Spacecraft to jupiter by NASA

NASA to probe Jupiter’s stormy clouds

NASA will launch a spacecraft Friday to unravel the secrets of Jupiter, the largest planet in the universe.
Temperatures on Jupiter drop to minus 234 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 145 degrees Celsius, thick brooding clouds obscure its atmosphere and winds rage at a peak of 384 miles per hour, or 618 km an hour.

The spacecraft, named Juno after the ancient Roman goddess, will explore what drives the violent weather on Jupiter and what lies beneath its stormy clouds. The $1.1 billion probe will peer through the planet - 1,321 times as big as earth - and find out what lies under its atmosphere. Juno will begin its 1,740 million-mile journey after launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, US, the Telegraph reports.

Hovering 3,100 miles above Jupiter's multihued clouds, the 66-foot wide Juno probe will spend a year looking deep inside the giant gas planet. Scott Bolton, NASA mission's principal investigator, said: "What we are trying to do is discover the recipe for planet formation. We are looking at the ingredient list and what is at the core of the planet."

Juno is carrying a suite of eight instruments to help it reveal clues about how Jupiter formed and evolved.


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ISS to be sunk in Pacific

ISS to be sunk in Pacific after 2020

Built with great difficulty and labour, the International Space Station (ISS) will be de-orbited and sunk in the Pacific Ocean after 2020 like its Russian predecessor Mir, a top Russian official said Wednesday.

Russian space agency Roscosmos deputy head Vitaly Davydov said: "We will be forced to sink the ISS. We cannot leave it in orbit as it is a very complicated and a heavy object. There must be no space waste from it."

"We have agreed with our partners that the ISS would function roughly until 2020," he added.

The space station's life was initially estimated at 15 years.

The ISS has been functioning for 13 years now after receiving numerous international space expeditions.

Asked whether a new space station will be built, Davydov said: "There are several possibilities".

The Mir space station was in operation from 1983 to 1998 before it was sunk in the Pacific in a "spacecraft cemetery" near Christmas Island in 2000.

The agreement to construct the ISS was signed Jan 29, 1998, in Washington by representatives from Canada, 11 members of the European Space Agency - that included Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Britain - alongwith Japan, Russia and the US.

The ISS was launched Nov 20, 1998.


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NASA’s Messenger fetches first orbital photo of Mercury

NASA's Messenger spacecraft, the first ever to enter the orbit of Mercury, has fetched its first photo, the project's website said.

The image, the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit around Mercury, was taken as the spacecraft sailed high above the planet's south pole. It features portions of Mercury's surface not previously seen by spacecraft.

"The first images from orbit and the first measurements from Messenger's other payload instruments are only the opening trickle of the flood of new information that we can expect over the coming year," the website quoted Messenger Principal Investigator Sean Solomon as saying.

"The orbital exploration of the Solar System's innermost planet has begun."

The image was acquired as engineers checked how the spacecraft's systems are sustaining Mercury's harsh thermal environment after all equipment was turned on March 23. The scientific mission will begin on April 4.

"Instrument checkout has been proceeding according to plan," the scientist said.

It took the spacecraft more than six years to enter the orbit of Mercury, the least explored terrestrial planet of the inner Solar system.

To reach its destination point, the spacecraft, launched in 2004, covered more than 7.8 billion km. It followed a complicated route through the inner solar system, which included one flyby of Earth, two flybys of Venus, and three flybys of Mercury.

Mercury is the smallest and the densest planet among the four terrestrial planets. It also has the oldest surface and the largest daily variations in surface temperature.

Before the Messenger mission, only 45 per cent of the surface of Mercury had been photographed by a spacecraft. The previous mission was Mariner-10, launched in the 1970s.

Discovery astronauts complete ’textbook’ spacewalk

Two space shuttle Discovery astronauts moved a failed ammonia cooling pump during a more than six-hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station.

NASA officials called Monday's work a "textbook" spacewalk, after overcoming a problem with the station's robotic arm that left astronaut Steve Bowen holding the weightless pump for a bit longer than expected.

It was the first of two spacewalks in the shuttle mission, which is Discovery's last before the spacecraft is retired.

NASA said after the spacewalk that it had decided to add another day to the mission, making it a 12-day affair, in order to allow Discovery astronauts to help with work setting up a new room that it carried aloft.

Astronauts Bowen and Alvin Drew also installed a back-up power extension cable and camera equipment and did other work to make future spacewalks easier.

Before heading back inside, they filled a metal container with the vacuum of space as part of a Japanese experiment called "Message in a Bottle" that will later be displayed on Earth.

The cooling pump broke last year and had to be relocated from a temporary storage location where it had been stashed on an earlier spacewalk. It had to be moved before it can be taken back to Earth for analysis.

The six-hour, 34-minute spacewalk wrapped up at 2220 GMT.A second spacewalk is set for Wednesday.

Two more shuttle flights are planned for later this year in the final missions for the rest of the fleet, Endeavour and Atlantis.

Discovery's mission is delivering the last major US contribution to the ISS - an extra room - along with supplies and equipment, including a human-like robot, known as Robonaut 2 (R2), the first such robot ever sent to space.

Amazing pictures by NASA