GOES-15 Snaps First Infrared Images

NOAA's newest Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-15) took its first Imager full-disk infrared image of the Earth on April 26

Experts at NASA and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announce that their newest orbital satellite has finally opened its infrared “eyes” a couple of days ago. The group says that the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-15) took the first images of our planet in these wavelengths from its vantage point, some 22,236 miles above the surface, on April 26.

The infrared equipment on GOES-15 is of tremendous practical importance, especially to meteorologists and weather forecasters. Observing the planet in these wavelengths enables these experts to gain more data on temperatures on the ground, in the sea and in the air, as well as to derive various other data. For example, they can calculate wind, temperature and moisture profiles for the atmosphere, and can observe how smoke plumes – such as those from volcanic eruptions – migrate across the surface of the planet. The IR instruments can also be used to monitor wildfires, experts add.

“This (image) marks the final stage of the critical events for the spacecraft and indicates that the visible and infrared spacecraft imaging instruments are performing as expected. We’re looking forward to more imagery as we finish up post-launch testing,” explains the NASA GOES deputy project manager, Andre Dress. The expert is based at the space agency's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in Greenbelt, Maryland. The new picture was snapped using the multi-channel GOES Imager instrument, Space Fellowship reports.

Another instrument that can produce advanced-quality infrared data is the GOES Sounder. Using datasets this payload collects, mathematicians can apply analysis technique to determine surface and cloud-top temperatures, as well as ozone distribution, temperature and moisture profile across the planet's atmosphere. The first infrared information came from GOES less than three weeks after the satellite relayed its first visible-light images of Earth, on April 6. The space craft was launched on March 4 this year, from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) Space Launch Complex 37, in Florida.

NOAA and NASA began verifications of GOES-15's systems on March 24. The procedures will last for about 150 days, after which time NASA will hand over operational control of the spacecraft to NOAA.

Creating a 'Perpetual Eclipse' in Space

StarTiger-2 external coronagraph demonstrator during testing

In September 2009, a group of prominent scientists was convened by the European Space Agency (ESA) at one of its research facilities with a single objective – produce a space-based setup that would allow for the continuous analysis of a portion of the Sun hiding in plain sight. The results of the investigation were announced yesterday, April 27, as the six-month-long research project was officially closed down on time, at the agency's European Space Research and Technology Center (ESTEC), in the Netherlands.

The StarTiger project is one of ESA's latest endeavors, and it was developed at the Laboratoire Astrophysique d’Marseille (LAM), where the science team was convened. Inside a clean room at the facility, the researchers constructed a scale-model prototype of the new mission, whose main goal is to create a perpetual eclipse in space. Usually, the edges of the Sun are only visible from Earth during a full eclipse by the Moon, but the astronomical event happens rather rare. What ESA wanted to achieve is the capability to conduct eclipse study around the clock.

The solution its research team proposed was constructing a double-satellite system. The instruments would fly in a close, tight formation, where the one in front would cast a perennial shadow on the one in the back. This approach raises monumental engineering problems, given that both spacecraft would be flying at high speeds through space. The navigation and control systems are the most difficult aspects to set up, but the endeavor is not impossible, scientists say.

“ESA’s StarTiger is a new R&D approach, one that has paid off handsomely here. This integrated ‘breadboard’ demonstrator has been completed in just six months, including all necessary subsystems, mathematical models and software, to not only validate the external coronagraph concept but assess its performance in practical terms,” explained at yesterday's ceremony the supervisor of the initiative, expert Peter de Maagt.

“The main objective was achieved together with several secondary objectives. The idea was to perform relative positioning between the two satellites and absolute positioning with respect to the Sun. Working face-to-face in the same room was our key to success, considering the schedule we faced. We combined our various competences to solve the many problems that arose along the way,” added LAM team leader Sebastien Vives. He managed the main research group of seven experts, who were supported by 20 other investigators.

ISRO To launch Cartosat-2B On May 9

Undeterred by the GSLV-D3 mission failure, India is going ahead with the launch of an advanced remote-sensing satellite Cartosat-2B, now tentatively fixed for May 9 from Sriharikota spaceport.

The high-resolution spacecraft, designed for an operational life of five years, is slated to be launched from the first launchpad on May 9 around 10 am, ISRO spokesperson S Satish told said here on Friday.

Thursday's GSLV-D3 mission to flight-test the indigenous cryogenic engine and stage for the first time ended in failure after the rocket veered off course and plunged into the sea.

GSLV and PSLV missions are independent of each other. ISRO officials said there is no change in its earlier announced plans to launch PSLV in the first half of May - now fixed for May nine.

"It (Cartosat-2B) will give pictures of 0.8 metre resolution," ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan has said. In simple terms, the single panchromatic camera on board this cartographic satellite would be able to identify and take pictures of a moving car.

Thus, this highly-agile satellite, weighing around 690 kg, is expected to give a boost to the tasks of infrastructure and urban planning. The camera provides scene specific spot imageries for cartographic and a host of other civilian applications.

First Data from CryoSat-2 Successfully Received

Image comment: The CryoSat mission is dedicated to monitoring of the changes in the thickness of marine ice floating in the polar oceans and thickness variations on the ice sheets that overlay Greenland and Antarctica.

Image credits: ESA / AOES Medialab

Experts at the European Space Agency (ESA) announce that one of their control centers has already begun receiving the first datasets from the newly-launched CryoSat-2 satellite. The instrument took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, on April 8, and its managers say that it has performed beautifully during the critical stage of the mission. In most satellite launches, the first few days of operations are absolutely critical. Just hours after mission experts turned on the sophisticated radars aboard the spacecraft, they began receiving back telemetry, the ESA team says.

Only a few minutes after being launched last Thursday, the satellite was inserted by its Dnepr delivery system into a polar orbit above Earth. For the next three days, researchers working from the European Space Operations Center (ESOC), in Germany, monitored the payload and health status of the satellite around the clock. The goal was to ensure that everything was fairing along nicely and that no damage had come to either the satellite or its cargo during the harsh conditions of lift-off.

“The satellite is in excellent condition and the mission operations team quickly resolved the few problems that came up. It's been a very smooth entry into orbit, precisely as planned,” said on April 11 Pier Paolo Emanuelli, the Flight Director of ESA. He also announced at the time that the Launch and Early Orbit Phase (LEOP) of the mission had concluded successfully. The main instrument on CryoSat-2, called the Synthetic Aperture Interferometric Radar Altimeter (SIRAL), was turned on late Sunday, and it immediately began picking up echo data from the ground.

The ESA Kiruna ground station picked up on the spacecraft's telemetry shortly afterwards. The first data were collected and processed on-site, before being shipped out to ESA. “We switched SIRAL on and it worked beautifully from the very start. Our first data were taken over the Antarctic's Ross Ice Shelf, and clearly show the ice cover and reflections from underlying layers. These are excellent results at such an early stage and are a tribute to the hard work of the entire CryoSat community,” said the lead investigator of the CryoSat-2 mission, professor Duncan Wingham.

“The combined ground teams proved the value of months of extensive training and preparation and the satellite has shown to be a high-quality machine with very few problems. The launch and orbit injection have been almost flawless and we are looking forward to an extremely productive mission,” concluded the ESA project manager for the mission, Richard Francis.

Indian space mission advances with satellite plan

Scientists check data at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) center in Bangalore in 2008. India plans to put a satellite into orbit using its indigenously built cryogenic rocket engine, marking another step in the nation's ambitious space programme, officials said.

BANGALORE, India (AFP) – India plans to put a satellite into orbit using its indigenously built cryogenic rocket engine, marking another step in the nation's ambitious space programme, officials said.

Cryogenic rocket motors, which use supercooled liquid fuel, have been built by only six countries or regions in the world, with India joining this club in October 2006, according to Indian space researchers.

The engine will now be used to put a communications satellite into orbit with a launch scheduled for April 15, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman K. Radhakrishnan told reporters here on Wednesday.

The launch will take place at India's space centre at Sriharikota on the coast of the eastern state of Andhra Pradesh, he said.

India began its space programme in 1963 and has developed its own satellites and launch vehicles to cut dependence on other countries.

Government funding of around 2.8 billion dollars has been secured for an attempt on its first manned space mission in 2016.

In September, India's Chandrayaan-1 satellite discovered water on the moon, boosting its credibility among established space-faring nations.

In pictures: Satellite eye on Earth - March 2010

Sandstorms in China, dark days in Dakota and hydrogen sulphide eruption along the coast of Namibia - this month's stunning shots from space

Read the whole article on The Guardian - Science

Experts Find What Influences the Growth of Galaxy Clusters

Image comment: Illustration showing the ICM region of Abell 1689, which is heated at around 60 million degrees
Image credits: RIKEN Advanced Science Institute

Without a doubt, galaxy clusters are the largest coherent structures in the known Universe. They are made up of hundreds of thousands of galaxies, all held together through the force of gravity. While it may be difficult to observe clusters at first, careful analysis of how seemingly-unrelated galaxies move soon hints at their presence. For many years, astronomers and astrophysicists have been wondering how is it that these giant structures are held together, and also what factors govern their growth. Now, for the first time, an international collaboration of scientists proposes an answer to this mystery.

Scientists from the Japan-based RIKEN institution, working together with colleagues from the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, managed to identify details pertaining to cluster growth and development. While doing so, they may have also gained new insight into how our Universe developed a short time after the Big Bang exploded everything into being. Their work was prompted by the fact that the actual mass of galaxies in a cluster only accounts for a fraction of the gravitational pull that exists in these regions.

There are only two other possible sources for this force, physicists hypothesize. One is the elusive dark matter, which, for now, remains invisible to detectors, but which is believed to interact with normal matter only through gravity. The other one is the intracluster medium (ICM), the stuff that resides within the cluster itself. Using telescopes capable of measuring the Universe in X-ray wavelengths, researchers found in previous studies that the ICM is made up of superheated plasma, which exits at temperatures of millions of degrees.

Using Japan's sensitive Suzaku X-ray satellite, the group looked at the ICM in the galaxy cluster Abell 1689, in order to understand its influence better. It was discovered that the medium there has a temperature of no less than 23 million degrees, on average. However, areas that are heated beyond this value exist. The warmest spot, the team reports, was found to be heated at about 60 million degrees. This hot region had a weird filamentary structures protruding from it, which researchers determined was made up of many galaxies.

The group writes in the April 9 issue of The Astrophysical Journal that this structure is most likely nothing more than a shock wave. They hypothesize that it was produced after the galaxy cluster that provides the heat for the ICM collided with the cold gas clouds the filament contains. Hence, the science team was able to determine that the large-scale structure of the surrounding Universe influenced the growth of the cluster itself. Gravitational lensing data supplied by the Japanese Subaru observatory, and the Hubble Space Telescope, confirmed the initial readings Suzaku gathered.

Russia to launch 7 new navigation satellites in 2010

Russia is to launch seven new satellites this year for Moscow's GLONASS navigation system, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Tuesday.

"By the end of the year, we plan on launching seven new satellites" which will bring the number operational to 27 or 28, Putin was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying.

"GLONASS will cover the whole planet," he added.

Russia is to spend 1.7 billion rubles (42.5 million euros, 58 million dollars) developing the system next year compared to 2.0 billion rubles this year and 2.5 billion rubles in 2009, he said.

GLONASS was initially developed by the Russian military in the 1980s to compete with the US Global Positioning System (GPS), and will in the future face competition from Europe's Galileo.

India To Cut Satellite Launch Cost By Half

India plans to cut satellite launch cost by half with the heavy-lift rocket that it is developing, a senior space department official said. The country is also aiming a two-to-three fold increase in the number of spacecraft launches from this year, Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation K Radhakrishnan said.

GSLV-Mk III that ISRO is developing now would bring down the satellite launch cost at least by half, at present, the launch cost is pegged at around USD 20,000 per kilogram, he said.

GSLV-Mk III, which would have the capability to launch satellites of four tonne class, nearly twice the mass that ISRO can currently carry to space, is expected to be operational in next two-three years.

Delivering the inaugural lecture of IIScAA (Indian Institute of Science Alumni Association) here last evening, he said India currently has 211 communication transponders, including 195 operational.

"We need to go up to 500 (transponders) by 2014," Radhakrishan, also Secretary in the Department of Space and Space Commission Chairman, said.

Radhakrishnan said ISRO has so far been launching two to three satellites per year, but from this year the Bangalore headquartered space agency plans to launch six to eight satellites.

"We are augmenting capacity like two-three fold increase in terms of missions (per year)," he said.

He said ISRO is also developing a heavy cryogenic engine and stage, almost three-times what it would use in GSLV (Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle) that it proposed to launch in the middle of this month.

As part of efforts to lower cost of access to space, ISRO is developing semi-cryogenic engine, replacing liquid hydrogen with purified kerosene, bringing down the launch cost price "drastically".

In 2013, ahead of India's human space flight planned for 2015-16, ISRO plans to put an unmanned crew module on board a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, Radhakrishnan said.

He also said ISRO is working on a mission to Mars, adding that advanced space-faring nations like US and Russia are eyeing human habitation in Mars from 2030 onwards.

"For them, moon is not an end by itself, but means to reach Mars and have human habitat there. They are devising new transportation systems to reach Moon and Mars," he said.

"There are various strategies for reaching Mars. It's a 250 day journey (for Mars). We are working on it. The years 2013, 2016 and 2018 offers good opportunity for ISRO to launch Mars mission," he added.

Source: Press Trust of India