Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart takes a walk in space, March 6, 1969.
(NASA)
This dramatic outburst from the nucleus of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko occured on August 12, just hours before perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun. Completing an orbit of the Sun once every 6.45 years, perihelion distance for this periodic comet is about 1.3 astronomical units (AU), still outside the orbit of planet Earth (at 1 AU). The stark image of the 4 kilometer wide, double-lobed nucleus in bright sunlight and dark shadows was taken by the Rosetta spacecraft’s science camera about 325 kilometers away. Too close to see the comet’s growing tail, Rosetta maintains its ringside seat to watch the nucleus warm and become more active in coming weeks, as primordial ices sublimating from the surface produce jets of gas and dust. Of course, dust from the nucleus of periodic comet Swift-Tuttle, whose last perihelion passage was in 1992 at a distance of 0.96 AU, fell to Earth just this week.
SpaceX and Boeing are currently developing crew transportation modules that will ferry US astronauts to and from the ISS. It’s part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, aimed at stimulating the private spaceflight sector, and it’s scheduled to begin in 2017.
This is the first time the space agency has entrusted the lives of its astronaut fleet to private companies. It’s a new model of space exploration with new methods for ensuring safety. NASA is holding these private companies to similar — if not higher — safety standards as it did for its Shuttle missions, but the level of oversight the space agency has during the vehicles’ development process is minimal. Instead, SpaceX and Boeing must meet a few hundred predefined safety requirements and demonstrate they can keep the astronauts alive if the rocket that’s carrying them falls apart. NASA doesn’t get much say in what the vehicles look like or how they work.
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For Krepon, the debate over the definitions of space weapons and the saber-rattling between Russia, China and the U.S. is unhelpfully eclipsing the more pressing issue of debris. “Everyone is talking about purposeful, man-made objects dedicated to warfighting in space, and it’s like we are back in the Cold War,” Krepon says. “Meanwhile, there are about 20,000 weapons already up there in the form of debris. They’re not purposeful—they’re unguided. They’re not seeking out enemy satellites. They’re just whizzing around, doing what they do.”
Astronauts on the International Space Station are ready to sample their harvest of a crop of “Outredgeous” red romaine lettuce from the Veggie plant growth system that tests hardware for growing vegetables and other plants in space.
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