A survey of space shuttle Atlantis' outer body has revealed that four tiles on the right side have "some dings" in them, the flight director said Tuesday.

Space shuttle Atlantis launched from Florida Monday on its way to the Hubble telescope.

"As we were going through the surveys we did see probably about 21 inches in all ... four tiles with some dings in them," Tony Ceccacci told reporters.

"To me, I'm not the tile expert, but they looked very minor."

He said tile experts will examine the dings, which are on the wing.

Ceccacci said an "event" occurred around 103 seconds into Monday's launch.

He said NASA is looking into what may have caused the nicks. Debris that fell off the external fuel tank during liftoff has been the culprit on previous flights.

Atlantis launched Monday afternoon for NASA's fifth and final repair visit to the Hubble Space Telescope, with which it is scheduled to rendezvous on Wednesday.

It has been seven years since NASA's last mission to service the Hubble, which was designed to go only about three years between fixes.

NASA canceled an Atlantis mission to extend Hubble's operational life in January 2004 because the trip was considered too risky in the wake of the 2003 Columbia tragedy, which killed seven astronauts.

That disaster was blamed on a hole punched in the front of the wing by debris during liftoff.

But public pressure and steps taken to increase shuttle safety led the U.S. space agency to reconsider.

Space shuttle Endeavour is on standby at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the unlikely event that NASA will need to rescue the Atlantis crew members during their 11-day mission. Read more!

Last October 16th was a big day for the Chinese astronomical community. Nearly 200 kilometers northeast of Beijing, at the Xinglong Observing Station of the National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC), leaders of the Chinese Academy of Sciences held a ceremony to celebrate the founding of something new and unique: LAMOST, the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope.

The LAMOST observatory buildings, aligned on the meridian.

Renjiang Xie

LAMOST is a survey instrument like no other. It was designed for maximum efficiency for one vital purpose: taking spectra of many millions of individually selected, very faint objects. Its designers had to find the best balance for this purpose between aperture, field of view, and many other factors.

The surface shape of LAMOST's 4-meter segmented primary mirror will be actively controlled, allowing the segments to be thin and light.

Renjiang Xie

The instrument's segmented thin mirror, seen above, has an aperture of 4 meters (160 inches), with the segments controlled by active-optics techniques. This aperture will enable LAMOST to obtain spectra of objects as faint as magnitude 20.5 magnitude in a 1.5-hour exposure.

LAMOST's fiber-optic image detector, seen from behind.

Renjiang Xie

That's not remarkable by today's standards — LAMOST's real power comes from its extraordinary field of view. The working focal plane is an immense 1.75 meters in diameter, corresponding to a 5° field on the sky.

As many as 4,000 optical fibers can be automatically positioned onto selected objects in the field, with each fiber feeding light to a spectral analyzer. As a result, the telescope has the highest spectrum-acquiring rate of any in the world.

Being a survey telescope, LAMOST needs to look only near the sky's north-south meridian to catch, in time, a large fraction of the celestial sphere passing across. As a result the telescope occupies special domes that look less like a traditional observatory than like some spaceport from a sci-fi movie.

“LAMOST’s equipment was completely installed by the end of August after four years’ of building," says Yongheng Zhao, the general manager of the project. "We are now in the stage of doing test observations and refining performance, which may take two years.”

With a diameter of some 500 meters (1,600 feet), FAST will be the world's largest radio dish. Click image for cross-section diagram.

NAOC / Chinese Academy of Sciences

FAST Radio Dish

Meanwhile, the ambitious Five hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) has been allocated government funds of nearly 700 million RMB yuan (nearly US$100 million). FAST will be built in a limestone karst valley in a sparsely populated mountanous area of Guizhou province about 1,800 kilometers southwest of Beijing.

FAST's dish will be composed of about 2,000 active panels, each 15 meters square, that can reshape into a paraboloidal surface for pointing in any direction as much as 40° from the zenith. Construction has begun and should be finished in 2014. FAST is expected to be 10 times as sensitive as the 300-meter dish radio telescope near Arecibo, Puerto Rico, currently the world's largest.
Read more!

In the game of astronomy, size matters. To get crisp, clear images of things billions of light years away, a telescope needs to be big.

"The bigger the better," says astronomer Harley Thronson, who leads advanced concept studies in astronomy at the Goddard Space Flight Center. And he thinks "NASA's new Ares V rocket is going to completely change the rules of the game."

Ares V is the rocket that will deliver NASA's next manned lunar lander to the moon as well as all the cargo needed for a lunar base. Its roomy shroud could hold about eight school buses, and the rocket will pack enough power to boost almost 180,000 kg (396,000 lbs -- about 16 or 17 school buses) into low Earth orbit. Ares V can haul six times more mass and three times the volume the space shuttle can.

"Imagine the kind of telescope a rocket like that could launch," says Thronson. "It could revolutionize astronomy."

Right: The roomy shroud of the Ares V could hold about eight school buses. Credit: NASA

Optical engineer Phil Stahl of the Marshall Space Flight Center offers this example: "Ares V could carry an 8-meter diameter monolithic telescope, something that we already have the technology to build. The risk would be relatively low, and there are some big cost advantages in not having to cram a large telescope into a smaller launcher."

For comparison, he points out that Hubble is only 2.4 meters wide.

An 8-meter monolithic telescope would see things more than three times as sharply as Hubble can. More importantly, in the same amount of observing time, the larger mirror would see objects that are about 11 times fainter than Hubble sees because the 8-meter telescope has 11 times the light collecting area.

But Ares V can go yet bigger. It could transport a huge segmented telescope – one with several separate mirror panels that are folded up for transport like the James Webb Space Telescope--but three times the size!

The Space Telescope Science Institute's Marc Postman has been planning a 16-meter segmented optical/ultraviolet telescope called ATLAST, short for Advanced Technology Large-Aperture Space Telescope. The science from an aperture its size would be spectacular.

"ATLAST would be nearly 2000 times more sensitive than the Hubble Telescope and would provide images about seven times sharper than either Hubble or James Webb," says Postman. "It could help us find the long sought answer to a very compelling question -- 'Is there life elsewhere in the galaxy?'"

ATLAST's superior sensitivity would allow astronomers to hugely increase their sample size of stars for observation. Then, discovery of planets hospitable to life could be just around the corner!

"With our space-based telescope, we could obtain the spectrum of Earth-mass planets orbiting a huge number of nearby [60 - 70 light years from Earth] stars," says Postman. "We could detect any oxygen and water in the planets' spectral signatures. ATLAST could also precisely determine the birth dates of stars in nearby galaxies, giving us an accurate description of how galaxies assemble their stars."

This telescope could also probe the link between galaxies and black holes. Scientists know that almost all modern galaxies have supermassive black holes in their centers. "There must be a fundamental relationship between the formation of supermassive black holes and the formation of galaxies," explains Postman, "but we don't understand the nature of that relationship. Do black holes form first and act as seeds for the growth of galaxies around them? Or do galaxies form first and serve as incubators for supermassive black holes? A large UV/optical telescope could answer this question: If our telescope finds ancient galaxies that do not have supermassive black holes in their centers, it will mean galaxies can exist without them."

Dan Lester of the University of Texas at Austin envisions another 16-meter telescope, this one for detecting far-infrared wavelengths.

"The far-infrared telescope is quite different from, and quite complementary to, the optical telescopes of Stahl and Postman," says Lester. "In the far-infrared part of the spectrum, we generally aren't looking at starlight itself, but at the glow of warm dust and gas that surrounds the stars. In the very early stages of star formation, the proto-star is surrounded by layers of dust that visible light can't penetrate. Our telescope will allow us to see down into the innards of these giant dense clouds that are forming stars deep inside."

Observations in the far-infrared are especially challenging. These long wavelengths are hundreds of times larger than visible light, so it's hard to get a clear picture. "A very big telescope is necessary for good clarity at IR wavelengths," notes Lester.


Like the telescopes of Stahl and Postman, Lester's Single Aperture Far-Infrared Telescope ('SAFIR' for short), comes in two flavors for the Ares V: an 8-meter monolithic version and a 16-meter segmented version. Lester realized that, with an Ares V, he could launch an 8-meter telescope that didn't need complicated folding and unfolding. "But on the other hand, if we don't mind adding the complexity and cost of folding and still use an Ares V, we could launch a really mammoth telescope," says Lester.

In addition to all the above telescopes, Ares V could boost an 8-meter-class X-ray telescope into space. NASA's highly-successful Chandra X-ray Observatory has a 1 meter diameter mirror, so just imagine what an 8-meter Chandra might reveal!

Roger Brissenden of the Chandra X-ray Center is excited about the possibility of a future 8-meter-class X-ray telescope called Gen-X.

"Gen-X would be an extraordinarily powerful X-ray observatory that could open up new frontiers in astrophysics," he says. "This telescope will observe the very first black holes, stars and galaxies, born just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, and help us determine how these evolve with time. Right now, the study of the young universe is almost purely in the realm of theory, but with Gen-X's extreme sensitivity (more than 1000 times that of Chandra) these early objects would be revealed."

Indeed, Ares V flings shutters open wide on our view of the cosmos. It shakes off the shackles of mass and volume constraints from science missions and sweeps us into deep space to view "...a hundred things/ You have not dreamed of."

"We could get incredible astronomy from this big rocket," says Thronson, a professional dreamer. "I can't wait." Read more!

International Year of Astronomy 2009

by the Editors of Sky & Telescope

---

IAU

New Year's Day marks the beginning of what will undoubtedly be more than 12 months of celebrating astronomy. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has designated 2009 as the International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009) to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first celestial observations using a telescope. IYA2009 has been endorsed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the U.N. General Assembly.

Much of IYA2009's activities revolve around 11 Cornerstone Projects. While some initiatives are already underway, others still remain under development. The links to their individual sites are listed below. You'll find even more information at U.S. National Node. If you don't live in the U.S., see IYA2009's main site for a link to your country's node.

100 Hours of Astronomy: 400 Years in the Making
The Galileoscope: Millions of People Looking at the Sky
Cosmic Diary: The Life of an Astronomer
Portal to the Universe: A One-stop Universe of News
She Is an Astronomer: Breaking Down Misconceptions
Dark Skies Awareness: Seeing in the Dark
Astronomy and World Heritage: Universal Treasures
Galileo Teacher Training Program: Teaching the Teachers
Universe Awareness: One Place in the Cosmos
From Earth to the Universe: The Beauty of Science
Developing Astronomy Globally: Astronomy for All

And while it's not an official Cornerstone Project, the amateur-led The Earth at Night project is another important element for IYA2009.

Make room on your iPod for the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. There's a fact-filled, fun episode every day.

We're happy to provide the article "The Year to Celebrate Astronomy" by organizers Catherine Cesarsky, Pedro Russo, and Lars Lindberg Christensen from the January 2009 issue of Sky & Telescope as a free download in PDF format. (To display PDF files, download and install the free Adobe Reader.)

Be sure to check out the official movie of IYA2009: Eyes on the Skies produced by the European Space Agency and European Southern Observatory.

Read more!

HOUSTON -- Nations around the world will join together to mark a milestone in space exploration this week, celebrating the 10th birthday of a unique research laboratory, the International Space Station.

Now the largest spacecraft ever built, the orbital assembly of the space station began with the launch from Kazakhstan of its first bus-sized component, Zarya, on Nov. 20, 1998. The launch began an international construction project of unprecedented complexity and sophistication.

The station is a venture of international cooperation among NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency, Canadian Space Agency, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, and 11 members of the European Space Agency, or ESA: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. More than 100,000 people in space agencies and contractor facilities in 37 U.S. states and throughout the world are involved in this endeavor.
"The station's capability and sheer size today are truly amazing," said International Space Station Program Manager Mike Suffredini. "The tremendous technological achievement in orbit is matched only by the cooperation and perseverance of its partners on the ground. We have overcome differences in language, geography and engineering philosophies to succeed."

Only a few weeks after the U.S.-funded, Russian-built, Zarya module was launched from Kazakhstan, the space shuttle carried aloft the Unity connector module in December 1998. Constructed on opposite sides of Earth, Unity and Zarya met for the first time in space and were joined to begin the orbital station's assembly and a decade of peaceful cooperation.

Ten years later, the station's mass has expanded to more than 627,000 pounds, and its interior volume is more than 25,000 cubic feet, comparable to the size of a five-bedroom house. Since Zarya's launch as the early command, control and power module, there have been 29 additional construction flights to the station: 27 aboard the space shuttle and two additional Russian launches.

One hundred sixty seven individual representing 14 countries have visited the complex. Crews have eaten some 19,000 meals aboard the station since the first crew took up residence in 2000. Through the course of 114 spacewalks and unmatched robotic construction in space, the station's truss structure has grown to 291 feet long so far. Its solar arrays now span to 28,800 square feet, large enough to cover six basketball courts.

The International Space Station hosts 19 research facilities, including nine sponsored by NASA, eight by ESA and two by JAXA. Cooperation among international teams of humans and robots is expected to become a mainstay of space exploration throughout our solar system. The 2005 NASA Authorization Act recognized the U.S. orbital segment as the first national laboratory beyond Earth, opening it for additional research by other government agencies, academia and the private sector.

"With the International Space Station, we have learned so many things -- and we're going to take that knowledge and apply it to flying to the moon and Mars," said Expedition 18 Commander Mike Fincke, now aboard the station. "Everything we're learning so close to home, only 240 miles away from the planet, we can apply to the moon 240,000 miles away."

To take a virtual tour of the International Space Station and learn more about the current mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/station


To find out how to see the station from your own backyard, visit:

http://www.spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings
Read more!

Are you ready for a just-in spacecraft result that will blow your mind?

The Cassini spacecraft recorded the jumbled icescape near Enceladus's south pole with a resolution of just 40 feet (12 m) per pixel. This portion of a much larger mosaic is about 2 miles (3 km) wide.

NASA / JPL / Space Science Inst.

Have a close look at this image. It's one of many ultra-high-resolution images of Saturn's moon Enceladus (near its south pole, to be precise) taken by the Cassini spacecraft a few days ago, on October 31st.

This is just a small snippet (about 1%) of the full image mosaic, which measures 2,531 by 2,376 pixels. What's shown here is a swatch of icy terrain about 2 miles (3 km) on a side. The smallest details are just 40 feet (12 m) across — about the size of a house. It's the eyeball view you'd get from an altitude of about 12 miles (20 km).
If I were to track down Saturn in the predawn sky from my light-polluted backyard, glimpsing 12th-magnitude Enceladus would be a real challenge. But, thanks to Cassini's Imaging Science System ("cameras" for short), with a few mouse clicks I can achieve a virtual magnification of 75,000,000× — and no Barlow is needed!

The spacecraft took this view and others just after passing within 107 miles (171 km) of Enceladus. That's close — too close in some respects. We've all had the problem of trying to photograph the scenery from a fast-moving car, and Cassini's images would likewise have been badly smeared were it not for a "skeet-shoot" technique first tried last August. Essentially, the spacecraft slews its cameras as fast as it can to track the icy moonscape whizzing by. As you can see, it worked really, really well.

So kudos to the Cassini flight team for providing this Halloween treat. You can get the encounter's play-by-play at ciclops.org, the website maintained by ISS principal investigator Carolyn Porco and her team.

Cassini's next brush with Enceladus won't occur until this time next year. And by then, as Porco notes in her NASA blog, the Sun will be slowly setting on the south polar terrain. "So take your fill of this fabulous place now," she writes, "because it will be a very, very long time before you see it like this again."

By the way, Cassini had another brush with Enceladus back on October 9th. That one was incredibly close — just 15 miles (25 km) from the surface! — and it carried the spacecraft right through the icy plumes rising from the eight geysers concentrated near the moon's south pole. Some instruments should have determined what's in those plumes, but for now their science teams are keeping mum on what they've learned. Stay tuned!

Posted by Kelly Beatty, http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/newsblog/33840874.html Read more!

Chandrayaan-1, India’s first unmanned spacecraft mission to moon, entered lunar orbit today (November 8, 2008). This is the first time that an Indian built spacecraft has broken away from the Earth’s gravitational field and reached the moon. This historic event occurred following the firing of Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft’s liquid engine at 16:51 IST for a duration of 817 seconds. The highly complex ‘lunar orbit insertion manoeuvre’ was performed from Chandrayaan-1 Spacecraft Control Centre of ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network at Bangalore.

Indian Deep Space Network (IDSN) at Byalalu supported the crucial task of transmitting commands and continuously monitoring this vital event with two dish antennas, one measuring 18 m and the other 32 m.

Chandrayaan-1’s liquid engine was fired when the spacecraft passed at a distance of about 500 km from the moon to reduce its velocity to enable lunar gravity to capture it into an orbit around the moon. The spacecraft is now orbiting the moon in an elliptical orbit that passes over the polar regions of the moon. The nearest point of this orbit (periselene) lies at a distance of about 504 km from the moon’s surface while the farthest point (aposelene) lies at about 7502 km. Chandrayaan-1 takes about 11 hours to go round the moon once in this orbit.

The performance of all the systems onboard Chandrayaan-1 is normal. In the coming days, the height of Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft’s orbit around the moon will be carefully reduced in steps to achieve a final polar orbit of about 100 km height from the moon’s surface. Following this, the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) of the spacecraft will be released to hit the lunar surface. Later, the other scientific instruments will be turned ON sequentially leading to the normal phase of the mission.

It may be recalled that Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was launched on October 22, 2008 by PSLV-C11 from India’s spaceport at Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) SHAR, Sriharikota. As intended, PSLV placed the spacecraft in a highly oval shaped orbit with a perigee (nearest point to Earth) of 255 km and an apogee (farthest point to Earth) of 22,860 km. In the past two weeks, the liquid engine of Chandrayaan-1 has been successfully fired five times at opportune moments to increase the apogee height, first to 37,900 km, then to 74,715 km, later to 164,600 km, after that to 267,000 km and finally to 380,000km, as planned. During this period, the Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC), one of the eleven payloads (scientific instruments) of the spacecraft, was successfully operated twice to take the pictures, first of the Earth, and then moon.

With today’s successful manoeuvre, India becomes the fifth country to send a spacecraft to Moon. The other countries, which have sent spacecraft to Moon, are the United States, former Soviet Union, Japan and China. Besides, the European Space Agency (ESA), a consortium of 17 countries, has also sent a spacecraft to moon. Read more!