Russian space junk almost destroys NASA telescope

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  NASA's $690 million Fermi space telescope was nearly hit by the dead Russian spy satellite Cosmos 1805 on April 3, 2013. This NASA graphic depicts the orbital paths of the two spacecraft.NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

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  Artist's illustration of NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.NASA

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  This NASA graphic depicts the amount of space junk currently orbiting Earth. The debris field is based on data from NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office. Image released on May 1, 2013.NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/JSC

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A high-tech NASA telescope in orbit escaped a potentially disastrous collision with a Soviet-era Russian spy satellite last year in a close call that highlights the growing threat of orbital debris around Earth.

NASA's $690 million Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope — which studies the most powerful explosions in the universe — narrowly avoided a direct hit with the defunct 1.5-ton Russian reconnaissance satellite Cosmos 1805 on April 3, 2012, space agency officials announced Tuesday, April 30. The potential space collision was avoided when engineers commanded Fermi to fire its thrusters in a critical dodging maneuver to move out of harm's way.

'My immediate reaction was, whoa, this is different from anything we've seen before!'

- NASA's Fermi project scientist Julie McEnery

NASA created a video of Fermi's near miss with space junk to illustrate how high the risk of a space collision really was. [Space Junk Photos & Cleanup Concepts]

Fermi mission scientists first learned of the space collision threat on March 29, 2012 when they received a notice that the space telescope and Cosmos 1805 would miss each other by just 700 feet. The mission team monitored the situation over the next day and it became clear that the two spacecraft, traveling in different orbits, would zip through the same point in space within 30 milliseconds of one another, NASA officials said.

"My immediate reaction was, 'Whoa, this is different from anything we've seen before!'" NASA's Fermi project scientist Julie McEnery said in a statement.

The Russian space junk was travelling at a speed of 27,000 miles per hour in relation to Fermi. If it had smashed into the space telescope the explosion of the two spacecraft would have released "as much energy as two and a half tons of explosives," NASA officials said

"It was clear we had to be ready to move Fermi out of the way, and that's when I alerted our Flight Dynamics Team that we were planning a maneuver," McEnery added.

After making those calculations, scientists started planning to fire Fermi's thrusters specifically designed to move the satellite out of the way if these situations arise.

"It's similar to forecasting rain at a specific time and place a week in advance," Eric Stoneking, the attitude control lead engineer for Fermi at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said of predicting these kinds of impacts in a statement. "As the date approaches, uncertainties in the prediction decrease and the initial picture may change dramatically."

The two spacecraft ultimately missed each other by 6 miles when they passed one another on April 3, 2012.

"The maneuver, which was performed by the spacecraft itself based on procedures we developed a long time ago, was very simple, just firing all thrusters for one second," Stoneking said. "There was a lot of suspense and tension leading up to it, but once it was over, we just sighed with relief that it all went well."

"A huge weight was lifted," McEnery said. "I felt like I'd lost 20 pounds."

Space junk has been a growing threat to satellites and manned spacecraft in orbit, and collisions do occur from time to time. Last month, the European Space Agency held its sixth conference dedicated to combating the space junk threat in Darmstadt, Germany.

In February 2009, another dead Russian satellite slammed into the U.S. communications satellite Iridium 33 in a space collision that spawned vast clouds of debris, one along each craft's orbit. In 2007, China intentionally destroyed a defunct weather satellite in an anti-satellite test.

NASA tracks 17,000 objects larger than 4 inches across in orbit above the Earth every day. Only 7 percent of the objects tracked are currently active satellites.

The Fermi telescope — launched in 2008 — searches the sky for signs of dark matter, black holes and spinning pulsars by seeking out sources of gamma-ray bursts, the brightest flashes of light in the universe since the Big Bang.

Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Russian officials contacted US twice in 2011 about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, sources say

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Russian officials contacted the U.S. government at least twice in 2011 with concerns Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Chechen who two years later would carry out last week's deadly bombing of the Boston Marathon, Fox News' sources say.

The latest details about what U.S. authorities knew about Tsarnaev ahead of the bombing come as lawmakers question whether enough was done to prevent the attack.

The Russians contacted the FBI once in March 2011, and several months later they contacted the CIA about Tsarnaev, sources say. In October 2011, the CIA sent info to many federal agencies and to "the watchlisting system" about him, the sources say. That step ultimately put him on the vast TIDE database of people potentially tied to terrorism cases.

The FBI has said previously that it was told Tsarnaev was a "follower of radical Islam" and was preparing to travel to this foreign country to join unspecified underground groups. The FBI said that it responded by interviewing Tsarnaev and family members, but found no terrorism activity.

Authorities suspect Tsarnaev, 26, and his younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, of using improvised explosives to kill and maim runners and spectators near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Three people were killed and more than 180 injured in the April 15 attack.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed days later in a shootout with police. His 19-year-old brother escaped but was captured alive Friday night and now faces a charge of use of a weapon of mass destruction that could carry the death penalty.

The brothers immigrated to the United States about a decade ago with their family. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev became a U.S. citizen last year, but Tamerlan had not yet earned citizenship.

Senators, after being briefed on the case Tuesday, said the U.S. government had "multiple contacts" with Russia about the older Boston bombing suspect, but those lawmakers wouldn't offer any more details.

Fox News was told the FBI tried to determine if Tsarnaev had any ties to terrorism, but those efforts apparently proved inconclusive.

"We did everything we could," one FBI source said, and their assessment was based on the "totality of the evidence."

The FBI insists, despite suggestions to the contrary, that it was contacted only once by the Russians about Tsarnaev.

Lawmakers and investigators are taking a close look at Tsarnaev's trip to Russia in January 2012. His father says his son stayed with him in Dagestan.

Despite violence there, Anzor Tsarnaev said Sunday that his son did not want to leave and had thoughts on how he could go into business. But the father said he encouraged him to go back to the U.S. and try to get citizenship. Tamerlan Tsarnaev returned to the U.S. in July.

His mother said that he was questioned upon arrival at the airport in New York.

"And he told me on the phone, 'Imagine, mama, they were asking me such interesting questions as if I were some strange and scary man: Where did you go? What did you do there?'" Zubeidat Tsarnaeva recalled her son telling her at the time.

Fox News' Mike Levine and Catherine Herridge and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

View the original article here

Russian spaceship docks with orbiting International Space Station

Published March 28, 2013

Associated Press

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  The Soyuz-FG rocket booster with a Soyuz TMA-04M spaceship carrying a new crew to the International Space Station, ISS, blasts off from the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, Tuesday, May 15, 2012. The Russian rocket is carrying U.S. astronaut Joseph Acaba along with Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin. (AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel)AP2012

A Soyuz capsule carrying three astronauts has successfully docked with the International Space Station, bringing the size of the crew at the orbiting lab to six.

Chris Cassidy of the United States and Russians Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin traveled six hours in the capsule before linking up with the space station's Russian Rassvet research module. It was the first time a space crew has taken such a direct route.

The incoming crew will spend five months in space before returning to Earth.

Their mission began with a late-night launch from the Russian-leased Baikonur launch pad in Kazakhstan.

View the original article here

Russian meteorite 1,000 times bigger than originally thought

It turns out the meteor that landed in Russia last week was a bit bigger than the 10 tons first reported. About 1,000 times bigger.

When a hunk of rock raced out of the morning skies over Russia on Friday and exploded with nearly 500 kilotons of energy, early size estimates from the Russian Academy of Sciences that were carried by the Associated Press, Reuters and other news wires pegged it on the small size, with a weight of about 10 tons.

Oops.

'This event was so much bigger than anything we've seen on video that it doesn't surprise me the guess was off by three orders of magnitude.'

- Margaret Campbell-Brown, physics professor at the University of Western Ontario

Later in the evening, after studying infrasound data from stations around the world, NASA released a new estimate revising that first guess upward by a thousand-fold: The meteorite actually weighed closer to 10,000 tons, scientists said.

“My guess is that someone eyeballed the videos and made an educated guess,” said Margaret Campbell-Brown, associate professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Western Ontario. “This event was so much bigger than anything we've seen on video that it doesn't surprise me the guess was off by three orders of magnitude.”

That poor estimate underscores the daunting task scientists face today: While NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program currently tracks about 10,000 objects through the heavens, there are far, far more smaller objects that are simply too tiny to track.

“If you think about objects the size of the one that came into Russia, you’re probably looking at 100 million up there. Of those likely to intersect Earth, there’s less, maybe 100,000,” said K.T. Ramesh, director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute and a professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins. “Space is pretty big.”

And the size of those smaller objects -- whether they’re 10 tons or 10,000 tons -- makes them impossible to track with current technology, he said.

“In general, we're pretty good at seeing things that are 1 kilometer and up in diameter, and have trouble seeing things that are less than 100 meters in diameter. The big problem is knowing where they are -- once you know where to look, you can find even the smaller objects,” he said.

For comparison, NASA currently believes the Russian meteorite was about 49 feet in diameter, or 15 meters. (Asteroid 2012 DA14, which NASA tracked on its flight near our planet on Friday, was approximately 150 feet in diameter, or 45 meters.)

“A good analogy is finding a few pennies scattered over an acre of dirt. If you know where to look, you have no trouble seeing them. But if you just look over the whole field, your chance of finding a penny is pretty small,” Ramesh told FoxNews.com.

Without sensors aimed directly at the incoming meteor, initial data was scarce. As other bits of data came in, scientists were able to hone their estimates of the size of the meteor, explained Edwin Bergin with the University of Michigan’s Department of Astronomy.

“Reports say that the network used to detect and infer nuclear explosions led to the revision,” he told FoxNews.com. “I think it just is better information that took time to filter out.”

View the original article here

Russian meteorite 1,000 times bigger than originally thought

It turns out the meteor that landed in Russia last week was a bit bigger than the 10 tons first reported. About 1,000 times bigger.

When a hunk of rock raced out of the morning skies over Russia on Friday and exploded with nearly 500 kilotons of energy, early size estimates from the Russian Academy of Sciences that were carried by the Associated Press, Reuters and other news wires pegged it on the small size, with a weight of about 10 tons.

Oops.

'This event was so much bigger than anything we've seen on video that it doesn't surprise me the guess was off by three orders of magnitude.'

- Margaret Campbell-Brown, physics professor at the University of Western Ontario

Later in the evening, after studying infrasound data from stations around the world, NASA released a new estimate revising that first guess upward by a thousand-fold: The meteorite actually weighed closer to 10,000 tons, scientists said.

“My guess is that someone eyeballed the videos and made an educated guess,” said Margaret Campbell-Brown, associate professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Western Ontario. “This event was so much bigger than anything we've seen on video that it doesn't surprise me the guess was off by three orders of magnitude.”

That poor estimate underscores the daunting task scientists face today: While NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program currently tracks about 10,000 objects through the heavens, there are far, far more smaller objects that are simply too tiny to track.

“If you think about objects the size of the one that came into Russia, you’re probably looking at 100 million up there. Of those likely to intersect Earth, there’s less, maybe 100,000,” said K.T. Ramesh, director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute and a professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins. “Space is pretty big.”

And the size of those smaller objects -- whether they’re 10 tons or 10,000 tons -- makes them impossible to track with current technology, he said.

“In general, we're pretty good at seeing things that are 1 kilometer and up in diameter, and have trouble seeing things that are less than 100 meters in diameter. The big problem is knowing where they are -- once you know where to look, you can find even the smaller objects,” he said.

For comparison, NASA currently believes the Russian meteorite was about 49 feet in diameter, or 15 meters. (Asteroid 2012 DA14, which NASA tracked on its flight near our planet on Friday, was approximately 150 feet in diameter, or 45 meters.)

“A good analogy is finding a few pennies scattered over an acre of dirt. If you know where to look, you have no trouble seeing them. But if you just look over the whole field, your chance of finding a penny is pretty small,” Ramesh told FoxNews.com.

Without sensors aimed directly at the incoming meteor, initial data was scarce. As other bits of data came in, scientists were able to hone their estimates of the size of the meteor, explained Edwin Bergin with the University of Michigan’s Department of Astronomy.

“Reports say that the network used to detect and infer nuclear explosions led to the revision,” he told FoxNews.com. “I think it just is better information that took time to filter out.”

View the original article here