India launches spacecraft on Moon-landing mission

India launched a bid to become a leading space power Monday, sending up a rocket to put a craft on the surface of the Moon in what it called a "historic day" for the nation. Chandrayaan-2 -- or Moon Chariot 2 -- took off on time at 2:43 pm (0913 GMT) from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on an island off the coast of Andhra Pradesh state. Applause broke out in the mission control room as the rocket blasted off into the grey skies over the Indian Ocean and mission control announced that the orbiter had broken away from the rocket with no problem. "Today is a historic day for space, science and tech in India," Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chief K. Sivan said. The launch came a week after a fuel leak forced a previous attempt to be scrubbed 56 minutes before the scheduled blast-off. The South Asian nation is bidding to follow Russia, the United States and China in landing a spacecraft on the Moon. President Ram Nath Kovind watched the launch alongside 7,000 dignitaries and flag-waving children. The rocket carried an orbiter, a lander and a rover, and has been almost entirely designed and made in India. The 2.4-tonne (5,300-pound) orbiter is expected to circle the Moon for about a year, taking images of the surface, looking for signs of water, and studying the atmosphere. The lander -- named after Vikram A. Sarabhai, the father of India's space programme -- will carry the rover and be placed on the surface near the lunar South Pole. The operation is expected to take place in early September. ISRO scientists will remotely control the rover named Pragyaan -- "wisdom" in Sanskrit -- as it carries out experiments. It will work for one lunar day, the equivalent of 14 Earth days, studying rocks and soil on the Moon's surface.

- National pride -

Former NASA scientist Kumar Krishen said India's space agency should be praised for taking on ambitious projects such Chandrayaan-2. "We should keep in mind that space exploration is risky as many systems have failed in the past and many lives lost," he told AFP. Aside from propelling India into the rarefied company of spacefaring nations, Chandrayaan-2 also stands out because of its low cost. About $140 million has been spent on preparations for the mission, a much smaller price tag compared with similar missions by other countries. The United States -- which is marking the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong becoming the first human on the Moon -- spent the equivalent of more than $100 billion on its Apollo missions. Chandrayaan-2, and India's space programme as a whole, are a source of national pride. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has vowed to send a manned mission into orbit by 2022, and India also hopes to seek out lucrative commercial satellite and orbiting deals.

The new mission comes almost 11 years after the launch of India's first lunar mission -- Chandrayaan-1 -- which orbited the Moon and searched for water.

India to make new bid to launch Moon rocket on Monday

India will make a new bid to launch a landmark mission to the Moon on Monday, a week after aborting lift-off at the last minute because of a fuel leak, officials said. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said it had rescheduled the launch of Chandrayaan-2, or Moon Chariot-2, for 2:43 pm (0913 GMT) on Monday. India is aiming to become just the fourth nation after Russia, the United States and China to land a spacecraft on the Moon. Indian space chiefs called off the planned launch of the rocket 56 minutes before blast-off on Monday morning because of what ISRO called a "technical snag". Media reports quoted ISRO scientists saying a helium fuel leak had been detected. India has spent about $140 million on preparations for the project, which is one of the cheapest among international space powers. By comparison, the United States spent about $25 billion -- the equivalent of more than $100 billion in current prices -- on 15 Apollo missions in the 1960s and 70s. The rocket will launch from a space centre in Sriharikota, an island off the coast of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. It will carry an orbiter, lander and a rover which has been almost entirely designed and made in India. The orbiter is meant to keep circling the Moon for about one year, taking pictures of the surface and sending back information on the atmosphere. A lander named Vikram will take the rover to the surface near the lunar South Pole.

India's first lunar mission in 2008 -- Chandrayaan-1 -- did not land on the Moon, but carried out a search for water using radar.

A soft landing on the Moon would be a huge leap forward in India's space programme, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi determined to launch a manned mission into space by 2022.

India also has ambitions to land a probe on Mars. In 2014, India became only the fourth nation to put a satellite into orbit around the Red Planet.

New Measurement Adds to Mystery of Universe's Expansion Rate

Astronomers have made a new measurement of how fast the universe is expanding, using an entirely different kind of star than previous endeavors. The revised measurement, which comes from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (http://www.nasa.gov/hubble), falls in the center of a hotly debated question in astrophysics that may lead to a new interpretation of the universe's fundamental properties. Scientists have known for almost a century that the universe is expanding, meaning the distance between galaxies across the universe is becoming ever more vast every second. But exactly how fast space is stretching, a value known as the Hubble constant, has remained stubbornly elusive. Now, University of Chicago professor Wendy Freedman and colleagues have a new measurement for the rate of expansion in the modern universe, suggesting the space between galaxies is stretching faster than scientists would expect. Freedman's is one of several recent studies that point to a nagging discrepancy between modern expansion measurements and predictions based on the universe as it was more than 13 billion years ago, as measured by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite. As more research points to a discrepancy between predictions and observations, scientists are considering whether they may need to come up with a new model for the underlying physics of the universe in order to explain it. "The Hubble constant is the cosmological parameter that sets the absolute scale, size and age of the universe; it is one of the most direct ways we have of quantifying how the universe evolves," said Freedman. The discrepancy that we saw before has not gone away, but this new evidence suggests that the jury is still out on whether there is an immediate and compelling reason to believe that there is something fundamentally flawed in our current model of the universe."

In a new paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, Freedman and her team announced a new measurement of the Hubble constant using a kind of star known as a red giant. Their new observations, made using Hubble, indicate that the expansion rate for the nearby universe is just under 70 kilometers per second per megaparsec (km/sec/Mpc). One parsec is equivalent to 3.26 light-years distance.

This measurement is slightly smaller than the value of 74 km/sec/Mpc recently reported by the Hubble SH0ES (Supernovae H0 for the Equation of State) team using Cepheid variables, which are stars that pulse at regular intervals that correspond to their peak brightness. This team, led by Adam Riess of the Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland, recently reported refining their observations to the highest precision to date for their Cepheid distance measurement technique.

How to Measure Expansion
A central challenge in measuring the universe's expansion rate is that it is very difficult to accurately calculate distances to distant objects.

In 2001, Freedman led a team that used distant stars to make a landmark measurement of the Hubble constant. The Hubble Space Telescope Key Project team measured the value using Cepheid variables as distance markers. Their program concluded that the value of the Hubble constant for our universe was 72 km/sec/Mpc.

But more recently, scientists took a very different approach: building a model based on the rippling structure of light left over from the big bang, which is called the cosmic microwave background. The Planck measurements allow scientists to predict how the early universe would likely have evolved into the expansion rate astronomers can measure today. Scientists calculated a value of 67.4 km/sec/Mpc, in significant disagreement with the rate of 74.0 km/sec/Mpc measured with Cepheid stars.

Astronomers have looked for anything that might be causing the mismatch. "Naturally, questions arise as to whether the discrepancy is coming from some aspect that astronomers don't yet understand about the stars we're measuring, or whether our cosmological model of the universe is still incomplete," Freedman said. "Or maybe both need to be improved upon."

Freedman's team sought to check their results by establishing a new and entirely independent path to the Hubble constant using an entirely different kind of star.

Certain stars end their lives as a very luminous kind of star called a red giant, a stage of evolution that our own Sun will experience billions of years from now. At a certain point, the star undergoes a catastrophic event called a helium flash, in which the temperature rises to about 100 million degrees and the structure of the star is rearranged, which ultimately dramatically decreases its luminosity. Astronomers can measure the apparent brightness of the red giant stars at this stage in different galaxies, and they can use this as a way to tell their distance.

The Hubble constant is calculated by comparing distance values to the apparent recessional velocity of the target galaxies - that is, how fast galaxies seem to be moving away. The team's calculations give a Hubble constant of 69.8 km/sec/Mpc - straddling the values derived by the Planck and Riess teams.

"Our initial thought was that if there's a problem to be resolved between the Cepheids and the Cosmic Microwave Background, then the red giant method can be the tie-breaker," said Freedman.

But the results do not appear to strongly favor one answer over the other, say the researchers, although they align more closely with the Planck results.

NASA's upcoming mission, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), scheduled to launch in the mid-2020s, will enable astronomers to better explore the value of the Hubble constant across cosmic time. WFIRST, with its Hubble-like resolution and 100 times greater view of the sky, will provide a wealth of new Type Ia supernovae, Cepheid variables, and red giant stars to fundamentally improve distance measurements to galaxies near and far.

Pioneer satellites launched

The latest ESA Partnership Projects mission has launched two tiny supercomputing nanosatellites aboard a Soyuz rocket from Vostochny in Russia. The parallel supercomputing scalable devices, aboard the lightweight, shoebox-sized nanosatellites, can be programmed to both receive and process data while in orbit. This enables them to select high-quality data and immediately transfer it to Earth. Their owner, Spire Global, specializes in using continuous global monitoring to track aircraft, ships and weather patterns using a large constellation of 80 nanosatellites that report to a global network of ground stations. The two new satellites, developed under ESA's Pioneer programme, were designed, built and tested at Spire Global's factory in Glasgow, with support from the UK Space Agency. They were launched aboard a Soyuz Meteor rocket on 5 July. Peter Platzer, chief executive of Spire Global, said: "We see these parallel supercomputing scalable satellites as being extremely important for the next phase of Earth observation applications for the benefit of all mankind. "Just one of our small satellites can collect over a terrabyte of data per day, which would be prohibitive to download. It has to be analysed in orbit so that true insights can be delivered to customers directly and in a timely fashion. A hurricane does not wait for a download window. "It is exciting to see ESA's continued support and focus on deploying these necessary data analytics and capabilities."

Khalil Kably, pioneer programme manager at ESA, said: "The whole idea of the Pioneer programme is to give European and Canadian industries access to space, rapidly and at low cost.

"As soon as they have an innovative idea, such as supercomputing by Spire here, we want them to be able to try it in orbit. It's the ability to go from a new idea to market very quickly, through in-orbit validation."

Methane vanishing on Mars

The processes behind the release and consumption of methane on Mars have been discussed since methane was measured for the first time for approx. 15 years ago. Now, an interdisciplinary research group from Aarhus University has proposed a previously overlooked physical-chemical process that can explain methane's consumption. For approx. 15 years ago, one could for the first time read about methane in Mars's atmosphere. This aroused great interest, also outside the scientific circles, since methane, based on our knowledge of methane on Earth, is considered a bio-signature, i.e. signs of biological activity and thus life. In subsequent years, one could read articles that alternately reported on methane's presence and absence. This variation led to doubts about the accuracy of the first methane measurements. Recent measurements of methane in Mars' atmosphere have now shown that its dynamics is real enough and the fact that sometimes only very low concentrations can be measured is due to an unresolved mechanism that makes methane disappear from the atmosphere and not a mis-measurement. The methane sources or the causes for its disappearance have not been identified at present. Especially the latter, the rapid disappearance of methane, lacks a plausible mechanistic explanation. The most obvious mechanism, namely the photochemical degradation of methane caused by UV radiation, cannot explain methane's rapid disappearance, which is a prerequisite for explaining the dynamics. Aarhus researchers have just published an article in the journal Icarus in which they propose a new mechanism that can explain the removal of methane on Mars. For years, the multidisciplinary Mars group has investigated the importance of wind-driven erosion of minerals for the formation of reactive surfaces under Mars-like conditions.

For this purpose, the research group has developed equipment and methods for simulating erosion on Mars in their "earthly" laboratories.

Based on Mars-analogue minerals such as basalt and plagioclase, the researchers have shown that these solids can be oxidized and gases are ionized during the erosion processes. Thus, the ionized methane reacts with the mineral surfaces and bonds to them.

The research team has shown that the carbon atom, such as methyl group from methane, directly binds to the silicon atom in plagioclase, which is also a dominant component of Mars' surface material.

What the researchers see in the laboratory could also explain the loss of methane on Mars. By this mechanism, which is much more effective than photochemical processes, methane could be removed from the atmosphere within the observed time and then deposited in the Martian source soil.

Affects the possibility of life
The research group has furthermore shown that these mineral surfaces can lead to the formation of reactive chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide and oxygen radicals, which are very toxic to living organisms, incl. bacteria.

The group's results are important for assessing the possibility of life on or near Mars' surface. In a number of follow-up studies, the researchers will now examine what is going on with the bound methane, and whether the erosion process in addition to the gases in atmosphere also changes or even completely removes more complex organic material, which can either originate on Mars itself or has come to Mars as part of meteorites.

The results thus have an impact on our understanding of the preservation of organic material on Mars and thus the fundamental issue of life on Mars - inter alia in connection with the interpretation of the results of the upcoming ExoMars rover, which ESA is expected to land on Mars in 2021.