May 28 News Items

New Challenge for Space Station Crew: A Broken Toilet (Source: New York Times)
Four words you don’t want to hear in space: “The toilet is broken.” The crew aboard the International Space Station is working on a problem with the system for collecting solid and liquid waste, which is a trickier proposition without gravity than it is on the Earth. Space toilets use jets of fan-propelled air to guide waste into the proper container. A NASA status report noted that last week, while using the toilet system in the Russian-built service module, “the crew heard a loud noise and the fan stopped working.” The solid waste collector is functioning properly, but the system for collecting liquid waste was not.

The crew tried replacing one device, an air/water separator, and then a filter, but nothing seemed to bring the toilet back to full operation. Russian mission control told the crew — Russian Cosmonauts Sergey Volkov and Oleg Kononenko, and Garrett Reisman, a NASA astronaut, to use the toilet on the Soyuz capsule that is attached to the station as a lifeboat. But that system has very limited capacity, and so repairing the system has become an increasingly urgent issue. (5/28)

No Criminal Charges to be Filed Against Orbital (Source: Space News)
The U.S. Department of Justice has notified Orbital Sciences Corp. that no criminal charges will be filed against the company as the result of an investigation into alleged violations of government contracting laws, according to a May 27 Orbital filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). (5/28)

ITAR-Free Version of European Satellite Planned (Source: Space News)
European governments have agreed that a new commercial telecommunications satellite design they are financing will permit customers to order a version without U.S.-built parts covered by the now-infamous U.S. technology export regime known as ITAR, government and industry officials said here May 27. (5/28)

Congressional Leaders Urge Orbital Sciences' Use of Cape Canaveral Spaceport (Source: Space Florida)
Following on a recent proposal from Space Florida on behalf of the State of Florida, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D) and Sen. Mel Martinez (R), along with 18 additional members of the Florida congressional delegation, sent a letter to Orbital Sciences Corporation urging them to locate their facilities for their Taurus-2 rocket at the Cape Canaveral Spaceport. Click here to view the letter. (5/27)

Military Auditors Say They Can't Keep up With Spending Growth (Source: Wall Street Journal)
Staffing shortages have left DOD auditors unable to oversee billions in military spending. A report by the Pentagon's inspector general said auditors have not been able to keep pace with the expansion of the budget, which doubled from $300 billion in fiscal 2000 to $600 billion in fiscal 2007. (5/28)

Editorial: Britain Should be Leading the Search for Life on Mars (Source: The Guardian)
Had Europe fully backed the Beagle project we, rather than Nasa, would be on the verge of solving space's greatest mystery. I'm 99% certain they will find water. And, if so, they will also be able to identify the salts within it, and whether they are suitable for micro-organisms to live on. They'll be able to clearly answer whether this place could be suitable for life to evolve. They are also going to check for organic molecules. I really hope they find them. Though we have found carbon on meteorites on earth, nobody has ever discovered a single atom of carbon on Mars - other than the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

And this is where the mission's limitations could set in. The measuring equipment they have on board won't be able to tell if any carbon is biological (ie, living carbon) or simply the debris of meteorites that may have crashed on the planet. I can't help feeling frustrated, because the Beagle 2 mission would have been able to make this distinction. The Phoenix design is based on a craft that crash-landed in 1999, and building Beagle technology into this mission simply wasn't feasible in the planning time they had. After the 1999 loss, NASA simply shrugged their shoulders, learned their lessons, and got on with the next mission. With Beagle, the British government and the European Space Agency sighed a collective "oh dear," and stopped there. There was no reason why another Beagle mission couldn't have worked, but they seemed to lose the will to go on. (5/28)

Iraq Spending Bill Eyed As Vehicle To Boost R&D Funding (Source: Congress Daily)
House members of the Congressional Research Caucus, as well as their backers in the science community, are hoping their colleagues will follow the Senate's lead and use the Iraq supplemental budget to replenish research and development budgets. The Senate-passed version, approved last week by a veto-proof majority, contained about $1.2 billion for federal research programs, including $400 million for the National Institutes of Health; $200 million each for NASA and the National Science Foundation; and $100 million for the Energy Department's Office of Science. But Reps. Bill Foster, D-Ill., and Judy Biggert, R-Ill., expect a tough fight ahead in the House. (5/27)

Radio Glitch Delays Plans for Maneuvering Mars Lander Arm (Source: AP)
A glitch with a Mars orbiter relaying commands from Earth delayed plans for the Phoenix Mars Lander's second day of activities on Tuesday. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter turned its UHF radio off, possibly because of a cosmic ray, cutting off communications with the lander. The orbiter was programmed to respond as it did, but orbiter team members were trying to get the radio back on. It has a second radio aboard that might be used instead, though reprogramming would be needed. (5/28)

"The Earth Strain" - Spreading Life To The Stars (Whether We Want To or Not) (Source: Daily Galaxy)
When the Apollo 11 astronauts splashed down in the Pacific they were immediately whisked off into quarantine, spending three weeks in a rather unglamorous steel shell for fear that they'd contracted lethal space-plagues. A recent paper by Professor Cockell of the Open University points out that the flow of life is more likely to be FROM the vast dirty ball teeming with billions of organisms TO the utterly dead space rocks. The idea is that hardy hitchhikers on our interplanetary probes could face alien ecosystems with "The Earth Strain", and they won't even have a rugged team of determined scientists to find a cure. Visit http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/05/the-earth-strai.html to view the article. (5/27)

SpaceDev Provided More Than 30 Mechanisms for Phoenix Program (Source: SpaceDaily.com)
SpaceDev says it has provided a wide array of hardware and instruments for the Phoenix Lander that successfully landed on Mars' north arctic plain Sunday, May 25th at 4:53 pm PDT. SpaceDev mechanical systems on the spacecraft included 16 devices supporting the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer (MECA) instrument, eight actuators on the Thermal Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA) instrument, two actuators deploying the solar arrays, two actuators pointing the Stereo Surface Imager (SSI) camera, and three actuators on the robotic arm. All in all, more than 30 SpaceDev devices are now on the surface of Mars supporting the Phoenix spacecraft. (5/28)

Editorial: Russia Watches Another American Robot Visit Mars Again (Source: SpaceDaily.com)
People may well be interested to know how America's main space partner and rival is faring. The USSR and new Russia tried to organize unmanned missions to Mars eleven times, but none of them has been followed through: the probes either failed to reach Mars or stopped work immediately upon landing. Ever since President Bush announced plans for Mars, arguments have raged among Russian scientists whether the costly attempts to land on Mars with uncertain results were worthwhile. The Russian Space Agency does not have a clearly articulated Martian program. There is a reason for that. Russia at present is implementing the Federal Space Program for 2006-2015, which does not envisage large-scale Martian projects.

At the same time Roscosmos has repeatedly said that manned missions to Mars are certain to take place after 2030-2035. Next year will see the start of the much-touted Mars-500 project, when a group of volunteers will spend 520 days in a special module simulating the conditions of a prolonged space flight. As part of that project the Russian Medical-Biological Research Institute in late May completed experiments to assess the capacity of the human body to spend prolonged periods in a confined space with low oxygen content. (5/28)

NASA Pullout Could Cut 'Hope' Short (Source: USA Today)
Excitement over the launch of Japan's Kibo ("Hope") module is tempered by concern that the lab's mission may be cut short if NASA follows through on its plan to withdraw from the station after 2015. The space lab is designed to last at least 10 years and could probably be used for 20. NASA's withdrawal from the space station could lead the lab to prematurely shut down. Withdrawing from the station for lack of money a few years after finishing it is "like buying a new car and saying, 'You paid $40,000 for a new car, and now I can't put the gas in the tank,' " said former senator John Glenn, the first American in orbit, during a Capitol Hill visit this month. (5/28)

Editorial: Lander's Legacy: Young People Looking Skyward (Source: Tucson Citizen)
Maybe Phoenix will find life's building blocks on Mars, maybe it won't. But in one lasting way, the mission already is a huge success: It has prompted thousands of people to tilt their heads skyward and ponder space exploration. The Phoenix program has spent $4 million on educational outreach. Thousands of Tucson-area students have visited the mission's operations center north of downtown. More hourlong tours are scheduled to begin Wednesdays starting June 11. Mars-related activities are planned for the Tucson Children's Museum and the UA Museum of Art. (5/28)

Space Tourism Explores a Different Role in Science (Source: Columbus Dispatch)
For your next vacation, how about a trip to the International Space Station? In April 2007, that's exactly what billionaire Charles Simonyi did, at a cost of about $20 million. Simonyi is the fifth space tourist to fly to the station via a Russian Soyuz rocket. Simonyi was asked about the role of humans in space and whether it affects our scientific understanding of the cosmos. He was clear in his opinion that virtually all scientific knowledge beyond the Earth-moon system has come from telescope observations and robotic probes. He said that we send people into space for adventure and to learn more about the considerable hazards of space travel, not to learn about astronomy. This was a refreshingly honest assessment. Both observational astronomy and the human-space program are useful, each in its own way. As a philanthropist and space tourist, Simonyi has contributed to both. (5/28)

How to Win the Google Lunar X Prize and Beat NASA to the Moon (Source: Popular Mechanics)
The year is 2012. A quarter-million miles from Earth, a small spacecraft is nearing the surface of the moon. When the unmanned craft touches down in a cloud of rocket-blown dust, it becomes the first man-made object to arrive intact on the lunar surface in 32 years. But the logo on the side of the spacecraft doesn't belong to NASA or any other government space agency. Instead, the images beamed back to Earth by the small rover that emerges from the spacecraft reveal a familiar multicolored corporate logo: Google's. Not a single dollar of public money has been expended, or a scrap of governmental red tape encountered, during the mission.

That's the scenario envisioned by the creators of the Google Lunar X Prize, a $20 million reward for the first privately funded group to land a rover on the moon by Dec. 31, 2012. To win the prize, the rover must do more than arrive in one piece. It must ­travel at least 500 meters, or about a third of a mile, and send a "mooncast" of high-definition video, photos and text to Earth. At this writing, 10 teams have registered to compete for the jackpot. "It used to take a nation to land on the moon," says Peter Diamandis, CEO of the X Prize Foundation. "We're throwing down the gauntlet to challenge private groups to do it a hundred times cheaper." Visit http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4265261.html to view the article. (5/28)