“These solar cells would have lower efficiencies compared to devices currently used on Earth,” Freundlich is quoted as saying. “But by using such a large surface area, we could eventually generate enough electricity to supply a lunar base, support lunar manufacturing or colonies.”

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It is being planned for returning astronauts to go for missions of longer durations than previously experienced. To do this, according to NASA they will first need more reliable sources of power, with the latest explorations of nuclear fission and many other developments. Building a permanent lunar human habitat is not as simple as it sounds, depending on several things—with all of them depending on the type of technology that will be available.

When we look at our future on the moon, many questions are asked about our need to return to the moon-its costs, its scientific benefits, whether or not we need a lunar base, and whether it needs to be controlled by NASA or an industry that is private. Some of these ideas involve using lunar rocks, an interesting fact in itself. Others utilizing the moon’s intense vacuum in order to develop photovoltaic cells on the lunar location–placing long strips of solar cells on the surface of the moon in order to create solar power installation.

Different than a nuclear reactor on our planet, the one on the moon will be the size of a medium office garbage can without large concrete cooling towers. Supplying the astronauts with less energy than on Earth, it will still be adequate for the needs of the lunar outpost and its projected power. And the moon is also being looked at to not only supply power needs to the lunar outpost, but also to provide energy on Earth.

More and more novel ideas are being created at the Texas Center for Superconductivity & Advanced Materials for solar arrays on the moon, through the efforts of an individual by the name of Alex Freundlich—a UH researcher. These arrays can be developed using lunar materials, which are able to be found in the lunar regolith of the upper crust of the moon. Freundlich is working with NASA Johnson Space Center, using simulated material found on the moon to devise these solar devices. With this work, a master plan has been able to be developed for the astronauts and their lunar habitat–

“The objective is to provide an analog close to space where the consequences are really life and death,” said Marc Reagan, mission commander for NASA’s sixth Extreme Environment Mission Operations program or NEEMO. “Rookies can make their mistakes before they get to space.”

On July 23, 2004, an astronaut by the name of Dave Williams was diving into the sea after assisting in the building of the International Space Station in the year 1998. The underwater habitat that he was entering was called Aquarius, located under the Florida Keys and part of the NASA training site—a NASA marine laboratory that trained 50-year old Williams and many others for their expeditions into space, Mars, and the moon—along with many new developments of technology for these expeditions.

Today, in 2008, underwater work is still going on but in different ways, with Google applying for a patent that is considered a “water-based data center.” With this in mind, THE NEW YORK TIMES: TECHNOLOGY article states that Google would be able to create “mobile data center platforms at sea by stacking containers with servers, storage systems, and networking gear on barges or other platforms. ” The whole idea allows Google to push computing centers closer to people where it normally would not be feasible, cost-effective or as efficient to build a data center on land.

The energy gained for the powering of these centers is from water splashing against the sides of barges. “In general, computing centers are located on a ship or ships, which are then anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away from computers in the data center,” Google writes in the patent application. Considered extremely unique, Google is one of the major service providers willing to do custom work on data center equipment, building its own servers and networking equipment.

Patents cannot remove something from the public domain, but instead must be very useful and brand new. The entire purpose of a patent is to encourage one group of people or a person to teach someone else or another group how to do something new. And until someone gets a patent and describes it, it is considered something new and different.

Maybe it was the $100 dollar bet that Stephen Hawkings made regarding the inability of CERN to find the elusive particle seen as “a holy grail of cosmic science”, after the LHC was turned on. Or maybe it was the exhausting hours by the CERN team preparing for the LHC project over many years. Or maybe it is just plain competiveness between two old Nobel physicists. But stupidity has been brought to a whole new level in the scientific field recently.

Call me old-fashioned, but for no reason should two high-level intelligent physicists act like two old men at a corner bar on a fool-moon night in a “he said-no–I said” fight over something not even known yet while still in its infancy stages. It’s an embarrassment to the scientific community—regardless of how “cute” the media thinks it is and will make millions of this “cuteness”, lathering up the public with every article about it.

More light is shed on the little tiff made big, regarding the accusation made by Higgs about the work of Stephen Hawkings “not being good enough”, helping us better understand the search for the “God particle” by the “God physicists” who work at CERN, seemingly excluding the lesser physicists who do not work there. But wait! Phys.Org had another opinion in 2006 when Hawkings visited CERN:

“Prof. Hawking was visiting the Theory Unit of the Physics Department at CERN. The Theory Unit welcomes about 400 visiting physicists per year, who come together to debate and discuss their ideas. As a key figure in the field of theoretical cosmology, Prof. Hawking’s visit reinforces the exciting anticipation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), due to start up in 2007, and the importance of CERN as a central meeting place for the best minds in physics.”

Obviously not detrimental to the CERN project, when Professor Hawkings visited the project and lent his name to the project, showing support for it was good enough for Professor at that time. And the other day when the complex scientific experiment was turned on to accelerate sub-atomic particles to nearly the speed of light before smashing them together, nothing negative came out of astrophysicist Stephen Hawking’s mouth except this statement to BBC, “”The LHC will increase the energy at which we can study particle interactions by a factor of four. According to present thinking, this should be enough to discover the Higgs particle.” You will notice he referred to the fact “we can study….”, not “they can study.”

But somewhere along the line the right remark was not made to the right person, as now we have two used-to-be intelligent men acting like two twenty-year olds fighting over the drop of a hat—or in this sense—a drop of a word or two. The bet of $100 shows that Stephen Hawkings feels the “god particle” cannot be found, at least in the sense they desire it will be–or he feels the spindly $100 bet will spur someone on. That is his opinion, and he has that right. Professor Higgs has his, and he has that right. After all, look at all the time involved and money spent. The field of science has absolutely NEVER been based on a group of scientists agreeing on anything; that is how the field has grown and new things have become discovered over them.

And now there is a fight because two renowned physicists disagree? Come on, people. This has to be one of the stupidest things I have even shamefully seen coming out of this area of work. Attacks have been leveled against Hawkings’ theories for a long time, and it just rolls of his back while those doing the leveling seem to come out of it a little smarter with some new break-through theories. Nothing the matter with it. Why is it that CERN and Higgs feels they are exempt from criticism or excludes other physicists from having their onw opinion when it is in disagreement with that of CERN—to the point upon which anger, words, and the media becomes involved. I guess I feel these individuals as Nobel men should know better, but I guess I was wrong.

Seventy-nine year old Professor Peter Higgs believes that the God-Particle will be found by the simple act of switching on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Researcher (CERN), located below the Franco-Swiss border. And now that the switch has been turned on, he still feels it is necessary to understand how particles acquire mass, recognizing that by turning on the machine something will eventually be found to better understand electromagnetic interactions.

Professor Higgs is the one who came up with the idea in 1964 that there must exist a background field that would “act rather like treacle.” The particles that would be passing through it would acquire mass by being dragged through a mediator, dubbed the “Higgs Boson” which was derived through his breakthrough theory 44-years ago.

Today, the LHC has cost over 5.46 billion dollars (3.76 billion euros) (six billion Swiss frances) to develop, with the total purpose of resolving physic enigmas—why particles have mass; more in-depth explanations about “dark matter” and “dark energy” which involves 96% of the cosmos; and answering the question “do other dimensions exist in parallel to our own.” The blip this morning was of cosmic proportions, offering the physics a new tool to probe the birth of our universe.

Once the world’s largest atom smasher was turned on this early Wednesday morning, which will allow them to reveal how the tiniest particles first created the original “big bang”—the massive explosive that formed our universe’s stars, planets, and everything in between. When the two firings of the beam of protons—clockwise and counter clockwise—went around the 17-mile tunnel of the deep collider, they formed white flashing dots on the blue screen of the control room which showed a successful crossing of the finish line. “The first technical challenge has been met,” said a jubilant Robert Aymar, director-general of CERN. “What you have just seen is the result of 20 years of effort. It all went like clockwork. Now it’s for the physicists to show us what they can do. They are ready to go for discoveries. Man has always shown he wants to know where he comes from and where he will go, where the universe comes from and where it will go. So here we’re looking at essential questions for mankind.”

“It appears to be several weeks before any significant findings will be found from the collisions:

The beams will gradually be filled with more protons and fired at near the speed of light in opposite directions around the tunnel, making 11,000 circuits a second. They will travel down the middle of two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder than outer space. At four points in the tunnel, the scientist will use giant magnets to cross the beams and cause protons to collide. The collider’s two largest detectors — essentially huge digital cameras weighing thousands of tons — are capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.” (yahoo news.)

“We are a bastard life form, born of unknown parents, with no relatives, no friends, no outside contact. WE are human, animal, and plant, isolated and abandoned on a planetary island…and WE are increasingly lonely.”

(Jeremy Heil, Ted Meyer, Terry Schmidt, and Matt Whitten—Group 1, 2002)
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In 1984, a meteorite called ALH84001 was found in Allan Hills ice field, Antartica. Founded by an annual expedition, the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Meteorite Program, it was preserved for study in the JSC Meteorite Processing Laboratory, but not recognized as containing possible Martian origins not identified until 1993. The eldest of the 12 meteorites matching Martian chemistry, it is three times as old as any of them.

Recent high-resolution scanning electron microscopy and laser mass spectrometry have allowed us to locate recently found small bacteria on Earth called nanobacteria, prompting the NASA teams to look further into the ALH84001 meteorite for this minute life form. A previous theory with this find is that life may have not originated on Earth but on another planet, arriving via meteoric vehicles. This process is called Transpermia, or transfer of life between planets.

The possibility of extraterrestrial life on another planet has long appealed to the scientific field, with astrophysicist Stephen Hawking stating, “Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on earth.” He has states that alien life or life form on another planet may carry diseases which “may” infect us due to the difference in our DNAs. And CERN is searching even deeper for the truth of God and life with the LHC machine and its search for the Bing Bang theory, and what actually happened during this moment in history.

In October of 2006, Stephen Hawkings had visited CERN in Geneva for about a week, specifically the Theory Unit of the Physics Department at CERN. His visit signified the importance of CERN as a central meeting place for the highest and best minds in physics. Yet when CERN turned on the particle machine today, he bet $100 that their experiment would not find an elusive particle seen as the holy grail of cosmic science.

Issues being approached for the Hubble Repair Mission are due to ground diagnosis for the telescope, using clues from telemetry by NASA similar to a mysterious “CSI Goddard Mission” based on little things viewed or obtained through data. But the hardware is not on the ground, so newly developed tools are being designed to handle Hubble issues being diagnosed on Earth as if the team was in space.

The repair of the instruments is very much an experiment on such a huge magnitude, with the new instruments considered a major part of the experiment. The astronauts and EVA Task Timeline are what NASA feels what “may be encountered”, not what is 100% known for a fact, while using simulations for training. What helps is the fact the servicing machine has a crew with several going to the Hubble on previous missions.

The Hubble Telescope is operated every day, twenty-four hours a day, located 353 miles above Earth. The task ahead has involved several years of preparation for the EVA Mission, with preparation at Goddard for delivery of the tools, the equipment needed, and the crew involved. Two main elements have been heavily involved with the mission: (1) crew familiarization where the astronauts are part of the developing team which offers the hardware maintenance a hands-on training, and (2) the MBL at Johnston Center mockup of a space shuttle in their underground water tank, with mockup tools and hardware, providing training for the repair mission. In the tank are twenty engineers in addition to astronauts, performing repair training to simulate the movements and actions in space onboard the Hubble telescope.

The newly designed Hubble Repair tools provided for the repair mission provide efficiency and bring a task into the “do-able” process against not being able to complete a task. Today the hardware is pretty much complete, in addition to all the tools. Testing capabilities and simulation is being practiced and performed on a daily basis for testing loads, vacuum of space, hardware operation, acoustic chambers against working of hardware, HST testing, slick carrier carries 4,000 pounds of hardware is being tested for launch loads.

HST main center for Hubble is operational for 365-days a year, 24-hours a day with the Hubble remaining powered up during its maintenance—which includes charging batteries, heated bay areas, hardware turned off when astronauts are on-duty for operations, spare hardware always on call, hardware is now delivered to launch site as this writing, final configures at Kennedy Space Center of hardware. The hardware will be loaded for the shuttle launching preparation, with fully charged batteries completed before launching, and anything else than needs to be completed in order to not get in the way of the Kennedy operations for launching preparations.

NASA WATCH

Mike Griffin’s Leaked Email: Is He Falling On His Sword?

Editor’s note: Some of you may recall my posting on 11 March 2005 that Mike Griffin was going to be the next Administrator of NASA. In that posting I recalled an action taken by Griffin during the Space Station Freedom redesign activity - one I described as having “demonstrated personal integrity - and did so in a public way that was rather career adverse.” At the time, a common NASA phrase for such an action was to say that someone “fell on their sword”.

For the first time on NASA Watch, here is the letter that Griffin wrote that more or less encapsulated that action - and also sank his immediate future at NASA at the same time.

To his credit, Mike Griffin has taken rather bold and blunt stances before. Motives aside, is he doing that again? And if so, isn’t it curious that both actions were due to threats to the space station - something that is not Mike Griffin’s favorite NASA project?

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Meanwhile, a Mars Odyssey went back on January 10, 2006 to look at another of Griffin’s letters regarding the shuttle situation:

“NASA administrator Michael Griffin repeated a pledge Tuesday he has made several times since taking over the space agency last April. Speaking to a packed house at the 207 th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Griffin said because of his deep appreciation of the scientific importance of the Hubble Space Telescope, “NASA will, if at all possible, use one of the remaining flights of the space shuttle for Hubble servicing.”The fate of the aging Hubble has remained in doubt since February 1, 2003, when the shuttle Columbia disintegrated in the skies above Texas during re-entry, killing all seven of its crew members. After that tragedy, NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe said he would only consider a robotic spacecraft to repair the Hubble because he could not assure the safety of shuttle astronauts sent on such a mission.

Griffin, who told the audience he has pursued a career in space ever since he was a small boy in the 1950s, said NASA needs to conduct at least one more test flight of the shuttle to evaluate its safety. Even then, there may be no guarantees of a safe and completed mission, “but I am hopeful,” he said.

He estimated that NASA’s continuing efforts to mount a shuttle mission to repair and refit the Hubble – which currently is down to two working gyroscopes – are running about $10 million per month, or $120 million a year. He said the agency is looking at attempting the mission by the end of 2007, so the total cost – not including the cost of any new hardware – would be something under $200 million.

Despite his own previous involvement in studying a robotic repair mission, he said the possibility is virtually non-existent.

“Within the timeframe available,” Griffin said, “there is no robotic mission which is basically going to do anything other than a controlled de-orbit. If time and money were not an issue, I totally believe that the robotic repair could work. But time and money are issues, and in the context of the available money I judged it to be unfeasible. I am sorry to tell you it is either a shuttle mission to repair Hubble or it will not be repaired.”

Griffin’s talk ranged from topics such as supporting a reinvigoration of the NASA Advisory Council as a participant in the agency’s science policy decisions – he said he thought the council’s role had been “marginalized” under the agency’s previous leadership – to presenting a posthumous award to John Bahcall, a former NASA astronomer and AAS president who was instrumental in developing the Hubble program.

He also said he recognized “there has been significant concern within the scientific community” about whether the costs of the Bush administration’s Vision for Space Exploration – which was announced by the president in January 2004 – will alter NASA’s level of support for space astronomy.

“It is not our desire to sacrifice present-day scientific efforts for the sake of future benefits to be derived from exploration,” Griffin said. “We who run NASA today are doing our very best to preserve a robust science program in the face of some daunting fiscal realities that affect all domestic discretionary spending. These realities dictate that we set priorities.”

He bluntly told the AAS audience, however, that “NASA simply cannot accomplish everything that was on our plate when I took office last April. In space-based astronomy, as in other areas, we will have to make tough choices between maintaining current missions, of which there are 14, and developing new capabilities. It is a difficult time.”

Griffin also said that because of the renewed push to return U.S. astronauts to the Moon, it might be time to reconsider the possibility of using Earth’s only natural satellite as a future platform for new observatories, particularly for radio astronomy.

“To my way of thinking,” he said, “a stable platform like the Moon offers advantages in the engineering aspects of astronomy that are hard to obtain in space. The back side of the Moon offers a region which is substantially quieter from a radio astronomy perspective than any other region I can conveniently think of.”

He quickly added he did not want the scientific community to think he was promoting “another space station, meaning I will not say ‘hey, we’re doing this for you and here are all the great things that can occur.’ I well recognize that no one would go to the Moon to site astronomical platforms, but if we’re going there anyway for other and larger purposes, then science can benefit by rethinking some of the engineering traits that are involved in the choice of basing modes.”

When considering whether or not to have a research station on the Moon in some future decade, he explained, “the opportunities that that would offer and the costs it would have should be rethought and should not simply be taken as having been decided decades ago.”

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With the change in launching date of NASA’s Hubble Repair Mission and as time approaches, the media is filling the airwaves with questions and concerns on NASA Television. Questions like “are MMODs a major concern” and “why choose a crew member of four instead of two” are approached by the NASA panel regarding the upcoming repair mission. Flight STS-125 experts and professionals are offering many panels online to answer many questions, including NASA Goddard scientists and the Hubble team members.

The servicing operation has a certain criteria for success, with the Hubble being a major milestone for the space agency in rewriting the books on what space is actually about. But is it considered effective for people on Earth who are not involved with space and astronomy? Used in conjunction with other observatories on a global basis, the universe and its evolution is better understood in the field of science—with data having been written by the Hubble in reports and studies for our futurel.

We are now in the “Golden Age of Understanding the Cosmos”, all due to data arriving from the Hubble. This final servicing date will allow the Hubble to operate for a longer basis to better prepare the future for NASA and other space agencies, with technology being improved due to new hardware and repairing techniques. The service mission for the Hubble has evolved over time with much planning for its process. It is different from the previous missions–for one thing, the HST has always been developed to be serviced in the future, to extend its life and ability to deliver updated data—until now.

Upgrading its telescoping has been a given every three years, with the last mission about 6.5 years ago. Modifying the operations to obtain greater life on the Hubble has been the main reason for this extended period, with the hardware content changed. Getting prepared for this year’s mission has been exhaustive, and that is because it will be the very last planned mission to the Hubble, attempting to make it the best it will ever be.

No later servicing missions will be available if this mission is not done right —on the line are: new pieces of equipment, upgrade science capabilities with new instruments, replacement of gyroscopes, insulation repairs in bay areas that are deteriorating, new batteries replace to replace 20-year old ones presently there, new electrical work, etc.-–all have to be done the best in can be during this “one shot mission”.

A special thank you to Discovery News space correspondent, Irene Klotz, who chronicles humanity’s efforts to leave the planet. One day, she wants to see for herself what all the fuss is about. Meanwhile, she is hosting this week’s Carnival of Space #69 for a variety of subjects, all done in alphabetic order per subject matter. Speaking for ourselves, we sent in “Space Tourism & Space Travel–How Far Off Are We?” by guest speaker Julie-Ann Amos. The article speaks of the contests sponsored to promote space tourism,

Google’s stimulus will award the first team to land on the moon and complete its objectives $20 million dollars, available until December 31, 2012. From that moment on, the prize amount will drop–first prize will be $15 million, the second team which can accomplish this will receive $5 million with another $5 million in bonus prizes…”

March 2, 2004 was the Rosetta international spacecraft’s official entrance toward its mission, approved earlier in 1993 by the European Space Agency’s Science Program Committee. The Rosetta Mission is a Planetary Cornerstone Commission in their long-term space science program, with its original mission to have been its rendezvous with the 46P/Wirtanen comet.

Taking its name from the ancient “Rosetta Stone”, with three scripts—Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Egyptian Demotic, and Greek—shown, with only two represented. The Rosetta Stone provided the key to an ancient civilization. ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft will allow scientists to unlock the mysteries of the oldest building blocks of our Solar System - the comets.

When the launch was postponed to March of 2004, the new target became Comet 67P/Churyumov - Gerasimenko on its ten-year journey–a large dirty snowball that orbits the Sun once every 6.6 years, in a successful launch by an Ariane-5 G+ from Kourou, French Guiana. Four gravity assists were required for the mission to work: three assists by Earth and one by Mars, with extended hibernation periods required due to the long mission durations.

The next phases for the Rosetta spacecraft will be the Third Earth gravity assist on November 13, 2009, followed by the Asteroid Lutetia flyby on July 10, 2010, upon which it will enter deep space hibernation on July 2011 to January 2014 when it exits deep space hibernation. Two asteroids were planned as part of the ESA Rosetta mission—2867 Steins in the year 2008 and 21 Lutetia in the year 2010. ESA’s main objective is to rendezvous with/orbit around both of them in order to perform observations of comet’s nucleus and coma, with the 2867 successful today.