Defunct 6-ton satellite crashing back to Earth (Reuters)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – A defunct NASA science satellite dispatched by a space shuttle crew in 1991 will come crashing back to Earth this month, with debris most likely landing in an ocean or unpopulated region, officials said Friday.

The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS, was turned off in 2005, becoming another piece of space junk loitering in Earth orbit. The 6.5-ton spacecraft is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere later this month, although exactly when and where is unknown.

"The atmosphere changes on a daily basis. It's impossible to say how that's going to impact this re-entry," Michael Duncan, deputy chief of space situational awareness at the U.S. Strategic Command, told reporters during a conference call.

Satellites and rocket bodies falling back to Earth are nothing new. Last year, about 400 small pieces of trackable debris returned to the atmosphere.

Spent rocket bodies re-enter at a rate of about one per week. Large spacecraft, like the 35-foot long, 15-foot diameter (10-6-metres long, 4.5-metres diameter) UARS, fall back to Earth about once a year.

Most of UARS will burn up in the atmosphere, but up to 26 individual pieces, with a combined mass of about 1,100 pounds (500 kg), will survive the fall, said Nicholas Johnson, chief scientist of NASA's Orbital Debris Program office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The largest chunk, part of the spacecraft's structure, is expected to be about 331 pounds (150 kg), he added.

The debris most likely will land in an ocean or in an uninhabited region of Earth.

The satellite's orbit takes it over most of the planet, from as far north as northern Canada to the southern part of South America.

"It's highly unlikely it's going to strike a populated area, just from a statistical standpoint," Johnson said.

"Throughout the entire 54 years of the space age, there's been no report of anybody in the world being injured or severely impacted by any re-entering debris," he said.

The chance that even one person will be struck by a piece of UARS debris is one in 3,200, NASA says.

The satellite is so big, its plunge through the atmosphere will be visible -- if anyone is around to see it.

"This should be quite a nice show," Johnson said. "Odds are though, it's going to happen over an ocean, unlikely to be seen unless it's by an airliner. We've had reports like that before.

"We just will not know precisely where it's going to come down until it comes down."

(Editing by Jane Sutton and Doina Chiacu)

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Rocket lifts off with satellites to probe moon (Reuters)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – An unmanned U.S. rocket blasted off on Saturday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida to deliver twin robotic probes to the moon in the hope of learning what is inside.

The 124-foot (37.8-meter) booster soared off its seaside launch pad at 9:08 a.m. EDT, arcing over the Atlantic Ocean as it raced into orbit.

Less than two hours later, both probes were flying freely from the rocket's upper-stage motor and were communicating with NASA's Deep Space Network.

"I couldn't be more pleased," Jim Adams, deputy director of NASA's planetary division, told reporters after the launch.

Liftoff of the Delta 2 rocket occurred two days later than planned due to high winds at the launch site and because of time required to review data on the rocket after its tanks were drained of fuel following an earlier launch scrub on Thursday.

The twin satellites on board are headed to a point in space 932,0570 miles away where gravitational pull from the Sun and Earth balances out.

From there, the NASA Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL, satellites will make a long, slow approach to the moon, arriving on December 31 and Jan 1.

The twin GRAIL probes are designed to precisely map the moon's gravity so scientists can learn what lies beneath the lunar crust and whether the moon's core is solid, liquid or some combination of the two.

Combined with high-resolution imagery, ongoing analysis of rock and soil samples returned by the 1969-1972 Apollo missions and computer models, the gravity maps are expected to fill in the biggest missing piece in the puzzle of how Earth's natural satellite formed and evolved.

MAPPING MOON GRAVITY

The small boxy probes are designed to fly single file over the lunar poles, mapping the dips and swells in lunar gravity.

Linked by radio waves, the spacecraft will be able to detect changes in the tug of lunar gravity as small as one micron -- about the width of a red blood cell.

Pockets of terrain with more mass will cause first one and then the second satellite to speed up slightly as they fly over, changing the distance between the two probes in minute, but measurable amounts. Less dense regions will cause the probes to slow slightly.

The measurements are so precise that scientists have to factor out a myriad of other forces, including the pressure of sunlight and the gravitational influences of all other planets in the solar system, even the dwarf planet Pluto, currently about 2.9 billion miles (4.7 billion km) away.

Scientists believe the moon's building blocks were large chunks of debris jettisoned from Earth after a collision with an object as big as Mars.

The moon's ancient face reveals a history of impacts over the eons and other events, such as flowing rivers of molten lava. The GRAIL researchers' job is to determine how all these processes impacted the moon internally.

"Large impacts deposit a great deal of energy into a planet. They heat the interior. They potentially could cause the convection pattern to change. They can contribute to the way a planet de-gasses," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology planetary scientist Maria Zuber, lead researcher and manager of the $496-million GRAIL mission.

Besides unraveling the moon's history, GRAIL scientists expect to extrapolate their findings to other rocky bodies, both in our solar system and eventually to those beyond.

United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, manufacture and provide launch services for the Delta 2 rocket. Lockheed Martin also is the prime contractor on the GRAIL satellites.

(Editing by Pascal Fletcher and Sandra Maler)

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NASA bids farewell to "amazing" relic, the shuttle (Reuters)

MIAMI (Reuters) – When the United States embarked on its shuttle program decades ago, it set out to build a workhorse vehicle that would make space travel routine and beat the Soviets during the Cold War struggle for dominance in space.

The resulting spaceship had 2.5 million parts and was nine times faster than a speeding bullet as it climbed heavenward. It was the first reusable spacecraft, capable of gliding back to Earth like an airplane.

"It was leading-edge stuff back then," said NASA Chief Historian Bill Barry. "It was seen as a major leap forward."

Other manned spacecraft did not fly home. They were ballistic missiles that splashed down into the sea or used thrusters and parachutes to control their plunge to Earth.

The shuttle program will end next month after three decades and 135 voyages when Atlantis returns from a mission set to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 8.

NASA is consigning its shuttles to museums because they are too old and too expensive to keep flying, and the space agency plans to design and build something new with a farther reach.

To understand what relics the shuttles are, consider:

When the first one, Columbia, made its inaugural flight in April 1981, music was sold on cassette tapes, there were no dot-coms and the United States had no commercial cell phone service.

IBM introduced its first Personal Computer four months later -- a desktop that weighed 21 pounds (9.5 kg), not counting the disk drive or keyboard, and came with a 16-bit operating system called MS-DOS 1.0.

The shuttle design itself is a product of the 1970s. President Richard Nixon signed off on the shuttle program in 1972, a mere 15 years after the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite, the beachball-sized Sputnik that marked the dawn of the space age.

TIME TO LET GO

The shuttles have been "pretty darn amazing," Barry said.

"I'm going to be very sad in July when the last shuttle flight ends," he said. "I love the program and I'm sorry to see it go but I think it's time to let it go."

Five shuttles were built, ending with Endeavour in 1992. The design changed a bit with each one and there were steady upgrades over the years. The external fuel tanks were made lighter and stronger. The main engines underwent several overhauls to make them safer.

A crew escape system was added after Challenger exploded in 1986, killing seven astronauts. The toilets and air-scrubbing systems were upgraded so the crew could stay in space longer than the original one-week limit.

But the basic structure stayed the same, Barry said.

"Out of 2.5 million parts, many of them have been replaced but not changed dramatically. I suspect it's not that much different from what it used to be," he said.

The shuttle never lived up to Nixon's dream of a reliable, low-cost space freighter that would fly almost weekly. It was supposed to whisk ordinary people into space in such gentle comfort that they would not need to undergo years of rigorous training -- they would no longer need the Right Stuff, the macho toughness of NASA's original astronaut corps.

"It was going to make access to space easy, cheaper and accessible to average American scientists and engineers, not just NASA test pilots," Barry said.

NASA did put politicians, a Saudi prince and other civilians on shuttle flights, until the Challenger explosion killed Christa McAuliffe, who was to be the first teacher in space.

The shuttles were never as reliable as their planners envisioned. NASA lost seven more astronauts when Columbia was torn apart during re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere in 2003.

The shuttles averaged only four or five flights a year and were not as cheap as envisioned either. The original design was changed in order to keep the construction cost within budget, but that raised the operating costs, Barry said.

The lifetime cost of the shuttle program is hard to calculate, but researchers at the University of Colorado-Boulder estimated it at $196.5 billion (in 2010 dollars), according to a study published in the April 7 issue of the journal Nature.

SATELLITE WORKSHOP

The shuttles did exceed expectations in some ways, Barry said. They allowed astronauts to not only launch satellites, but to grab and repair them and put them back into service.

Most remarkably, he said, they allowed NASA to regularly rejuvenate the Hubble Space Telescope, which for 21 years has produced images that are transforming astronomers' understanding of the universe.

With their enormous cargo bays, the shuttles also enabled the United States and its partners to build the International Space Station, though not in a way anyone imagined when President Ronald Reagan green-lighted that project in 1984.

The United States' original goal was to one-up the Soviets by building a bigger, fancier space laboratory than the Soviet Mir. Today that competition between the two Cold War enemies is seen as having been good for the entire space program, and leading to the broad international cooperation for the peaceful exploration of space.

"We wouldn't have gone to the moon in the first place if they hadn't been kicking us in the butt every chance they got in the 60s," said Barry, who formerly led the Russia Team in NASA's Office of External Relations.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States realized its space program was one legacy of communism "that was really good," Barry said.

The former enemies now are now partners in space. Russia will ferry U.S. astronauts to the 16-nation International Space Station in its Soyuz capsules until the next generation of U.S. spaceships are ready to do the job.

(Editing by Philip Barbara)

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Government sues Apollo 14 astronaut over lunar camera (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. government has sued a former NASA astronaut to recover a camera used to explore the moon's surface during the 1971 Apollo 14 mission after seeing it slated for sale in a New York auction.

The lawsuit, filed in Miami federal court on Wednesday, accuses Edgar Mitchell of illegally possessing the camera and attempting to sell it for profit.

In March, NASA learned that the British auction house Bonhams was planning to sell the camera at an upcoming Space History Sale, according to the suit.

The item was labeled "Movie Camera from the Lunar Surface" and billed as one of two cameras from the Apollo 14's lunar module Antares. The lot description said the item came "directly from the collection" of pilot Edgar Mitchell and had a pre-sale estimate of $60,000 to $80,000, the suit said.

Mitchell was a lunar module pilot on Apollo 14, which launched its nine-day mission in 1971 under the command of Alan Shepard. The sixth person to walk on the moon, Mitchell is now retired and runs a website selling his autographed picture.

He has made headlines in the past for his stated belief in the existence of extraterrestrial life.

"All equipment and property used during NASA operations remains the property of NASA unless explicitly released or transferred to another party," the government suit said, adding NASA had no record of the camera being given to Mitchell.

The suit said the government had made repeated requests to Mitchell and his lawyer to return the camera but received no response.

Mitchell's lawyer, Donald Jacobson, said NASA management was aware of and approved Mitchell's ownership of the camera 40 years ago.

"Objects from the lunar trips to the moon were ultimately mounted and then presented to the astronauts as a gift after they had helped NASA on a mission," Jacobson said.

Bonhams said in an emailed statement that the camera had been slated to be auctioned off in May when it learned about the ownership dispute from NASA. The auction house withdrew the camera from sale "pending further discussion between NASA and the consignor," a Bonhams spokesperson said.

The government is asking the court to stop Mitchell from selling the camera to anyone, to order its return and to declare that the United States has "good, clean and exclusive title" to the camera.

(Reporting by Terry Baynes; Editing by Cynthia Johnston)

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New Mars rover arrives at Florida launch site (Reuters)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory, a nuclear-powered, car-sized rover designed to assess the planet's suitability for life, reached the Kennedy Space Center for launch preparations, officials said on Thursday.

Aboard the Air Force cargo plane with the rover, named Curiosity, was the complicated landing system it will use for a pinpoint touchdown on Mars in August 2012.

Curiosity is about four times bigger and has many more science instruments than NASA's last Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which reached the Red Planet in 2004 for what were expected to be three-month missions.

Seven years later, Spirit is no longer working, but Opportunity remains operational. Those rovers were dispatched to look for signs of past water on Mars.

The new rover's bigger size and more robust science capabilities are intended to answer a thornier riddle: Does the Red Planet have, or has it ever had, the right conditions for microbial life to arise?

The rover is designed to spend at least one Martian year -- the equivalent of almost two Earth years -- surveying the selected region to assess habitability.

Problems developing the "sky crane" descent system forced NASA to miss its original launch opportunity in 2009 and added $800 million to the project.

"The design and building part of the mission is nearly behind us now," David Gruel, manager of Mars Science Lab's assembly, test and launch operations at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.

The agency's inspector general warned earlier this month that NASA was in danger of missing this year's launch opportunity as well, a period that opens November 25 and runs through December 18 when Earth and Mars are favorably aligned for interplanetary transport.

But NASA said it had resolved issues by the June 8 report and is in good shape for meeting the opening of the probe's launch window.

NASA is in the midst of a final assessment of four potential landing sites.

(Editing by Tom Brown and Sandra Maler)

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Monitor says north army masses in Sudan oil state (Reuters)

KHARTOUM (Reuters) – Satellite images taken on Friday showed northern Sudanese military vehicles including heavy transports and artillery massing in the capital of the conflict-stricken Southern Kordofan state, a monitor said.

Fighting between the northern military and southern-aligned groups has spread across the key north-run oil state since June 5. Tens of thousands have fled the violence, according to the United Nations.

The clashes have also raised tensions at a sensitive time in Sudan, with the south less than three weeks away from becoming an independent country following a January referendum.

"New imagery ... confirms that the Sudan Armed Forces, or SAF, control the town of Kadugli in Sudan's tense border region of South Kordofan, and that thousands of civilians have been displaced," the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP) said in a report.

The images "show a massing of SAF artillery, light vehicles, and heavy transports of the kinds used to carry tanks, troops, and munitions."

Set up last year by Hollywood actor George Clooney and other activists, the SSP says it seeks to head off renewed fighting and atrocities in Sudan by publishing commercial satellite images collated and analyzed with the help of a U.N. agency.

A spokesman for the northern military was not immediately available to comment on the report. It has previously said its forces were fighting to end an armed rebellion in the state.

Southern Kordofan -- the main oil-producing state that will be left in the north after the south secedes on July 9 -- is home to thousands of fighters who fought against Khartoum during the last civil war, many of them from the Nuba mountains region.

Officials with the south's dominant Sudan People's Liberation Movement have said clashes started when the north tried to disarm fighters there.

Northern officials have blamed the southern-aligned groups for provoking the fighting after an official from the north's ruling National Congress Party was named winner of a state gubernatorial election last month.

The south's independence vote was promised in a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of civil war. That conflict claimed some 2 million lives.

(Reporting Alexander Dziadosz; Editing by Dan Williams)

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Black hole shreds star, sparking gamma ray flash (Reuters)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A monster black hole shredded a Sun-like star, producing a strangely long-lasting flash of gamma rays that probably won't be seen again in a million years, astronomers reported on Thursday.

That is definitely not the norm for gamma ray bursts, energetic blasts that typically flare up and end in a matter of seconds or milliseconds, often the sign of the death throes of a collapsing star.

"This is truly different from any explosive event we have seen before," said Joshua Bloom of the University of California-Berkeley, a co-author of research on the blast published in the journal Science.

Initially spied on March 28 by NASA's Swift spacecraft, which is trolling the universe for gamma ray bursts, this particular flash has lasted more than two months and is still going on, Bloom said in a telephone interview.

What makes this even stranger is that the black hole, located in the constellation Draco (The Dragon) about 4 billion light years, or 24 sextillion miles (38.62 sextillion km) -- 24 followed by 21 zeroes -- from Earth, was sitting quietly, not eating much, when a star about the mass of our Sun moved into range.

"We have this otherwise dormant black hole, not gobbling up an appreciable amount of mass, and along comes this star which just happens to be on some orbit which puts it close to the black hole," Bloom said.

FEEDING FRENZY

"This was a black hole which was otherwise quiescent and it sort of has an impulsive feeding frenzy on this one star," he said.

Bloom figures this may happen once per black hole per million years.

This kind of behavior is different from what active black holes generally do, which is to suck in everything their vast gravity can pull in, even light. Most galaxies, including our Milky Way, are thought to harbor black holes in their hearts.

Black holes are invisible, but astronomers can infer their existence because the material they pull in lights up before it gets sucked in.

In this case, though, the black hole feasted on one star -- about the same mass as our Sun -- with such relish that it tore the star apart before gulping it down. As it did so, the black hole emitted powerful gamma ray jets from its center as bits of the dying star were turned into energy.

The black hole's gravitational pull was so great that it exerted what's called a tidal disruption on the passing star.

Astronomers could use this observation to help them learn more about how black holes grow, Bloom said.

"We still don't understand how black holes and the universe grow," he said. "We think most black holes start off as being no more than the mass of our Sun ... How they go from 10 solar masses to a billion solar masses is critical."

There is a strong connection between the mass of black holes and the mass of the galaxies that host them, with black holes feeding on gas and stars that come near.

(The distance in miles/km of black hole was corrected in paragraph 5)

(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

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Astronaut trio blasts off for space station (Reuters)

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (Reuters) – A Soyuz spacecraft blasted off for the International Space Station on Wednesday with a Russian, American and a Japanese astronaut on board.

The cramped Russian craft is to deliver cosmonaut Sergei Volkov, Japan's Satoshi Furukawa and 53-year-old NASA astronaut Michael Fossum to the orbital station after a two-day voyage up from the Kazakh steppe.

Its booster rocket trailing a jet of flame in the night sky, the Soyuz TMA-02M lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on schedule at 2:12 a.m. on Wednesday (2000 GMT on Tuesday).

Officials at Russian Mission Control outside Moscow congratulated the crew over the scratchy radio when the craft shed its rocket stages and safely reached orbit minutes later.

"We're feeling good," Volkov reported back to Earth as the ship ascended, a small toy pig named Nyusha that his son gave him as a mascot dangling above the crewmen crouched in their white spacesuits. "Everything is in order on board."

Fossum, a veteran of two spaceflights, waved to the camera.

Furukawa, 47, was in orbit for the first time, while Volkov, 38, is following in the footsteps of his father Alexander, who spent more than a year in space under the flag of the Soviet Union.

The trio is to spend six months on the station, a stint that will include the docking of the U.S. space shuttle Atlantis, which is to launch on July 8 on NASA's last planned shuttle mission before the fleet is retired.

Volkov, Furukawa and Fossum will be greeted upon arrival -- scheduled for 2022 GMT on Thursday -- by NASA astronaut Ron Garan and Russians Andrey Borisenko and Alexander Samokutyayev, who have been aboard the station since April.

Volkov is to blog on the Russian space agency website from the station.

While Europe worries about a deadly E.coli outbreak blamed on raw vegetables, Volkov is to try growing cucumbers on the station and Furukawa tomatoes, they said at a pre-launch news conference, joking that they might make a salad.

The station, a $100 billion project of 16 nations, has been under construction about 220 miles above the earth since 1998. A football field-sized mix of mostly Russian and American-built modules, it can accommodate a crew of six.

But rides there are going to be harder to catch, and only Russia will be able to provide them.

With NASA mothballing its shuttle fleet, it will be at least four years before its astronauts can fly out of the United States again. Until new ships are ready, Russia will ferry crews to the station at a cost of more than $50 million per person.

(Additional reporting by Dmitry Solovyov in Almaty; writing by Steve Gutterman and Alissa de Carbonnel; editing by Andrew Roche)

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