Volunteers end simulated mission to Mars

ScienceDaily (Nov. 6, 2011) — The record-breaking simulated mission to Mars has ended with smiling faces after 17 months. Mars500's six brave volunteers stepped out of their 'spacecraft' Nov. 4, 2011 to be welcomed by the waiting scientists -- happy that the venture had worked even better than expected.

Mars500, the first full-length, high-fidelity simulation of a human mission to our neighbouring planet, started 520 days ago, on 3 June 2010, at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow.

The international crew were isolated in their interplanetary spacecraft mock-up, faithfully following the phases of a real mission: a long flight to Mars, insertion into orbit around the planet, landing, surface exploration, return to orbit, a monotonous return flight and arrival at Earth.

During the 'flight', the crew performed more than 100 experiments, all linked to the problems of long-duration missions in deep space.

To add to their isolation, communications with mission control were artificially delayed to mimic the natural delays over the great distances on a real Mars flight.

The crew of three Russians, one Chinese and two Europeans have performed exceptionally well. They have kept together and showed that motivation and team spirit can keep humans going under very difficult conditions. Scientists are pleased at their exceptional discipline.

"Thank you very much for your outstanding effort," said the European Space Agency's Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain in his greeting from Paris after the crew stepped from their module.

"I welcome the courage, determination and generosity of these young people who have devoted almost two years of their lives to this project, for the progress of human space exploration."

Touching reunions

The hatch was opened at 14:00 local time (11:00 CET, 10:00 GMT) and the 'marsonauts' walked out from their modules and greeted the mission directors.

After their first taste of freedom, they were led to meet doctors and their families and close friends.

"It is great to see you all again," said Diego Urbina, ESA's Italian crewmember, after emerging.

"On the Mars500 mission we have accomplished on Earth the longest space voyage ever so that humankind can one day greet a new dawn on a distant but reachable planet.

"And, as a European Space Agency crewmember, I am honoured to have been part of this remarkable challenge together with five of the most professional, friendly and resilient individuals I have ever worked with.

"I'll be forever thankful to those who, even from a distance, always stood close to me during this space odyssey."

Romain Charles, ESA's French crewmember, noted: "One year and a half ago, I was selected by the European Space Agency to be part of the Mars500 crew. Today, after a motionless trip of 520 days, I'm proud to prove, with my international crewmates, that a human journey to the Red Planet is feasible.

"We have all acquired a lot of valuable experience that will help in designing and planning future missions to Mars.

"We're ready to embark on the next spaceship going there!"

During their first few days of liberty, the crew will undergo extensive medical checks and psychological evaluation. They will also enjoy some private time and relaxation before talking to the media on 8 November in Moscow.

Their mission continues into early December, as they go through an exhaustive series of debriefings, tests and evaluations to collect the mission's final data.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by European Space Agency.

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Russia's Phobos-Grunt Mission to Mars is Stuck in Earth Orbit After Engines Fail to Fire

Russia's Phobos-Grunt Mission to Mars is Stuck in Earth Orbit After Engines Fail to Fire | Popular Science@import "/files/css/a1c433465f8fe485195cb11d70c36108.css";@import "/files/css/33f6b7ecb4513ed2fe6c670880a27187.css"; home Login/Register Newsletter Subscribe RSS GadgetsComputersCamerasSmartphonesVideo GamesCarsConceptsHybridsElectric CarsScienceFuture of the EnvironmentEnergyHealthTechnologyMilitaryAviationSpaceRobotsEngineeringDIYProjectsHacksToolsAuto DIYMore From Our Partner: Toolmonger GalleriesVideosColumnsThe GrouseSex FilesGreen Dream Innovation ChallengesHow It WorksFeatures Tweet Digg Russia's Phobos-Grunt Mission to Mars is Stuck in Earth Orbit After Engines Fail to Fire Engineers have three days to save the craft before its batteries run out By Clay Dillow Posted 11.09.2011 at 10:45 am 20 Comments
Phobos-Grunt and Upper Stage A model of the Phobos-Grunt probe with its upper state MKonair on Flickr

A day after the successful launch of the Phobos-Grunt probe from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Russian mission handlers are already scrambling to save their spacecraft from the fate that has befallen so many Russian Mars missions. Phobos-Grunt found orbit yesterday but then failed to fire the engines that would put it on a path for the Martian moon Phobos. The probe is now stuck in Earth orbit, and engineers have three days to fix the problem before the batteries run out.

Problems for the multi-year mission arose almost immediately after the spacecraft was dropped into elliptical orbit eleven minutes after launching. The orientation system was supposed to use the stars to turn itself toward Phobos, then initiate two firings of the huge cruise stage attached to the spacecraft that would first lift it from orbit and then set it on a path toward Phobos.

None of this happened.

Related ArticlesRussian Probe Launches Today, Heading to Mars' Runt MoonRussian Progress Cargo Spacecraft Crashes in Eastern Russia After Failing to Find OrbitKremlin's Favorite Innovator Pushes Dubious Science, Russian Researchers SayTagsTechnology, Clay Dillow, Mars, phobos, phobos-grunt, roscosmos, russian space agency, Space, space scienceHowever, all is not yet lost. “I would not say it’s a failure,” Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin told the media. “It’s a non-standard situation, but it is a working situation.”

Engineers are now racing against the clock the get Phobos-Grunt back online. If it’s a software glitch causing the problem, new commands can be uploaded and it’s likely the mission could be saved. But if it’s a hardware problem, the entire mission might be doomed before it gets out of Earth orbit.

Phobos-Grunt isn’t just Russia’s most ambitious space project in years, but the largest interplanetary science mission ever devised (after Cassini-Huygens) at more than 14 tons. The spacecraft is also carrying Yinghuo-1, China’s first Mars satellite. If lost, Phobos-Grunt would be something like the 16th Mars-related mission sent by Russia to the Red Planet since the ‘60s. None of the previous have completed their mission objectives.

[BBC]

Previous Article: Video: A Steerable Remote 'Telexistence' Robot that Transmits Sight, Sound, and Touch to the OperatorNext Article: New Super-Black Material Absorbs 99 Percent of All Light That Dares to Strike It 20 Comments Link to this comment scientific anomaly 11/09/11 at 10:58 am

told you so

-Knock knock
-Who's there?
-The Doctor.
-Doctor Who?
-Yes

Link to this comment lawsonrw 11/09/11 at 11:10 am

And these are the guys we're relying on to get our astronauts and equipment to space? Give me a break!

Link to this comment pheonix1012 11/09/11 at 11:17 am

Damn! Now we'll never get those microbes onto Phobos. Roscosmos has really gotta step it's game up. We're relying on them to send astronauts into LEO. If they got software and hardware issues this will spell disaster for future manned flights.

Link to this comment shutterpod 11/09/11 at 11:26 am

Lets hope they get it working...

Link to this comment Delkomatic 11/09/11 at 11:34 am

haha
Only thing good about Russia is the women

Link to this comment pheonix1012 11/09/11 at 11:36 am

I don't care how many unmanned vehicles they bust up. The one thing I don't want to wake up to is the news of several people dying on another launch or re-entry attempt.

Spaceflight advocacy is already at an all time low. The death of a few more astronauts will be just enough to kill support of human spaceflight all together.

Roscosmos needs to get their s### right if we're going to trust them with the lives of scientists, engineers, and technicians bound for space (this includes their own countrymen).

Link to this comment pheonix1012 11/09/11 at 11:37 am

@Delkomatic

I've heard Ukraine is where it's at.

Link to this comment pioneer10 11/09/11 at 11:39 am

There was a time I was only too happy to hear of yet another Russian Mars Mission failure. Mars96 was the first time I instead felt sympathy. Now, I feel as anxious as any of them to hear word that the mission, or any part of it can continue successfully. C'mon comrades, you can do it!

Link to this comment JediMindset 11/09/11 at 12:19 pm

lol im sorry i just had to laugh.

@Delkomatic, pheonix1012

yep you gotta love east European women!!

_________________
The people of the world only divide into two kinds, One sort with brains who hold no religion, The other with religion and no brain.

- Abu-al-Ala al-Marri

Link to this comment pheonix1012 11/09/11 at 12:32 pm

@JediMindset

Actually, I'm more into middle-eastern and latin women. Thing of beauty.

Link to this comment Grunt 11/09/11 at 1:07 pm

I like to see the next USA probe that lands on Mars or even orbit Mars to possess a high power laser. Each time Russia shots off another probe to Mars, we power up the old laser and zap into crash landing. They are so used to messing up their probes; they never suspect it was us, lol.
Ooops, I have said to much.

Link to this comment rg-5 11/09/11 at 1:32 pm

Go suck your Bawls JediMindSh'I't

Link to this comment Aldrons Last Hope 11/09/11 at 2:33 pm

@Grunt, you probably just revealed the plan for space dominance D'oh!!

I was worried that it would get lost on the way to Mars, kind of a non-issue now :-/

Link to this comment aarontco 11/09/11 at 3:09 pm

For the sake of science, I hope they grunt this little guy out of earth orbit and onto phobos. I have been envious for some time about the prospect of the Russians being the first nation to return materials from a martian moon. It should have been NASA, but our program can't do everything, and often has its priorities completely mixed up.

A phobos landing is another step toward becoming an interplanetary species, so let's hope they get lucky and succeed.

Link to this comment gizmowiz 11/09/11 at 5:45 pm

It's a shame mankind waste money on space when were not involved enough yet to dare show our faces to other civilizations anywhere. Mankind has a long way to go back here on planet earth which is where we need to focus our energies. NASA should be focusing on deep sea ventures instead.

Link to this comment JediMindset 11/09/11 at 6:50 pm

@pheonix1012
yep also Asian and African. come to think about it, i love them all!!

@rg-5
why do you say such mean things?

_________________
The people of the world only divide into two kinds, One sort with brains who hold no religion, The other with religion and no brain.

- Abu-al-Ala al-Marri

Link to this comment Robot 11/09/11 at 7:03 pm

Probes are wonderful. ;)

Link to this comment prime2011 11/09/11 at 9:36 pm

Eventually we will develop AI to be able to resolve much of these issues by itself, saving us poor humans the headache of going through reams of code trying to figure out where the glitch is. A AI could intercept a issue and attempt to make adjustments on the fly to correct issues, even re-programming aspects of itself.

The AI I am talking about is proper AI, like perhaps that on 2001 space odyssey but without the talking and irrational behaviour :)

Link to this comment Raynre 11/09/11 at 10:54 pm

Isn't this something like the third failed Russian launch in as many months?

And we rely on them to get our astronauts into orbit. So comforting...

Link to this comment lyls14 11/10/11 at 12:04 am

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November 2011: Data Is Power

This month, we examine all the ways information is driving our future, from dating to crime to how we see the world.

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Sun and planets constructed differently, analysis from NASA mission suggests

ScienceDaily (June 30, 2011) — The sun and the solar system's rocky inner planets, including Earth, may have formed differently than previously thought, according to UCLA scientists and colleagues analyzing samples returned by NASA's Genesis mission.

The data from Genesis, which collected material from the solar wind blowing from the sun, reveal differences between the sun and planets with regard to oxygen and nitrogen, two of the most abundant elements in our solar system, the researchers report in two studies in the June 24 issue of the journal Science. And although the differences are slight, the research could help determine how our solar system evolved.

"We want to understand how rocky planets form, particularly our rocky planet," said Genesis co-investigator and UCLA professor of Earth and space sciences Kevin McKeegan, who was the lead author of the Science study on oxygen. "To understand that, we need to understand how the isotope composition of the most abundant element in the Earth came to be what it is."

On Earth, the air contains three kinds, or isotopes, of oxygen atoms, which differ in the number of neutrons they contain. All three have eight protons, and almost all have eight neutrons (O-16), but a small proportion of isotopes contain nine neutrons (O-17) or 10 neutrons (O-18). Although isotopes of an element behave similarly, there are subtle differences in reaction rates according to the isotopic mass, McKeegan said.

"We found that the Earth and moon, as well as Martian and other meteorites, which are samples of asteroids, have a lower concentration of the O-16 than does the sun," McKeegan said. "The implication is that we did not form out of the same solar nebula materials that created the sun. Just how and why remains to be discovered."

McKeegan and his colleagues measured, for the first time, the isotopic composition of oxygen in the solar wind. They found that the sun has about 6 percent more O-16 -- relative to both of the minor oxygen isotopes -- than Earth does. Because the sun represents the "starting composition of the entire solar system," these findings are surprising, McKeegan said.

"It's the most abundant element in the Earth, and it is isotopically anomalous," he said, adding that something chemically unusual happened to the material that eventually formed Earth and other rocky planets some 4.6 billion years ago, after the sun had already formed.

"The present composition of the rocky planets is quite different from the starting composition in a way we do not fully understand," he said, "but it must have involved interesting chemistry before the planets formed in the gaseous nebula that produced the sun and planets."

The data were obtained from an analysis of material ejected from the outer portion of the sun. That material can be thought of as a "fossil of our nebula" because scientific evidence suggests that the sun's outer layer has not changed measurably in billions of years. The sample of solar material collected by Genesis was small, but there was enough to be analyzed using UCLA's MegaSIMS (secondary ion mass spectrometer).

"This is the first time the heavy elements in the sun have had their isotope composition determined with precision, directly from solar material," McKeegan said. "The Genesis mission was a success. The mission has achieved its highest priority objectives. We are learning how planets form."

Analyses of meteorites from Mars indicate that oxygen on Mars is very similar to oxygen on Earth, but not identical, McKeegan said.

Genesis launched in August 2001. The spacecraft traveled to the L1 Lagrange Point, about 1 million miles from Earth, where it remained for 886 days between 2001 and 2004, passively collecting solar wind samples.

On Sept. 8, 2004, the spacecraft released a sample return capsule that entered Earth's atmosphere. Although the capsule made a hard landing -- the result of a failed parachute -- in the Utah Test and Training Range in Dugway, Utah, it marked NASA's first sample return since the final Apollo lunar mission in 1972 and the first material collected beyond the moon.

Co-authors of the oxygen study included Veronika Heber, a UCLA research scientist in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences; George Jarzebinski, senior electronics engineer at UCLA; Chris Coath, a former UCLA researcher who designed the ion optics of the MegaSIMS; Peter Mao, a former UCLA researcher who is currently an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology; Antti Kallio, a former UCLA postdoctoral scholar who acquired much of the solar wind data; Takaya Kunihiro, a former UCLA postdoctoral scholar currently at Japan's Okayama University; and Don Burnett, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, who was Genesis' principal investigator. A team from Los Alamos National Laboratory led by Roger Wiens built a device on the Genesis spacecraft for the analysis of oxygen and nitrogen from the solar wind. Wiens and his colleagues are also co-authors of the study. NASA funded the research.

"The sun houses more than 99 percent of the material currently in our solar system, so it's a good idea to get to know it better," Burnett said.

A second paper in Science by different researchers details differences between the sun and planets with regard to the element nitrogen. Like oxygen, nitrogen has one isotope (N-14) that makes up nearly 100 percent of the nitrogen atoms in the solar system, but there is also a tiny amount of N-15.

Researchers studying the same Genesis samples found that compared to Earth's atmosphere, nitrogen in the sun and Jupiter had slightly more N-14 -- but 40 percent less N-15. The sun and Jupiter appear to have the same nitrogen composition, but as with oxygen, the nitrogen composition of Earth and the rest of the inner solar system is very different.

"These findings show that all solar system objects, including the terrestrial planets, meteorites and comets, are anomalous compared to the initial composition of the nebula from which the solar system formed," said Bernard Marty, a Genesis co-investigator from the Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques in France and lead author of the second Science study. "Understanding the cause of such a heterogeneity will impact our view on the formation of the solar system."

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed the Genesis mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C. Genesis was part of the Discovery Program managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver developed and operated the spacecraft. Analysis at the Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques was supported by the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, both in Paris.

For more information on the Genesis mission, visit http://genesismission.jpl.nasa.gov.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by University of California - Los Angeles. The original article was written by Stuart Wolpert.

Journal References:

K. D. McKeegan, A. P. A. Kallio, V. S. Heber, G. Jarzebinski, P. H. Mao, C. D. Coath, T. Kunihiro, R. C. Wiens, J. E. Nordholt, R. W. Moses, D. B. Reisenfeld, A. J. G. Jurewicz, D. S. Burnett. The Oxygen Isotopic Composition of the Sun Inferred from Captured Solar Wind. Science, 2011; 332 (6037): 1528 DOI: 10.1126/science.1204636B. Marty, M. Chaussidon, R. C. Wiens, A. J. G. Jurewicz, D. S. Burnett. A 15N-Poor Isotopic Composition for the Solar System As Shown by Genesis Solar Wind Samples. Science, 2011; 332 (6037): 1533 DOI: 10.1126/science.1204656

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