NASA

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA’s Dawn spacecraft began its 1.7 billion mile journey through the inner solar system to study a pair of asteroids Thursday at 7:34 a.m. EDT.

The Delta 2 rocket, fitted with nine strap-on solid-fuel boosters, safely climbed away from the Florida coastline and launch complex 17B at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. “We have our time machine up and flying,” said Dawn Principal Investigator Christopher Russell of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dawn is scheduled to begin its exploration of Vesta in 2011 and Ceres in 2015. The two icons of the asteroid belt are located in orbit between Mars and Jupiter and have been witness to so much of our solar system’s history.

By using the same set of instruments at two separate destinations, scientists can more accurately formulate comparisons and contrasts. Dawn’s science instrument suite will measure shape, surface topography and tectonic history, elemental and mineral composition as well as seek out water-bearing minerals.

A critical milestone for the spacecraft comes in is acquiring its signal. The launch team expects that to occur in approximately 2-3 hours.

For the latest information about Dawn and its mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/dawn

NASA

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Launch and flight teams are in final preparations for the planned liftoff tomorrow morning (September 27) of NASA’s Dawn mission. The Dawn spacecraft will venture into the heart of the asteroid belt, where it will document in exceptional detail the mammoth rocky asteroid Vesta, then the even bigger, icy dwarf planet Ceres.

“If you live in the Bahamas, this is one time you can tell your neighbor, with a straight face, that Dawn will rise in the west,” said Dawn Project Manager Keyur Patel of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Weather permitting, we are go for launch Thursday morning, a little after dawn.”

Dawn’s Sept. 27 launch window is 7:20 to 7:49 a.m. EDT. from Pad 17-B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.

At the moment of liftoff, the Delta II’s first-stage main engine along with six of its nine solid-fuel boosters will ignite. The remaining three solids are ignited in flight following the burnout of the first six. The first-stage main engine will burn for 4.4 minutes. The second stage will deposit Dawn in a 185-kilometer-high (100-nautical-mile) circular parking orbit in just under nine minutes. At about 56 minutes after launch, the rocket’s third and final stage will ignite for approximately 87 seconds. When the third stage burns out, actuators and push-off springs on the launch vehicle will separate the spacecraft from the third stage.

“After separation, the spacecraft will go through an automatic activating sequence, including stabilizing the spacecraft, activating flight systems and deploying Dawn’s two massive solar arrays,” said Patel. “Then and only then will the spacecraft energize its transmitter and contact Earth. We expect acquisition of signal to occur anywhere from one-and-a-half hours to three-and-a-half hours after launch.”

The Dawn mission will explore Vesta and Ceres because these two asteroid belt behemoths have been witness to so much of our solar system’s history.

“Visiting both Vesta and Ceres enables a study in extraterrestrial contrasts,” said Dawn Principal Investigator Christopher Russell of the University of California, Los Angeles. “One is rocky and is representative of the building blocks that constructed the planets of the inner solar system. The other may very well be icy and represents the outer planets. Yet, these two very diverse bodies reside in essentially the same neighborhood. It is one of the mysteries Dawn hopes to solve.”

Using the same spacecraft to reconnoiter two different celestial targets makes more than fiscal sense. It makes scientific sense. By utilizing the same set of instruments at two separate destinations, scientists can more accurately formulate comparisons and contrasts. Dawn’s science instrument suite will measure mass, shape, surface topography and tectonic history, elemental and mineral composition, as well as seek out water-bearing minerals. In addition, the Dawn spacecraft itself and the way it orbits both Vesta and Ceres will be used to measure the gravity fields of the celestial bodies.

“Understanding conditions that lead to the formation of planets is a goal of NASA’s mission of exploration,” said David Lindstrom, Dawn program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The science returned from Vesta and Ceres could unlock many of the mysteries of the formation of the rocky planets including Earth.”

Before all this celestial mystery unlocking can occur, Dawn has to reach the asteroid belt and its first target, Vesta. This is a four-year process that begins with launch and continues with the firing of three of the most efficient engines in NASA’s space motor inventory: ion propulsion engines. Employing a complex commingling of solar-derived electric power and xenon gas, these frugal powerhouses must fire for months at a time to propel as well as steer Dawn. Over their eight-year, almost 4-billion-mile lifetime, these three ion propulsion engines will fire cumulatively for about 50,000 hours (over five years) - a record for spacecraft.

The Dawn mission is managed by JPL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The University of California, Los Angeles, is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Other scientific partners include the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico; Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg, Germany; and Italian National Institute of Astrophysics, Rome. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., designed and built the Dawn spacecraft.

NASA

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Space shuttle Discovery is scheduled to roll out to Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Fla., on Saturday, Sept. 29, as preparations for the STS-120 mission move forward. Discovery is targeted to lift off Oct. 23 on a 14-day mission to the International Space Station.

The first motion of the shuttle out of Kennedy’s Vehicle Assembly Building is planned at 8 p.m. EDT. The 3.4-mile journey to the launch pad is expected to take about six hours.

The STS-120 mission will add a module to the space station that will serve as a port for installing additional international laboratories. The Harmony module will be the first expansion of the living and working space on the orbiting laboratory since 2001. The upcoming mission also will move the first set of solar arrays installed on the station to a permanent location on the complex and redeploy them.

In the past week, workers at the Kennedy Space Center replaced four seals and their associated components on the right-hand main landing gear strut of Discovery after a hydraulic fluid leak was discovered during the “weight on wheels” test.

NASA

WASHINGTON — NASA Administrator Michael Griffin kicked off a lecture series honoring the agency’s 50th anniversary with an address Monday describing the critical role that space exploration plays in the global economy.

The “space economy” was estimated at about $180 billion in 2005, according to a report by the Space Foundation released in 2006. More than 60 percent of space-related economic activity came from commercial goods and services.

“NASA opens new frontiers and creates new opportunities, and because of that [NASA] is a critical driver of innovation,” Griffin said. “We don’t just create new jobs, we create entirely new markets and possibilities for economic growth that didn’t previously exist. This is the emerging space economy, an economy that is transforming our lives here on Earth in ways that are not yet fully understood or appreciated. It is not an economy in space — not yet. But space activities create products and markets that provide benefits right here on Earth, benefits that have arisen from our efforts to explore, understand, and utilize this new medium.”

Since NASA’s birth almost a half-century ago, military and political competition in space largely has faded away. The focus of space exploration today is in the economic arena. Rising living standards and technological advancement around the world mean greater competition from places that were never competitors before.

“If technological innovation drives competitiveness and growth, what drives innovation?” Griffin said. “There are many factors, but the exploration and exploitation of the space frontier is one of them. The money we spend — half a cent of the federal budget dollar — and the impact of what we do with it, doesn’t happen ‘out there.’ It happens here, and the result has been the space economy. So if America is to remain a leader in the face of burgeoning global competition, we must continue to innovate, and we must continue to innovate in space.”

NASA is uniquely positioned to drive the space economy with technological innovation. Griffin cited a number of examples where the space economy yields tangible benefits for people here on Earth.

“We see the transformative effects of the space economy all around us through numerous technologies and life-saving capabilities,” Griffin said. “We see the space economy in the lives saved when advanced breast cancer screening catches tumors in time for treatment, or when a heart defibrillator restores the proper rhythm of a patient’s heart. We see it when GPS, the Global Positioning System developed by the Air Force for military applications, helps guide a traveler to his or her destination. We see it when weather satellites warn us of coming hurricanes, or when satellites provide information critical to understanding our environment and the effects of climate change. We see it when we use an ATM or pay for gas at the pump with an immediate electronic response via satellite. Technologies developed for exploring space are being used to increase crop yields and to search for good fishing regions at sea.”

Griffin’s lecture followed a luncheon Monday at the Renaissance Mayflower Hotel in Washington. It was the first in a series that will honor NASA’s 50th birthday. The space agency began operations on Oct. 1, 1958. U.S. Rep. Alan B. Mollohan of West Virginia introduced Griffin.

Future lectures in the series will feature prominent speakers to discuss the benefits that space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research provide in addressing global issues such as the economy, education, health, science and the environment. Lockheed Martin Corporation of Bethesda, Md., is co-sponsoring the two-year lecture series.

NASA

The Dawn spacecraft completed the 25-kilometer (15-mile) journey from Astrotech Space Operations in Titusville, Fla., to Pad-17B of the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 5:10 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, September 11. The launch period for Dawn, NASA’s eight-year, more than 5-billion-kilometer (3.2-billion-mile) odyssey into the heart of the asteroid belt, opens Sept. 26.

“From here, the only way to go is up,” said Dawn project manager Keyur Patel of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “We are looking forward to putting some space between Dawn and Mother Earth and making some space history.”

Dawn’s goal is to characterize the conditions and processes of the solar system’s earliest epoch 4.5 billion years ago by investigating in detail the massive asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. They reside between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt. Scientists theorize these were budding planets never given the opportunity to grow. However, Ceres and Vesta each followed a very different evolutionary path during the solar system’s first few million years. By investigating two diverse asteroids during the spacecraft’s eight-year flight, the Dawn mission aims to unlock some of the mysteries of planetary formation. Dawn will be the first spacecraft to orbit an object in the asteroid belt and the first to orbit two bodies after leaving Earth. Recent images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope raise further intriguing questions about the evolution of these asteroids.

Now that the Dawn payload is atop the Delta II 7925-H, a heavier-lift model of the standard Delta II that uses larger solid rocket boosters, a final major test will be conducted. This integrated test of the Delta II and Dawn working together will simulate all events as they will occur on launch day, but without propellants aboard the vehicle.

The Sept. 26 launch window is 4:25 to 4:54 a.m. PDT (7:25 to 7:54 a.m. EDT). Should the launch be postponed 24 hours for any reason, the launch window will extend from 4:20 to 4:49 a.m. PDT (7:20 to 7:49 a.m. EDT). For a 48-hour postponement, the launch window will be from 4:14 to 4:43 a.m. PDT (7:14 to 7:43 a.m EDT). Dawn’s launch period closes Oct. 15.

The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by JPL for the NASA Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The University of California Los Angeles is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Other scientific partners include Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico; German Aerospace Center, Berlin; Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg, Germany; and Italian National Institute of Astrophysics, Palermo. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., designed and built the Dawn spacecraft. The NASA Launch Services Program at Kennedy Space Center and the United Launch Alliance are responsible for the launch of the Delta II.

NASA

HOUSTON — The astronauts that flew last month aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour will give a first-hand account of their flight at 6 p.m. Sept. 20 at Space Center Houston.

The event is free and open to the public. The crew members will present video of their flight, designated mission STS-118, and take questions from the audience. A brief autograph session will follow. Seating in the Northrop Grumman Theater is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Once the theater fills, guests will be seated in an adjacent area to watch the program on closed-circuit television.

Navy Cmdr. Scott Kelly commanded the seven-person crew. Marine Col. Charlie Hobaugh was Endeavour’s pilot. Mission specialists were Rick Mastracchio, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Dr. Dave Williams, Barbara R. Morgan, Tracy Caldwell and Alvin Drew.

STS-118 was the 119th shuttle mission and the 22nd time a shuttle visited the International Space Station. The mission continued station construction by delivering a starboard truss segment and included multiple spacewalks. The 13-day mission landed at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, Aug. 21 after traveling 5.3 million miles.

For more information about STS-118 visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts118

NASA

PASADENA, Calif. — Two months after sky-darkening dust from severe storms nearly killed NASA’s Mars exploration rovers, the solar-powered robots are awake and ready to continue their mission. Opportunity’s planned descent into the giant Victoria Crater was delayed, but now the rover is preparing to drive into the half-mile diameter crater as early as Sept. 11.

Spirit, Opportunity’s rover twin, also survived the global dust storm. The rovers are 43 months into missions originally planned to last three months. On Sept. 5, Spirit climbed onto its long-term destination called Home Plate, a plateau of layered bedrock bearing clues to an explosive mixture of lava and water.

“These rovers are tough. They faced dusty winds, power starvation and other challenges — and survived. Now they are back to doing groundbreaking field work on Mars. These spacecraft are amazing,” said Alan Stern, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

Victoria Crater contains an exposed layer of bright rocks that may preserve evidence of interaction between the Martian atmosphere and surface from millions of years ago, when the atmosphere might have been different from today’s. Victoria is the biggest crater Opportunity has visited.

Martian dust storms in July blocked so much sunlight that researchers grew concerned the rovers’ daily energy supplies could plunge too low for survival. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., put Opportunity onto a very low-energy regimen of no movement, few observations and reduced communication with Earth. Skies above both rovers remain dusty but have been clearing gradually since early August.

Dust from the sky has been falling onto both rovers’ solar panels, impeding their ability to collect energy from the sun. However, beneficial wind gusts removed some of the new buildup from Opportunity almost as soon as it accumulated.

Opportunity drove to the lip of Victoria Crater in late August and examined possible entry routes. This week, Opportunity has been driving about 130 feet toward its planned entry point. The route will provide better access to a top priority target inside the crater: a bright band of rocks about 40 feet from the rim. “We chose a point that gives us a straight path down, instead of driving cross-slope from our current location,” said Paolo Bellutta, a JPL rover driver plotting the route. “The rock surface on which Opportunity will be driving will provide good traction and control of its path into the crater.”

For its first foray into the crater, Opportunity will drive just far enough to get all six wheels in; it will then back out and assess slippage on the inner slope. “Opportunity might be ready for that first ‘toe dip’ into the crater as early as next week,” said JPL’s John Callas, rover project manager. “In addition to the drives to get to the entry point, we still need to conduct checkouts of two of Opportunity’s instruments before sending the rover into the crater.”

The rover team plans to assess if dust has impaired use of the microscopic imager. If that tool is working, the team will use it to observe whether a scanning mirror for the miniature thermal emission spectrometer (Mini-TES) can function accurately. This mirror is high on the rover’s camera mast. It reflects infrared light from the landscape to the spectrometer at the base of the mast, and it also can be positioned to close the hole in the mast as protection from dust. The last time the spectrometer was used, some aspects of the data suggested the instrument may have been viewing the inside of the mast instead of the Martian landscape.

“If the dust cover or mirror is no longer moving properly, we may have lost the ability to use that instrument on Opportunity,” said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the rovers’ science instruments. “It would be the first permanent loss of an instrument on either rover. But we’ll see.”

The instrument already has provided extensive valuable information about rocks and soils in the Meridiani region where Opportunity works. “Mini-TES has told us a lot about the rocks and soils at Meridiani, but we’ve learned that the differences among Meridiani rocks are often too subtle for it to distinguish,” Squyres said. “The same instrument on Spirit, at Gusev Crater, has a much more crucial role for us at this point in the mission because there is such diversity at Gusev.” Researchers will rely heavily on a different type of instrument, Opportunity’s alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, for analysis of rocks at the bright-band target layer in the crater.