Category: space.com

The U.S. government’s hush-hush Zuma satellite may have run into some serious problems during or shortly after its Sunday launch (Jan. 7), according to media reports.

Zuma lifted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Sunday evening — a launch that also featured a successful landing back on Earth by the booster’s first stage.

Everything seemed OK at the time. But on Monday (Jan. 8), rumors began percolating within the spaceflight community that something had happened to Zuma, Ars Technica reported.

“According to one source, the payload fell back to Earth along with the spent upper stage of the Falcon 9 rocket,” Ars Technica’s Eric Berger wrote.

To be clear: There is no official word of any bad news, just some rumblings to that effect. And the rocket apparently did its job properly, SpaceX representatives said.

“We do not comment on missions of this nature, but as of right now, reviews of the data indicate Falcon 9 performed nominally,” company spokesman James Gleeson told Space.com via email.

Space.com also reached out to representatives of aerospace company Northrop Grumman, which built Zuma for the U.S. government. “This is a classified mission. We cannot comment on classified missions,” Northrop Grumman spokesman Lon Rains said via email.

Classified indeed. Pretty much all we know about Zuma is its vague destination — low-Earth orbit. It’s unknown what the satellite will do, or even which government agency is charged with operating it.

If we hear anything else about Zuma’s status, we’ll let you know.

Zuma is widely regarded as a national-security mission. Before Sunday, SpaceX had launched just two national-security payloads — the NROL-76 satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office in May 2017 and the Air Force’s robotic X-37B space plane this past September.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Any way you slice it, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is one of the boldest, highest-stakes gambles in the space agency’s storied history. Just building and testing the observatory has proved to be a dauntingly complex technological enterprise, pushing the observatory’s astronomical price tag to nearly $9 billion and requiring participation from the European and Canadian space agencies. JWST is both a barrier-breaking and budget-busting undertaking.

Conceived in the late 1980s as a way to peer back over 13.5 billion years of cosmic history to see the faint infrared light from the universe’s very first stars and galaxies, JWST today is being tasked with an ever-growing menu of other scientific duties. Scientists now see its stargazing power, which by some metrics is 100 times greater than that of the famed Hubble Space Telescope, as a promissory note: The future of practically every branch of astronomy will be unquestionably brightened by JWST’s successful launch and operation. But due to its steadily escalating cost and continually delayed send-off (which recently slipped from 2018 to 2019), this telescopic time machine is now under increasingly intense congressional scrutiny.

To help satisfy any doubts about JWST’s status, the project is headed for an independent review as soon as January 2018, advised NASA’s science chief Thomas Zurbuchen during an early December congressional hearing. Pressed by legislators about whether JWST will actually launch as presently planned in spring of 2019, he said, “at this moment in time, with the information that I have, I believe it’s achievable.”

‘We Can’t Go Out and Fix It’

JWST’s eagle-eyed astronomical acumen stems from its gigantic 6.5-meter primary mirror. Composed of 18 gold-coated hexagons forged from featherweight beryllium, the mirror is taller than a four-story building, and once launched will be the largest ever flown in space. Carrying science instruments to detect very faint infrared sources, the observatory must operate at ultra-cold temperatures requiring a multi-layered tennis-court-sized “sunshield” to insulate it from the Sun’s heat.

Now toss in for good measure where in space JWST will reside. After launching on Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana and following roughly 100 days of space travel, the observatory will be parked one million miles away from Earth, far beyond the orbit of the moon. It will reside within the Earth-Sun Lagrange point, or L2, a locale where the collective gravitational tugs of the Earth, Sun and moon allow the telescope to stay aligned with our planet as it moves around our star. Out there—way, way out there—JWST’s operators will remotely test and tweak the observatory with commands beamed from Earth, bringing it fully online and ready for science within six months of its launch.

But, first things first: Simply launching JWST is fraught with peril, not to mention unfurling its delicate sunshield and vast, segmented mirror in deep space. Just waving goodbye to JWST atop its booster will be a nail-biter.

“The truth is, every single rocket launch off of planet Earth is risky. The good news is that the Ariane 5 has a spectacular record,” says former astronaut John Grunsfeld, a repeat “Hubble hugger” who made three space-shuttle visits to low-Earth orbit to renovate that iconic facility. Now scientist emeritus at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, he sees an on-duty JWST as cranking out science “beyond all of our expectations.”

“Assuming we make it to the injection trajectory to Earth-Sun L2, of course the next most risky thing is deploying the telescope. And unlike Hubble we can’t go out and fix it. Not even a robot can go out and fix it. So we’re taking a great risk, but for great reward,” Grunsfeld says.

There are, however, modest efforts being made to make JWST “serviceable” like Hubble, according to Scott Willoughby, JWST’s program manager at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems in Redondo Beach, California. The aerospace firm is NASA’s prime contractor to develop and integrate JWST, and has been tasked with provisioning for a “launch vehicle interface ring” on the telescope that could be “grasped by something,” whether astronaut or remotely operated robot, Willoughby says. If a spacecraft were sent out to L2 to dock with JWST, it could then attempt repairs—or, if the observatory is well-functioning, simply top off its fuel tank to extend its life. But presently no money is budgeted for such heroics. In the event that JWST suffers what those in spaceflight understatedly call a “bad day,” whether due to rocket mishap or deployment glitch or something unforeseen, Grunsfeld says there’s presently an ensemble of in-space observatories, including Hubble, and an ever-expanding collection of powerful ground-based telescopes that would offset such misfortune.

“The loss of a major spaceborne observatory would be a real tragedy, but I suspect we would recover quickly,” contends Grunsfeld. “With or without JWST, it’s going to be a Golden Age of astronomy,” he says.

Boosterism

During the December congressional hearing on JWST and other future NASA space telescopes, Space Subcommittee chairman Brian Babin (R-Texas) questioned the decision to send JWST to space by way of the Ariane 5 rocket “instead of a reliable U.S. launch vehicle.” He also asked about the risks associated with transporting the telescope to the European launch site in South America.

When asked by Scientific American, two senior members of NASA’s JWST team provided assurances. Jon Lawrence, JWST mechanical systems lead engineer/launch vehicle liaison at NASA Goddard and Eric Smith, program director and program scientist for JWST at NASA headquarters, jointly offered a carefully optimistic take.

JWST “will launch on the stable, reliable Ariane 5 with 81 consecutive successful flights over nearly 15 years,” they explain. Moreover, there is “robust insight” provided by a combination of frequent direct interactions between the JWST team and the booster’s operator, Arianespace, a French launch company. That relationship is further supplemented by ongoing advisory support from other parts of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).

“Through a more than 14-year partnership, JWST has developed a strong relationship with ESA and Arianespace, with leadership personnel maintaining long-term stability,” Lawrence and Smith explain. This “gives NASA confidence that all launcher issues of interest will be thoroughly and adequately addressed for JWST prior to launch,” they note.

The Blame Game

JWST coming to a fiery end due to a booster malfunction at launch or freezing to death after failed deployment at L2 stirs up deep, dark nightmares for scientists. For astronomers who have planned the long-term future of their field around the telescope’s success, its loss would be akin to a cosmological cardiac arrest.

“The consequences are almost too horrific to imagine,” says Jack Burns, professor of astrophysics and planetary science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “The thought of over $8 billion of taxpayer funding being lost [would] have potential dire consequences for NASA and for astrophysics. There [would] be multiple committee hearings on Capitol Hill and independent panels assembled to investigate,” he says.

Those investigations, Burns says, would follow a long and winding road of accusations and denials that would be made all the worse by the absence of JWST’s foremost congressional champion, Barbara Mikulski, a veteran Democratic senator from Maryland who recently retired from public service.

“So, the finger pointing [could] be ugly,” Burns says. “Depending upon the nature of the failure, contractors [would] have difficulty in winning new space-science mission contracts and managers at NASA [could] be taking early retirement.” Once the telescope is up and running, JWST’s massive “budget wedge” (the amount of year-to-year money it requires) will shrink, and those freed-up funds would then support NASA’s next large telescope project. An observatory dud after nearly $9 billion of expenditures could very well mean a financial disappearing act for huge portions of NASA’s science budget, potentially jeopardizing planning for JWST’s successors, Burns says.

“The ripple effect [would] likely be felt for a decade as the community attempted to rebuild our credibility with the Congress and the public,” Burns says. “So, failure is not really an option—or, as we heard during the Great Recession, JWST is ‘too big to fail.’”

That said, NASA and its myriad contractors have worked hard over the past decade to test and re-test JWST’s components, Burns attests. “The management over the program is much better in the past five years than it was previously. If this current delay [to 2019] results in burning through the remaining [budget] reserves but helps guarantee success, then this is the right decision,” Burns says.

Further Delays Ahead?

Increasingly, however, there are rumblings that JWST may not even make its planned launch in 2019. During December’s congressional hearing, Thomas Young, a former director of NASA Goddard and a member of the National Academies Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics said JWST could still experience further disruptions.

“The current assessment of JWST’s status is that integration and [testing] will take significantly longer than planned,” Young testified. “The result is a launch schedule delay and the consumption of most of the remaining funding reserves. In my opinion, the launch date and required funding cannot be determined until a new plan is thoughtfully developed and verified by independent review.” At that same hearing, Cristina Chaplain, director of acquisition and sourcing management for the U.S. Government Accountability Office–a federal budgetary watchdog group–underscored JWST’s significant cost increases and schedule delays. Prior to being approved for development, Chaplain noted, JWST’s cost estimates ranged from $1 billion to $3.5 billion, with expected launch dates varying from 2007 to 2011.

Chaplain noted that the price tag for building, launching and operating the telescope is now estimated to tally nearly $9 billion.

While JWST continues to make progress toward launch, Chaplain warned the program is encountering technical challenges that require both time and money to fix and may lead to additional delays. “Given the risks associated with the integration and test work ahead, coupled with a level of schedule reserves that is currently well below the level stated in the procedural requirements issued by the NASA center responsible for managing JWST, additional delays to the project’s revised launch readiness date of June 2019 are likely,” she stated in written testimony.

On Track, For Now

JWST’s final stage before being shipped to its launch site will occur at Northrop Grumman in California. Last October, company engineers there deployed the telescope’s five-layered sunshield subsystem at full tension for the first time.

Additionally, in November, the telescope’s combined science instruments and optical elements — including those 18 special lightweight beryllium mirrors—completed about 100 days of rigorous testing within a large chamber at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Those tests mimicked the cold and vacuum of space to certify the hardware will work properly once on location at Lagrange point 2.

While the march to launch of JWST is underway, still ahead is the final integration phase where the instruments and telescope are united with the spacecraft and sunshield to form the whole, completed observatory. The telescope is now entering its riskiest phase of development, a time when issues are likely to crop up and schedules could slip. Tensions surrounding this risky and costly enterprise are as high as the tautness of JWST’s spring-loaded multilayered sunshield. The chance for failure may be low, but its cost could prove catastrophic. Then again, few ever assumed plying the universe for its deepest secrets would come cheaply.

This article was first published at ScientificAmerican.com. © ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved.

Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs. Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.

A good tire means a lot when the nearest roadside assistance is 34 million miles (55 million kilometers) away. For future rovers that will explore the surface of Mars, NASA scientists have created a tire that contains no air, can handle the rugged Martian terrain, and may even have applications on Earth for trucks and off-road vehicles. 

The new tire is made of a “shape memory alloy” composed of nickel and titanium. These alloys bend and twist like other metals (in materials science parlance, they are ductile rather than brittle). What makes them different is their atomic structure, which tends to resume its original shape after the alloy is bent, stressed or deformed. 

The idea for the tire came from a meeting between Santo Padula, a NASA materials scientist at NASA’s Glenn Research Center, and Colin Creager, a NASA engineer at Glenn who was working on how to make a Mars-ready tire for a rover. NASA’s Curiosity rover had rigid wheels that sustained damage in 2013 from rolling on the rough terrain, even though the rover doesn’t move very fast. [The Evolution of Mars Tires in Pictures]

Ordinarily, when metal like steel is bent, the bonds between atoms are stretched. 

The shape memory alloy used to make the new tire design is engineered into an interwoven mesh.

Credit: NASA

“If you overstretch [the metal], the bonds break,” Padula told Space.com. “You’ve exceeded the elastic limit of that bond. Think of when you had a slinky as a kid, and stretched it too much.” An overstretched slinky, he said, won’t return to its former shape. 

The alloy works because its arrangement of nickel and titanium atoms requires the least amount of energy out of any alternative arrangement, so the atoms naturally fall back into that arrangement, he said. It takes energy to stretch or bend a shape memory alloy, but once that energy is no longer being applied, the atoms fall back to their original positions. 

Padula said the nickel-titanium alloy bonds will break eventually, but the material can handle 30 times the deformation that conventional spring steels, like the ones in car suspensions or piano strings, can sustain. 

A tire with no air

An ordinary tire provides shock absorption because the tire is a soft material (rubber) filled with air. With shape memory alloys, engineers can make a tire out of arches that support a mesh with no air inside. The “bounce” comes from metal bending and springing back into its former shape.

Damage to a wheel on NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars is visible in this image.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

When Padula and Creager met, the latter was trying to come up with a way to make a mesh tire similar to the ones on the Apollo-era vehicles used on the moon, Creager told Space.com. 

The problem was that the springy mesh structure of the moon vehicles’ tires could become permanently bent on the Martian terrain. 

“You put too much load in one spot, and you deform the springs,” he said. “Nothing fully solved that problem.” That was when he met Padula, who suggested the shape memory alloys. 

The SLOPe (Simulated Lunar Operations) laboratory at NASA’s Glenn Research Center has test rigs and equipment used for studying the traction and performance of tires developed for lunar and planetary surfaces.

Credit: NASA

Tires in space can’t be the gas-filled types we use on Earth, according to NASA. Filling a tire with gas is a problem in space missions, because if the tire gets punctured, changing it is an involved process, even if there are humans around to do it. Clearly a flat on Mars or the moon isn’t easy to fix. (One type Apollo-era tire was gas-filled, but that was for a kind of pulled cart on a crewed mission, not a powered vehicle.) [A Brief History of Mars Missions]

The shape memory alloy tires have been tested at the Mars Life Test Facility in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The tires (which are roughly the size of an ordinary car tire) were also tested on a Jeep, as shown in a NASA video. 

While the new tires won’t be on the next NASA rover going to Mars — the Mars 2020 rover — they are part of a new rover design proposal.

Padula said he thinks the tires could be used on earthbound vehicles someday. Even though it might seem like a metal tire would be harder to produce or more expensive than a traditional tire, it could save money for trucking companies, because there’s no problem with under-inflating the tire. 

“You think that if under-inflation costs a trucking company a few thousand dollars a year in fuel, this could save money even if the up-front capital cost is higher,” Padula said. 

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Make a New Year’s resolution to get out and look at the moon more often, with help from a free, do-it-yourself Moon Phases Calendar and Calculator from NASA. 

We love this NASA Moon Phases Calendar because it tells you what phase the moon will be in on a particular date, as well as what time of day you can see Earth’s satellite and in which direction. Following the moon’s changing position in the sky from night to night, and month to month, can be a fun, easy and often surprising astronomical activity for both kids and adults. 

To make the calendar at home, you’ll first need to print the free template from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), using a color printer that can do doubled-sided printing. (If you don’t have one at home, check with a local print shop.) You’ll need a few other supplies as well: a hole punch; a brass fastener; scissors; tape; and a pen, pencil or black marker.

You can make NASA’s Moon Phases Calendar and Calculator at home with a few supplies.

Credit: NASA/JPL

Construction of the calendar requires some knowledge of the moon’s phases — but if you aren’t familiar with the phase, you can check NASA’s website or make a moon journal to observe the phases yourself. The calendar is interactive; users move the interlocking panels to find out what phase the moon will be in on a particular date. Or they can search for the next occurrence of a particular phase (so, for example, the calendar can tell you when the next full moon is).

You can find the template and instructions here. And if you want to know what the 2018 moon phases will be like from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, check out these awesome videos from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center below.

2018 Moon Phases (Northern Hemisphere)

2018 Moon Phases (Southern Hemisphere)

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

WASHINGTON — Scientists gathering this week for the country’s largest astronomy meeting will discuss plans for future space telescopes, while raising questions about the status of upcoming missions.

More than 3,000 people are expected to attend the 231st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) at National Harbor, Maryland, for a week of scientific presentations as well as mission and policy updates from NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Astronomers come to the meeting as NASA’s next two flagship astrophysics missions, the James Webb Space Telescope and Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), face delays and questions about their budgets and capabilities. [‘Super Bowl of Astronomy’ Attracts a Galaxy of Space Scientists ]

NASA had planned to launch JWST this October on an Ariane 5, but in September announced a delay until the spring of 2019. The agency said at the time that the mission was facing no specific hardware issues, but instead that integration and testing of the $8 billion observatory was taking longer than anticipated.

“This is nothing to worry about,” said Martin Still, executive secretary of the Exoplanet Program Analysis Group (ExoPAG) at NASA Headquarters at a meeting of the group Jan. 7 in advance of the AAS conference. “This is the first time that NASA engineers and Northrop Grumman engineers had put all this together. They’re learning as they go, and they were just a little bit overenthusiastic about their schedule, overenthusiastic about how many things they could do in parallel.”

At a House Science Committee hearing a month ago, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said that an updated launch date for JWST would be ready for release in January and February, after an independent review of the status of the mission. Others at the hearing, though, cautioned that additional delays may be possible as the spacecraft goes through integration and testing work in the next year.

“More delays are possible given the risks associated with the work ahead and the level of schedule reserves that are now below what is usually recommended,” said Cristina Chaplain of the Government Accountability Office at the Dec. 6 hearing.

NASA’s next flagship astrophysics missions after JWST, WFIRST, is also facing scrutiny. Zurbuchen announced in October that he was asking program officials to make changes to the proposed mission, still in early stages of development, after an independent review concluded its estimated costs were approaching $4 billion. The redesign, Zurbuchen said, should bring the mission’s cost down to $3.2 billion.

That effort is in progress and is scheduled to be completed in February. Zurbuchen, in his October memo calling for the redesign, raised the possibility of revisiting the decision to use a donated 2.4-meter telescope assembly from the National Reconnaissance Office for WFIRST, rather than a smaller telescope originally envisioned for the mission, should the redesign not meet its cost cap.

At the December hearing, Thomas Young, a retired aerospace executive, said he was not particularly concerned about the WFIRST review. “I want to emphasize that there is no cause for panic,” he said. “What is transpiring is a perfectly healthy process to assure that the scope, cost and risk are appropriately defined prior to proceeding past milestone B,” a reference to Key Decision Point B, which NASA has postponed while the WFIRST redesign takes place.

Despite the problems with JWST and WFIRST, another NASA astrophysics missions is making good progress for a launch in the next few months. At the ExoPAG meeting, Still said the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was wrapping up integration and test activities, and should be delivered to the Kennedy Space Center in February.

TESS is scheduled for launch no earlier than March 20 on a SpaceX Falcon 9, a launch date that is dependent on NASA certifying the vehicle in time for carrying science missions like TESS. Zurbuchen said at the December hearing that he expected that certification effort to be complete by early 2018.

“Everybody at Headquarters is excited enough that they’re starting to book flights” to attend the TESS launch, Still said.

TESS is a successor to Kepler, a NASA mission that has allowed astronomers to discover thousands of exoplanets as they cross, or transit, the disks of the stars they orbit, causing brief, periodic dimmings of those stars that can be observed. Kepler is expected to end operations later this year when it runs out of fuel used by its thrusters and is no longer to maintain attitude control.

“It is very much running on fumes,” Still said of Kepler. “Some time over the next 12 months, Kepler will indeed start to inelegantly drift away in pointing and will be unusable.”

At the AAS meeting, scientists will also be looking ahead to missions unlikely to fly for more than a decade. As part of preparations for the next astrophysics decadal survey, scheduled for release in late 2020, studies are underway of four concepts for flagship-class missions for consideration by that report. Updates about those mission concepts — the Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission, the Large Ultraviolet/Optical/Infrared Surveyor, the Lynx X-ray observatory and Origins Space Telescope — are scheduled for presentation at the conference, along with an update for the planning of the decadal survey.

This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.

John Young was NASA’s longest-serving astronaut. He first became an astronaut when the agency was flying two-man space capsules. He left when the agency was flying the space shuttle. In between, he flew six space missions — the first person to do so.

In his decades with the agency, Young racked up several milestones. He made it to the moon’s neighborhood twice, and walked on it once. He commanded the first space shuttle flight and then came back into space yet again to command another. His flight experience spanned three different programs: Gemini, Apollo and the space shuttle.

In 2004, with an impressive 15,000 hours of spaceflight training across four decades, Young retired from the agency. Young died on Jan. 5, 2018, following complications from pneumonia.. He was 87.

Astronaut John Young, Who Walked on the Moon and Led 1st Shuttle Mission, Dies at 87

Astronaut Legend John Young Remembered in Photos

Early life

John Watts Young was born on Sept. 24, 1930, in San Francisco, Calif. When he was 18 months old, Young’s parents moved, first to Georgia and then Orlando, Florida, where he attended elementary and high school.

Young earned his bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1952.

After graduation, he entered the U.S. Navy, serving on the destroyer USS Laws in the Korean War and then entering flight training before being assigned to a fighter squadron for four years.

Young graduated from the U.S. Navy Test Pilot School in 1959 and served at the Naval Air Test Center at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland, where he evaluated Crusader and Phantom fighter weapons systems. In 1962, he set world time-to-climb records to 3,000 and 25,000-meter (82,021 and 9,843-feet) altitudes in the F-4 Phantom.

‘Snoopy and Charlie Brown are hugging each other’

NASA picked Young as an astronaut in September 1962, just as the one-man Mercury spacecraft program was winding down and the Gemini program was starting up. In fact, Young flew on the first manned Gemini flight — Gemini 3 — in 1965, transferring his test pilot skills to figuring out the new spacecraft.

Young then joined Michael Collins to do two rendezvous with two separate target Agena spacecraft in 1966, during Gemini 10. Working in close vicinity with other spacecraft was a requirement for moon missions, when two spacecraft would need to dock together to get to the moon and return home.

This experience came in handy for Apollo 10 in 1969, which featured the first moon-orbiting docking between two spacecraft. At the controls of the command module Charlie Brown, Young successfully joined with the lunar module, Snoopy, that had been doing a landing test a few miles above the surface.

“Snoopy and Charlie Brown are hugging each other!” said an exuberant Tom Stafford, who was commanding Apollo 10.

Driving on the moon

Young went back to the moon in 1972, during Apollo 16. He commanded a scientifically ambitious journey to the Descartes highlands, searching for volcanic rock and some possible clues to the moon’s history. He and his crewmates, Charles Duke and Ken Mattingly, brought back 200 lbs. of rock during more than 20 hours on the surface.

Young and Duke only found sedimentary rocks along the way, which surprised scientists back home. Despite the challenges, however, the men kept their sense of humor. They did a controlled but wild-looking test with the lunar rover, for example, skidding it across the surface in front of a video camera.

“One-sixth gravity on the surface of the moon is just delightful,” Young said in a 2006 interview with NASA. “It’s not like being in zero gravity, you know. You can drop a pencil in zero gravity and look for it for three days. In one-sixth gravity, you just look down and there it is.”

John Young, astronaut and Navy veteran, salutes the U.S. flag at the Descartes landing site during the first Apollo 16 extravehicular activity (EVA-1). Young, commander of the Apollo 16 lunar landing mission, jumps up from the lunar surface as astronaut and Air Force veteran, Charles M. Duke Jr., lunar module pilot, took this picture.

Credit: NASA, Charles M. Duke Jr.

After Apollo

In 1974, Young was named the fifth chief of the Astronaut Office, after serving for a year as the office’s space shuttle branch chief. For 13 years, Young led NASA’s astronaut corps, overseeing the crews assigned to the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the approach and landing tests with the prototype orbiter Enterprise, and the first 25 space shuttle missions.

In 1981, Young moved to a very different kind of vehicle: the space shuttle, which acted and performed more like a plane than a spacecraft. Development on the ambitious vehicle was not without its challenges, as Young and his crewmate Robert Crippen discovered.

“I remember [senior NASA official Bob] Gilruth telling me it’s going to be as reliable as a DC-8 and right after he said that, Crip and I, every time we went out to Rocketdyne or somewhere to see what was happening, engines were blowing up. So I wasn’t sure it was going to be as reliable as a DC-8. It was a lot of fun,” Young quipped.

Young and Crippen lifted off in the space shuttle Columbia in April 1981, on a test flight of a vehicle that had never before been used in space. There were questions about how its systems would perform, and whether the new tile heat-shield system for re-entry would hold up. The flight was a success.

Still with a taste for spaceflight, Young returned to space once more at the helm of STS-9. This flight, like his last Apollo mission, was scientifically heavy. The crew flew the experimental Spacelab module for the first time, performing hours of experiments during 10 days. “The mission returned more scientific and technical data than all the previous Apollo and Skylab missions put together,” NASA stated.

After the loss of space shuttle Challenger and its seven-person crew in January 1986, Young penned internal memos critical of NASA’s attention to safety, a topic he had championed since his days flying Gemini. Young expressed concern over schedule pressure and wrote that other astronauts who had launched on missions preceding the ill-fated STS-51L mission were “very lucky” to be alive.

Young was subsequently reassigned to be special assistant to the director of the Johnson Space Center for engineering, operations and safety until 1996, when he was named the associate director for technical affairs, a position he held until his retirement from NASA on Dec. 31, 2004.

Young was the recipient of many honors for his contributions to space exploration, including the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, NASA Distinguished Service Medal, Rotary National Space Achievement Award, and six honorary doctorates. Young was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1988 and Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1993.

He was awarded the NASA Ambassador of Exploration in 2005, including a moon rock he assigned for display at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, and was bestowed the General James E. Hill Lifetime Space Achievement Award from the Space Foundation in 2010. A stretch of Florida State Road 423 that runs through Orlando is named John Young Parkway in his honor.

Reflecting on his time as a veteran of three programs, Young said the role of an astronaut has not changed, although the technology certainly did.

“I don’t think it changed it any,” he told the Houston Chronicle in 2004. “You just had to learn a lot of systems and learn how to operate them and be a systems person. That’s what we were. We were systems operators.”

Additional reporting by Robert Z. Pearlman, collectSPACE.com editor.

Astronomers, astrophysicists and other space scientists from around the U.S. are gathering in Washington, D.C., this week for the 231st meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

During the biannual meeting, which is often referred to as the “Super Bowl of astronomy,” scientists will present new research on topics such as the solar system, planets around other stars, gravitational waves and more. NASA scientists and engineers will also preview the agency’s new Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, scheduled to launch in March 2018, as well as the new James Webb Space Telescope that will launch in 2019. 

Other discussions and presentations at the conference will address the biggest astronomy events of 2017, including the Great American Solar Eclipse, the discovery of gravitational waves coming from two merging neutron stars, and the damage Hurricane Maria inflicted on Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory. Space.com will be in Washington all week long to bring you all the latest news from what will be the largest gathering of astronomers in the U.S. this year.

The conference begins today (Jan. 7) and will continue through Friday (Jan. 12). More than 3,000 scientists, educators, journalists and general space enthusiasts are expected to attend, AAS spokesman Rick Fienberg told Space.com in an email, adding that AAS meetings in D.C. tend to draw the largest crowds.

“A typical winter AAS meeting elsewhere attracts around 2,500 people. There are so many astronomy-related institutions in the D.C. metro area, including funding agencies, that we always get a big boost in attendance by meeting there,” Fienberg said. On-site registration is open to the public, but it isn’t free. If you’d like to make last-minute plans to attend, you can find more information on the AAS 231 website.

Some of the briefings will be webcast live for reporters during the conference, and the recordings will be available to the public online shortly afterward. You can watch the webcasts here once they become available.

Visit Space.com this week for complete coverage of the 231st American Astronomical Society meeting. 

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookand Google+. Original article on Space.com.

SpaceX plans to launch the secret Zuma payload for the U.S. government this evening (Jan. 7), after a nearly two-month delay.

Zuma is scheduled to lift off atop a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station tonight between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. EST (0100 to 0300 GMT on Jan. 8). You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of the company. You can also watch the liftoff directly from SpaceX’s live webcast page here. 

Sunday’s launch will also include a landing attempt by the Falcon 9’s first stage, which will come back down to Earth at Landing Zone 1, a SpaceX facility at Cape Canaveral. To date, SpaceX has pulled off 20 such first-stage landings, which are part of its push to develop fully and rapidly reusable rockets. [SpaceX’s Zuma Launch: Here’s What We Know]

Zuma is a U.S. government spacecraft headed to low-Earth orbit. But that’s pretty much all that outside observers know about it; everyone involved with the mission has remained pretty tight-lipped.

Sunday’s launch was originally slated to take place in mid-November, but SpaceX stood down to investigate the results of payload-fairing testing done for another customer. (The payload fairing is the nose cone that protects a spacecraft during liftoff.)

The company then aimed to loft Zuma on Friday (Jan. 5) but ended up pushing things back by two additional days.

“Team at the Cape completed additional propellant-loading tests today,” SpaceX representatives wrote on Twitter Thursday (Jan. 4). “Extreme weather slowed operations, but Falcon 9 and the Zuma spacecraft are healthy and go for launch — now targeting Jan. 7 from Pad 40 in Florida.”

That rough weather was presumably linked to the “bomb cyclone” storm that has been battering the U.S. East Coast all week. 

Zuma is the third classified launch for the U.S. government by SpaceX. In 2017, the company launched a secret spy satellite   for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office and the X-37B robotic space plane  on a classified mission for the U.S. Air Force.

Visit Space.com at 8 p.m. EST (0100 GMT) tonight for complete coverage of SpaceX’s Zuma mission.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

A group of astronomers is using a new method to search for hard to spot alien planets: By measuring the difference between the amount of light coming from the planets’ daysides and nightsides, astronomers have spotted 60 new worlds thus far.

The researchers used data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope to apply their technique. After training computers to hunt for the worlds, the researchers released the machines on over 140,000 stars. For their first dive into the data, the scientists targeted only stars with no known planets (although some of the systems are suspected to host planets). The computer program looked for changes in the amount of light coming from the star system that could be caused by the telescope alternately seeing a close-orbiting planet’s dayside and then its nightside. 

“We’re searching for the light that the planets reflect from their host stars,” Sarah Millholland, a graduate student at Yale University and a co-author of the paper, told Space.com by email. She and her co-author Greg Laughlin, a professor of astronomy at Yale, are using their program to identify exoplanets that otherwise would have been missed in the Kepler data. [7 Ways to Discover Alien Planets]

Normally, Kepler detects exoplanets via the transit method. As a planet passes between its star and the sun, the amount of light Kepler observes drops sharply because it has been blocked by the distant world, and rises again once the planet moves on. The researchers’ new method also examines how starlight is changed by a passing planet, but in a whole new way.

“This [new] method of planet hunting uses the same kind of data as transits … but it involves looking for a different kind of signal in the data,” Millholland said.

Glowing worlds

Traditionally, scientists have relied on a handful of methods to hunt for planets. One technique, called the radial velocity (RV) method, was the first to reveal a distant world, tracking how a massive planet can cause its parent star to wobble. And using another technique, called the direct imaging method, researchers snap photos of exoplanets, but that method can be applied only to large worlds orbiting far from their stars.

But thanks to the Kepler space telescope, the transit method rules the exoplanet roost. Over the course of its primary mission, which lasted about four years, Kepler revealed thousands of potential and confirmed worlds. (The Kepler spacecraft is now being used for a secondary mission, dubbed K2.) The spacecraft has a numbers advantage: Whereas instruments capable of searching for planets via the direct imaging and RV methods can focus on only one star at a time, Kepler can collect light from thousands of stars simultaneously.

But the transit method of searching for exoplanets also has limitations. For a planet to block the light of its star, it must orbit along the line of sight between Earth and the parent star. For every planet Kepler has spotted, there are likely another 99 that it couldn’t see, according to an estimate by astronomy blogger and astrophysicist Ethan Siegel. That’s an awful lot of missed worlds.

Millholland and Laughlin weren’t content to leave all of those planets hidden. They used the Kepler data to look for worlds lit up by their parent stars, just like the sun lights up the face of the moon and the planets in our solar system (which is why planets in our solar system look like “stars” in the night sky). When an alien planet is on the near side of its star, it radiates a dim light from its nightside (from retained heat), and when the exoplanet is on the far side of the star, it reflects light from its parent star (the dayside). If those variations appear in the Kepler data, they can reveal a planet’s presence.

After ensuring that the program could identify already-known, hot gas giants by their glow, the researchers turned their program loose on over 140,000 Kepler stars. The new technique turned up 60 previously unidentified gas giant candidates that don’t transit their sun. 

Due to limitations in its precision, Kepler can hunt only for the glow of close-in gas giant planets — the so-called hot Jupiters. Future instruments with increased precision could extend the method to smaller worlds, Millholland said.

Compared to the dazzling searchlight glow of a star, the glow from a planet is extremely faint. Stellar activity, such as sunspots and flares, have the potential to give false positives in the search for planets. That’s why, Millholland said, any detections made with the new method should be followed up with RV-method measurements; they have not yet used RV to follow up on the 60 detections reported in the new study.

“RV observations are necessary to confirm the planet candidates,” she said. (Many “objects of interest” detected by Kepler are also confirmed using RV measurements.) “Close-in giants produce large RV signals, so they should be readily detectable,” Millholland said.

Millholland and Laughlin started out with stars with no known or suspected planets, but eventually, they plan to use the method to search for gas giants in systems already known to host small worlds. 

This method could help solve the mystery of how and where hot Jupiters form, according to the authors. 

Prior to the first discoveries of planets around other stars, planetary evolution models — which were based on Earth’s solar system — set the birth of gas giants far from their stars, similar to where Jupiter and the other giant planets orbit the sun. So when the first exoplanet hunts revealed hot Jupiters, scientists were startled. The leading hypothesis became that these massive gassy worlds had migrated inward after forming at a distance.

But several years ago, some scientists proposed that hot Jupiters might have formed closer to their star. Laughlin is among those who question the migration model. Following another line of research, Laughlin predicted that hot Jupiters born near their stars would have small-mass sibling planets with orbits that are not aligned with the parent star’s orbital plane. (In Earth’s solar system, the eight planets orbit in a kind of flat disk around the sun.) Soon, he and Millholland plan to turn their attention toward known collections of rocky worlds with strange orbital alignments, in hunt of hidden gas giants.

The research was published in The Astronomical Journal on Aug. 4, which is the end of the Northern Hemisphere observing season for the Kepler field, Millholland said. She said several groups of scientists in the Northern Hemisphere plan to begin their hunt for the glowing worlds next spring.

“If we use this technique to find systems with hot Jupiters and misaligned small planets, it would be evidence toward this theory of hot-Jupiter formation,” Millholland said. In the near future, the pair plans to use the method to probe stars that host oddly aligned rocky planets, after the 60 new worlds have been confirmed using the radial-velocity method.

“It would be best to study those systems separately,” she said.

Follow Nola Taylor Redd at @NolaTRedd, Facebook, or Google+. Follow us at @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.