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ISS crew members usually conduct experiments associated with the development of vaccines. Why develop a vaccine in space?
Because the lack of gravity makes it far easier to grow protein crystals. Pharmaceutical researchers rely on protein crystallization, the process by which protein molecules—the building blocks of both viruses and vaccines—are made to form crystals, solids in which the various atomic components are arranged in regular, repeating patterns. Once the proteins crystallize, their structural properties can be carefully scrutinized using X-ray crystallography. This analysis is critical because a protein’s function is dependent on its structure.
The problem is that growing protein crystals is a lot easier said than done. The more complex the protein, the harder it is to crystallize. This probably has something to do with the effect of gravity, which puts stress on the atomic structures of these complicated molecules. But in the near weightlessness of space growing protein crystals is a much simpler task. Not only is it relatively simple to crystallize proteins, but the crystals grown can be much larger—10 times larger. And space-grown crystals are typically free of clumping and other imperfections that complicate the analysis process.
The ease of crystallization isn’t the only benefit of celestial drug research. It’s also known that microbes—a key component in antibiotics—grow much more efficiently in microgravity environments. In addition, genes can be more readily spliced with foreign proteins, which has led some researchers to believe that edible vaccines could be manufactured in space: The measles vaccines of tomorrow could be delivered via potato, rather than injection.
Veteran NASA astronaut John Phillips and seasoned Russian Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev are the next crew of the International Space Station. Their six month mission is set for launch in April 2005.
Krikalev will serve as Station Commander, and Phillips is Flight Engineer and NASA International Space Station Science Officer. Designated Expedition 11, they will be on board the Station when the Space Shuttle makes its first Return to Flight mission. The Shuttle is scheduled to dock with the Space Station in May 2005. Here are their bios.
John L. Phillips
NASA Astronaut
Born April 15, 1951 in Fort Belvoir, Virginia and graduated from Scottsdale High School, Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1966; received a bachelor of science degree in mathematics and Russian from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1972; master of science degrees and a doctorate from the University of West Florida and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Phillips received a navy commission upon graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1972 and was designated a Naval Aviator in November, 1974.
After leaving the Navy in 1982, Phillips enrolled as a graduate student at UCLA. While at UCLA he carried out research involving observations by the NASA Pioneer Venus Spacecraft. From 1993 through 1996 he was Principal Investigator for the Solar Wind Plasma Experiment aboard the Ulysses Spacecraft as it executed a unique trajectory over the poles of the sun.
Phillips has logged over 4,400 flight hours and 250 carrier landings.
Selected by NASA in April 1996 he flew aboard STS-100 in 2001, logging nearly 12 days and 5 million miles in space. STS-100 crew successfully delivered and installed the Canadarm-2 Robotic Arm.
Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev
Russian Cosmonaut
Born August 27, 1958 and graduated from high school in 1975; in 1981, received mechanical engineering degree from the Leningrad Mechanical Institute, now called St. Petersburg Technical University.
He was a member of the Russian and Soviet national aerobatic flying teams and Champion of the Soviet Union in 1986. For his space flight experience, he was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, the Order of Lenin, the French title of L’Officier de la L’egion d’Honneur, and the new title of Hero of Russia. He also has been awarded the NASA Space Flight Medal (1994, 1998).
After graduation in 1981, he joined NPO Energia, the Russian industrial organization responsible for manned space flight activities. He tested space flight equipment, developed space operations methods, and participated in ground control operations.
Krikalev was selected as a cosmonaut in 1985. Krikalev flew aboard the Mir Space Station in 1988-89, 1991-92 and the International Space Station in 2000-01. He flew aboard the Shuttle on the first joint U.S.-Russian mission, STS-60 in 1994, and on the first International Space Station assembly mission, STS-88 in 1998. Krikalev has accumulated 625 days in space. At the completion of a six-month stay aboard the Station on Expedition 11, Krikalev will have spent more time in space than any other person.
The Expedition 11 backup crewmembers are astronaut Daniel Tani and cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin.
Scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder have used the technique to make observations of Saturn’s rings with tremendous clarity. Their insrtrument on the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft was pointed through the rings toward a star, Xi Ceti. The fluctuations of starlight passing through the rings provide information on the structure and dynamics of the particles within them.
The size of the ring particles varies from dust specks to mountains, with most ranging between marbles and boulders.
The Cassini observations show dramatic variations in the number of ring particles over very short distances. The particles in individual ringlets are bunched closely together, with the amount of material dropping abruptly at the ringlet edge.The sharp edges of small ringlets are especially evident in the C ring and in the so-called Cassini Division on either side of the bright B ring, Saturn’s largest ring.
The Cassini observations show that the distance between the presence and absence of orbiting material at some ring edges can be as little as 160 feet, or 50 meters, about the length of a typical commercial jetliner, he said.
The stellar occultation process also shows very high-resolution views of several density waves visible in the rings, including a previously unstudied one. Density waves are ripple-like features in the rings caused by the influence of Saturn’s moons. The density waves, which resemble a tightly wound spiral much like the groove in a phonograph record, slowly propagate away from the resonance toward the perturbing moon. The shapes of these wave peaks and troughs help scientists understand whether the ring particles are hard and bouncy, like a golf ball, or soft and less bouncy, like a snowball.
A density wave analysis by scientists involved in NASA’s Voyager 2 mission that visited Saturn in 1981 were used to determine the mass and thickness of the planet’s rings.
Since the first Station residents arrived Nov. 2, 2000, humans have lived and worked continuously in International Space Station(ISS).
Science on the Station this year was focused on future exploration, with human life science experiments taking on highest priority.
One such experiment called ADUM (Advanced Diagnostic Ultrasound in Microgravity) was used to develop the remote medical diagnostic and telemedicine capabilities that will be needed by crews on distant exploration missions. The objectives of the experiment are-
To determine accuracy of ultrasound in novel clinical conditions including: orthopedic, thoracic, and ophthalmic injury and dental/sinus infections; and to assess the ultrasound as a feasible option for monitoring in-flight bone alterations.
To determine optimal training methodologies for advanced ultrasound including CD-ROM based and remote guidance.
Another experiment, called FOOT, evaluates the exercise forces necessary to maintain muscle and bone health on long-duration missions. Wearing black Lycra "biking tights" with 20 electrodes as well as shoes fitted with insoles that measure impact forces on the bottom of the foot, astronaut Foale went through a typical 12-hour on-orbit day, the hardware measured reaction forces in his legs and feet to determine how much exercise these muscles get while in orbit.
A related experiment, called BIOPSY, studied some of the basic fundamental principles involved in the muscle atrophy that occurs during spaceflight. Crewmembers were recording their food consumption for the experiment and biopsies were taken from their calf and foot-flexing muscles before launch. Similar biopsies were again taken immediately when they returned to Earth.
World’s first solar sail spacecraft, Cosmos 1, is set for March 1, 2005 from a submerged Russian submarine in the Barents Sea
Cosmos 1 is a spacecraft propelled by sunlight. Whereas a conventional rocket is propelled by the thrust produced by its internal engine burn, a solar sail is pushed forward simply by light from the Sun. This is possible because light is made up of packets of energy known as "photons," that act like atomic particles, but with more energy. When a beam of light is pointed at a bright mirror-like surface, its photons reflect right back, just like a ball bouncing off a wall. In the process the photons transmit their momentum to the surface twice – once by the initial impact, and again by reflecting back from it. Ever so slightly, propelled by a steady stream of reflecting photons, the bright surface is pushed forward.
Once it spreads its sails the spacecraft will be 10 stories tall Its eight triangular blades are 15 meters (49 feet) in length, and have a total surface area of 600 square meters (6500 square feet).
Even with such a gigantic surface, a solar sail spacecraft will accelerate very slowly when compared to a conventional rocket. Under optimal conditions, a solar sail on an interplanetary mission would gain only 1 millimeter per second in speed every second it is pushed along by Solar radiation.
But the incomparable advantage of a solar sail is that it accelerates constantly. A rocket only burns for a few minutes, before releasing its payload and letting it cruise at a constant speed the rest of the way. A solar sail, in contrast, keeps on accelerating, and can ultimately reach speeds much greater than those of a rocket-launched craft. At an acceleration rate of 1 millimeter per second per second (20 times greater than the expected acceleration for Cosmos 1), a solar sail would increase its speed by approximately 310 kilometers per hour (195 mph) after one day, moving 7500 kilometers (4700 miles) in the process. After 12 days it will have increased its speed 3700 kilometers per hour (2300 mph).
While these speeds and distances are already substantial for interplanetary travel, they are insignificant when compared to the requirements of a journey to the stars. Given time, however, with small but constant acceleration, a solar sail spacecraft can reach any desired speed. If the acceleration diminshes due to an increasing distance from the Sun, some scientists have proposed pointing powerful laser beams at the spacecraft to propel it forward. Although such a strategy is not practicable with current technology and resources, solar sailing is nevertheless the only known technology that could someday be used for interstellar travel.
The complete Cosmos 1 project cost is under $4 million.
Samples of lunar soil, collected by Ameraican and Soviet spacecrafts, mostly represent the near-side equatorial region. The far side of the Moon and polar regions, which have a quite different geological history, were not included.
Two small American spacecraft, Clementine and Lunar Prospector, went into orbit around the Moon in 1994 and 1998, carrying a variety of remote-sensing instruments to explore the whole lunar surface. Lunar Prospector also mapped the Moon’s gravity and discovered magnetic regions. But many unanswered questions still perplex the lunar scientists.
Now it is the turn of Europeans to unravel the secrets of our natural satellite. SMART-1(Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology), Europe’s first mission to the Moon is set to scrutinise the largest crater in the Solar System and looking for a new type of Moon rock. The crater sits over the Moon’s south pole and was excavated billions of years ago by the impact of a giant asteroid or comet.It will also be on the lookout for landing sites so that a future robotic mission can bring samples home. SMART-1’s camera AMIE will enable scientists to study afresh the Moon’s topography and surface texture. It will use X-rays and infrared light to map the composition of the whole Moon.
Launched on 27 September 2003 the spacecraft is using its ion drive over a period of 14 months to elongate its Earth orbit and utilizing three lunar resonance maneuvers in August, September, and October 2004 to minimize propellant use. Its final continuous thrust maneuver took place over 100 hours from 10 to 14 October 2004.
On 15 November 2004, Smart 1 began firing its ion engine to bring it into lunar orbit The probe will spiral ever closer to the surface until reaching its final orbit on 1 February 2005. When Smart 1 reaches a stable elliptical orbit it will range between 3,000km and 300km from the Moon’s surface.
SMART-1, conceived as a technology demonstrator for future spacecraft, is an all-new, miniaturised and lightweight spacecraft. It only needs an engine with a thrust equivalent to blowing on your hand, to waft it to the Moon and, at two kilograms, its infrared spectrometer is 10 times lighter than any previous instrument.
The mission will cost 110 million Euros.
In the historic speech at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC on 14 January, 2004, U.S. President George W. Bush stated that America’s first goal in space exploration is to return the Space Shuttle to flight safely.
"Our second goal," Bush went on, "is to develop and test a new spacecraft, the Crew Exploration Vehicle, by 2008, and to conduct the first manned mission no later than 2014. The Crew Exploration Vehicle(CEV) will be capable of ferrying astronauts and scientists to the Space Station after the shuttle is retired. But the main purpose of this spacecraft will be to carry astronauts beyond our orbit to other worlds. This will be the first spacecraft of its kind since the Apollo Command Module."
The CEVs will be built in slightly different versions, like different models of the same automobile. Some of the craft will have the capability of docking with the International Space Station, now under orbital assembly. Other versions will feature hardware allowing them to serve as bases of operations on the moon’s surface. Still other variants will be capable of leaving the Earth-moon system behind and head out to the asteroids or Mars, or possibly more distant destinations.
Although all such machines may exhibit the same shape, under their heat shield skins they could prove to be very different craft — some even bigger, some smaller.
The program to build the "Crew Exploration Vehicle" and related exploration systems is now called "Project Constellation". Named after the patterns that stars form in the night sky, Project Constellation will be made up of Earth-to-orbit, in-space and surface transportation systems, surface and space-based infrastructures, power generation, communications systems, maintenance and science instrumentation, and robotic investigators and assistants. NASA will utilize a spiral development model to create variants of the CEV which can travel to earth orbit, to lunar orbit, to help conduct lunar landings, to build extended duration habitats, and to destinations beyond, such as Mars, near-earth asteroids, and the outer planets.
Created originally to advanced new software designs, spiral development process incorporates new technologies or capabilities into a system more quickly than other management methods, then brings the whole system to operational readiness while still refining its capabilities. Engineers say it is a way to update system design even as development continues.
NASA officials will employ spiral development — in a phase called Spiral 1 — to create the first generation of crew exploration vehicles, capable of carrying astronauts only into Earth orbit. According to Capt. Michael Hecker, the agency’s deputy administrator for development programs in the Office of Exploration, the objective is to send the first crewed CEVs into space no later than 2014, preceded by unpiloted flight tests in 2011 and the first test flight of a stripped-down prototype as early as 2008.
At the end of development cycles, the resulting design would fold into Spiral 2, a moon-bound CEV fully capable of supporting astronauts on a trip from Earth orbit to the moon and down to live on its surface. Another Spiral, not yet fixed on the development calendar, would involve building a CEV capable of interplanetary flights to Mars and beyond.
NASA now plans to spend $5 billion between 2005 and 2020 to launch a dozen robotic missions to the moon, or one per year, beginning in 2008.
The idea is to have robots map the moon, search for water ice, survey potential landing sites, and test prototypes for oxygen production and electrical power plants, among other things.The robotic craft also would help determine how to protect human explorers from deadly cosmic and solar radiation they would be exposed to outside Earth’s magnetic field.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter would return a global topographical map of the moon, measure deep space radiation in lunar orbit and attempt to find water ice at the lunar poles.NASA’s Lunar Prospector and the Pentagon’s Clementine spacecraft yielded evidence in the 1990s of abundant stores of water ice trapped beneath the surface at the poles.Scientists think humans could convert water ice into oxygen and hydrogen for breathing air as well as rocket propellant for missions to Mars or elsewhere in the solar system.
NASA’s plans for a second robotic spacecraft, which would launch in 2009, are much less mature. Vondrak said the spacecraft likely would be a lander with instruments that would verify the existence of water ice and measure radiation.
The 10 missions that would follow have yet to be defined.
In a Gallup poll, 68% of those surveyed support the new plan to return to the moon, then travel to Mars and beyond.
Robotic missions to the Moon would begin no later than 2008, followed by an extended human expedition as early as 2015. Lunar exploration would lay the groundwork for future exploration of Mars and other destinations. A new spacecraft to support these journeys — the Crew Exploration Vehicle — would be tested before the end of this decade.
Evidence of an astronomical "smoking gun" has been discovered that supports the idea that cosmic rays from a nearby supernova triggered climate change on Earth. The evidence comes from an unusual form of iron that was blasted through space by a supernova before eventually settling into the rocky crust beneath the Pacific Ocean
Gunther Korschinek, a physicist from the Technical University of Munich in Germany, leads a team who in 1999 found the first deposits of supernova matter on Earth. But it was impossible to date the supernova accurately from those samples, because the material was distributed through several different layers of rock.
The team has now analysed a different piece of ocean crust, where the supernova detritus is concentrated into a clear band of rock that can be accurately dated. The researchers found small but significant amounts of an isotope called iron-60 in the rock, which could only have come from a supernova.
When the iron-60 arrived from space, it was evenly distributed all over the Earth. But the signatures are only detectable in crust that has lain undisturbed for millions of years, such as certain parts of the Pacific Ocean floor. This particular crust was taken from an area a few hundred kilometres southeast of the Hawaiian Islands in 1980.
Korschinek estimates that the supernova was between about 100 and 200 light years away and happened 2.8 million years ago. The explosion can’t have been too close to Earth, or it would have delivered enough radiation to cause global climate change. Conversely, if the supernova was any further away, more of the iron-60 would have been filtered out by the thin wisps of matter drifting between the stars.
This means the supernova would have been at the right distance to spray out a stream of cosmic rays that could have increased the cloud cover on Earth. Korschinek calculates that there may have been 15% more cosmic rays arriving on Earth than normal for at least 100,000 years. This is not enough to actually kill anything, but was perhaps sufficient to change the Earth’s climate.
NASA announced that coming Space Shuttle launch window would run from May 12 to June 3, 2005. So, what is a ‘launch window’?
A launch window is a particular period of time in which it will be easier to place the spacecraft in the orbit necessary to perform its intended function.
If the spacecraft intends to rendezvous with another spacecraft, a planet, or other point in space, the launch must be carefully timed so that the orbits overlap at some point in the future. If the weather is bad or a malfunction occurs during a launch window, the mission must be postponed until the next launch window appropriate for the flight. If a satellite were launched at the wrong time of the day in perfect weather, the satellite could end up in an orbit that would not pass over any of its intended users.
If we are going to send a mission to a planet why not just launch the rocket at any time, find where The planet is in the sky, point the rocket at it and travel there?
Imagine the Solar System as an athletics race track. If you were watching the 400 metres race from the centre of the track and wanted to intercept one of the runners taking part, one way would be to simply chase the runner you wish to stop. If you were fast enough, you might eventually catch up but only after expending a lot of energy and travelling a long way.
A much better way to intercept your athlete is simply to walk across the centre to the other side of the circular track. It is a much shorter distance and you use a lot less energy and time getting there.
You calculate your walk so that you arrive at the other side of the track at the same time as they do. Too early and you are waiting around for them. Too late and you have missed them completely - you’d have to wait one lap until they came around again.
In spaceflight, straight-line paths do not exist for the same reason. All planets move in long, curved paths around the Sun that take the shape of circular and elliptical orbits. In order to reach the targeted planet, the spacecraft must leave Earth and then travel in an elliptical orbit around the Sun that will eventually intersect the orbit of the planet.
Calculating the launch window for the planetary mission involved timing the launch to allow the spacecraft and the intented planet to arrive at the same point in space at the same time.
With the Space Shuttle, an extremely important factor in choosing the launch window is the need to bring down the astronauts safely if something goes wrong. The astronauts must be able to reach a safe landing area where rescue personnel can be standing by. One important safety constraint is to have a daylit Trans-Atlantic Landing (TAL) site. If the Space Shuttle were to have engine trouble and have to land before it gets to space, it would use a TAL site.
For example, the MIR rendezvous mission (STS-71), had only a five minute launch window. Another example would be a Shuttle mission deploying a satellite destined for another planet. Because the Earth and the other planet have to be in a certain alignment to accomplish the journey with the engine and the amount of fuel on board, the mission might have a launch window of only a few days in a specific month.
Mo'nonymous on New companion of Nep...
Mo'nonymous on New companion of Nep...
Mo'nonymous on New companion of Nep...
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