NASA Releases First Images from the Hubble Space Telescope After Upgrades and Repairs had Been Made in May by Space Shuttle Astronauts

 

"This is the first image NASA has released from the Hubble Space Telescope since it became fully functional after being repaired by space shuttle astronauts in May. Hubble’s newly repaired camera captured this image on June 13 and July 8 of a spiral galaxy in the Big Dipper constellation 6 million light years away."

-WIRED SCIENCE

Writing for WIRED SCIENCE Betsy Mason reports that NASA has begun releasing images obtained from the newly repaired camera on board the Hubble Space Telescope. The first image is of a spiral galaxy 6 million light years away from the Earth located in the constellation Ursa Major.

WIRED SCIENCE's Alexis Madrigal provides more on Hubble's first eight, clearer images of deep space objects and writes that: "The 19-year-old telescope is now more powerful than it’s ever been. Two new instruments — the Wide Field Camera 3 and Cosmic Origins Spectrograph — are ready for action."

 

Planetary Nebula NGC 6302

"The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), a new camera aboard the Hubble Space Telescope, snapped this image of the planetary nebula, catalogued as NGC 6302, but more popularly called the Bug Nebula, or Butterfly Nebula. NGC 6302 lies within the Milky Way, roughly 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. The glowing gas is the star’s outer layers, expelled over about 2,200 years. The “butterfly” stretches for more than 2 light-years, which is about half the distance from the Sun to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri."

Image and caption: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

 

Carina Nebula

"These two images of a huge pillar of star birth demonstrate how observations taken in visible (top) and in infrared light (bottom) by Hubble reveal dramatically different and complementary views of an object.

Composed of gas and dust, the pillar resides in a tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina."

Image and caption: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

  

 Omega Centauri

"Hubble snapped this panoramic view of a colorful assortment of 100,000 stars residing in the crowded core of a giant star cluster.

The image reveals a small region inside the massive globular cluster Omega Centauri, which boasts nearly 10 million stars. Globular clusters, ancient swarms of stars united by gravity, are the homesteaders of our Milky Way. The stars in Omega Centauri are between 10 billion and 12 billion years old. The cluster lies about 16,000 light-years from Earth."

Image and caption: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

  
 

Stephan’s Quintet, also known as Hickson Compact Group 92

"A clash among members of a famous galaxy quintet reveals an assortment of stars across a wide color range, from young blue stars to aging red stars.

This portrait of Stephan’s Quintet, also known as Hickson Compact Group 92, was taken by the new Wide Field Camera 3. Stephan’s Quintet, as the name implies, is a group of five galaxies. The name, however, is a bit of a misnomer. Studies have shown that group member NGC 7320, at upper left, is actually a foreground galaxy about seven times closer to Earth than the rest of the group."

Image and caption: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

Supernova Remnant N132D

"The wispy, glowing, magenta structures in this image are the remains of a star 10 to 15 times the mass of the Sun that we would have seen exploding as a supernova 3,000 years ago. The remnant’s fast-moving gas is plowing into the surrounding gas of the galaxy, creating a supersonic shock wave in the surrounding medium and making the material glow.

The Hubble visible-light image reveals, deep within the remnant, a crescent-shaped cloud of pink emission from hydrogen gas and soft purple wisps that correspond to regions of glowing oxygen. A dense background of colorful stars is also visible.

"Probing this tattered gaseous relic, the newly installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope detected pristine gas ejected by the doomed star that has not yet mixed with the gas in the interstellar medium. The supernova remnant, called N132D, resides in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small companion galaxy of the Milky Way located 170,000 light-years away. The resulting spectrum, taken in ultraviolet light, shows glowing oxygen and carbon in the remnant."

Image and caption: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

 

Galaxy Cluster Abell 370

"The Hubble Space Telescope’s newly repaired Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) has peered nearly 5 billion light years away to resolve intricate details in the galaxy cluster Abell 370.

"Abell 370 is one of the very first galaxy clusters where astronomers observed the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, where the warping of space by the cluster’s gravitational field distorts the light from galaxies lying far behind it. This is manifested as arcs and streaks in the picture, which are the stretched images of background galaxies.

"Gravitational lensing proves a vital tool for astronomers when measuring the dark matter distribution in massive clusters, since the mass distribution can be reconstructed from its gravitational effects."

Image and caption: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

Doomed Star Eta Carinae

"The signature balloon-shaped clouds of gas blown from a pair of massive stars called Eta Carinae have tantalized astronomers for decades. Eta Carinae has a volatile temperament, prone to violent outbursts over the past 200 years.

"Eta Car A is one of the most massive and most visible stars in the sky. Because of the star’s extremely high mass, it is unstable and uses its fuel very quickly, compared to other stars. Such massive stars also have a short lifetime, and we expect that Eta Carinae will explode within a million years.

"Eta Carinae is 7,500 light-years away in the constellation Carina."

Image and caption: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

 

Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 6217

  "This image of barred spiral galaxy NGC 6217 is the first image of a celestial object taken with the newly repaired Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope. The camera was restored to operation during the STS-125 servicing mission in May to upgrade Hubble.

"The barred spiral galaxy NGC 6217 was photographed on June 13 and July 8, 2009, as part of the initial testing and calibration of Hubble’s ACS.

"The galaxy lies 6 million light-years away in the north circumpolar constellation Ursa Major."

Image and caption: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

All celestial object descriptions provided by WIRED SCIENCE

Kepler Space Telescope Opens New Vistas for NASA

"The centuries-old quest for other worlds like our Earth has been rejuvenated by the intense excitement and popular interest surrounding the discovery of hundreds of planets orbiting other stars.

"There is now clear evidence for substantial numbers of three types of exoplanets; gas giants, hot-super-Earths in short period orbits, and ice giants.

"The challenge now is to find terrestrial planets (i.e., those one half to twice the size of the Earth), especially those in the habitable zone of their stars where liquid water and possibly life might exist.

"The Kepler mission, scheduled to launch in 2008, will be a space mission to search for Earth-size and smaller planets around other stars in our neighborhood of the galaxy. Scientists also expect to detect larger planets during the mission. Kepler is a special-purpose spacecraft that precisely measures the light variations from distant stars, looking for planetary transits.

"When a planet passes in front of its parent star, as seen from our solar system, it blocks the light from that star. This is known as a 'transit.' Searching for transits of distant 'Earths' is like looking for the drop in brightness when a moth flies across a searchlight. Measuring repeated transits, all with a regular period, duration and change in brightness, provides a rigorous method for discovering and confirming planets and their orbits – planets the size of Earth and smaller in habitable zones around other stars. Scientists define habitable zones as volumes in space where planets could be that may well have liquid water on their surfaces.

"Kepler will survey four classes of stars – F stars (bigger and brighter than Earth's sun), G stars (similar to our sun in brightness and size) and K and M stars (smaller and less bright than our sun).

"Kepler will operate for four years to view an area of the sky 500 times the area of Earth's moon. During this time, Kepler will continuously monitor the brightness of 100,000 stars in the Milky Way galaxy. The Kepler spacecraft consists of a spacecraft bus and a single instrument called a photometer, that is, a light meter, which can simultaneously measure the brightness variations of stars with a precision of about 20 parts per million.

"Kepler must measure at least three transits of a planet to consider it a valid planetary candidate. Then, each star with a candidate planet must be observed by ground-based telescopes to eliminate any that have nearby stars that produce a signal that imitates a planetary transit. Consequently, the announcement of planetary discoveries can only be made after a minimum of several months. For Earth-size planets in orbit around stars similar to our sun, we must wait a minimum of three years to get three transits plus the ground-based observing time. Thus, the most valuable discoveries cannot be announced until near the end of the Kepler mission in 2012.

"According to researchers, the results will tell scientists how often planets occur in the habitable zone of other stars. If these planets are common, then hundreds of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone and thousands outside the habitable zone will be detected, according to Kepler scientists.

"The Kepler Mission, NASA Discovery mission #10, is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets.

"Results from this mission will allow us to place our solar system within the continuum of planetary systems in the Galaxy.

"Kepler Mission Scientific Objective

"The scientific objective of the Kepler Mission is to explore the structure and diversity of planetary systems. This is achieved by surveying a large sample of stars to:

- "Determine the percentage of terrestrial and larger planets there are in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of stars

- "Determine the distribution of sizes and shapes of the orbits of these planets

- "Estimate how many planets there are in multiple-star systems

- "Determine the variety of orbit sizes and planet reflectivities, sizes, masses and densities of short-period giant planets

- "Identify additional members of each discovered planetary system using other techniques, and

- "Determine the properties of those stars that harbor planetary systems.


"The Transit Method of Detecting Extrasolar Planets

"When a planet crosses in front of its star as viewed by an observer, the event is call a transit. Transits by terrestrial planets produce a small change in a star's brightness of about 1/10,000 (100 parts per million, ppm), lasting for 2 to 16 hours. This change must be absolutely periodic if it is caused by a planet. In addition, all transits produced by the same planet must be of the same change in brightness and last the same amount of time, thus providing a highly repeatable signal and robust detection method.

"Once detected, the planet's orbital size can be calculated from the period (how long it takes the planet to orbit once around the star) and the mass of the star using Kepler's Third Law of planetary motion. The size of the planet is found from the depth of the transit (how much the brightness of the star drops) and the size of the star. From the orbital size and the temperature of the star, the planet's characteristic temperature can be calculated. From this the question of whether or not the planet is habitable (not necessarily inhabited) can be answered.

"The Kepler Mission Design

"For a planet to transit, as seen from our solar system, the orbit must be lined up edgewise to us. The probability for an orbit to be properly aligned is equal to the diameter of the star divided by the diameter of the orbit. This is 0.5% for a planet in an Earth-like orbit about a solar-like star. (For the giant planets discovered in four-day orbits, the alignment probability is more like 10%.) In order to detect many planets one can not just look at a few stars for transits or even a few hundred. One must look at thousands of stars, even if Earth-like planets are common. If they are rare, then one needs to look at many thousands to find even a few. Kepler looks at 100,000 stars so that if Earths are rare, a null or near null result would still be significant. If Earth-size planets are common then Kepler should detect hundreds of them.

"Considering that we want to find planets in the habitable zone, the time between transits is about one year. To reliably detect a sequence one needs four transits. Hence, the mission duration needs to be at least three and one half years.

"The Kepler instrument is a specially designed 0.95-meter diameter telescope called a photometer or light meter. It has a very large field of view for an astronomical telescope —105 square degrees— or about the area of both your hands held at arm's length, in order to observe the necessary large number of stars. It stares at the same star field for the entire mission and continuously and simultaneously monitors the brightnesses of more than 100,000 stars for the life of the mission.

"The Kepler Space Telescope, which launched earlier this year to find Earth-like planets elsewhere in our galaxy, showed it’s open for business with NASA’s announcement that an exoplanet we thought we knew is like nothing we’ve seen before.

"Peering at a large planet orbiting very close to its star, HAT-P-7b, the telescope delivered what one scientist called “exquisite” data, proving that it’s ready to start looking for Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones around stars.

"Analyzing just 10 days of data, the scientists even turned up a major surprise: HAT-P-7b isn’t like Jupiter at all. It has a “dark” side and its atmosphere could be made of relatively exotic chemicals like titanium oxide.

“This planet is not like anything in Earth’s solar system,” said Sara Seager, an exoplanetary scientist at MIT.

"The hottest spot on Hat-P-7b could be more than 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the coldest spot. There is no comparable planet around our star.

"Kepler’s first findings, some of which were published in the journal Science, augur a new level of exoplanetary research, Seager said.

“This exquisite data is just the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “We’re going to see a new world of exoplanet exploration where discoveries will come much more rapidly than they’ve come in the last 10 years.”

"But while we’ll be learning more about planets in the universe every month, Kepler’s ultimate mission — finding Earth-like planets in the habitable zone — is still going to take years.

"The habitable zone is the term astronomers use to denote the distance from a star where orbiting planets wouldn’t get fried or frozen. In those locations, liquid water could exist — and that’s something that is necessary for life as we know it. In our solar system, Venus, Earth, and Mars lie within the zone. The more planets that Kepler finds in its survey of 100,000 stars, the more likely that Earth-like planets exist in large numbers throughout the universe. And the more Earths out there, the better our chances get of finding life outside our solar system.

"The announcement that Kepler is working as designed is great news for the exoplanetary research community, which had been eagerly awaiting the first data from the instrument. 225993main_kepler-browse

“It appears Kepler is working at its design precision — the noise level of just 40 parts per million per data point is amazing!” Matthew Muterspaugh, an exoplanet researcher at Tennessee State University, wrote in an email to Wired.com.

"Kepler’s mission is primarily statistical. It will tell us how many solar systems like ours likely exist in the universe, but the stars in its field of vision are too far away to characterize in much detail. Kepler will be able to tell us that the planet is in the right place, but not whether it’s suitable for or home to life.

“[Kepler] will be able to say it’s a rocky planet like Venus or Earth, but won’t be able to say whether it’s more like Venus or Earth,” Muterspaugh said.

"So, while Kepler will help sort out how likely life is around the universe, it won’t actually find any definitive signs of it. The stars that it’s looking at are just too far away.

“The downside to the Kepler technique is that the stars tend to be very far away and faint,” said Muterspaugh. “This set of stars will not be well optimized for the follow up observations.”

"The ultimate quest to find other planets that support life will require a series of other missions and telescopes, which focus on planets much closer to home.

"First, we’ll have to find out which local stars have rocky planets. NASA’s first potential mission with that capability is the SIM Lite Astrometric Observatory. It will be able to find Earth-sized planets around 60 stars in our neighborhood.

"Once these planets are identified by SIM or other missions like Gaia and CoRoT, NASA will be able to peer at them with the powerful James Webb Space Telescope or a dedicated planet-hunting telescope like the agency’s proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder missions.

"For planets larger than Earth, the James Webb telescope will be able to characterize them effectively, but for the true Earths, we’ll need the more powerful instrumentation of the TPF. It will be a long road from finding the first Earth-like planet with Kepler to knowing how habitable any extrasolar planet is, but if all goes well, scientists think we could have answers by 2020.

“The timeline is set for in 2020 having that image of our brother world out there,” Muterspaugh said. “I think that this is a fantastic thing for our generation to do, answering a question that’s thousands of years old: are we alone?”

NASA Astronauts Repairs will Prepare Hubble Space Telescope for it's Final Mission And an Ability to Peer into Deeper Space and "Dark Matter"

The Hubble Space Telescope is getting one final repair before it's mission will be ended.

"Periodic maintenance visits by astronauts have been the lifeblood of the Hubble telescope ever since it was launched in 1990 from the shuttle. Floating above the murky atmosphere, the telescope was designed to see the stars with peerless precision. It was hailed as the greatest advance in astronomy since Galileo, until astronomers discovered shortly after its launching that it couldn’t be focused because its mirror had been exquisitely polished to the wrong shape."

Ever since 1993 when astronauts refitted the Hubble Space Telescope with a new lens that allowed man's clearest vision into the depths of space there have been three more missions that have retrofitted Hubble with updated parts to ensure the improvement of the space telescope's capabilities.

"On the Atlantis mission that began Monday, astronauts for the first time will be opening instruments and replacing circuit boards in space. The last maintenance mission was in March 2002.

"Virtually every important part of the telescope, except the warped mirror itself, has been replaced over the last 19 years. The result, astronomers say, is that the telescope today is 100 times as powerful as the one they thought they were putting in orbit back in 1990.

"In 2003, astronomers used Hubble to record the deepest optical and infrared images ever made, showing galaxies forming in the primordial mist only 800 million years after the Big Bang. Before it conked out due to electrical problems in 2007, Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys took one of the first ever images of a planet around another star, a dot orbiting Fomalhaut, and it had become the foremost instrument on or near the Earth for investigating dark energy, the strange effect that is accelerating the expansion of the universe.

"Another instrument, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, or STIS, made the first identification of ingredients in the atmosphere of a planet around another star.

"If all goes well, in five spacewalks starting Thursday morning, the crew members will revamp and refresh the telescope, which has dazzled the public and the science community with its iconic cosmic postcards. Then they will say goodbye on behalf of humanity forever. Sometime in the middle of the next decade, the Hubble will run out of juice, and it will eventually be crashed into the ocean.

The mission to repair the Hubble took on a new meaning "last fall, when a router that controls all the telescope’s instruments and data failed, shutting Hubble down. Engineers on the ground resuscitated the router by activating a backup electrical channel on the telescope, but rather than send astronauts all the way to space in order to leave the telescope with no further backup should the other side of the router fail, NASA postponed the already long-delayed mission until a replacement router could be readied."

"The problematic router is scheduled to be replaced during the first spacewalk along with the Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2, which has been on the telescope since 1993 and is currently the only operating instrument on Hubble. In its place will be the new Wide-Field Camera 3.

"On the second day the astronauts will install the new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph in place of Hubble’s original corrective lenses, which are no longer needed. The spectrograph is designed to investigate an invisible “cosmic web” of dark matter and primordial gas that is thought to stretch like tendrils through space connecting galaxies and in which most of the atoms in the universe are thought to reside.

"More dicey and uncertain are the plans on the third and fourth days to attempt to repair the advanced camera and the imaging spectrograph, partly because these instruments were not designed to be opened in space and partly because the engineers, especially in the case of the camera, have had to do instrument forensics from 350 miles away and don’t know for sure what went wrong inside of them.

The payoff from successfully repairing the Hubble would be that the space telescope "would return as much data in the next six months as it did in the first eight years of its life."

The flight comes as NASA is once again at a crossroads. The agency lacks a permanent administrator; Christopher Scolese has been acting administrator since Michael D. Griffin stepped down in January, and the White House is said to have been having trouble finding a candidate who can pass various forms of muster.

"The agency has begun laying off workers as part of the decision to retire the shuttles next year. Last week, President Obama ordered a review of the agency’s long-heralded plan to return humans to the Moon and of the Constellation spacecraft that are to succeed the shuttle.

"So if it is the beginning of the last act for the Hubble, the flight Monday also marks the beginning of the end for the space shuttle, whose greatest legacy might very well be the role it played in the repair and maintenance of the Hubble, what Commander Altman recently called “an incredible example of how humans and machines can work together.”

Dr. Grunsfeld, who has earned the sobriquet of “Hubble repairman” for his previous exploits in space with the telescope, said: “The only reason Hubble works is because we have a space shuttle. And of all things we do, I think Hubble is probably the best thing we use it for.”

"If all goes completely to plan on Hubble Servicing Mission 4, the orbiting observatory will be reborn as the most productive telescope in history, with even greater powers to probe the Universe's deep history and help cosmologists make sense of one of their biggest problems - "dark energy".

"Hubble was also at the forefront of unveiling the existence of dark energy: the name coined for a mysterious and pervasive force which appears to be inflating the Universe at an ever increasing speed.

"Cosmologists had assumed that for most of the 14-odd billion years since the Big Bang, the Universe's expansion had been slowing down.

"In the mid-1990s Hubble - along with the ground-based Keck telescope in Hawaii - made the key measurements on distant exploding stars, supernovae, which showed otherwise.

"It was the most shocking cosmological revelation since the 1920s when astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the Universe was expanding.

"The mystery of dark energy may be a little clearer, if not solved, with the new camera the astronauts are going to install.

"This is the Wide Field Camera 3 - an instrument with the dimensions of a street telephone box.

"Like Hubble's existing, but currently dead, Advanced Camera for Surveys, the WFC-3 has a sensitive detector which can form images of very distant galaxies in the same wavelengths of light our eyes perceive.

"These objects are so faraway, their starlight started its journey across the cosmos just under 13 billion years ago. The camera catches them as they were at that early time - though only just. They are very faint.

"But the new Wide Field Camera will make its great advance by virtue of a second detector chip, sensitive to wavelengths of light in the infrared part of the spectrum.

"This will let astronomers use Hubble to see deeper with more detail. This is because visible light from stars that has travelled from very far away in the cosmos has been "stretched" en route as the Universe itself has expanded.

"Its wavelengths are widened - or "red-shifted" - in proportion to the distance it has crossed. So if a galaxy or supernova is well beyond 13 billion years away, all of its light reaches us as infra-red radiation.

"According to Steven Beckwith - professor of astronomy at University of California, Berkeley, and former director of the Space Telescope Science Institute - the new Wide Field Camera should help to characterise the nature of dark energy.

"Thanks to its infrared vision, it will be able to pick up large numbers of supernovae too distant and red-shifted for other instruments.

"Studies of the light from each exploding star will allow astronomers to get a better idea of how fast or slowly the Universe was expanding at different times in its early history. Plotting this is vital in the challenge of figuring out what dark energy is.

"Theorists have come up with many possibilities but none fit with our current understanding of physics.

Steven Beckwith said: "I think the new instrument will let us zero on those few ideas that could be right and get rid a lot of bad ideas. But I don't think it will tell us the answer."

"The problem of dark energy aside, the new Wide Field Camera will give us a deeper view into the early Universe in general: the epoch when the first galaxies and stars came into being.

"To date Hubble has seen back to 900 million years after the Big Bang. Steven Beckwith says that with WFC-3, the telescope's view will extend to 400 million years after creation.

"It is almost anyone's guess what astronomers will see, although theory would suggest the earliest mini-galaxies of stars should have formed by then.

"They would be untidy ill-formed blobs lacking the size and regular shapes of "modern day" galaxies like our own Milky Way.

"They would be populated by stars much more massive and burning more fiercely than our Sun.

"This is how astronomers picture the first galaxies and stars that formed out of dark gaseous debris created in the Big Bang.

"Exactly when that happened and starlight began to flood across the Universe is unknown. Steven Beckwith speculates that Hubble's new camera might pin-point the "Cosmic Dawn", if it broke more than half a billion years after the Big Bang.

The Hubble Space Telescope's imagery of a deep space field full of stars' galaxies and nebula.

"The other new instrument for Hubble is the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). COS is also the size of a phone booth.

"It does not make spectacular images but its kind of work is just as important for astronomers. Spectrographs make measurements of the motions, temperatures and chemical make-up of galaxies, stars and planets.

"What distinguishes COS is its great sensitivity to very faint objects and that it works at the ultraviolet end of the spectrum - a "flavour" of light radiation largely screened out by the Earth's atmosphere.

"COS team member Mike Shull at the University of Colorado, Boulder, describes the instrument as "a very fancy prism which takes the light from Hubble's mirror and spreads it out into its component colours."

"Every element whether it is helium, oxygen or carbon has a unique set of fingerprints that get imprinted on the light."

"The imprinting of particular wavelengths at tell-tale intensities reveals which chemical elements are present in distant planets, stars, galaxies or even the great expanses of space between galaxies.

"In the past 20 years, astronomers have found that galaxies are not uniformly distributed across the sky.

"Galaxies are concentrated along a filamentary network called the Cosmic Web. Between these vast films and fingers of galaxies are even more immense voids of very nearly empty darkness. But there is something in them - a vanishingly tenuous amount of gas."

Next Stop Star Trek: Obama Considers Combining Civilian and Military Space Programs

Demian McLean, writing at Bloomberg.com reports that "President-elect Barack Obama will probably tear down long-standing barriers between the U.S.’s civilian and military space programs to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect of a new space race with China. Obama’s transition team is considering a collaboration between the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration because military rockets may be cheaper and ready sooner than the space agency’s planned launch vehicle, which isn’t slated to fly until 2015, according to people who’ve discussed the idea with the Obama team." The considered charge comes with increased U.S. concerns over China's increasing military capabilities in space, witnessed by it's 2007 destruction of a satellite in orbit by a missile launched from China. In addition, the combining of civilian and military space capabilities could make the U.S. space program more efficient in terms of budgetary matters and in the creation and use of similar launch vehicles. "Obama has said the Pentagon’s space program -- which spent about $22 billion in fiscal year 2008, almost a third more than NASA’s budget -- could be tapped to speed the civilian agency toward its goals as the recession pressures federal spending." Such a move would end the development of the Ares I rocket and shift manned missions to the military's already existing Delta IV and Atlas V rockets. Another concern for the Americans is that as it stands now a new space race has taken shape between the Chinese and the Americans - and we are losing. China could land astronauts on the moon several years ahead of the U.S.

NASA's Troubled Path for Manned Missions to the Moon and Mars Faces Uncertain Future

JOHN SCHWARTZ reports in the New York Times that NASA's attempts "to replace the nation’s aging space shuttles" with a newly designed and never flown rocket system known as the Ares I rocket and the space craft known as the Orion is proving to be technically difficult, expensive and politically vexing. "The issues have become a focus of the members of the presidential transition team dealing with NASA, and the space program could undergo a transformation after Barack Obama takes office." Another significant problem regards the transition from the current space shuttle fleet to the new rocket and space capsule system. There is the definite possibility that there will be a five year long window between the retirement of the shuttle systems and the completion and launch of Ares I and Orion. During this estimated five year period, the United States will not have the ability to put humans into space. The U.S. would have to rely on other nations; Russia being most often mentioned, to get our astronauts to the International Space Station. This situation has caused a great deal of concern among many Americans and alternative means for U.S. controlled missions into space using current Atlas and Delta rockets are being hastily discussed. In addition: "Pressure has grown to keep the shuttles flying. In July, former Senator John Glenn of Ohio said in testimony before the House Science and Technology Committee that he favored flying the shuttles until the Constellation craft were ready to fly" explains Mr. Schwartz. Glenn also remarked at the hearing that: “I never thought I would see the day when the world’s richest, most powerful, most accomplished spacefaring nation would have to buy tickets from Russia to get up to our station,.." Mr. Schwartz further explains similar views expressed by the Obama team Assessing NASA: "Continuing shuttle flights has also been proposed by the New Democracy Project, a group with strong ties to John D. Podesta, a co-chairman of the Obama transition team.” The most pressing question asks; which path into space in the near term and over the long range of years will the United States decide upon?