ABSTACT
This paper intends to offer the reader an interesting biography about NASA and most of its space programs. The origins, how it developed and the space missions are presented in three chapters. The ideas which pervade the study are those of a NASA as the main International Space Station both in the past as long as the future that explores and studies The Universe and all its great mysteries.
3
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………….................….…...6 CHAPTER ONE NASA’S BEGINNING…………………………………………….….………………7 1.1 ORIGINS……………………………………………………………………..……………7
1.1.1
WORLD WAR II………………………………………………………….…..7
1.1.2
BALLISTIC MISSILES RELATED TO NASA……………..….....................7
1.1.3
SOVIET UNION AGAINST NASA……………………………….................8
1.2 NASA’S FIRST SATELIT………………………………………………….…..................8
CHAPTER TWO SPACE FLIGHT PROGRAMS………………………………………….……….…10 2.1 FULFIELD MISSIONS…………………………………………………………………..10 2.1.1 APOLLO MISSION…………………………………………………………...10 2.1.2 THE “HUBBLE TELESCOPE” MISSION……………………….…………..11 2.1.3 SKYLAB MISSION…...………………………………………………………12 2.2 FAILED MISSION……………………………………………………………………….12 CHAPTER THREE FUTURE PLANS FOR NASA……………………………….……..……………14 3.1 MANNED MISSION TO MARS………………………………………….……………..14 3.2 JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE……………………………………………….…………...14 3.3 TRANSITING EXOPLANET SURVERY SATELITE (TESS)…………….…………...15 CONCLUSIONS………………………………………………………………………….…………….16 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………………………….…17
4
MOTTO
“A rough road leads to the stars.” “The difficult we do right away, the impossible, takes just a while longer.”
5
INTRODUCTION
It may well be argued that NASA has become the world's premier agent for exploration, carrying on in "the new ocean" of outer space a long tradition of expanding the physical and mental boundaries of humanity. Fifty years ago, however the agency that pushed the frontiers of aeronautics, took us to the moon, flew the space shuttle, built the International Space Station and revealed the secrets of the cosmos, was in its birth throes, and fundamental decisions were being made that profoundly shaped all that was to come. Maj. Gen. Charles Frank Bolden Jr., was nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the 12th Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He began his duties as head of the agency on July 17, 2009. As Administrator, Bolden leads a nationwide NASA team to advance the missions and goals of the U.S. space program. I chose to write about NASA because ever since I was a little child I was fascinated about everything related to the Universe and I also wanted to learn more about the Agency is working on knowing more about the Cosmos so I can feed my curiosity through TV news and documentaries. To that end, the first chapter of the present project introduces NASA’s birth and development, how it’s related to World War II and the technologies created at that time by the military to win the war. It also present the rivalry of the two super powers of the world competing in Space science. Chapter two is about NASA’s past space programs that revolutionized the way we see things in the Universe and they showed us that there are so many mysteries out there that are waiting to be discovered. Chapter three presents the future of NASA’s space missions, it reveals the long term plans to explore new worlds, work on new ideas, replace old satellites with new ones so that we will have more and better quality information, it will truly be an interesting story.
CHAPTER ONE NASA’S BEGINNING
6
1.1 ORIGINS 1.1.1 WORLD WAR II Like all historical events, the birth of NASA must be placed in the context of its times. Following World War II, the United States was in direct competition with the Soviet Union (the superpower that in 1991 disbanded into several sovereign nations including the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, etc.) for the hearts and minds of people around the world. It was not for the most part a shooting war, but a “Cold War,” a test of two very different systems of government. Technology was one means of measuring success and projecting power, and nothing was more powerful than the intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) being developed in the wake of World War II to deliver warheads. 1.1.2 BALLISTIC MISSILES RELATED TO NASA It was these missiles that brought human technology to the brink of space, and it was the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, that first put an object into orbit around Earth. Passing overhead with its faint radio signal as people watched and listened, the 183-pound satellite was a powerful symbol. It was followed in November by the even larger Sputnik II, which carried the dog Laika. Only in late January 1958 was the United States able to answer the challenge with Explorer 1, hoisted aloft by the Army’s rocket team led by Wernher von Braun, using rocket technology developed from World War II.
1.1.3 SOVIET UNION AGAINST NASA NASA’s birth was directly related to the launch of the Sputniks and the ensuing race to demonstrate technological superiority in space. Driven by the competition of the Cold War, on July 29, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, providing for 7
research into the problems of flight within Earth’s atmosphere and in space. After a protracted debate over military versus civilian control of space, the act inaugurated a new civilian agency designated the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The agency began operations on Oct.1, 1958. NASA began by absorbing the earlier National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), including its 8.000 employees, an annual budget of $100 million, three major research laboratories – the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory in Virginia, the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory in California, and the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Ohio – and two smaller test facilities. It quickly incorporated other organizations (or parts of them), notably the space science group of the Naval Research Laboratory that formed the core of the new Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., the Jet Propulsion Laboratory managed by the California Institute of Technology for the Army, and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Ala., where Wernher von Braun’s team of engineers was developing large rockets.
1.2 NASA’S FIRST SATELIT
Explorer 1 was the first satellite launched by the United States when it was sent into space on January 31, 1958. Following the launch of the Soviet Union's Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957, the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency was directed to launch a satellite using its Jupiter C rocket developed under the direction of Dr. Wernher von Braun. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory received the assignment to design, build and operate the artificial satellite that would serve as the rocket's payload. JPL completed this job in less than three months. The primary science instrument on Explorer 1 was a cosmic ray detector designed to measure the radiation environment in Earth orbit. Once in space this experiment, provided by Dr. James Van Allen of the University of Iowa, revealed a much lower cosmic ray count than expected. Van Allen theorized that the instrument may have been saturated by very strong radiation from a belt of charged particles trapped in space by Earth's magnetic field. The existence of these radiation belts was confirmed by another U.S. satellite launched two months later, and they became known as the Van Allen Belts in honor of their discoverer. Explorer 1 revolved around Earth in a looping orbit that took it as close as 354 kilometers to Earth and as far as 2,515 kilometers. It made one orbit every 114.8 minutes, or a total of 12.54 orbits per day. The satellite itself was 203 centimeters long and 15.9 centimeters in diameter. Explorer 1 made its final transmission on May 23, 1958. It entered Earth's atmosphere and burned up on March 31, 1970, after more than 58.000 orbits. The satellite weighed 14 kilograms. 8
Picture 1 – NASA’s logo
CHAPTER TWO SPACE FLIGHT PROGRAMS
2.1 FULFIELD MISSIONS
2.1.1 APOLLO MISSION
9
The U.S public's perception of the Soviet lead in putting the first man in space, motivated President John F. Kennedy to ask the Congress on May 25, 1961 to commit the federal government to a program to land a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s, which effectively launched the Apollo program. Apollo was one of the most expensive American scientific programs ever. It is estimated to have cost $ 205 billion in present - day US dollars. The first person to stand on the Moon was Neil Armstrong, who was followed by Buzz Aldrin, while Michael Collins orbited above. Five subsequent Apollo missions also landed astronauts on the Moon, the last in December 1972. Throughout these six Apollo spaceflights, twelve men walked on the Moon. These missions returned a wealth of scientific data and 381.7 kilograms of lunar samples. Topics covered by experiments performed included soil mechanics, meteoroids, seismology, heat flow, lunar ranging, magnetic fields, and solar wind. The Moon landing marked the end of the space race and as a gesture, Armstrong mentioned mankind when he stepped down on the Moon. NEIL ARMSTRONG: “GOOD LUCK MR. GORSKY” A little story which shows that some wishes come true. Be careful what you promise, sometimes anything can be possible. On 20 July 1969, the mission commander of Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong was the first person that ever stepped on the moon’s surface. His first words were: “One small step for man, one big step for mankind”. This event was shown on TV on Earth, before entering the space shuttle, Neil Armstrong said this next words: “Good luck mister Gorsky”. Many people from NASA thought that it was a remark on a rival soviet cosmonaut and curiosity made them search for such a person, yet they found no one on the Russian cosmonaut list or the American one. Over the years many asked Neil what he meant by “Good luck mister Gorsky”, yet he smiled back with no reply. On 5th July 1995 a reporter asked him the same mysterious question and finally he was able to answer because mister Gorsky died. In 1938, when I was a child, I was playing baseball with a friend and the ball accidently got in mister Gorsky’s yard, my neighbor at the time. Sneaking in the yard to get the ball I heard Mrs. Gorsky yelling at Mr. Gorsky: “Do you want me to fool around with you? I shall do that when our neighbor’s boy will get to the moon”.
10
Picture 2 – Neil Armstrong on the Moon, July 20, 1969.
2.1.2 THE “HUBBLE TELESCOPE” MISSION The most-loved of all NASA spacecraft, the Hubble Space Telescope has name recognition around the world. Its photos have changed the way everyday people figure themselves into the cosmos. The observatory has also radically changed science, making breakthroughs on astronomical issues too numerous to count. By finally sending up an optical telescope to peer at the sky from beyond Earth's turbulent atmosphere, NASA developed a tool that could reveal stars, planets, nebulae and galaxies in all their fully-detailed glory.
2.1.3 SKYLAB MISSION Skylab was the United States' first and only independently built space station. Conceived in 1965 as a workshop to be constructed in space from a spent Saturn IB upper stage, the 169,950 lb station was constructed on Earth and launched on May 14, 1973 atop the first two stages of a Saturn V, into a 235nautical-mile orbit inclined at 50° to the equator. Damaged during launch by the loss of its thermal protection and one electricity-generating solar panel, it was repaired to functionality by its first crew. It was occupied for a total of 171 days by 3 successive crews in 1973 and 1974. It included a laboratory 11
for studying the effects of microgravity, and a solar observatory. NASA planned to have a Space Shuttle dock with it, and elevate Skylab to a higher safe altitude, but the Shuttle was not ready for flight before Skylab's re-entry on July 11, 1979. To save cost, NASA used one of the Saturn V rockets originally earmarked for a canceled Apollo mission to launch the Skylab. Apollo spacecraft were used for transporting astronauts to and from the Skylab. Three three-man crews stayed aboard the station for periods of 28, 59, and 84 days. Skylab's habitable volume was 11,290 cubic feet (320 m3), which was 30.7 times bigger than that of the Apollo Command Module.
2.2 FAILED MISSION
During the launch of STS-107, Columbia's 28th mission, a piece of foam insulation broke off from the Space Shuttle external tank and struck the left wing. Most previous shuttle launches had seen minor damage from foam shedding, but some engineers suspected that the damage to Columbia was more serious. NASA managers limited the investigation, reasoning that the crew could not have fixed the problem if it were confirmed. When the Shuttle reentered the atmosphere, the damage allowed hot atmospheric gases to penetrate and destroy the internal wing structure, which caused the spacecraft to become unstable and slowly break apart. After the disaster, Space Shuttle flight operations were suspended for more than two years, similar to the aftermath of the Challenger disaster. Construction of the International Space Station was put on hold; the station relied entirely on the Russian Federal Space Agency for resupply for 29 months until Shuttle flights resumed with STS-114 and 41 months for crew rotation until STS-121. Several technical and organizational changes were made, including adding a thorough on-orbit inspection to determine how well the shuttle's thermal protection system had endured the ascent, and keeping a designated rescue mission ready in case irreparable damage was found. Except for one final mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Subsequent missions were flown only to the International Space Station so that the crew could use it as a "safe haven”.
12
CHAPTER THREE FUTURE PLANS FOR NASA
3.1 MANNED MISSION TO MARS
A manned mission to Mars has been the subject of science fiction, engineering, and scientific proposals throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. The plans comprise proposals not only to land on but in the end for settling on and terraforming Mars, while exploiting its moons Phobos and Deimos. 13
Preliminary work for missions has been undertaken since the 1950s, with planned missions typically taking place 10 to 30 years in the future. The list of manned Mars mission plans in the 20th century shows the various mission proposals that have been put forth by multiple organizations and space agencies in this field of space exploration.
3.2 JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE
The James Webb Space Telescope, previously known as Next Generation Space Telescope, is a planned space telescope optimized for observations in the infrared, and a scientific successor to the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope. The main technical features are a large and very cold 6.5-meter diameter mirror and four specialized instruments at an observing position far from Earth, The combination of these features will give unprecedented resolution and sensitivity from longwavelength visible to the mid-infrared, enabling its two main scientific goals – studying the birth and evolution of galaxies, and the formation of stars and planets. JWST's capabilities will enable a broad range of investigations across many subfields of astronomy. One particular goal involves observing some of the most distant objects in the Universe, beyond the reach of current ground and space based instruments. This includes the very first stars, the epoch of reionization, and the formation of the first galaxies. Another goal is understanding the formation of stars and planets. This will include imaging molecular clouds and star-forming clusters, studying the debris disks around stars, direct imaging of planets, and spectroscopic examination of planetary transits. 3.3 TRANSITING EXOPLANET SURVERY SATELITE (TESS)
TESS is a space telescope planned for the NASA program Small Explorer, designed to search exoplanets using the transit method. Led by the Institute of Technology in Massachusetts, funded by Google TESS was one of the eleven proposals selected for NASA’s funding in September 2011. In 5 th April 2013, it was announced that TESS, along with Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), were selected to launch 2017. Once launched, the telescope would conduct a two-year all-sky program for exploring transiting exoplanets around nearby and bright stars. TESS would be equipped with four wide-angle telescopes 14
and charge-coupled device (CCD) detectors, with a total size of 67 megapixels. Science data, which are pixel sub arrays around each of up to 10,000 target stars per field, are transmitted to Earth every two weeks for analysis. Full-frame images with an effective exposure time of two hours are transmitted to the ground as well, enabling astrophysicists to search the data for an unexpected, transient phenomenon, such as the optical counterpart to a gamma-ray burst. TESS will carry out the first space-borne all-sky exoplanet transit survey, covering 400 times as much sky as any previous mission, including Kepler. It will identify thousands of new planets in the solar neighborhood, with a special focus on planets comparable in size to the Earth. TESS will be in a special orbit, one that is not too close, and not too far, from both the Earth and the Moon. As a result, every two weeks TESS will approach close enough to the Earth for high data-downlink rates, while remaining above the planet's harmful radiation belts. This special orbit will remain stable for decades, keeping TESS' sensitive cameras in a stable temperature range.
CONCLUSIONS
Searching through NASA’s history I learned many new and exciting things not only about the universe but also about our own planet. It is the main space agency in the world and without it we would not have had many of the technologies and possibilities that we are having today.
15
I believe that NASA will continue to develop and in the near future the question that’s been haunting us since the dawn of civilization will be answered that is “are we alone in the universe?”. Ultimately thanks to NASA we will be able to travel within the Cosmos and find new Earthlike planets that in the worst case scenario the Earth will end one day and we will be able to colonize other planets and survive. Even though in the past there were many failed missions, some of them even ended up with death, they never gave up because they know that one cannot learn without ever making a mistake and that leaving the planet with a space shuttle will not always go as planned. I will end this conclusion with NASA's vision: “To reach for new heights and reveal the unknown so that what we do and learn will benefit all humankind”. To do that, thousands of people have been working around the world and off of it for more than 50 years, trying to answer some basic questions. What's out there in space? How do we get there? What will we find? What can we learn there, or learn just by trying to get there, that will make life better here on Earth?
REFERENCES
1. Galloway Eilene. “Sputnik and the Creation of NASA: A Personal Perspective” in NASA: 50 Years of Exploration and Discovery (Faircount, 2008), pp. 48-49. Retrieved March 15, 2014 from http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/whyweexplore/Why_We_29.html . 16
2. Griffith Alison. “The National Aeronautics and Space Act”: A Study of the Development of Public Policy (Washington,
D.C.,
1962).
Retrieved
April
2,
2014
from
http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/whyweexplore/Why_We_29.html . 3. Hunley J. D., editor. “The Birth of NASA”: The Diary of T. Keith Glennan (NASA SP - 4105, 1993). Retrieved January 25, 2014 from http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4105/sp4105.htm . 4. Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopedia. “NASA’s space flight programs”. Retrieved November 7, 2013 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA .
5. Red
Orbit.
“Future
plans
for
NASA”.
Retrieved
December
11,
2013
from
http://www.redorbit.com/topics/nasa/ .
6. Air space. “Space Shuttle Columbia
disaster”. Retrieved
http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/ .
17
February 15, 2014 from
