ID :
40054
Sun, 01/11/2009 - 16:33
Auther :

NASA partners India on moon mission

Seema Hakhu Kachru

Houston, Jan 11 (PTI) American space agency NASA,
partnered India in its first lunar mission 'Chandrayaan' in
2008, a venture that is contributing to the agency's increased
understanding of the lunar environment.

The partnership came in the golden anniversary year of
NASA, even as financial crunch cast a shadow over its mission
of space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics
research.

NASA partnered with India to fly two instruments aboard
the country's first lunar explorer, Chandrayaan-1, which was
successfully launched by the ISRO on October 22 and entered
the lunar orbit on November 8.

In the 'Moon Mineralogy Mapper', NASA planted aboard the
Indian mission an instrument that surveys mineral resources of
the moon, while the 'Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar' is
mapping the moon's polar regions and looking for ice deposits
in the permanently shadowed craters.

Data from the two instruments is contributing to NASA's
increased understanding of the lunar environment as the agency
implements the nation's space exploration policy, which calls
for robotic and human missions to the moon.

Besides taking part in the lunar science mission with
India, NASA during 2008 landed on Mars, photographed distant
worlds, added to the International Space Station and made
major progress towards returning astronauts to the moon.

Meanwhile on Earth, NASA researchers recorded the
continued decline of Arctic sea ice, won awards for aviation
breakthroughs, discovered the cause of storms that brighten
the Northern Lights and helped create state-of-the-art
swimsuits worn by Olympic gold medallists.

The year also marked the 10th anniversary of the
International Space Station (ISS), the first piece of which --
Russian-built FGB also called Zarya -- was lifted off from
Earth on November 20, 1998.

NASA made four trips to the ISS in 2008 to build out the
station with new modules and hardware, increasing its size,
volume, and scientific research capabilities, and famously
delivering a new water recycling system.

The mass of the station, which contains 19 research
facilities, now stands at more than 313 tons, with an interior
volume of more than 25,000 cubic feet, comparable, NASA says,
to the size of a five-bedroom house.

NASA's Mars mission, the 'Phoenix Mars Lander' also
ceased communications on November 2 after successfully
returning unprecedented science data to Earth for over a year.

The Phoenix, which touched down on Mars on May 25, 2008,
at a site farther north than where any previous spacecraft had
landed, was the first such explorer in 32 years and the third
in history.

Phoenix, which exceeded its planned operational life from
three to five months, discovered small concentrations of salts
that could be nutrients for life, besides locating calcium
carbonate and perchlorate salt. The findings also advanced the
goal of documenting the history of water on Mars.

The year also saw NASA successfully completing the
preliminary design review for the new Ares I rocket. Starting
in 2015, the rocket will launch the Orion crew exploration
vehicle, its crew of four to six astronauts, and small
payloads to the International Space Station and will also be
used as part of missions to explore the moon.

NASA is preparing for the first test flight in 2009 of
the rocket, the preliminary design review of which is the
first such milestone in more than 35 years.

Beyond the solar system, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope
took the first visible-light snapshot of a planet circling
another star 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis
Australis, or the "Southern Fish."

Observations taken 21 months apart by the coronagraph on
Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys showed the object
orbiting around a star named Fomalhaut.

Despite 2008 being an eventful year, US space flight is
at a turning point and its future is looking a bit shaky, with
the possibility of that the next president could drastically
redefine the plan for NASA.

US President-elect Barack Obama's transition team is
demanding deep cuts from the agency, and is planning to scrap
the ARES program, the successor to the space shuttle,
prompting it to investigate whether old military rockets such
as the Delta IV and Atlas V could be used in place of Ares.

For nearly two decades, NASA and its projects have made a
"high-risk" list compiled by government auditors because of
cost overruns totaling billions of dollars.

The designation applies to programs that are "impeding
effective government and costing the government billions of
dollars each year," according to the Government Accountability
Office, a federal watchdog agency.

The cost overruns, experts say, have cost the agency's
science program about USD 5 billion over five years.

NASA says that part of the problem is the cutting-edge
nature of what it does. "We start these things out, and we
admit up front we don't completely know how to do them. That
is what makes them interesting," NASA Director Michael Griffin
said recently.

Agency officials said they had improved financial
controls -- including forcing managers to better estimate
costs. But the problem is so bad that the Congressional Budget
Office estimated that NASA's new moon rocket would go over
budget by as much as USD 7 billion.

On the campaign trail, Obama pledged to increase NASA's
USD 17-billion budget by USD 2 billion. But that was before
the economic meltdown.

With the budget deficit ballooning, a new administration
might be reluctant to give more money to an agency with a
history of managing it poorly.

Griffin and NASA didn't help their case when the agency
announced this month that its Mars rover mission would be
delayed two years and cost an additional USD 400 million.

"If we are to judge the worth of our work by our ability
to estimate, then that is a standard I am not ready to apply
or to accept," Griffin said. "We are always going to be on
(GAO's) high-risk list," he said.

Meanwhile, a report released by the Space, Policy and
Society Research Group at MIT, based on a two-year independent
review, offers recommendations for the future of human space
flight program.

"Our major recommendation is that the Obama
administration should rethink the Bush plan," said MIT
technology historian David Mindell, who led the review.

NASA's current plan, outlined by President Bush in 2004
under his "Vision for Space Exploration", is to get humans
back to the moon, then on to Mars with Constellation program,
and to complete the ISS and retire the space shuttle by 2010.

These goals are unattainable with NASA's current budget,
the review team concluded. They also recommended more
international collaboration, especially with nations such as
China and India. PTI SHK
RKM
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