Four asteroids on COLLISION course with Earth - RT

It’s a scenario straight out of a Hollywood blockbuster, an asteroid is careening towards Earth and is set to wipe out human existence. To mark Asteroid Day, here are four space rocks on a collision course with our planet.

The United Nations fears that the possibility of an asteroid smashing into a densely populated area isn’t being taken seriously enough, so it designated June 30 as International Asteroid Day to raise awareness about the potentially catastrophic occurrence.

The date was chosen because the largest asteroid impact in recorded history took place over Tunguska, Russia on that day in 1908 when an enormous asteroid exploded and destroyed hundreds of acres of forest. 

To mark the event, here are four asteroids that could wallop into Earth.

1979 XB

With its 900-meter diameter, if this enormous rock hits our planet the impact would be devastating. It’s currently hurtling through the solar system at nearly 70,000kph and is getting almost 30km closer to Earth every second.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has put it in second place on its ‘Risk List’ for Near-Earth Asteroids. The orbit of this minor planet is unreliable but it’s predicted to have a chance of hitting Earth midway through this century.  

Experts warn that 1979 XB could suddenly come a lot closer to Earth, given only a tiny variation in its orbit. Its next predicted approach of Earth is set to come in 2024.

Apophis

Roughly the size of four football fields, Apophis is in very close orbit to Earth. It’s currently more than 200 million kilometers away but gets half a kilometer closer every second. 

It regularly passes Earth on its orbit but the latest radar and optical data suggests we’re in for a close shave when it blazes past our planet at a distance of just 30,000km in 2029. This is less than a tenth of the distance to the Moon.

It will next fly by Earth in mid-October this year when it will pass us at a safe distance of around 30 million kilometers. If Apophis did blast into Earth the impact is calculated to be similar to about 15,000 nuclear weapons detonating at once.

2010 RF12

This asteroid holds the dubious honor of topping both the Sentry List (Earth Impact Monitoring system) and the ESA impact risk list. It’s currently around 215 million kilometers from Earth and is traveling at a speed of 117,935kph. 

The danger from this asteroid isn’t forecast to come until the end of the century when it’s calculated to come as much as 40 times closer than the Moon. Luckily it weighs, a relatively small, 500 tons and is about seven meters in diameter. The impact is forecast to be slightly less than the meteor that hit the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013, which damaged thousands of buildings and injured hundreds of people. 

2010 RF12 is set to pass Earth on August 13, 2022 when astronomers around the world will train their telescopes on the object to learn as much as possible about it and its trajectory.

2000 SG344 

2000 SG344 is part of a group called the Aten Asteroids, which have orbits aligned very closely with Earth’s. It is predicted to have a chance of impact in the next three or four decades. With just a 50-meter diameter, it’s relatively small but is still twice as big as the Chelyabinsk meteor which caused so much damage six years ago. 

It’s currently traveling through space at more than 112,000kph and is getting 1.3km closer to Earth every second. Interestingly, it travels around the Sun in almost the exact same time as Earth, 353 days versus Earth’s 365 days. This gives astronomers regular chances to observe the asteroid and assess the risk it poses.

Undetected asteroids

Of course, a big part of the danger with hazardous space objects is that we are not good at detecting them and some of the most dangerous ones have caught us by surprise. When the Chelyabinsk meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere undetected, its explosion released up to 30 times more energy than the atomic bombs the US dropped on Japan in 1945.

As recently as last December, another asteroid broke apart over the Bering Sea that was 10 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Neither Near Earth Objects (NEOs) were tracked in advance. It’s hoped that International Asteroid Day will prompt authorities around the world to improve how they detect the potentially cataclysmic space rocks.

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2019-06-30 17:10:00Z
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Alabama and its rocket put Apollo 11, first man on the moon - AL.com

Florida had Cape Canaveral, launch pad 39A, the countdown, and the liftoff. Houston had Mission Control and the astronauts.

But America’s historic moon landing program wouldn’t have gotten started and the landing wouldn’t have happened 50 years ago without another key place and the very big thing built there.

Full coverage of the Apollo 11 50th anniversary

The place was Alabama, the city was Huntsville and the big thing was the Saturn V rocket. It’s where Alabama is focusing its celebration of the golden anniversary of Apollo 11, and a lot of the celebration will take place at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center under one of the three Saturn V’s left from those glory days.

The Saturn V was one of the most complex and important things America built in the 20th century. The Apollo program it supported created 400,000 jobs at 20,000 firms and universities before it was finished.

The rocket itself rivals the automobile, the telephone and the computer in terms of impact. And it wouldn’t have happened without Wernher von Braun’s German rocket team on Redstone Arsenal. It wouldn’t have been built without the thousands of young engineers, technicians and crafts people who poured into the Tennessee Valley to work at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and its contractor companies.

“When Kennedy said, ‘Can we do this?’ it was really that group of people that gave him the ability to say it was even possible,” NASA-Marshall historian Brian Odom said recently.

Huntsville had been building rockets for the Army at Redstone since 1950. Von Braun and his team go back even further to the German V-2 rocket program in World War II. When the Germans surrendered to American troops in the last days of the war, making what they said was a decision to give their technology to the West and not to the advancing Russian army, they were moved with their remaining V-2s to an Army test range at Fort Bliss, Tx.

This photo by Neil Armstrong shows Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the Moon in 1969. The image of Armstrong reflected in Aldrin's visor is one of the few of the first man to walk on the Moon actually on the Moon.

By the time Kennedy made his commitment, the German team and its Army counterparts had fired enough rockets to know the problems ahead. They had already solved some of them.

“I think that’s really key,” Odom said. “By the time you get to the Saturn V, you’ve already learned a lot of these things.”

But how critical was what happened in Huntsville? The first stage of the Saturn V “was an in-house development, basically,” Odom said. “A lot of people forget about that. They think it was just Boeing, but it was in-house. The first three stages were built here at Marshall before the first stage gets turned over to New Orleans.”

“All of that early development is critical,” Odom said. “Without the success of that team, Kennedy wouldn’t even had made the statement. He was talking to the folks here and seeing what was possible, and landing on the moon was possible because they knew where they were going with the Saturn V by that point.”

It’s worth stopping the story briefly to remember a few of the numbers that describe the rocket. It was 363 feet tall and weighed 6 million pounds. Its five F-1 main engines could produce 7.5 million pounds of thrust. It was massive and massively powerful.

There are three Saturn Vs on display in the world today, and one of them is at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville. It wasn’t built to fly, but it is a “real” Saturn V built to test the rocket’s strength. All three stages were assembled in Marshall’s Saturn V Dynamic Test Stand – the tallest building in Alabama at the time – and shaken and shoved for more than 400 hours to obtain data about durability.

The rocket changed during the Apollo program. The Apollo 1 launch pad fire that killed astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom II, Ed White II and Roger Chaffee happened because of a spark in the pure oxygen atmosphere of the capsule. That meant pure oxygen had to go. “But to fix (that) led to a weight issue,” Odom said. “It made the rocket heavier. It made it more complex.”

“You could swing a cat and hit a problem with the Saturn V,” Odom said.

The first stage of the Saturn V got everything rocket off the ground, and Odom said that is the hardest part. But getting the kick to take it into orbit was the job of the second stage.

There were problems with engine instability during ignition. There were problems insulating the liquid hydrogen fuel tanks and stabilizing the engines. The people working these problems were subject matter experts in fields that didn’t exist until then.

“They didn’t learn it from their teacher,” Odom said. “They learned it because a specific problem arose, and they had to solve a very specific issue. And they did that”.

Astronauts explored the Moon on a rover developed in Huntsville, Ala., at the Marshall Space Flight Center.

The German management approach was to take a high-level view and trust these new experts. “If you can explain it to me and reassure me that you know what you’re doing, I’m going to trust you to know what you’re doing,” Odom explained.

Even with those first stage issues, Odom said the Saturn V’s second stage was “the thing the Russians could never do. They could never figure it out. They were not terrified of liquid hydrogen; they’d worked with it to some degree. But they didn’t know how to get the kick that you need.”

Everyone knows how the story ended. The Saturn V flew successfully around the Earth twice to test its systems and then flew six crews to the moon. No one had walked on another world before, and no one has done it since.

Today, the moon missions are history, “a dramatic storyline” in one author’s words that became intertwined with the other big narratives of the 1960s. They are a symbol of what American can do, but also oddly a reminder of what we haven’t done yet. Apollo was a pivot point and is forever an example.

“People say, ‘We can land a man on the Moon, but we can’t make a pen that won’t run out of ink,’” Odom said. “There’s something that’s almost eerie in the power behind that shift in thinking, the idea that if we could accomplish that feat, why couldn’t we use technology to do other things?”

“During the Saturn program, during the tumultuous decade of the ‘60s, there was also of this feeling, not of why are we doing that versus this, but if we can do that, how come we can’t solve civil rights issues? How come we can’t feed the hungry?” Odom said.

Looking back at Apollo like this engages the country’s problems in a different way, the historian said. It can be an inspiration that makes young people consider their own options.

“Without an inspirational program like that, they’ll go into finance or accounting or whatever,” Odom said. “And that’s cool, too. But to inspire people to solve those hard problems? Somebody in school right now is going to solve a problem that is going to impact your life because they were inspired by NASA to do something hard and being invested in something like this.

“Those, to me, are the cool things,” Odom said.

How did NASA put men on the moon? One harrowing step at a time

Leadership. Luck. Timing. Public will. Those are not line items in a federal budget. They can't be commanded to materialize.

We’e celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11 with stories through the month of July. You can find the full collection of stories, from AL.com staff and others, here: Apollo 11 Anniversary.

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2019-06-30 13:01:00Z
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Celebrate the Promise of Planetary Defense This Asteroid Day - Space.com

The quest to protect Earth from threatening asteroids is about to get a boost, as "an absolute flood of new observations" comes from a new telescope designed to scan the sky, says Ed Lu, co-founder of the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to planetary defense.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in Chile is anticipated to have "first light" in 2020, meaning that the telescope's mirrors will be exposed to the sky for the first time. Then full operations for its decade-long survey of the southern sky will commence in 2022, if all goes to plan. Lu said the telescope will spot tens of thousands of new asteroids in its first year alone, with many more to come.

Lu and others shared the latest developments in planetary defense just in time for Asteroid Day, an annual celebration on June 30 to discuss the science of asteroids and the possible threat they pose to Earth. While we know of no asteroids that will imminently cause damage to our planet, the possibility always exists, participants said in an Asteroid Day teleconference on Thursday (June 27).

Related: Humanity Will Slam a Spacecraft into an Asteroid in a Few Years to Help Save Us All

Between LSST and other already operational telescopes, Lu added, scientists anticipate they will quickly catalog "70% or more" of the asteroids — or space rocks — that are more than 460 feet (140 meters) in size. That statistic is relevant to Congress, which in 2005 asked NASA to catalog at least 90% of asteroids of those size by 2020, according to the agency. Lu acknowledged that scientists will not meet the deadline, but he said they would be able to generate that catalog with enough time and funding.

Lu said that scientists should start thinking now about how to frame new discoveries to the public. When LSST first spots these objects, observations of them will be so sparse that it will be hard to constrain the orbits of the asteroids. In the time before scientists are confident of these objects' paths, more of them could be seen as posing a threat to Earth simply because scientists can't get a read on where they are moving in space.

Airburst danger

But smaller asteroids pose a threat too, just on a more local scale, said Mark Boslough — who was the first U.S. scientist to visit Chelyabinsk after a six-story object exploded over the Russian town in 2013. Even objects in the 130-foot (40 meters) size range can pose a threat to cities, he said.

Boslough cited the Tunguska Event, a 1908 incident in which an asteroid shattered in Earth's atmosphere and flattened 830 square miles (2,150 square kilometers) of Siberian forest. This and other "airbursts" are quite capable of causing a lot of property damage, so asteroids of a smaller size should also be included in disaster planning, he said.

"I've always thought we should be more concerned about those than we are [now], primarily because they are just so much more abundant. There is something like 10 million of those things," he said.

Boslough — a physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory — said these smaller objects perhaps shouldn't be cataloged, because there are so many of them. Instead, he recommends developing surveys that would note any that are imminently hurtling toward Earth. Then disaster planners could evacuate cities that might be under threat of the object, just like we do today for incoming hurricanes.

There are other opportunities to look for these objects as well. This summer, the Beta Taurid meteor stream from Comet Encke will be passing a little closer to Earth than usual. This swarm of objects is in a 7-to-2 resonance with the planet Jupiter, meaning that they orbit the sun seven times for every time that Jupiter orbits twice. The orbit of these objects intersects with that of Earth, although they don't pass close by our planet every year.

Telescopes will monitor the swarm for Tunguska-size objects in the coming weeks, because the swarm will be crossing through our orbit in late June, and continuing through August, he said. He added that evoking Tunguska is not a coincidence, because this object was "more than likely a Beta Taurid" based on the timing of it hitting Earth on June 30, 1908.

Asteroid missions ongoing

Another aspect of planetary defense is studying near-Earth asteroids up close. NASA's OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) mission is in orbit at asteroid Bennu, and Japan's Hayabusa2 is circling asteroid Ryugu. In the next few years, both spacecraft are expected to deliver samples to Earth.

And there's more to come. Patrick Michel, the co-investigator of forthcoming asteroid mission Hera, talked about the progress for that European asteroid mission. Hera is expected to launch in 2024 for the double asteroid Didymos. What makes Hera unique from past missions is it will work in tandem with a NASA spacecraft, called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test). DART will attempt to change the orbit of the moon of Didymos, and Hera will examine any crater DART leaves behind. 

Hera is still in the planning stages and will go through another major approval milestone in November, Michel said. He added it's an important milestone for the European Space Agency, because it may be "the only asteroid mission possibly done by Europe within the next decade."

But asteroids aren't just dangerous — they could also become extremely valuable, according to Marc Serres, CEO of the Luxembourg Space Agency. Since they contain water and minerals — resources that can be used for space missions — he said the time to generate a catalog is now, before we begin exploring the solar system. As humans begin to move to the moon and other destinations, he said, it will be important to mine as much as we can along the way.

"Using the resources that we can find in space will completely revolutionize the way we act in space, because we don't need to bring everything with us," he said.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

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2019-06-30 12:00:00Z
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How to watch the July 2 solar eclipse from anywhere in the world - CNET

The total solar eclipse of Aug. 21, 2017, as seen in Oregon.

Aubrey Gemignani/NASA

The Pacific Ocean, Chile and Argentina will get a great look at a total solar eclipse on Tuesday, July 2. If you can't get to South America, you can instead watch the eclipse action unfold live online as the moon casts its shadow onto Earth.

The eclipse will trace a path of totality (area of total darkening) over a narrow swath of the South Pacific, and then over land across Chile and Argentina. 

San Francisco's Exploratorium museum will host a livestream of the view from the National Science Foundation's Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile.

The Exploratorium's live broadcast will include telescope views from Chile starting at 12:23 p.m. Pacific, and then coverage with commentary from the museum's experts and NASA scientists at 1 p.m. Pacific. You can also catch all the eclipse goodness through the museum's Total Solar Eclipse 2019 app for iOS and Android. 

The European Southern Observatory will livestream the eclipse as seen from the La Silla Observatory near the Atacama Desert in Chile. That broadcast starts at 12:15 p.m. Pacific.

Eclipse fever swept across the US in 2017. The upcoming July eclipse will be the first total solar eclipse since that event. Though the main path of the eclipse is relatively narrow, a good chunk of South America will still get to see the moon's shadow take a partial bite out of the sun. 

A total solar eclipse is a cause for celebration. "One occurs on average at any specific location every 360 years," ESO says. We're fortunate to live at a time when your location on the globe doesn't matter. You can still be a witness to eclipse history.

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2019-06-29 19:16:00Z
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Total Solar Eclipse 2019: Path, Viewing Maps and Photo Guide - Space.com

On July 2, a solar eclipse will sweep across the South Pacific and parts of South America. 

In parts of Chile and Argentina, skywatchers will witness a total eclipse of the sun, in which the moon will block the sun from view — with the exception of its wispy corona. In other parts of South America, skywatchers can see a partial eclipse, and the sun will look like the moon took a "bite" out of its face. 

With this photo guide, you can find out exactly where the eclipse will be visible and what it will look like. If you're not in the path of the eclipse, be sure to check out these eclipse webcasts from various observatories in its path. 

Related: Total Solar Eclipse 2019: A Complete Guide

 

Visibility Map

(Image credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio)

This map represents the path that the moon's shadow will take across the Earth's surface during the total solar eclipse. Outside the path of totality, this map shows the percentage of the sun's disk that will be covered by the moon at maximum partial eclipse. 

Before the eclipse reaches South America, it will first pass over a few remote islands in the Pacific Ocean. The first place to see the eclipse will be Oeno Island, which will experience 2 minutes and 53 seconds of totality starting at 10:24 a.m. local time (1824 GMT). Totality will narrowly miss Easter Island, where skywatchers will see the moon cover up to about 80% of the sun's disk. 

The moment of greatest eclipse will occur at a point about 1,600 miles (2,600 km) southwest of Isla Isabela of the Galapagos Islands, where totality lasts a whopping 4 minutes and 32.8 seconds. Unfortunately, that's happening over open water, so unless there's an airplane or boat passing though, there won't be any humans around to see it. 

Eclipse Animation

(Image credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio)

An animation of the total solar eclipse on July 2 shows the path the moon's shadow will take across the South Pacific Ocean and South America.

Totality in South America

(Image credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio)

A more detailed map shows the path of totality across Chile and Argentina. Here you can see features including national boundaries, major roads and cities along the path. The shape of the umbra, or the inner part of the moon's shadow, is shown at 3-minute intervals and labeled with the local time zones at its center.

Totality will make its first landfall in South America near La Serena, Chile. The partial eclipse there begins at 3:15 p.m. local time (1915 GMT), and totality begins at 4:38 p.m. local time (2038 GMT). La Serena will experience 2 minutes and 17 seconds of totality.

From there, the eclipse will move southeast across Chile and into Argentina before disappearing into the sunset just south of Montevideo, Uruguay. Most of South America will see at least a partial eclipse, but the path of totality is only about 95 miles (150 kilometers) wide. 

To find out the exact circumstances of the eclipse's visibility from a specific location, check out this interactive map by timeanddate.com. 

Path of Totality in Chile

(Image credit: ESO/P. Horálek/M. Druckmüller/P. Aniol/Z. Hoder/S. Habbal/L. Calçada)

This chart shows how the eclipse will appear from different locations in Chile. To the right is an artist's impression of totality over the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory, which is located north of La Serena in Chile's Atacama Desert.

Stages of the Eclipse

(Image credit: ESO/P. Horálek/M. Druckmüller/P. Aniol/Z. Hoder/S. Habbal)

This timeline shows how and when the phases of the total solar eclipse will progress as seen from the La Silla Observatory. 

Eclipse Progression Over La Silla

(Image credit: ESO/B. Tafreshi (twanight.org)/P. Horálek)

This ESO infographic shows the predicted path of the eclipsed sun in the sky above La Silla. The partial phase of the eclipse will end just before sunset there. Farther east, the sun will set before the eclipse is over.  

Visible Planets and Stars

(Image credit: M. Druckmüller, P. Aniol, K. Delcourte, P. Horálek, L. Calçada/ESO)

During totality, the sky will darken enough to reveal planets and stars that are not otherwise visible from the Southern Hemisphere this time of year, because they're above the horizon during the daytime. 

Of course, you'll want to spend your totality looking at the eclipsed sun. But if a cloud happens to block your view of the corona, these are still a good reason to keep looking up! 

Be sure to check our eclipse skywatching guide for more details about the visible stars and planets. 

How to Observe the Sun Safely

(Image credit: Karl Tate, Space.com Contributor)

You should never look directly at the sun, but there are ways to safely observe an eclipse. See how to safely observe a solar eclipse with this Space.com infographic.

Read more eclipse-observing tips here:

A Solar Eclipse Can Blind You (Read This Before Looking at the Sun!)

Solar Eclipse Glasses: Where to Buy the Best, High-Quality Eyewear

Things I Used to Observe an Eclipse, Rated

Eclipses to Come

(Image credit: T. Matsopulos/NASA)

If you missed this year's total solar eclipse, it's not too late to start planning for the next one! Here's a map of all the total solar eclipses coming up until the year 2040. 

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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2019-06-29 16:40:00Z
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NASA Reopens Apollo Mission Control Room That Once Landed Men on Moon - The New York Times

[Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]

HOUSTON — After Gene Kranz retired in the 1990s, he started to give occasional tours to VIPs at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

It was there in the Apollo Mission Control Center that Mr. Kranz had a view like few others during the highest highs and lowest lows of the moon race. As a flight director, he helped lead the complex human and technical operation that managed the triumph of the Apollo 11 moon landing 50 years ago. He also rallied and refocused NASA mission flight controllers after the tragedy of Apollo 1 in 1967, when Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger B. Chafee died in a fire during a launchpad simulation.

But mission control was a mess.

Mr. Kranz would have to show up early before each tour to police the place. He had to pick up trash left on computer consoles that had once landed men on the moon. Water bottles, Coke cans. He would empty brimming wastebaskets.

“This place was not representative of historic mission control,” Kranz said. It was likewise a technical mess. “The configuration of the consoles in no way represented where we were and what we did.”

On Friday, Mr. Kranz and Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, cut a ribbon marking the official reopening of the restored Apollo Mission Control Center. It was a three-year, $5 million project, and every inch of the famed heart of America’s lunar aspirations was repaired and refurbished. Its reopening comes three weeks before the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind, and helps to kick off Apollo festivities across the country.

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Gene Kranz, an Apollo flight director,  at mission control center’s opening ceremony on Friday.CreditTodd Spoth for The New York Times

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Mr. Kranz in the control room in 1965, during the Gemini program, preparing for a four-day flight.CreditJCS/NASA

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Apollo mission control had been abandoned in 1992, with all operations moved to a modernized mission control center elsewhere in the building. Center employees, friends, family — and anyone, really, who had access to Building 30 — could walk in, take a seat, take a lunch break and take pictures.

While they were there, they might take a button from one of the computer consoles. Or a switch or dial, anything small — a personal memento from an ancient American achievement. The furniture fabric and carpet underfoot grew threadbare. The room was dark; none of the equipment had power. Wires hung where rotary phones had once sat. The giant overhead screens in front of the room were damaged, and the room smelled of mildew. Yellow duct tape held carpet together in places.

“You knew it wasn’t right — you just knew,” said Sandra Tetley, the historic preservation officer at the Johnson Space Center. “But it was not a priority. We are an organization that’s moving toward the future, so there is not a budget to do things like this.”

The project began in earnest six years ago. The anniversary loomed, and that was the catalyst to fix up mission control, and to do it right. “We wanted to meet a high standard to restore it, and we were able to meet this 50th anniversary,” Ms. Tetley said.

The National Park Service established the Apollo Mission Control Center as a National Historic Landmark in 1985. But once they had resolved to restore the facility in 2013, Mr. Kranz, Ms. Tetley, Jim Thornton, the restoration project manager and others were stymied at every turn. There were funding issues and internal turf wars.

The Apollo Mission Control Center is in the middle of an operational building where life-or-death decisions are made for missions in flight. Judgment calls regarding spacewalks, station-threatening debris and solutions to mechanical malfunctions leave little margin for error — or interruption by errant tourists.

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Marlboros, flags ready for waving, tea cups and flight plans in the restored center.CreditTodd Spoth for The New York Times

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Celebrations on July 24, 1969, at the conclusion of the Apollo 11 mission.CreditJSC/NASA

Eventually, however, Space Center Houston, a nonprofit educational complex and space museum, took the lead on fund-raising efforts. The nearby city of Webster, Tex., donated $3.5 million of the $5 million necessary to complete the project. A Kickstarter campaign and independent donations filled in the rest.

Like the Oval Office, or the Assembly Room of Independence Hall, mission control is a distinctly American room — one so ingrained into culture that to say its name is to conjure it crisply in the mind, as though you had been there, even worked there. And the restoration was completed in a way that’s true to its place in the American historical imagination.

Four long rows of pale green consoles fill the room. There are white panels overhead and beige new carpet below. Lights dance purposefully on the consoles, with each one playing Apollo-accurate video broadcasts as would have been seen at the time of the moon landings, or displaying grids of numbers and prehistoric computer code. On four giant displays in the room’s front are maps, matrices and astronaut positional plots.

On the consoles are the objects seen in photographs from the Apollo era. Ashtrays and coffee cups, staplers and stopwatches, pens and pencils, headsets and rotary dial phones. There are mission control manuals three inches thick and canisters for pneumatic tubes. Binders and eyeglasses and cigar boxes sit next to cans of RC Cola and packs of Winston cigarettes. The room is a museum piece, and yet it is alive, as though engineers stepped out briefly but would be right back. Every item is authentic, painstakingly researched from grainy photographs.

“It was a herculean effort by the team to really pull off what we pulled off in that room today,” said Jennifer Keys, the project manager of the restoration team.

Ceiling tiles that matched the original were eventually recovered from a lobby phone booth elsewhere at the Johnson Space Center. Preserved wallpaper was discovered behind a fire extinguisher. All had to be meticulously matched or fabricated identically. Original paint was found for the consoles. And across those consoles, the artifacts of a time gone by.

“We tracked things down on eBay, from people’s donations — whatever we could scrounge up. We did a scavenger hunt across Johnson Space Center to find things like trash cans, chairs and binders,” said Ms. Keys.

The flight crews of Apollo mission control were known for their attention to detail. It’s how they got every astronaut home. The restoration team showed no less respect for fine details, and the effect is uncanny.

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Mission control on Friday...CreditTodd Spoth for The New York Times

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...and in 1975, with Mr. Kranz overseeing the Soyuz-Apollo space docking mission. It was the last flight of an Apollo spacecraft.CreditJSC/NASA

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“We tracked things down on eBay, from people’s donations — whatever we could scrounge up,” said Jennifer Keys, the restoration’s project manager.CreditTodd Spoth for The New York Times

From the observation gallery, you can all but see phantom engineers in white shirts and black ties speaking into headsets very calmly about high-stakes orbital maneuvers, see them making notes and pushing those buttons. The stories there play out in your imagination, and yet before your eyes.

Christopher Craft, who invented flight operations for NASA when the agency was formed, is credited with designing mission control. Nothing like the space program had existed, and there were no models for how it should be done. The air traffic control model wouldn’t work, because the tower in that setting has a line-of-sight on everything in its aegis. Mission control’s domain, on the other hand, is abstract: a specific set of procedures at any one time, and problems that are solved with mathematics and moxie.

The genius of its design is reflected in the present-day mission control center that runs operations for the International Space Station. The computers are smaller, the monitors larger, tabletops wider and office chairs nicer.

But the design of the room is virtually identical. Five giant screens loom above, with mission status updates and feeds from orbit. And though the time of the Apollo generation draws rapidly to a close, the things used by mission control operators are still basically the same.

From the gallery, it is all plainly visible. Desktops are lined with coffee cups and Coca-Cola, pens and paperwork, binders, headsets and eyeglasses. The room is crowded and calm, the stakes still high. As NASA plots an American return to the moon in the next decade with the Artemis mission, the stakes will get higher yet.

Guided tours for the public will begin on July 1. Earlier this week, Mr. Kranz walked into the newly restored mission control for the first time. He approved.

“It was dazzling,” he said. “You couldn’t believe this. All of a sudden you were 50 years younger and you wanted to work in there. I wanted back in that room to work.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/29/science/apollo-11-mission-control-nasa.html

2019-06-29 14:23:36Z
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Classified Apollo 11 anomaly threatened to crash first moon astronauts - INSIDER

Apollo 11 is rightfully hailed as an extraordinary success for the US. After all, NASA rocketed humans to the moon's surface for the first time and brought them home alive.

But there were quite a few close calls during the historic mission that could have ended it in tragedy.

Minutes ahead of the moon landing, for instance, alarms blared inside the lunar-landing spacecraft, indicating that the flight computer was overloaded and might quit. Then a surprise crater threatened to botch the landing, so Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (the two moonwalkers) used up nearly all of their fuel navigating to safer lunar pastures.

These and other stories — frozen fuel lines, a stuck hatch, a busted switch required to leave the moon — are well-shared among spaceflight enthusiasts and historians.

But according to a forthcoming book, the mission's three astronauts may have been in far more peril than previously reported.

A serious anomaly occurred as the crew careened toward a landing on Earth, according to Nancy Atkinson, a science journalist and author who details formerly classified information about the event in her new book, " Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions."

"Through my interviews and research for the book, I uncovered a serious anomaly that occurred during Apollo 11's return to Earth," Atkinson — whose book comes out July 2 — told Business Insider in an email. "The event was discovered only after the crew had returned safely to Earth."

The problem happened just before Apollo 11 returned to Earth, causing a discarded space module to nearly crash into the crew's capsule.

What's more, Atkinson's sources suggest, the same issue also threatened the crews of three other Apollo missions.

'We were lucky'

The main spacecraft that NASA used during the Apollo moon-landing program. Astronauts left the lunar module on the moon, broke away from the service module during landing, and splashed into the ocean inside the command module.

NASA; Business Insider

The anomaly happened less than an hour before the Apollo 11 crew landed. As Atkinson tells it, most everyone at NASA did not realize the peril it put astronauts in until weeks after they'd returned to Earth.

For most of their eight-day mission, the crew of Apollo 11 rode inside a gumdrop-shaped capsule called the command module. This capsule sat on top of the service module: a large cylinder that carried supplies, propellants, and a large rocket engine. NASA called the two-part spacecraft the command and service module, or CSM.

The CSM delivered a third part, called the lunar module, to lunar orbit. Then that lander took Aldrin and Armstrong to and from the surface, while astronaut Michael Collins remained in orbit around the moon. The CSM then rocketed everyone back toward Earth on a three-day voyage.

About 15 minutes before the astronauts splashed into the Pacific Ocean, the CSM fully separated into its two parts. This was necessary because only the command module (which held the crew) had a heat shield. The heat shield protected the astronauts by deflecting and absorbing the scorching energies created by plowing through Earth's atmosphere at about 25,000 mph — more than a dozen times as fast as a speeding bullet.

A line drawing illustrating the Apollo 14 Command and Service Modules changes following the Apollo 13 near-disaster.

NASA

The service module became useless and posed a collision risk after the two parts separated, so it was supposed to skip off Earth's atmosphere like a stone thrown across a pond.

But it did not.

Read more: An Apollo astronaut explains how he nearly killed himself 'horsing around' on the moon in 1972

Instead, as Atkinson explains, the service module chased the astronauts during their descent.

"Houston, we got the service module going by. A little high and a little bit to the right," Aldrin, who was looking out of the command module's window, told Mission Control over the radio.

Moments later he added: "It's coming across now from right to left."

As plasma built up ahead of the capsule, its radio communications temporarily went out (as expected) yet prevented the astronauts from offering any more details. But an airplane pilot spotted the returning command module and service module, the latter of which was breaking apart and splintering into glowing pieces.

Gary Johnson, who worked as an electrical engineer on the Apollo program, told Atkinson that the service module should have been "absolutely nowhere close to the command module" as it descended.

If the part had collided with the command module carrying the astronauts, it could have crippled or destroyed the vehicle or sent it flying out of control. Chunks of the disintegrating service module could also have struck the capsule, which could have led to catastrophe as well, Atkinson wrote.

"If things had gone bad, we could have lost the Apollo 11 crew," Johnson told Atkinson. "We were lucky."

Why the Apollo jettison anomaly isn't well known

Apollo 11's command module and service module careen back to Earth at thousands of miles per hour, creating superheated plasma in the process, on July 24, 1969. Most of the lights are pieces of the disintegrating service module.

NASA/JSC via Smithsonian Institution

The astronauts, mission controllers, and communications personnel didn't understand there was a problem until after NASA debriefed the three moon men about their mission weeks later.

NASA launched an investigation based on their reports and found that two prior missions — Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 — had suffered the same glitch. Those astronauts did not see the service module outside their windows, however, so they didn't report it, Atkinson wrote. (A review of old radar recordings showed the service modules on those missions did also fly dangerously close to the command modules, though.)

The problem's cause turned out to be a bad sequence in a controller that helped jettison, or separate, the command and service modules. NASA knew the same problem was baked into the Apollo 12 spacecraft, which launched in November 1969, but decided not to fix it due to time constraints, Atkinson said.

According to Johnson, NASA kept the Apollo 11 astronaut debriefs classified until November 1970 — about six months after the harrowing Apollo 13 mission — and the anomaly stayed out of newspapers.

"The event never made it into the Apollo 11 mission reports and somehow was largely forgotten — I think due to the frantic-ness of the time, of needing to move on to the next flight, etc.," Atkinson said. "The first time the fix for this anomaly was in place was for Apollo 13. And of course, you know what happened with 13, and I think the anomaly was probably largely forgotten due to all the other excitement."

More details about the anomaly can be found in Atkinson's book.

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https://www.insider.com/classified-apollo-11-anomaly-threatened-to-crash-first-moon-astronauts-2019-6

2019-06-29 12:58:54Z
52780322691971

Apollo 11 tapes bought for $218 may sell for millions after nearly being lost - The Guardian

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1. Apollo 11 tapes bought for $218 may sell for millions after nearly being lost  The Guardian
2. Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke says he almost died jumping on moon  Business Insider
3. 50 years after Apollo, NASA prepares for return trip to the moon  Houston Chronicle
4. How the space program created the culture of learning from failure  Fast Company
5. Apollo moon rocks help us understand our place in the cosmos  Vox.com
6. View full coverage on Google News

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jun/28/apollo-11-tapes-moon-landing-sale-value-nearly-lost

2019-06-28 15:50:00Z
52780322691971

NASA’s restored Apollo Mission Control is a slice of 60s life, frozen in amber - Ars Technica

• Standing at the top row of the MOCR looking forward. The consoles are all lit via internal LEDs powered by a Crestron commercial lighting system, and the positions are all dressed to appear as if the controllers had all gotten up mid-shift and walked out and left all their stuff behind.

  Lee Hutchinson

• Looking toward the right of the room. There were still workers finishing the room setup while we were shooting.

  Lee Hutchinson

• Standing at the far right of the top row near the DOD console looking left. Construction supplies visible at front.

  Lee Hutchinson

• Compare the previous image to this pre-restoration picture of the room in 2012. Prior to restoration, the consoles were a mish-mash of Apollo- and shuttle-era panels in incorrect configurations, with no lighting or dressing.

  Steven Michael

• Standing at the front right side of the room looking back at the rows of consoles. All had been removed and freighted to Kansas for careful restoration.

  Lee Hutchinson

HOUSTON—Following the completion of a multi-year, multi-million-dollar restoration, NASA's historic Apollo Mission Operations Control Room 2 ("MOCR 2") is set to reopen to the public next week. The $5 million in funding for the restoration was partially provided by NASA, but the majority of the money was donated by the city of Webster, the Houston suburb where the Johnson Space Center is located. Another half-million in funding came from the general public via a Kickstarter campaign (disclosure: your humble author was a backer).

For the past two years, historians and engineers from the Kansas Cosmosphere's Spaceworks team have been lovingly restoring and detailing the 1,200-pound (544kg) historic sage green Ford-Philco consoles that populated the control room—repairing damage from decades of casual neglect and also adding in the correct control panels so that each console now correctly mirrors how it would have been configured for an Apollo flight.

Ars was invited to view the restored MOCR 2 last week as the final finishing restoration touches were still being applied. We conducted some interviews and shot some photos while technicians and construction workers bustled around us, hammering and screwing the last bits and bobs into place. The room's lighting system was in the process of being worked on, and the room flickered several times between fully illuminated daytime lighting and dim twilight—providing an even more accurate glimpse of what it might have looked like during an actual mission.

• Standing at the right end of the "Trench," the first row of consoles. I shot several of these without a flash and adjusted the white balance so that the image closely mirrors the actual lighting tone in the room. It looks about like this—a little yellow-y and a bit dim.

  Lee Hutchinson

• Long shot of row 2, the systems row, with the LM CONTROL console in foreground.

  Lee Hutchinson

• Wide shot of the Trench from the midpoint, looking right across the FDO (Flight Dynamics Officer) and GUIDANCE consoles.

  Lee Hutchinson

• A shot from the left of row 3, with the SURGEON console in foreground.

  Lee Hutchinson

• Standing in the third row looking forward at the LM CONTROL console in row 2. CONTROL watched over much of the Lunar Module's hardware, including its radar and thrusters.

  Lee Hutchinson

• Standing in the same spot looking a bit more left. Centermost console visible on the second row is TELMU, or "Telemetry, Electrical, and EVA Mobility Unit," responsible for watching over the Lunar Module's computer and software.

  Lee Hutchinson

• Now looking far left. First row in background is the Trench, with all four positions (BOOSTER, RETRO, FDO, and GUIDANCE, left to right) are visible. Second row positions visible from left to right are EECOM, GNC, and TELMU.

  Lee Hutchinson

• Now standing roughly center and looking forward at PROCEDURES (far left) and AFD (Assistant Flight Director, lower middle with gray stapler).

  Lee Hutchinson

How we got to now

Do you want to know more?

If you'd like to dig in deep on exactly how Mission Control worked during the Apollo era and learn a bit more about how the consoles worked, head on over to our detailed 2012 write-up of the MOCR.

Today, the Mission Control Center in JSC's Building 30 (renamed a few years ago to the "Chris Kraft Mission Control Center" to honor Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr., the person most directly responsible for defining how NASA's Mission Control would come to function) includes multiple Flight Control Rooms, referred to in NASA shorthand as FCRs ("fickers"). But during the Apollo era, there were two control rooms in the building—Mission Operations Control Room 1, on the second floor, and Mission Operations Control Room 2, on the third floor (referred to as MOCR 1 and MOCR 2, it's pronounced "mo'-ker"). MOCR 1 was only used for a few flights prior to the shuttle era and was primarily used for simulations and as a backup. MOCR 2, on the other hand, was where controllers sat and ran every Apollo flight except for Apollo 7. "The Eagle has landed" and "Houston, we've had a problem" both happened in MOCR 2. After Apollo, the room served as a shuttle FCR until 1992, when it was converted back to something resembling its early Apollo configuration and transformed into a tour stop. It was also used for other NASA events—personnel could book the room for meetings or show movies there. It was a frequent stop for VIP visitors and media who wanted to do something Apollo-related (Ars included, more than once!), and over the decades, the room slowly deteriorated. The carpet was stained and bare. The paint faded. And the consoles themselves, the objects of so much studious attention from generations of flight controllers, sat dark and silent. Random visitors could even run hands over the artifacts, casually pressing buttons and toggling switches that once perhaps were used for life-and-death purposes.

But with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing fast approaching in 2019, NASA finally had the ammunition it needed to push for the restoration—and now MOCR 2 shines like new.

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https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/behind-the-scenes-at-nasas-newly-restored-historic-apollo-mission-control/

2019-06-28 13:41:00Z
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