China launches powerful rocket in boost for 2020 Mars mission

China launched one of the world's most powerful rockets, Friday, in a major step forward for its planned mission to Mars in 2020.

The heavy lift Long March 5 rocket carrying a Shijian 20 test satellite payload blasted off from the Wenchang launch site on the southern island of Hainan, a livestream from state broadcaster CCTV showed.

"After more than 2,000 seconds, the Shijian 20 satellite was sent into its predetermined orbit," the official Xinhua news agency reported.


The rocket launch "tests key technologies related to future space missions," Xinhua said.

The successful launch is a key part of China's ambitious plans for a mission to the Red Planet next year and hopes of having a crewed space station by 2022.

"The Long March 5 rocket is tasked with important missions," Wu Yanhua, the deputy head of China's National Space Administration, said in a video released by CCTV last week.

"It will be tasked with a series of key missions including launching China's first Mars probe, the Chang'e-5 lunar probe and a core module for the manned space station," Yanhua added. 

More than a million people watched the online livestream of the launch and crowds gathered near the island launch site cheered as the rocket blasted off into the night sky, videos posted on social media showed.

"Fat Five," the rocket's nickname, was a trending topic on the Twitter-like Weibo social media platform.

Friday's success gets the space program back on track after a previous attempt in July 2017 failed mid-launch.

The Long March 5 Y2 was supposed to put the Shijian 18 experimental communications satellite into orbit and its failure delayed plans to use the rocket in a planned mission to collect lunar samples in the second half of 2017.

China successfully launched the first Long March 5 in November 2016, which it said at the time was the most powerful launcher it had yet developed.

The Long March 5, which is capable of carrying up to 25 tonnes, is comparable in capacity to the US-made Delta IV Heavy and Russia's Proton-M, some of the most powerful launchers in existence, according to NASASpaceFlight.com.

By contrast the US's Saturn V, which delivered astronauts to the Moon in 1969, was designed to deliver some 140 tonnes of payload into low Earth orbit.

Space Ambitions

Beijing has invested billions of dollars in its space program in an effort to catch up with its rival the United States and affirm its status as a major world power.

In 2003, the Asian giant, which now spends more than Russia and Japan on its civil and military space programs, became only the third nation to put a human into orbit.

China became the first nation to land a probe on the far side of the Moon this January. 

The Chang'e-4 lander, named after the Moon goddess in Chinese mythology, released a rover in the Moon's South Pole-Aitken Basin shortly after New Year.

In November, China completed a test of its Mars exploration lander, ahead of its first mission to the Red Planet slated for 2020 which is planned to deploy a rover to explore the Martian surface.

By 2022, China also aims to have a manned space station in orbit.

The Tiangong or "Heavenly Palace" is set to replace the International Space Station, which is due to be retired by 2024.

China will also seek to build an international lunar base, possibly using 3D printing technology, in the future, Wu said last January.

China's space program has alarmed the US, which fears that Beijing will threaten its dominance in space.

The White House announced the creation of a new military arm called the Space Force earlier this month, with President Donald Trump calling space "the world's newest warfighting domain."

source: news.abs-cbn.com

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket soars in debut test launch from Florida

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida - The world's most powerful rocket, SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, roared into space through clear blue skies in its debut test flight on Tuesday from a Florida launch site where moon missions once began, in another milestone for billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's private rocket company.

The 23-story-tall jumbo rocket, carrying a cherry red Tesla Roadster automobile into space as a mock payload, thundered off its launchpad in billowing clouds of steam and rocket exhaust at 2045 GMT (4:45 am in Manila) at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.

Boisterous cheering could be heard from SpaceX workers at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, California, where a livestream feed of the event originated. Several hundred spectators packed a campground near Cocoa Beach, 5 miles (8 km) from the space center, to watch the blastoff.

Musk previously said one of the most critical points of the flight would come as two side boosters separated from the central rocket within three minutes of launch. That occurred seemingly without a hitch.

Then, capitalizing on cost-cutting reusable rocket technology pioneered by SpaceX, the two side boosters flew themselves back to Earth for safe simultaneous touchdowns on twin landing pads at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station about eight minutes after launch. The center booster was expected for a return landing on a drone ship floating at sea, but its fate was not immediately known.

Musk told reporters on the eve of the rocket's test flight that he would "consider it a win if it just clears the (launch) pad."

While the Falcon Heavy's initial performance appeared, by all accounts, to have been near flawless, it remained to be seen whether the upper stage of the vehicle and its payload would survive a six-hour "cruise" phase to high Earth orbit through the planet's radiation belts.

TURNING POINT 

The launch, so powerful that it shook the walls of the press trailer at the complex, was conducted from the same site used by NASA's towering Saturn 5 rockets to carry Apollo missions to the moon more than 40 years ago. SpaceX has said it aspires to send missions to Mars in the coming years.

The successful liftoff was a key turning point for Musk's privately owned Space Exploration Technologies, which stands to gain a new edge over the handful of rivals vying for lucrative contracts with NASA, satellite companies and the US military.

Falcon Heavy is designed to place up to 70 tons into standard low-Earth orbit at a cost of $90 million per launch. That is twice the lift capacity of the biggest existing rocket in America's space fleet - the Delta 4 Heavy of rival United Launch Alliance (ULA), a partnership of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co - for about a fourth the cost.

The demonstration flight put the Falcon Heavy into the annals of spaceflight as the world's most powerful rocket in operation, with more lift capacity than any space vehicle to fly since NASA's Saturn 5, which was retired in 1973, or the Soviet-era Energia, which flew its last mission in 1988.

Propelled by 27 rocket engines, the Falcon Heavy packs more than 5 million pounds of thrust at launch, roughly three times the force of the Falcon 9 booster rocket that until now has been the workhorse of the SpaceX fleet. The new heavy-lift rocket is essentially constructed from three Falcon 9s harnessed together side by side.

Going along for the ride in a bit of playful cross-promotional space theater was the sleek red, electric-powered sports car from the assembly line of Musk's other transportation enterprise, Tesla Inc.

The Tesla Roadster is supposed to be sent into a virtually indefinite solar orbit, on a path taking it as far from Earth as Mars. Adding to the whimsy, SpaceX has planted a space-suited mannequin in the driver's seat of the convertible.

Whether the car makes it onto its planned trajectory will not be known before late on Tuesday, SpaceX said. The roadster, which carries a plaque inscribed with the names of more than 6,000 SpaceX employees, could instead end up in Earth orbit.

The launch followed an impressive run of successful paid missions - 20 in all since January 2017, when SpaceX returned to flight following a 2016 launchpad accident that destroyed a $62 million rocket and a $200 million Israeli communications satellite that it was to put into orbit two days later.

SpaceX had previously announced plans to eventually use the Falcon Heavy to launch two paying space tourists on a trip around the moon and back. Musk said on Monday he was now inclined to reserve that mission for development of an even more powerful SpaceX launch system, the Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR, which he said was proceeding more quickly than expected. 

source: news.abs-cbn.com

One year and counting: Mars isolation experiment begins

MIAMI, United States - Six people shut themselves inside a dome for a year in Hawaii on Friday, in the longest US isolation experiment aimed at helping NASA prepare for a pioneering journey to Mars.

The crew includes a French astrobiologist, a German physicist and four Americans -- a pilot, an architect, a doctor/journalist and a soil scientist.

They are based on a barren, northern slope of Mauna Loa, living inside a dome that is 36 feet (11 meters) in diameter and 20 feet tall.

In a place with no animals and little vegetation around, they closed themselves in at 3:00 pm Hawaii time (0100 GMT Saturday), marking the official start to the 12-month mission.

The men and women have their own small rooms, with space for a sleeping cot and desk, and will spend their days eating food like powdered cheese and canned tuna, only going outside if dressed in a spacesuit, and having limited access to the Internet.

So what kind of person wants to spend a year this way?

Crew member Sheyna Gifford described the team as "six people who want to change the world by making it possible for people to leave it at will," she wrote on her blog, LivefromMars.life.

Architect Tristan Bassingthwaighte said he will be "studying architectural methods for creating a more habitable environment and increasing our capability to live in the extreme environments of Earth and other worlds," according to his LinkedIn page.

"Hoping to learn a lot!" he added.

- Pioneer troubles -

Any astronauts that go to Mars are facing a trip that would last far longer than the six months that humans typically spend at the orbiting International Space Station.

NASA's current technology can send a robotic mission to the Red Planet in eight months, and the space agency estimates that a human mission would take between one and three years.

With all that time spent in a cramped space without access to fresh air, food, or privacy, conflicts are certain to occur.

The US space agency is studying how these scenarios play out on Earth -- in a program called Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) -- before pressing on toward Mars, which NASA hopes to reach sometime in the 2030s.

The first HI-SEAS experiment involved studies about cooking on Mars and was followed by a four-month and an eight-month co-habitation mission.

NASA is spending $1.2 million on these simulations and has just received funding of another $1 million for three more in the coming years, according to principal investigator Kim Binsted.

"That is very cheap for space research," she told AFP by phone from Hawaii.

"It is really inexpensive compared to the cost of a space mission going wrong."

Other simulation experiments have taken place under the ocean off the Florida coast, in Antarctica and in Russia, where a 520-day Mars experiment was carried out in 2011.

- Conflict resolution -

Binsted said that during the eight-month co-habitation mission, which ended earlier this year, conflicts did arise.

She said she could not go into detail about the nature of them without breaching confidentiality of the crew.

But the crew was able to work through their problems, she said.

"I think one of the lessons is that you really can't prevent interpersonal conflicts. It is going to happen over these long-duration missions, even with the very best people," she told AFP.

"But what you can do is help people be resilient so they respond well to the problems and can resolve them and continue to perform well as a team."

Binsted said the first scientific results from the missions should be made public about a year from now.

Jocelyn Dunn, a crew member from the previous mission, said she came to love the inside jokes among the crew, doing daily workouts, and learning to cook things like bagels and pizza dough with the ingredients on hand.

"I guess I got a taste of marriage, albeit a hexagon of relationships rather than a dyad," she wrote on her blog.

Then, just days after the mission ended in mid-June, she described the joy of being "on Earth" again, eating fresh vegetables, using a knife to cut meat, swimming, and drinking soda and champagne.

"I couldn't believe how much I had missed the flavors and textures of a juicy steak."

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Earthlings to send 90,000 hellos to Mars

Radio telescopes on Earth will beam 90,000 messages to Mars on Friday to commemorate the launch 50 years ago of the first robotic probe to visit the planet.

A U.S. space funding company called Uwingu organized the extraterrestrial shout-out to mark the 50th anniversary of NASA's Mariner 4 mission and to raise funds for its other projects.

Uwingu's "Beam Me To Mars" initiative invited interested participants to send digital radio-wave transmissions of their names, messages and pictures to Mars for fees ranging from $5 to $99.

The effort attracted several celebrities including actor and comedian Seth Green and actor George Takei, who portrayed Mr. Sulu on the television series "Star Trek."

The transmission is scheduled to begin just after 3 p.m. EST/2000 GMT on Friday. Traveling at the speed of light, the messages will take 15 minutes to reach Mars. The entire transmission will be repeated twice.

While there is no one on Mars to answer the call, project organizers say that is beside the point.

Copies of the messages will be delivered to Congress, to NASA headquarters in Washington, and the United Nations in New York as a show of support for space exploration.

"Though no one is on Mars yet to receive the messages, here on Earth people will hear them loud and clear," Uwingu wrote on the project website.

Uwingu, pronounced "oo-wing-goo" which means "sky" in Swahili, is a privately owned company that raises money to fund space research and educational outreach projects.

Since Mariner 4's successful flyby of Mars, returning the first pictures of the planet's surface, more than 20 other spacecraft have successfully visited, orbited or landed on the planet's surface.

NASA currently has three orbiters and two rovers working on Mars, and the European Space Agency and India each have one Mars orbiter.

The long-term goal of the U.S. space program is to land astronauts on the Red Planet.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

NASA's next Mars rover will advance hunt for past life

WASHINGTON - The next robotic rover to explore Mars in 2020 should scour the surface of the red planet more closely than ever for signs of past life, a NASA science team said Tuesday.

The US space agency's science definition team (SDT) released a 154-page document containing its proposals for the next Mars rover, after five months of work.

The mission would use microscopic analysis for the first time, collect the first rock samples for possible return to Earth and test ways to use natural resources on site for a future human trip, it said.

The Mars 2020 mission would build on the work being done by NASA's Curiosity rover, which has been exploring the red planet since August 2012 and has already found evidence of potentially habitable environments.

The mission would present "a major step toward seeking signs of life," said Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA headquarters.

The next step is for NASA to analyze the recommendations and issue a call for scientific instruments, which could include higher resolution imaging devices, microscopes, fine scale minerology, chemistry and organic carbon detection tools to scan for biosignatures on the surface of Mars.

"To combine this suite of instruments would be incredibly powerful," said Jack Mustard, SDT chair and professor of geological sciences at Brown University.

The rover would collect about 31 samples that might someday be returned to Earth, representing "a legacy for understanding the development of habitability on the planet," he told reporters.

The US space agency has not yet devised the technology to bring the cache back to Earth without disturbing its contents, and no plans have been set for any potential sample-return.

The next NASA mission to Mars is a November launch of MAVEN, an orbiter that will study how Mars interacted with the solar wind and lost its atmosphere.

The European Space Agency will follow in 2018 with its ExoMars rover.

John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science, said the 2020 Mars rover would get the US space agency to the next step in the "quest to answer the grand questions," before a planned human mission in the 2030s.

"Do we see any evidence of past life in those habitable environments?" he said, alluding to the aims of the future missions.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com