Monthly Archives: February 2022

WASHINGTON The European Space Agency will establish a committee with representatives from both inside and outside the space industry to develop options for a European human space exploration program.

The creation of what ESA called a high-level advisory group was one of the major outcomes of a one-day space summit held in Toulouse, France, Feb. 16 that brought together representatives of member states of both ESA and the European Union to discuss future European space initiatives.

Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said the proposal for the advisory group came from French President Emmanuel Macron. We got a very clear message from President Macron that such a group is needed. He has asked ESA to put the group together, he said at a press conference at the end of the summit.

In a speech earlier in the day, Macron mentioned his desire to study options for a European human spaceflight program. Between now and summer, we want to come up with more specific European targets and ambitions for manned space travel, he said through an interpreter. We need to know what our priorities are, have the data to back it up and prepare the choices we are going to take for the November [ESA] ministerial meeting.

Those options, he said, included a European Mars mission by the end of the next decade or an ISS-style project. These are bold ambitions, he said. These are fundamental human issues that we will be working on for the next decades.

Aschbacher said a draft mandate for the new advisory group will be presented to ESA members at a March meeting of the ESA Council, with the goal for the group to start working immediately thereafter. The committee will prepare an interim report in time for the ministerial meeting in November, with a final report by next spring.

It is clear that this group has to be independent and comprising mostly non-space experts, he said, because we really would like to look at various aspects of society from an economic point of view, a historical point of view, a geopolitical point of view. That means including people such as artists and philosophers in the group to look at various aspects of exploration beyond science and technology.

French economic minister Bruno Le Maire, who presided over the summit meeting, said the group would help Europe establish strategies for space exploration. The Chinese have defined a strategy for exploration. The Americans, likewise, he said through an interpreter at the press conference. We havent done that yet, and we need the right method.

The issues the group would look it, he said, would include what level of cooperation Europe will seek with other nations as well as the roles of humans versus robots. What are the timetables? What sort of funding arrangements? These are all important questions, and weve tasked this expert group with finding answers so that we can then set guidelines.

ESA had, in the weeks and months leading up to the summit, been pushing hard to win support for a human space exploration program. That included the release of a European Astronauts Manifesto by the European branch of the Association of Space Explorers, the professional organization of astronauts.

A Europe that projects itself as a leading society must have the capabilities to set its own goals, and to decide for itself how far it wants to go in space exploration, united in our European values, the document stated. We now have a unique window of opportunity to accelerate and become a fully recognized partner of the global space endeavor.

While Europe is still at the forefront of many space endeavors, such as Earth observation, navigation and space science, it is lagging in the increasingly strategic domains of space transportation and exploration, Luca Parmitano, an ESA astronaut, said in a luncheon speech at the summit, reading from the manifesto. With utmost urgency, European leaders must decide now whether Europe shall accelerate its efforts to remain in the leading ranks of spacefaring nations that shape the future of this planet, or to fall behind into the role of a junior partner for decades to come.

The summit endorsed other European space initiatives with few major developments. That includes a set of accelerators and inspirators previously backed by ESA members, of which human space exploration is one, as well as European Union initiatives on a secure connectivity constellation and space traffic management. Participants also agreed to hold a second summit in 2023.

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ESA to set up committee to study human space exploration options - SpaceNews

Posted on: February 15, 2022; Updated on: February 15, 2022By Bryan Gentry, brgentry@sc.edu

If humans ever move to Mars, several University of South Carolina alumni will be among those who helped make the journey possible.

South Carolina graduate students have played instrumental roles in developing the technology to scour the Red Planets surface for signs of ancient life and then getting that technology safely there. Whether in research labs on campus or in NASA offices, theyve made their mark on our neighbor in the solar system.

You might say the record for the longest field goal in Gamecock history belongs to Yang Cheng, a 1993 geography Ph.D. graduate.

This diagram shows how Perseverance landed on Mars using Cheng's landing vision system. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

The distance: 300 million miles. The football: a one-ton, $2 billion scientific instrument.

Cheng was a key designer of the landing vision system for NASAs Perseverance rover, which launched in 2020 and reached Mars in February 2021. When winds over the Red Planet tried to sweep the lander off course, the landers cameras detected the change. Rocket boosters fired to steer the lander toward a safe landing zone. Back on earth, Cheng held his breath.

He watched the livestream from his home office, his eyes fixed to his computer screen while an announcers voice shared the landers speed and elevation every few seconds. When the rover touched down safely within five meters of the target location less than the distance between the field goal uprights Cheng slapped his desk, jumped in his seat and celebrated like hed just scored the game-winning point.

That made everyone very happy, he says, recalling the victorious moment. It was exciting and a great relief. I was very nervous, but I have confidence in the system.

Cheng studied mapmaking in China before coming to the university to study geographic information systems. His dissertation focused on using supercomputers to improve satellite images, making them more useful for creating maps.

Since that time, theres been a revolution in the field, resulting in sharp satellite images and easily obtained GPS data.

But Mars hasnt seen the same resolution revolution. The only high-resolution images of Mars dont have the coverage necessary for making a map. The larger images are low-resolution and suffer from problems like jitter from the satellites vibration. Since theres no GPS network and no map of Mars made on the ground, theres no way to verify a satellite map, either.

I liked seeing a connection between what I did as a nerdy scientist potentially impacting people I cared about.

Alicia Strange-Fessler, chemistry and biochemistry, Ph.D. graduate

That wasnt a problem with previous rovers Cheng helped NASA land on Mars rovers that aimed for vast flatlands with few obstacles. But Perseverance needed to land in Jezero Crater, a former lake where scientists hope to find ancient signs of life. Landing in a dried-up lake is no simple task.

This areas pretty dangerous, Cheng says. There are a lot of landing hazards, like craters, quicksand, boulders and steep landscapes.

Because of Chengs background in cartography and geography, he got the task of mapping Mars. He developed ways to remove jitter and other errors from the Martian images to create a map NASA could trust to help steer the lander to the surface.

I was excited that I had the opportunity to make the first navigation map for the safe landing of a spacecraft in human history, he says. But I was nervous because this is the first time in history.

Now that the rover is roaming Jezero Crater and collecting samples, Cheng is gratified to know that he helped it get there.

Ive always been interested in space and interested in doing something that has not been done before, Cheng says. Thats my motivation, the passion that drives me forward.

Meanwhile, the Perseverance rover is studying rocks and soils on Mars with the help of technology developed by South Carolina chemists. The rovers SuperCam includes a spectrometer device that uses a laser to analyze the components of objects several meters away.

Perseverance took this selfie over a rock nicknamed Rochette, on the 198th Martian day of the mission. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

Thirty years ago, Raman spectrometry required up close and personal contact between the spectrometer and the object being studied. But just before Mike Angel became a chemistry professor at South Carolina, he pioneered a method for collecting the data at a distance.

At the time, Angel was trying to analyze volcanic plumes and radioactive waste tanks that people couldnt get close to. Mars wasnt even on the map.

When I wrote that paper in 1992, I never would have imagined [the technology] would end up on Mars. Not in a million years," Angel says. I was interested in planetary exploration, but [the spectrometer] was too crude and too big. It needed a lot of engineering.

Angel, who recently retired as a Carolina Trustee Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, improved on the technology with numerous graduate students in Columbia. One of the first was Chance Carter, who then made standoff spectrometry a pivotal part of his research career.

What could be more fun than shooting laser beams to do standoff detection? Carter says, recalling a lot of fun tests in the lab. Its just exciting, fun work. Its captivating. It was exciting because it was something that only we were doing.

Carter calls Angel visionary for leading graduate students to new breakthroughs with spectrometry. Angel always had this knack for being able to think about whats the next important thing to do, he says.

Ive always been interested in space and interested in doing something that has not been done before. Thats my motivation, the passion that drives me forward.

Yang Cheng, a 1993 geography Ph.D. graduate

Most of the Raman spectrometry applications Angel studied were related to defense uses, such as detecting bombs by examining electromagnetic wavelengths. That attracted Alicia Strange-Fessler, whose husband was in the military at the time, to join the lab as a doctoral student.

I liked seeing a connection between what I did as a nerdy scientist potentially impacting people I cared about, she says.

Strange-Fessler's research focused on extending the range and accuracy of remote spectrometers in defense applications. But Angel and others were already exploring how the spectrometers could go to space.

Although the specific technology Strange-Fessler worked on was not developed enough to include on Perseverance, the rover does rely on techniques refined by Angels students over the years. Strange-Fesslers work may be carried by the next Mars mission, or it might be sent to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, Angel says.

That prospect is humbling, breathtaking and inspiring, Strange-Fessler says. Its exciting to know that something youve worked toward could help make discoveries in other worlds and increase our understanding of the solar system and larger space beyond that."

Angel, who helped analyze data sent back by Perseverance, is excited by the rovers progress. It already has packaged several rock samples to be returned to earth by a future Mars mission, and the data is promising.

"We are finding the kind of layered rocks that we expect to see at the bottom of a lake the kind of rocks that we think might preserve evidence of life from billions of years ago, he says.

Banner image: An artist's concept image depicts the rover analyzing rocks on Mars.

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Topics: Alumni, Academics, Research, Graduate Studies, College of Arts and Sciences

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Alumni make their mark on Mars exploration - UofSC News & Events - @UofSC

The Mars weather is beautiful today, and an astronaut is about to suffocate to death under the cloudless blue sky.

The trouble starts after three crew members leave the safety of the Hab, their pressurized six-person living station, and venture outside to do some routine work. They trudge along in 35lb spacesuits, breathing air pumped in by a fan and watching the jagged red landscape through their fishbowl-like glass helmets.

As they head back to the station, one astronaut, Aga Pokrywka, begins acting strangely. Her movements are sluggish. She stops walking.

The radio crackles. Aga, are you all right? the crews commander, Sionade Robinson, asks. The Hab is only a few dozen yards away, but Pokrywka cant seem to go further. She collapses on to the red clay.

Robert Turner, the crews medical officer, radios the Hab: Astronaut down, astronaut down!

The three crew members inside begin emergency protocols. Two don spacesuits, grab a stretcher and enter the airlock. They must wait five painstaking minutes for the air pressure to adjust. If they dont, they may be torn apart when they step into Marss thin atmosphere.

After the agonizing wait ends, the rescue party rushes to Pokrywka and rolls her on to the stretcher. They run toward the Hab, maneuver her body into the cramped airlock, and begin the countdown all over again.

A crew member inside, Kay Sandor, holds a timer against the airlock window: Five four three two

They get Pokrywka inside and on to the ground and remove her helmet. After a while, she starts to revive.

Patient stabilized, someone says. Everyone relaxes.

After a beat, Pokrywka asks: Did I win my Oscar?

It is hard to imagine that anyone would volunteer to live with five semi-strangers in a tin can in the desert. Yet hundreds of people from around the world apply for the chance to come to the remote wilderness of south-east Utah and pretend to colonize Mars.

Crews at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) conduct research to understand what humans may face when visiting or settling the red planet. And, in a sense, the crew members are the research.

For two or three weeks, they live like Martians. They wake each morning in bedrooms slightly larger than coffins. They gather in a small common area to eat breakfast usually a surprisingly edible meal made with dehydrated food, bacteria cultures and harvested greenhouse plants and watch the sunrise through portholes. Each crew member is allotted one 90-second shower every three days.

Operated by the non-profit Mars Society, the MDRS is a so-called analog space station. The crews there have no communication with the outside world except for a brief window every 24 hours when off-site personnel playing ground control make contact. No one is allowed to go outside without donning a spacesuit, or before going through airlock procedures. The station is surrounded by one of the most stunning landscapes on Earth, but crew members are allowed to interact with it only while confined, in effect, in a diving bell.

Knowing all this, I headed to the MDRS expecting my hosts, the members of Crew 238, to resemble the cast of The Thing, the clammy 1982 sci-fi film about an Antarctic research station riven by paranoia, at the phase shortly before the flamethrowers come out.

On the way to Mars, I stopped to gas up in Hanksville, Utah, a tiny roadside hamlet whose main attraction is a convenience store built, missile-silo-style, into the side of a mountain. Due to an epidemic of sign theft, the miles-long dirt road to get to the station, Cow Dung Road, is unmarked. This may be for the best, as the station has an occasional trespassing problem tourists, sometimes bearing drones, show up uninvited and disrupt the simulation. (The Mars Society asked me to remind readers that the station is a private research facility and closed to the public.)

Arriving at the MDRS is a slightly surreal experience: the small white compound, framed by windswept desert devoid of a single tree or shrub, really does look like a settlement on an alien planet. When I knocked cautiously on the airlock door, I heard a flurry of pleasant, multinational voices a German accent followed by a British one, and then by an unflappable southern American drawl straight from The Right Stuff or Apollo 13.

My astronaut hosts turned out to be an affable group: earnest, collegial and not visibly suffering from the kind of nervous breakdown that one might expect of a group of six sharing a single, bucket-powered dry toilet. After a week in sim, they were eager for a visitor and pressed me for news from outside.

In my daily life I produce ironically, perhaps Big Brother, PJ Marcellino, the executive officer and crew journalist, said. So I guess observing people gave me this weird foray into small-team dynamics.

In addition to working as a protocol producer on the reality TV show, Marcellino is a political scientist by training, a documentarian and an amateur writer of speculative fiction.

Ranging in age from 37 to 74, the other crew members had similarly eclectic career backgrounds art, nursing, engineering and as a business professor. None have held space-related day jobs, though Turner, a paramedic from Tennessee, has attended Nasa launches as an observer. The Mars Society reviewed their individual research applications and matched them as a crew. Crew 238 started planning their mission more than two years ago, but only met in person when they arrived.

Touring the MDRS doesnt take long. The Hab is deliberately cramped, to replicate the size of living quarters that could conceivably be delivered to Mars by rocket, and the rest of the facility is similarly utilitarian. Covered walkways connect the Hab to several outbuildings a greenhouse, a telescope, a lab and a mechanic room fashioned from the belly of a decommissioned Chinook helicopter. The facility has a small fleet of electric dune buggies. An array of solar panels provides much of the MDRSs energy, which, like water, is strictly rationed. The only neighbors are the programs on-site director, who lives in a trailer nearby, and a desert rat occasionally seen scavenging.

Over lunch lentil soup, Verdean chili, homemade bread and an apple crumble made from dried food the crew members talked about what attracted them to space. One common denominator: science fiction.

Two members of the crew were born behind the iron curtain Pokrywka in Poland and Simon Werner, the crew engineer, in East Germany and Marcellino was raised by leftwing parents in Portugal after the fall of the rightwing regime. Where North American sci-fi novels tend to emphasize individuality and the importance of technological innovation, they said, the Soviet sci-fi they grew up reading was more interested in the political and social aspects of future life.

Everyone disputed the perception of space travel as an expensive boondoggle. We spend billions on our militaries on fighting each other, Werner said; by comparison, he argued, space exploration was a drop in the bucket and one that could very well be crucial to humanitys survival.

Marcellino rejected the idea that there is a dichotomy between space travel and solving needs here on Earth. High-efficiency fuel, he said, was an example of a space technology that could be vital to alleviating the Earths climate crisis.

Werner and Marcellino also defended private space programs such as SpaceX, arguing that the interest that tech billionaires have taken in space exploration was a mostly positive development. (Elon Musk has contributed money to the Mars Society, which is funded by a mixture of membership dues, individual donations, grants and crowdfunding campaigns. MDRS crews are also charged a fee to help cover the cost of the program.)

Public space programs have as a rule struggled with financing, Marcellino said. Its hard for politicians to justify the funding. Only tech billionaires such as Musk and Jeff Bezos can afford to test rockets over and over, he said, and they are willing to do it at their own expense.

The crew members all told me that they did not expect to participate in a staffed mission to Mars and were just trying to lay some groundwork for whoever does.

I think we need to equip ourselves for the fact that we may not live to see the results of the things were working on, Pokrywka said.

The Mars Society has its origins in frustration. In the early 1990s, an American aeronautics engineer and inventor, Robert Zubrin, became convinced that direct exploration of Mars was not only possible but decades overdue.

I was 17 when we landed on the moon, and if anyone had told me then that Id be 61 and wed have not landed on Mars or even that people were not going to the moon any more I would have thought they were nuts, Zubrin told Business Insider in 2013. We were on the brink of opening up space, and we just stopped.

Zubrin has prosecuted his argument in a series of emphatic books The Case for Space, Entering Space, The Case for Mars, How to Live on Mars that sketch what a mission to Mars might look like, rebut common political and technological criticisms, and make a philosophical case for space exploration.

In 1998, Zubrin and others founded the Mars Society, which has no affiliation with Nasa. The Mars Society view has always been that there is nothing preventing a human mission within a decade, a representative told me. That was the case 10 years ago and its the case today.

Based on current technological trends, any journey to Mars would probably take six to nine months. Including the roundtrip voyage, even a short stay on Mars would require a group of human beings ready to spend a long time frighteningly far from home.

One dilemma, Robinson told me, is that the kinds of personalities that would be most attracted to a Mars mission people who are novelty-seeking, thrill-seeking, extremely accepting of risk are also those who would be most restless during the day-to-day reality.

Marcellino added: I think theres been an evolution of personality types from extreme type-A people who like to break records think Chuck Yeager to people with the social and cooperative skills to endure a nine-month space voyage.

Hence the importance of analog space stations. The Mars Society also maintains a base in the Canadian Arctic, though the one in Utah sees more use, for practical and cost reasons. Nasa and other groups have tried similar projects on a Hawaiian volcano and in a cave in Spain.

Much of what we know about long-term isolation comes from personnel stationed on submarines or in remote outposts in the Arctic or Antarctic. Space advocates believe that such case studies have limited application. Those sailors were bored, Zubrin told Business Insider, regarding US navy personnel stationed in Antarctica. They didnt want to be there. They wanted to be in San Diego where they can go out on the pier on Friday night and pick up girls.

By contrast, he argued, scientists and engineers who volunteered for long-term space missions would be highly motivated. Overwork, not boredom, would be a greater risk. The crew members I met at the MDRS seemed to partly bear out that observation; they worked hours each day and told me they were anxious about not finishing their research before leaving.

Either way, however, theres a huge difference between a few weeks in small-group isolation and, say, two years. A study completed in 2013 which confined six men at a facility in Russia, under simulated Mars conditions, for 520 days found that the men became lethargic and seemed to be tired even as they slept more.

In 1991, members of an experimental theater troupe undertook an audacious project to create a completely self-sustained ecosystem. At the Biosphere 2 facility in Arizona, a mixed-gender group of eight volunteers were enclosed in a giant terrarium, with water, plants and animals, for two years.

Tensions ran high; food, and eventually oxygen, ran low. The mission was only completed with the aid of emergency supplies smuggled in. In 1994 a second group tried, but were forced to end their mission early because of a power struggle in the Biospheres ownership.

Astronauts to Mars will live with the danger of fires, meteor impacts, radiation poisoning and solar storms. Air will need to be expertly managed to avoid astronauts choking on the carbon dioxide in their own breath, and months of low gravity will weaken them before they even arrive.

Depending on the relative positions of the two planets, communications between Mars and Earth will take as long as 20 minutes. Think of how stressful Zoom delays are, Marcellino said. Your brain starts to fry. Extrapolate that to four to 20 minutes, perhaps in an emergency situation.

If an emergency strikes on Mars, help or extra supplies will take months to arrive. Humans there will need to prioritize collective survival above all else, a principle that the MDRS emphasizes in emergency simulations. In a common scenario, some astronauts are contaminated by radiation while outside the station; their comrades inside have to decide whether to let them in.

During one such simulation, a contaminated woman pleaded to be let inside, but another crew member who was also her actual husband voted to let her die, arguing that it was necessary to protect the rest of the crew. The simulation supervisor praised the husbands choice. (No word on whether the marriage survived.)

And even the most rigorous training cant always prevent human error or mechanical failure. During Crew 238s simulated emergency, Pokrywka, who was designated to play possum, was saved, but afterward Turner admitted that his suit kept malfunctioning during the rescue operation.

I think I died, he said, casually. My airflow collapsed.

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Inside the Mars simulation project, where volunteers put their bodies on the line - The Guardian

An iconic portrait of famed NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon and the first earthrise viewed by humans from the lunar surface in 1968 are among 1,200 photographs and ephemera items heading for a virtual sale on February 22 at Dreweatts, an auction house in Donnington, England. The rare items come from the collection of the late British journalist Tim Furniss, who between 1984 and 2006 served as Flight International magazines spaceflight correspondent, and are being offered up for auction by his son, Thomas Furniss.

The portrait of Aldrin (estimated at 8,000-12,000 or $10,872-$16,308), the second man on the moon, was captured by Neil Armstrong, who beat him to making moonfall and whose reflection can be seen in his subjects helmet. The Lunar Lander Eagle the spacecraft that aided Apollo 11 in safely landing on the moon is also visible in Aldrins face shield. Taken on July 20 of 1969, the photo instantly became iconic, disseminated on the cover of Life magazines and reproduced worldwide. Aldrin himself later commented that he remembered the moon more from these photographs than from his memories.

Another image that rapidly made an imprint on the collective consciousness was a photo of the Earth rising over the moons horizon on Christmas Eve of 1968. Captured in color by Apollo 8 crew members on their first orbit of the moon, the photo depicts the gray, cratered lunar surface in the fore and a crescented Earth in the far distance. The photo, estimated at 4,000-6,000 or $5,435-$8,153, channeled the spirit of human triumphalism during a tumultuous political era while marking the eerie beginnings of humanitys ability to see its own home from above. It was one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, as Armstrong famously said.

Other lots feature items that are less immediately recognizable yet provide a fuller picture of the quirks, scientific study, and broader culture of space exploration in the late 20th century. A print of the first color photograph taken on the surface of Mars in July of 1976 shows a rugged terrain bespeckled by rocks, appearing in a magenta hue. The photo was taken on the day that the Viking 1 landed on Mars, the first unmanned spacecraft to do so.

A diptych of photographs lovingly remembers the life of Laika, a stray husky-spitz mix sent into outer space by the Soviet Union on the Sputnik 2 and the first animal to orbit Earth in 1957. Unfortunately, she died soon after liftoff. Armed with sensors and outfitted in a spacesuit, Laika, who scientists knew would be doomed, was launched into space as part of a trial run to determine if human space flight would be feasible. Between 1951 and 1966, the Soviet Union strapped dogs into spaceships 71 times. A photo that tells a tale with a happier ending captures Miss Baker, a squirrel monkey, cupped by gloved human hands. Miss Baker was the first animal to survive a spaceflight in 1959, and after retirement, eventually lived to the age of 27.

A NASA concept for a space station was mocked up even before energy was later focused almost single-mindedly on heading a mission to the moon. Illustrated by John Sentovic, the space station was conceived by Krafft Ehricke, an assistant to the technical director at Convair, a division of the General Dynamics Corporation, and featured on the cover of Spaceflight. Designed to host four people, it promised the possibility of short-term human existence in space. The slick, geometrically art deco-style of the illustration embodies the technological aspirations of the time, if a bit rudimentary in its engineering and design.

Finally, a remarkably meditative photograph tempers the adrenaline of blastoff by framing it with the curvature of a gnarled tree trunk resting in a pond. Two birds can even be seen flying on the horizon. Its unique composition suggests a corrective to the Cold War-era race to space that tinged the human spirit of exploration with a dark, bellicose streak.

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Captivating Space Photographs and Ephemera Hit the Auction Block - Hyperallergic