Space and Astronomy News: January 2013

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Sun Grows Super-Hot 'Dragon Tail' in Amazing NASA Video

A NASA spacecraft studying the sun has recorded amazing video of a giant plume of super-hot plasma erupting from the star's surface, only to crash back down hours later.

The solar plasma eruption, which NASA scientists nicknamed a 'Dragon Tail,' rose up from the sun's surface today (Jan. 31) and was spotted by the agency's Solar Dynamics Observatory, a powerful spacecraft that constantly records the sun's weather in different wavelengths of light.

A video of the Dragon Tail solar eruption shows a tendril of solar plasma, which scientists call a 'filament,' extending across the northeastern face of the sun over the course of four hours. Near the end of the event, the filament begins to break apart.

'Some of the plasma was released into space but not all could escape the gravitational pull of the sun,' SDO mission officials explained in a video description. 'It's not surprising that plasma should fall back to the sun. After all, the sun's gravity is powerful. '

Filaments are plasma formations on the sun sculpted by the star's intense magnetic field, with one end anchored to the sun's surface. The other end can extend through the sun's outer atmosphere, called the corona, hundreds of thousands of miles into space.

Filament structures typically last about a single day, though stable ones can exist for months at a time, SDO officials explained. The plasma in filaments consists of super-hot helium and hydrogen that is electrically charged, they added.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory is one of several spacecraft constantly monitoring the sun for signs of solar flares, eruptions and other space weather events. The sun is currently in an active phase of its 11-year solar weather cycle and is expected to reach its peak activity period in 2013. The current sun weather cycle is known as Solar Cycle 24.

You can follow SPACE.com Managing Editor Tariq Malik on Twitter @tariqjmalik. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

NASA to Launch World's Largest Solar Sail in 2014

The largest solar sail ever constructed is headed for the launch pad in 2014 on a mission to demonstrate the value of 'propellantless propulsion'- the act of using photons from the sun to push a craft through space.

Dubbed Sunjammer, the giant solar sail measures about 124 feet (38 meters) on a side and boasts a total surface area of nearly 13,000 square feet (1,208 square m, or one-third of an acre). The project is under the wing of NASA's Space Technology Program, within the agency's Office of the Chief Technologist.

NASA has contracted with a team of high-tech 'solar sailors' at L'Garde Inc. of Tustin, Calif., to build Sunjammer.

L'Garde is no newcomer to novel space structures. The company has worked with the space agency on several projects, including the creation of inflatable structures for radio frequency antennas and solar arrays. In 1996, the company flew the Inflatable Antenna Experiment (IAE) aboard the space shuttle Endeavour's STS-77 mission. [Photos: Solar Sail Evolution for Space Travel]

Programmatic milestone

'We took the name Sunjammer from an Arthur C. Clarke short story, a fictional yacht race in the heavens using solar sails,' said Nathan Barnes, L'Garde's chief operating officer and executive vice president, as well as Sunjammer's project manager. Permission to use the name came from the Clarke estate, he told SPACE.com.

Work on Sunjammer this year includes a programmatic milestone - a critical design review - along with a variety of ground demonstration tests and qualification of components, Barnes said. The flight of the solar sail, he said, is set for the end of 2014, to be sent spaceward atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

'With this sail, we're targeting our end goal somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,864,114 miles (3 million kilometers) distance from the Earth,' Barnes said.

A number of test objectives are to be checked off within the first couple months of flight, he added. These include deployment of the sail, demonstration of vector control using sail-tipped vanes, navigation with accuracy and, finally, maintenance of the spacecraft's position at a gravitationally stable location called Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1.

Sunjammer won't be the world's first solar sail mission. NASA launched NanoSail-D, whose sail covered just 100 square feet (9.3 square m), in November 2010. And Japan's Ikaros probe deployed its solar sail in June 2010, becoming the first craft ever to cruise through space propelled only by sunlight.

Neat, clever, exotic orbits

Sunjammer is potentially applicable to an advanced space weather warning system, which could provide more timely and accurate notice of solar flare activity.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is collaborating with NASA and L'Garde on the upcoming demonstration flight, which will cruise to a spot that provides an interesting view of the sun.

'It will be us flying to a place that a customer actually wants to fly a solar sail to,' Barnes said. 'There are neat, clever, exotic orbits you can do with the solar sail that would permit viewing different portions of the sun that we can't normally.' [The Sun's Wrath: Worst Solar Storms in History]

One-quarter the size of a football field, Sunjammer will produce a whopping maximum thrust of approximately 0.01 newton, Barnes said - roughly equivalent to the weight of a sugar packet.

Thinner sail

Kapton is the solar sail material of choice. The mission team worked with chemical company DuPont to produce a special layer of Kapton for Sunjammer just 5 microns thick.

'Thinner is always better,' Barnes said.

When collapsed, the Sunjammer solar sail is the size of a dishwasher and weighs just 70 pounds (32 kilograms).

There are a number of control techniques involved in successfully unfurling the sail, said Billy Derbes, L'Garde's chief engineer for Sunjammer.

'The highest risk is in the deployment,' Derbes said. A camera attached to the sail will capture the unfurling process.

Game-changing capabilities

NASA is keen to infuse solar sail technology into other potential game-changing mission capabilities.

Barnes said that possibilities include the collection and removal of orbital debris, deorbiting spent satellites, providing a direct communications link to Earth's south pole, as well as for deep space propulsion.

Barnes said nongovernment, entertainment-oriented uses of solar sails are also being explored by L'Garde.

'All space travel right now is limited by expendables,' Derbes said. 'If you show a technology not limited by expendables - and Kapton is a long-lasting film material - what new applications will people think up? We're opening up a whole new kind of thinking about how you do things in space.'

'Star Trek' passengers

Also to fly onboard Sunjammer are the cremated remains of individuals, a service provided by Celestis, Inc., an affiliate company of Space Services, Inc., a Houston-based aerospace firm.

Celestis flight capsules and modules will be carried by Sunjammer on its voyage through deep space. Already part of that payload are the ashes of 'Star Trek' creator Gene Roddenberry and his wife Majel Barrett Roddenberry, often called the 'first lady' of the sci-fi series.

'Celestis is pleased to offer our first-ever Voyager deep space memorial spaceflight aboard the Sunjammer mission,' said Celestis CEO Charles Chafer.

'Since 1997, Celestis has conducted a dozen memorial spaceflights, and this solar sail mission will mark our most ambitious flight ever. We are excited to be a part of the Sunjammer team,' Chafer told SPACE.com.

'Green' space propulsion

Sunjammer's success is the key to enabling several science and exploration missions that can only be accomplished with a solar sail, said Les Johnson, deputy manager of the Advanced Concepts Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Along with better sun-watching and warning tasks, NASA recently studied the use of a solar-sail-propelled spacecraft for visiting multiple near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), Johnson said.

'We found that a Sunjammer-derived sail could visit up to six NEAs within six years of being launched. This would be impossible with chemical rockets and might not be achievable by electric propulsion. And it's all because the sail uses no propellant . deriving its thrust from sunlight, making it a very 'green' space propulsion system,' he said.

Johnson is co-editor with Jack McDevitt of 'Going Interstellar' (Baen Books, 2012), a unique blend of science fact and science-fiction writings on interstellar voyaging.

'For me, I'm most excited about using a solar sail unfurled close to the sun, inside the orbit of Mercury, and using the increased solar pressure there to accelerate a large solar sail to speeds that will allow it to reach well beyond the edge of the solar system and into interstellar space within my lifetime,' Johnson said.

Doing so, Johnson said, 'would be the first 'baby step' in a series of increasingly large sails that might one day enable us to reach the stars. This is one of the few ways nature has provided for us to travel between the stars.'

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is former director of research for the National Commission on Space and a past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines. He has written for SPACE.com since 1999. Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

NASA launches communication satellite

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- NASA launched a new communication satellite Wednesday to stay in touch with its space station astronauts and relay more Hubble telescope images.

An unmanned Atlas V rocket blasted into the starry night sky carrying the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite.

This is the 11th TDRS satellite to be launched by NASA. The space agency uses the orbiting network to communicate with astronauts living on the International Space Station.

The first TDRS spacecraft flew in 1983; it recently was retired along with No. 4. The second was lost aboard space shuttle Challenger in 1986; Monday marked the 27th anniversary of the launch disaster.

This newest third-generation TDRS carries the letter K designation. Once it begins working, it will become TDRS-11. It will take two weeks for the satellite to reach its intended 22,300-mile-high orbit. Testing will last a few months.

NASA estimates the satellite costs between $350 million and $400 million.

Another TDRS spacecraft, L in the series, will be launched next year.

NASA wants at least seven TDRS satellites working in orbit at any one time. The one launched Wednesday will make eight.

Venus Can Have'Comet-Like' Atmosphere

The planet Venus sometimes looks less like a planet and more like a comet, scientists say.

Scientists with the European Space Agency have discovered that a part of the upper atmosphere of Venus - its ionosphere - acts surprisingly different depending on daily changes in the sun's weather. The side of Venus' ionosphere that faces away from the sun can billow outward like the tail of a comet, while the side facing the star remains tightly compacted, researchers said.

The discovery was made using ESA's Venus Express spacecraft, which observed Venus's ionosphere during a period of low solar wind in 2010 to see exactly how the sun affects the way the planet's atmosphere functions. In 2013, the sun is expected to reach the peak of its 11-year solar activity cycle.

'As this significantly reduced solar wind hit Venus, Venus Express saw the planet's ionosphere balloon outwards on the planet's 'downwind' nightside, much like the shape of the ion tail seen streaming from a comet under similar conditions,' ESA officials said in a statement today (Jan. 29).

It only takes 30 to 60 minutes for the planet's comet-like tail to form after the solar wind dies down. Researchers observed the ionosphere stretch to at least 7,521 miles (12,104 kilometers) from the planet, said Yong Wei, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Katlenburg, Germany who worked on this research.

Earth's ionosphere never becomes comet-like largely because the planet has its own magnetic field that balances out the sun's influence on the way the atmospheric layer is shaped. Venus, however, doesn't have its own magnetic field and is therefore subject to the whims of the sun's solar wind.

Researchers think that Mars behaves in much the same way. The Red Planet doesn't have a magnetic field to mitigate the influence of the sun's wind either.

The Venus Express spacecraft launched in 2005 and has been orbiting the second planet from the sun since 2006. The spacecraft is equipped with seven instruments to study the atmosphere and surface of Venus in extreme detail. The spacecraft is currently in an extended mission slated to last until 2014 .

Follow Miriam Kramer on Twitter @mirikramer or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Columbia's 7 astronauts were close, diverse crew

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - The seven astronauts who died aboard space shuttle Columbia 10 years ago were husbands, fathers, wives and a mother. Military pilots, doctors and engineers. Born in the United States, Israel and India.

'It's amazing to me how cohesive they were with the diverse backgrounds that they had,' said the widow of Columbia's last commander, Evelyn Husband Thompson.

'They had a genuine affection for each other that was just tremendous. And they had fun together. I mean, what a blessing at whatever job you're in, to have fun with your co-workers,' she said in a phone interview from Houston this week.

A brief look at the seven Columbia astronauts and their families:

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Commander Rick Husband, 45, an Air Force colonel from Amarillo, Texas, who was making his second space shuttle flight. Wife Evelyn lives in Houston with 17-year-old son Matthew, a high school sophomore, and new husband Bill Thompson. Daughter Laura, 22, is a seminary student pursuing a master's degree in theology. The ordeal, and the family's faith in God, prompted Evelyn to write a memoir about Rick in 2004 titled 'High Calling.'

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Co-pilot William McCool, 41, a Navy commander from Lubbock, Texas, who was making his first space shuttle flight. Wife Lani and three sons, now in their 20s and 30s. The oldest, Sean, is a Marine captain with three children of his own. Middle son Christopher is a photographer who works with high school debate teams, according to family. The youngest, Cameron, is finishing a master's degree in fine arts in New York.

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Flight engineer Kalpana Chawla, 40, an Indian-born engineer who was making her second space shuttle flight. Husband Jean-Pierre Harrison remarried and has a young son. He runs a publishing company in Los Gatos, Calif., and, in 2011, wrote what he calls the authoritative biography of his first wife, 'The Edge of Time.' He reveals how Kalpana's birthdate was misrepresented to be a year earlier than it actually was, so she could start school sooner at her insistence.

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Payload commander Michael Anderson, 43, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force from Spokane, Wash., and one of NASA's few early black astronauts. It was his second flight; he traveled to Russia's Mir space station in 1998. Wife Sandra still lives in Houston. Daughters Kaycee and Sydney are now 19 and 21.

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Dr. Laurel Clark, 41, a Navy captain and medical doctor from Racine, Wis., who was making her first space shuttle flight. Husband Jonathan Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon. Son Iain, 18, will graduate from boarding school in Arizona this spring. Clark has dedicated himself to improving space crew safety, and helped bring skydiver Felix Baumgartner back alive from a 24-mile-high jump from the stratosphere last fall.

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Dr. David Brown, 46, a Navy captain and medical doctor who grew up in Virginia and was making his first space shuttle flight. He was single.

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Ilan Ramon, 48, a fighter pilot who became the first Israeli in space with Columbia's launch. Wife Rona lives in Israel. Their oldest son, Asaf, became a fighter pilot like his father and died, at age 21, in a 2009 training accident. One surviving son is a combat soldier in Israel; another is studying music in college. The youngest, a daughter, is 15. Rona Ramon went back to school after her son's death. She works as a grief counselor.

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Online:

NASA: http://history.nasa.gov/columbia/index.html

NASA: http://columbia.nasa.gov/

South Korea Launches Rocket in 1st Space Success

South Korea launched its first homegrown rocket into space Wednesday (Jan. 30) after a series of delays and two earlier failures, marking a spaceflight leap for the country's space program, according to press reports.

The Korean Space Launch Vehicle-1, also known as the Naro booster, soared into space from South Korea's Naro Space Center 300 miles (482 kilometers) south of Seoul. The rocket launch was aimed at sending the small Science and Technology Satellite 2C (STSAT-2C) into orbit, Yonhap News reported today.

'At 4 p.m. today, the Naro was successfully launched. The satellite was deployed 540 seconds after the launch and an analysis of related data shows the satellite has successfully entered its target orbit,' Lee Ju-ho, minister of education, science and technology told Yonhap News Agency.

Today's successful liftoff marks South Korea's third launch attempt to send a satellite into orbit, and the country's first attempt since 2010. South Korea's attempts to launch the Naro rocket in 2010 and 2009 met with failure, with this latest mission experience weeks of delay due to technical issues.

Today's launch carried the 220-pound (100 kilograms) STSAT-2C satellite into orbit atop the 108-foot-tall (33 meters) KSLV-1 rocket. The rocket consists of a Russian-built first stage and a South Korean upper stage.

Officials won't be sure the satellite made it into orbit unscathed until Thursday (Jan. 31) when the spacecraft can make contact with ground stations in South Korea the news agency goes on to report. A ground station in Norway did pick up beacon signals from the satellite, suggesting that it is performing as expected, mission officials said.

The STSAT-2C satellite was expected to reach a final orbit that circles the Earth once every 103 minutes, with a high point about 932 miles (1,500 km) above the planet and a low point of about 186 miles (300 kilometers), according to previous mission descriptions.

South Korea's successful rocket launch comes just over a month after its nearest neighbor, North Korea, successfully launched its own Unha-3 rocket and a satellite into orbit in December. U.S. and other observer nations, however, suspect the North Korean rocket launch was a veils missile test to support that country's ballistic missile program.

Follow Miriam Kramer on Twitter @mirikramer or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

Private Space Plane Poised for Big Test Flight

A private space plane is slated to fly on its own for the first time in the next six to eight weeks, a key drop-test milestone in the vehicle's quest to fly astronauts on roundtrip space missions.

The Dream Chaser spacecraft, built by aerospace firm Sierra Nevada Corp., will be released by a carrier helicopter at an altitude of 12,000 feet (3,657 meters) or so, then fly back and land autonomously on a runway at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California.

The unmanned 30-second drop test will kick off a series of trials that culminate in trips to low-Earth orbit and back, potentially paving the way for contracted, crew-carrying flights to the International Space Station for NASA, company officials said during a press conference today (Jan. 30).

The seven-person Dream Chaser looks a bit like a miniature space shuttle. It's about 29.5 feet (9 m) long and has a wingspan of 22.9 feet (7 m). For comparison, NASA's space shuttle was 122 feet (37 m) long, with a wingspan of 78 feet (24 m). [Gallery: Meet the Dream Chaser Space Plane]

Filling the space shuttle's shoes

Colorado-based Sierra Nevada is one of several spaceship-building companies to receive funding from NASA's commercial crew program, which is encouraging private American vehicles to fill the void left by the space shuttle fleet's retirement in 2011.

In its latest round of awards, NASA granted funding to Sierra Nevada for the Dream Chaser and to SpaceX and Boeing, which are working on capsules called Dragon and the CST-100, respectively. The Dream Chaser space plane is the only non-capsule design being developed by a major contender.

The space agency hopes at least one of these vehicles is ready to fly astronauts to and from the space station by 2017. Until such homegrown private spaceships come online, NASA and the nation are dependent on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to provide this orbital taxi service.

The newly announced drop test is a step along the path to orbit. It will mark the first time the Dream Chaser has ever flown solo, though the space plane did take to the skies last year in a captive-carry test, during which it was held aloft the entire time by a heavy-duty helicopter.

The Dream Chaser drop-test vehicle is currently at a facility in Colorado, but it will be moved to Dryden in about two weeks, officials said. The first flight test should come four to six weeks after that, with two to five more flights following to gather additional data about the vehicle's in-air performance.

'The first flight test is just to make sure it will fly, everything works properly, we land on the runway safely,' said Sierra Nevada's Jim Voss, head of the Dream Chaser program and a former space shuttle astronaut. 'We'll put in maneuvers on the following tests that will gather the coefficients that we need to properly define the aerodynamic characteristics of the vehicle.'

A testing campaign

If everything goes well with the upcoming series of tests, Sierra Nevada will conduct more extensive flight trials with another Dream Chaser vehicle, officials said.

'It will be similar to this vehicle, but we'll be able to pilot it with a test pilot on board, and then that same vehicle will be ultimately used for an orbital flight to demonstrate the capability of the Dream Chaser in orbit,' Voss said.

Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin will help build that more advanced flight-test vehicle, as part of an extensive partnership with Sierra Nevada that the companies just announced today.

'They're building the structure for that vehicle, as we finish the design of some of the other systems we'll use for that additional flight test that we'll do in about a year to 18 months,' Voss said.

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

New Cosmic 'Scale' Could Weigh Distant Black Holes

Swirling gas around black holes may be the key to estimating the masses of black holes otherwise too distant to weigh, according to a new study.

Supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun are thought to lurk at the heart of all large galaxies. Oddly, the properties of these black holes appear linked with a variety of properties of their parent galaxies, such as how bright the galaxies are and the speed of stars within them. This suggests a fundamental link between galaxy and black hole evolution.

'This is quite surprising, and not well understood, as these relations tie together black holes with event horizons on solar system scales and galaxies, which are billions of times larger,' study lead author Timothy Davis, an astrophysicist at the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany, told SPACE.com. 'Why a massive galaxy should care about its black hole, and vice versa, is not well understood.'

One way to learn more about this mystery is by studying the masses of black holes in many different types of galaxies. For instance, early-type elliptical galaxies 'are thought to have violent histories, with lots of merger activity that could build up black holes and galaxies simultaneously,' Davis said. 'On the other hand, spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way are thought to have had quieter lives, with less violent disturbances. One could imagine that if galaxy mergers were important in the buildup of black holes, that spiral galaxies could well have different relations between their black holes and galaxy properties.' [No Escape: Dive Into a Black Hole (Infographic)]

Weighing black holes

Scientists have a number of strategies for deducing the masses of black holes, most of which involve watching the motions of stars or of disks of glowing hot, electrically charged gas as it swirls near the black hole. The mass of a black hole determines the strength of its gravitational field, and thus how strongly it pulls on surrounding matter. However, these approaches rely on telescopes that can see light from these stars and gas, which is only visible when relatively nearby.

The new technique depends on the dynamics of clouds of cold gas around black holes. By comparing models of gas motions both in the presence and absence of black holes, researchers can deduce how massive a black hole must be to result in the gas motions they see. Molecular gas observations can overcome the resolution limit on strategies dependent on watching stars or ionized gas, helping researchers measure the masses of black holes much farther away.

The scientists tested their model on gas seen around the supermassive black hole in the galaxy NGC 4526, which is 53 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo. They employed the Combined Array for Research in Millimetre-wave Astronomy (CARMA) telescope in California.

'We observed NGC 4526 with CARMA's sharpest array, achieving a resolution of 0.25 arcseconds,' Davis said. 'This is the equivalent of being able to spot a one euro coin (or U.S. quarter) being held up 10 kilometers (6 miles) away! With these super-sharp images we were able to zoom right into the center of NGC 4526, and observe the gas whizzing around the black hole.'

They estimate NGC 4526's central black hole weighs about 450 million times the mass of the sun.

'We have shown for the first time that it is possible to use molecular gas observations to measure black hole masses,' Davis said.

Next-generation telescope

Using next-generation scientific instruments such as ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, this method could determine black hole masses in hundreds of galaxies in less than five hours of observations each, researchers say.

'The measurement we have made on one object took over 100 hours of observing time with the CARMA telescope in California,' Davis said. 'With the new ALMA telescope currently being built in Chile, the same measurement can be repeated in just 10 minutes!'

'The next step will be to observe a sample of spiral galaxies with the ALMA telescope, and determine their black hole masses,' Davis said. 'Even starting with 10 objects will about double the number currently available to study, and allow us to start determining if they follow the same black-hole mass relations as early-type galaxies.'

The scientists detailed their findings online today (Jan. 30) in the journal Nature.

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Tuesday, January 29, 2013

NASA's Planet-Hunting Spacecraft Recovering from Glitch

NASA's Kepler space telescope has resumed its search for alien planets after resting for 10 days to work out kinks in its attitude control system, mission officials announced today (Jan. 29).

Kepler went into a protective 'safe mode' on Jan. 17 after engineers detected elevated friction levels in one of its reaction wheels - devices that maintain the observatory's position in space. Engineers spun the wheels down to zero speed, hoping the break would redistribute lubricant and bring the friction back down to normal.

That phase is now over and Kepler is back in action, though it will take time to determine if the problem is solved.

Kepler began coming out of safe mode at 2:30 p.m. EST (1930 GMT) Sunday (Jan. 27) and started collecting science data again at 8 p.m. EST Monday (Jan. 28; 0100 GMT Jan. 29), officials wrote in a mission update today. [Gallery: A World of Kepler Planets]

'The spacecraft responded well to commands and transitioned from thruster control to reaction wheel control as planned,' Kepler mission manager Roger Hunter wrote in the update. 'During the 10-day resting safe mode, daily health and status checks with the spacecraft using NASA's Deep Space Network were normal.'

Kepler flags exoplanets by detecting the telltale brightness dips caused when they pass in front of their parent stars from the instrument's perpsective. The telescope requires three functioning reaction wheels to stay locked onto its roughly 150,000 target stars.

When Kepler launched in March 2009, it had four reaction wheels - three for immediate use, and one spare. But one wheel (known as number two) failed in July 2012, so a major problem with the currently glitchy wheel (called number four) could spell the end of the $600 million Kepler mission.

It's unknown at the moment if the 10-day rest period will bring wheel number four back into line.

'Over the next month, the engineering team will review the performance of reaction wheel #4 before, during and after the safe mode to determine the efficacy of the rest operation,' Hunter wrote.

The wheel has acted up before without causing serious problems.

'Reaction wheel #4 has been something of a free spirit since launch, with a variety of friction signatures, none of which look like reaction wheel #2, and all of which disappeared on their own after a time,' Hunter wrote.

To date, Kepler has discovered more than 2,700 exoplanet candidates. While just 105 of them have been confirmed by follow-up observations so far, mission scientists estimate that more than 90 percent of them will end up being the real deal.

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

Iran's Space Monkey Launch Prompts Missile Technology Concerns

The reports that Iran launched a monkey into space Monday has sparked concern among U.S. officials and missile watchdog groups who cite that the same technology could be used to extend the reach of Iran's military weapons.

According to Iranian news reports, the country's space agency launched a monkey into space and returned it to Earth in a mission using the Iranian-built Kavoshgar 5 rocket. The launch, while unconfirmed by Western monitoring groups, has raised eyebrows because the rockets developed for such missions could also be used to fire weapons across continents.

'We don't have any way to confirm this one way or the other with regard to the primate,' U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said during a press briefing in Washington Monday (Jan. 28), though she added that she 'saw the pictures of the poor little monkey preparing to go to space.'

'Our concern with Iran's development of space-launch vehicle technologies are obviously well known,' Nuland said. 'Any space-launch vehicle capable of placing an object in orbit is directly relevant to the development of long-range ballistic missiles.' [Photos: Iran in Space: Rockets & Monkeys]

However, some scientist have said that the details so far on the Iranian rocket launch suggest the flight would do little to enhance the Islamic republic's ability to develop a long-range ballistic missile.

Though the Islamic republic has denied military ambitions for its space program, Western critics have long expressed concern over the potential applications of Iran's rockets. Nuland said the launch, if confirmed, would violate a 1929 U.N. Security Council resolution that 'prohibits Iran from undertaking any act related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons.'

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) said the launch, if it occurred, likely used a Kavoshgar rocket, which would do little to advance Iran's missile capabilities.

Laura Grego, a senior scientist with UCS, wrote in a blog post that 'some concern has been expressed that Iran will improve its abilities to produce heat shielding (important both for protecting a monkey and a warhead as they return through the atmosphere).' But a biocapsule returning from a 75-mile (120 kilometers) altitude, such as Iran's monkey-carrying Pishgam capsule, would travel through the atmosphere significantly slower than an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM.

According to Grego, 'a warhead would require shielding against more than 40 times greater heat load than the Pishgam.'

Iran has reported progress in spaceflight technology in recent years. The country sent its first domestically built satellite into space in February 2009 and launched a Kavoshagar-3 rocket in 2010 that delivered a rat, two turtles and a worm into space. Iran also launched Earth-observing satellites into orbit in 2011 and 2012.

Space officials in the country have said that a successful launch of a monkey would pave the way for them to send a human into space by 2020 and put an astronaut on the moon by 2025.

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How the Columbia Shuttle Disaster Changed Spacecraft Safety Forever

Ten years after the devastating Columbia space shuttle accident that took the lives of seven astronauts, NASA is building a new spacecraft that will take humans farther into space than ever before, and will incorporate the safety lessons learned from the disaster that befell the agency Feb. 1, 2003.

That day, the shuttle Columbia was returning from a 16-day trip to space devoted to science research. But what began as a routine re-entry through Earth's atmosphere ended disastrously as the orbiter disintegrated about 200,000 feet (61 kilometers) over Texas.

Later analysis found that Columbia was doomed during its launch, when a small bit of foam insulation broke off the shuttle's external fuel tank and tore a hole in the orbiter's wing. That hole prevented Columbia from withstanding the scorching heat of re-entry.

Afterward, the independent team that investigated the accident, called the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB), found a number of factors, from the safety culture at NASA to the design of the shuttle, that led to the disaster. [Photos: The Columbia Space Shuttle Tragedy]

All of the lessons the agency learned were incorporated into every subsequent flight NASA flew, and are now being used to inform the design of its next-generation spaceship, Orion. That vehicle is slated to carry people to asteroids, the moon and Mars sometime in the mid-2020s.

'We're hoping nothing ever goes wrong, but if it does, we've taken every possible step to keep the crew safe and give them every possible fighting chance they can have,' said Dustin Gohmert, NASA crew survival engineering team lead, at Johnson Space Center in Houston. 'It's especially important to us that were here during the Columbia accident, because they were our friends, too.'

Race car seats and children's seatbelts

The Columbia investigation exposed a number of flaws in the design of the shuttle's crew cabin, including its seats, seatbelts, spacesuits and life support system. Each of these has been redesigned for Orion.

'The seats were one of the weaker links during the Columbia accident,' Gohmert told SPACE.com. 'We wanted to make these seats formfitting so they had a true fit to the body's shape.'

NASA looked to the formfitting seats used in professional race vcars, which provide even support to every part of the body, offering extreme cushioning and shock absorption during a crash. Orion designers even fine-tuned the vibration frequency of the seats to have different resonances than the internal organs of a human body.

The engineers also redesigned the seatbelts, which were another issue during Columbia's flight. Here, they took inspiration from the belts on children's car seats, which are adjustable to fit a wide range of body sizes.

'We wanted an exact fit for every single person who could fit in the vehicle, from females down to 4'10' and males up to 6'4',' Gohmert said. 'It was quite a challenge.'

Suiting up

The astronaut spacesuits were also completely redesigned for Orion. The Columbia investigation board found that the crewmembers didn't have time to configure their suits to protect against depressurization, which occurred rapidly. In fact, some of the astronauts were not wearing their safety gloves, and one didn't even have a helmet on, because of how quickly the accident took place. [Columbia Shuttle Disaster Explained (Infographic)]

'In the case of Orion, the suits will instantaneously, and without any action of the crew, inflate and protect from the loss of pressure,' Gohmert said.

The capsule life support system was also upgraded to provide a constant flow of oxygen to the crew, even with their helmet visors up and locked, which wasn't possible in the shuttle.

Each of these changes addresses flaws exposed by the Columbia shuttle disaster. Yet Gohmert said none of these upgrades alone would have made a difference during the disaster.

'I caution against saying that any one thing we've corrected would have protected against the outcome,' he said. 'However, we examined all the lethal events that occurred in Columbia and addressed each of them in the Orion. We're doing a whole lot of things to make it safer, and everything we've learned from the shuttle accidents, from Russian space accidents, automobile accidents - we've taken lessons from all of them and tried to incorporate them into Orion.'

Capsule vs. space plane

Perhaps the largest change from shuttle to Orion is the shift from a winged space plane design to the cone-shaped capsule, which sits atop the rocket rather than next to it.

'When we went to the capsule, we went from a side-mounted spacecraft to a forward-mounted one,' said Julie Kramer White, Orion chief engineer. 'Therefore, it's not exposed to debris environments, which was obviously a huge issue for Columbia.'

This configuration also allows the crew compartment of the capsule to be ejected from the top of the rocket stack in the case of an emergency on the launch pad or during liftoff. Such an escape would not have been possible for the crew cabin of the space shuttle.

Of course, the shuttle had capabilities that no capsule has - namely, the ability to haul large, heavy cargos, such as the building blocks of the International Space Station, inside its cargo bay, White pointed out.

Moreover, the culture of safety at NASA has changed for the better since the days of Columbia, Gohmert said.

'The reaction has been very positive around all of NASA in terms of giving us the capacity to make these safety improvements,' he said. 'Previously, it was difficult to implement some of the safety features as we'd hoped. Now it really is on the forefront of everyone's mind.'

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