Russia designs reusable spacecraft good for as many as five missions

A Russian company designing a new spacecraft for the country's space program says the craft will be reusable and able to make as many as five flights.

Energia Rocket and Space Corp. said the spacecraft's technical design has been finalized but is yet to be officially approved, RIA Novosti reported Wednesday.

The new reusable craft is to replace the Soyuz capsule and will have modification to allow it to perform a number of missions, Energia deputy general designer Alexander Chernyavsky said. They include flights to near-Earth and moon orbits, missions to maintain and repair other spacecraft, and for collecting space debris, he said.

A prototype is set to be rolled out in August while flight tests are due to begin in 2017, Energia said.

Planet-Seeking Spacecraft Spies Water Worlds

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered two planets that are the most similar in size to Earth ever found in a star’s habitable zone — the temperate region where water could exist as a liquid.

The finding, reported online today in Science, demonstrates that Kepler is closing in on its goal of finding a true twin of Earth beyond the Solar System, says theorist Dimitar Sasselov of the Harvard-Smithso

nian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who is a member of the Kepler discovery team.

Both planets orbit the star Kepler-62, which is about two-thirds the size of the Sun and lies about 1,200 light years (368 parsecs) from the Solar System. The outermost planet from the star, Kepler-62f, has a diameter that is 41% larger than Earth’s and takes 267 days to circle its star. The inner planet, Kepler-62e, has a diameter 61% larger than Earth’s and a shorter orbit of 122 days.

Kepler detected the planets by recording the tiny decrease in starlight that occurs when either of them passes in front of their parent star. Astronomers used those measurements to calculate the planets’ relative size compared to that star.

Worlds apart
In the Science paper, the Kepler team — led by principal investigator William Borucki of NASA — suggests that the planets are solid, but may be rocky or icy. But Sasselov believes that the two orbs are likely to be covered entirely by oceans, based on his own unpublished analysis co-authored with colleagues at Harvard-Smithsonian and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. They theorize that the two water worlds are either liquid all the way down to their core or have a solid surface just beneath a shallower ocean. The latter model would be more conducive to life as we know it on Earth, where a recycling of material and energy from hydrothermal vents can sustain organisms, Sasselov says.

But some recycling could also occur in a much deeper ocean, owing to...

How the Hubble Space Telescope Works?

Launched from space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope orbits at an altitude of about 350 miles (560 kilometers). The telescope is 43.5 feet (13.2 meters) long, weighs 24,500 pounds (11,110 kilograms) and cost $2.5 billion.

Hubble’s six cameras and sensors see visible, infrared and ultraviolet light. At the heart of Hubble is its 8-foot-diameter

(2.4 meters) primary mirror. The Hubble telescope is named after the famed late astronomer Edwin Hubble, who has been lauded as the father of modern cosmology and determined the rate of the expansion of the universe. Incoming light strikes the primary mirror, and is reflected onto the secondary mirror and through a hole in the primary mirror, until it finally reaches a focal point at the science instruments. The complicated path increases the telescope’s focal length. When Hubble was first trained on distant heavenly targets, astronomers were horrified to discover that the images were out of focus. The primary mirror had been ground to the wrong prescription. After astronauts installed corrective optics in 1993, the view was clear. Hubble was designed to be serviced on-orbit by space-shuttle astronauts. Cameras, sensors and even the large solar-panel "wings" have been replaced. Hubble was visited five times: in 1993, 1997, 1999, 2002 and 2009. Since the retirement of the space shuttles in 2011, no more manned Hubble visits are planned.

Scheduled to launch in 2018, Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will orbit about 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) away from Earth.

The JWST’s 21-foot-diameter (6.4 m) mirror dwarfs that of Hubble. The James Webb Space Telescope is estimated to cost a total of $8.8 billion.

Astronomers Discover the Birth of the Black Hole ‘Cygnus X-1’

Astronomers have discovered for the first time the complete description of a black hole which allowed them to reconstruct the history of the object from its birth around six million years ago.

The scientists used several telescopes, both ground-based and in orbit, to unravel the mysteries about the object called Cygnus X-1, a famous binary-star system found to be strongly emitting X-rays almost half a century ago. The scientists' efforts yielded the most accurate measurements ever of the black hole's mass and spin rate. "Because no other information can escape from a black hole, knowing its mass, spin, and electrical charge gives a complete description of it," said Mark Reid, of the Harvard-Smithso

nian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "The charge of this black hole is nearly zero, so measuring its mass and spin make our description complete," he added

Since its discovery, scientists have studied the Cygnus X-1 intensely since its discovery but because of lack of a precise measurement of its distance from Earth previous attempts to measure its mass and spin was not successful.

With the new study, Reid led a team that used the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a continent-wide radio-telescope system, to make a direct trigonometric measurement of the distance and their VLBA observations provided a distance of 6070 light-years. Previous estimates had ranged from 5800-7800 light-years. With the new, precise distance measurement, scientists used the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer, the Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics, and visible-light observations made over more than two decades, to calculate the black hole in Cygnus X-1. They found out that it is nearly 15 times more massive than our Sun and is spinning more than 800 times per second.

"This new information gives us strong clues about how the black hole was born, what it weighed...

Why Spacewalking Is All About The Hands?

Think about your typical construction worker — there’s a lot of reaching, bending, stretching, lifting. How do you accomplish those tasks without gravity, as astronauts do on the International Space Station?
According to astronaut Shane Kimbrough — who should know, as he spent more than 12 hours “outside” doing station work and repairs during shuttle mission STS-126 in 2008 — instead of using your feet, you transfer most of the work to your hands. Your feet are basically used to brace yourself.
“You’re moving around, kind of walking with your hands, and pulling yourself in between the handholds and the rails,” he said to Universe Today, expanding on comments he made publicly at a conference last week.

Astronauts train for hours in a large pool known as the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, which includes a full-size model of the station modules inside. “You build up the [hand] strength in the NBL,” Kimbrough said, “with your hands fighting against the pressure of the spacesuit. If you didn’t do that, your hands would be fatigued [during a spacewalk.]”
It’s not a perfect training environment, though. “The big difference in the water is the drag it produces. You don’t realize you are floating, at times. If you’re moving along and walking with your hands down the rail, and you stop, you will immediately stop. In space, the mass of your spacesuit keeps going even if you stop. Your body will keep moving back and forth a few times, and using more energy when you need.” “It’s really out in front, not very far, in a circular motion. If you put your hand out in front, a small circle, that’s my work envelope. If I want to get something higher or lower, I can’t get there by reaching based on the way the [spacesuit] shoulder and arm operates. You maybe have to go sideways or upside down.” Spacewalking is inherently a dangerous business. Many people remember a daring station-era spacewalk in 2007, when Scott Parazynski dangled on the end of a Canadarm2 extension to stitch together a torn — and live — solar array. For this spacewalk, a lot of procedures were put together on the fly.
NASA also has a computer program that can roughly simulate how the astronauts can get into various areas of the station, and this was extensively used before Parazynski’s spacewalk, Kimbrough said.
Kimbrough’s crew had a more messy problem as they worked to repair the broken solar array rotary joint (that controlled one of the station’s solar panel arrays) and do other station work. The grease guns the crew used in that mission periodically squirted way too much grease and covered everything. The work area, the spacesuits, the tools.
“It had to do with the thermal properties,” Kimbrough said. “It would go in between pretty hard, to not being so hard. So sometimes, the grease guns that were designed at the time leaked … they have been redesigned, a few modifications, and they’ve worked well since then.”
Kimbrough himself ran into a minor, but still surprising situation when at the end of a lengthy tether. It turned out that tether had a bit of zing to it. “I was working way out on the end of the truss, and it was nighttime and I felt somebody pulling me back and almost spinning me around. The force of it surprised me the most.”
Other astronauts had warned him about that ahead of time, Kimbrough said, but he didn’t realize how vehement the pull could be. “I was a believer after that,” he joked.