Venus Express Does Aerobreaking Maneuvers

The European Space Agency (ESA) has been operating the Venus Express spacecraft around the second planet from the Sun since April 2006. The instruments aboard the probe managed to collect a wealth of data about the surface and atmosphere of the space rock, and contributed considerably to our understanding of its structure. In order to boost the amount of data we have on Venus, experts at ESA conducted a series of 5 aerobreaking maneuvers in its sweltering atmosphere last week, during which the solar panels on the spacecraft were used as sails to propel it through the chemical mix.

This meant that the entire probe was basically transformed into a highly-sensitive sensor, which proved to be very suitable for assessing the density of the atmosphere above Venus, just 111 miles, or 180 kilometers, over the cloud cover that conceals its surface. “The aerodrag campaign went without problem, and conclusively demonstrated that Venus Express can be securely and accurately used to sense the density of the planet's atmosphere. Venus Express has shown once again that it is a very capable satellite,” explained the Venus Express spacecraft operations manager, Octavio Camino.

Measuring atmospheric density with a probe such as this one is fairly easy. All engineers had to do is orient its solar panels in a manner that saw a small amount of torque force being generated in the body of the spacecraft. This happened because the instrument was passing through the faintest traces of the Venusian atmosphere, which created drag. The density could then be inferred from the amount of correction that reaction wheels needed to apply in order to keep the craft in its planned trajectory in space. These wheels counter-rotate within Venus Express itself, and are considered to play a fundamental role in ensuring the success of small correction maneuvers.

According to ESA mission managers, the spacecraft is expected to continue performing such aerobreaking maneuvers well into 2011 and 2012, even though the mission was originally scheduled to end back in May 2009. Due to the amazing performances of the probe, the mission was first extended for 4 months, and then, in September 2009, it was extended to 2010. However, engineers in charge of the machine are convinced that there's still life in it, and that the mission will receive additional funding, Space reports.

Surfing an alien atmosphere

Venus Express has completed an 'aerodrag' campaign that used its solar wings as sails to catch faint wisps of the planet’s atmosphere. The test used the orbiter as an exquisitely accurate sensor to measure atmospheric density barely 180 km above the hot planet.

During five aerodrag measurements last week, Venus Express' solar arrays and control systems were operated as one big flying sensor, with the solar arrays rotated at various angles to the direction of flight.

The special configuration exposed the wings to the vanishingly faint wisps of atmosphere that reach to the boundary of space around Venus, generating a tiny but measurable aerodynamic torque, or rotation, on the satellite.

This torque can be measured very accurately based on the amount of correction that must be applied by reaction wheels, which counter-rotate inside the spacecraft to maintain its orientation in space.

Mimicking the vanes of a windmill

Starting on Monday, the solar panels rotated through five daily-changing sets of orientations. While one panel remained perpendicular to the direction of flight, the other rotated in steps, gradually increasing the torque to be counter-balanced by the reaction wheels.

On the last day, 16 April, the solar arrays were rotated at plus and minus 45° to the atmospheric flow, mimicking the vanes of a windmill, in order to gather additional information on the behaviour of the molecules of the atmosphere bouncing off the solar wings.

A very capable satellite

"The aerodrag campaign went without problem, and conclusively demonstrated that Venus Express can be securely and accurately used to sense the density of the planet's atmosphere. Venus Express has shown once again that it is a very capable satellite," said Spacecraft Operations Manager Octavio Camino.

Camino explained that the mission operations team will study last week’s results to develop an optimised configuration for aerodrag campaigns in October and in 2011. Aerodrag testing was also conducted in 2008, 2009 and February 2010.


Continued positive results may enable Venus Express to conduct more sophisticated investigations deeper in the atmosphere, which would be of immense interest to planetary scientists.

The solar array on Venus Express comprise two symmetrical wings supporting gallium-arsenide solar cells. Their combined 5.7 sq m can generate up to 1400 W of power in Venus orbit.

Source:- ESA

Venus is alive – geologically speaking

This figure shows the volcanic peak Idunn Mons (at 46°S, 214.5°E) in the Imdr Regio area of Venus. The topography derives from data obtained by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft, with a vertical exageration of 30 times. Radar data (in brown) from Magellan has been draped on top of the topographic data. Bright areas are rough or have steep slopes. Dark areas are smooth.

The coloured overlay shows the heat patterns derived from surface brightness data collected by the visible and infrared thermal imaging spectrometer (VIRTIS) aboard ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft. Temperature variations due to topography were removed. The brightness signals the composition of the minerals that have been changed due to lava flow. Red-orange is the warmest area and purple is the coolest. The warmest area is situated on the summit, which stands about 2.5 km above the plains, and on the bright flows that originate there. Idunn Mons has a diameter of about 200 km.

The VIRTIS data was collected from May 2006 to the end of 2007.

Credits: ESA/NASA/JPL

ESA's Venus Express has returned the clearest indication yet that Venus is still geologically active. Relatively young lava flows have been identified by the way they emit infrared radiation. The finding suggests the planet remains capable of volcanic eruptions.

It has long been recognised that there are simply not enough craters on Venus. Something is wiping the planet's surface clean. That something is thought to be volcanic activity but the question is whether it happens quickly or slowly? Is there some sort of cataclysmic volcanic activity that resurfaces the entire planet with lava, or a gradual sequence of smaller volcanic eruptions? New results suggest the latter.

"Now we have strong evidence right at the surface for recent eruptions," says Sue Smrekar, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

That strong evidence comes in the form of compositional differences compared to the surrounding landscape in three volcanic regions. The data were collected by the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) on ESA's Venus Express spacecraft, which has been orbiting the planet since April 2006.

VIRTIS records the brightness of surface rocks, providing an estimate of 'emissivity'. In 2008, Jörn Helbert and Nils Müller, Institute of Planetary Research, German Aerospace Center, Berlin and co-authors on this new work, published a map of the variation of infrared emissivity across the southern hemisphere of Venus.

Dr Smrekar and her colleagues targeted three regions that geologically resemble Hawaii, well known for its active volcanism. They show that the regions on Venus have higher emissivities than their surroundings, indicating different compositions.

On Earth, lava flows react rapidly with oxygen and other elements in the atmosphere, changing their composition. On Venus, the process should be similar, though more intense because of the hotter, denser atmosphere, chiefly of carbon dioxide.

The researchers interpret the fact that the lava flows appear to have different compositions from their surroundings as being evidence of a lack of surface weathering, indicating that the flows erupted relatively recently. They estimate that the flows are possibly as geologically recent as 2 500 000 years - and likely much less, possibly even currently active. "This is a significant result," says Hľkan Svedhem, ESA Venus Express Project Scientist.

Whilst the gradual resurfacing scenario might not be the most spectacular, it does make Venus look a little more Earth-like.

"There are some intriguing models of how Venus could have completely covered itself in kilometres of volcanic lava in a short time, but they require that the interior of Venus behaves very differently from Earth. If volcanism is more gradual, this implies that the interior may behave more like Earth, though without plate tectonics," says Dr Smrekar.

Source:- http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMUKVZNK7G_index_0.html

Venus' Catastrophe Hypothesis Challenged

Astronomers have always considered that Venus, the second planet from the Sun, is a celestial body that went through a massive upheaval millions of years ago. They thought that a series of catastrophic events prompted the reshaping of the planet's surface, to the extent that no less than 80 percent of its surface was buried under new crust. This massive resurfacing of the planet was believed to have taken place about 500 million years ago, ScienceDaily reports. However, according to a recently-published report, it would appear that this view is flawed, and not very well rooted in scientific fact. The resurfacing theory implies that, when looking at the planet's surface, an observer shouldn't be able to notice any traces or records of events that occurred before the changes that took place half a billion years ago. The process that buried the old surface should by all accounts have erased most, if not all, data on how Venus looked before the changes. But these data are currently being questioned by the results of a new global mapping investigation, which was conducted on ribbon-tessera terrain (RTT). These units, which are structurally very distinctive, are among the oldest surface discovered on the planet, having formed long before the catastrophic event. Using data from the NASA Magellan mission, researchers were recently able to delineate unit exposures, as well as structural trends, datasets that are all included in the geological RTT map. The tool charts the global RTT structure on Venus. At a planetary level, these terrains exhibit patterns that would seem to indicate a rich geological history. According to planetary scientists, had the resurfacing occurred, such records would have not been found. But Venus reveals millions of square kilometers of records, each of them holding data on variable temporal evolutions that may be used to gain more insight on past events that affected the celestial body on a large scale. The new work was completed by experts at the Institute for Frontier Research on Earth Evolution at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, and details of the findings appear in the April issue of the respected scientific journal Geology.

Are Venus and Earth in a long-distance relationship?

The heart of Venus may belong to Earth. Our planet could be tugging on the core of Venus, exerting control over its spin.

Whenever Venus and Earth arrive at the closest point in their orbits, Venus always presents the same face to us. This could mean that Earth's gravity is tugging subtly on Venus, affecting its rotation rate. That idea, raised decades ago, was disregarded when it turned out that Venus is spinning too fast to be in such a gravitational "resonance".

But Earth could still be pulling on Venus by controlling its core, according to calculations by Gérard Caudal of the University of Versailles-Saint Quentin, France.

Caudal made large assumptions about Venus's interior, which we know little about. For his hypothesis to be correct, the planet would, like Earth, need a solid core surrounded by a liquid layer. This could allow the solid core to rotate slower than the rest of the planet. The core would also have to be asymmetric or heterogeneous, so that Earth can exert a variable tug as Venus spins. "For the resonance to be possible, there should be something that the gravity of the Earth could grasp," Caudal says.

This latter requirement could be problematic for the hypothesis, says Jean-Luc Margot of the University of California, Los Angeles. "In order to maintain a resonance, the inner core must be out of round by a significant amount," he notes.

Yet persistent imperfections in planetary cores tend to smooth out because the core is hot and under great pressure, according to David Stevenson of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Still, the resonance theory is worth revisiting, he adds.

Watching for changes in Venus's spin over time using radar observations may reveal more about what's going on inside the planet, says Margot.

Journal reference: Journal of Geophysical Research

Source:- http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18660-are-venus-and-earth-in-a-longdistance-relationship.html

JAXA Gets Ready to Launch Venus Probe

Officials at the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announce that they have entered the final stages of preparing the organization's new space probe for flight. The Akatsuki spacecraft will fly to our neighboring planet Venus, where it will conduct science for Japan. This is the first such mission that the Asian country sets up. American and Russian crafts have reached Venus on several occasions, and have mapped and analyzed it extensively, but now JAXA wants to have a go at it too, Nature News reports. The main goal of the mission is to determine exactly why the Venus, which has so much in common with Earth, is so inhospitable to life.

For more than ten years, this planet has fallen in scientific neglect, in the sense that new missions to investigate it have been placed on hold. But JAXA is about to break the cycle with the May 18 launch of its Venus Climate Orbiter spacecraft, which is being shipped this week to the Tanegashima Space Center. According to mission scientists for Akatsuki, one of the primary objectives for the new mission is to determine precisely what drives the atmosphere of our scorching-hot neighbor to rotate around Venus at speeds of up to 60 times higher than that of the planet's rotation.

There aren't many space experts that can answer the question as to why studying Venus was placed on hold. Evidence collected throughout its mission by the Venus Express spacecraft, built and operated by the European Space Agency (ESA), suggests that the planet may have once been covered in oceans. It would also appear that its density is very similar to Earth's, and also that the cores of the two planets are very similar in composition. Given these data, why does our neighbor look and feel so inhospitable to life. Discovering the changes that led to this transformation is among the top objectives for the Venus Climate Orbiter spacecraft.

Venus is known to rotate at a speed of roughly 6.5 kilometers per hour. Experts have determined as well that the atmosphere moves around the planet at about 400 kilometers per hour. In addition, the body is enveloped in sulphuric acid clouds and is battered by temperatures on the range of 460 degrees Celsius. This is largely caused by global warming effects, set forth by an atmosphere made of 95 percent carbon dioxide. The magnetic field around it is also too weak to defend emergent life forms against very strong solar winds.

NASA and Space - The Future vs. the Past

In covering the uproar over the just-released NASA budget and its implications, the major media headlines have been trumpeting: "Lunar Program Cancelled". Yes, sadly the budget has cancelled the current lunar program, based on the NASA designed Ares boosters and Orion capsule. However, as some other writers have pointed out, the Vision for Space Exploration program (VSE), which was conceived by a true government consensus after the Columbia disaster, was in effect hijacked in 2005 by the last person anyone of us would have ever suspected, the greatly respected aerospace engineer, Dr. Michael Griffin. That the VSE envisioned by the White House was hijacked is in little doubt, since the only representative of the space advocacy community specifically invited to attend the former President's 2004 speech was Rick Tumlinson, no friend of business-as-usual in US space policy. The White House shares no blame for picking Dr. Griffin, since many in the space community saw him as a very good choice. Other writers have pointed out that the VSE and Constellation which supposedly implemented it are very different programs. In an interview, Brett Alexander said "I was a primary author of the Vision for Space Exploration.....But they chose the most expensive architecture (for Constellation) and they had cost and technical issues with it. The cost overruns are astonishing."(Amy Klamper - Space News 2-1-2010).

Under Admiral Craig Steidle starting early in 2004, the VSE was a forward looking program that was open to new ideas and the development of fundamentally new, innovative technology. Griffin shut the door firmly on most of those new ideas in 2005. Instead, he looked backward at what had been stolen away from him and the space community by politics 40 years ago - a continuation of the Apollo Program, and tried to re-create it as "Apollo on Steroids". Any studies which had been underway involving re-usable rockets or spacecraft were apparently ruthlessly suppressed, so that the public and most outside experts never got to see the results. Critical long-range programs were cancelled and their funds raided for the short-term goal. Everything that possibly could be made expendable to save a few pennies was. MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics professor David Mindell says in a Space and Earth article posted on physorg (2-5-2010) that "NASA is eating its seed corn for Constellation". The result was exactly what I warned about in 2005 (Return to the Moon p. 137 - 2005) - the use of "giant expendable LEMS" (Lunar Modules) in the new program, itself only symptomatic of NASA's institutional mindset under Griffin.

I have had the experience of being laid off and I know what an terrible impact this has on a person and his family. I have also experienced the frustration of having a project taken away from me. I thus totally commiserate with any and all of the employees who may lose their current NASA jobs, and who have expended herculean efforts on trying to make the Constellation program work. But we need to think about the whole purpose of the space program. The concept of NASA as a short-range jobs program has to end, since it is politically and economically unsustainable. The unwillingness of Congress and the previous President to adequately fund the program that they superficially publically supported proves this beyond a doubt. Dr. Griffin also consistently and massively underestimated the development and construction costs of all the single use vehicles that would be needed for any lunar program and the program's annual operating costs. All of the jobs currently about to be lost would have been eventually lost, but with even greater trauma and distress at the additional wasted effort.

Why has the announcement been received so negatively by many whose jobs are not at risk?. Newspapers and politicians of both parties from the affected areas uniformly responded negatively to the proposal, due to the loss of local jobs. Reaction from national news outlets was mixed and more balanced. It is also now clear from other writers that the announcement gave some of them the impression that the long-range intent was to end human spaceflight. For example, Stephen Weinberg, a long-time opponent of manned space flight and supporter of the "look but don't touch" viewpoint, threw contrary evidence to the wind with the title of his article "Ending Manned Space Flight Is The Right Thing For Science".

As a result of this and similar opinions, fear grew that the budget announcement was intended to kill the current Constellation program but then not replace it with anything. Even the Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords echoed fears that "We may soon abandon our mission" (of manned space exploration). The current budget does remove the Constellation Lunar program without replacing it with any specific destination or goal. (It is admittedly very hard to come up with a specific first goal without at least a year of discussion, and the Augustine Commission deliberately did not focus on a single first goal.) The most obvious first goal for a human expedition would be a near earth asteroid, since it would not require the development of a lander. One comment following a negative article by Astronaut Tom Jones (Popular Mechanics 2-2-2010) made an excellent analogy to support the fact that we can't go very far yet since we do not have a space infrastructure in place: (placing propellant depots in orbit in 2020 is the equivalent of building a road network and gas stations to enable auto travel in 1920).

In addition, those of us who have watched with frustration as mankind was restricted to Low Earth orbit (where we have now been stuck for about 38 years), were depressed at the thought of another whole decade stuck in Low Earth Orbit, even if the human program survives. The justification for staying in LEO has been that we were preparing for further exploration beyond LEO. Bolden's honest press conference comment (2/6/2010) that we would not be flying the Heavy Lift Vehicle (HLV) needed for further exploration until after 2020 did not help. Practically, though, to develop a really inexpensive and practical HLV would probably take about that long, and to develop payloads to put on it would also take about the same amount of time. All of the serious, current, competing, expendable HLV plans are so expensive that very few would ever be launched. One writer agreeing with Augustine Commission member Leroy Chiao's blog of 2-4-2010 pointed out that what we need is "indefinitely affordable technology" to access the Moon and other destinations. (Constellation would have been affordable only very temporarily at best).

If you would ask any of the older astronauts, many of them would tell you in effect, that "Space is about the future". It is not about the past. While we greatly honor all of the past work that has been done on the program, if we only focus on the glories of the past, we miss the ultimate point of the program - the future and long term survival of the human race, and using space resources and energy to protect the Earth. A one-planet species is eventually a dead end. Many other individuals and groups have rallied to the defense of the new path, including Buzz Aldrin, the X-Prize Foundation, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, the Space Frontier Foundation, The Planetary Society, The Economist, and Wayne Hale, who made an eloquent reference to Robert Heinlein and his writing in support of space (NASA Blogs 2-2-2010).;
Lori Garver, NASA Associate Administrator, said "We're not cancelling our plans to explore space: we're cancelling Constellation" (Leslie Mullen - Astrobiology 2-3-2010).

There is also an article from someone who's job is obviously NOT at stake, and who is a long-time friend of the space program, Director James Cameron (Washington Post 2-5-2010). Cameron is a calm, clear and practical thinker and manager who knows how to pick good technical people, and how to use his resources and funds most effectively to make good movies. He has directed the development of very advanced technical equipment which will soon be used to very good effect by many other producers and directors. He (with his picked staff), had to imagine what this equipment would do, why it was needed and how it would work, before they designed it. He is also able to follow engineering arguments so that he has a respect for the opinions of engineers and does not order them to do the impossible or the dangerous. Thus he has many of the exact skills that would be needed to make high-level decisions about a large technical program. He is obviously far more competent in such matters than the NASA manager who so little respected engineers that on the day in 1986 before the Challenger exploded, he said the immortal, despised and ultimately deadly words "take off your engineer's hat and put on your manager's hat".

About 10 years ago, Cameron attended one of the early Mars Society Conventions. He sat in the audience with us, soaking up all the Mars technical lore for his projected Mars TV series which was probably cancelled by all the quickie competition from the cheap Mars movies that were made during that period. Later, in a talk to the whole convention, he revealed a better pressurized manned rover design for the Moon or Mars than any that I have ever seen from NASA. As a result of operating cameras in the Russian submersibles during the filming of the actual wreck of the Titanic, miles deep under the North Atlantic, he wanted to be able to reach out and pick up objects on the ocean floor, which was of course impossible due to the extreme pressure. As a result, his rover design allows the entire rover to "kneel down" on its axles when a promising object on the surface is spotted. A robot arm then can pick up the object and place it into a small airlock. When the inner airlock door is opened, the rock can be immediately examined, without the hours required to "suit up" just to collect a single rock.

Some of the comments on Cameron's article criticize him for expressing his opinion while not being a "rocket scientist". The answer to this may lie in what led Dr. Griffin astray. Griffin is a world-class and magnificent engineer, but without casting aspersions on engineers, who I greatly admire for their technical skill, he is "only" an engineer. Cameron (as described here) is thus in effect operating at a level "above" the level of the engineer. He has to respect engineers, but also be more than an engineer. If you ask a space engineer to design a space program, he will probably design it based on vehicles. This is the famous "If you have a hammer - the answer is a nail" trap. Before you ever start designing hardware, first you have to decide the overall purpose of the program - why are we doing this at all, then what that hardware should do and then how it should do it. Only then should hardware design begin. Griffin and his team instead began with hardware designs and created a program that partially fit those designs.

While the cancellation of the lunar program has made many of us depressed at the prospect of returning to the treadmill of going in circles in LEO for another decade or two, the actual choice is one of going in bureaucratic circles forever or not. The basic question is (if you work in the space industry): do you want to get to the point where large numbers of people can travel to and can work in space, or do you want space to be too expensive for that for decades to come? Do you want to build expendable rockets forever, or start building Mars landers and lunar mining equipment. Government agencies by their very nature cannot and will not reduce operating costs. Private companies have to do that to compete. Without reducing operating costs dramatically, our space future will be left on the ground.

What will happen if the new program (which once more opens NASA to new ideas) is allow to proceed? It is even possible that with private enterprise handling the known hazards of transport to LEO, NASA will be able to re-focus its old genius on transport and exploration beyond LEO, so that we might even be able to return to the moon sooner than under the current program. (That is, of course, if we can formulate a good scientific or economic reason to go back there immediately.)

So yes, we will not be going to the moon on impossibly expensive expendable rockets, with expendable crew capsules and expendable lunar ferries, and without even knowing why we are going back or what we would do once we return. What we will be doing (hopefully - if the politicians keep their promises, which no-one can guarantee), is beginning the transition to the expansion of the human economic sphere into space. The so-called "flexible path, if it is followed properly, will open up access to multiple destinations and space activities. For example the use of space for production of clean, continuous solar energy could be enabled (although this option was unfortunately not mentioned in the announcement). Reduced cost of access will also allow much more and better space science to be done. Human and robotic expeditions to the Moon, Mars, its moons and to near earth asteroids would become possible and much safer.

How will we be able to tell if the program is going in the "right" direction? The government should go ahead and create launch contract guarantees with at least two companies for ground to LEO operations. It should never develop or operate an earth to orbit vehicle again. We (the future-oriented space community) will need to see actual funding supported and enacted to allow development of advanced and innovative technology, such as plasma rocket engines like the VASIMR for use in deep space, and hypersonic air-breathing engines for future launch vehicles. We want several companies to be able to develop systems to safely, reliably and cheaply deliver cargo and passengers to low Earth orbit destinations. We want the government to underscore the critical need for a heavy lift booster (HLV), and encourage the private sector to develop one itself, preferably as a re-usable two stage booster (no easy task).

We want to see the development of a truly and fully integrated space transportation system by NASA in conjunction with the private sector, one that will allow access to all areas within and including the Moon's orbit (cis-lunar space), as well as the nearby Earth-Sun LaGrange Points 1 and 2. This system should include both vehicles and nodes and incorporate delivery of propellants to orbit by private launch vehicles to be stored in large propellant depots (nodes). This would allow deep space vehicles to be launched without propellants in their tanks, greatly increasing the size of vehicles that can be launched. We want to see the development of generalized, re-usable vehicles (space taxis, space tugs, lunar ferries) for transport of humans and cargo to points beyond low earth orbit and return to their starting point for re-fueling. We need to see a long-range, realistic plan for actual exploration missions based on reduced transport costs and the actual funds available. We want crew safety, redundancy and creation of self-rescue abilities and crew refuges to be a high priority. We also need solid reasons and rationales for each exploration mission. We also expect closer cooperative efforts in manned exploration between the US and other countries with less visible US domination. In space, countries should cooperate and companies should compete for the benefit of all.

What can we do to make the current massive lurch in the space program palatable to its critics. In the near term, exceptional measures should be taken to assist NASA and contractor employees to find new jobs with either orbit access service providers or within NASA to begin work on the new in-space transport system. We would hope that the government would encourage the new companies to open facilities in some of the communities which stand to lose the most jobs, as Bolden suggested at his press conference. Within just a few years, reduced costs could mean even more space-related jobs than there are now as cost savings spill over into the private sector and encourage more launches by both government and business. Reduced access costs could thus mean more missions. We should establish a clear path and timetable to the availability of a private HLV, and specific payloads for its manifest, such as giant space telescopes and propellant depots. As soon as feasible, a logical sequence of human mission destinations with a rough timetable should be established, to show everyone that human exploration beyond LEO will continue.

Space is a very, very hard row to hoe. Some of the projected entrepreneurial milestones will happen later than expected and expenses will initially be higher than expected. Disasters will probably happen. However, the benefits of space commerce and clean energy and being a multi-planet species far outweigh the risks and costs if they are accomplished by business methods. Space must become economical before it is practical. Give the new (and old) space entrepreneurs a real chance to accomplish this and I believe that the results will be truly amazing.

Source:- http://www.marstoday.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1377

The Moon, Venus and Regulus

Eastern horizon with Venus and the Moon at 5:30 am local time on Thursday morning September 17, click to embiggen.

Just a reminder that tomorrow morning (Thursday September 17) Venus is near the crescent Moon and the bright star Regulus, foring an attractive triangle.

This will be difficult to observe if you do not have a level clear eastern/north eastern horizon as the grouping is close to the horizon.

Weekend Sky Show Starts With Moon-Venus-Mars Grouping

From June 19 to 21, 2009, the crescent moon will seem to make a series of cosmic pit stops as it hovers near several planets and a star cluster in the predawn skies. Weather permitting, this chain of conjunctions, seen above in an illustration, will be easily visible to the naked eye.

Sky chart courtesy StarDate Online/University of Texas at Austin McDonald Observatory

Set your alarms early for the next few days to sneak a peek at a stargazing spectacle.

The moon will seem to make a series of cosmic pit stops as it hovers near Venus and Mars, a famous star cluster, and finally Mercury in the predawn skies between Friday and Sunday, June 19 and 21.

This chain of conjunctions—when objects appear to be close together in the sky—is not unusual, astronomers note. But the event will create striking cosmic groupings that should be easy to spot without optical aids.

"When the moon parks itself next to starlike objects, this is the kind of astronomical happening that everyone takes note of and anyone can really enjoy," says Anthony Cook of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.

(See a related photo of Venus, Jupiter, and the moon making a smiley face in the skies over the Philippines.)

"The only requirements you need to worry about are having clear skies and an unobstructed view of the low eastern horizon 45 minutes before dawn."

Lunar Guidepost

The sky show begins worldwide Friday when the waning crescent moon snuggles up to brilliant white Venus and the much fainter, rust-colored Mars.

Venus and Mars will be in close conjunction that morning—just two degrees apart, or the equivalent of four full-moon disks.

On Saturday the moon will sit to the right of the Pleiades star cluster, which lies 400 light-years away.

"They should make quite an attractive pair in binoculars, but the trick to enjoying the cluster will be to catch sight of it while skies are still dark," Cook said.

The show closes out on Sunday, when the moon sinks closer toward the eastern horizon and settles to the upper left of faint Mercury.

"For many sky-watchers Mercury is always a challenge, because it gets lost in the glare of the dawn," Cook said.

"But for one morning the razor-crescent moon will act as a wonderful guidepost to easily track it down."

Read the whole article on National Geographic