Saturday, September 29, 2012

Saturn's Glorious Rings Dazzle in NASA Photo

Saturn's southern reaches are draped in the shadow of the huge planet's iconic ring system in a spectacular new picture from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

The near-infrared photo, which Cassini snapped on June 15, looks toward the southern, unlit side of Saturn's rings from 14 degrees below the ringplane, researchers said. The spacecraft was about 1.8 million miles (2.9 million kilometers) from Saturn at the time; the image scale is 11 miles (17 km) per pixel.

Saturn's ice-covered moon Enceladus, which is 313 miles (504 km) wide, is visible as a tiny, bright speck in the lower lefthand corner of the image.

Many researchers regard Enceladus as one of the best bets in our solar system to host life beyond Earth. Though surface temperatures on the moon are frigid, Enceladus is believed to harbor a vast ocean of liquid water beneath its icy shell.

Enceladus also boasts huge amounts of internal heat, which power a system of geysers that erupt from the moon's south polar regions. Cassini discovered these geysers in 2005 and has snapped many photos of them since.



The $3.2 billion Cassini mission is a collaboration involving NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The spacecraft launched in 1997 and arrived at Saturn in 2004. It has been studying the ringed planet and its many moons ever since, and should continue to do so for years to come; the Cassini mission has been extended to at least 2017.

In early 2005, Cassini's Huygens lander, an ESA probe, touched down on the enormous moon Titan and relayed the first photos ever from the surface of that intriguing world.

Titan has a thick, nitrogen-dominated atmosphere and a weather system based on methane and ethane, which have pooled to form lakes in various places across the moon's surface.

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Friday, September 28, 2012

Huge X-Wing-Like Cargo Ship Undocks from Space Station

An unmanned European cargo ship the size of a double-decker bus undocked from the International Space Station Friday (Sept. 28), ending a six-month delivery flight to the orbiting lab.

The robotic Automated Transfer Vehicle 3 (ATV-3), with its four X-wing-like solar arrays unfurled, cast off from the space station Friday as the two spacecraft sailed 255 miles (410 kilometers) over western Kazakhstan in Asia. The cargo ship's undocking occurred at 5:44 p.m. EDT (2144 GMT).

The space departure occurred three days later than planned due to delays, first by a computer glitch and later by space junk near the space station.

But Friday, the ATV-3 spacecraft, which is named the Edoardo Almadi after the famed late Italian physicist of the same name, made a flawless departure from the station. It will spend the next few days orbiting Earth before being intentionally destroyed on Tuesday (Oct. 3) by burning up in Earth's atmosphereover the Pacific Ocean. [Photos: Europe's Robotic ATV Spaceships]

'Today, everything has worked to perfection,' NASA spokesman Rob Navias said during the agency's live broadcast of the undocking.

The ATV-3 spacecraft was built by the European Space Agency and delivered 7.2 tons of food, water and other vital supplies to astronauts aboard the International Space Station when it launched in March from a South American spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The ATV-3 spent 184 linked to the space station before being packed with trash and other unneeded items for its eventual fiery demise in Earth's atmosphere.



The ATV-3 is ESA's third unmanned cargo ship mission to visit the space station, which is also supplied by robotic cargo ships from Japan and Russia. In the United States, NASA has contracted two companies - SpaceX of Hawthorne, Calif., and Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp. - to provide unmanned cargo delivery flights to the station. The first official flight by SpaceX is scheduled to launch on Oct. 7, when the company

The ATV craft are huge cylinders 32 feet long (10 meters) and nearly 15 feet wide (4.5 m) and may be visible by observers on Earth as a bright moving light in the night sky, weather permitting. The ATV-3, like the International Space Station, can be spotted if you know where to look.

To find out if the ATV-3 will be flying over your location, visit one of these websites and enter the information for your location:

The European Space Agency is also holding a photo contest for satellite trackers hoping to snap a photo of the ATV-3 as it orbits the Earth during the next few days. Prizes will be awarded for the best snapshots.

'We look forward to seeing any and all photos of ATV in free flight and we wish you happy snapping for the contest!' ESA officials said in blog post.

For more info on the ESA's photo contest for the ATV-3 spacecraft, visit: http://blogs.esa.int/atv/2012/09/28/atv-orbital-photo-contest-orbit-details/

The next ATV to launch toward the space station will be the ATV-4 Albert Einstein, which is slated to blast off in April 2013.

You can follow SPACE.com Managing Editor Tariq Malik on Twitter @tariqjmalik and SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

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Back-to-Back Space Junk Buzzes Space Station

Two pieces of space junk whizzed by the International Space Station this week but posed no threat to the orbiting laboratory or its three-person crew, NASA officials say.

The space debris -a chunk of an old Russian Cosmos satellite and leftover chunk of an Indian rocket -made back-to-back flybys of the space station Thursday and Friday (Sept. 27 and 28). The Russian Cosmos satellite debris made its closest approach to the space station on Thursday at 10:42 a.m. EDT (1442 GMT), with the Indian rocket remnant making its close pass Friday at 1:47 a.m. EDT (0547 GMT).

Initially, NASA and its Russian partners planned to move the space station clear of the incoming debris by firing the rocket thrusters on a European cargo ship. But more observations of the orbital debris found the space junk fragments would not creep too close for comfort when they zoomed by, NASA officials said.

'Additional tracking Wednesday night of both the Cosmos satellite debris and the Indian rocket body debris resulted in a high degree of confidence that neither object would pose any possibility of a conjunction with the International Space Station and a debris avoidance maneuver scheduled for Thursday morning was cancelled by the flight control team at Mission Control,' NASA officials said in an update Thursday. [Space Junk Photos & Cleanup Concepts]

NASA and its partners typically move the space station if there is a high probability of space junk passing inside a safety perimeter shaped like a pizza box that extends around the orbiting lap. This red zone extends about a half-mile (0.75 kilometers) above and below the station, and about 15 miles (25 km) around the football-field size space lab.

Planning for the possibility of a space junk avoidance maneuver forced space station controllers to delay the undocking of the European cargo ship that would have performed the move. The departure of the European Space Agency's Automated Transfer Vehicle 3 (ATV-3) was originally scheduled for Tuesday (Sept. 25), but failed to undock due to a computer glitch that has since been resolved.

The ATV-3 spacecraft, which is named Edoardo Almadi to honor the late Italian physicist of the same name, is now scheduled to undock on Friday afternoon at 5:46 p.m. EDT (2146 GMT), NASA officials said.

Space junk has been a growing threat for astronauts on the International Space Station and satellites in orbit. The U.S. military's Space Surveillance Network and NASA regularly track about 20,000 pieces of space debris orbiting the Earth.

You can follow SPACE.com Managing Editor Tariq Malik on Twitter @tariqjmalik. Follow SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

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Mars Water Mystery: NASA Rover's Ancient Streambed Discovery Is the Latest Clue

A NASA rover's discovery of an ancient streambed on Mars is exciting, but it's far from the first solid evidence that the Red Planet was once a warmer and wetter place.

On Thursday (Sept. 27), scientists announced that the Curiosity rover had found rocky outcrops containing large and rounded stones cemented in a conglomerate matrix. The discovery suggests that water had flowed fast and relatively deep - perhaps hip-deep, in fact - through the area billions of years ago.

'This is the first time we're actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars,' Curiosity co-investigator William Dietrich, of the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement.

But Curiosity's find didn't exactly surprise mission scientists. They chose to set the $2.5 billion robot down in the Red Planet's huge Gale Crater, after all, because Mars-orbiting spacecraft have spotted signs there of long-ago water activity - from channels and alluvial fans to minerals that form in the presence of liquid water.

And these more recent observations build on evidence for a wet ancient Mars that goes back four decades and has been accumulating ever since. [The Search for Water on Mars (Photos)]



Eyes in the sky

Perhaps the first compelling signs that the Red Planet's surface - a frigid and dry place today - once harbored liquid water came from NASA's Mariner 9 spacecraft.

Mariner 9 launched toward Mars in May 1971 and later that year became the first probe ever to orbit another planet. Mariner 9's images showed canyons - including the enormous Valles Marineris, which is named after the spacecraft - and what appeared to be riverbeds.

A succession of other NASA orbiters - from the twin Vikings in the mid-1970s to Mars Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which remain active today - have spotted many more landforms that speak of long-ago erosion by liquid water.

MRO has observed streaks in the Red Planet's Newton Crater that shift over the course of a few months, suggesting that water might even be flowing seasonally on Mars today.

The evidence is also mineralogic as well as topographic. Instruments aboard MRO and other craft have detected water-associated minerals such as clays and sulfates in numerous locations across the Red Planet.

Ground-truthing

Over the past decade, rovers have ground-truthed some of the observations made from orbit, strengthening the case for a wet ancient Mars.

For example, NASA's Opportunity rover found multiple deposits of odd, iron-rich spherules after landing on the Red Planet in January 2004. These so-called 'blueberries' are concretions created by the action of mineral-rich water inside rocks, scientists say.

Opportunity's twin, Spirit, discovered strong evidence of an ancient hydrothermal system near its landing site back in 2007. And last December, researchers announced that Opportunity had found a thin vein of gypsum while poking along the rim of Mars' Endeavour Crater.

'There was a fracture in the rock, water flowed through it, gypsum was precipitated from the water. End of story,' Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Opportunity's principal investigator, told reporters at the time. 'There's no ambiguity about this, and this is what makes it so cool.'

Searching for habitable environments

Here on Earth, life thrives pretty much anywhere liquid water is found, which explains the intense interest in searching for signs of the stuff on Mars.

Indeed, the past decade or so of NASA's activities at the Red Planet have been geared toward 'following the water.' Curiosity's mission marks a transition to the next phase in the hunt for past or present Mars life: searching for habitable environments.

Curiosity is about 50 days into a two-year mission to determine if the Gale area can, or ever could, support microbial life. This is a long and involved process that requires more than the confirmation of an ancient streambed, researchers said.

'The question about habitability goes just beyond the simple observation of water on Mars to recreating the environments in greater detail, with an understanding of the chemistry that was going on at that time, to ask if this is the kind of place that micro-organisms could've lived,' Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, told reporters Thursday.

'That's still to be determined, and that's the research the team is working on,' he added.

Curiosity's mission may also shed light on when and why Mars dried out long ago. Scientists plan to drive the 1-ton robot partway up Mount Sharp, which rises 3.4 miles (5.5 kilometers) into the Red Planet sky from Gale's center.

They're keen to explore Mount Sharp's base, which harbors clays and sulfates, orbital observations have shown. About 2,300 feet (700 meters) up, however, these deposits peter out. If Curiosity climbs high enough to cross this threshold, it could help scientists piece together a history of wet Mars, dry Mars and the transition between the two, researchers have said.

Follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+.



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Harvest Full Moon Rises This Weekend

The full moon that rises this weekend is a special one, carrying the title of 'Harvest Moon' for those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere.

The moon officially turns full when it reaches that spot in the sky exactly opposite the sun, and this moment will occur Saturday (Sept. 29) at 11:19 p.m. EDT (0319 GMT Sunday). When you gaze at the full moon this weekend, think of farmers working late into the evening to gather their crop, because that's how the Harvest Moon got its name.

The Harvest Moon allows farmers at the peak of the current harvest season to stay in the fields longer than usual, working by the moon's light. It rises around sunset, but also - and more importantly - the moon seems to appear at nearly the same time each successive night.

For example, in New York City, moonrise on Sep. 29 occurs at 6:11 p.m local time. On Sep. 30, moonrise is at 6:41 p.m. and on Oct. 1, it comes at 7:12 p.m. These 30-minute gaps are far shorter than the usual 50-minute difference in moonrise times from night to night. [2012 'Supermoon' Photos from Around the World]



Night-to-night differences in Harvest Moon rise times vary considerably by latitude. For example, Cocoa, Fla, located near latitude 28.4 degrees north, sees moonrise come an average of 36 minutes later each evening. In the town of Priddis, Alberta, Canada, latitude 50.9 degrees north, the average difference is 24 minutes.

The reason for this circumstance is that the moon appears to move along the ecliptic - the apparent path of the sun across the sky - and at this time of year when rising, the ecliptic makes its smallest angle with respect to the horizon for those living in the Northern Hemisphere.

In contrast, for those living in the Southern Hemisphere, the ecliptic at this time of year appears to stand almost perpendicular to the eastern horizon. As such, the difference for the time of moonrise exceeds the average of 50 minutes per night. For example, in Canberra, Australia (35.3 degrees south latitude), the night-to-night difference amounts to 58 minutes.

Interestingly, for those who live near the Arctic Circle (66.7degrees north latitude), the moon does indeed rise at about the same time each night around the time of the Harvest Moon.

And for those who live even farther to the north, a paradox: The moon rises earlier on each successive night around the time of the Harvest Moon!

At Resolute Bay in Nunavut, Canada (74.7 degrees north), for instance, the times of moonrise on Sep. 29, Sept. 30 and Oct. 1 will be, respectively, 5:32 p.m., 5:04 p.m. and 4:22 p.m. local time - an average of 35 minutes earlier each night.



The Harvest Moon is traditionally the full moon that comes closest on the calendar to the September equinox, which marks the beginning of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere and the beginning of spring south of the equator.

In 2012 this celestial event comes a bit later than usual. While most traditionally associate the Harvest Moon with the month of September, it occurs in October some years.

Between 1970 and 2050, there are 18 years when the Harvest Moon comes in October. The last time was in 2006, and the next will be in 2017. The Harvest Moon can occur as early as Sept. 8 (as in 1976) or as late as Oct. 7 (as in 1987).

Some people are under the impression that the Harvest Moon remains in the night sky longer than any of the other full moons we see during the year, but that's simply not so. That particular circumstance is reserved for the full moon closest on the calendar to the Winter Solstice (which this year comes on Dec. 28).

Editor's note: If you snap an amazing photo of September's Harvest Full Moon that you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, please contact managing editor Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York.

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Thursday, September 27, 2012

Mouth of Giant Black Hole Measured for First Time

For the first time, scientists have peered to the edge of a colossal black hole and measured the point of no return for matter.

A black hole has a boundary called an event horizon. Anything that falls within a black hole's event horizon - be it stars, gas, or even light - can never escape.

'Once objects fall through the event horizon, they're lost forever,' Shep Doeleman, assistant director of the MIT Haystack Observatory and research associate at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, said in a statement Thursday (Sept. 27). 'It's an exit door from our universe. You walk through that door, you're not coming back.'

Although the event horizon is an imaginary line that's impossible to observe, astronomers have imaged the region around a giant black hole at the center of a distant galaxy, and measured, for the first time, the closest stable orbit in which matter can circle the black hole. The findings were reported today in the journal Science.

The supermassive black hole in question lies at the center of the galaxy M87, which is about 50 million light-years from our own Milky Way. This behemoth black hole contains the mass of 6 billion suns.

Using a new observatory called the Event Horizon Telescope, which links up radio dishes in Hawaii, Arizona and California, astronomers measured that the innermost possible orbit for matter around the black hole is roughly 5.5 times the size of the black hole's event horizon.

This innermost orbit is about five times the size of the solar system, or 750 times the distance from Earth to the sun, Doeleman told SPACE.com. The distance between the Earth and the sun is nearly 93 million miles (150 million kilometers).

The observations allowed the researchers to confirm that this swirling mass around the black hole is the source of the powerful jets of light seen radiating from the galaxy. Many galaxies throughout the universe spot similar jets, thought to be produced by matter falling into their central black holes. Until now, no telescope has had the resolution power to verify the idea.

The Event Horizon Telescope is a new project that aims to link as many as 50 radio dishes around the world to work in concert to image the distant universe. Already, the observatory can see celestial objects with 2,000 times more detail than the Hubble Space Telescope.

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Mars Rover Finds Ancient Streambed Where Water Once Flowed

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has discovered what appears to be an ancient streambed, suggesting that water once flowed in large volumes - perhaps hip-deep in places - across the Martian surface.

Photos from the Curiosity rover have revealed several different rocky outcrops that contain stones cemented into a layer of conglomerate rock. Some of these stones are rounded and large, indicating that they were transported relatively long distances across the Red Planet surface by water.

This water flow was likely quite vigorous, perhaps akin to the flows produced by flash floods in desert areas here on Earth, researchers said.

'From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep,' Curiosity co-investigator William Dietrich, of the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. [The Search for Water on Mars (Photos)]

'Plenty of papers have been written about channels on Mars with many different hypotheses about the flows in them,' Dietrich added. 'This is the first time we're actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it.'

The findings came after researchers studied photographs of three different outcrops inside Gale Crater, where Curiosity touched down on Aug. 5.

The first outcrop, known as Goulburn, lies a few feet from the rover's landing site. Curiosity spotted the other two - called Link and Hottah - as it's been rambling toward an area called Glenelg, its first major science target.



Photos of Link really got the team thinking of long-ago stream flows, Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, told reporters today (Sept. 27). And images of Hottah, which juts from the Red Planet surface at an odd angle, pretty much sealed the deal.

'Hottah looks like someone jack-hammered up a slab of city sidewalk, but it's really a tilted block of an ancient streambed,' Grotzinger said in a statement.

On Earth, tilted outcrops are usually the result of tectonic activity. But Hottah could have been deformed by a nearby impact or other process, Grotzinger said.

The water on Mars likely flowed several billion years ago, researchers said, though an exact timeframe will be tough to determine. But the extent of the system that produced the outcrops - and the surrounding alluvial fan and channels - suggests that it wasn't produced in a single shot.

Rather, water was likely flowing over a relatively long chunk of time, scientists said.

'I'm comfortable to argue that it's certainly beyond the thousand-year timescale, but we're still gathering data to go further with that,' Dietrich told reporters today.

The team has not yet analyzed Link or Hottah with Curiosity's 10 different science instruments; rather, the researchers' conclusions are based on images of Mars snapped by the rover's Mast Camera. But those pictures capture plenty of evidence, Grotzinger said.

'In some cases, when you do geology, a picture's worth a thousand words,' he said.

The $2.5 billion Mars rover Curiosity is about 50 days into a roughly two-year mission to determine if the Gale Crater area has ever been capable of supporting microbial life.

Despite the outcrop discoveries, the six-wheeled robot's ultimate destination remains the base of Mount Sharp, a 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) mountain that rises from Gale's Center. The mysterious mountain's foothills show signs of long-ago exposure to liquid water.

'A long-flowing stream can be a habitable environment,' Grotzinger said. 'It is not our top choice as an environment for preservation of organics, though. We're still going to Mount Sharp, but this is insurance that we have already found our first potentially habitable environment.'

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Mars Rover Curiosity Photo Reveals Crescent Moon Phobos

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has been doing more than just driving around the Red Planet and taking pictures of rocks. It's been doing a bit of Martian moon-gazing too.

The Curiosity rover's latest Mars photo captured the planet's largest Martian moon, Phobos, during a Martian evening, revealing the satellite as a faint crescent moon.

"Moon Over Mars: I snapped a pic of one of Mars' moons, Phobos, in the twilight sky over Gale crater," NASA's Curiosity team announced on the mission's Twitter page @MarsCuriosity, writing as the rover itself, on Wednesday (Sept. 26) - the same day Curiosity made its longest drive yet.

The photo shows Phobos as a faint white crescent that almost blends in with the Martian sky. A black blemish also appears in the image, but is merely the result of a bad pixel in the image data, rover officials said.

"When you send images from 179 million miles away, stuff happens," they added via Twitter. 

The new photo of Phobos is Curiosity's latest view of Martian moons from the surface of the Red Planet. Earlier this month, Curiosity snapped photos of Phobos as it crossed part of the sun, creating a partial solar eclipse on Mars.

Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos, both of which are much smaller than Earth's moon. Phobos is about 14 miles wide (22 kilometers), making it the largest Martian satellite. Deimos is about 9.3 miles across (15 km) at its largest point and is farther from Mars than Phobos. 

The Curiosity rover's Phobos photos are just part of the science work the car-size robot has been performing on Mars. The rover landed inside the planet's vast Gale Crater on Aug. 5 and is currently driving toward its first science destination, a location called Glenelg.

On Wednesday, Curiosity drove 160 feet (48.9 meters) closer to Glenelg, marking its longest single drive of its mission so far. To date, the rover has covered about a quarter-mile (416 meters) on Mars.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity is expected to spend at least two years exploring Gale Crater to determine if the region could have ever supported microbial life. Mission scientists plan to drive the rover up a 3-mile (5-km) mountain - Mount Sharp -that rises from the crater's center.

NASA will hold a press conference today at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT) today to update the media and public on Curiosity's progress on Mars. You can watch the press conference live on SPACE.com here.

You can follow SPACE.com Managing Editor Tariq Malik on Twitter @tariqjmalik and SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

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US Military Wants Space Planes, Reusable Rockets

Shrinking space budgets don't stop the U.S. military from dreaming about space planes or rockets capable of flying back and landing on their own.

Reusable launch vehicles capable of soaring into space and returning by flying through Earth's atmosphere like airplanes could potentially save millions on expensive launches that typically cost thousands of dollars per pound - especially if they fly frequently. But U.S. military officers and researchers acknowledged the challenge of pushing for next-generation space vehicles during a time of budget cuts.

'Money is tight, and we have to make tough decisions on where to invest money,' said Col. Scott Patton from Air Force Space Command. 'In the long term, we need full spectrum launch capability at dramatically lower cost.'

The U.S. government spent tens of millions of dollars on space plane programs in past decades - not to mention the $3 billion National Aero-Space Plane project - but most never got off the ground before cancellation. Such half steps need to change if the U.S. hopes to create a launch vehicle that can truly revolutionize launch costs, Air Force researchers said. [Evolution of the Space Plane (Infographic)]

'The reality is that if you're going to learn, you have to go out there and fly hardware,' said Jess Sponable, a program manager at the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Sponable and Patton represented two of the expert panel discussing reusable launch vehicles at the AIAA Space 2012 conference hosted by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Pasadena, Calif., on Sept. 13.

Making the dream real

The dream of space planes has often raced ahead of reality - original arguments for NASA's space shuttles envisioned flights once per week at a cost of just $20 million. But the space shuttle program ended up flying just several times per year at a cost of about $1.6 billion per flight.

The Air Force's robotic space plane X-37B, a miniature version of the space shuttle, has flown two missions aimed at testing satellite technologies, rather than paving the way for cheap, reusable launch vehicles. Like the retired space shuttle, X-37B launches aboard a rocket and flies back down to Earth after reentering the planet's atmosphere. [Photos: Air Force's Secret X-37B Missions]

'We've got to learn how to build and fly this class of system,' Sponable said. 'It's some strange, in-between hybrid that's not an aircraft and not a rocket.'

The private space industry has also experimented with the space plane concept. SpaceShipOne, a private suborbital space plane, won the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004. But the air-launched vehicle and its SpaceShipTwo successor are more suited to carrying space tourists to the edge of space rather than lift heavy cargo.



Bringing rockets back

Perhaps the most promising reusable launch vehicle designs won't be space planes at all, but simply reusable rockets. SpaceX, the firm founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Elon Musk, has begun working on a reusable rocket concept called the Grasshopper that puts landing gear on a Falcon 9 rocket's core stage.

'We emphasize we don't care if [a solution] has wings or no wings - we want maintenance to be minimal,' Sponable said. 'How you fly it and how it actually looks like is a secondary issue.'

The Air Force Research Laboratory has also studied a reusable rocket concept under its Reusable Booster System (RBS) Pathfinderprogram. The 'rocket-back' concept would involve the rocket firing its engines to reverse its climb and glide back down to an aircraft-style landing.

Rocket-back designs from Andews Space, Boeing and Lockheed Martin came out of the Phase I contracts that wrapped up this month. The next step would have involved a $55-75 million contract to build it, not including launch costs - but the Air Force decided to discontinue funding and shelve the project.

'The program office was satisfied that at least one feasible system solution would have been proposed,' said Jeffrey Zweber, program manager for RBS Pathfinder.



Driving down the launch cost

Program cancellations make the immediate future of space planes or reusable rockets seem uncertain. But the overall market and demand for space launch services continues to grow and could support new, cheaper ways to get into space, said David Byers, an independent consultant to the U.S. government on space propulsion and power.

The private space industry may end up paving the way during a time of less government spending - especially with companies such as Elon Musk's SpaceX working to drive down launch concepts through its conventional Falcon rockets and its more experimental Grasshopper concept. Future space plane projects would do well to learn from the SpaceX example, Air Force researchers said.

'We need to reconcile why Elon was able to do what he did with the money spent, on an order of magnitude lower cost than what models would have predicted,' Sponable said.

Zweber, Sponable's Air Force Research Laboratory colleague, also gave the cautious thumbs up for the SpaceX approach.

'I think we all wish them the best and hope they deliver on what they promise,' Zweber said.

This story was provided by TechNewsDaily, sister site to SPACE.com. You can follow TechNewsDaily Senior Writer Jeremy Hsu on Twitter @ScienceHsu. Follow TechNewsDaily on Twitter @TechNewsDaily, or on Facebook.

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Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Jupiter's Big Moon Ganymede Mapped by Amateur Astronomer

An amateur astronomer has created the first-ever homemade brightness map of Jupiter's huge moon Ganymede in a magnificent display of how non-professional skywatchers can contribute to the field of observational astronomy.

Greek skywatcher Emmanuel Kardasis of the Hellenic Amateur Astronomy Association created the new Ganymede map using a common 'hobby' telescope and off-the-shelf camera and computer equipment. His map matches up well with images of Ganymede's surface taken by professionals, said officials with the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC), which is meeting this week in Madrid.

For example, Kardasis' brightness (or albedo) map identifies such Ganymede features as Phrygia Sulcus, a system of grooves and ridges thousands of miles across, and a low-lying dark area called the Nicholson region.

To create the images, Kardasis attached a camera to his telescope and recorded a video of the ice-covered Ganymede, which is the largest moon in the solar system at 3,273 miles (5,268 kilometers) across.

He picked the video's sharpest frames, then enhanced them using photo-editing software, EPSC officials said.

'Ganymede has a tiny disk as seen from Earth so was a good test for my techniques,' Kardisis said in a statement. 'If the same methods were applied to other worlds, perhaps [Jupiter's] volcanic moon Io, we could capture surface fluctuations. Professional observatories may create better images, but they cannot monitor our rapidly and ever-changing universe.'

The equipment amateurs need to generate products like his Ganymede map is relatively easy to find, Kardasis said.

'Creating useful images of planets requires a telescope with a diameter of at least eight inches. For tiny discs, such as the moons of Jupiter, bigger is definitely better,' he said. 'My Ganymede images were made using an 11-inch telescope. You also need a good motor drive on your tripod, a sensitive camera, some freely available software and lots of patience!'



Kardasis' work highlights the valuable contributions amateurs can make to astronomy, EPSC officials said. For example, amateurs could monitor surface and atmospheric changes on planets such as Neptune and moons like Saturn's massive satellite Titan, complementing the more detailed (but much less frequent) observations made by professionals.

'I hope my work will inspire anyone interested in astronomy to use whatever equipment they have to make useful observations,' Kardasis said.

Kardasis' work will be presented at the EPSC meeting in Madrid on Thursday (Sept. 27).

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NASA Tracking Space Junk Near International Space Station

NASA is keeping a close eye on two pieces of space junk expected to whiz by the International Space Station in back-to-back passes, and the station may even have to dodge the orbital debris.

The drifting space flotsam includes the remains of a Russian Cosmos satellite and a leftover chunk of an old Indian rocket. The Russian satellite debris will creep close to the space station on Thursday morning (Sept. 27), with the Indian rocket remnant zooming by on Friday, NASA officials told SPACE.com.

As a precaution, NASA and its Russian partners began planning for a possible 'debris avoidance maneuver' on Thursday morning that would steer the station clear of both pieces of space debris. The maneuver, if ultimately required, would fire the thrusters on a European cargo ship currently docked at the station for just over two minutes to move the station clear of the space junk.

NASA and its partners traditionally order a debris avoidance maneuver when a piece of space junk is expected to pass so close that it enters a safety perimeter shaped like a pizza box that extends just over 15 miles (25 kilometers) around the space station, and a half-mile (0.75 km) above and below the orbiting lab. [Space Junk Photos & Cleanup Concepts]

NASA spokesman Rob Navias of the Johnson Space Center, home to the agency's space station Mission Control center, told SPACE.com the two space debris fragments being tracked now will come just inside that safety zone.

Navias said the avoidance maneuver would be performed at 8:12 a.m. EDT (1218 GMT) on Thursday, if ultimately required. It is possible that additional tracking of the space junk may allow station flight controllers to call off the maneuver, he added.

The Russian satellite debris will make its closest approach to the space station on Thursday at 10:42 a.m. EDT (1432 GMT), with the Indian rocket debris passing by on Friday at 1:47 a.m. EDT (0547 GMT), he added.

At no time will the station's three-person Expedition 33 crew be in danger, NASA officials said. The station is currently home to NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko.

Space junk has been a growing threat for astronauts living on the International Space Station, as well as other satellites in orbit. NASA and the U.S. military's Space Surveillance Network track about 20,000 pieces of space debris in orbit today.

The potential for Thursday's space debris avoidance maneuvers has forced station flight controllers to delay the departure of the European cargo ship that will perform the engine burn - the Automated Transfer Vehicle 3 (ATV-3) - by at least one day. The unmanned spacecraft was originally scheduled to leave the space station on Wednesday (Sept. 25), but a minor computer glitch delayed its undocking.

The next chance for the ATV-3 spacecraft to undock will be Friday afternoon, Navias said.

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Brightest Star Explosion in History Reveals Lonely Supernova

The brightest exploding star ever seen with the naked eye in recorded history apparently experienced a quick and lonely death, a new study reveals.

The discovery, which centered on a star explosion witnessed in the year 1006, suggests that many similar outbursts leave no companion star to accompany their demise.

The most powerful exploding stars in the universeare supernovas, which are bright enough to momentarily outshine their entire galaxies. One type of star explosion, known as a Type 1a supernova, occurs when one star pours enough fuel onto a dying companion star known as a white dwarf to trigger an extraordinary nuclear explosion.

The new study centered its sights on the supernova SN 1006, which was seen all over Earth in the spring of 1006 above the southern horizon of the night sky, in the constellation Lupus, just south of Scorpio. At its peak, researchers say the supernova, which exploded about 7,100 light-years away, was about one-quarter the brightness of the moon, luminous enough that people could have read by its light at midnight. [Video: How to Make a Supernova]

Explosive deaths of stars

Our sun and more than 90 percent of all stars in our galaxy will one day end up as white dwarfs, which are made up of their dim, fading cores.

There are two ways Type 1a supernovas are born - the slow way, which involves a living star dumping gas onto a white dwarf, and the fast way, where two white dwarves merge catastrophically. The slow route would leave the white dwarf's companion behind, while the fast one would effectively blast away discernible traces of either white dwarf.

Whether slow origins of Type 1a supernovas were more commonplace than fast ones or vice versa remained a puzzle. Knowing more about the causes behind these explosions is essential because Type 1a supernovas are key to gauging the rate at which the universe is expanding, which in turn could shed light on why this expansion is apparently accelerating due to a mysterious force called dark energy.



Scientists have tried looking for companion stars of Type 1a supernovas before. One possible instance was Tycho's supernova, SN 1572, one of the few supernovas visible to the naked eye in historical records, although that case remains questioned.

Now a fruitless search for a companion star to the brightest supernova ever seen with the naked eye on Earth suggests this explosion took the fast route.

Brightest supernova post mortem

Using data from the Paranal Observatory in Chile, the researchers combed through the space 16.5 light-years in diameter around SN 1006 and 'do not find any star in the surroundings of the supernova remnant to be the possible companion of the progenitor of SN 1006,' lead study author Jonay González Hernández, an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands in Spain, told SPACE.com.

When combined with previous results, these findings suggest less than 20 percent of Type 1a supernovas apparently occur via the slow route.

The scientists detailed their findings in the Sept. 27 issue of the journal Nature.

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Packing for an Interstellar Space Voyage: What to Bring?

Contemplating the idea of a manned voyage to another star raises many confounding questions, including one that has been around since the days of the first travelers: What to pack?

To build a closed environment that can sustain astronauts and perhaps their descendants during the long mission is going to require many kinds of technological innovations, some of them needed just to clothe the interstellar travelers, said Karl Aspelund, a professor of textiles, fashion merchandising and design at the University of Rhode Island.

'The longest time anyone has been in space is around 400 days. Now we're suddenly talking years, decades, possibly even generations,' Aspelund said last week at the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Houston, a conference about interstellar space travel. 'That changes everything.'

An interstellar mission is most likely going to be a very extended trip, considering the nearest stars are light-years away. Aspelund estimated that every person aboard a ship on a 30-year voyage would need to pack about 100 cubic feet of clothing. For 10 people, that means enough clothes to fill a railcar. Based on current launch costs, so much mass could add $18 million to $36 million to the price tag for the mission simply for shirts, pants and underwear, he calculated. [Spacesuit Suite: Evolution of Cosmic Clothes (Infographic)]

Clearly, future astronauts will have to pack lighter.

'We might have to rethink the idea of clothing altogether,' Aspelund said. 'We might have to really re-evaluate what constitutes being dressed and undressed.'

Aspelund is only half joking when he contemplates sending spaceflyers onto a starship naked. He concedes there are good reasons ? culturally as well as individually ? why humans couldn't just discard clothes on an interstellar mission.

But researchers will need to find ways for clothes (and everything else astronauts pack) to be used sustainably, he says.

So far NASA hasn't figured out many good ways to do laundry in space. Astronauts on the International Space Station have been known to rarely change outfits.

'It's basically a flying dorm room, by the sound of it,' Aspelund said of the space station. 'The solution to keeping things clean is exactly the dorm room solution: You stuff it into a hole and you never see it again. That's not so good if you're not going to be coming back, or if you're going to be out there for years.'

Aspelund plans to write a grant and collaborate with other researchers on the issue of cosmic duds and space laundry. The solutions may require completely different types of textiles that are more durable and recyclable, or new ways to clean existing materials.

On an even deeper level, the issue forces people to question just what items are essential for life on Earth and whether those same items are essential in space.

'We have things that are absolutely critical to our well-being on the planet,' Aspelund said. 'This project, the 100 Year Starship, inspires a completely fresh look. Suddenly we step back from Earthly concerns.'

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Stunning Nebula Photo Shows Head of 'Cosmic Seagull'

A huge cloud of gas that looks like the head of a seagull shines brightly in a gorgeous new picture snapped by a telescope in Chile.

The photo, taken by a telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory, shows the head portion of the Seagull Nebula. The cloud of gas spotlighted in the image glows intensely due to radiation blasted out by a hot young star at its heart, scientists said.

Like other nebulas, the Seagull is a stellar nursery - an enormous cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other ionized gases where stars are being born. Nebulas come in a variety of sizes and shapes, some of which spur astronomers' imaginations and evoke comparisons to animals or familiar objects.

The Seagull Nebula is so named because it resembles a gull in flight. The nebula, which is formally known as IC 2177, spans about 100 light-years from wingtip to wingtip. It's found about 3,700 light-years from Earth, on the border between the constellations Monoceros (The Unicorn) and Canis Major (The Great Dog).

The nebula appears to be close to Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. But IC 2177 actually lies more than 400 times farther away from us than Sirius, researchers said.



The bright star lighting up the Seagull's head is known as HD 53367. This star, which is visible in the center of the image and could be taken to be the bird's eye, is about 20 times more massive than our own sun, researchers said.

Radiation streaming from the nebula's young stars causes surrounding hydrogen gas to glow a rich red color. Light from these hot bluish-white stars also scatters off tiny dust particles, creating the blue haze seen in parts of the picture.

Parts of the Seagull Nebula complex were first observed in 1785 by the famed German-British astronomer Sir William Herschel, but the region imaged in the new picture weren't photographed until a century later, researchers said.

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Astronauts may play role in Mars robotic missions

WASHINGTON (AP) - NASA's future plans to explore Mars may end up using astronauts as space messengers.

The new idea surfaced as a special team looking for a new Mars robotic exploration plan released a preliminary report Tuesday.

One of the option calls for a Martian robotic rover to collect rocks on the red planet. Later, astronauts in a newly built spaceship would be used to pick them up from a cosmic delivery point somewhere between Earth and Mars and return them home.

The report gives the space agency several options with no specific timing for future missions and no decision is expected until next year. The new plan is needed because budget cuts earlier this year killed two future robotic flights.

The space agency has so far explored Mars with orbiters and robots, like the rover Curiosity that landed last month. The ultimate goal has been to get a robot to collect rocks and Martian soil to send to Earth for more detailed scientific examination.

Separately, NASA is working on new missions for astronauts to explore away from Earth, with an ultimate goal of sending them to Mars sometime in the 2030s.

The NASA team proposed combining both dreams, getting astronauts involved in Martian exploration earlier. But they wouldn't exactly go to Mars itself. The astronauts would go somewhere between Mars and Earth and pick up the rocks left by a spacecraft that carried them off Mars.

That plan takes advantage of the new rocket and spaceship system for astronauts that should be ready in the next decade, said NASA associate administrator for sciences John Grunsfeld.

It also would lessen contamination worries about the Martian rocks. Scientists want to make sure that the Martian samples could not bring alien germs to Earth and that Earth organisms don't contaminate the Martian sample, Grunsfeld said.

And it would help the mission to land humans on Mars because it 'looks a lot like sending a crew to Mars and returning them safely,' Grunsfeld said.

The planning team looked at a few options for a Mars sample return mission:

-Send a bunch of spacecraft to Mars - a rover, a launcher to return home, an orbiter - in several launches.

-Package all those spacecraft into one or two launches that would save money but increase risk of failure.

-Send a bunch of small rovers to look around different spots of Mars to find the best samples and then design a system to collect and return those rocks.

Before that can happen, NASA still has to decide what robotic or orbiter mission it wants to send to Mars in 2018, if any. It's a time when Earth and the red planet will be close and save money on fuel costs. Grunsfeld said NASA only has about $800 million budgeted for that, which is not enough for a major rover.

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NASA's Mars planning group: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/marsplanning/home/index.html



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Giant Gas Cloud Surrounds Our Milky Way Galaxy

Astronomers have discovered a cloud of gas engulfing our Milky Way galaxy that weighs as much as all the stars inside our galactic home. If the size and mass of this cloud is confirmed, it may solve a longstanding astronomical mystery, experts say.

The cloud, called a halo, appears to be enormous, extending hundreds of thousands of light-years across. Scientists suspect it is composed mainly of hydrogen, with some oxygen and other elements. The halo's temperature, size and mass were estimated using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton space observatory and Japan's Suzaku satellite.

Researchers think the mass inside this halo could be the answer to what's called the 'missing baryon problem.' Baryons are a class of subatomic particles that includes the protons and neutrons that make up the atoms inside stars and galaxies.

Theories of the formation and evolution of the universe predict there should be many more baryons than we see. In fact, the baryons that have been accounted for in our local cosmic neighborhood are only half of those predicted to exist there. [8 Baffling Astronomy Mysteries Today]

Galaxy-shrouding gas haloes, such as the one around the Milky Way, may be the hiding spot for many of these missing baryons.

'Although there are uncertainties, the work by Gupta and colleagues provides the best evidence yet that the galaxy's missing baryons have been hiding in a halo of million-Kelvin gas that envelopes the galaxy,' NASA officials wrote in a statement. 'The estimated density of this halo is so low that similar halos around other galaxies would have escaped detection.'

Initial signs of our galaxy's halo came from the Chandra observatory, which observed eight objects shining brightly in X-ray light, and found that some of this light was being absorbed by charged oxygen atoms around the Milky Way. Scientists determined that this absorbing gas is between 1 million and 2.5 million Kelvin (1.8 million and 4.5 million degrees Fahrenheit) - a few hundred times hotter than the surface of the sun.

'We know the gas is around the galaxy, and we know how hot it is,' Anjali Gupta, lead author of a paper reporting the findings in The Astrophysical Journal, said in a statement. 'The big question is, how large is the halo, and how massive is it?'

Follow-up observations by the XMM-Newton and the Suzaku satellite indicate that the gas is as heavy as 10 billion to 60 billion suns.

'Our work shows that, for reasonable values of parameters and with reasonable assumptions, the Chandra observations imply a huge reservoir of hot gas around the Milky Way,' said co-author Smita Mathur of Ohio State University in Columbus. 'It may extend for a few hundred thousand light-years around the Milky Way or it may extend farther into the surrounding local group of galaxies. Either way, its mass appears to be very large.'

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Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Computer Glitch Delays Cargo Ship's Undocking from Space Station

An unmanned European cargo ship as large as a double-decker bus inside will have to wait a bit longer before leaving the International Space Station due to computer problems, NASA officials say.

The robotic Automated Transfer Vehicle 3 (ATV-3) spacecraft was slated to undock from the space station Tuesday evening (Sept. 25), but a technical glitch with a laptop computer inside the station prevented to orbital departure. The two spacecraft were scheduled to part ways at 6:35 p.m. EDT (2235 GMT).

'We're not undocking today, that's been canceled,' a flight controller in Mission Control told the station's three-person crew.

The computer glitch apparently interrupted signals from a laptop computer inside the station that serves as a command panel for the departing ATV-3 spacecraft. The computer is inside the Russian-built Zvezda module, the rear-most module that serves as the docking port for ATV spacecraft and visiting Russian spacecraft. [Photos: Europe's Robotic ATV Spaceships]

Station commander Sunita Williams of NASA told Mission Control that commands sent from the laptop apparently were not reaching the ATV spacecraft. Engineers are expected to meet early Wednesday to discuss the malfunction and determine when the next undocking attempt can be made, NASA officials said.

The space station's current Expedition 34 crew includes Williams, Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko.

The ATV-3 spacecraft, which is also known as Edoardo Almadi in honor of the late Italian physicist of the same name, is the third unmanned cargo ship built by the European Space Agency to send food, water, science gear and other supplies to the International Space Station. The spacecraft launched to the station in late March and delivered 7.2 tons of food to the orbiting lab.



The cylindrical ATV spacecraft are 32 feet long (10 meters) and nearly 15 feet wide (4.5 m). They are disposable spacecraft designed to fly themselves to the space station, and then be jettisoned at mission's end to burn up in Earth's atmosphere somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. The European Space Agency commands the spacecraft from a mission control center in Toulouse, France.

The fourth ATV mission will launch the ATV-4 Albert Einstein to the station in April 2013.

Europe's ATV vehicles are part of a robotic spaceship fleet that regularly haul supplies to the space station. Russia's unmanned Progress vehicles and Japan's H-2 Transfer Vehicles have also made delivery flights to the station. NASA has contracted the private spaceflight companies SpaceX, of Hawthorne, Calif., and Orbital Sciences Corp., of Dulles, Va., to build unmanned cargo ships for station deliveries.

SpaceX performed the first test flight to the station using its Dragon cargo ship in May and is expected to launch the first official delivery flight to the orbiting lab on Oct. 7. SpaceX has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to provide 12 Dragon delivery flights. Orbital Sciences has a $1.9 billion contract with NASA for eight delivery missions using its Cygnus spacecraft.

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Hubble Telescope Reveals Farthest View Into Universe Ever

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the farthest-ever view into the universe, a photo that reveals thousands of galaxies billions of light-years away.

The picture, called eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, combines 10 years of Hubble telescope views of one patch of sky. Only the accumulated light gathered over so many observation sessions can reveal such distant objects, some of which are one ten-billionth the brightness that the human eye can see.

The photo is a sequel to the original "Hubble Ultra Deep Field," a picture the Hubble Space Telescope took in 2003 and 2004 that collected light over many hours to reveal thousands of distant galaxies in what was the deepest view of the universe so far. The XDF goes even farther, peering back 13.2 billion years into the universe's past. The universe is thought to be about 13.7 billion years old.

"The XDF is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen," Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz, principal investigator of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2009 program, said in a statement. "XDF allows us to explore further back in time than ever before."

The photo reveals a wide range of galaxies, from spirals that are Milky Way-lookalikes, to hazy reddish blobs that are the result of collisions between galaxies. Some of the very tiny, faint galaxies could be the seeds from which the biggest galaxies around today grew. [Most Amazing Hubble Discoveries]



The XDF is a portrait of a small area of space in the southern constellation Fornax, and spans only a small fraction of the area of the full moon. Within that region, Hubble has revealed 5,500 galaxies, many of which existed shortly after the birth of the universe.

The farthest-away galaxies are 13.2 billion light-years from Earth, meaning their light has taken 13.2 billion years to travel to Hubble's cameras. 

"The light from those past events is just arriving at Earth now, and so the XDF is a 'time tunnel into the distant past,'" according to a NASA statement. "The youngest galaxy found in the XDF existed just 450 million years after the universe's birth in the Big Bang."

Hubble was only able to image these objects by amassing light in 2,000 images of the same area, with a total exposure time of 2 million seconds, through two of its cameras: the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3.

Hubble was launched in April 1990, and has been visited by space shuttle crews five times since then for upgrades. The telescope, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, is still going strong, and scientists say the scope should be able to function through at least 2018.

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Skydiver to Attempt Record-Breaking Supersonic 'Space Jump' Oct. 8

An Austrian daredevil plans to leap from nearly 23 miles above the Earth on Oct. 8 in a supersonic plunge that, if successful, will be the world's highest-ever skydive.

If all goes according to plan, a helium-filled balloon will lift off from Roswell, N.M., on Oct. 8 and carry Felix Baumgartner's custom-built capsule to an altitude of 120,000 feet (36,576 meters). The daredevil will then step out of the capsule into the void, breaking a skydiving record that has stood for 52 years.

Baumgartner's 2,900-pound (1,315 kilograms) capsule was damaged in a hard landing during a July 25 practice run from 97,146 feet (29,610 m), forcing a delay while repairs were made. But on Monday (Sept. 24), officials with Red Bull Stratos - the name of Baumgartner's mission - declared the capsule fit for launch and set Oct. 8 as the target date for the skydiver's 'space jump.'



The all-clear came as welcome news to Baumgartner, who is itching to go.

'I feel like a tiger in a cage waiting to get out,' the 43-year-old skydiver said in a statement.

The current record for world's highest skydive stands at 102,800 feet (31,333 m). It was set in 1960 by U.S. Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger, who serves as an adviser for Baumgartner's mission. [Most Extreme Human Spaceflight Records]

If Baumgartner succeeds on Oct. 8, he will break not only that mark but also the sound barrier, becoming the first skydiver ever to fall at supersonic speeds, Red Bull Stratos officials said. During the July 25 jump, Baumgartner's top freefall speed was 537 mph (864 kph) - about as fast as a commercial airliner.

On Oct. 8, Baumgartner hopes to etch his names in the record books for highest skydive, fastest freefall, longest freefall and highest manned balloon flight. But his mission could have scientific value as well, collecting data that could help enable high-altitude escapes from spacecraft, mission officials said.

Red Bull Stratos describes the Oct. 8 attempt as a jump from the edge of space. But space is generally considered to begin at an altitude of 62 miles, or 327,000 feet.

The team is cautiously optimistic that the weather will cooperate on Oct. 8.

'Early fall in New Mexico is one of the best times of the year to launch stratospheric balloons,' mission meteorologist Don Day said.

Baumgartner and his team had originally hoped to attempt the record jump in 2010, but they were delayed by a legal challenge that claimed the idea of the dive was suggested to Red Bull by California promoter Daniel Hogan. That lawsuit has been settled out of court, and the mission is moving forward.

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