Astronaut William Lenoir, Who Flew on 1st Operational Shuttle Mission, Dies

Former NASA astronaut William "Bill" Lenoir, who flew aboard the first operational mission of the space shuttle in November 1982, died Saturday at age 71.

According to sources close to his family, Lenoir died after suffering head injuries during a bicycle accident Thursday.

Lenoir, who was selected by NASA for its sixth astronaut group and second class of "scientist-astronauts" in 1967, did not fly in space until 15 years later as a member of the STS-5 crew.

Lenoir served as the first flight engineer during the Nov. 11, 1982 launch, aiding commander Vance Brand and pilot Robert Overmyer from his seat on Columbia's flight deck. Five days later, when it came time to return to Earth, he traded places with fellow mission specialist Joseph Allen, becoming the first to experience a shuttle re-entry from the orbiter's middeck.

Lenoir and Allen were scheduled to establish another first together – the first spacewalk from the shuttle. But the outing was delayed a day when Lenoir became ill, was and ultimately canceled due to mechanical issues with both of their spacesuits.

The STS-5 mission successfully deployed its two communication satellites, the first commercial shuttle payloads, leading to the crew displaying a sign dubbing themselves the "Ace Moving Company" with the motto, "We Deliver."

After landing on Nov. 16 at Edwards Air Force Base in California, Lenoir and his three crewmates had logged more than 2.1 million miles (nearly 3.4 million km) in space. For Lenoir, the mission's 81 orbits would be his only spaceflight experience.

Lenoir was offered another mission, the STS-61A flight in October 1985 that flew the German-managed D1 Spacelab aboard orbiter Challenger, but he ultimately declined citing the time that training would require he would be away from his family and his desire to start a new career.

Russia plans to start cosmodrome work in 2011

The construction of a new rocket launch site in Russia's Far East will begin next year, the country's top space official said in a scientific council meeting.

Officials hope the Vostochny Cosmodrome will be ready to assume spaceflight duties by 2018, giving Russia a domestic spaceport for human space missions to replace the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Anatoly Perminov, head of the Russian Federal Space Agency, said all decisions have been taken to ensure construction of the cosmodrome starts in 2011.

Perminov made the comments in a meeting of the Scientific and Technical Council, according to the space agency's press service.

The Russian space agency's plans through 2015 call for development of the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Amur region of southeast Russia. The new launch site will be near the Russia-China border.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced in July an $800 million spending package for construction at Vostochny over the next three years, but that figure is a fraction of the projected total cost of the facility.

Vostochny, which means eastern in Russian, would host flights of the planned Rus-M rocket, which engineers are designing to launch a proposed next-generation manned spacecraft to replace the venerable Soyuz capsule.

Mars Crater Contains Water Ice

A fresh crater on Mars has revealed a hidden cache of frozen water in some of the latest photos from a powerful NASA spacecraft.

A recent false color image from NASA's  Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter clearly shows a patch of Mars water ice at the bottom of a 20-foot (6-meter) wide crater in the Martian surface. The photo came from the orbiter's high-resolution HiRISE camera.

The young crater is in the northern hemisphere of Mars. Scientists suspect it formed only recently, sometime between April 2004 and January of this year, said Nathan Bridges, a HiRISE science team member at the University of Arizona.

Bridges said the icy crater is farther south than some other sightings of buried water ice.  It appeared in one of hundreds of Mars photos taken between June 6 and July 7 of this year.

 "It's showing we're getting ice pretty far south," Bridges said. "As we continue to look at these things it's a good way to determine where shallow ice is on Mars." 

The  ice patch covers an area of up to 20 square feet (2 square meters). It "is probably at the same depth and has a similar origin to that excavated by the Phoenix lander back in 2008," he wrote in an image description.

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander touched down in the Martian arctic in May 2008 and found evidence of water ice just beneath the surface using a small scoop at the end of its robotic arm.

This also is not the first time ice-filled Martian craters have been found and photographed by the HiRISE camera.

The orbiting spacecraft first spotted exposed ice in Martian craters in August 2008. The ice did not last, it ultimately turned straight into vapor in a process known as sublimation. There is no definitive proof of liquid water on Mars today.

Flying Missile Defense Laser Test Delayed

The U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA)'s flight test this week of the Airborne Laser system was postponed when one of its cooling systems failed in preparation for the test, the agency's top official said Aug. 18.

The Airborne Laser, a modified Boeing 747 aircraft designed to zap ballistic missiles with a high-power laser, was being prepared for its third intercept test at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., on Tuesday. A commercial-off-the-shelf cooling system for the aircraft's tracking laser failed, and its replacement is now being installed, Army Lt. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly, the MDA's director, told reporters at the Space and Missile Defense conference here.

For the upcoming flight test, the Airborne Laser will attempt to destroy a target missile from twice the distance of previous tests, MDA officials have said. The MDA does not disclose actual standoff distances for the flight tests.

Boeing Defense, Space & Security of St. Louis is the Airborne Laser prime contractor; Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems of Los Angeles developed the high-power chemical laser; and Lockheed Martin developed the beam control/fire control system.

You can see the device on the nose of the aircraft:

New NASA Game

The game, "Moonbase Alpha," will allow players to work together in a futuristic lunar base. Players must tackle the challenge of restoring oxygen flow and critical systems after a meteor strike cripples a solar array and life support system.

This comes as a precursor to NASA's massively multiplayer online game, called "Astronaut: Moon, Mars & Beyond," where players would take on astronaut roles, such as a roboticist, and explore virtual versions of the moon and other extraterrestrial locations.

NASA and the game developers had debated about whether to keep the "Moonbase Alpha" setting on a lunar base, after the cancellation of NASA's Constellation Program that aimed to return astronauts to the moon. But they eventually decided to forge ahead with their original plans.

"The moon's not going anywhere," said Daniel Laughlin, project manager for NASA Learning Technologies at the agency's Goddard Earth Science and Technology Center in Maryland.

Games that recreate real space environments inside a user's computer can entertain casual gamers and perhaps spread the word about space exploration activities. At least that's the hope among NASA's "Moonbase Alpha" designers, and the U.S. space agency isn't alone in trying to tap into that potential.

Consider: If paying $200,000 for a real-life suborbital spaceflight on a Virgin Galactic space liner sounds like a hefty price, that ticket price still falls short of the $330,000 one gamer spent to buy a virtual space station in the online game "Entropia Universe."

The company behind "Entropia Universe" has since created a demo for the European Space Agency (ESA) to show how online gaming could promote space exploration.

The developers at MindArk used their "Entropia Universe" game engine to create a virtual base set on Jupiter's moon Europa. Their scripted demo shows players cooperating on in-game missions, such as repairing a broken-down rover

"[ESA] was expecting a mock-up, but not a prototype," said Christian Bjorkman, chief marketing officer for MindArk. "But for us to create the mock-up, we might as well create the environment and run around in it."

But Joachim Fuchs, a technical officer and system modeler at ESA, had also seen examples of engineers holding collaborative work sessions in online games. He wondered if an online game could not only promote space exploration among gamers, but also allow engineers to play out scenarios for future space missions.

Joint panel selects payload for 2016 Mars orbiter

NASA and the European Space Agency have selected five instruments for a methane-sniffing Mars orbiter scheduled for launch in 2016, the first mission of a transatlantic partnership to reconnoiter the Red Planet.

The payloads will seek methane and other trace gases in the Martian atmosphere and collect high-resolution snapshots of the planet's surface.
Since its discovery on Mars in 2003, methane has been a priority for planetary scientists. The presence of methane implies Mars still harbors microbial life or continues to be geologically active. Scientists say either explanation would prove Mars is not a dead planet.
Representatives from both space agencies selected two spectrometers, two cameras and a radiometer for the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter scheduled for launch in January 2016.
ESA leads the project and is building an entry, descent and landing demonstrator to piggyback on the spacecraft. NASA will provide an Atlas 5 launch vehicle to send the orbiter toward the Red Planet.
The agencies announced the winning payloads Monday after a six-month competition open to researchers in the United States and Europe. Scientists submitted 19 proposals, according to a joint press release.

NASA considering June 2011 for possible shuttle flight

Awaiting word on whether one additional shuttle flight will be approved by Congress and the Obama administration, NASA managers are protectively considering June 28, 2011, for launch of shuttle Atlantis on a rescue mission if a major problem threatens the crew of the final planned shuttle flight in late February. If not, and if NASA gets the required funding, the agency would launch Atlantis on an actual space station resupply mission to close out the shuttle program.

As it now stands, only two more shuttle flights are officially planned. The shuttle Discovery is scheduled for launch Nov. 1 on mission STS-133, a flight to deliver spare parts and a cargo storage module to the International Space Station. The shuttle Endeavour is set for takeoff Feb. 26 on mission STS-134 to deliver more spares, supplies and a $1.5 billion physics experiment known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.
Endeavour will serve as the rescue vehicle for Discovery's crew and Atlantis will be on standby for the Endeavour astronauts. The launch-on-need mission, known as STS-335, had been targeted for launch in late April. But NASA managers began processing an official "change request" Friday that would move the rescue/resupply flight to June 28, 2011. If the additional flight is funded, the mission designation would change to STS-135.
By launching with a crew of four astronauts instead of six or seven, NASA would not need another shuttle on standby for rescue duty. If a major problem cropped up during Atlantis' mission, the astronauts could seek safe haven aboard the International Space Station and rotate home aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Chinese mapping satellite deployed in Earth orbit

A Chinese mapping satellite is circling Earth after launching on a Long March rocket Tuesday, according to official media reports.
The Tianhui 1 satellite was released in a circular orbit more than 300 miles above Earth following liftoff aboard a Long March 2D booster at 0710 GMT (3:10 a.m. EDT).
The 13-story rocket took off from the Jiuquan launching base near the border of northern China's Inner Mongolia and Gansu provinces, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.
Liftoff occurred at 3:10 p.m. Chinese time.
The two-stage launch vehicle deployed Tianhui 1 on a trajectory over Earth's poles with an inclination of approximately 97 degrees.
Authorities will use Tianhui 1 for scientific research, mapping and land resource surveys to help promote economic development, according to a statement on the Chinese Ministry of Defense website.
The satellite was developed by a company under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., Xinhua reported.
Tuesday's flight was the seventh Chinese space launch of the year and the 40th rocket to reach orbit worldwide in 2010. It was the 13th mission for a Long March 2D rocket since 1992.

Trip to Mars Would Turn Astronauts Into Weaklings

Astronauts on a mission to Mars could lose nearly half their muscle strength during the long trip, giving them the physiques of senior citizens by the time they arrived, according to a new study.

Prolonged exposure to weightlessness could cause astronauts to lose more than 40 percent of their muscle strength even with regular exercise, researchers said. On a long voyage, a healthy 30- to 50-year-old astronaut could end up with the strength of an 80-year-old.

A 10-month trip to Mars would cause such extreme muscle deterioration that astronauts would find it difficult to perform even routine tasks, let alone move around the Martian surface in spacesuits, according to the study, which was led by Robert Fitts of Marquette University.

Returning to Earth could be even more perilous, the researchers found: The astronauts could be too weak to evacuate their spacecraft if they needed to make an emergency landing.

The research is detailed in the Aug. 17 edition of the Journal of Physiology.

Newfound Alien Planets May Include Smallest One Yet

A tantalizing group of alien planets that may include the smallest, most Earth-sized world yet seen has been discovered around a star like our sun, NASA announced Thursday.

Observations from the Kepler space observatory confirmed two Saturn-sized planets that orbit a star about 2,300 light-years from Earth. They also revealed a candidate for a possible planet roughly the size of Earth within the same system.

Astronomers have not yet confirmed the potential Earth-like planet, but early analysis suggests it has a radius just 1.5 times that of Earth. The Earth's radius is about 3,962 miles (6,378 km). Additional observations of the planetary system will help confirm the planet's existence, researchers said.

"Our hope is that in the coming days or weeks, we'll be able to be more definitive," said William Borucki, Kepler's mission science principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

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