New Mars Forums

Beginning next month, the spectrograph will serve as the uppermost component to the biggest telescope in the southern hemisphere, named the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT).

“SALT will be used as a direct detector of history — as a time machine,” Nordsieck said. “With a very large telescope, you can look at great big objects at the very beginning of the history of the universe.”

According to the SALT website, the telescope will be capable of gathering light the size of a candle flame on the moon.

SALT is part of a worldwide collaboration of a dozen academic and government establishments including New Zealand, Poland, Germany, Africa and the United States. These groups work for the advancement of astronomy by studying the southern heavens.

The cooperation will focus on developing a miniature synthetic aperture radar sensor that the lunar probe will use to develop detailed maps of the Moon’s surface. The Pentagon is planning to launch the fourth in a series of small spacecraft known as TacSat or Joint Warfighter spacecraft that year.

In the meantime, NASA and the Air Force Research Laboratory continue to work together on the Integrated Powerhead demonstration, said Michael Braukus, a NASA spokesman. NASA and the Air Force have spent about $80 million on that effort, which is intended to develop an experimental reusable engine capable of 250,000 pounds of thrust, since 1994.

Buzz Lightyear wanted to go to infinity and beyond, now the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) wants to venture almost as far with a survey of the edge of the solar system.

Nasa has given the go-ahead for the Interstellar Boundary Explorer - or Ibex - to be built. It will be launched in 2008 from a Pegasus rocket, which will be dropped from the underbelly of a high-altitude aircraft.

Experiments involving radish plants were carried out aboard the ISS several years ago, producing very small radishes

The spacecraft's mission is to obtain extremely detailed global imagery, composition and weather data around which to focus the next 15-20 years of Mars robotic lander planning and operations. MRO will have a resolution at least five times better than the best resolution from current Mars orbiters.

The goal of the $700-million mission is to create a comprehensive foundation of knowledge for the Mars side of NASA's new exploration vision and to accelerate the search for evidence of life on the red planet.

The MRO data will be used to find sites for the 2007 Phoenix north polar stationary lander, the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory rover and the unmanned sample return rovers planned after 2010.

MRO is also expected to provide data that will begin to identify candidate landing sites for manned Mars missions envisioned after 2020.

The SpaceX Mission Control Center is an 18-wheeler.

Its Falcon rockets don't require huge mobile service towers or other complicated launch pad systems that are expensive to build and maintain.

Near launch-ready when they leave their California factory, Falcons roll up to a launch pad on an extended flatbed truck that also serves as a rocket erector with a built-in umbilical tower.

And the company's launch team is made up of 15 to 20 people, rather than hundreds or thousands of workers.

"My goodness, you can't sell rockets at low prices if you've got a standing army," said Gwynne Shotwell, the company's vice president of business development.

"We are looking at all concepts from a heavy-lift, Saturn V-like vehicle, to a shuttle-type vehicle, to using expendable rockets," Marshall Director Dave King said. "The truth is that we've got to pick what type of crew vehicle that's best for the exploration (plan), and then design a vehicle to lift it."

There are advantages and disadvantages to many designs. A Saturn V-like vehicle would place a lot of cargo into Earth orbit with just a few launches, but it would be expensive, space experts predict.

Another option would be to modify the shuttle's external tank and solid rocket boosters to lift an unmanned cargo package, and yet another one to launch multiple expendable rockets like the Boeing Delta IV or Lockheed Atlas 5 into orbit.

"We just don't know yet," King said. "I expect that within the next year the design (plan) will take shape and we will work toward that goal."

A new, large rocket could keep NASA plans to return to the moon on the ground. Dennis Wingo, Huntsville businessman and space expert, predicts a Saturn V-type design would bankrupt any space exploration plan.

"If they hold out for a Saturn V, then this will fall apart," Wingo said. "There's no money for a long development program to design and test a heavy-lift, Saturn V type vehicle."

Wingo said a promising option would be to develop automated docking systems and use Boeing's Delta IV expendable vehicles to assemble a crew vehicle in space. "This is all proven hardware and wouldn't take that long to develop,"

Experiments on moss grown aboard two space shuttle Columbia missions showed that the plants didn't behave as scientists expected them to in the near-absence of gravity.

The common roof moss (Ceratodon purpureus) grew in striking, clockwise spirals, according to Fred Sack, the study's lead investigator and a professor of plant cellular and molecular biology at Ohio State University.