Space
Mars, which is, according to the re-
port, “the ultimate destination for
human exploration”.
NASA
Kip Hodges, director of Earth and
Space Exploration at Arizona State
University, welcomes the committee’s
recognition that manned missions
are useful in exploring the solar system. “There are many things we can
do with robotic assets,” he says. “But
there are many things that humans
can do that robots can not do – and
may not be able to do.” Hodges also
hopes that any flexible option will include manned landings on the Moon
and also the Martian moons, where
astronauts could command robotic
instruments on the Martian surface in
real time. “There is a great tactical
advantage to exploring the surface of
Mars from a moon,” he says.
by the mid-2020s, but one would deorbit the ISS, while the other would
let it remain in position until 2020.
The final option is a “flexible path”
that would start with sending astronauts on manned lunar and Martian
fly-bys by 2020 and the option to visit
Lagrange points and asteroids. The
path would also include possible
rendezvous with Mars’s two moons
Phobos and Deimos or a human return to the Moon by the late 2020s.
All these three options would be a
preparation for a manned mission to
The committee will soon present a
final report to the Obama Administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and NASA.
With the Administration due to make
its request to Congress in February for
the 2011 financial year, both parties
will have to react fast to the recommendations. NASA Administrator
Charles Bolden has said the agency
will work with the OSTP to review and
evaluate the options put forth by the
committee. “Ultimately, of course,
the president will make the final decision,” says Bolden.
Peter Gwynne
Boston, MA
Panel slams NASA’s lunar vision
The US manned spaceflight programme is on an “unsustainable trajectory” according to a committee
reviewing the country’s ambitious
plans to send astronauts to the Moon
and Mars. The committee, chaired by
former Lockheed Martin chief executive Norman Augustine, asserts in
a report issued last month that sending astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit
will require NASA’s budget to be increased by $3bn a year. The Augustine report adds that even with extra
funding, NASA should try to collaborate with other countries and exploit commercial launch services.
The report puts forward five options for future US manned spaceflight. Two involve holding the space
agency’s annual budget at the currently proposed limits. These would
force NASA to either deorbit the
International Space Station in 2016
and wait for a manned lunar lander
until the 2030s, or abandon plans for a
Moon lander and instead develop
commercial services to take crews into
low-Earth orbit.
The other three options all require
an extra $3bn in annual funding. Two
would return astronauts to the Moon
Guided tour
The Augustine
committee examine
NASA’s Michoud
Assembly Facility in
New Orleans.
India analyses loss of lunar orbiter
A failure-analysis committee is ex-
pected to focus on various anomalies,
including temperature swings owing
to the harsh lunar environment, that
may have contributed to a series of
minor failures prior to the communi-
cation loss. Each instrument on the
orbiter had its own characteristic op-
erating temperature, varying from
– 17 to 40 °C, but in November 2008,
the satellite’s temperature soared to
50 °C. Mission specialists solved the
problem by re-orienting the satellite,
but according to T K Alex, head of the
ISRO Satellite Centre, one of the
computers in the control unit failed
soon afterwards.
A sequence of malfunctions followed, including a device used to fix
the spacecraft’s direction by locking
the orientation of the on-board gyroscope with respect to a distant star. An
improvized substitute technique to
determine the spacecraft’s attitude
required frequent orbit corrections,
so the satellite was raised to a higher,
more stable orbit on 19 May. This
After a flawless launch last year,
Chandrayaan- 1, India’s first lunar
orbiter, has come to a disappointing
end. In the early hours of 29 August,
the tracking network of the Indian
Space Research Organization (ISRO)
lost its link with the satellite, just
312 days into a planned two-year mission. However, ISRO scientists have
concluded that the 11 onboard experiments had “largely met their objectives of studying the Moon from
different perspectives”.
ISRO
Down and out
Chandrayaan- 1 –
India’s first mission
to the Moon – has
failed halfway
through its two-year programme.
higher orbit meant a loss of resolution
in imaging but an increased speed of
data collection. The final, abrupt, loss
of radio contact on 29 August may
have been due to the failure of the
back-up control unit, Alex speculates.
On 20 August, Chandrayaan- 1 attempted a first-ever coordinated
“bistatic radar” experiment with
NASA’s recently launched Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). The
plan was for the radars on both satellites to point simultaneously at the
Moon’s permanently shadowed Erlanger Crater and receive reflected
radio waves from different angles
and reveal the presence of ice near
the lunar north pole. But ISRO and
NASA scientists disagree over why
the attempt failed, with NASA ascribing it to the inability of the Indian
craft’s radar to point accurately at the
crater because of more-than-anti-cipated gyroscopic drift. The ISRO
scientists, however, say that the tricky
manoeuvres were achieved as planned but that the LRO had signal-reception problems.
Ramaseshan Ramachandran
New Delhi
