Tag: lander (page 3 of 3)

Amazon, Google, IBM & Microsoft Want to Store Your Genome

November 7, 2014 / / 0 Comments


Excerpt from  technologyreview.com


By Antonio Regalado

 For $25 a year, Google will keep a copy of any genome in the cloud.

Google is approaching hospitals and universities with a new pitch. Have genomes? Store them with us.

The search giant’s first product for the DNA age is Google Genomics, a cloud computing service that it launched last March but went mostly unnoticed amid a barrage of high profile R&D announcements from Google...

Google Genomics could prove more significant than any of these moonshots. Connecting and comparing genomes by the thousands, and soon by the millions, is what’s going to propel medical discoveries for the next decade. The question of who will store the data is already a point of growing competition between Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft.

Google began work on Google Genomics 18 months ago, meeting with scientists and building an interface, or API, that lets them move DNA data into its server farms and do experiments there using the same database technology that indexes the Web and tracks billions of Internet users.

This flow of data is smaller than what is routinely handled by large Internet companies (over two months, Broad will produce the equivalent of what gets uploaded to YouTube in one day) but it exceeds anything biologists have dealt with. That’s now prompting a wide effort to store and access data at central locations, often commercial ones. The National Cancer Institute said last month that it would pay $19 million to move copies of the 2.6 petabyte Cancer Genome Atlas into the cloud. Copies of the data, from several thousand cancer patients, will reside both at Google Genomics and in Amazon’s data centers.

The idea is to create “cancer genome clouds” where scientists can share information and quickly run virtual experiments as easily as a Web search, says Sheila Reynolds, a research scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. “Not everyone has the ability to download a petabyte of data, or has the computing power to work on it,” she says.

Also speeding the move of DNA data to the cloud has been a yearlong price war between Google and Amazon. Google says it now charges about $25 a year to store a genome, and more to do computations on it. Scientific raw data representing a single person’s genome is about 100 gigabytes in size, although a polished version of a person’s genetic code is far smaller, less than a gigabyte. That would cost only $0.25 cents a year.


The bigger point, he says, is that medicine will soon rely on a kind of global Internet-of-DNA which doctors will be able to search. “Our bird’s eye view is that if I were to get lung cancer in the future, doctors are going to sequence my genome and my tumor’s genome, and then query them against a database of 50 million other genomes,” he says. “The result will be ‘Hey, here’s the drug that will work best for you.’ ”


At Google, Glazer says he began working on Google Genomics as it became clear that biology was going to move from “artisanal to factory-scale data production.” He started by teaching himself genetics, taking an online class, Introduction to Biology, taught by Broad’s chief, Eric Lander. He also got his genome sequenced and put it on Google’s cloud.

Glazer wouldn’t say how large Google Genomics is or how many customers it has now, but at least 3,500 genomes from public projects are already stored on Google’s servers. He also says there’s no link, as of yet, between Google’s cloud and its more speculative efforts in health care, like the company Google started this year, called Calico, to investigate how to extend human lifespans. “What connects them is just a growing realization that technology can advance the state of the art in life sciences,” says Glazer.

Datta says some Stanford scientists have started using a Google database system, BigQuery, that Glazer’s team made compatible with genome data. It was developed to analyze large databases of spam, web documents, or of consumer purchases. But it can also quickly perform the very large experiments comparing thousands, or tens of thousands, of people’s genomes that researchers want to try. “Sometimes they want to do crazy things, and you need scale to do that,” says Datta. “It can handle the scale genetics can bring, so it’s the right technology for a new problem.”

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Rosetta readies for its close rendezvous with a comet ~ Video

October 27, 2014 / / 0 Comments






sciencenews.org

Very soon, on November 12, a spacecraft called Rosetta will sidle up to a comet, steady itself and drop a 100-kilogram robotic lander toward the hunk of rock, dust and ice. The lander, named Philae, will drift through space, tugged only slightly by the gravity of the comet, commonly called 67P. Mission scientists will be holding their breath for what could be several anxiety-filled hours to see if Philae lands where and how it’s supposed to.

The exercise — the first attempt to set a lander on a comet — is as nerve-racking as landing on Mars or the moon, with some added challenges. Comets and other small space rocks have much less gravity than planets or moons, which is why it will take Philae close to seven hours to float to comet 67P’s surface. Then there’s the comet’s speed: Rosetta will drop the lander toward 67P as the comet shoots through the solar system at 55,000 kilometers per hour.

Add to that a comet's unpredictable nature: At any moment and without warning, 67P might spew out jets of gas and dust. Such eruptions could blow the spacecraft off course or skew the lander’s trajectory so it hits a boulder or misses its mark.

Early in the mission, scientists estimated that Philae had a 70 to 75 percent chance of successfully touching down on the comet, officially known as 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. They made that prediction when they thought the comet was shaped like a potato. In July, Rosetta began sending pictures of 67P, indicating it looks more like a rubber duck — two masses connected by a thin neck. The new shape adds a bit more uncertainty to Philae sticking its landing.


The potential payoff of this mission is worth the hazards and the nail-biting, says Matt Taylor, Rosetta’s project scientist at the European Space Agency’s Science and Technology Center in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. Comets, along with asteroids, are thought to be the oldest, most pristine relics of the early solar system. We can’t go back billions of years to the birth of the sun, Taylor says, so exploring comets and asteroids may be the best option for learning how the solar system evolved. Studying their geology and chemistry could give clues to how the planets became what they are today and whether comets brought water and other ingredients for life to Earth.

Cometary close-up

Rosetta’s rendezvous with the comet, which is currently traveling between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, has been a long time coming. The mission was first conceived in the late 1970s. By late 2002, when ESA was preparing to finally launch Rosetta, disaster struck. As part of a separate mission, the same type of rocket that was set to carry Rosetta exploded three minutes after liftoff. That rocket failure delayed Rosetta’s launch, closing the window to the original target of the mission, 46P/Wirtanen. Over the next few months, scientists scrambled to find another comet that would be at the right place in the solar system at the right time. 67P fit the bill.

Rosetta finally launched in 2004. Ten years later, on August 6, the spacecraft began orbiting 67P, and its 11 instruments started scrutinizing myriad characteristics of the comet (SN: 9/6/14, p. 8). Those instruments, plus the cameras and sensors on the Philae lander, are designed to map 67P, determine what it’s made of and observe how its chemistry might change as it swings around the sun.
As 67P approaches the sun, its ice transforms directly to water vapor and other gases, which, along with dust, shoot outward. These jets collide with other particles from the sun to form two tails. Unlike Halley’s comet and its showy run in 1986, 67P’s tails won’t be visible to the naked eye. But Rosetta will have a front-row seat on the action. As the comet’s tails grow, Rosetta will give scientists their most detailed look at a comet and the changes it goes through.

Already, Rosetta’s high-resolution photos have shown scientists that 67P looks different than other comets explored with spacecraft. It may even be two comets merged together with a surface that’s a mountain climber’s dream.

“The team really hit the jackpot with this comet,” says Donald Brownlee, a planetary scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Seeing a duck-shaped comet with house-sized boulders, craggy craters and 150-meter-high cliffs “really knocks your socks off,” he says. The bath-toy shape and rugged surface indicate that the comet has had an interesting life history, one scientists are eager to learn about. But first, they’ve got to get their instruments down to the comet’s surface.

“This very particular shape of the comet doesn’t make it easy to land,” Philae project manager Stephan Ulamec of the German Aerospace Center in Cologne said at a September 15 news conference. But the team has confirmed that it will attempt to set the lander down in November on a sliver of flat land on 67P’s small lobe, or head. The spot is flanked by cliffs, crevices and a few boulders.

It is also covered in carbon-rich dust, according to Rosetta’s measurements, which makes mission scientists extremely happy with the site, says lead lander scientist Jean-Pierre Bibring of the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France. The lander, he explains, can immediately start testing the comet’s surface and drill deeper to look for traces of ice and complex carbon-based compounds, which are among the major requirements for life.

Ice and certain complex carbon compounds are also some of the characteristics thought to distinguish comets from asteroids, the other early inhabitants of the solar system.

Rethinking space rocks


Distinctions blur Comets and asteroids seem to be different at first glance. But more detailed descriptions from space missions such as Rosetta suggest that the two types of space rocks may have more in common than scientists initially thought.
Source: NASA

“At first glance, comets are fundamentally different from asteroids, the way ice cream is different from a cookie,” says NASA scientist Claudia Alexander, based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Most asteroids appear to be made of rocky materials and no water. Comets, however, seem to be icier. These distinctions are thought to explain where comets and asteroids originated as the solar system formed.Scientists think that around 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system started to form as a giant cloud of gas and dust collapsed inward and coalesced. Most of the material got pulled into the center of the cloud to form the sun. The rest condensed into a handful of huge rocks that became planets plus smaller bodies that became comets and asteroids.

In that scenario, asteroids probably formed between Mars and Jupiter, where it was too hot for water and other ices to survive. Comets, on the other hand, probably condensed farther out in this embryonic cloud where it was considerably cooler and ice could persist and start to attach to clumps of gas and dust.

If comets formed far out in the Kuiper belt or Oort cloud, where there was a lot more ice, they could have ferried a lot more water to Earth than did asteroids from the inner solar system.

“That’s the conventional wisdom,” says Alexander, a leader of the U.S. arm of Rosetta. NASA contributed electronics and three instruments to the mission; at least one of these instruments will look at 67P’s water.

Rosetta and Philae will give scientists a chance to virtually “get their hands on” the comet’s ice, says Alexander. That could help them figure out pretty quickly whether comets like 67P brought water to Earth billions of years ago.

The first question: What type of water is on 67P? If it is the same H2O that makes up Earth’s oceans, then perhaps 67P and similar comets brought that water to Earth. But if 67P, like most comets studied so far, contains a larger amount of the heavy hydrogen isotope called deuterium than does water found on Earth, then the idea that comets brought most of the water here is less likely.

That opens the door for the paradoxical idea that asteroids were the main source of our planet’s water. Scientists have recently found at least one asteroid with water. For example, the asteroid Ceres (actually large enough to be considered a dwarf planet) orbits the sun on a path between Mars and Jupiter, but it spouts off water vapor, sort of like a comet.

To confuse matters further, Rosetta’s observations indicate that 67P has characteristics of an asteroid. The comet, for example, isn’t covered in surface ice. Instead, its water appears to be stored deeper within its core.

These observations hint that comets and asteroids aren’t as radically different as scientists had thought. Instead, they may fall on a continuum with rocky, dry asteroids on one end, really icy comets on the other and everything else in between, Alexander says.

Getting warmer

When a comet gets close to the sun, a lot of its ice turns to vapor, and dust comes shooting out of its core. The comets with shorter orbits around the sun — 67P takes a brief 6.5 years — could eventually lose all of their ice and vapor leaving only rock and dust. Of course, scientists can’t really understand the long-term fate of 67P and other comets until they figure out the chemistry of what happens as a comet swings close to the sun on its elliptical orbit.
“We have theories about what happens to a comet as it gets closer and then moves away from the sun, but we do not understand how a comet really works,” says retired ESA scientist Gerhard Schwehm, one of the original leaders of the Rosetta mission.

That’s because scientists have never been able to stay with one for very long. All the previous comet missions have been flybys, lasting a few hours. If Philae sticks its November landing, it could work on the surface of 67P until March 2015, when the sun’s heat will become too hot for the lander to function. Rosetta will stay with 67P through August, when the comet reaches its closest point to the sun at a distance of 185 million kilometers. But Rosetta won’t give up there. It will continue orbiting the comet until at least December 2015.

A MOUNTAIN OF A COMET 67P is average in size when it comes to icy space rocks. Compared with human-made structures, however, it’s a behemoth, miniaturizing several iconic world wonders and rivaling the height of many of Earth’s famous mountains.
Source: ESA Credit: NAVCAM/Rosetta/ESA, adapted by M. Atarod

Spending a year or more with 67P will give scientists a chance to track how the sun’s heat changes the comet’s composition over time. To do this, Philae will first identify the elements and compounds that make up the comet’s surface. These materials may have survived unchanged for billions of years and could give scientists clues to what materials were available when the solar system started to form.Scientists are most interested in molecules containing carbon and hydrogen (SN: 11/1/14, p. 7), which could have existed even before the birth of the solar system. Investigators are also looking for amino acids and other building blocks of life that may have been brought to Earth by comets. Past missions have found both kinds of materials on comets before (see sidebar above, “Comets visited by spacecraft”). If they exist on 67P, they could add more evidence for scientists’ ideas that comets delivered the ingredients for life to Earth.

However, because scientists have never studied a comet while it faces the sun’s intense heat, they cannot be sure if these molecules are primordial or if they formed later, after being cooked by the sun. There are hints to support both origin stories. Rosetta’s observations could tell scientists if some of the molecules they see on the comet predate the solar system, or if they are created in reactions from the sun’s heat.

The comet’s chemistry could also have implications for places far beyond Earth, says Edward Young, a geochemist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Establishing the link between these primitive building blocks of planets and our own planet will go a long way toward helping us understand whether rocky planets with at least as much water as Earth are the norm, or not,” he says.
That’s a lofty goal, one that hinges on a spectacular landing and the final 14 months of Rosetta’s 10-year voyage.




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Mysterious Mars ~ Why have so many Mars missions ended in failure?

October 1, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Mars as imaged by the Hubble telescopeWith so many failures of U.S. as well as Russian missions sent to Mars, one begins to wonder if there is another cause at the root of these mission ending failures other than technical glitches. Most intriguing are...

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European Spacecraft to Make Historic Comet Landing on November 12th, 2014

September 30, 2014 / / 0 Comments


Europe Unveils Comet Landing Site for Historic Rosetta Mission

 One of the boldest and most dramatic maneuvers in the history of spaceflight is just six weeks away.


On Nov. 12, the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe will try to drop a robotic lander onto the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which Rosetta has been orbiting since early August. No spacecraft has ever attempted a soft landing on a comet before.

The current plan calls for the lander, named Philae, to come down at a location on Comet 67P that the mission team has dubbed Site J.

"Site J was chosen unanimously over four other candidate sites as the primary landing site because the majority of terrain within a square kilometer [0.4 square miles] area has slopes of less than 30 degrees relative to the local vertical and because there are relatively few large boulders," European Space Agency (ESA) officials said in a statement.

"The area also receives sufficient daily illumination to recharge Philae and continue surface science operations beyond the initial 64-hour battery-powered phase," they added.

If all goes according to plan, Rosetta will deploy Philae at 4:35 a.m. EDT (0835 GMT) on Nov. 12, at a distance of 14 miles (22.5 km) from the comet. Philae will spiral down slowly toward 67P, eventually securing itself to the surface with harpoons at Site J around 11:30 a.m. EDT (1530 GMT) that same day.

European Spacecraft to Make Historic Comet Landing on Nov. 12
This image from Europe's Rosetta spacecraft shows the mission's planned landing site on Comet 67P/Churyum

Confirmation of the historic maneuver's success or failure will come 28 minutes and 20 seconds later — the amount of time it takes for signals to travel from Rosetta to its controllers here on the ground.It's also possible that Philae could touch down at a backup location called Site C, ESA officials said. Final confirmation of the landing plan will come on Oct. 14, after a formal review of data gathered by the Rosetta mothership. ESA will also launch a public competition to name Philae's landing site on that date.

The $1.7 billion (1.3 billion euros) Rosetta mission blasted off in March 2004 and finally arrived in orbit around Comet 67P on Aug. 6 of this year. The Rosetta orbiter is studying the 2.5-mile-wide (4 km) comet with 11 different science instruments, and Philae will contribute by photographing 67P's surface and collecting and analyzing samples.

Comet 67P, which takes 6.5 years to complete one lap around the sun, is now getting closer and closer to our star. Rosetta and Philae will continue to observe the comet and study how it changes as it warms up on its trek through the inner solar system.

The goal is to better understand the composition and behavior of comets, which are remnants from the solar system's formation 4.6 billion years ago, ESA officials have said. Rosetta is expected to continue gathering data through December 2015.

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Rosetta’s Comet Releasing Jets of Water

September 17, 2014 / / 0 Comments

This artist's impression shows the Rosetta orbiter at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The image is not to scale. Image Credit: ESA/ATG Medialabjpl.nasa.govComet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is releasing the Earthly equivalent of two glasses of water i...

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European spacecraft snaps selfie with comet in background

September 11, 2014 / / 0 Comments




csmonitor.com

The European Space Agency released on Wednesday a photo with a spectacular view: the Rosetta spacecraft front and center, with Comet 67P in the background.

Spacecraft “selfies” are always a treat and this one is doubly awesome: taken by the Philae lander piggybacked onto ESA’s Rosetta, it shows one of the spacecraft’s 14-meter-long (46-foot) solar arrays glinting with reflected sunlight while off in the distance is the double-lobed nucleus of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko!...

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The great trek to catch a comet

September 7, 2014 / / 0 Comments


Copy of nt Rosetta - Artist's impression of Philae lander_SUN_E1
Rosetta: Artist's impression of the Philae lander, 2013 An artist's impression of the Philae lander being sent down to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov Gerasimenko in November.Picture: ESA/J.Huart
iol.co.za

Cape Town - Scientists have taken another key step in the unfolding drama of what is being hailed as one of the great scientific achievements of all time: sending a spacecraft to catch a comet and land a probe on its surface as the comet continues its headlong rush towards the Sun.
The spacecraft Rosetta caught Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko earlier this month and will send its lander, Philae, down on to the comet’s icy surface on November 11 – if everything keeps going according to plan.
This week, less than three weeks after Rosetta arrived at the comet after a mind-boggling journey of 10 years, five months and four days in which it looped around the Sun five times and clocked 6.4 billion kilometres, mission controllers identified five candidate landing sites after extensive but rapid mapping of the comet.
The comet, which some observers suggest is shaped like a duck with two big sections joined by a narrow neck – technically, it has a “bi-lobate” form – has a nucleus about 4km across and each elliptical landing site covers about 1km2.
“Choosing the right landing site is a complex process,” said the European Space Agency (ESA), which is the lead player in the Rosetta mission that is planned to achieve several historic scientific firsts.
“That site must balance the technical needs of the orbiter and lander during all phases of the separation, descent and landing, and during operations on the surface with the scientific requirements of the 10 instruments on Philae.”
There have been previous comet fly-bys to collect data, but Rosetta will be the first to orbit and track a comet at close range before, during and after perihelion – the point in the comet’s orbit at which it is nearest the sun, in August next year, as well as being the first to send a lander on to a comet (if successful).
It will study the comet at close range “as it transforms from a quiet nugget of ice and rock, frozen solid by years spent in deep space, to a sun-warmed dynamo spewing jets of gas and dust into a magnificently evolving tail”, Dr Tony Phillips, production editor of Nasa Science News, said earlier this year.
Rosetta was launched on its 11-year journey by an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou in French Guiana in March 2004. During its long, lonely journey, it travelled around the Sun five times and picked up energy during three gravity-assist fly-bys of Earth and one of Mars, in order to line it up with its rendezvous point with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
In June 2011, for the coldest leg of its mission as it travelled out towards the orbit of Jupiter, Rosetta was put into a record 957 days of deep space hibernation mode.
Then, with its destination finally in sight – but still 9 million kilometres away – it was “woken” on January 20 this year and its cameras turned on and its 11 science instruments and 10 lander instruments were reactivated and readied for science observations.
Ten orbital correction manoeuvres were carried out between May 7 and August 6 when it arrived at the comet, reducing the spacecraft’s velocity with respect to the comet from 775 metres per second to 1 m/s, equivalent to walking pace, the ESA said.
“Each of these manoeuvres was critical: if any had failed, no rendezvous would have been possible.”
When the odd couple paired up, they were 405 million kilometres from Earth, about halfway between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars, and were rushing towards the inner solar system at nearly 55 000 km/h, the ESA said.
Scientists calculated that the average temperature of the comet – comprising rock and ice; comets are often described as “dirty snowballs – to be about -70°C.
This week, Stephan Ulamec, Philae lander manager at the German Aerospace Centre in Cologne, said it was the first time landing sites on a comet had been considered.
“The candidate sites that we want to follow up for further analysis are thought to be technically feasible on the basis of a preliminary analysis of flight dynamics and other key issues.
“For example, they all provide at least six hours of daylight per comet rotation and offer some flat terrain.
“Of course, every site has the potential for unique scientific discoveries.”
For each possible landing zone, important questions had to be asked, the ESA said. Will the lander be able to maintain regular communications with Rosetta? How common are surface hazards such as large boulders, deep crevasses or steep slopes? Is there sufficient illumination for scientific operations and enough sunlight to recharge the lander’s batteries beyond its initial 64-hour lifetime without causing overheating?
“The process of selecting a landing site is extremely complex and dynamic; as we get closer to the comet, we will see more and more details, which will influence the final decision on where and when we can land,” said Fred Jansen, Rosetta’s mission manager from the ESA’s Science and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, The Netherlands.
“We had to complete our preliminary analysis on candidate sites very quickly after arriving at the comet, and now we have just a few more weeks to determine the primary site. The clock is ticking and we now have to meet the challenge to pick the best possible landing site.”
Rosetta is being manoeuvred to within just 50km of the comet to allow a more detailed study of the proposed landing sites, and the final selection is likely to be taken by September 14.
The landing of Philae is expected to take place in mid-November when the comet is about 450 million kilometres from the Sun, the ESA said.
“This will be before activity on the comet reaches levels that might jeopardise the safe and accurate deployment of Philae to the comet’s surface, and before surface material is modified by this cometary activity.”
Sylvain Lodiot, the ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft operations manager, said: “Arriving at the comet is really only just the beginning of an even bigger adventure, with greater challenges still to come as we learn how to operate in this uncharted environment, start to orbit and, eventually, land.”
The mission is due to finally shut down at the end of next year.
l Rosetta is an ESA mission with contributions from its member states and Nasa.

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NASA’s Next Mars Lander Will Peer Deep Into Red Planet’s History: Here’s How

August 18, 2014 / / 0 Comments

NASA's new InSight Mars Lander



By Leonard David 
space.com



A still from an animation shows NASA's new InSight Mars Lander lowering a drill onto Mars to analyze …
DENVER — NASA's next Mars lander, now under construction, will probe the inner workings and early stages of the Red Planet's development billions of years ago.
The InSight mission (short for Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport), a NASA Discovery Program spacecraft, is built to respond to highly focused scientific goals.
"Things are coming together," said Stu Spath, InSight program manager here at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, the aerospace firm building the Mars spacecraft for its 2016 liftoff. [The Boldest Mars Missions in History]

Powered descent

In many ways, InSight is a technological kissing cousin to the NASA Phoenix Mars Lander of 2008, which was equipped to investigate ice and soil on Mars's far-northern region.
InSight's will mirror the Phoenix mission in its blistering entry into the Martian atmosphere; parachute deployment; self-controlled, powered descent; and gentle meeting with the planet's surface on three outstretched landing legs.
"The lander structurally looks extremely similar to Phoenix," Spath told Space.com. However the new craft's internal electronics, such as its power distribution unit and command and data handling hardware, have been updated.
InSight's avionics draw from other spacecraft built by Lockheed Martin, Spath said. Specifically, it takes cues from the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission (MAVEN) en route to the Red Planet, the Juno craft headed for Jupiter, and the now-completed twin Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission probes that were sent to the moon.
 
NASA's Next Mars Lander Will Peer Deep Into Red …
NASA's InSight lander mission would add to the number of successful touchdowns on the Red Plan…

Two chief instruments

The InSight mission will last a Mars year, or roughly two Earth years. That is 630 days longer than the Phoenix mission lasted, which means that the lander will have to endure a wider range of environmental conditions on the Martian landscape, Spath said.
InSight will study a different aspect of planetary history with instruments never previously used on Mars, Spath said.
The Mars lander's scientific payload consists of two chief instruments:
  • The Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure provided by the French Space Agency.
  • A Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package provided by the German Space Agency.
Additionally, the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment (RISE), led by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), will use the lander's X-band radio system to make ultra-precise measurements of planetary rotation.
Wind and temperature sensors from Spain's Centro de Astrobiologia and a pressure sensor will monitor weather at the landing site. A lander magnetometer will measure magnetic disturbances caused by the Martian ionosphere.

Come together

"It is very exciting, seeing the flight hardware start to come together," said Bruce Banerdt, the principal investigator for the InSight mission to Mars at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
 
NASA's Next Mars Lander Will Peer Deep Into Red …
NASA's InSight lander mission would add to the number of successful touchdowns on the Red Planet…
"At the same time, this is a very nerve-wracking period in the project, as testing of our instruments and spacecraft subsystems uncover subtle design and manufacturing problems that inevitably occur, and that must be corrected in the short time, just over one and a half years, before launch," Banerdt told Space.com via email.
The cost of the InSight mission, excluding the launch vehicle and related services, is capped at $425 million in 2010 dollars.

California to Mars

An upcoming milestone for the project, in aerospace lingo, is Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations (ATLO), Spath said. That evaluation begins in early November. Next June, the InSight spacecraft will face a suite of critical tests, with ship and shoot dates in December of 2015 and March of 2016, respectively, Spath said.
After those tests, InSight won't see a speedy sendoff from Florida.
Rather, the lander will travel to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket will give the craft a boost. This will be the first interplanetary mission ever to launch from California — although in 1994, the joint Ballistic Missile Defense Organization/NASA Clementine spacecraft that studied the moon and an asteroid headed off from that launch area. 
Once Mars-bound, InSight will fly a quick trip. After roughly 6.5 months in transit, the craft will stick a landing in the southern Elysium region of Mars in September 2016.
 
InSight mission logo.
The specific touchdown zone is still under discussion, with Mars researchers making use of super-sharp imagery from the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) to decide InSight's precise destination.

Work space

In August of last year, researchers trimmed the number of candidate landing sites for InSight from 22 down to four.
JPL's Banerdt said that NASA has a lot of HiRISE images now that largely confirm that the candidate sites are safe for landing.
NASA is looking for the same sort of landing features as Phoenix used. "We're using the same rock-abundance measurements that we used on Phoenix. Same with the slope requirements," Spath said. "So not too sloped, not too rocky, then it's fine to land and do the science there."
Once down on Mars, after a few days of spacecraft checkout, the lander will begin compiling pictures of the "work space," the available terrain suitable for setting up scientific equipment.
Then InSight's real legwork begins: making use of the lander's robotic arm.
 
NASA's Next Mars Lander Will Peer Deep Into Red …
The Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) spacecraft…
"The robotic arm is critical to the success of the mission," said Spath. That camera-equipped arm will pick up the seismic and heat flow hardware from the lander's topside deck, then set it on the Martian surface.

Mars gets hammered

The first measurement tool to be placed on the Martian surface will be the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) device.
"It's a top priority. We'll pick a nice, level spot. It has a self-leveling mechanism inside, but we want to get it on a flat area," Spath said. Following seismometer checkout, the lander will place a JPL-built wind and thermal shield over the device to protect it from the environment.
"We don't want the seismometer buffeting in the wind," Spath said. Such wind effects would make the device falsely record quakes or even meteorite hits on the Martian surface.
Then, the lander's robot arm will deploy the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3). This device consists of a so-called "mole" that will spend a few weeks hammering itself 10 to 16 feet (3 to 5 meters) deep into Martian terrain. [Quiz: Mars Myths and Misconceptions]
"We're allocated something like 30 to 40 days to drill down to the final depth," Spath said.
From there, the device will monitor heat coming from the planet's interior. The mole pulls an instrumented tether behind it, a ribbon that is equipped with temperature sensors to find out the thermal gradient in the ground — the rate of temperature change with distance. A second cable provides an electrical connection to the lander.

Mix of investigations

InSight will study a mix of Red Planet vital signs, including seismic, geodetic and thermal features. That will help scientists characterize the Martian crust and mantle, as well as the properties of the Martian core.
But the findings will shed light on more than just the Red Planet, Spath said.
"Even though we're going to Mars, this is not a Mars mission … as much as it is a terrestrial planet mission," Spath said. "This mission is applicable to Mercury, Venus, Earth, the moon and Mars.”
Mars is big enough to have undergone most of the early processes that fundamentally shaped the terrestrial bodies in the solar system, yet small enough in stature to have retained the signature of those processes for the next 4 billion years, signs that Earth has lost.
Indeed, in that sweet-spot sense, InSight is a mission to a "Goldilocks" planet, Spath said. "It"s a world not too big, not too small. It's just right."

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See Rosetta’s Comet Up Close & in Stunning 3-D

August 15, 2014 / / 0 Comments



news.discovery.com

On Aug. 6, 2014, the European Space Agency’s “comet chaser” Rosetta arrived at 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko after a decade of travel across the inner solar system. Now in the process of maneuvering into orbit around 67P’s 2.5 mile (4 kilometer) wide nucleus (via a series of triangular spiraling passes) Rosetta is returning some incredible images, the most recent showing the comet from a mere 65 miles (104 kilometers) away… and in 3D!

Captured by Rosetta’s OSIRIS (Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System) instrument on Aug. 7, the image above reveals some of 67P’s rugged surface around the “neck” joining the two sections of the contact binary comet. Check out that giant landslide and the cluster of building-sized boulders!
Below is a 3D anaglyph made from that same OSIRIS images and another one acquired 17 minutes earlier, creating a stereo version that is viewable with standard red and blue paper glasses.


3D glasses needed to view this image in 3D
Although images of 67P/C-G have been acquired by Rosetta’s NAVCAM more recently than Aug. 7, these OSIRIS NAC images have much better resolution — and the pictures will only get better as Rosetta moves closer to the comet. It’s truly amazing to be able to witness the exploration of another member of our solar system!

Rosetta and its Philae lander, which will be deployed to the comet’s surface in November, will stay with 67P/C-G as it travels toward the sun, evolving from an asteroid-like hunk of icy rubble to a tail-sprouting comet as it approaches. It will make its closest pass (perihelion) on Aug. 13, 2015, coming within 186 million km of the sun (1.24 AU) before heading back out past the orbit of Jupiter.

 
 
 
 


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