Nov 1 2012

From The Space Library

RELEASE: 12-378 SPACEX TRANSITIONS TO THIRD COMMERCIAL CREW PHASE WITH NASA

WASHINGTON -- Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) has completed its first three performance milestones for NASA's Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) initiative, which is intended to lead to the availability of commercial human spaceflight services for government and commercial customers. During the company's first milestone, a technical baseline review, NASA and SpaceX reviewed the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket for crew transportation to low-Earth orbit and discussed future plans for ground operations for crewed flights. The second milestone included a review of the company's plan to achieve the CCiCap milestones established during SpaceX's $440 million Space Act Agreement. SpaceX also presented the company's financial resources to support its co-investment in CCiCap. At the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., on Oct. 29, SpaceX presented techniques it will use to design, build and test its integrated system during the third milestone, called an integrated systems requirements review. The company also provided NASA with the initial plans it would use for managing ground operations, launch, ascent, in-orbit operations, re-entry and landing should they begin transporting crews. "These initial milestones are just the beginning of a very exciting endeavor with SpaceX." said Ed Mango, NASA's Commercial Crew Program manager. "We expect to see significant progress from our three CCiCap partners in a fairly short amount of time." SpaceX also has completed its Space Act Agreement with NASA for the Commercial Crew Development Round 2 (CCDev2) initiative, the development phase that preceded CCiCap. During CCDev2, the company designed, developed and tested components of a launch abort system. A large hypergolic engine named SuperDraco would propel the Dragon spacecraft away from its rocket to save the crew from a disastrous event during launch or ascent. SpaceX also built a rocket engine test stand for developing an abort system. Engineers from NASA and SpaceX analyzed the trajectories, loads and dynamics the spacecraft would experience as it separates from a failing rocket. "Our NASA team brought years of experience to the table and shared with SpaceX what components, systems, techniques and processes have worked for the agency's human space transportation systems in the past and why they've worked," said Jon Cowart, NASA's SpaceX partner manager during CCDev2. "This sharing of experience benefitted both NASA and the company, and is creating a more dependable system at an accelerated pace." SpaceX is one of three U.S. companies NASA is working with during CCiCap to set the stage for a crewed orbital demonstration mission around the middle of the decade. SpaceX already is executing a contract with NASA for 12 cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station. "The Dragon spacecraft has successfully delivered cargo to the space station twice this year, and SpaceX is well under way toward upgrading Dragon to transport astronauts as well," said SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell. Future development and certification initiatives eventually will lead to the availability of human spaceflight services for NASA to send its astronauts to the International Space Station, where critical research is taking place daily.

RELEASE: 12-385 NASA'S FERMI MEASURES COSMIC 'FOG' PRODUCED BY ANCIENT STARLIGHT

WASHINGTON -- Astronomers using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have made the most accurate measurement of starlight in the universe and used it to establish the total amount of light from all the stars that have ever shone, accomplishing a primary mission goal. "The optical and ultraviolet light from stars continues to travel throughout the universe even after the stars cease to shine, and this creates a fossil radiation field we can explore using gamma rays from distant sources," said lead scientist Marco Ajello, a postdoctoral researcher at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University in California and the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. Gamma rays are the most energetic form of light. Since Fermi's launch in 2008, its Large Area Telescope (LAT) observes the entire sky in high-energy gamma rays every three hours, creating the most detailed map of the universe ever known at these energies. The total sum of starlight in the cosmos is known to astronomers as the extragalactic background light (EBL). To gamma rays, the EBL functions as a kind of cosmic fog. Ajello and his team investigated the EBL by studying gamma rays from 150 blazars, or galaxies powered by black holes, that were strongly detected at energies greater than 3 billion electron volts (GeV), or more than a billion times the energy of visible light. "With more than a thousand detected so far, blazars are the most common sources detected by Fermi, but gamma rays at these energies are few and far between, which is why it took four years of data to make this analysis," said team member Justin Finke, an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. As matter falls toward a galaxy's supermassive black hole, some of it is accelerated outward at almost the speed of light in jets pointed in opposite directions. When one of the jets happens to be aimed in the direction of Earth, the galaxy appears especially bright and is classified as a blazar. Gamma rays produced in blazar jets travel across billions of light-years to Earth. During their journey, the gamma rays pass through an increasing fog of visible and ultraviolet light emitted by stars that formed throughout the history of the universe. Occasionally, a gamma ray collides with starlight and transforms into a pair of particles -- an electron and its antimatter counterpart, a positron. Once this occurs, the gamma ray light is lost. In effect, the process dampens the gamma ray signal in much the same way as fog dims a distant lighthouse. From studies of nearby blazars, scientists have determined how many gamma rays should be emitted at different energies. More distant blazars show fewer gamma rays at higher energies -- especially above 25 GeV -- thanks to absorption by the cosmic fog. The farthest blazars are missing most of their higher-energy gamma rays. The researchers then determined the average gamma-ray attenuation across three distance ranges between 9.6 billion years ago and today. From this measurement, the scientists were able to estimate the fog's thickness. To account for the observations, the average stellar density in the cosmos is about 1.4 stars per 100 billion cubic light-years, which means the average distance between stars in the universe is about 4,150 light-years. A paper describing the findings was published Thursday on Science Express. "The Fermi result opens up the exciting possibility of constraining the earliest period of cosmic star formation, thus setting the stage for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope," said Volker Bromm, an astronomer at the University of Texas, Austin, who commented on the findings. "In simple terms, Fermi is providing us with a shadow image of the first stars, whereas Webb will directly detect them." Measuring the extragalactic background light was one of the primary mission goals for Fermi. "We're very excited about the prospect of extending this measurement even farther," said Julie McEnery, the mission's project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Goddard manages the Fermi astrophysics and particle physics research partnership. Fermi was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy with contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

RELEASE: 12-386 NASA SEEKS OPTIONS FOR SLS CARGO PAYLOAD FAIRINGS AND ADAPTERS

WASHINGTON -- NASA is exploring options for larger payload fairings to enhance the cargo carrying capabilities of its Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket, now in development, to carry cargo, crewed spacecraft and science payloads. In a Request for Information (RFI) published Thursday, the agency is seeking information about payload adapters and fairings already available within commercial industry. Designed to be flexible for crew or cargo missions, SLS will be safe, affordable, and sustainable to continue America's journey of discovery from the unique vantage point of space. Initial SLS configurations will launch NASA's Orion spacecraft, which will sustain astronauts during space travel and provide safe re-entry from deep space. Future configurations could carry science instruments and other exploration payloads to destinations including Lagrange points, the moon, asteroids, and ultimately Mars. "This is a no-cost examination of the aerospace landscape to identify existing components that could augment the rocket's architecture as we move beyond the initial Orion configuration," said Todd May, SLS program manager at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. "SLS can make challenging human and science missions possible in large part because of the unprecedented size of the payload it can lift. We are hopeful industry may offer some innovative and affordable ideas about alternative fairing and adapter options." The SLS will have an initial lift capability of 77 tons (70 metric tons) and grow in performance through a series of upgrades, providing more lift capacity and volume than existing launch vehicles. Larger payload fairing sizes enabled by SLS could reduce experiment design complexity and the rocket's high performance can decrease travel time and, by extension, cost and risk of science missions. NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland is responsible for payload fairing development for SLS and will manage this RFI. Marshall manages the SLS Program for the agency. SLS will launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

CONTRACT RELEASE: C12-056 NASA SELECTS CONTRACT FOR SAFETY, ENVIRONMENTAL, MEDICAL SERVICES

WASHINGTON -- NASA has selected Earth Resources Technology, Inc., (ERT), of Laurel, Md., to receive a contract for safety, environmental, and medical support services at the agency's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. The contract has a maximum value of $55 million. This is a firm-fixed-price, time-and-materials indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity hybrid contract that begins Nov. 16. The contract consists of a two-year base period and three one-year options. Under the terms of the contract, the company will provide resources and technical expertise to support occupational safety, industrial hygiene, health physics, occupational medicine, and environmental management. ERT also will implement programs that ensure the safety and health of all employees, and provide oversight to ensure all Ames operations are carried out in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local regulations and NASA policies.