Four asteroids on COLLISION course with Earth - RT

It’s a scenario straight out of a Hollywood blockbuster, an asteroid is careening towards Earth and is set to wipe out human existence. To mark Asteroid Day, here are four space rocks on a collision course with our planet.

The United Nations fears that the possibility of an asteroid smashing into a densely populated area isn’t being taken seriously enough, so it designated June 30 as International Asteroid Day to raise awareness about the potentially catastrophic occurrence.

The date was chosen because the largest asteroid impact in recorded history took place over Tunguska, Russia on that day in 1908 when an enormous asteroid exploded and destroyed hundreds of acres of forest. 

To mark the event, here are four asteroids that could wallop into Earth.

1979 XB

With its 900-meter diameter, if this enormous rock hits our planet the impact would be devastating. It’s currently hurtling through the solar system at nearly 70,000kph and is getting almost 30km closer to Earth every second.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has put it in second place on its ‘Risk List’ for Near-Earth Asteroids. The orbit of this minor planet is unreliable but it’s predicted to have a chance of hitting Earth midway through this century.  

Experts warn that 1979 XB could suddenly come a lot closer to Earth, given only a tiny variation in its orbit. Its next predicted approach of Earth is set to come in 2024.

Apophis

Roughly the size of four football fields, Apophis is in very close orbit to Earth. It’s currently more than 200 million kilometers away but gets half a kilometer closer every second. 

It regularly passes Earth on its orbit but the latest radar and optical data suggests we’re in for a close shave when it blazes past our planet at a distance of just 30,000km in 2029. This is less than a tenth of the distance to the Moon.

It will next fly by Earth in mid-October this year when it will pass us at a safe distance of around 30 million kilometers. If Apophis did blast into Earth the impact is calculated to be similar to about 15,000 nuclear weapons detonating at once.

2010 RF12

This asteroid holds the dubious honor of topping both the Sentry List (Earth Impact Monitoring system) and the ESA impact risk list. It’s currently around 215 million kilometers from Earth and is traveling at a speed of 117,935kph. 

The danger from this asteroid isn’t forecast to come until the end of the century when it’s calculated to come as much as 40 times closer than the Moon. Luckily it weighs, a relatively small, 500 tons and is about seven meters in diameter. The impact is forecast to be slightly less than the meteor that hit the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013, which damaged thousands of buildings and injured hundreds of people. 

2010 RF12 is set to pass Earth on August 13, 2022 when astronomers around the world will train their telescopes on the object to learn as much as possible about it and its trajectory.

2000 SG344 

2000 SG344 is part of a group called the Aten Asteroids, which have orbits aligned very closely with Earth’s. It is predicted to have a chance of impact in the next three or four decades. With just a 50-meter diameter, it’s relatively small but is still twice as big as the Chelyabinsk meteor which caused so much damage six years ago. 

It’s currently traveling through space at more than 112,000kph and is getting 1.3km closer to Earth every second. Interestingly, it travels around the Sun in almost the exact same time as Earth, 353 days versus Earth’s 365 days. This gives astronomers regular chances to observe the asteroid and assess the risk it poses.

Undetected asteroids

Of course, a big part of the danger with hazardous space objects is that we are not good at detecting them and some of the most dangerous ones have caught us by surprise. When the Chelyabinsk meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere undetected, its explosion released up to 30 times more energy than the atomic bombs the US dropped on Japan in 1945.

As recently as last December, another asteroid broke apart over the Bering Sea that was 10 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Neither Near Earth Objects (NEOs) were tracked in advance. It’s hoped that International Asteroid Day will prompt authorities around the world to improve how they detect the potentially cataclysmic space rocks.

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https://www.rt.com/news/463071-asteroids-collision-course-earth/

2019-06-30 17:10:00Z
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Alabama and its rocket put Apollo 11, first man on the moon - AL.com

Florida had Cape Canaveral, launch pad 39A, the countdown, and the liftoff. Houston had Mission Control and the astronauts.

But America’s historic moon landing program wouldn’t have gotten started and the landing wouldn’t have happened 50 years ago without another key place and the very big thing built there.

Full coverage of the Apollo 11 50th anniversary

The place was Alabama, the city was Huntsville and the big thing was the Saturn V rocket. It’s where Alabama is focusing its celebration of the golden anniversary of Apollo 11, and a lot of the celebration will take place at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center under one of the three Saturn V’s left from those glory days.

The Saturn V was one of the most complex and important things America built in the 20th century. The Apollo program it supported created 400,000 jobs at 20,000 firms and universities before it was finished.

The rocket itself rivals the automobile, the telephone and the computer in terms of impact. And it wouldn’t have happened without Wernher von Braun’s German rocket team on Redstone Arsenal. It wouldn’t have been built without the thousands of young engineers, technicians and crafts people who poured into the Tennessee Valley to work at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and its contractor companies.

“When Kennedy said, ‘Can we do this?’ it was really that group of people that gave him the ability to say it was even possible,” NASA-Marshall historian Brian Odom said recently.

Huntsville had been building rockets for the Army at Redstone since 1950. Von Braun and his team go back even further to the German V-2 rocket program in World War II. When the Germans surrendered to American troops in the last days of the war, making what they said was a decision to give their technology to the West and not to the advancing Russian army, they were moved with their remaining V-2s to an Army test range at Fort Bliss, Tx.

This photo by Neil Armstrong shows Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the Moon in 1969. The image of Armstrong reflected in Aldrin's visor is one of the few of the first man to walk on the Moon actually on the Moon.

By the time Kennedy made his commitment, the German team and its Army counterparts had fired enough rockets to know the problems ahead. They had already solved some of them.

“I think that’s really key,” Odom said. “By the time you get to the Saturn V, you’ve already learned a lot of these things.”

But how critical was what happened in Huntsville? The first stage of the Saturn V “was an in-house development, basically,” Odom said. “A lot of people forget about that. They think it was just Boeing, but it was in-house. The first three stages were built here at Marshall before the first stage gets turned over to New Orleans.”

“All of that early development is critical,” Odom said. “Without the success of that team, Kennedy wouldn’t even had made the statement. He was talking to the folks here and seeing what was possible, and landing on the moon was possible because they knew where they were going with the Saturn V by that point.”

It’s worth stopping the story briefly to remember a few of the numbers that describe the rocket. It was 363 feet tall and weighed 6 million pounds. Its five F-1 main engines could produce 7.5 million pounds of thrust. It was massive and massively powerful.

There are three Saturn Vs on display in the world today, and one of them is at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville. It wasn’t built to fly, but it is a “real” Saturn V built to test the rocket’s strength. All three stages were assembled in Marshall’s Saturn V Dynamic Test Stand – the tallest building in Alabama at the time – and shaken and shoved for more than 400 hours to obtain data about durability.

The rocket changed during the Apollo program. The Apollo 1 launch pad fire that killed astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom II, Ed White II and Roger Chaffee happened because of a spark in the pure oxygen atmosphere of the capsule. That meant pure oxygen had to go. “But to fix (that) led to a weight issue,” Odom said. “It made the rocket heavier. It made it more complex.”

“You could swing a cat and hit a problem with the Saturn V,” Odom said.

The first stage of the Saturn V got everything rocket off the ground, and Odom said that is the hardest part. But getting the kick to take it into orbit was the job of the second stage.

There were problems with engine instability during ignition. There were problems insulating the liquid hydrogen fuel tanks and stabilizing the engines. The people working these problems were subject matter experts in fields that didn’t exist until then.

“They didn’t learn it from their teacher,” Odom said. “They learned it because a specific problem arose, and they had to solve a very specific issue. And they did that”.

Astronauts explored the Moon on a rover developed in Huntsville, Ala., at the Marshall Space Flight Center.

The German management approach was to take a high-level view and trust these new experts. “If you can explain it to me and reassure me that you know what you’re doing, I’m going to trust you to know what you’re doing,” Odom explained.

Even with those first stage issues, Odom said the Saturn V’s second stage was “the thing the Russians could never do. They could never figure it out. They were not terrified of liquid hydrogen; they’d worked with it to some degree. But they didn’t know how to get the kick that you need.”

Everyone knows how the story ended. The Saturn V flew successfully around the Earth twice to test its systems and then flew six crews to the moon. No one had walked on another world before, and no one has done it since.

Today, the moon missions are history, “a dramatic storyline” in one author’s words that became intertwined with the other big narratives of the 1960s. They are a symbol of what American can do, but also oddly a reminder of what we haven’t done yet. Apollo was a pivot point and is forever an example.

“People say, ‘We can land a man on the Moon, but we can’t make a pen that won’t run out of ink,’” Odom said. “There’s something that’s almost eerie in the power behind that shift in thinking, the idea that if we could accomplish that feat, why couldn’t we use technology to do other things?”

“During the Saturn program, during the tumultuous decade of the ‘60s, there was also of this feeling, not of why are we doing that versus this, but if we can do that, how come we can’t solve civil rights issues? How come we can’t feed the hungry?” Odom said.

Looking back at Apollo like this engages the country’s problems in a different way, the historian said. It can be an inspiration that makes young people consider their own options.

“Without an inspirational program like that, they’ll go into finance or accounting or whatever,” Odom said. “And that’s cool, too. But to inspire people to solve those hard problems? Somebody in school right now is going to solve a problem that is going to impact your life because they were inspired by NASA to do something hard and being invested in something like this.

“Those, to me, are the cool things,” Odom said.

How did NASA put men on the moon? One harrowing step at a time

Leadership. Luck. Timing. Public will. Those are not line items in a federal budget. They can't be commanded to materialize.

We’e celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11 with stories through the month of July. You can find the full collection of stories, from AL.com staff and others, here: Apollo 11 Anniversary.

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https://www.al.com/news/huntsville/2019/06/alabama-and-its-rocket-put-apollo-11-first-man-on-the-moon.html

2019-06-30 13:01:00Z
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Celebrate the Promise of Planetary Defense This Asteroid Day - Space.com

The quest to protect Earth from threatening asteroids is about to get a boost, as "an absolute flood of new observations" comes from a new telescope designed to scan the sky, says Ed Lu, co-founder of the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to planetary defense.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in Chile is anticipated to have "first light" in 2020, meaning that the telescope's mirrors will be exposed to the sky for the first time. Then full operations for its decade-long survey of the southern sky will commence in 2022, if all goes to plan. Lu said the telescope will spot tens of thousands of new asteroids in its first year alone, with many more to come.

Lu and others shared the latest developments in planetary defense just in time for Asteroid Day, an annual celebration on June 30 to discuss the science of asteroids and the possible threat they pose to Earth. While we know of no asteroids that will imminently cause damage to our planet, the possibility always exists, participants said in an Asteroid Day teleconference on Thursday (June 27).

Related: Humanity Will Slam a Spacecraft into an Asteroid in a Few Years to Help Save Us All

Between LSST and other already operational telescopes, Lu added, scientists anticipate they will quickly catalog "70% or more" of the asteroids — or space rocks — that are more than 460 feet (140 meters) in size. That statistic is relevant to Congress, which in 2005 asked NASA to catalog at least 90% of asteroids of those size by 2020, according to the agency. Lu acknowledged that scientists will not meet the deadline, but he said they would be able to generate that catalog with enough time and funding.

Lu said that scientists should start thinking now about how to frame new discoveries to the public. When LSST first spots these objects, observations of them will be so sparse that it will be hard to constrain the orbits of the asteroids. In the time before scientists are confident of these objects' paths, more of them could be seen as posing a threat to Earth simply because scientists can't get a read on where they are moving in space.

Airburst danger

But smaller asteroids pose a threat too, just on a more local scale, said Mark Boslough — who was the first U.S. scientist to visit Chelyabinsk after a six-story object exploded over the Russian town in 2013. Even objects in the 130-foot (40 meters) size range can pose a threat to cities, he said.

Boslough cited the Tunguska Event, a 1908 incident in which an asteroid shattered in Earth's atmosphere and flattened 830 square miles (2,150 square kilometers) of Siberian forest. This and other "airbursts" are quite capable of causing a lot of property damage, so asteroids of a smaller size should also be included in disaster planning, he said.

"I've always thought we should be more concerned about those than we are [now], primarily because they are just so much more abundant. There is something like 10 million of those things," he said.

Boslough — a physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory — said these smaller objects perhaps shouldn't be cataloged, because there are so many of them. Instead, he recommends developing surveys that would note any that are imminently hurtling toward Earth. Then disaster planners could evacuate cities that might be under threat of the object, just like we do today for incoming hurricanes.

There are other opportunities to look for these objects as well. This summer, the Beta Taurid meteor stream from Comet Encke will be passing a little closer to Earth than usual. This swarm of objects is in a 7-to-2 resonance with the planet Jupiter, meaning that they orbit the sun seven times for every time that Jupiter orbits twice. The orbit of these objects intersects with that of Earth, although they don't pass close by our planet every year.

Telescopes will monitor the swarm for Tunguska-size objects in the coming weeks, because the swarm will be crossing through our orbit in late June, and continuing through August, he said. He added that evoking Tunguska is not a coincidence, because this object was "more than likely a Beta Taurid" based on the timing of it hitting Earth on June 30, 1908.

Asteroid missions ongoing

Another aspect of planetary defense is studying near-Earth asteroids up close. NASA's OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) mission is in orbit at asteroid Bennu, and Japan's Hayabusa2 is circling asteroid Ryugu. In the next few years, both spacecraft are expected to deliver samples to Earth.

And there's more to come. Patrick Michel, the co-investigator of forthcoming asteroid mission Hera, talked about the progress for that European asteroid mission. Hera is expected to launch in 2024 for the double asteroid Didymos. What makes Hera unique from past missions is it will work in tandem with a NASA spacecraft, called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test). DART will attempt to change the orbit of the moon of Didymos, and Hera will examine any crater DART leaves behind. 

Hera is still in the planning stages and will go through another major approval milestone in November, Michel said. He added it's an important milestone for the European Space Agency, because it may be "the only asteroid mission possibly done by Europe within the next decade."

But asteroids aren't just dangerous — they could also become extremely valuable, according to Marc Serres, CEO of the Luxembourg Space Agency. Since they contain water and minerals — resources that can be used for space missions — he said the time to generate a catalog is now, before we begin exploring the solar system. As humans begin to move to the moon and other destinations, he said, it will be important to mine as much as we can along the way.

"Using the resources that we can find in space will completely revolutionize the way we act in space, because we don't need to bring everything with us," he said.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

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https://www.space.com/asteroid-detection-updates-planetary-defense.html

2019-06-30 12:00:00Z
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BYU to provide NASA with critical research for future human missions to Mars - KSL.com

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1. BYU to provide NASA with critical research for future human missions to Mars  KSL.com
2. NASA alien life warning: Have humans ALREADY contaminated other planets?  Express.co.uk
3. A dog sent to die and tortoises that flew around the moon: These are the most famous, bizarre, and important animals that have been sent to space  INSIDER
4. What Will Humans Really Need in Space?  Slate
5. 18 space missions to look forward to  Digit
6. View full coverage on Google News

https://www.ksl.com/article/46584243/byu-to-provide-nasa-with-critical-research-for-future-human-missions-to-mars

2019-06-29 13:18:00Z
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Classified Apollo 11 anomaly threatened to crash first moon astronauts - INSIDER

Apollo 11 is rightfully hailed as an extraordinary success for the US. After all, NASA rocketed humans to the moon's surface for the first time and brought them home alive.

But there were quite a few close calls during the historic mission that could have ended it in tragedy.

Minutes ahead of the moon landing, for instance, alarms blared inside the lunar-landing spacecraft, indicating that the flight computer was overloaded and might quit. Then a surprise crater threatened to botch the landing, so Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (the two moonwalkers) used up nearly all of their fuel navigating to safer lunar pastures.

These and other stories — frozen fuel lines, a stuck hatch, a busted switch required to leave the moon — are well-shared among spaceflight enthusiasts and historians.

But according to a forthcoming book, the mission's three astronauts may have been in far more peril than previously reported.

A serious anomaly occurred as the crew careened toward a landing on Earth, according to Nancy Atkinson, a science journalist and author who details formerly classified information about the event in her new book, " Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions."

"Through my interviews and research for the book, I uncovered a serious anomaly that occurred during Apollo 11's return to Earth," Atkinson — whose book comes out July 2 — told Business Insider in an email. "The event was discovered only after the crew had returned safely to Earth."

The problem happened just before Apollo 11 returned to Earth, causing a discarded space module to nearly crash into the crew's capsule.

What's more, Atkinson's sources suggest, the same issue also threatened the crews of three other Apollo missions.

'We were lucky'

The main spacecraft that NASA used during the Apollo moon-landing program. Astronauts left the lunar module on the moon, broke away from the service module during landing, and splashed into the ocean inside the command module.

NASA; Business Insider

The anomaly happened less than an hour before the Apollo 11 crew landed. As Atkinson tells it, most everyone at NASA did not realize the peril it put astronauts in until weeks after they'd returned to Earth.

For most of their eight-day mission, the crew of Apollo 11 rode inside a gumdrop-shaped capsule called the command module. This capsule sat on top of the service module: a large cylinder that carried supplies, propellants, and a large rocket engine. NASA called the two-part spacecraft the command and service module, or CSM.

The CSM delivered a third part, called the lunar module, to lunar orbit. Then that lander took Aldrin and Armstrong to and from the surface, while astronaut Michael Collins remained in orbit around the moon. The CSM then rocketed everyone back toward Earth on a three-day voyage.

About 15 minutes before the astronauts splashed into the Pacific Ocean, the CSM fully separated into its two parts. This was necessary because only the command module (which held the crew) had a heat shield. The heat shield protected the astronauts by deflecting and absorbing the scorching energies created by plowing through Earth's atmosphere at about 25,000 mph — more than a dozen times as fast as a speeding bullet.

A line drawing illustrating the Apollo 14 Command and Service Modules changes following the Apollo 13 near-disaster.

NASA

The service module became useless and posed a collision risk after the two parts separated, so it was supposed to skip off Earth's atmosphere like a stone thrown across a pond.

But it did not.

Read more: An Apollo astronaut explains how he nearly killed himself 'horsing around' on the moon in 1972

Instead, as Atkinson explains, the service module chased the astronauts during their descent.

"Houston, we got the service module going by. A little high and a little bit to the right," Aldrin, who was looking out of the command module's window, told Mission Control over the radio.

Moments later he added: "It's coming across now from right to left."

As plasma built up ahead of the capsule, its radio communications temporarily went out (as expected) yet prevented the astronauts from offering any more details. But an airplane pilot spotted the returning command module and service module, the latter of which was breaking apart and splintering into glowing pieces.

Gary Johnson, who worked as an electrical engineer on the Apollo program, told Atkinson that the service module should have been "absolutely nowhere close to the command module" as it descended.

If the part had collided with the command module carrying the astronauts, it could have crippled or destroyed the vehicle or sent it flying out of control. Chunks of the disintegrating service module could also have struck the capsule, which could have led to catastrophe as well, Atkinson wrote.

"If things had gone bad, we could have lost the Apollo 11 crew," Johnson told Atkinson. "We were lucky."

Why the Apollo jettison anomaly isn't well known

Apollo 11's command module and service module careen back to Earth at thousands of miles per hour, creating superheated plasma in the process, on July 24, 1969. Most of the lights are pieces of the disintegrating service module.

NASA/JSC via Smithsonian Institution

The astronauts, mission controllers, and communications personnel didn't understand there was a problem until after NASA debriefed the three moon men about their mission weeks later.

NASA launched an investigation based on their reports and found that two prior missions — Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 — had suffered the same glitch. Those astronauts did not see the service module outside their windows, however, so they didn't report it, Atkinson wrote. (A review of old radar recordings showed the service modules on those missions did also fly dangerously close to the command modules, though.)

The problem's cause turned out to be a bad sequence in a controller that helped jettison, or separate, the command and service modules. NASA knew the same problem was baked into the Apollo 12 spacecraft, which launched in November 1969, but decided not to fix it due to time constraints, Atkinson said.

According to Johnson, NASA kept the Apollo 11 astronaut debriefs classified until November 1970 — about six months after the harrowing Apollo 13 mission — and the anomaly stayed out of newspapers.

"The event never made it into the Apollo 11 mission reports and somehow was largely forgotten — I think due to the frantic-ness of the time, of needing to move on to the next flight, etc.," Atkinson said. "The first time the fix for this anomaly was in place was for Apollo 13. And of course, you know what happened with 13, and I think the anomaly was probably largely forgotten due to all the other excitement."

More details about the anomaly can be found in Atkinson's book.

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https://www.insider.com/classified-apollo-11-anomaly-threatened-to-crash-first-moon-astronauts-2019-6

2019-06-29 12:58:54Z
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Apollo 11 tapes bought for $218 may sell for millions after nearly being lost - The Guardian

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1. Apollo 11 tapes bought for $218 may sell for millions after nearly being lost  The Guardian
2. Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke says he almost died jumping on moon  Business Insider
3. 50 years after Apollo, NASA prepares for return trip to the moon  Houston Chronicle
4. How the space program created the culture of learning from failure  Fast Company
5. Apollo moon rocks help us understand our place in the cosmos  Vox.com
6. View full coverage on Google News

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jun/28/apollo-11-tapes-moon-landing-sale-value-nearly-lost

2019-06-28 15:50:00Z
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NASA’s restored Apollo Mission Control is a slice of 60s life, frozen in amber - Ars Technica

• Standing at the top row of the MOCR looking forward. The consoles are all lit via internal LEDs powered by a Crestron commercial lighting system, and the positions are all dressed to appear as if the controllers had all gotten up mid-shift and walked out and left all their stuff behind.

  Lee Hutchinson

• Looking toward the right of the room. There were still workers finishing the room setup while we were shooting.

  Lee Hutchinson

• Standing at the far right of the top row near the DOD console looking left. Construction supplies visible at front.

  Lee Hutchinson

• Compare the previous image to this pre-restoration picture of the room in 2012. Prior to restoration, the consoles were a mish-mash of Apollo- and shuttle-era panels in incorrect configurations, with no lighting or dressing.

  Steven Michael

• Standing at the front right side of the room looking back at the rows of consoles. All had been removed and freighted to Kansas for careful restoration.

  Lee Hutchinson

HOUSTON—Following the completion of a multi-year, multi-million-dollar restoration, NASA's historic Apollo Mission Operations Control Room 2 ("MOCR 2") is set to reopen to the public next week. The $5 million in funding for the restoration was partially provided by NASA, but the majority of the money was donated by the city of Webster, the Houston suburb where the Johnson Space Center is located. Another half-million in funding came from the general public via a Kickstarter campaign (disclosure: your humble author was a backer).

For the past two years, historians and engineers from the Kansas Cosmosphere's Spaceworks team have been lovingly restoring and detailing the 1,200-pound (544kg) historic sage green Ford-Philco consoles that populated the control room—repairing damage from decades of casual neglect and also adding in the correct control panels so that each console now correctly mirrors how it would have been configured for an Apollo flight.

Ars was invited to view the restored MOCR 2 last week as the final finishing restoration touches were still being applied. We conducted some interviews and shot some photos while technicians and construction workers bustled around us, hammering and screwing the last bits and bobs into place. The room's lighting system was in the process of being worked on, and the room flickered several times between fully illuminated daytime lighting and dim twilight—providing an even more accurate glimpse of what it might have looked like during an actual mission.

• Standing at the right end of the "Trench," the first row of consoles. I shot several of these without a flash and adjusted the white balance so that the image closely mirrors the actual lighting tone in the room. It looks about like this—a little yellow-y and a bit dim.

  Lee Hutchinson

• Long shot of row 2, the systems row, with the LM CONTROL console in foreground.

  Lee Hutchinson

• Wide shot of the Trench from the midpoint, looking right across the FDO (Flight Dynamics Officer) and GUIDANCE consoles.

  Lee Hutchinson

• A shot from the left of row 3, with the SURGEON console in foreground.

  Lee Hutchinson

• Standing in the third row looking forward at the LM CONTROL console in row 2. CONTROL watched over much of the Lunar Module's hardware, including its radar and thrusters.

  Lee Hutchinson

• Standing in the same spot looking a bit more left. Centermost console visible on the second row is TELMU, or "Telemetry, Electrical, and EVA Mobility Unit," responsible for watching over the Lunar Module's computer and software.

  Lee Hutchinson

• Now looking far left. First row in background is the Trench, with all four positions (BOOSTER, RETRO, FDO, and GUIDANCE, left to right) are visible. Second row positions visible from left to right are EECOM, GNC, and TELMU.

  Lee Hutchinson

• Now standing roughly center and looking forward at PROCEDURES (far left) and AFD (Assistant Flight Director, lower middle with gray stapler).

  Lee Hutchinson

How we got to now

Do you want to know more?

If you'd like to dig in deep on exactly how Mission Control worked during the Apollo era and learn a bit more about how the consoles worked, head on over to our detailed 2012 write-up of the MOCR.

Today, the Mission Control Center in JSC's Building 30 (renamed a few years ago to the "Chris Kraft Mission Control Center" to honor Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr., the person most directly responsible for defining how NASA's Mission Control would come to function) includes multiple Flight Control Rooms, referred to in NASA shorthand as FCRs ("fickers"). But during the Apollo era, there were two control rooms in the building—Mission Operations Control Room 1, on the second floor, and Mission Operations Control Room 2, on the third floor (referred to as MOCR 1 and MOCR 2, it's pronounced "mo'-ker"). MOCR 1 was only used for a few flights prior to the shuttle era and was primarily used for simulations and as a backup. MOCR 2, on the other hand, was where controllers sat and ran every Apollo flight except for Apollo 7. "The Eagle has landed" and "Houston, we've had a problem" both happened in MOCR 2. After Apollo, the room served as a shuttle FCR until 1992, when it was converted back to something resembling its early Apollo configuration and transformed into a tour stop. It was also used for other NASA events—personnel could book the room for meetings or show movies there. It was a frequent stop for VIP visitors and media who wanted to do something Apollo-related (Ars included, more than once!), and over the decades, the room slowly deteriorated. The carpet was stained and bare. The paint faded. And the consoles themselves, the objects of so much studious attention from generations of flight controllers, sat dark and silent. Random visitors could even run hands over the artifacts, casually pressing buttons and toggling switches that once perhaps were used for life-and-death purposes.

But with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing fast approaching in 2019, NASA finally had the ammunition it needed to push for the restoration—and now MOCR 2 shines like new.

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https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/behind-the-scenes-at-nasas-newly-restored-historic-apollo-mission-control/

2019-06-28 13:41:00Z
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Future - Apollo in 50 numbers: Food - BBC News

170: Weight of breakfast steaks eaten by astronauts, in grams

Every Nasa astronaut since Alan Shepard in 1961 has been given a hearty breakfast before blast-off. All the pre-flight Apollo meals were specially prepared for nutrition, calories and – crucially – were what doctors refer to as "low residue". In other words, low-fibre meals that wouldn’t have astronauts needing the toilet too soon after lift-off.

Early missions also limited coffee intake before launch, because of its diuretic properties. Shepard’s Mercury flight, for instance, was only 15 minutes so doctors figured that he could avoid urinating until splashdown. Unfortunately, they did not account for countdown delays.

“They put Alan Shepard on top of his rocket without a way to take a leak,” says reporter Jay Barbree, who was commentating on the mission for US TV channel NBC. “After two hours, he starts complaining and desperately asks for permission to wet his suit – finally they gave him permission.” The astronaut is relieved but the medical sensors go crazy.

Astronauts flying in the Apollo spacecraft used personal urine collection devices – like condoms – which were connected to a disposal system, which ejected the waste from a port on the side of the spacecraft. 

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Solid waste involved using plastic bags and most astronauts tried to avoid going to the toilet for as long as possible. The first to crack during Apollo 7 was Walt Cunningham.

“It was hard to get everything working just right,” he tells me. “You can catch everything but after that you had the get some pills loose from inside the bag and you spend your time mixing the pills up with whatever you had there – it was not terribly fun.”

2,800: Daily calories consumption

The first American to eat a meal in space was John Glenn. During his five-hour flight, he tested out a tube – a bit like a toothpaste tube – of apple puree, proving that people could swallow and digest food in weightlessness.

For the two-man Gemini missions of the mid-1960s, astronauts were allocated 2,500 calories a day and consumed plastic packs of freeze-dried foods produced by the Whirlpool Corporation (the home appliance company). Freeze-drying involved cooking the foods, quickly freezing them and then slowly warming them in a vacuum chamber to remove the ice crystals formed by the freezing process.

The astronauts squirted water through a nozzle to rehydrate the foods and kneaded the resulting paste into some sort of gloop. The meals were tastier than the tube food on Mercury, and included such delights as beef and gravy, but the water was cold, which made them often less than appetizing.

During the first Gemini mission – Gemini 3 in 1965 – John Young created a minor scandal and the only blemish on his exemplary astronaut career, by smuggling a corned beef sandwich on board. What started as a joke threatened to cause a serious problem with the spacecraft, with fears that crumbs would interfere with the spacecraft circuitry.

Not only were the foods tastier, the water gun – supplied from the spacecraft fuel cells – ran hot as well as cold

During the Apollo missions – when the astronauts could do some limited exercise in the capsule and were exerting themselves on the Moon – Nasa nutritionists upped the calorie intake to 2,800.

Not only were the foods tastier, the water gun – supplied from the spacecraft fuel cells – ran hot as well as cold. And the meals didn’t only have to be sucked through a straw, the astronauts could even eat some of them with a spoon. 

6: Packs of pineapple fruit cake

The pantry of the Apollo spacecraft was jammed with snacks. Along with six portions of pineapple fruit cake, there were packs of brownies, chocolate cake and jellied fruit candy. For the savoury palate, there were cheese crackers and BBQ beef bites. Apollo astronauts were even allocated 15 packs of chewing gum, containing four sticks in each.

A typical dinner during Apollo 17 consisted of a main of chicken and rice, followed by butterscotch pudding and ‘Graham Cracker cubes’. They could wash this all down with instant coffee, tea, cocoa or lemonade.

Missions from Apollo 15 onwards also carried less appealing "nutrient defined food sticks". A precursor of today’s nutrition bars, these were positioned within the front of the astronauts’ helmets during their moonwalks alongside a drinking tube. This enabled them to eat and drink – either water or fruit-flavoured beverages – during their extended expeditions on the lunar surface.

Despite the varied diet and increased calories, almost every astronaut lost weight during the missions. Neil Armstrong shed 4kg (8.8lb) during his Apollo 11 flight. During Apollo 13, commander Jim Lovell lost 6kg (13.2lb) – partly because of dehydration due to water rationing.

Since Apollo, food in space has continued to improve. Today’s astronauts eat an almost normal diet although find themselves craving fresh fruit and vegetables – a rare treat available only after supply ships dock.

0: Shots of brandy consumed

Christmas Day 1968, and the crew of Apollo 8 were on their back from the Moon. They had a special surprise ration package to unwrap from the head of the astronaut corps, Deke Slayton. Inside, a full Christmas meal – complete with turkey, gravy and cranberry sauce, and it didn’t even have to be rehydrated.

If anything had gone wrong, it would be blamed on the brandy so we brought it home – Deke Slayton

“It was a new type of food packaging that we hadn't experienced before,” says mission commander Frank Borman. “We had our best meal on the flight on Christmas Day – I was really glad to experience turkey, gravy and all the works.”

But Slayton had also packed another surprise. “He also smuggled on board for us three shots of brandy,” says Borman. “But we didn't drink that.

“If anything had gone wrong, it would be blamed on the brandy so we brought it home,” he says. “I don't know what happened to mine – probably worth a lot of money now.”

Alcohol has been consumed in space – mostly in small quantities by Russian cosmonauts on their early space stations. It’s banned, however, on the International Space Station. Even a small amount could break the station’s complex water recovery system, which is fed with water from astronaut sweat and urine.

15: Microwaveable ready meals eaten by Apollo 11 crew

In the long list of benefits to mankind from the space programme, ready meals might perhaps be an unlikely contender. But without Apollo, the microwave ovens many of us have in our kitchens or the ready meals millions consume every day, might never have been developed.

That’s right… Apollo contributed to the global obesity epidemic.

When Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins returned from the Moon and were winched aboard USS Hornet, they spent their first few days in the Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF) to protect the world from any possible Moon bugs. Although the MQF was fitted with comfy chairs, bunks, a toilet and shower, it only had limited room for cooking.

With no room for a conventional oven or grill – and to minimise the dangers of fire – Nasa looked for an innovative solution.

“This is the original countertop microwave oven, developed for the Apollo programme,” says Bob Fish, a trustee of Hornet, now preserved as a museum in Oakland in California.

The microwave proved a big hit allowing the astronauts to reheat three frozen meals a day

“Nasa went to Litton Industries who had developed giant walk-in microwave ovens and asked them to shrink it down so that it could be fit inside a place like this,” says Fish. “So, they shrunk it down, and the first time the guys tried it they put some eggs in there and they hit start – it just exploded the eggs because they hadn't shrunk down the power they only shrunk down the size.”

After these initial teething difficulties, the microwave proved a big hit allowing the astronauts to reheat three frozen meals a day. These included full cooked breakfasts, ribs of beef and even lobster. Desserts included ice cream, pecan pie and cherry cobbler.

Once the astronauts had been air-lifted to Houston and transferred (still under quarantine) to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, the food stepped-up a notch again. They ate freshly cooked food at tables covered with crisp white table linen.

--

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2019-06-28 07:47:55Z
CBMiQmh0dHA6Ly93d3cuYmJjLmNvbS9mdXR1cmUvc3RvcnkvMjAxOTA2MjctYXBvbGxvLWluLTUwLW51bWJlcnMtZm9vZNIBAA

NASA will fund a revolutionary mission to fly through Titan’s atmosphere - Ars Technica

• Mission concept of Dragon's entry, descent, landing, surface operations, and flight at Titan.

  Johns Hopkins APL

• Dragonfly on descent to Titan, poised to leave its protective backshell.

  Johns Hopkins APL

• Dragonfly on Titan's surface.

  Johns Hopkins APL

• Dragonfly in flight over Titan.

  Johns Hopkins APL

• Dragonfly moving between study sites on Titan.

  Johns Hopkins APL

• Dragonfly in flight over Titan.

  Johns Hopkins APL

On Thursday, NASA announced its next medium-class mission to explore the Solar System—a lander named Dragonfly that will fly like a drone over the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest Moon. Titan has a fascinating environment, with a hydrocarbon atmosphere much thicker than Earth's atmosphere. NASA intends to spend a couple of years exploring its complex chemistry.

NASA scientists were deciding between this Titan explorer and another mission that would have flown to a comet named 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. The comet had been previously visited by Europe's Rosetta spacecraft, which returned a sample of cometary material to Earth.

Of the two missions, the Titan explorer—with an unprecedented design that would fly a vehicle the size of a larger Mars rover over the moon—carried the higher risk. But, half a century after the Apollo lunar landings, NASA decided to go boldly. "A great nation does great things," said NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine.

In 2004, a small spacecraft built by the European Space Agency detached from NASA's Cassini probe in the Saturn system and descended through Titan's thick atmosphere. It only survived about 90 minutes on the surface, but it returned tantalizing information about the complexity of a cold, exotic world that nonetheless has familiar features such as lakes and rivers filled with liquid methane.

"[Dragonfly] has so much potential for fundamental science," said Elizabeth Turtle, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physical Laboratory who is the principal investigator for the mission. Scientists believe the complex organic chemistry in the atmosphere of Titan and on its surface may look something like the chemistry on Earth before life developed. "Titan is just a perfect chemical laboratory to understand pre-biotic chemistry," Turtle said.

Cost capped at $1 billion

As a New Frontiers mission in NASA's portfolio, Dragonfly will be cost-capped at $1 billion. It is the fourth mission in this medium classification, following the New Horizons Pluto flyby mission, the Juno spacecraft now at Jupiter, and the OSIRIS-REx mission exploring the Bennu asteroid. It is expected to launch in 2026, aboard an unspecified rocket, before reaching Titan in 2034.

Once there, Dragonfly will land in the equatorial region of the moon, which is covered by large sand dunes. A radioisotope thermoelectric generator will recharge a battery, which in turn will power Dragonfly's rotorcraft flight system for a couple dozen flights across the surface of Titan during a period of 2.5 years. Over that time, Dragonfly will cover about 180km, a sizable chunk of a Moon that is 5,149km in diameter—about 1.5 times the size of Earth's Moon.

While flying on distant moon may sound ambitious, Turtle said it is by far the most expedient way to get around Titan. The moon's atmosphere is about four times thicker than Earth's atmosphere, and the gravity is one-seventh that of our planet. This means Dragonfly's rotors should be able to fly the vehicle around with relative ease.

Before the announcement, scientists were excited about the scientific potential of a Titan mission but worried that NASA might spurn it due to the high risk. However, after the announcement, NASA's chief of science, Thomas Zurbuchen, said the agency worked with Turtle and her team to reduce a number of serious risks and enhance the mission's chance of success.

"We want to do something bold and take measured risks," said Zurbuchen, who added that the weight of Apollo's 50th anniversary has been on his mind. This is an agency that has done great things, and his Science directorate wants to live up to that legacy.

"I've been asking myself what it means to be a part of an agency that has this great history," he said. One thing it appears to mean is that NASA could have something to celebrate on the 65th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

Listing image by Johns Hopkins APL

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2019-06-27 22:33:00Z
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NASA Announces New Dragonfly Mission: a Drone to Explore Titan - The New York Times

NASA announced Thursday that it is sending a drone-style rotorcraft to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.

Dragonfly, as the mission is called, is capable of soaring across the skies of Titan and landing intermittently to take scientific measurements. The mission will be developed and led from the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Md. It is scheduled to launch in 2026.

BIG NEWS: The next @NASASolarSystem mission is… #Dragonfly – a rotorcraft lander mission to Saturn’s largest moon Titan. This ocean world is the only moon in our solar system with a dense atmosphere & we’re so excited to see what Dragonfly discovers: https://t.co/whePqbuGBq pic.twitter.com/BQdMhSZfgP

— Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) June 27, 2019

“Titan is an incredibly unique opportunity scientifically,” said Elizabeth Turtle, who will lead the mission for the lab as its principal investigator, in an interview in April given before NASA’s announcement. “Not only is it an ocean world — an icy satellite with a water ocean in its interior — but it is the only satellite with an atmosphere. And the atmosphere at Titan has methane in it, which leads to all sorts of rich organic chemistry happening at even the upper reaches of the atmosphere.”

[Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar.]

Titan has long intrigued planetary scientists. On Christmas Day 2004, the spacecraft Cassini launched a probe, Huygens, to Titan’s surface, revealing a world analogous to a primordial Earth. Rather than water, however, Titan’s seas are filled with liquid methane.

Where a Mars rover is limited to inching forward over a decade or longer, for the Dragonfly team, Titan’s sky and the drone’s nuclear fuel source are the limit.

“We have the capacity, over the mission’s lifetime, to go hundreds of kilometers. One of the advantages we have is that we can always scout the next site. We can fly ahead, look at it, see what kind of terrain there is, and decide whether we want to go there or elsewhere,” says Dr. Turtle.

The spacecraft has been under consideration for two-and-a-half years in NASA’s class of science missions, called New Frontiers, which are supposed to cost less than $1 billion. The competition, held between multiple institutions in government and academia, is not unlike a “Shark Tank” for deep space exploration.

The competition’s other finalist was Caesar — the Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return mission — which intended to collect a sample of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and return it to Earth for analysis. That comet was previously explored by Rosetta, a spacecraft built by the European Space Agency, until its mission ended in 2016.

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2019-06-27 20:03:45Z
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Ancient crocodiles had vegetarian cousins that roamed the planet 200 million years ago, research shows - Fox News

Ancient crocodiles had vegetarian cousins that roamed the planet 200 million years ago, research shows. (Credit: SWNS)

Modern crocodiles had ancient vegetarian cousins that roamed the planet 200 million years ago, research shows.

Tooth fossils revealed between three and six members of the crocodile and alligator family had specialized teeth for chewing on plants.

Researchers reconstructed their vegetarian diets by analyzing the fossils of 146 teeth from 16 crocodyliforms.

Many of their "complex" sets of teeth were shaped unlike any modern day herbivore until the plant-eaters were wiped out along with the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

Study author Keegan Melstrom, a doctoral student at the University of Utah, US, said: "The most interesting thing we discovered was how frequently it seems extinct crocodyliforms ate plants.

"Carnivores possess simple teeth whereas herbivores have much more complex teeth.

"Omnivores, organisms that eat both plant and animal material, fall somewhere in between.

Tooth fossils revealed between three and six members of the crocodile and alligator family had specialized teeth for chewing on plants. Researchers reconstructed their vegetarian diets by analyzing the fossils of 146 teeth from 16 crocodyliforms. Many of their "complex" sets of teeth were shaped unlike any modern day herbivore until the plant-eaters were wiped out along with the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. (Credit: SWNS)

"Our study indicates that complexly-shaped teeth, which we infer to indicate herbivory, appear in the extinct relatives of crocodiles at least three times and maybe as many as six.

"Part of my earlier research showed that this pattern holds in living reptiles that have teeth, such as crocodylians and lizards.

"So these results told us that the basic pattern between diet and teeth is found in both mammals and reptiles, despite very different tooth shapes, and is applicable to extinct reptiles."

All crocodylians alive today have a similar body shape with relatively simple, conical teeth ideal for their semi-aquatic generalist carnivore lifestyles.

But the tooth fossils in the study were clearly non-carnivorous and appeared to have specialized forms not seen in modern day animals.

Mr. Melstrom and Dr. Randall Irmis, chief curator of paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah, US, compared the tooth complexity of extinct crocodyliforms to those of living animals to work out what they ate.

They used a method that was originally developed for use in living mammals - measuring the teeth's dimensions and morphological features at a resolution of 25 data rows per tooth.

Mr. Melstrom said the unexpected variety in crocodyliforms' teeth showed they were able to thrive in a greater range of ecological environments than previously thought.

He also found the plant-eaters appeared early in the evolutionary history of the family, shortly after the end-Triassic mass extinction some 200 million years ago.

They existed until the end-Cretaceous mass extinction that killed off all dinosaurs except birds.

Many of their "complex" sets of teeth were shaped unlike any modern day herbivore until the plant-eaters were wiped out along with the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. (Credit: SWNS)

The fossil analysis suggested that between three and six species evolved herbivore diets during in Mesozoic era.

Mr. Melstrom said: "Our work demonstrates that extinct crocodyliforms had an incredibly varied diet.

"Some were similar to living crocodylians and were primarily carnivorous, others were omnivores and still others likely specialized in plants.

"The herbivores lived on different continents at different times, some alongside mammals and mammal relatives, and others did not.

"This suggests that an herbivorous crocodyliform was successful in a variety of environments."

He planned to continue to reconstruct the diets of extinct crocodyliforms, including in fossilized species that are missing teeth.

The researcher also wanted to understand why the extinct relatives of crocodiles diversified so radically after one mass extinction but not the one that killed the dinosaurs - and whether dietary ecology could have played a role.

The study by the University of Utah and the National History Museum of Utah in the US was published in the journal Current Biology.

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https://www.foxnews.com/science/ancient-crocodiles-vegetarian-cousins

2019-06-27 13:07:51Z
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