commitments.

“We showed we could the big, hard and difficult things still,” Griffin said. “And [2007] is an opportunity to demonstrate that further.”

NASA plans to launch five shuttle flights to the ISS by the end of 2007, a year that will see the deliver of new solar arrays, a connector node, a European laboratory and a Japanese logistics module to support that country’s own ISS laboratory. No less than 23 spacewalks are planned throughout the year for shuttle and ISS astronauts to complete the assembly work. 

“We’re moving into really complex missions to the station,” Griffin said. “You have to wish that program well.”

Last week’s news of top CEOs telling Bush to get his climate act together was the beginning of the end of the global warming argument, I argued. Today’s news of a 113-nation agreement on human contribution marks the actual end.

It’ll go on, of course, but henceforth the anti-global warming voices will be heard much like the Apollo Moon-landing hoax devotees. The voices are not regarded by policy-makers because they are silly.

The evidence for climate change is unquestionable. The rapid pace of change can only involve a human contribution.

Sure, we don’t know all the details of exactly how much we are to blame or how it will play out. But it’s refreshing that 113 governments on this planet can finally ignore the arguments against global warming’s reality and begin dealing with that reality.