NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver discusses the Asteroid Grand Challenge during the Asteroid Initiative Industry and Partner Day (Credits: NASA/Bill Ingalls).

NASA has announced a Grand Challenge focused on finding asteroids that may become a threat to the planet, and proposing solutions on how to deal with them,. The announcement was made during the Asteroid Initiative Industry & Partner Day, on June 18 held at NASA HQ by the agency’s deputy administrator, Lori Garver.

“NASA already is working to find asteroids that might be a threat to our planet, and while we have found 95 percent of the large asteroids near the Earth’s orbit, we need to find all those that might be a threat to Earth,” said Garver. “This Grand Challenge is focused on detecting and characterizing asteroids and learning how to deal with potential threats. We will also harness public engagement, open innovation and citizen science to help solve this global problem.”

The challenge consists in a multi-disciplinary collaborations and partnership with other government agencies, international partners, industry, academia, and citizen scientists. The effort complements NASA’s recently announced mission to redirect an asteroid to a stable orbit near the Moon and send humans to study it. Grand Challenges are part of President Obama’s Strategy for American Innovation to pursue ambitious goals on a national or global scale, and requires advances in innovation and breakthroughs in science and technology.

Tom Kalil, deputy director for technology and innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, praised the initiative. According to Kalil, finding and dealing with asteroid threats is an all-hands-on-deck effort but the Grand Challenge will improve near-Earth object detection capabilities.

As part of the Grand Challenge, NASA issued a request for information (RFI) soliciting industry and potential partners to think about concepts and different approaches on how to accomplish NASA’s asteroid mission. The RFI will stay open until July 18 and the responses will contribute to developing public engagement opportunities and an industry workshop in September.

IAASS President Tommaso Sgobba with Malaysian High Commissioner Dato’Hayati Ismail (Credits: Norul Ridzuan).

Malaysia is a progressive and fast developing country with a land area of 330,000 square kilometers, a population of 28 million; and new economies particularly those that are science and technology oriented are gaining popularity and recognition from both the people and the government.  Space is one of the new economies that have received a lot of attention in recent times and with increasing visibility.

Malaysia started looking at space science seriously about two decades ago with the establishment of the Space Science Studies Division within the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment, in 1993.  At that time, the focus was purely on space science education with activities centered at the planetarium in Kuala Lumpur.

Within a few years, the division became more than just an office for space science education when it ventured into satellite program management by designing, constructing, launching and operating a microsatellite called Tiungsat-1.  (Tiung is the local name of a species of small bird very common in Malaysia known as the Common Myna).  This satellite program was later spearheaded by a company fully owned by the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment, called Astronautics Technology Sdn. Bhd., and in September 2000, Tiungsat-1 was successfully launched into orbit.

In March 2001, the Space Science Studies Division came to be known as the National Space Agency and was chaired by Dato’ Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, the then Prime Minister of Malaysia, signifying the official entry of the country and the Malaysian government into space ventures, chronicling Malaysia as among the first developing countries in the world to establish its own national space agency.

The Malaysian Space Agency later became a focus among the international space community, when it successfully sent the first Malaysian astronaut to the International Space Station in October 2007.  Today, the Malaysian space agency is known as ANGKASA, a Malay translation from the word “space”, and it conducts various activities in the continuation of its satellite and astronaut programs, while maintaining its original role as a general space educator with its planetarium and astronomical observatory facilities.

Such achievements by the country has positioned Malaysia as a pioneer and front-runner in space ventures in the South East Asia region, and created a positive environment for non-governmental efforts in space ventures.  The biggest non-governmental space venture in Malaysia is Spaceport Malaysia; an idea pioneered by a group of commercial space travel activists since 1999.

The vision of Spaceport Malaysia was first presented at the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety at the 2^nd IAASS Conference in Chicago in May 2007, and since then progress has been significant.  It has received substantial cooperation and support from international partners, including major international aerospace manufacturers and space research organizations.  Today, the Spaceport Malaysia project is well known amongst the international space community, including the IAASS and in particular, supporters of commercial space travel.  Its objective is to provide safer and lower cost access to space.

Spaceport Malaysia today is a project under the attention of a dedicated government agency on aviation and space industry in Malaysia – the Malaysian Industry-Government Group for High Technology (MIGHT), which advises and monitors its progress to ensure the project is synchronized with the national development agenda.

Spaceport Malaysia has attracted a number of service partners including providers of commercial zero gravity flights, small satellite launches, and potential investors.  The planned zero gravity flight service will be part of a complete zero gravity research and recreation facility, while the small satellite launch service will use an air launch system from conventional commercial airliners for economy and reliability.

SpaceportSEA (Spaceport at South East Asia), the new facility for commercial suborbital spaceflight that will be built in Malaysia (Credits: SpaceportSEA).

Several existing commercial airports in Malaysia have agreed to provide facilities to host the early operation of Spaceport Malaysia, forecasted next year before the real spaceport complex is ready in less than half a decade. These airports not only provide the basic facilities such as hangars and runways, but also land for supporting commercial activities.

Spaceport Malaysia will consist of both the traditional commercial space components and new property components.  Besides a spaceflight terminal, an aviation and space university, satellite services facilities, space theme accommodations, space theme parks, manufacturing facilities and commercial facilities are planned for the spaceport.  Within the spaceport project too, there are two suborbital vehicle development programs, where one with foreign partnership and the other a fully local venture.  Both have received attention from potential investors.  These suborbital vehicle programs also give unique strength and advantage to the Spaceport Malaysia project, as not all spaceport projects in the world include such a vehicle development program.

Being a project under the attendant of IAASS, Spaceport Malaysia embraces the Philosophy of Safety, which has been well integrated within the project, not only at the design stage, but also at the policy making stage, placing safety as the main agenda in the planning, designing, development and the operation of the spaceport and all its components including suborbital vehicles.  As a major entry by Malaysia into international space ventures, Spaceport Malaysia will not compromise safety in its progress and development.

Green technology is also a main agenda where buildings and its occupants will smartly interact with the environment and use natural resources. Electric vehicles will be used extensively at the spaceport and to encourage this, public facilities and private residences will be equipped with light electric vehicles and charging facilities.

Another major agenda is Strategic Globalization.  Spaceport Malaysia plans to play a significant role in globalization and internationalization in the future.  Activities of this agenda will be strategic cooperation with particular spaceports and the promotion of point-to-point inter-continental suborbital spaceflights.

The Malaysian High Commission in Canada wishes to thank the IAASS for its support of Spaceport Malaysia and opportunities given to the project and welcomes international recognition such as from the IAASS, which will be significant for international promotion and marketing of the spaceport.

As part of Malaysia’s Economic Transformation Programme, the Government of Malaysia is committed to ensure continued support for the advent and development of new space and high technology industries, which will catapult Malaysia as a developed country by 2020.  The synergy between governmental and non-governmental efforts, particularly in this field is crucial and we believe that the globalization of the space industry is a very significant aspect that will make up the new global economy.

On a related note, I would like to congratulate Canada on the successful space mission by Commander Chris Hadfield.  He has brought space closer to the ordinary person on the ground.

Thank you.
Her Excellency Dato’ Hayati Ismail
Malaysian High Commissioner to Canada

NASA’s 2013 Astronaut Candidate Class. Top left to right: Josh A. Cassada, Ph.D.; Victor J. Glover, Lt. Commander, U.S. Navy; Tyler N. Hague (Nick), Lt. Colonel, U.S. Air Force; Christina M. Hammock, NOAA Station Chief. Bottom left to right: Nicole Aunapu Mann, Major, U.S. Marine Corps; Anne C. McClain, Major, U.S. Army; Jessica U. Meir, Ph.D.; Andrew R. Morgan, M.D., Major, U.S. Army (Credits: NASA)

NASA announced that after an exhaustive year-and-a-half search, the space agency has selected eight new astronaut candidates. The eight were whittled down from a pool of 6,100 applicants, the second-largest number ever to apply to NASA’s astronaut corps.

The candidates are as follows:

Josh A. Cassada, Ph. D., 39, is originally from White Bear Lake, Minn. Cassada is a former naval aviator who holds an undergraduate degree from Albion College, and advanced degrees from the University of Rochester, N.Y. Cassada is a physicist by training and currently is serving as co-founder and Chief Technology Officer for Quantum Opus.

 Victor J. Glover, 37, Lt. Commander, U.S. Navy, hails from Pomona, Calif., and Prosper, Texas. He is an F/A-18 pilot and graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School. Glover holds degrees from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, Calif.; Air University and Naval Postgraduate School. He currently is serving as a Navy Legislative Fellow in the U.S. Congress.

 Tyler N. Hague (Nick), 37, Lt. Colonel, U.S. Air Force, calls Hoxie, Kan., home. He is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School, Edwards, Calif. Hague currently is supporting the Department of Defense as Deputy Chief of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization.

Christina M. Hammock, 34, calls Jacksonville, N.C. home. Hammock holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, N.C. She currently is serving as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Station Chief in American Samoa.

Nicole Aunapu Mann, 35, Major, U.S. Marine Corps, originally is from Penngrove, Calif. She is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Stanford (Calif.) University and the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School, Patuxent River, Md. Mann is an F/A 18 pilot, currently serving as an Integrated Product Team Lead at the U.S. Naval Air Station, Patuxent River.

Anne C. McClain, 34, Major, U.S. Army, lists her hometown as Spokane, Wash. She is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.; the University of Bath and the University of Bristol, both in the United Kingdom. McClain is an OH-58 helicopter pilot, and a recent graduate of U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at Naval Air Station, Patuxent River.

Jessica U. Meir, Ph.D., 35 is from Caribou, Maine. She is a graduate of Brown University, has an advanced degree from the International Space University, and earned her doctorate from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Meir currently is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston.

Andrew R. Morgan, M.D., 37, Major, U.S. Army, considers New Castle, Pa., home. Morgan is a graduate of The U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and earned doctorate in medicine from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Md. He has experience as an emergency physician and flight surgeon for the Army special operations community, and currently is completing a sports medicine fellowship.

Janet Kavandi, director of Flight Crew Operations at Johnson Space Center, and Charles Bolden, NASA’s administrator, both commented about the new selections.

“This year we have selected eight highly qualified individuals who have demonstrated impressive strengths academically, operationally, and physically. They have diverse backgrounds and skill sets that will contribute greatly to the existing astronaut corps. Based on their incredible experiences to date, I have every confidence that they will apply their combined expertise and talents to achieve great things for NASA and this country in the pursuit of human exploration,” said Kavandi.

Bolden added: “These new space explorers asked to join NASA because they know we’re doing big, bold things here—developing missions to go farther into space than ever before. They’re excited about the science we’re doing on the International Space Station and our plan to launch from U.S. soil to there on spacecraft built by American companies. And they’re ready to help lead the first human mission to an asteroid and then on to Mars.”

The group is said to be training to conduct missions in low-Earth orbit, to an asteroid or to Mars. This announcement comes at a time when the Commercial Orbital Transportation System (COTS) program and the Space Launch System (SLS) program are years from achieving manned orbital operations. At present time, the COTS program intends to send humans to the ISS beginning in 2017; the SLS program doesn’t intend on making test flights until 2017 and may not become operational until well into the 2020s. Time will tell as to whether these new astronauts will make spaceflights into worlds unknown.

First view from ISS inside ATV-4, shortly after final hatch opening (Credits: ESA/Lionel Ferra).

The hatch of the newly docked Autonomous Transfer Vehicle (ATV-4) has finally been opened on June 18, after a delay involving a suspected build-up of mold or bacteria in three cargo bags.

“Things sometimes do not go as planned,” said Roland Luettgens, Volare mission director. “The opening of the supply ferry’s hatch was planned for Monday (June 17). Before opening the door of the spacecraft though, many things need to be checked to ensure everything is set correctly. We decided to postpone opening ATV-4’s hatch to today (June 18).”

The opening has been postponed because mission managers had to discuss whether the crew needed to disinfect the three bags. Alberto Novelli, ATV-4 mission manager later explained that the hatch opening had to be rescheduled due to ongoing discussion between Russia and NASA on the exact content of the initial crew ingress operations. The “No go” call was taken by Mission Control Moscow, who were concerned with the build-up of mold inside the bags. Although the level of contamination was not posing any risk to the crew members, the Russian team was concerned about the protection of the atmosphere aboard the International Space Station (ISS). According to Spaceflight101.com, current plans involve the crew using fungistat kits to clean the bags before the transfer. A fungistatic agent is a substance designed to impede the growth of fungi.

Commander Pavel Vinogradov and Flight Engineer Luca Parmitano spent June 17’s morning performing leak checks of the docking interface at the aft end of the Zvezda service module where “Albert Einstein” is docked. The operations were necessary to make sure the connection between the two vehicles was properly sealed. They also used fans and filters to remove particles and contaminants from the atmosphere inside the ATV-4 to preserve the ISS environment.

The first piece that will be moved inside the station by Parmitano is a spare water pump assembly.. The pump, mounted on a special configuration on ATV-4,’s cargo bay, was filled with water prior to launch. Parmitano will have to move and install the pump assembly into the Columbus module. The piece is part of the Columbus module’s thermal control system which cools all systems and payloads inside the science module.

Below, footage of the first ingress into ATV-4 (Courtesy of ESA).

STS-7 Mission Specialist Sally Ride poses on aft flight deck with her back to the on orbit station (Credit: NASA).

This week marks the anniversary of two significant events in the history of space exploration–the flight of Valentina Tereshkova 50 years ago on June 16 and of Sally Ride 30 years ago on June 18. With the exception of the single flight by Tereshkova, human spaceflight during the early years of the space race was the province of men only. Women demonstrated their ability to withstand the rigors of space missions, and indeed a hardy group of American women pilots passed the same medical tests as the Mercury 7 with excellent scores. However, NASA policy at the time required qualification as a military test pilot. The policy, originally established by President Eisenhower in December 1958, stood until the mid-1960s when the first scientist-astronauts were selected. Although the Eisenhower selection policy did not specifically discriminate on the basis of gender, the fact that there were no women military pilots (never mind test pilots) made it clear that women would not become U.S. astronauts at that time. For its part, the Soviet Union decided to send a woman into space in order to score propaganda points against the U.S. In April 1962, five women were chosen for the program. Among them only the 25-year-old Valentina Tereshkova ever flew in space. Nineteen years later, after the U.S. had recruited women into the astronaut corps the Soviet Union trained Svetlana Savitskaya and launched her on a mission to the Salyut 7 space station in the summer of 1982; thus making sure that the first two women in space were Soviet citizens. (Savitskaya flew a second time in 1984 and became the first woman to do a space walk, but only one other Russian woman has flown since that time.)

One of six women selected in NASA’s 1978 astronaut class, Sally Ride was the first of them to fly. When she rode aboard the space shuttle Challenger as it lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on June 18, 1983, she became the first American woman in space and captured the nation’s attention and imagination as a symbol of the ability of women to break barriers. As one of the three mission specialists on the STS-7 mission, she played a vital role in helping the crew deploy communications satellites, conduct experiments and make use of the first Shuttle Pallet Satellite. Her pioneering voyage and remarkable life helped, as President Barack Obama said soon after her death last summer, “inspire generations of young girls to reach for the stars” for she “showed us that there are no limits to what we can achieve.”

Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, flew 20 years and 2 days before Sally Ride, the first American woman to follow in her footsteps (Credits: NASA).

Sally Ride was born in Los Angeles, California, on May 26, 1951. Fascinated by science from a young age, she pursued the study of physics, along with English, in school. As she was graduating from Stanford University with a Ph.D. in physics, having done research in astrophysics and free electron laser physics, Ride noticed a newspaper ad for NASA astronauts. She turned in an application, along with 8,000 other people, and was one of only 35 chosen to join the astronaut corps. Joining NASA in 1978, she served as the ground-based capsule communicator, or capcom, for the second and third space shuttle missions (STS- 2 and STS-3) and helped with development of the space shuttle’s robotic arm.

After her selection for the crew of STS-7, and thereby becoming the first American woman in space, Ride faced intense media attention. But, Ride had no time for many of the questions the press asked her; questions like “Do you weep when things go wrong on the job?” She saw herself first and foremost as an astronaut and a scientist, and felt that “one thing I probably share with everyone else in the astronaut office is composure.” Talking about her fellow astronauts in the class of 1978, she said, “We’re all people who are dedicated to the space program and who really want to fly in the space shuttle. That’s a common characteristic that we all have that transcends the different backgrounds.” (It is worth noting that the astronaut class of 1978 also included the first three African-Americans and the first Asian-American to serve in the astronaut corps.) Her commander on STS-7, Bob Crippen, agreed that Sally was more than capable of flying in space, saying, “I wanted a competent engineer who was cool under stress. Sally had demonstrated that talent.”

Ride continued her career with NASA after her historic flight, flying on a second shuttle mission (STS-41G) in October 1984. She later served on the presidential commission that investigated the Challenger accident and led NASA’s strategic planning effort in the mid-1980s. Retiring from NASA in 1987, she became a science fellow at the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University and, in 1989, joined the University of California-San Diego as a professor of physics and director of the California Space Institute. In 2001, she founded her own company, Sally Ride Science, to pursue her passion for motivating girls and boys to study the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering and math. The company creates innovative classroom materials, programs and professional development training for teachers. In 2003 she also served on the presidential commission investigating the Columbia accident (the only person to serve on both commissions). In addition to this work, she wrote a number of science books for children, including The Third Planet, which won the American Institute of Physics Children’s Science Writing Award in 1995. Following a 17-month long battle with pancreatic cancer, Sally Ride died on June 23, 2012, leaving behind a heroic legacy.

Almost exactly 20 years prior to Sally Ride’s first Shuttle mission, on the morning of June 16, 1963, Vostok 6 blasted off on a mission of 48 orbits around the Earth. While orbiting the Earth for almost three days, Valentina Tereshkova conducted a number of experiments, took photographs and recorded flight notes. Although she would never fly again, her role in the historic flight was a significant public relations coup for the Soviet Union and her moving life story and accomplishments were held up as an example for others to follow. Her voyage, like Sally Ride’s, inspired women around the world to reach for their dreams and shoot for the stars.

Born on March 6, 1937, in the Yaroslavl Oblast in central Russia, Tereshkova’s father had been killed during the Second World War and after school she found employment as a textile worker in a local factory. Interested in parachuting from a young age, it was during this time that she became an experienced parachutist. She also became a member of the local Young Communist League, and later joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Her parachuting expertise and party affiliation helped win her selection to, and made her a leading candidate in, the woman cosmonaut program. Major General Nikolai Kamanin, the official in charge of cosmonaut training, felt that Tereshkova should fly first, noting in his diary that “she is active in society, is especially pleasing in appearance, makes use of her great authority among everyone who she knows…. We must first send Tereshkova into space.”

Following her flight, Tereshkova was swept into Soviet politics, serving as a member of the Supreme Soviet, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and the Central Committee of the Communist Party. She also became a well-known representative of the Soviet Union abroad, acting as the Soviet representative to the UN Conference for the International Women’s Year in 1975 and leading the Soviet delegation to the World Conference on Women in Copenhagen. She was awarded the Joliot-Curie Gold Medal of Peace for her work with the World Peace Council.

Sally Ride and Valentina Tereshkova, as the first women from their respective countries to fly in space, helped to usher in an era of equality in human spaceflight. On the anniversary of the missions which launched them off the Earth, the legacies of their historic flights remind us of the hard work, passion and dedication of the women who have worked on the ground and in space to pave the way for 55 more women (and counting) who have since journeyed into space.

Cody Knipfer

Summer 2013 Intern

NASA History Office Program

First man in space, Yuri Gagarin (left) with fellow cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov, the first man to undertake a spacewalk (Credits: RIA Novosti).

Yuri Gagarin became the first man to fly in space on April 12, 1961 when he road Vostok 1 into history. Gagarin became an instant celebrity, and is still hailed world-round for his accomplishment.

With all that attention, Gagarin’s premature death in a routine fighter jet training flight is all the more surprising in that first the USSR, then Russia was able to keep it under wraps for so long. Until June 14, all Gagarin’s fans could do was speculate.

On June 14, 2013, RT News published an interview with Gagarin’s friend and fellow cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov. After decades of requests and pursuit of his own investigations, Leonov, who was the first man to conduct a spacewalk, was given access to the official investigation report this month – and permission to talk about it. Here is what happened on March 27, 1968.

Gagarin, who had not flown regularly in some years, was recertifying to become a fighter pilot. Some thought that he had lost his edge in the intervening years, taking to heavy drinking and womanizing, somewhat overwhelmed with his fame. He was getting back to business in 1968, however, and on March 27 he accompanied flight instructor  Vladimir Seryogin on a  MiG-15UTI test flight. It was a windy, rainy, snowy day at Chkalovsky Air Base, with poor visibility. Gagarin and Seryogin had radioed in that their test run was completed – a series of simple turns, pitches, and nose dives. Minutes later, Leonov, who was scheduled to conduct parachute jump training at the base, heard “a sonic spike, a blast, followed by one-and-a-half or two seconds of supersonic noise.” On returning to base, he learned that Gagarin’s plane had crashed. Gagarin’s body was not found until the next day, sparking some initial hope that he had ejected and survived. Seryogin ‘s body was found near the remains of the plane.

As the investigation unfolded, the official story of the incident became clear: Gagarin had had a bird strike, or similar projectile event, and gone into a spin. They had been given incorrect weather data, and so were flying at a dangerous altitude. There was even some mention of outboard fuel tanks being improperly attached to the plane. Or so said the State Commission. There were very few who believed the official story. As Leonov told RT, “That conclusion is believable to a civilian – not to a professional.” It was clear that something was being covered up, but what?

One common rumor held that Gagarin was intoxicated during the flight, or that his piloting skills had so seriously slipped that he was unable to handle the craft properly. Another story held that there was an air vent left improperly opened that caused the pilots’ deaths through asphyxiation or loss of consciousness when they conducted an emergency dive to return to breathable airspace. Every once in a while, the Russian government would release a new tidbit of information, making it clear that there was a story to be told, but not what that story might be.

With Leonov’s examination of the official investigation record, the veil appears to be lifted. Gagarin did die when his plane went into a spin, but it was certainly  through no fault of his own – and no birds were involved. “…a jet can sink into a deep spiral if a larger, heavier aircraft passes by too close and flips it over with its backwash. And that is exactly what happened to Gagarin,” explains Leonov. It turns out that, in a clear violation of the rules, a Su-15 jet whizzed right by Gagarin’s plane. “While afterburning, the aircraft reduced its echelon at a distance of 10-15 meters in the clouds, passing close to Gagarin, turning his plane and thus sending it into a tailspin – a deep spiral, to be precise – at a speed of 750 kilometers per hour,” recounts Leonov. “We knew that a Su-15 was scheduled to be tested that day, but it was supposed to be flying at the altitude of 10,000 meters or higher, not 450-500 meters. It was a violation of the flight procedure.”

Leonov was granted permission to go public with these findings on condition that he not reveal the identity of the Su-15 pilot, who was completely unaware of his proximity to the space legend whose death he caused, and who is now an ailing octogenarian.

And that appears to be that. 45 years after Gagarin’s death, we now know what killed him.

This documentary report of Gagarin’s death was broadcast in 2010, before this month’s reveal:

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (Credits: ESA).

ESA’s ExoMars program has entered the final stage of construction by signing a hardware contract with Thales Alenia Space at the Paris Air and Space show, on June 17th.

“The award of this contract provides continuity to the work of the industrial team members of Thales Alenia Space on this complex mission, and will ensure that it remains on track for launch in January 2016,” stated ESA’s Director of Science and Robotic Exploration, Alvaro Giménez, .

The project, aimed at determining if life has ever existed on Mars, will be split into two separate launches over 2016 and 2018. The first launch will contain the Trace Gas Orbiter which will seek the existence of biological methane, a by-product of life functions, and the Entry, Descent and Landing Demonstrator Module (EDM), which will test the verify the functionality of the landing system for the second mission.

Once that technology has been validated, it will be used to land a 350 kg rover on the surface of Mars in 2018. The rover will contain deep-drilling apparatus, capable of drilling to depths of 2 meters, where it is hoped that the soil will have protected any organic material from the harsh radiation that exists on the Martian surface.

Thales Alenia Space Italy are the prime contractor for the ExoMars mission, and will be building the EDM for the first launch. ESA will be teaming up with Roscosmos, who will provide launch vehicles and expertise in the form of software programming and the second EDL system.

The project life-cycle has been a bumpy road so far, with America withdrawing support from the project and with France questioning the usefulness of ExoMars. The signing of the contract with Thales Alenia Space is seen as a positive step securing the future of the project.

The contract is estimated to be worth about 230 million euros ($300 million),

Below, is there a biological source to Martian methane? ExoMars hopes to find out:

Cella Energy’s new hydrogen fuel, in pellet and fiber form (Credits: Cella Energy).

Dr. Stephen Perusich, Senior Scientist at Cella Energy’s Kennedy Space Center, Florida location recently sat down with Space Safety Magazine to talk about his company’s creative new method for storing hydrogen fuel in reusable plastic pellets. Dr. Perusich manages the lab at the Space Life Sciences Laboratory facility, where new hydrogen storage methods are in the research and development phase. Making hydrogen readily available as a clean, alternative fuel and storing it in a form at room temperature may be the solution to safer, greener transportation. Hydrogen has the highest energy density per unit mass compared to fossil fuels.

That solution comes in the form of a pellet you can hold in the palm of your hand. This method, invented by Cella Energy co-founder Professor Stephen Bennington and his students in England, stores the hydrogen from ammonia borane and other hydrides inside linear chains of a polyethylene oxide polymer. Similar to the structure of a rope, the linear chains hold the hydrogen compound in place. By freeze drying the two together, the ammonia borane and polyethylene oxide can be made into a fine powder that is then shaped into cylindrical pellets. Coating the pellets with a layer of plastic for filtering makes them safe for handling. It is a clean, efficient way to store the hydrogen without use of a coolant or insulation. The method can also be used to create light, thin fibers that resemble cotton balls that you would buy at the pharmacy.

At the beginning of the interview, Dr. Perusich produced two small glass vials and opened their contents onto the table in front of him. In one vial were approximately 10 small white beads and in the other, a small square of fluffy fibers.

Dr. Perusich: Here, you can handle them very easily if you want to.

Space Safety Magazine (SSM): Are they toxic to the skin?

Dr. Perusich:  No, not at all. They have a plastic coating over them. If you took a dozen or so of these, you could fill up your gas tank, if it was a hydrogen tank, and run your car for 300 miles or so.

SSM: The cotton swab in this vial, is it also an ammonia borane compound?

Cella’s electrospinning process uses a strong electric field (E) to spin and draw composite fibers from the polymer and hydride solutions. (Credits: S. Perusich).

Dr. Perusich: Yes, it’s made by the original electrospun process by which the fibers are created. The hydrogen goes in the empty space inside the fibers. This is the original method that Steve Bennington in England came up with about 5 years ago with some of his students. It essentially puts a core hydride material in the middle and a polymer shell solution on the outside. A high voltage is placed between the nozzle and a grounding plate to draw, or stretch the fibers and decrease their diameters. The electrospun fibers are far smaller in diameter than a human hair. If you look at it on a cross-section of the fibers, you see a bunch of holes inside so it’s not exactly core sheath, but instead a composite. From these fibers, we can make this stuff here (points to the fiber square) or by variations on that process, we can make this stuff here (holds up a pellet) and that’s essentially what we make. What looks like cotton is actually very dense amount of fibers spun from the chemicals that store the hydrogen.

SSM: Where does the vision of hydrogen fuel research stem from?

Dr. Perusich: The concept for a hydrogen economy goes back 100 years or so. The question has been: how can we make, store, and use hydrogen in a practical manner to maximize its energy potential in society? Up to today, we’ve only had two ways of storing hydrogen. One is as compressed gas, as some cars in California use. The other way is to cool it down to a liquid, which is what we do here at the Kennedy Space Center. Liquid hydrogen is great for rockets but isn’t really practical for cars. Even at KSC, by the time we obtain the hydrogen gas, cool it down and then use it in a rocket launch, 50% of it will be lost to the atmosphere. Eventually, I’d love to use Cella Energy’s technology to actually power rockets.  Instead of continuing to keep the hydrogen cryogenic- in a liquid state and suffering tremendous losses of hydrogen during launch delays, we could instead place a bin of our pellets next to the rocket at room temperature. Then, moments before launch, we could heat the vessel, release the hydrogen into the rocket, and away she goes. However, that’s in the future.

Hydrogen fuel research came about in a serious manner in the 1900’s, around the time the first cars were being developed. There were three kinds of cars back then- electric, steam-powered and the oil or gasoline powered car. Steam had lots of problems and that was eliminated early on. Electric cars didn’t have efficient batteries or fuel cells at the time, so they lost out to gasoline. There has been a debate since that time: did we go down the wrong path?

It is difficult to beat the energy density of gasoline on a per volume basis. Hydrogen will never compete with gasoline based on this. It will, however, compete with battery technology, like lithium batteries, and can be two or three times better than battery technology. The beautiful part about hydrogen is that it’s clean. When you put it into a fuel cell and react it, you get water out. So that’s a huge environmental advantage. 

SSM: What function does the lab here at the Kennedy Space Center have in the hydrogen storage research project?

Dr. Perusich: We have a lab of 15 people in Oxford, England and a lab of 4 researchers here in the United States, where 90% of the personnel have their Ph.D. We tend to joke that anything that’s on the ground they do and anything that’s in the sky, we do. That’s a little simplistic because a lot of the research that each lab does helps the other lab. However, any kind of airplane/space related work, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s) and radiation shielding, we do here. The lab in England right now is working on material development to optimize the properties of these pellets and fibers. In the USA, we are looking at a way to regenerate these pellets. Doing so will drive down the price. We try to look at the supply chain all the way back to the raw ingredients like boron and hydrogen and several boron complexes. Right now the pellets are not reusable, but we hope to remedy that soon.

SSM: How many years in development was the final product- hydrogen stored in polyethylene oxide and plastic pellets?

Dr. Perusich: It goes back 5 years to some laboratory work, at Oxford University, Imperial College London and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. They were looking for a way to penetrate the American market and Space Florida approached them since KSC is the single largest user of hydrogen in the world. We and Space Florida saw the potential of using our technology for both radiation shielding as well as rocket propulsion. That’s how we really got started here. We hope to have a commercial shielding product available in just 2-3 years.

SSM: How long does it take to process one pellet or a batch of these pellets?

Dr. Perusich: We are researching three processes right now. All three work but are not yet optimized. Right now, all of this is done by hand. To make one pellet takes roughly a half an hour, maybe less. To spin this amount of fiber takes one hour. For pellets in a car engine, we would make them 1000 times smaller than our current pellet in order to act more as a fluid than a solid. One thousand smaller pellets could to fit on your finger nail. We could then pump these small pellets as we do gasoline now.

SSM: Is the hydrogen pellet creation process dangerous? What steps does your lab take to ensure worker safety?

Dr. Perusich: That’s a great question. If you had the raw hydride in air at normal room conditions, it has the potential to catch fire. Therefore, we do all our chemical processing in the  dry glove box and we don’t move anything outside of it until we’re done processing the completed composite and we are sure it’s safe. To establish a manufacturing process, we will be using a lab similar to an electronics clean room.

Cella Energy’s mock-up demonstrating a pure hydrogen fuel station for automobiles with dual nozzle pumps. (Credits: S. Perusich).

SSM: So, a handful of these smaller ones would power the car?

Dr. Perusich: Yes, absolutely. What we envision is a customer pulling up to a “gas station” but not a gasoline station. It will have a nozzle with two ports in it, one to suction out the used pellets and one to put in new pellets. In current gasoline stations, tankers bring gasoline and then go back empty. Here, they go back full of used pellets ready to reprocess them. We’ve been talking with the biggest car companies here in America and in Germany and there is a lot interest. We also have some programs with airplane companies for the same applications. 

SSM: Cella Energy has both UK-based and a US-based facilities. Based on your company’s environmental research, which country has a larger need for alternative cleaner fuels?

Dr. Perusich: I can’t tell you which one needs it more, but the product will roll out in Europe first. The first reason is because of more extensive environmental legislation in Europe. The second is fuel price; gasoline in England is above $8.00/gallon. In the US, we do not have the same sense of environmental urgency as other countries because of our vast natural resources. 

SSM: At what temperature is the hydrogen is released?

Dr. Perusich: About 100 degrees Celsius  At that temperature, the pellet stays intact. At a higher temperature, you can get more hydrogen out but eventually it will melt to goo. Up to 100 or 120 degrees C, it stays intact and you should be able to recycle it. We want to use waste energy there to do the heating inside the engine block to provide a heating source. The whole thought here is to take our material, put it in a tank and when needed, take the right amount of hydrogen pellets into a pre-heater to get pure hydrogen out. Then we flow the released hydrogen gas into either an internal combustion engine or fuel cell, react it, and take the spent material out. That should give you nice, clean hydrogen energy and spent pellets we can regenerate.

In addition, for diesel engines it’s been known for a while that if you a few percent hydrogen to a diesel engine, the efficiency goes up. One way to crack into the market is to start with that technology. Better efficiency and lower emissions- hey! 

SSM: Liquid hydrogen has previously been used in the Space Shuttle main engine. How does the energy density of the plastic pellets compare to that of liquid hydrogen?

Dr. Perusich: Since we are diluting our hydrogen in plastic, it has a lower energy density. The hydrogen quality that would come off would be comparable to what we use right now but would need more to create the same amount. The advantage of the pellets is that they keep for an infinite amount of time next rocket on the pad without getting those losses seen in the liquid form. In addition, only the hydrogen gas would enter and be used by the rockets, so no additional weight would be added during launch. The pellets would stay behind.

TDS-1 radiation shielding finished box components. (Credits: S. Perusich).

SSM: Hydrogen nano-compounds can also be used for shielding space electronics. The commercial satellite market is an obvious choice to advertise this technology to. How does Cella’s shielding method compare to shielding with liquid hydrogen?

Dr. Perusich: Hydrogen gives you an excellent shielding medium. Polyethylene isn’t bad. Aluminums and metals are not very good shields for the most part because protons come in and fracture the metal atoms, causing highly energetic particles. This secondary radiation is worse than the primary radiation. Our materials are in between pure hydrogen and polyethylene. Dealing with liquid hydrogen, much energy must be put into cooling, and the problem of hydrogen escape is always present. Ultrahigh molecular polyethylene is used for shielding on the International Space Station. It’s about 6 ½ cm thick in the crew quarters. Most radiation is stopped in this area except the really high energy particles above 100 eV. Our material has 30% more hydrogen than polyethylene does and gives you a 40% lower radiation dose than polyethylene does.

Now that Cella has a viable product, they will be continuing to research how plastics and hydrogen might shield astronauts from space radiation, a subject that is vital to enabling deep space exploration and has yet to produce a feasible solution. With initial data from NASA, Cella researchers are investigating the effectiveness of the shielding against radiative protons similar to those encountered in low Earth orbit. In the next 2-3 years, Cella will be taking its hydrogen pellets to the commercial markets, where real-world applications will develop the technology even further.

ATV-4 firing thrusters as it approaches the S3 hold point (Credits: NASA).

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) fourth Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV-4) completed its 10 day flight executing a successful rendezvous, and successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS), on 15 June. The spacecraft delivered scientific experiments, vital supplies, fuel and clothing to the astronauts.

“Bravo Europe, bravo ESA, bravo ATV. Thank you Member States, thank you industry, thank you CNES, thank you Russian partner,” said a proud Jean-Jacques Dordain, Director General of ESA. “With the fourth ATV now ready to support and supply the Space Station with essential supplies and scientific experiments, ESA again proves itself to be a reliable partner in the international station upon which the future can be developed.”

The 20-ton ATV-4, named after Albert Einstein, docked with the Zvezda service module on the ISS at 14:07 GMT, about 20 minutes behind schedule. When the spacecraft stopped at the S3 waypoint at 249 m from the ISS, the flight controllers of the ATV Control Center in Toulouse, France, took extra time to update their abort tables based on the results of navigation system checkouts. ESA Astronaut Luca Parmitano and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Misurkin started their monitoring from inside the Zvezda module, using external cameras and ATV navigation data, when the spacecraft was at a distance of 15 km. From that location, the astronauts could have sent hold, retreat or abort commands, in case the ATV had been off course.

Final phases and major waypoints of a typical ATV mission (Credits: ESA).

From the S3 waypoint the spacecraft transitioned from using GPS data from both the ATV and ISS to calculate ATV’s relative position and velocity, to its proximity and close range navigation equipment. The sensors aiding the ATV in the final approach consist of two videometers and two telegoniometers as a backup. The videometers pulse laser beams to the station at very high frequency. The light pulsed is reflected back by 26 mirrors on the Zvezda module, creating a light pattern, which is captured by cameras aboard the spacecraft. The ATV’s on board computer calculates then range, closing rate, and orientation, to ensure a safe approach.

The gentle autonomous docking on the Zvezda’s aft port between the bus-sized ATV and the 420-ton Station was barely noticed by the crew members. To compensate atmospheric drag, ATV is loaded with 2580 kg of propellant, used to perform periodically reboosts. In addition, the spacecraft also delivered 860 kg of fuel, 100 kg of oxygen and air and 570 kg of drinking water, to be pumped into the Station’s tanks. The pressurized cargo consists of 2480 kg of scientific equipment, spare parts, food and clothes.

The end of the ATV-4 mission is scheduled for October 28, when the spacecraft packed with waste will separate from ISS to burn up in the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean.

Below, the ATV-4 docking sequence (Courtesy of ESA).

Valentina Thereskhova might have been a controversial hero but she definitely became a role model.

It’s been fifty years since the first woman in history took off in a tiny Soviet space capsule to spend three days in orbit. Being officially hailed alongside Yuri Gagarin as a symbol of USSR’s victory in the space race and referred to by many in the West as a proof that Russia is more open to opportunities for women, Valentina Thereskhova remains a contradictory hero.

In eastern European media, many astonishing accounts -of limited reliability – detailing her flight can be found, stating that Valentina experienced severe mental break-down during her flight, cried the whole time and didn’t perform most of the tasks she was expected to. According to those accounts, upon Valentina’s return, the chief designer of the soviet space program Sergei Korolev, who had reportedly never been particularly fond of female space flight and was only pushed to send Valentina up by the Communist party leader Nikita Khrushchev, swore he would never ever send another woman to space. And he actually never did.

Whether these accounts are just a bunch of gossip or an accurate description probably doesn’t matter. Valentina Thereskhova prefers to stay away from the media scrutiny and rarely gives interviews, focusing on a political career instead.

Svetlana Savitskaya was a real success, she became the first woman to perform a space walk and flew to orbit twice.

The team of five female soviet astronaut trainees who were preparing for the mission alongside her was disassembled and it took a whole 19 years before Soviets decided to allow another woman into space. Despite being far less known by the general public than the legendary first ‘space girl’ Valentina,  Svetlana Savistskaya is said to have far outperformed not only Thereskhova, but also many men. The first American astronaut, Sally Ride, flew to space on Space Shuttle Challenger shortly after Savitskaya.

Samantha – the multilingual fighter pilot and astronaut engineer

Samantha Cristoforetti is a multilingual military pilot, aerospace engineer and a current ESA astronaut trainee (Credits: ESA).

“I believe that all anniversaries of those early space pioneers have to be honored,” says Samantha Cristoforetti, a current European astronaut trainee. “These people were in a very different situation than we are today, they didn’t know at all what they would encounter, how the body would react to space and how the space ship would behave. So obviously, Valentina Thereskhova, besides being the first female, she was also one of the very first people, one of the first pioneers in space,” she says.

Unlike Valentina, who had been a rather uneducated textile factory worker before being propelled to international stardom as the first woman in space, Samantha is a multilingual fighter pilot and an aerospace engineer with degrees from several international universities. Whereas Valentina had been selected in a rather rushed procedure powered by the need of USSR’s leaders to triumph over the USA once again and her only previous experience relating to aerospace had been in skydiving, Samantha was the only woman who succeeded in the last ESA selection in 2009, and was chosen together with 5 men out of 8000 highly qualified applicants.

“As most astronauts, I have been dreaming about going to space ever since I was a kid and I was fortunate that I have developed towards a more mature interest in technology and science and also in flying. So I ended up studying aerospace engineering and then, when it became possible in Italy for women to join the military, I joined the airforce and I became a military pilot,” says the 36-year old superwoman who has recently returned to the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, after a three-week training in NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Samantha training in the pool (Credits: NASA).

She took part in an emergency procedure there after a serious ammonia leak from the ISS’s cooling system had been spotted. “It was an amazing experience,” she says. Together with fellow mission trainees, she tested the repair procedures for the broken pump in the swimming pool before the instructions how to fix the leak were beamed up to the ISS crew.   “It was fascinating on several levels, just to see the professionalism and how they went about planning such an EVA in a couple of days, how people came together and everybody worked through the night without sleeping. And the next morning, they had the procedure ready.”

You have to prove you are good

Listening to Samantha cherishing her experience in the space community, one would say it is all plain sailing for women who want to achieve in aerospace related disciplines. But let’s have a look at some statistics. According to the March 2013 special report published in Nature, there are not only considerably fewer women in science and engineering disciplines but they are also paid less, they need to work harder to achieve the same as men, and make bigger sacrifices. They also give up more often than their male counterparts.

Many people have commented on this phenomenon. Some blame the omnipresent cultural stereotypes that push girls towards believing that technical disciplines are simply not for them. Others promote quite daringly an opinion that women might not be as biologically well-equipped for certain tasks as men. In 2006, Lawrence Summers, then-president of Harvard University, actually lost his job after publicly posing such a question in an attempt to explain the general lack of women in physics and math.

Aerospace engineer Adina Cotuna is one of the first Romanian Young Graduate Trainees in ESA (Credits: Shripathy Hadigal).

“In Romania, where I come from, there is this general presumption that girls are supposed to be good at humanities and talented in languages, while boys have this natural knack for technical things, but I don’t think that’s true,” says Adina Cotuna, a 27-year-old aerospace engineer, currently gaining experience as a Young Graduate Trainee at ESA’s Space Research and Technology Centre in The Netherlands.

Adina’s story seems to be that exception to the rule: she says it was not really  her childhood dream to work in the aerospace industry, but more of following what she has always been good at that led her to become one of the first Romanian ESA trainees after the country joined the agency in 2012. “I have always been good at maths, since primary school, and I’ve always had more technical and analytical thinking, so after high school, I was advised to go into engineering. One thing led into another and that’s why I am here right now.”

She admits that there being only five of them, the girls in her class at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at the Technical University in Bucarest probably had to work harder at the beginning to prove they deserved to be there. But then, she says, it’s mostly about your skills and the work you do. “You have to show them, that you can think clearly and do the job, that you have something to say. For example here in ESA, it’s all very fair and everyone treats you according to your performance and that’s it,” says Adina, who showed up for our Skype interview at almost 10 pm, after a very challenging week she had spent at ESA’s concurrent design facility with a team assessing the feasibility of a new mission.

In fact, she says, it was not her gender that was difficult to overcome on her way towards international experience in aerospace. Coming from a little town in one of the EU’s poorest member states, she said money was the biggest obstacle in her way. “When you are eastern European, it’s always about whether you can afford to go to some international university, whether your parents can afford to support you,” she says.

So again, what’s all that gender fuss about, is it just an unfortunate coincidence that there are so few women in engineering and science?

Yes, there IS a glass ceiling…

Simonetta di Pippo became the first woman to serve as an ESA director.

Simonetta di Pippo was the first woman in the history of ESA to be appointed as a head of one of the agency’s eleven directorates. In 2008, the graduated astrophysicist who had been involved in the Italian space program since the 1980’s, became ESA’s director for Human Space Flight. She stepped down after three years, leaving the male-female ratio in ESA’s leadership 10 -1, with only one woman, Magali Vaissiere, serving on the board of ESA directors today.

“A young female talent encounters several potential career stoppers in her way, but the two main critical points are when she has to start her career and when she is reaching higher levels in the organization but never enough to get to the top,” Simonetta says about the glass ceiling she believes exists in the sector, taking the statistics as evidence.

And Artemis Westenberg, President of Explore Mars and an outspoken feminist, supports this opinion: “Men would view women who have finished their studies, who are 29 or 30 years old, differently from a male applicant. They would acknowledge these women have a PhD, but they would think that they are also in the child bearing age.”

Both women believe that the fact that women tend to approach tasks differently compared to their male counterparts can make them look suspicious in a male-dominated team. At the same time, they say, approaching things differently, in fact, might be an advantage. “Flexibility, broad understanding, deep analysis, cooperation instead of competition, hard work, details, accomplishment of objectives in the interest of the collective and not for personal visibility and power: these are the characteristics we would like to see in a good manager and leader. Most of these characteristics can be easily found in a boss of female gender,” Simonetta believes.

When it comes to the question of why there are so few women in technical fields, both ladies simply reject the idea suggested by the former Harvard University dean. However, they believe the power of society might play a role. “If you are a female engineer, you might feel that you are not feminine enough because you are in a very male profession.  People around you and the society might say that engineering is not a very feminine thing as a profession, even though you might not believe it,” Artemis says.

The importance of encouraging the interest of children and young people, regardless of their gender, in STEM disciplines has been recently widely discussed. For some reason, compared to other fields, STEMs tend to attract a progressively decreasing number of students. Simonetta believes that not being discriminating when it comes to opening opportunities in such fields to both genders might empower nations to better achievements.

“We should have a look at what is happening worldwide and which countries are better in having a proper representation of both men and women in key positions. The countries which are better on this, these are the countries which are in pole position to take the world leadership in the near future. The answer is easy: China! From recent news, we see that women now take up 51 percent of top management positions in Chinese mainland companies, the highest such ratio worldwide, the global average being 24 percent,” says Simonetta.

And if you have a look at the Chinese space program and its observable tendency to put female astronauts on missions regularly since the early years of the country’s manned flights, one has to admit that Simonetta might be right.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter how well or poorly Valentina Thereskhova performed during her mission, the important thing is that she became a role model – the one who can inspire little girls to aspire to ambitious goals, such as those of women like Samantha Cristoforetti.

Watch an original video from Valentina’s flight below

Space Safety Magazine would like to thank the women who agreed to be interviewed for this piece. Their opinions are reflective of their own views, not necessarily the official positions of the organizations in which they are involved.

Artist’s conception of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter above the Moon. The Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER) instrument is visible in the center of the image at the bottom left corner of the spacecraft. (Credits: NASA).

by David Sims

DURHAM, N.H. — Space scientists from the University of New Hampshire (UNH) and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) report that data gathered by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) show lighter materials like plastics provide effective shielding against the radiation hazards faced by astronauts during extended space travel. The finding could help reduce health risks to humans on future missions into deep space.

Aluminum has always been the primary material in spacecraft construction, but it provides relatively little protection against high-energy cosmic rays and can add so much mass to spacecraft that they become cost-prohibitive to launch.

The scientists have published their findings online in the American Geophysical Union journal Space Weather. Titled “Measurements of Galactic Cosmic Ray Shielding with the CRaTER Instrument,” the work is based on observations made by the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER) on board the LRO spacecraft. Lead author of the paper is Cary Zeitlin of the SwRI Earth, Oceans, and Space Department at UNH. Co-author Nathan Schwadron of the UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space is the principal investigator for CRaTER.

Says Zeitlin, “This is the first study using observations from space to confirm what has been thought for some time – that plastics and other lightweight materials are pound-for-pound more effective for shielding against cosmic radiation than aluminum. Shielding can’t entirely solve the radiation exposure problem in deep space, but there are clear differences in effectiveness of different materials.”

The plastic-aluminum comparison was made in earlier ground-based tests using beams of heavy particles to simulate cosmic rays. “The shielding effectiveness of the plastic in space is very much in line with what we discovered from the beam experiments, so we’ve gained a lot of confidence in the conclusions we drew from that work,” says Zeitlin. “Anything with high hydrogen content, including water, would work well.”

The space-based results were a product of CRaTER’s ability to accurately gauge the radiation dose of cosmic rays after passing through a material known as “tissue-equivalent plastic,” which simulates human muscle tissue. Prior to CRaTER and recent measurements by the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) on the Mars rover Curiosity, the effects of thick shielding on cosmic rays had only been simulated in computer models and in particle accelerators, with little observational data from deep space.

The CRaTER observations have validated the models and the ground-based measurements, meaning that lightweight shielding materials could safely be used for long missions, provided their structural properties can be made adequate to withstand the rigors of spaceflight.

Since LRO’s launch in 2009, the CRaTER instrument has been measuring energetic charged particles – particles that can travel at nearly the speed of light and may cause detrimental health effects – from galactic cosmic rays and solar particle events. Fortunately, Earth’s thick atmosphere and strong magnetic field provide adequate shielding against these dangerous high-energy particles.

The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. developed and manages the LRO mission. LRO’s current science mission is implemented for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate sponsored LRO’s initial one-year exploration mission that concluded in September 2010.

This article was originally published by the University of New Hampshire’s Earth, Oceans, and Space Institute. ©2013, The University of New Hampshire, and then on MoonandBack.com.  Reposted by kind permission.

Space food, as envisioned by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Credits: MGM).

Neil deGrasse Tyson gives an interview for his StarTalk radio show, and discusses the importance of food for the psychological wellbeing of astronauts, and also comments on the joys of eating 5-year old irradiated steak.

Tyson is a renowned astrophysicist, and Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York.

He is often blamed for the man directly responsible for the relegation of Pluto to “dwarf planet” status, and he regularly hosts a comedy/pop-science show called ”StarTalk”, which can be found on the StarTalk YouTube channel.

Lt. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, commander of SMC, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk signing the CRADA (Credits: U.S. Air Force/Joe Juarez).

The U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) and SpaceX have signed an agreement that will eventually allow SpaceX to be considered as a launch provider for U.S. military satellites, on June 7. The Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) is an important milestone for SpaceX on the road to Falcon 9 v1.1 certification for National Security Space (NSS) missions.

“A CRADA enables the Air Force to evaluate the Falcon 9 v1.1 launch system according to the Air Force’s New Entrant Certification Guide,” reported a statement from SMC. “As part of the evaluation, SMC and SpaceX will look at the Falcon 9 v1.1′s flight history, vehicle design, reliability, process maturity, safety systems, manufacturing and operations, systems engineering, risk management and launch facilities.”

SMC is going to monitor at least three launches to meet the flight history requirements outlined by the Air Force. The process will evaluate SpaceX’s capability of carrying out NSS mission using the Falcon 9 v1.1.The move has put SpaceX in direct competition with United Launch Alliance (ULA), the company formed in 2006 by the merging of Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s rocket divisions. Since 2006, ULA has provided its Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets for all the major military launches, from communications and navigation to missile warning and reconnaissance satellites. The Air Force has identified 14 missions where SpaceX and other potential companies can competitively bid with ULA. According to Air Force officials, the entrance of new players in the market will reduce costs, ensuring flexibility to the military’s satellite launch manifest.

The Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket is the enhanced version of the Falcon 9 launcher with upgraded Merlin engines and a payload fairing to accommodate satellites. The Falcon 9 v1.1 will be able to deliver a standard telecommunications satellite into geostationary transfer orbit. Until now, SpaceX has launched five Falcon 9 V1.0’s, with three test flights and two operational missions to the International Space Station under NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program. The first mission of Falcon 9 v1.1 is expected within the next few months.

Regardless of the certification plan, SpaceX has already won contracts for the launch of two Air Force satellites in late 2014. The contracts are under the Orbital/Suborbital Program 3 that allows commercial firms to compete to launch smaller military satellites.

Below, recent test firing of Falcon 9′s reusable 1st stage:

Poster of The Cosmonaut (Credits: Riot Cinema).

“The Cosmonaut” is a film produced by the Riot Cinema Collective, a fusion of science fantasy and history inspired by the legends of the lost Soviet cosmonauts. The film is set between from 1967 and 1976, and follows the life of Stas, Andrei, and Yulia in the recently built Star City. The main characters are witnesses to the successes and failures of the Soviet space program, and are frustrated by political intrigues and power struggles prevalent at the time.

“The Cosmonaut” proposed a new model of fi­nancing production and distribution, making full use of social media. The film has raised €400,000 from over 4,500 people with a crowdfunding campaign and generated a huge community of fans well before the premiere, which took place in May 2013. The Cosmonaut is also a transmedia project, meaning it is more than just a film, it is a story-universe that expands the experience of the film through bonus texts, photos, clips, and books. The film is distributed freely on the Internet under a creative commons license.

Space Safety Magazine interviewed Nicolás Alcalá, the director of “The Cosmonaut.”

How did you have the idea for “The Cosmonaut” and what were your most important influences in making this movie?

It all started with a fake project developed by Spanish photographer Joan Fontcuberta. It was about lost cosmonauts and I started to discover a whole world of stories and black legends about secret accidents and cosmonauts lost in space, never being able to return to Earth or dying during reentry. The idea of a human being, alone, 400,000 km away from home, knowing he is going to die, just blew my mind. I wrote many stories with cosmonauts in them, began to read Ballard and a bunch of historic books, ending up falling in love with the space race, especially the Soviet part, and decided to tell my story in that period, with all those incredible achievements and conspiracies and epic stories. I’ve been inspired by the hard arm of science fiction like Ballard, Asimov, Lem, and by films too, like Solaris or Stalker, but also by directors that have little to do with space, like Wong Kar Wai or Terence Malick.

From left to right, the director, Nicolás Alcalá, Leon Ockenden aka Stas, Katrine Lister aka Yulia and Max Wrottesley aka Andrei (Credits: Daniel Mayrit).

4 years, 130 different locations, 3 countries, hundreds of professionals involved, everything allowed by almost 5000 people contributing via a crowdfunding campaign. Can you tell us: how did you make it possible? What were the major difficulties you encountered in making “The Cosmonaut”?

Phew, so little space to write about all the things we have been going through! It has been like a roller coaster. When you read all those stories about difficult shootings in films like Fitzcarraldo, Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, they sound like fun. It is not so much when hell breaks loose on you but, hey, it is always nice to have enough stories to write one of those books by yourself.

“The Cosmonaut” was a leap of faith. Since we innovated so much, not only in the funding and distribution part, but also on the narrative part, breaking the story world in many pieces, (the 34 webepisodes, the film, the book, the diaries of the cosmonaut, the Facebook fiction etc.), it has been a very difficult project to put together. However, “The Cosmonaut,” in the end, is an epic story. All the things that happened between the moment I read Biskind’s “Easy riders, ranging bulls” five or six years ago and now are an epic tale of wild indie dreams, excitement, huge loads of work, crazy things, and tons of luck.

Behind “The Cosmonaut” there is one of the most amazing creative teams that any film could have dreamt about. Besides my beloved partners, Bruno and Carola, with whom I built our entire project and our company, there are also amazing directors of photography, incredible and generous British actors, crazy skilled editing assistants, amazing designers, and a lot of very special brains put together to get the film to its highest possible quality.

That is the only reason for the film to have succeeded. That and that we never took a no for an answer.

Nikolai Petrovich Kamanin, head of cosmonaut training in Soviet space program from 1960 to 1971, portrayed by Guy Williams (Credits: The Cosmonaut).

Crowdfunding campaigns are now also used to finance actual space projects. For example, Planetary Resources would like to finance ARKYD 100, an asteroid-hunter telescope and SHIPinSPACE is seeking money to continue the study of a new suborbital plane. Do you think that, in the future, crowdfunding will replace the usual way of getting money for projects?

I am not an evangelist of crowdfunding, on the contrary, I do believe blindfolded in crowdsourcing. The worst part is that is exhausting. It consumes a lot of time to find money unless you are Veronica Mars’ producer and you are able to raise 5 million in a week. Then you need to produce the merchandise you are giving in return, ship it over, and it is challenging. In our case, it was even more difficult since we have never been paid from production money and we worked 8 hours a day on “The Cosmonaut” and then another six on advertising to pay the rent.  Crowdfunding is a great tool and it will fund many projects in the future. Will it be the only option? I do not think so.

A moment of the shooting preparation in Latvia (Credits: Daniel Torello).

“Back then, there was true love for space,” says the character of Giovanni Battista Judica-Cordiglia just at the beginning of the movie. I am sure that many space professionals would agree with that phrase, especially when they struggle to get funding or media attention for milestone missions. Is the true love for space really lost?

I think it has been lost because in the fifties and sixties it was all about discovery, which is something human beings are inclined to. We love to learn about new things and have that feeling of discovery. However, when the Moon was conquered, that feeling vanished.  The reasons to go to the Moon back then were not scientific or technological, although it served those purposes too. It was about beating the adversary and making a statement. That is why so many millions were put into the efforts. It was more of a propaganda stunt. When that ended, the next step was not Mars but just a lot of pretty intriguing scientific and technological stuff, interesting only for scientists and technological companies. It was not about human beings conquering the cosmos anymore, and I think that is why people got bored about space. We need to turn it into a human story again.

 The movie suggests there has been significant historical research. Did you have some kind of consultancy when you showed the everyday life in Star City or when you choose the design of the Kolibri rocket and capsule?

I read a ton of books. I also visited Star City three times before making the film and talked to some cosmonauts and people related to space. Many of the stories they told me are in the film. Many details I read or saw by myself. However, I have not had a single consultant. I just asked around, asked for some help sometimes on Twitter to space lovers and so on.

The UR700 in the film was inspired by the original designs of Chelomei, but modified, so we called it UR701, like it was an evolution made by Andrei. The Kolibri capsule was one of the few things that we have decided to not be historically accurate with and it is nothing like the original LK700 module. We made a design that might have existed but it was inspired more in science fiction models from the sixties than in something made by Chelomei or other designer.

Stas’ alone in the Kolibri capsule. The model for the capsule was inspired by science fiction model from the sixties (Credits: Miki Auvila).

“Isolation is overwhelming,” says the character Stas, alone in the Kolibri capsule between Moon and Earth. Do you think that, in the end, he regretted his dream to become an astronaut?

There is a moment at the end of the film where Andrei says he has had a dream where he asked Stas if it was worth it to have lost Yulia to walk on the Moon, and he dreams about Stas saying to him that it was not, but that, for just a fraction of a second, he felt alive.

I think that is the answer Stas would have given and what men and women that went to space and decided to put their lives under such great risks felt too: it is just that micro second, when you feel something no other human beings are going to ever feel. There is this great book, Moon Dust, interviewing the remaining men that had travelled to the Moon, and all of them have more or less the same feeling.

“Space is a bizarre place, there is so much to see down here,” says the character of Yulia. What is Space for you?

It is indeed a bizarre place. A wonderful one, but so away from what being human is. Like a Volcano, a cliff, or an abyss, it is something that is not made to host life, and I think that is precisely what makes it so fascinating. It is, again, that need of discovery, of adventure. It is knowing we can challenge it, look it in the eye and say: Here we are. We are humans, but here we are.

“The Cosmonaut” is more than a movie, it is more an experience, with many bonus materials and a growing community and I think it is keeping you busy even now that the movie is completed. What are your next projects? Are you planning to stay on “space” subjects?

I will need to stay working on “The Cosmonaut” for a few months still, of course. There is a lot more to do yet. However, I have new projects in mind and I will start developing them little by little. I have a few films and transmedia projects in my head but none of them related to space. I think I need a rest for a while, but maybe someday.

Cosmonaut is out now, and is free to watch.

Below, trailer for the movie, Cosmonaut:

Oil Platform utilizing Astro Technology’s downhole monitoring systems (Credits: Astro Technology, Inc)

Groundbreaking new technology has recently resulted from collaborative efforts between NASA and Astro Technology Inc., a Houston, Texas-based oil and gas sensor and monitoring company, known for its deepwater Trident Subsea Systems. Notable previous designs include a fiber optic sensing system that can specifically withstand internal conditions of a solid-fuel rocket motor.  The newly developed fiber optic Tendon Tension Monitoring System (TTMS) will make off-shore drilling platforms safer for workers and coastal environments worldwide that are often damaged by rig accidents, including oil leaks, spills and explosions. Improving safety is a company goal, as they work to ensure the integrity of extreme condition equipment like risers and flowlines. The Clear Gulf Joint Industry Project (JIP) was initiated to share knowledge between the oil and space sectors.

Installed earlier this year, the system is being evaluated on two oil platforms in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of West Africa. Operationally, the TTMS functions to detect changes such as tension in the fiber-optic strain gauge system. Tension change can be subtle, caused by tides, docking and waves, or stronger if there is a storm. Subsea risers and pipelines are subject to these and other types of stress on the legs of the platforms and can be tracked via sensor clamps. TTMS can be monitored in real time with data streamed to operators ensuring a platform or riser’s stability. In a recent test, commercial divers secured 16 of the sensor clamps to the two drill platforms, connecting them to fiber optic data cables running to each platform’s control room.

TTMS is the result of a Space Act Agreement and has potential future applications in long-term human space exploration such as asteroid and lunar resource mining activities that would require real-time monitoring. Mining resources such as metal ore would promote structural manufacturing of habitats and spacecraft body frames in extraterrestrial mission locations.

The 2014 NASA budget proposal includes a $105 million jump-start robotic asteroid capture mission with a sampling mission to launch in 2016 using the Orion capsule. In addition to planetary exploration, the technology can be applied to deep space propulsion systems. Johnson Space Center Director Ellen Ochoa explains, “We need to be able to demonstrate capabilities that, as you add them up, allow you to get to Mars.” In order to do this, safely acquiring resources becomes increasingly vital the farther from Earth we travel.

Through other similar agreements, NASA is able to partner with companies in broader technical fields outside of NASA’s core capabilities. NASA’s aeronautics and space research, supported by partnerships such as that formed with Astro Technology, propels goals of space exploration by bringing new ideas to the table. Space Act Agreements are one way in which the US-space agency rises to new technical challenges in the pursuit of acquiring new skill sets and engineering data. NASA’s Chief Technologist, Mason Peck, summarizes this partnership by saying, “What we learn from testing this technology on the oil platforms will benefit a broad range of terrestrial and space applications, and shows NASA’s technology investments support America’s future in space and improves our lives here on Earth.”

An image from the undocking operation of Progress 51 (Credits: Roscosmos)

The Progress 51 resupply craft has undocked from the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS) filled with trash, on June 11. The spacecraft, after a few days in free flight, will be destroyed during the re-entry into the atmosphere.

“The Progress 51 will orbit Earth at a safe distance from the station for a few days while controllers in Moscow perform engineering tests,” reported a station status update from NASA. “Afterwards, the cargo craft will re-enter the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean for a fiery disposal.”

While Progress 51 was performing the undocking operation from the Zvezda module’s aft port, its external cameras investigated the condition of the Laser Radar Reflectors (LRR). LRRs are navigation sensors that are required for the precise approach and docking of Europe’s Autonomous Transfer Vehicle (ATV). One of the three LRRs present on the Zvezda’s aft port was presumed to be damaged, following the contact with a Progress’ stowed KURS antenna. Video from the Progress vehicle showed that the module docking ring surface appeared free of debris and telemetry indicated that the faulty antenna had deployed after the vehicle hook opening. The gathered imagery confirmed that the sensor was not damaged, therefore the new ATV-4, that is going to occupy the same port that hosted Progress 51, will dock according to the schedule, on June 15.

Progress 51 reached the ISS with 3.1 tons of food, fuel, and equipment on April 26. After the launch, the spacecraft suffered a failure in the deployment of one of the KURS navigational antennas. Russian flight controllers did not succeed in moving the antenna into the correct position, therefore a software patch was sent up to rectify properly the docking operation and Progress 51 finally berthed after a delay of  2 days.

In the meantime, ATV-4 is following a 10 day route that will bring the spacecraft to dock with the station, on June 15. The European spacecraft, named after Albert Einstein, was launched atop an Ariane 5 ES rocket from Kourou, on June 5.

Below, the video of the separation between Progress 51 and ISS.

Chris Hadfield announces his retirement from CSA-ASC headquarters a month after returning from ISS (Credits: CSA-ASC webcast).

Just a month after his return from a stint aboard the International Space Station where he served as the first Canadian commander of that vessel, astronaut Chris Hadfield announced his resignation on his first trip back to his home country. ”I’ve had such an interesting career and after 35 years it’s time to step down,” he said.

Hadfield said he is looking forward to moving back to Canada after years spent in Houston to be near NASA Johnson Space Center, a move that will fulfill a promise he made to his wife nearly 30 years ago. Hadfield also appears mindful that, with the limited options available to Canadian astronauts, his sticking around for another flight could stand in the way of the two astronaut candidates currently in training. As it is, Canada is not expected to have another slot on ISS until 2016.

Hafield achieved a remarkable level of renown and public engagement during his spaceflight, attracting more than a million Twitter followers and creating a widely popular series of videos about life in space, and two music videos while aboard the station.

Watch the full report:

Spaceport America in New Mexico, is intended to host Virgin Galactic’s first suborbital flights (Credits: Virgin Galactic).

We are witnessing an explosion in private space ventures.  It has been many decades since ‘space’ was as popular and newsworthy as it is right now.

Companies and spaceports are springing up at an ever-increasing rate.  It’s all very exciting and, for those of us who are enthusiasts, this re-emergence of all things ‘Space’ is very welcome.

Perhaps it was the remarkable flight of the privately built Spaceship One, which flew to the very edge of space (and did it without the assistance of any government of multi-national) that relit the public imagination.  This was a small private adventure, conducted with great risk and it very nearly ended in disaster.  That’s fine.  There were no passengers, no ‘innocents’ were put at risk and it was never meant to be anything other than an experimental flight.  Then Felix Baumgartner jumped from a balloon at 39,045 m, and survived. Brilliant!  In both of these adventures things were learned that could well be useful to other less risky ventures.  The fact that it is possible to parachute from the edge of space and survive, and that techniques for doing this were developed, may turn out to be very useful one day.

This rush into space is reminiscent of the opening up of the American West.  At first, a few adventurers dared to explore and cross the vast deserts and mountain ranges. They established trails and passes that were followed by young men in search of fortune and, later, by the pioneer families in their ‘prairie schooners’ who were striving for a better life.  There were gold-rushes, mining booms, wild lawless towns ruled by the gun, and many, many untimely deaths.  Then came the railways, government, law and order and the ‘Wild West’ was no more. The West ceased to be a frontier.  Oh – and the people who already occupied the vast ‘empty’ spaces, and the wild-life they depended upon were just about wiped out in the process.  Those empty spaces weren’t empty after all.

SpaceportSEA (Spaceport at South East Asia), the new facility for commercial suborbital spaceflight that will be built in Malaysia (Credits: SpaceportSEA).

This new frontier of the orbital space around the planet, is in that first phase of adventure and fortune-hunting.  Space isn’t empty either.  It’s actually quite full.  Full with satellites and assorted space-junk.  While there are some treaties covering satellites and debris, there are no laws.  There is no regulator.  It’s the wild west in space.  Who is going to license and oversee the new commercial ventures?  Those involved in this commerce think regulation is a bad thing and that it will preclude innovation.  That’s what the early railroads thought.  But then the bodies started piling up.  When is an aircraft a spaceship?  What’s the difference?  Regulators such as the FAA have no experience in spacecraft.  Once you’re above the atmosphere there are no rules, certainly no laws.  If the history of transportation teaches us anything, it teaches us that there will be a dangerous mess until a regulatory regime is established.

Like the American West, space is not empty.  The orbital environment is pretty crowded.  There’s lots of stuff just above the atmosphere, satellites, space stations (with people on board), and an awful lot of debris.  Every rocket that goes up leaves stuff behind, mostly very small bits – but quite a few big ones as well.  They’re all hurtling along at around 40,000 kph.  At that speed, something as insignificant as a flake of paint can leave a hole in a spacecraft.  The bigger bits will tear spacecraft apart.  The more rockets that go up, the bigger the problem becomes.  Even the frozen exhaust from rocket motors adds to the mess.  There is, at present, nothing to prevent the rush into space rendering low Earth orbit unusable for satellites or manned craft.  To complicate matters, space is international.  Regulations in America have no effect in China, and rockets can come from just about anywhere.

Now we have the prospect of a paying passenger public going into space.  Instead of regulation, the concept for their protection that is now being rolled out is the concept of Informed Consent.  I’m fine with that.  So long as the passengers know the risks, and as long as they are adults who are competent to take those risks, then let them get on with it.  SO LONG AS THEY KNOW THE RISKS.

Make no mistake, if a few very wealthy people get killed, the waivers they signed won’t mean a thing if they didn’t know the risks.  It may make no difference whether they knew the risks or not.  There will be a massive outcry, huge negative publicity and a demand for regulation and accountability.  That would be the end of passenger space travel for decades and the damage to the industry would be immense.  A wise industry would regulate itself, set published standards, and be open about the risks involved.  It would do this before the disaster happens.

When the West was wild, it was a different era.  A Wild West in space won’t be acceptable in the day of 24 hour news and the litigious society.

The Lynx is a reusable launch vehicle designed to take one passenger to an altitude of 100 km (Credits: XCOR).

Right now, the risks are not being properly declared.  The impression is being given that riding rockets can be as safe as a ride in a light aircraft.  That simply isn’t true.  Rockets are dangerous and even the most careful engineering can only make them ‘as safe as possible’.  They can’t make them ‘safe’.

Standards must be established.  Openness and transparency will be the commercial spaceflight industry’s best defense against the consequences of what will inevitably go wrong, sooner or later.

Vehicles and propulsion systems must be peer-reviewed in public.  The present secrecy and slanted public relations do the industry no favors.

The alternative to an open, honest self-regulatory regime is one that this industry will not like or want.  The industry can, of course, carry on regardless with the present stance of “Trust us, it can’t happen here.”  We’ve heard that before and it has never ended well.

This article is not to be reproduced except by permission of the author. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Space Safety Magazine, the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety, or the International Space Safety Foundation.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this solar flare on June 7 in the UV range at 131 Angstroms (Credits: NASA).

The 2013 Space Weather Enterprise Forum entitled “Space Weather Impacts: They Happen All the Time,” convened at the headquarters of US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)  on June 4 to address our growing vulnerability to space weather events. 

Although there was discussion of potential impacts from severe, Carrington-level events – “an outage duration of possibly 16 days to one to two years,” for 40 million US citizens, for instance, as highlighted by acting NOAA Administrator and former astronaut Kathryn Sullivan – forum organizers particularly stressed the need to face even low-level space weather. “Though our need to be vigilant and prepared for the high-impact, low-frequency event is critically important, we must also know how to cope with high-frequency, low-impact events that happen all the time,” said the Forum program.

Sullivan revealed that a space weather event is one of six White House national emergency preparedness events being planned for the upcoming year, a sign that the hazards of space weather impacts are slowly gaining general recognition. “Our dependence on sophisticated electronics technology for almost everything we do today has introduced a new vulnerability into our societies,” Sullivan pointed out.

The forum aimed to address five objectives:

• Describe how space weather impacts society all the time.
• Explain how space weather science and infrastructure benefits the public.
• Highlight recent space events, impacts, and mitigation efforts.
• Report on improvements to our Unified National Space Weather Capability.
• Highlight potential vulnerabilities of our technological infrastructure to space weather impacts.

Credits: The National Space Weather Program

It’s not just scientists and spacecraft operators interested in addressing these problems anymore. One speaker representing Delta Airlines spoke to the impacts their company already feels from geomagnetic activity; they already spend thousands of extra dollars every time they must reroute a flight to avoid possible communications outages in key regions, particularly at high latitudes.

The need to derive better models for forecasting space weather and its impacts has resulted in ever increasing space missions geared to watching the Sun. These are some of the more recent and commonly referenced missions, although the list of solar-studying missions numbers in the hundreds.

Solar Heliophysics Observatory (SOHO) launched in 1995 in a collaboration between the European Space Agency and NASA to study the inner structure of the Sun and the origin of solar wind. It is positioned in the Sun-Earth first Lagrangian point, so it always sees the Earth-facing side of the Sun.

Hinode is a JAXA-led mission that launched in 2006. It orbits Earth sun-synchronously and studies the Sun’s magnetic fields in a quest to identify what instigates solar eruptions.

Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) A and B launched in 2006 by NASA is a pair of satellites that travel in Earth’s orbit about the Sun – one in front of, and one behind the planet. These spacecraft are used to produce three dimensional images of coronal mass ejections.

Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) was launched by NASA in 2010 and it the most comprehensive solar observatory to-date. SDO covers many wavelengths and looks for any variations in the observable Sun that can explain its changes and eruptions.

The Radiation Storm Belt Probes (RSBP) are not solar observing, but rather focus on the Sun’s direct impact on Earth’s Van Allen belts that product us from solar events. RSBP consists of two satellites that orbit Earth, passing through and across the Van Allen belts. It is a difficult orbit, one usually avoided by spacecraft operators to protect their electronics from radiation damage. RSBP studies energetic particles and magnetic field behaviour.

With all of these missions, scientists are only just beginning to scratch the surface of understanding what instigates Solar events and what they mean for Earth. The science of forecasting such events is still very much a work in progress.