The testing of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and many other similar projects in various states of development means that we are about to enter an era of commercial spaceflight.

This will bring about huge changes in the aerospace industry, which has prompted the European Space Agency (ESA) to look at how it should respond to this new environment. Being only able to help and fund commercial suborbital spaceplane projects in Europe, ESA has proposed the construction of a generic European “Cryogenic Sub-orbital Spacecraft”.

ESA looked at three different reusable spaceplane concepts that could use the Vinci rocket engine that is currently being developed as an upper stage rocket for their Ariane launch vehicle. The first had a conventional tail assembly and wings, the second had a forward canard, wings and butterfly tail assembly, and the third had a canard and winglets.

The ESA report favoured the second vehicle concept, as the design allows it to carry payloads on its back that can be launched into low Earth orbit. It would have a total weight of 13,920 kilograms (30,625 pounds) at takeoff, and would operate from an airstrip like a conventional aircraft. Using a fuel load of 7,515 kilograms (16,534 pounds), it would blast the craft to a maximum speed of 4,176 kilometres (2,595 mph).

The Vinci engine, which is capable of being fired up to 5 times on each mission, takes the two crew and six passengers to a height of 107.65 kilometres (66.8 miles) where several minutes of weightlessness can be experienced before the craft glides back down to Earth.

This vision of a potential Vinci spaceplane would use the technology currently being developed by ESA, and it would be able to use ESA’s expertise in astronaut training and space medicine. ESA is also able to help the flow and exchange of information between interested parties and to help meet the demands of European Aviation Safety Agency certification and other European legal requirements.

The Vinci spaceplane would certainly be able to send a variety of payloads into orbit at a lower cost per launch than conventional rockets, and could be equal to the commercial suborbital spaceplanes being developed in the United States. Whether any European companies are willing or able to take up the technological and economic challenges that need to be surmounted, before the Vinci spaceplane can take flight, is something only time will tell.

FutureTech

Forget the Shuttle – the ESA’s Vinci spaceplane is the future of space travel

Our exclusive illustration gives you the world’s first opportunity to see what this new concept vehicle from the ESA could look like.

This stunning image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, shows the individual galaxies UGC 1810 (right) and UGC 1813 (left) in the process of colliding. Together, this pair of interacting galaxies is known as Arp 273. The interaction of galaxies is thought to be relatively common in the universe, particularly within galactic clusters, but the opportunity to directly observe one such as this is rare.

The two galaxies, with their nuclei separated by 100,000 light years, are located 300 million light years from Earth in the Andromeda constellation. A collision is actually thought to have already occurred, with UGC 1813 passing through the five times more massive UGC 1810. As a result, the smaller galaxy is now showing signs of intense star formation at its nucleus. It is possible, though, that they will collide again due to their gravitational attraction.

Most galactic collisions result in the merging of the two galaxies’ cores, but it’s unknown if that will happen in this case. What can be seen is a ‘bridge’ of sorts between the two where their spirals have been pulled apart by the other. It is thought that the interaction of Arp 273 may bear similarities to the eventual fate of our own galaxy when we collide with Andromeda in 4.5 billion years.

Image courtesy of NASA/ESA/HHT

Deep Space

This is what two colliding galaxies look like

These two interacting galaxies are providing us with a rare opportunity to observe a galactic collision.

This is not some crazy idea or ridiculous flight of fancy; inflatable spacecraft have already been tried and tested, and it will not be long until the International Space Station is joined by these rather more expandable brothers and sisters in Earth orbit.

Bigelow Aerospace flew two unmanned inflatable spacecraft, Genesis I and II, in 2006 and 2007 respectively to test this technology. They are precursors to Bigelow Aerospace’s next venture, the BA 330 (above).

In 2015, Bigelow Aerospace will dock an inflatable module with the ISS to further test the concept, with a fully-fledged inflatable space station due by the end of the decade.

For more on inflatable space stations, check out issue 8 of All About Space magazine.

You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @Astro_Jonny

FutureTech

Inside Bigelow Aerospace’s inflatable space station

Take a tour of the expandable habitat that could soon be a destination for astronauts in Earth orbit.

As the seasons change, so does the night sky and as you gain a familiarity with the stars and planets you will notice new constellations and astronomical objects belonging to our Solar System, as well as our immediate portion of the Universe, creep into view from winter through to autumn.

Stepping outdoors into a clear night armed with layers of warm clothing and a hot drink, as well as an optional deck chair (to avoid a sore neck in the morning from looking up!), you have all you really need to learn your way around the night sky for your very first evening’s session; you might not realise it, but your eyes alone are a wonderful device when it comes to taking in what nature has to offer. Take a look at the illustration above to get to grips with the celestial sphere so you can perfect your observation techniques.

Tomorrow: How to use a sky chart

Astronomy

Stargazing LIVE Astronomy Week Part Three: Understand the Celestial Sphere

What is this imaginary sphere that surrounds the Earth?

The following is an excerpt from our article ‘Juno: The journey to Jupiter’. To read the full article check out issue 7 of All About Space, on sale now.

Mission dates: August 2011 – October 2017

Stargazers have pondered Jupiter for millennia – as the third brightest object in the sky, it demands attention. When Galileo pointed his telescope that way, 400 years ago, he was greeted by colourful clouds and orbiting moons, intensifying the fascination. But even after all these years scrutinising with increasingly powerful telescopes and spacecraft, we still haven’t unlocked all its mysteries, because the outer cloud cover has hidden its interior working from view. Now Juno is on its way, armed with an array of instruments to peek behind the curtain.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft will reach Jupiter in 2016. While there it will study Jupiter’s clouds, analyse the atmosphere, measure its gravitational field and much more. After 33 orbits it will purposefully be de-orbited to burn up in Jupiter’s atmosphere in October 2017.

Space Exploration

NASA’s next mission to Jupiter

Find out how the Juno spacecraft will unlock the secrets of Jupiter, the biggest planet in the Solar System, when it arrives in 2016.

Surrounding the Earth are hundreds of mineral-rich rocks, or asteroids, containing what might be billions or even trillions of dollars worth of resources, including metal and water. The possibility of tapping into these unclaimed goldmines has been a long-held and seemingly unobtainable dream, but it might be one that is now moving closer to reality.

Consider the stats, and you’ll start to realise why mining asteroids could be so important for the future of the human race. Just one near-Earth asteroid several kilometres in size could contain more precious metal than has ever been used by humanity, and enough water to power fleets of rockets.

The problem, as is ever the case with new space exploration proposals, is money. Who’s going to stump up the cash to mount an expedition to an asteroid that, for one, could fail, and two, would require huge infrastructure to even be considered a moderate success? The answer could be in the form of private enterprises with an eye for adventure and discovery rather than a significant return in investment.

One company that made headlines earlier this year to do just that was Planetary Resources. A conglomeration of entrepreneurs and technicians including co-founder Peter Diamandis and film director James Cameron, this ambitious venture will be the first to aim to mine asteroids and return their valuable resources to Earth or use them in space.

To read the rest of this article, check out issue 6 of All About Space magazine, on sale now.

Illustration by Adrian Mann

FutureTech

Could mining asteroids open up the Solar System’s resources to humanity?

How could we extract valuable resources from floating space rocks near Earth?

Solar System

Take a look inside an asteroid

What are these floating space rocks made of?

Note: Each marker is immediately below the referenced point of interest so as not to obscure it from view.

The Moon has accompanied our planet in its orbit for billions of years. Spared from atmospheric erosion, its surface charts a pristine geological (or rather ‘selenological’) record of Solar System history, from massive scale volcanism to catastrophic, seemingly apocalyptic bombardment from space.

The rugged surface catches the light of the Sun, and casts dynamic and intricate shadow patterns throughout the Lunar Month, about 29.5 days. If we look at the Moon from one night to the next, we can see its various craters, mountains and plains illuminated from different angles, giving us a tremendous sense of 3D during the mornings and evenings local to those features.

Scanning along the Moon’s terminator – the line where day meets night – is arguably the best way to get familiar with this fascinating landscape, but you’ll need a telescope for best results. Even a small telescope will produce awe-inspiring images.

Image courtesy of NASA

Astronomy

10 great sights to see on the Moon

Earth’s nearest neighbour has always captivated our imagination. Why not take a telescopic tour?

Join the people already enjoying offers and exclusive content from All About Space. Guaranteed no Spam.

The Quicklaunch project, above, plans to put into reality Verne’s 19th Century dream of using a cannon to launch space vehicles, though in this case it will be used to send cargo into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) rather than humans to the Moon.

The cannon, known as the Quicklauncher, will be submerged 183 metres (600 feet) under water. The initial scheme is to build a 400-metre (1,300-foot) long QL-100 launcher to carry payloads of 45 kilograms (100 pounds) into LEO. To benefit from the slingshot effect of the Earth’s rotation, it would be located near the equator. It would cost $50 million (£32 million) to build and be capable of launching ten vehicles a day.

To find out more check out issue 4 of All About Space, on sale now.

Image credit: Adrian Mann

FutureTech

How a giant underwater cannon could fire us into space

Jules Verne imagined using a cannon to send humans to the Moon. Now one could be built to send cargo into Earth orbit.

The heart of a black hole is its singularity, a single point in space containing all the matter that originally formed the black hole, as well as anything that fell in after it formed. Like a star, the black hole has mass equal to the combined mass of all this material, but it has nearly no size in the sense of volume. In other words, it would be impossible to measure the diameter of a black hole. Instead, the mass is compressed into an infinitely dense point. At this point, the normal laws of physics we know and love don’t apply.

As you get closer to this point, the pull of gravity increases, in the same way the Sun’s gravitational pull increases as you approach it. As the pull of gravity increases, the necessary speed of movement to counteract it, called the escape velocity, increases too. At a certain proximity to the singularity, the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light (300,000 kilometres per second/186,000 miles per second), the maximum speed anything can travel. In other words, beyond this point, called the event horizon, it’s absolutely impossible to escape being swallowed into the singularity. The distance between the event horizon and the singularity, named the ‘Schwarzschild radius’, depends on the mass of the black hole. The more massive the singularity is, the further out its event horizon is.

When a black hole is active, it’s surrounded by an accretion disk. As gases and other matter orbiting the black hole get closer to the event horizon, the intense gravitational pull of the black hole accelerates them, generating intense friction. The friction heats the gases, causing them to release electromagnetic energy, such as X-rays or visible light.

Along with accretion disks, scientists have observed bright jets propelling matter away from black holes. The leading explanation for these powerful jets is that the rotational movement of the accretion disk generates a strong magnetic field. This magnetic field, in turn, carries matter away from the accretion disk at the speed of light. This steady syphoning of matter reduces the angular momentum of the matter in the accretion disk, causing it to fall into the black hole.

Deep Space

What’s inside a black hole?

Take a journey with us into the phenomenon that bends space and time.

Getting into space is no easy feat. At the moment we use huge tanks of propellant powered by giant explosions at their base, which are better known as rockets, but these are both dangerous and very expensive.

That’s why various agencies have spent years looking for other ways to reach space. Previously we’ve looked at space planes, but this time we’re focusing on a more ambitious way to have a constant connection to space.

The idea of a space elevator was first inspired by Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1895. In principle it sounds simple – have a tether extend from the surface of Earth to space and just travel up and down it. In practice, however, it’s incredibly difficult to construct such a device. For starters, there are almost no known materials strong enough or that can be manufactured in sufficient quantities to create a cable tens of thousands of kilometres long. Second, the tether would need to be anchored both at a geostationary station and further out with a counterweight point to ensure it didn’t break. Finally, you’ll need some sort of elevator that can attach itself to the cable and travel into space.

Thankfully, there are solutions. One of the primary candidates for the cable’s material is carbon nanotubes, which could possess the tensile strength needed for such a structure. Meanwhile, a counterweight beyond the orbit of the space station could be an asteroid or an additional space station. This would ensure the cable had a centre of gravity beyond the space station it was attached to, allowing it to remain anchored in space. Finally, by making the cable much wider at its centre point, cars could climb up it without destroying it. The counterweight would move to ensure the cars did not cause the cable to rotate too much and be destroyed. There are also several proposed methods to power the cars including solar power and wireless energy transfer.

In 2012, Tokyo-based company Obayashi Corporation announced plans to build an operational space elevator by 2050. Although the project is merely in a concept phase, Obayashi Corp’s proposal (pictured above) isn’t too out of this world. We won’t be seeing one any time soon but, if all goes to plan, by 2050 we could all be taking regular trips to the stars.

Space elevator, space plane or a rocket – which would you choose to get to space? Let us know below.

FutureTech

How to build a stairway to heaven

In the near future, could we be taking a space elevator into Earth orbit?

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The Hayabusa probe, built by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), was launched on a Japanese M-V rocket on 9 May 2003 from the Uchinoura Space Centre in Japan. Its mission was to become the ﬁrst man-made object to return samples from an asteroid – in this case Itokawa, an S-Type asteroid chosen for its occasional proximity to Earth and its interesting iron and magnesium-silicate surface.

To obtain the necessary speed to reach Itokawa 186 million miles (300 million km) away, Hayabusa used its ion and chemical engines to orbit the Sun for more than a year. This provided continual acceleration, and when it ﬁnally approached Earth again it performed a swing-by to propel itself towards the Itokawa asteroid two years after its launch.

Communication to and from Hayabusa at the asteroid took 40 minutes, so it had to ﬁnish most of its mission alone. Upon its approach it dropped a 10cm-wide sphere with a reﬂective surface onto Itokawa. By shining light onto the sphere, Hayabusa could calculate its distance to the ground.

The probe was supposed to drop a lander, named Minerva, onto the surface. However, the lander missed the surface, and JAXA instead decided to land Hayabusa directly on the asteroid. Attempts to fire a ball bearing into the ground to kick up dust were unsuccessful, but fortunately the power of its engines disturbed enough dust to be collected inside a capsule.

After leaving the asteroid it lost all propulsion barring two ion engines, in addition to experiencing a communications failure with mission controllers. However, thanks to some clever workarounds including the use of the Sun’s pressure against the solar panels to help steer the spacecraft, Hayabusa eventually limped home three years behind schedule.

Upon arrival at Earth the capsule containing the sample from Itokawa separated from the probe, with the latter burning up as planned in the atmosphere and the former landing safely in Australia on 13 June 2010. However, all was not over just yet. JAXA were still unsure if Hayabusa had successfully retrieved samples or not. It was not confirmed until several months later that the particles in the sample container were from Itokawa, bringing to an end a remarkable mission that had been so close to failure but eventually came up trumps with the sample JAXA were looking for.

Image courtesy of JAXA and Akihiro Ikeshita.

Space Exploration

The incredible story of the first mission to mine an asteroid

How the Japanese mission that seemed destined to fail returned the first asteroid samples to Earth.

NASA launched the Galileo spacecraft, which comprises the Galileo Orbiter and Space Probe, atop a Space Shuttle in 1989, using a 38-month orbit of Venus and the Earth’s gravitational pull to gain the necessary speed to reach Jupiter.

While the Galileo Orbiter was designed to orbit and study Jupiter and its moons, the Galileo Probe was released near Jupiter and was sent into the gas giant itself on 7 December 1995. It entered the atmosphere of Jupiter at 30 miles per second (46km per second), the highest impact speed ever achieved by a man-made object. Amazingly, Jupiter’s dense atmosphere slowed the craft to 0.07 miles per second (0.12km per second) in just four minutes.

The probe’s heat shield, made of carbon phenolic, was able to withstand the 15,500°C ball of plasma caused by this sudden deceleration, producing light brighter than the Sun’s surface. It remained active for about 78 minutes as it passed through Jupiter’s atmosphere, losing more than half of its mass in the process before being crushed by the huge pressure.

Wrapped in black and gold blankets to provide insulation and protect against micrometeorites, the probe conducted nine experiments that measured Jupiter’s atmospheric structure. It discovered the presence of a large amount of argon, krypton and xenon. For these to form Jupiter would need to be at a temperature of -240°C, suggesting it once orbited much further from the Sun earlier in its lifetime.

The only other man-made object to enter Jupiter’s atmosphere was the accompanying Galileo Orbiter, which was set on an intentional fatal collision course with Jupiter in 2003 so that it did not accidentally contaminate any nearby moons by crashing on them.

Image courtesy of NASA

Space Exploration

The probe that survived for 78 minutes inside Jupiter

The Galileo Space Probe was the first man-made object to ever enter Jupiter’s atmosphere.

Launching probes is very expensive as they can be extremely heavy. This means that if we need to speed up a probe or change its course, extra fuel needs to be taken into space and this increases costs. Using planets to ‘slingshot’ probes is something of a ‘cheat’ to increase their speed through the Solar System. When a slingshot around a planet is performed a small amount of momentum is transferred from the planet to the probe. This works by slowing the planet down by a tiny amount, but because it is far larger than the probe, the probe speeds up by a great deal. A good and recent example of this is the New Horizons probe that is currently en route to Pluto. New Horizons got just such a speed boost from Jupiter and gained a 9,000kph (6,000mph) speed increase. These manoeuvres can make space flight for inter-planetary probes much cheaper.

Answered by Josh Barker, National Space Centre

Image courtesy of NASA.

Solar System

Take a ride on the Interplanetary Superhighway

Find out how probes use gravity to travel huge distances in the Solar System.

In the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo, designed by Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites, commercial space flight will become routine – like catching a flight from London to New York. The spacecraft, built in California, has its first test flight in 2010. It is made of a carbon-composite material and uses a rocket powered by nitrous oxide that propels the craft at 4,000 kilometres per hour. In fact, this is the most important difference between the first SpaceShipTwo vehicle, named VSS Enterprise (which uses a single rocket and consumes less fuel), and the Space Shuttle (which used two rockets – and more fuel). Virgin Galactic is due to complete a test flight of SpaceShipTwo before the end of the 2012.

Image courtesy of Virgin Galactic.

Would you be willing to pay $200,000 for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to space for six minutes aboard SpaceShipTwo or do you think it’s a waste of money? Let us know in the comments below.

FutureTech

How SpaceShipTwo will take paying customers into space

Find out about Virgin Galactic’s amazing new spacecraft right here.

To date there have been 42 missions to Mars, with half of them being complete failures. Other than the Earth it is the most studied planet in the Solar System, and for centuries it has been at the heart of wild speculation and groundbreaking scientific discoveries. Observations of Mars have not only revealed otherwise unknown secrets but also posed new and exciting questions, and it is for these reasons that it has become the most intriguing planetary body of our time. In fact, the structure of Mars suggests that it was once much more geologically active than it is now, and the presence of huge craters also points to large-scale impacts in its early formation.

Image source: NASA

Solar System

Take a look inside Mars

We peer inside the Red Planet to find out what it’s made of.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), originally known as the Next Generation Space Telescope, employs engineering techniques never used on a space telescope before and will produce unparalleled views of the universe. The JWST is scheduled for launch in 2018 in a joint venture between the ESA, NASA and Arianespace. Primarily, the JWST will observe infrared light from distant objects.

To gather light on the telescope the primary mirror on the JWST is made of 18 hexagonal beryllium segments, which are much lighter than traditional glass and also very strong. To roughly point the telescope in the direction of its observations a star tracker is used, and a Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) is employed to fine-tune the viewings.

The secondary mirror on the JWST, which reflects the light from the primary mirror into the instruments on board, can be moved to focus the telescope on an objects. Each of the 18 hexagonal segments can also be individually adjusted and aligned to produce the perfect picture. While Hubble’s primary mirror is just 2.4 metres in diameter, the mirror on JWST is almost three times as big at 6.5 metres in diameter, allowing for much more distant and accurate observations.

A box called the Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM) sits behind the primary mirror to collect the light incident on the telescope. The ISIM is attached to a backplane, which also holds the telescope’s mirror and keeps them stable. A sunshield, composed of five layers of Kapton with aluminium and special silicon coatings to reflect sunlight, protects the incredibly sensitive instruments.

Image courtesy of NASA.

FutureTech

Why the James Webb Space Telescope will rock

The successor to Hubble will change the way that we see the universe.

Lyman Spitzer Jr was one of the 20th Century’s leading scientists. He was also the ﬁrst person to consider the idea of putting a giant telescope in space and not only lived to see the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in 1990, but witness seven years of its incredible contribution to modern science.

Buy why space? Compared to many of the world’s most powerful Earth-bound telescopes the Hubble Space Telescope’s optics are actually quite small. Bar obvious payload limitations, in space the required optics of a telescope are smaller since the ‘seeing’ is always perfect. Looking through Earth’s atmosphere is not unlike trying to watch television through a desert mirage – the seeing is hindered by a constant shimmer produced by the atmosphere. In space the Hubble Space Telescope’s resolution is so great that it’s the equivalent of us being able to distinguish a car’s two separate headlights from 6,000 miles away.

Hubble didn’t have the smoothest of starts however, and for the ﬁrst three years of its life was partially sighted due to an error in the manufacture of its 2.4-metre primary mirror. Thankfully, upon its ﬁrst servicing mission in 1993 its optics were corrected.

It’s most recent scheduled servicing mission took place in May 2009, allowing Hubble to remain operational until about 2018 when it’s successor – the James Webb Space Telescope – is due to launch.

Image credit: NASA/ESA

Astronomy

All About The Hubble Space Telescope

After a false start and over 20 years of faithful service it’s a wonder the Hubble Space Telescope works at all…

The diagram above shows the key moments in time after the Big Bang.

Cosmic expansion

The expansion of the universe was ﬁrst theorised by Alexander Friedmann in 1922, who derived the Friedmann equations to show that the cosmos could be getting bigger. His theory was conﬁrmed in 1929 by Edwin Hubble, who was the ﬁrst to observe that distant galaxies appeared to be moving away from us. Since then, it has generally been accepted that the universe is expanding. Some think that it will expand faster and faster, some think that it will reach a stable ﬂat state and others believe it will eventually start to contract, culminating in a ‘Big Crunch’. But what’s for certain is that our observations clearly show that for now it is growing, and objects further away from us are moving faster than those that are closer.

A good way to imagine cosmic expansion is in a smaller, more everyday scenario. Imagine that you have a deﬂated balloon, and on it you draw lots of dots. As you blow up the balloon all of the dots start to move away from one another, but there is no central point from which all the dots move. Indeed, dots further away from one another appear to move at a greater speed and vice versa. This is essentially what is happening in the universe, but on an inﬁnitely larger scale, with entire galaxies appearing to move away from one another. There is, however, no centre of the cosmos. In other words, if we stood on a planet in another galaxy, we would observe the same phenomenon as on Earth – namely that everything is moving away from us, with further objects moving more rapidly.

Every galaxy has something known as red shift, which is the primary method through which the expansion of the universe was conﬁrmed. This can be best explained by comparison to the Doppler effect. When a police car drives past you with its siren on, the sound waves are compressed and subsequently expanded as it zooms by. As it comes towards you the sound waves are squashed, while as it moves away the waves are stretched. This decreases and increases the frequency of the sound waves, respectively. The same thing happens with light coming from a distant galaxy. As the galaxy is moving away from us, the light from it appears to stretch towards the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum. The further away – and thus the faster a galaxy is moving from us – the greater the red shift will be. As an aside, if a galaxy is spinning, the side moving towards us, will be squashed towards the blue end of the spectrum, known as blue shift, although this is unrelated to the expansion of the universe.

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence for cosmic expansion was something known as Olbers’ Paradox. In 1823 German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers posited if the universe was inﬁ nite and stationary, then the night sky should be as bright as a star because all stellar light should be constantly entering our atmosphere. Olbers suggested, therefore, that the night sky was black as the universe was expanding. The light from distant stars was being stretched and bent and, as a result, Earth was not being bombarded by constant light. Coupled with direct observations of distant galaxies, it’s clear the universe is growing, however what its eventual fate will be is still very much up for debate.

Image courtesy of NASA

Deep Space

Expansion of the universe

Find out about the history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the present day, in this amazing illustration.

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