Dwarf Star Endangering Solar System

(Editors Note: For some really interesting analysis on this topic, check out The-Rabbits-Hole.com)

Weapons in Space Inevitable Says China

China, which hopes to put a man on the moon by 2020, has long stated that it supported the peaceful uses of outer space and opposed the introduction of weapons there.

However Xu Qiliang, a senior Chinese air force commander, said it was imperative for the PLA air force to develop offensive and defensive operations in outer space.

Although Beijing has also sought to establish an international treaty to control the deployment of weapons in space, China surprised the world in 2007 when it shot down one of its own weather satellites in a test seen by many, including the United States, as a possible trigger of an arms race in space.

“The PLA air force must establish in a timely manner the concepts of space security, space interests and space development,” Mr Xu added, “We must build an outer space force that conforms with the needs of our nation’s development (and) the demands of the development of the space age.”

Superiority in outer space can give a nation control over war zones both on land and at sea, while also offering a strategic advantage, Xu said, noting that such dominance was necessary to safeguard the nation.

“Only power can protect peace,” the 59-year-old commander added.

China is currently in the process of rapidly modernising its armed forces, investigating the construction hardware such as aircraft carriers as well as cyber warfare techniques that could paralyse enemy’s command and control systems.

Last year’s annual Pentagon report to the US Congress warned that Chinese militarisation was changing the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region.

China, however, dismisses such talk as alarmist and says that its rise will be peaceful. China currently spends 1.4 per cent of GDP on its armed forces, compared with two per cent in Britain and France and four per cent in the United States.

Satellite Tending Robot

Dots Representing Objects Orbiting Earth

Robots that rescue failing satellites and push “dead” ones into outer space should be ready in four years, it has emerged. Experts described the development by German scientists as a crucial step in preventing a disaster in the Earth’s crowded orbit.

Last year it was reported that critical levels of debris circling the Earth were threatening astronauts’ lives and the future of the multibillion-pound satellite communications industry. But senior figures at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) told the Observer they have been given the go-ahead to tackle a crisis that will come to a head in the next five to 10 years as more orbiting objects run out of fuel.

Their robots will dock with failing satellites to carry out repairs or push them into “graveyard orbits”, freeing vital space in geostationary orbit. This is the narrow band 22,000 miles above the Earth in which orbiting objects appear fixed at the same point. More than 200 dead satellites litter this orbit. Within 10 years that number could increase fivefold, the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety has warned.

Klaus Landzettel, head of space robotics at DLR, said engineering advances, including the development of machines that can withstand temperatures ranging from -170C (-274F) to 200C (392F), meant that the German robots will be “ready to be used on any satellite, whether it’s designed to be docked or not”.

In 2007, the US Orbital Express project succeeded in refuelling an orbiting satellite. However, that satellite had been specifically designed to dock with the device.

LCROSS to Impact Moon

A Nasa spacecraft will deliberately crash into the Moon next week on a mission that could enhance the prospects of establishing a manned lunar base.

Only two weeks after three probes discovered water on the Moon, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) will blast two huge chunks out of its surface to establish whether it exists in a form that could be exploited by astronauts.

In the early hours of Friday morning, the LCROSS probe will separate from the Centaur upper stage of the rocket that carried it to lunar orbit, and send the spent module crashing into the Cabeus crater at the Moon’s south pole.

When the 2.4-tonne Centaur hits at 12.31pm BST, at a speed of 2.5km per second (1.6 miles per sec), it will throw up a plume of debris 10km (6 miles) high.

The LCROSS probe will then fly through the plume and analyse its contents with a battery of sophisticated instruments, before itself crashing into a different spot in the same crater four minutes later, to create a second cloud of dust and rubble.

The impacts, which will be visible from Earth through telescopes with mirrors of at least ten inches, will be studied both from the ground and with lunar orbiters, for traces of water and ice.

The goal is to confirm whether deep craters at the Moon’s poles, which never see the Sun, hold large quantities of water. Such a resource could potentially be tapped by future missions to the Moon for drinking water, oxygen and fuel, improving the outlook for a long-term human presence.

The culmination of the LCROSS mission follows the announcement last week that three probes, including India’s first lunar orbiter, had discovered traces of water all over the Moon’s surface. The water found by the Chandrayaan-1, Deep Impact and Cassini probes, however, is extremely scarce and inaccessible. It appears to exist only in the top millimetre or so of lunar soil regolith, tightly bound to minerals, and would be difficult for astronauts to use.

Large quantities of water at the poles, where hydrogen has been detected by several probes, would be a much more attractive resource for a lunar base. LCROSS should now establish whether or not it exists in at least one polar crater.

“It is an exciting time for water on the Moon,” said Dr Anthony Colaprete, the principal investigator for LCROSS. “Last week was great fun, and hopefully it’s about to get much more fun. You’d have a hard time using what Chandrayaan-1 saw as a resource. If deep craters really do have 1 to 2 per cent hydrogen [as observations suggest], and in water not minerals, that would be much more exploitable.”

As many polar craters are permanently in shadow, they are considered to be potential “cold traps” for water that reaches the Moon through the impact of asteroids and comets. Water of the sort discovered by Chandrayaan-1 could also migrate to these craters, as it sublimates during the hot lunar day and condenses into craters on reaching cold polar regions.

“These cold traps in permanently-shaded craters could have been accumulating water and building up over a billion years or more,” Dr Colaprete said, “That’s what we’re going to excavate and look at.”

The LCROSS impacts will test this hypothesis directly, by raising huge clouds of debris from the bottom of a deep lunar crater of the sort where ice is likely to collect. The Centaur and LCROSS will crash into the Cabeus crater, which is 98km (60 miles) across and of unknown depth: as it is permanently in shadow, this has been impossible to measure.

“The shadows are only so deep, so if you can make an impact that throws eject a few kilometres into the air, it goes from shadow into sunlight,” Dr Colaprete said.

The Centaur impact will leave a crater about 20 metres in diameter, and about 3m to 4m deep. “It’s about the size of a tennis court,” Dr Colaprete said. The explosion will have the energy of at least a tonne of TNT. The impact of LCROSS itself will be about two thirds as large.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter probe (LRO), which launched with LCROSS on June 18, will monitor the impacts, as will the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes. The impact time was chosen to offer the best possible viewing conditions from the Keck and Subaru observatories in Hawaii.

Nasa this week changed the impact site to Cabeus from the smaller nearby Cabeus A crater, because data from the LRO suggested that the bigger crater contained more hydrogen and was thus more likely to contain ice.

Cabeus was not the first choice because a mountain on its northern side could obscure the view of the debris from Earth-based telescopes.

“We’ve moved to a crater that’s a mixed blessing,” Dr Colaprete said.

“There’s a large hill in front of the impact site, but a deep shadow behind, so there will be less material in view but a higher contrast.

British astronomers will not be able to watch directly, as the impacts will occur in daylight, but large observatories will be able to see the Centaur separate from the LCROSS spacecraft.

Confirmation of Water on the Moon

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This video shows how we might get to and use the water on the Lunar surface, plus shows some really cool but expensive hardware.

Three different spacecraft have confirmed there is water on the Moon. It hasn’t been found in deep dark craters or hidden underground. Data indicate that water exists diffusely across the moon as hydroxyl or water molecules — or both — adhering to the surface in low concentrations. Additionally, there may be a water cycle in which the molecules are broken down and reformulated over a two week cycle, which is the length of a lunar day.  This does not constitute ice sheets or frozen lakes: the amounts of water in a given location on the Moon aren’t much more than what is found in a desert here on Earth. But there’s more water on the Moon than originally thought.

Obviously an artists representation of 'water on the Moon'

The Moon was believed to extremely dry since the return of lunar samples from the Apollo and Luna programs. Many Apollo samples contain some trace water or minor hydrous minerals, but these have typically been attributed to terrestrial contamination since most of the boxes used to bring the Moon rocks to Earth leaked. This led the scientists to assume that the trace amounts of water they found came from Earth air that had entered the containers. The assumption remained that, outside of possible ice at the moon’s poles, there was no water on the moon.

Forty years later, an instrument on board the ill-fated Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M cubed) found that infrared light was being absorbed near the lunar poles at wavelengths consistent with hydroxyl- and water-bearing materials.

M3 analyzes the way that light from the sun reflects off the lunar surface to understand what materials comprise the lunar soil. Light is reflected in different wavelengths off of different minerals, and specifically, the instrument detected wavelengths of reflected light that would indicate a chemical bond between hydrogen and oxygen. Given water’s well-known chemical symbol, H2O, which represents two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom, this discovery was a source of great interest to the researchers.

The instrument can only see the very uppermost layers of the lunar soil – perhaps to a few centimeters below the surface. The scientists were looking for a signature of water in the craters near the poles, but found evidence for water instead on the sunlit portions of the moon. This was certainly unexpected and the science team from M3 looked and re-looked at their data for several months.

Confirmation came from a recent flyby of the re-purposed Deep Impact probe, on its way to rendezvous with another comet in 2010. In June of 2009, the spectrometer on board also showed strong evidence that water is ubiquitous over the surface of the moon.

Jessica Sunshine and colleagues with Deep Impact also found the presence of bound water or hydroxyl in trace amounts over much of the Moon’s surface. Their results suggest that the formation and retention of these molecules is an ongoing process on the lunar surface – and that solar wind could be responsible for forming them.

Still another spacecraft, the Cassini spacecraft while on its way to Saturn, also flew by the Moon in 1999. Roger Clark, a U.S. Geological Survey spectroscopist on the M3 team, reanalyzed archival data from Cassini, and that data as well agreed with the finding that water appears to be widespread across the lunar surface.

There are potentially two types of water on the moon: exogenic, meaning water from outside sources, such as comets striking the moon’s surface, and endogenic, meaning water that originates on the moon. The M3 research team, which includes Larry Taylor of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, suspect that the water they’re seeing in the moon’s surface is endogenic.

But where did the water come from?

The team from M3 believe it may come from the solar wind.

As the sun undergoes nuclear fusion, it constantly emits a stream of particles, mostly protons, which are positively charged hydrogen atoms. On Earth, the atmosphere and magnetism prevent us from being bombarded by these protons, but the moon lacks that protection, meaning the oxygen-rich minerals and glasses on the surface of the moon are constantly pounded by hydrogen in the form of protons, moving at velocities of one-third the speed of light.

When those protons hit the lunar surface with enough force, suspects Taylor, they break apart oxygen bonds in soil materials, and where free oxygen and hydrogen are together, there’s a high chance that trace amounts of water will be formed. These traces are thought to be about a quart of water per ton of soil.

“The isotopes of oxygen that exist on the moon are the same as those that exist on Earth, so it was difficult if not impossible to tell the difference between water from the moon and water from Earth,” said Taylor. “Since the early soil samples only had trace amounts of water, it was easy to make the mistake of attributing it to contamination.”