"It’s fantastic to see the hardware sitting on the surface, waiting for us to come back again," Mark Robinson, chief of the camera science team, said in a news briefing in Washington, D.C.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched June 18 on a mission to map the lunar surface in preparation for the planned return of astronauts to the moon in 2020. It carries instruments designed to search for ice deposits in sunless canyons and crevices; those deposits could be a source of water and rocket fuel for future moon colonists.
The cameras started clicking away in the last few weeks, as the spacecraft settled into an orbit that brought it as close to the surface as 18 miles. Over the years, Japan, China and India have all sent probes to the moon that have focused on the old Apollo sites. But the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s images of the hardware left behind are the sharpest yet, NASA said, resolving features as small as 3 feet wide.

The reconnaissance orbiter took pictures of five of the six landing sites, missing only that of Apollo 12, which launched on Nov. 14, 1969.
Some of the best images are of the Apollo 14 landing site, where a set of scientific instruments can be seen, along with marks in the topsoil, known as regolith, left by the astronauts walking around in their spacesuits. The pictures also show the tracks of the tool cart the astronauts towed behind them, Robinson said. Apollo 14 launched on Jan. 31, 1971.
As impressed as they were by the images, NASA officials said they expect better quality after the orbiter finishes commissioning its instruments, a process similar to tuning a new musical instrument to get the best sound. Images of the Apollo 11 landing site, for one, are expected to be twice as good in the future, officials said.
Referring to conspiracy buffs who question whether the moon landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin really occurred, one reporter asked if the images show the American flag planted by the astronauts. Robinson said that would be difficult to resolve from space.
"If it’s standing, it would be very, very narrow," he said. "We might be able to see its shadow at some point."
But he said he believed the flag was knocked over by the exhaust from the Apollo 11 lunar module’s ascent engine as Armstrong and Aldrin lifted off for the trip home. The mission ended on July 24, 1969, when the module carrying Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins parachuted into the Pacific Ocean.
Aside from the curiosity value connected with the images, NASA said the pictures could be important to future moon colonists. Changes in the surface, in the form of new cratering, would help scientists understand how often a particular region on the moon is hit by rocks from space. That information would be important in designing habitats.
The lunar images can be viewed on the NASA website, at www.nasa.gov .

NASA orbiter offers images of moon landing sites

Astronauts aboard space shuttle Atlantis are preparing to return to Earth after an ambitious and risky mission to re-fit the Hubble telescope.

There are two chances to land on Friday: one at 1500 BST (1000 EDT) and a second at 1639 BST (1139 EDT).

If bad weather scuppers either of those opportunities, the shuttle will try to land on Saturday in Florida or at Edwards Air Force Base, California.

The mission was intended to give a new lease of life to Hubble.

The orbiting observatory is regarded as one of the most important scientific tools ever built.

The fifth and final mission to service Hubble has been hailed as a great success.

Over five spacewalks, astronauts installed new instruments and thermal blankets, repaired two existing instruments, replaced gyroscopes and batteries.

The only disappointment was the failure to restore the high resolution channel (one of three) on Hubble’s main camera – the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).

Cloudy skies and stormy weather could yet pose a problem for Friday’s landing attempts, Nasa has said.

The shuttle has enough supplies to remain in orbit until Monday.

The US space agency has cleared Atlantis for its fiery re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere following in-flight inspections of its heat shield by the crew.

The Hubble telescope was released from the shuttle’s robotic arm on Tuesday.

Atlantis ready to return to Earth

On a marathon spacewalk Sunday, two astronauts overcame repeated obstacles to make the second of two historic repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope.

One bolt that had to be extracted proved so stubborn that astronaut Michael Massimino resorted to brute force to rip it out of the telescope.

His efforts paid off. Hubble’s $166 million chemical analyzer, dead for nearly five years, came back to life after Massimino and a colleague rewired its electronics. The device makes a fingerprint of cosmic objects by separating light. It is good for finding black holes and examining the atmosphere of planets outside our solar system.

When Mission Control announced that the chemical analyzer had passed the “aliveness test” administered by engineers on Earth, the astronauts in space cheered.

“That sounds great,” Massimino said. “Thanks so much.”

Saturday, another team of astronauts revived a Hubble camera that broke two years ago.

Never before have astronauts tried to repair Hubble’s scientific instruments. Because those instruments weren’t designed for maintenance in space, working on them poses major challenges to astronauts wearing stiff, thick space gloves.

Sunday’s outing was the fourth of five spacewalks planned for the crew of space shuttle Atlantis, which is paying the last service call to the storied telescope. The seven Atlantis astronauts want to rejuvenate the Hubble to ensure it will last at least five more years.

The astronauts ran into a trio of unwelcome surprises during Sunday’s outing, which ran so long that they never got to their second scheduled chore, installation of insulation on the Hubble.

First, Massimino couldn’t undo a bolt holding a handrail in place — a major problem, because the handrail blocked access to the failed Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. Massimino yanked the handrail free after getting a go-ahead from Mission Control. Engineers estimated the task would take 60 pounds of force.

Then Massimino had trouble installing a device designed to grab 100-plus tiny screws he had to take out. The device was supposed to sit on the door to the spectrograph and keep the screws from floating into the Hubble’s workings.

Finally Massimino’s power screwdriver went dead, leading the exasperated astronaut to blurt out, “Oh, for Pete’s sake!” He had to break off working and travel to a distant toolbox to get a spare screwdriver.

The refrigerator-sized spectrograph has made major contributions to astronomy since it was added to Hubble in 1997. It doesn’t take photos but instead analyzes the composition of stars and other objects in the universe.

It detected black holes at the center of many galaxies and helped scientists do a definitive study of a star in the last stages of life. It was the first to analyze the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a star other than the sun.

Nearly every spacewalk made by the Hubble crew has run into unexpected difficulties. Thursday, spacewalker Andrew Feustel had to muscle another stuck bolt out of place. If he’d failed, a new camera would’ve had to return to Earth rather than being installed on the Hubble.

Friday, Massimino and spacewalking partner Michael Good had so much trouble replacing Hubble’s gyroscopes that they fell 90 minutes behind schedule.

The mission’s final spacewalk is scheduled for Monday. Feustel and partner John Grunsfeld will have to try to finish up the work that Massimino and Good didn’t have time for.

Hubble analyzer fixed, but not without headaches

A former Microsoft Corp. executive Charles Simonyi has safely returned from his 12-day “vacation” on the International Space Stati, It was the last trip on which nonastronauts could hitch a ride on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Simonyi blasted off March 26 from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with two crew members, Russian cosmonaut Gennadiy Padalka and American astronaut Michael Barratt. He took the only route available to space tourists: making a reservation for the Soyuz through US-based Space Adventures Ltd.

But the Soyuz is a one-time-use ship that can hold only three people. When the ISS crew goes up to six members from three, delivering the entire crew to the ISS will take two trips at capacity. There simply will be no seats for tourists, even those with $35 million to burn.

The seats that have been used by tourists will be taken by American astronauts. Last December, NASA signed a $141 million contract with the Russian Space Agency to send three ISS crew members on two Soyuz vehicles in 2011. And the number of seats booked by NASA probably will grow because the main transport used by US astronauts, the space shuttle, will be retired next year.

But space tourism companies are looking for ways to continue in business. Theoretically, they could purchase an entire Soyuz vehicle and send their clients to space even without docking at the ISS. This is what Space Adventurers intends to do. But such plans require building an extra Soyuz spacecraft, as all currently operating ships are contracted out for ISS expeditions.

"There is a potential to build [an extra] ship," Aleksey Krasnov, the head of manned flights for the Russian Space Agency, said at a news conference. "But there are problems with this. This year we have a record number of flights – four – which means we need to launch four spacecrafts.

"It is necessary to consider industrial and production capacities as well as human resources when building the fifth ship," Mr. Krasnov said. But he added that he hopes that Energiya, the company that constructs the Soyuz, will build a fifth ship.

Vitaliy Lopota, president and chief designer of Energiya, claims that it takes 2-1/2 to three years to build a spacecraft, which means tourist flights couldn’t resume until 2012-2013 at the earliest.

"But this project will require more financing," Mr. Lapota was quoted as saying by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti. "The current conditions of financial markets are not allowing building an extra manned spacecraft."

Private companies have started actively searching for cheaper options. A number of them are developing alternatives to Soyuz ships and carriers to get tourists to space. Competition is growing quickly.

The British firm Virgin Galactic is planning to send 500 people to space each year on its newly built SpaceShipTwo, carried by the rocket White Knight Two. It plans to send up its first tourist as soon as next year or in 2011, when all test flights are finished. A 2-1/2-hour space voyage will cost $200,000. Other companies such as Space Adventures and RocketShip Tours Inc. of Phoenix, are offering suborbital flights where tourists would fly about 37 to 68 miles high, experience weightlessness for five to 10 minutes, and return to Earth.

Former Microsoft Executive returns from Space – NetCrunch

Space shuttle Discovery returned in good shape, after traveling more than 5 million miles and circling Earth 202 times. The 13-day flight — which ended as a Russian-launched crew was settling into the space station — was highlighted by the installation and unfurling of the station’s last pair of solar wings. The $300-million addition brought the orbiting outpost up to full power, a vital part of NASA’s plan to double the space station population and boost scientific research in a few months.

Mission Control delayed Discovery’s homecoming by about 90 minutes, or one orbit, because of windy, cloudy weather. But the wind shifted and conditions improved enough for the second and final landing opportunity of the day.

Shuttle Discovery Back on Earth

2009 DD45, estimated to be between 21 and 47 meters (68 and 152 feet) across, raced by at 1344 GMT on Monday, the Planetary Society and astronomers’ blogs reported.

The gap was just 72,000 kilometers (44,750 miles), or a fifth of the distance between Earth and the Moon and only twice the height of satellites in geosynchronous orbit, the website space.com said.

The estimated size is similar to that of an asteroid or comet that exploded above Tunguska, Siberia, on June 30 1908, flattening 80 million trees in a swathe of more than 2,000 square kilometres (800 square miles).

2009 DD45 was spotted last Saturday by astronomers at the Siding Spring Survey in Australia, and was verified by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Centre (MPC), which catalogues Solar System rocks.

The closest flyby listed by the MPC is 2004 FU162, a small asteroid about six metres (20 feet) across which came within about 6,500 kms (4,000 miles) of us in March 2004.

Space rock gives Earth a close shave

The Chang’e 1 lunar satellite hit the moon’s surface at 1613 local time (0813 GMT) at the end of a 16-month moon-mapping mission.

China launched the spacecraft in late October 2007 on a mission to survey the entire surface of the moon.

China’s ever-more ambitious space programme includes plans for a space station and landing a man on the moon.

Future missions

Launched into space on one of China’s Long March 3A rockets, the probe mapped the moon’s surface using stereo radar.

Chang’e 1 was under the remote control of two stations in Qingda, eastern China, and Kashgar in the north-west of the country, the Xinhua news agency said.

China became only the third nation – after the Soviet Union and the US – to put a manned spacecraft in orbit in 2003.

State media said on Sunday China would launch a space module next year and carry out the country’s first space docking.

"The module, called Tiangong-1, will provide a "safe room" for Chinese astronauts to live and conduct scientific research in zero gravity," Chinese state media said.

"Weighing about 8.5 tonnes, Tiangong-1 is able to perform a long-term unattended operation, which will be an essential step toward building a space station," it added.

Chinese probe crashes into moon

NASA said it will take weeks to determine the full magnitude of the unprecedented crash and whether any other satellites or even the Hubble Space Telescope are threatened.

The collision, which occurred nearly 500 miles over Siberia on Tuesday, was the first high-speed impact between two intact spacecraft, NASA officials said.

“We knew this was going to happen eventually,” said Mark Matney, an orbital debris scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA believes any risk to the international space station and its three astronauts is low. It orbits about 270 miles below the collision course.

Scientists Eye Debris After Satellite Collision

The satellite called Omid, or hope in Farsi, was launched late Monday after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave the order to proceed, according to the radio report. State television also showed footage of what it said was the satellite blasting off in the darkness from an unidentified location in Iran.

The reports could not be independently verified by outside observers. Some western observers have accused Tehran of exaggerating its space program.

Iran has long held the goal of developing a space program, generating unease among world leaders already concerned about its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. One of the worries associated with Iran’s fledgling space program is that the same technology used to put satellites into space can also be used to deliver warheads.

The satellite was taken into orbit by a Safir-2, or ambassador-2 rocket, which was first tested in August and has a range of 155 miles (250 kilometers).

Despite the anxiety by the U.S. and its allies over Iran’s space program, it is not exactly clear how developed it is.

In 2005, Iran launched its first commercial satellite on a Russian rocket in a joint project with Moscow, which appears to be the main partner in transferring space technology to Iran. Also in 2005, the government said it had allocated $500 million for space projects in the next five years.

Iranian officials first started developing the satellite, which weighs 27 kilograms (60 pounds), in 2006.

Iran has said it wants to put its own satellites into orbit to monitor natural disasters in the earthquake-prone nation and improve its telecommunications. Iranian officials also point to America’s use of satellites to monitor Afghanistan and Iraq and say they need similar abilities for their security.

Iran hopes to launch three more satellites by 2010, the government has said.

The radio says the satellite launched Monday is designed to circle the earth 15 times during a 24-hour period and send reports to the space center in Iran. It has two frequency bands and eight antennas for transmitting data.

Report: Iran sends satellite to orbit