Carrying Humans Into Deep Space: NASA Announces Key Decision for Next Deep Space Transportation System

NASA has reached an important milestone for the next U.S. transportation system that will carry humans into deep space. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden announced May 25, 2011 that the system will be based on designs originally planned for the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle. Those plans now will be used to develop a new spacecraft known as the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV).

"We are committed to human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit and look forward to developing the next generation of systems to take us there," Bolden said. "The NASA Authorization Act lays out a clear path forward for us by handing off transportation to the International Space Station to our private sector partners, so we can focus on deep space exploration. As we aggressively continue our work on a heavy lift launch vehicle, we are moving forward with an existing contract to keep development of our new crew vehicle on track."

Lockheed Martin Corp. will continue working to develop the MPCV. The spacecraft will carry four astronauts for 21-day missions and be able to land in the Pacific Ocean off the California coast. The spacecraft will have a pressurized volume of 690 cubic feet, with 316 cubic feet of habitable space. It is designed to be 10 times safer during ascent and entry than its predecessor, the space shuttle.

"This selection does not indicate a business as usual mentality for NASA programs," said Douglas Cooke, associate administrator for the agency's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate in Washington. "The Orion government and industry team has shown exceptional creativity in finding ways to keep costs down through management techniques, technical solutions and innovation."

Kepler's Astounding Haul of Multiple-Planet Systems

NASA's Kepler spacecraft is proving itself to be a prolific planet hunter. Within just the first four months of data, astronomers have found evidence for more than 1,200 planetary candidates. Of those, 408 reside in systems containing two or more planets, and most of those look very different than our solar system.

In particular, the Kepler systems with multiple planets are much flatter than our solar system. They have to be for Kepler to spot them. Kepler watches for a planet to cross in front of its star, blocking a tiny fraction of the star's light. By measuring how much the star dims during such a transit, astronomers can calculate the planet's size, and by observing the time between successive events they can derive the orbital period -- how long it takes the planet to revolve around its star.

To see a transit, the planet's orbit must be edge-on to our line of sight. To see multiple transiting planets, they all must be edge-on (or nearly so).

"We didn't anticipate that we would find so many multiple-transit systems. We thought we might see two or three. Instead, we found more than 100," said Smithsonian astronomer David Latham (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics).

Latham presented the findings May 24 in a press conference at the 218th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

In our solar system, some planet orbits are tilted by up to 7 degrees, meaning that an alien astronomer looking for transits wouldn't be able to detect all eight planets. (In particular, they would miss Mercury and Venus.) The systems spotted by Kepler are much flatter, with orbits tilted less than 1 degree.

Why are they so flat? One clue comes from the planets themselves. The multiplanet systems found by Kepler are dominated by planets smaller than Neptune. They lack Jupiter-sized gas giants. Scientists believe that a gas giant's powerful gravity tends to disrupt planetary systems, tilting the orbits of neighboring worlds.

"Jupiters are the 800-pound gorillas stirring things up during the early history of these systems," explained Latham. "Other studies have found plenty of systems with big planets, but they're not flat."

Multiple-planet systems may offer a chance for confirming the densities of small, rocky worlds. The more massive a planet, the easier it is to detect using radial velocity measurements (essentially the star's wobble as a planet's gravity tugs it). Earth-sized worlds in Earth-sized orbits aren't massive enough to make a radial velocity signal that's detectable with present technology.

In systems with more than one transiting planet, astronomers have another option: transit timing variations. They can measure how the time between successive transits changes from orbit to orbit due to mutual gravitational interactions between the planets. The size of the effect depends on the planets' masses.

"These planets are pulling and pushing on each other, and we can measure that," said Smithsonian astronomer Matthew Holman. "Dozens of the systems Kepler found show signs of transit timing variations."

As Kepler continues to gather data, it will be able to spot planets with wider orbits, including some in the habitable zones of their stars. Transit timing variations may play a key role in confirming the first rocky planets with the right temperature for water to be liquid on their surfaces.

NASA Ames Research Center is responsible for the ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed the Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight system, and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes the Kepler science data.

Johannes Kepler

Johannes Kepler was born on December 27, 1571, a premature child. To be precise, according to his own records, the pregnancy lasted 224 days, 9 hours and 53 minutes. (This rather odd piece of information, and the quotes from Kepler's horoscopes for his family given below, I found in Koestler's book, reference 1.) It should be clear from this obsession with the precise time of birth and conception that Kepler took astrology fairly seriously. He was born in Weil, in Swabia, a wine region in southwest Germany not far from France. Unfortunately, the family he was born into makes Tycho's early life look tranquil by comparison. Kepler's grandfather was Mayor of Weil, Kepler describes his grandmother as "restless, clever and lying, but devoted to religion; slim and of a fiery nature; vivacious, an inveterate troublemaker; jealous, extreme in her hatreds, violent, a bearer of grudges...and all her children have something of this". His father he describes as "...a man vicious, inflexible, quarrelsome and doomed to a bad end. Venus and Mars increase his malice. Saturn in VII made him study gunnery..." Kepler's mother he describes in the family horoscope as "small, thin, swarthy, gossiping and quarrelsome, of a bad disposition". His mother collected herbs and made potions which she believed had magical powers. She was raised by an aunt who was burned at the stake as a witch, and Kepler's mother narrowly escaped a similar fate herself (see ref 2, page 159: Kepler had to hire several lawyers to defend his seventy-year-old mother incarcerated on a charge of witchcraft, and "Another woman born in the same town as Kepler's mother, and accused of complicity with her, had already left one of her thumbs stuck in the rack".)

As a seven-month child, Kepler was sickly from birth, and contracted smallpox when very young. His vision was severely defective, and he had various other illnesses fairly constantly, some of which may have been hypochondria. He took twice as long as normal children to get through elementary latin. He did a little better when he got to the higher school at Maulbronn, a school which only half a century earlier was haunted by the ill-famed Dr. Faustus (ref 2).

Kepler went to the University of Tuebingen, a Protestant institution, where he studied mainly theology and philosophy, but also mathematics and astronomy. (The Dukes of Wuerttemberg, after becoming Lutheran, put in place an efficient educational system, with grants and scholarships for the poor, to ensure the universities could supply well educated clergymen capable of defending the new faith in the religious controversies raging at the time.) At the university, Kepler's exceptional intellectual abilities became apparent. He greatly admired the astronomy professor Maestlin, who publicly taught the Ptolemaic scheme, but privately believed Copernicus. Kepler himself defended Copernicus' scheme in a public debate. Unfortunately for him, that ensured that he would not be offered a faculty position at Tuebingen when he graduated. (Luther himself had mocked at Copernicus' scheme, and quoted scripture to prove it wrong.) Instead, Kepler was offered a professorship of astronomy in faraway Graz, Styria (now part of Austria), where he went in 1594. One of the duties of this professorship was to make astrological predictions. Despite his earlier efforts at horoscopes, he wrote "a mind accustomed to mathematical deduction, when confronted with the faulty foundations (of astrology) resists a long, long time, like an obstinate mule, until compelled by beating and curses to put its foot into that dirty puddle" (ref 1, page 245). Nevertheless, he predicted a cold winter, and an invasion by the Turks. Both predictions turned out to be correct. He was treated with a new respect, and his salary was increased.

Niels Bohr

Name : Niels Henrik David Bohr
Nationality : Danish
Birth of Date: 07/10/1885
Death : 18/11/1962
1922 Nobel Prize For Physics : For his services in the investigation of the structure atoms and of the radiation emanating from them.

Early years :  Bohr was born in Copenhagen , Denmark . He received a doctorate from Copenhagen University in 1911.
  His father, Christian Bohr, was professor of physiology at the University of Copenhagen (it is his name which is given to the Bohr shift or Bohr effect), while his mother, Ellen Adler Bohr, came from a wealthy Jewish family prominent in Danish banking and parliamentary circles. His brother was Harald Bohr, a mathematician and Olympic footballer who played on the Danish national team. Niels Bohr was a passionate footballer as well, and the two brothers played a number of matches for the Copenhagen-based Akademisk Boldklub, with Niels in goal. There is, however, no truth in the oft-repeated claim that Niels Bohr emulated his brother Harald by playing for the Danish national team.

In 1903 Bohr enrolled as an undergraduate at Copenhagen University, initially studying philosophy and mathematics. In 1905, prompted by a gold medal competition sponsored by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, he conducted a series of experiments to examine the properties of surface tension, using his father's laboratory in the university, familiar to him from assisting there since childhood. His essay won the prize, and it was this success that decided Bohr to abandon philosophy and adopt physics.[3] As a student under Christian Christiansen he received his doctorate in 1911. As a post-doctoral student, Bohr first conducted experiments under J. J. Thomson at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1912 he joined Ernest Rutherford at Manchester University and he adapted Rutherford's nuclear structure to Max Planck's quantum theory and so obtained a theory of atomic structure which, with later improvements, mainly as a result of Heisenberg's concepts, remains valid to this day. On the basis of Rutherford's theories, Bohr published his model of atomic structure in 1913, introducing the theory of electrons traveling in orbits around the atom's nucleus, the chemical properties of the element being largely determined by the number of electrons in the outer orbits. Bohr introduced the idea that an electron could drop from a higher-energy orbit to a lower one, emitting a photon (light quantum) of discrete energy. This became a basis for quantum theory. After four productive years with Ernest Rutherford in Manchester, Bohr returned to Denmark becoming in 1918 director of the newly created Institute of Theoretical Physics.

Bohr and his wife Margrethe Nørlund Bohr had six sons. Their oldest died in a tragic boating accident and another died from childhood meningitis. The others went on to lead successful lives, including Aage Bohr, who became a very successful physicist and, like his father, won a Nobel Prize in physics, in 1975.
 

Scientist Ranking

1. Issac Newton
2. Albert Einstein 
3. Neils Bohr
4. Charles Darwin
5. Louis Pasteur
6. Sigmund Freud
7. Galileo Galilei
8. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
9. Johannes Kepler
10. Nicolaus Copernicus 
11. Michael Faraday
12. James Clark Maxwell
13. Claude Bernard
14. Franz Boas
15. Werner Heisenberg
16. Linus Pauling
17. Rudolf Virchow
18. Erwin Schrodinger
19. Earnest Rutherford
20. Paul Dirac
21. Andreas Vesalius
22. Tycho Brahe
23. Comte de Buffon
24. Ludwig Boltzman
25. Max Planck
26. Marie Curie
27. William Herschel
28. Charles Lyell
29. Pierre Simon de Laplace
30. Edwin Hubble
31. Joseph J. Thomson
32. Max Born
33. Francis Crick
34. Enrico Fermi
35. Leonard Euler
36. Justus Liebig
37. Arthur Eddington
38. William Harvey
39. Marcello Malpighi
40. Christiaan Huygens
41. Carl Gauss
42. Albrecht von Haller
43. August Kekule
44. Robert Koch
45. Murray Gell-Mann
46.  Emil Fischer
47. Demitri Mendeleev
48. Sheldon Glashow
49. James Watson
50. John Bardeen
51. John von Neumann
52. Richard Feynman
53. Alfred Wegener
54.  Stephen Hawking
55. Anton van Leeuwenhoek
56. Max von Laue
57. Gustav Kichoff
58. Hans Bethe
59. Euclid
60. Gregor Mendel
61. Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
62. Thomas Hunt Morgan
63. Harmann von Helmholtz
64. Paul Ehrlich 
65. Ernst Mayr
66. Charles Shernington
67. Theodosius Dobzhansky
68.  Max Delbruck
69. Jean Baptiste Lamarck
70. William Bayliss
71. Noam Chomsky
72. Frederick Sanger
73. Lucretius
74. John Dalton
75. Louis Victor de Broglie
76. Carl Linnaeus
77. Jean Piaget
78. George Gaylord Simpson
79. Claude Levi-Strauss
80. Lynn Margulis
81. Karl Landsteiner
82. Konrad Lorenz
83. Edward O. Wilson
84. Frederick Gowland Hopkins
85. Gertrude Belle Elion
86. Hans Selye
87. J. Robert Oppenheimer
88. Edward Teller
89. Willard Libby
90. Ernst Haeckel
91. Jonas Salk
92.  Emil Kraepelin
93. Trofim Lysenko
94. Francis Galton
95. Alfred  Binet
96. Alfred Kinsey
97. Alexander Fleming
98. B.F.Skinner
99. Wilhelm Wundt
100. Archimedes 
101.