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India is planning an unmanned mission to Luna in 2007. The US, Russia (when it was the USSR), and Japan are the only nations to have done so, or so they say. For some reason, I thought that ESA, the European Space Agency, had sent one also.

Nope, the ESA has never had a lunar mission, however we are currently building SMART-1 which is due to be ready in early 2003, and will be launched as an Ariane-5 auxiliary payload.

SMART-1 is actually a testbed platform for the ESA's Solar Electric Propulsion system, with the primary goal being to test this and other technologies that will be useful for deep space missions, however the craft will carry both X-ray and IR spectrometers for inspecting the lunar surface.

ESA is just preparing it's first trip to moon, it's project called SMART-1. It's going to travel to moon, but the key of the project is to test the new propulsion system, which is planned to be used for much longer trips.

ESA is just preparing it's first trip to moon, it's project called SMART-1. It's going to travel to moon, but the key of the project is to test the new propulsion system, which is planned to be used for much longer trips.

If you are willing to say that, you clearly haven't looked at it. Arianespace relies entirely on the international launching market for its business (unlike US firms which get regular US Defense Department business), and is only asking for money from the EU because the worldwide market has plummeted by 30%.
As for the previous mars lander missions, the Viking landers only took samples from the surface of the soil, where they would have been exposed to oxidation. BeagleII will take samples from up to a metre down. It also has a corer/grinder to expose the interior of rocks for analysis. And no-one has measured the UV flux on the surface of Mars before. This mission is doing things that no-one has done before. And as for the cost of the entire Mars Express mission - well, divide it by everyone in the EU and it is less than 33 pence. More of my tax money goes in subsidising opera (not the browser, the large people singing) than that...
More details here.

• SMART-1 from ESA (the only one this BBC article mentions)
• LUNAR-A from ISAS/NASDA (Japan).
• SELENE also from ISAS.
• TrailBlazer and Electra from TransOrbital Inc.
• Lunar Retriever from AppliedSpace Resources
• IceBreaker from Lunacorp
• Lunar Service from Celestis (you have to be dead...)
• Lunar Architecture is a subject of study for HJ Rombaut, including a recent Lunar Base design workshop
• Bill Mook's lunar tours
• The Artemis Project

No, you're not. And what I like most about this story is that, when you follow the links through to the ESA SMART-1 stuff, you can see that, underneath all the grown-up grant-aided professional image, they've got the same wide-eyed enthusiasm we got sitting in front of those broadcasts - Apollo 11 and the other moon landings I can just about remember being sat in front of because this was important, but Apollo-Soyuz I was old enough to have some idea why it was so important and exciting.

And when we look at the SMART-1 site, what do we see? Lunar survey craft, great in itself, about time too, but in addition, it's a test mission to see if their ion drive (with pretty blue exhaust) will do the job for their probe to Mercury

It's great to see that the ESA understand the importance of keeping this stuff exciting, and of communicating that excitement with the public. It's my tax money that goes into this, and I'm very happy to see what they're doing with it.

Because, 27 years ago, I was really looking forward to living in the Space Age, and it seems to have been mislaid somewhere in the intervening.

TomV

No, you're not. And what I like most about this story is that, when you follow the links through to the ESA SMART-1 stuff, you can see that, underneath all the grown-up grant-aided professional image, they've got the same wide-eyed enthusiasm we got sitting in front of those broadcasts - Apollo 11 and the other moon landings I can just about remember being sat in front of because this was important, but Apollo-Soyuz I was old enough to have some idea why it was so important and exciting.

And when we look at the SMART-1 site, what do we see? Lunar survey craft, great in itself, about time too, but in addition, it's a test mission to see if their ion drive (with pretty blue exhaust) will do the job for their probe to Mercury

It's great to see that the ESA understand the importance of keeping this stuff exciting, and of communicating that excitement with the public. It's my tax money that goes into this, and I'm very happy to see what they're doing with it.

Because, 27 years ago, I was really looking forward to living in the Space Age, and it seems to have been mislaid somewhere in the intervening.

TomV

And to add to this comment, there are some good reasons for thinking of the moon:

1) Low gravity as opposed to no gravity
Any degassing from equipment or other debris would settle to the ground, instead of hanging around the mirror... Of course, you would alos need periodic "cleaning" of the mirror.

2) Raw materials
You could imagine that since the moon is made up of silicates and other minerals like titanium, you'd have a chance of constructing the mirrors in place. Like solar powered robots mining and the extruding glass and mirror in the vacuum to be then formed into mirror and placed. (I still need to work out the minor details...)

3) Stability
Vibrations could quickly be damped, and astronauts would have less problems as they bumped it around.

There are problems, like the issue of the sun blinding it for a decent part of the month, but I'm sure these effects could be minimized by placing it in a crater or other such terrain.

Heard about ESA yet, Anonymous Coward?

Unfortunately, Gaia is not scheduled to launch until 2010. Until then, I wonder if a spacecraft like SOHO, (particularly the LASCO instrument) could look for asteroids? I've asked one of the project scientists (via email) about it. I'll post again if I find out anything good.

In the meantime, maybe one of YOU would like to search back in the archive of LASCO images and find the asteroid? You'll be famous if you find it!

Unfortunately, Gaia is not scheduled to launch until 2010. Until then, I wonder if a spacecraft like SOHO, (particularly the LASCO instrument) could look for asteroids? I've asked one of the project scientists (via email) about it. I'll post again if I find out anything good.

In the meantime, maybe one of YOU would like to search back in the archive of LASCO images and find the asteroid? You'll be famous if you find it!

There are other's than NASA too - dont think NASA is the only one around just because they were first. For instance European Countries put money into European Space Agency and have own telescopes etc. not like americans put money into that ;). ESA is also doing their part on ISS.

The Canadian mission is undoubtedly a robotic one (i.e. not manned). Since the EU has an unmanned mission on the way as well (Mars Express), then it's hardly surprising Canada has the technological expertise to do likewise.

Second, remember the Mars Climate Orbiter? NASA lost that one thanks to a confusion between metric and imperial units. "Mission control computers had incorrectly gauged the velocity of the craft throughout the entire four-month trip from Earth to Mars." Oops.

By the way, as a pilot, I have to tell you that I certainly would not count on an autopilot being bug-free either. (Probably one reason my flight instructor made me learn five different ways to disable it should it start misbehaving.)

Well, we actually have a pretty good idea which are the closest ones within a few hundred light years (barring the really dim red dwarfs and whatnot, of which there are probably plenty). The Hipparcos mission, flown by the European Space Agency did an all-sky survey of the distances to over 100000 stars by measuring the "wobble" of these stars relative to the backround as the Earth moves around the sun (called parallax).

An even more exciting mission is coming up in the next decade or so called the GAIA mission which will get accurate measurements for the distances of over one billion stars (about 1% of the entire galaxy!)

Here, at JPL.
For reasons that escape me, the bicycling site bikindex has some nice shots, here .
The European Space Agency here.

The Gardener

I don't see this article as saying that Canada is going to rescue anything. Rather, they are lining up along with Europe to complain (with some justice, since NASA is not upholding the ISS agreements as they currently stand). Now, I suppose if a nation complains enough and is willing to use this as a bargaining chip (e.g. in trade talks or whatever kind of talks matter to the US), then complaining becomes a kind of action. But a much more direct sort of rescue, a more obviously effective one, would be to come up with some funding. Europe once built a half-scale prototype of (some portions of) a crew return vehicle, but in recent years that activity has changed to "well, maybe we could build a few components for the US crew return vehicle, that would be cheaper. Well, is Europe prepared to build their own crew return vehicle? Or pay Russia to supply more Soyuzes?

The other amusing aspect of this whole thing is the number of times that the US has cancelled its part of a project (shuttle, partially; some science satellite in the 80's the name of which is at home; even Spacelab in a sense), and the fact that Europe (and other partners) fail to learn. It is like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown time after time, and Europe seems to always line up for another kick. I guess Canada is now joining them.

IANAA, but I have a few comments neverthe less :)

First of all, visible light just isn't the best spectrum to do astronomy in for a lot of things, especially not the detection of extrasolar planets. Infrared radiation, unhindered by most space dust, and lower in energy, is clearly superior for studying things that are not giant balls of gas. The Next Generation Space Telescope and the Terrestrial Planet Finder both use infrared radiation to study objects of great interest that are difficult to study with something like the HST.

Interferometry, the technology you refer to that allows telescopes to combine their phase information to generate an image with angular resolution of that of a single larger telescope (through something known as apature synthesis) is only one of the many uses of intereferometry. Perhaps much more exciting than that is the ability of the Terrestrial Planet Finder to use nulling interferometry to selectively block out the radiation from a star, without blocking out the much fainter (millions of times less) glow of a circling planet.

Unfortunately the earth's atmosphere is mostly opaque to infra-red light, and room temperature objects (like most of the surface of the earth, and the telescopes on it) generate so much infra-red radiation that it makes it nearly impossible to do any far-infrared studies from the ground. The Darwin Project web site has a good explaination about the reasons terrestrial planet hunting should be done in space.

Ground based observatories will always have a place, however eventually it will be a matter of cost and convenience rather than any technical superiority.

Not saying this isn't cool, but it's mostly postponing the inevitable day when very little new astronomy can be done inside the confines of an atmosphere....

Point 1) Before you talk about human rights, think about the fact that the U.S. is the country with the most death sentences. And frankly, when it comes to U.S. companys investing in China... This human rights thing is a fig leaf if you ask me.

Point 2) Europe *has* a space program, called ESA (European Space Agency, d'uh). Together with the U.S., they have people up in the ISS (and a good part of ISS has been transported up there by ESA's Ariane). However, they have an eye on economics, and such a program is very expensive. I think the rationale is: "We want to be able to get people up in space, they want to be able to get people up in space, this is expensive, we are on good terms... Let's do it together." Oh, and about communism: It's not that much of red flag in Europe: Don't forget, Communism is a nice vision. The Soviet Union or China don't have anything to do with Communism (Read Marx' and Engels' book if you don't belive me). They are/were dictatorships.

Side note: I'm not a communist, but I still think that labelling China as a communist state is unfair for commnuism.

Greets,
Anno.

According to the specs, the link laser will operate at a mean power of 60mW. Using F = P/c, we get a force of roughly 200fN (200 femto Newtons!). Just to give you some idea of the effect that would have, Artemis' mass at launch is 3100kg, so this means that if it was to emit a 60mW beam in the same direction for 10 years, its speed would change by approximately .01 mm per sec.

Forget space junk ... ENVISAT is being launched on an Ariane 5 rocket (one of the only rockets large enough to carry this beast of a satellite), and the last Ariane 5 launch had problems with its last stage. Of the two satellites it carried, one ended up a writeoff, and the other (another ESA satellite, meant to relay data from ENVISAT, called Artemis - here's a report of the recovery operation) will have to use most of its fuel just to reach the proper orbit, greatly reducing its operational life.

They've been investigating the problem since July, and that's the reason ENVISAT's launch has been delayed until 2002. It's all very scary, having so much riding on that one launch.

says here that:

"The on-board recording system is composed of two solid state recorders (SSR) with 70 Gbits capacity each, and one tape recorder (TR), 30 Gbits capacity as back up for low rate data recording."

It's about halfway down the page.

1. Spectrometers - These are good for checking atmospheric content and content of the surface below. This is useful to see how much ozone is where, or if there is a lot of chemical x in the ocean, ground, or atmosphere. There is also a radar there to measure the water vapor in the atmosphere. This is useful to metorologists.

2. Mapping - The SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) can make 3-d topographic maps of the earth.

3. Support - There is a laser altimeter and Radio Alitmeter used for ranging to further enhance the measurements from the first two categories.

This is the link to the ENVISAT website

we want to retain an overview, for example, of ocean water quality, of greenhouse gases or temperature distribution in the atmosphere, and to be able to establish the extent to which tropical forests are being cut down
I see statistics about this every day in the newspaper. Clearly, we can measure all these things from the ground - what does a satellite give us? Is it just there for the global view?

SCIAMACHY shows the consequences of forest fires, industrial emissions, arctic haze, dust storms and volcanic eruptions.
Whatever gases get released into the atmosphere, stay in the atmosphere. Big news.

Once their presence is identified from space, poisonous algae can be prevented from spreading
Help me understand why anyone cares enough about poisonous algae to send a satellite into space.

So in order to get some answers, I went to the satellite's web page and found myself overwhelmed by the amount of incomprehensible information. The page is basically a sales portal for scientists who want to buy the data, but doesn't give any information comprehensible to a little layman like me.

So, does anyone have a good source that will explain to me why I should care one snippet about this satellite, and not think that ESA just blew E2.3 billion on the world's biggest piece of space debris?

The dutch entrance for this race looks really serious, the even got help from ESA. They are testing a new type of solarcell which is to be used on communication satelites. Most of the competitors in the WSR are universities (so it this one) but this is proffesional material !!

Perhaps you're referring to earlier, more ambitious plans that I'm not aware of?

Geez, take an anti-paranoia pill dude. If anything opening up the space program will reduce industry corruption. The only way you'd get a space monopoly is if the government mandates it.

What happens when someone gets a monopoly in space? Everytime you try to star gaze you have to distinguise the stars from the MS logos?

I'm sure the ESA and NASDA will have a good laugh at the attempt. They aren't going to stand idily by you know.

If we were to commericialize space, there will need to be some heavy duty restrictions.

WRONG! Aside from some restrictions on safety similar to the airline industry, you want to open it up as wide as possible. Openness and competition are the cure to corruption and monopoly, not the cause!

this site has a neat-o HTML app which describes the spacecraft itself. Poke around a bit..

This mission is somewhat similar to that of the Giotto probe in 1986. Here is the link to the ESA site with more information about Giotto. But where Giotto was a dedicated mission, designed to take pictures and collect data of a comet core, the DS1 comet mission is "just" a great bonus mission.

In a few years we will be able to select the optimum place for the first Lunar base. After that, we should send a few robotic landers to study the places in more detail. And after that, we should get a base over there. I think it would take less than one decade to get the base there. Perhaps we should start lobbying the politicians, as otherwise they will do nothing.

ESA is making a number of contributions that I would consider "significant", such as the Columbus laboratory. Other nations provide significant parts also. I would be surprised if ESA's spending on the ISS is significantly below that of NASA.

One of my beefs with Enemy of the State, apart from the fact that the satellites appeared to hover over the target was the fact that they appeared to be unaffected by the weather. There were scenes where it was raining and yet they were able to get wonderful overhead optical imagery. Last time I checked, if it's cloudy, all you're going to see it white, basically.

If you want to "see" through clouds, use synthetic aperture radar. Of course, you'll have to use a non-American satellite like Canada's RADARSAT or ESA's ERS... ;)

anyone who can explain why canada is special member of european space agency ? wouldnt it be much more logical to 1) start own agency 2) join with usa into some kind of north american space agency (nasa :)


list of esa member states

I believe NASA, or ESA, or someone like those guys should really send 2 or 3 probes out there specifically made so that their trajectory can be very precisely monitored, but also made in order to minimize other possible factors, like gas tanks leaking and that sort of stuff.

Probably something like an advanced GPS satelite, without any propulsion means, as passive as possible, should be used.

ESA has an interesting project, not directly related to this, but witch perhaps will help a lot in revealing more about gravity nature.

Instead of dumping our money in ISS, space agencies should endeavour in less expensive and more productive stuff... like this one.

We could also send a probe to Pluto, never visited before, before it's atmosfere gets too cold due to it's orbit getting the planet too far away from the sun. Now that all missions targeted there have been canceled this would be an extra objective for the mission, witch could make it more feasible and less expensive.

Obviously this is only me thinking... few persons seem to agree.

I'm sorry buddy, but that's just crap. If we canadians felt like building some great nationilstic ventures, we would, cost doesn't even venture into it. How many nations of 30 million people have G7 status eh? Us and Australia that's who - and there are scads of countries with way more people who can't claim that. We have definitely got the money to burn on meaningless nationalism if we wanted. The reason we don't do it is two-fold: firstly canadians just don't have any nationalist sentiments, or very little. Hell most of us don't even know what it is we identify with as a country. Secondly the business and political culture of our country is so tight-assed and conservative that they refuse to invest in anything canadian for fear that it will flop, despite the overwhelming evidence that as such a small nation we have an insane overabundance of intelligent, talented and creative people.

"I would like to keep it that way. Armstrong's lunar vacation didn't do anything for the human race (after all, the Russians had already had a successful moon landing with the Luna-9 well ahead of his arrival)"

Yes, the russians did put plenty of unmanned landers on the moon - the key word here being 'unmanned'. NASA also sent lots of unmanned orbiters and landers on the moon before Armstrong and company went. There is a huge difference in sending a robot out into space and sending people - the requirements for sending human life into the emptiness of space is much much more demanding.

I think trying to measure achievements of this kind in terms of dollars & cents returns or immediate gratification to the masses is a very small-minded and limited way to look, and typical of the canadian business culture I mentioned above. The achievements of NASA in the last half century are certainly some of the most important feats humanity has ever accomplished. Putting human beings not only outside of the thin tiny little biosphere in which we evolved, but fully onto another celestial body ranks up there with the discovery of fire and the wheel as some of the most significant events in our evolution. I don't know if you've ever been to see any of the NASA stuff at Cape Canaveral or not - but I definitely have the sense that it is a place that will rank up their with the pyramids of Giza or the Great Wall of China thousands of years from now as one of the most important human landmarks. Don't belittle the great achievements of the species with petty economical arguments - that is an insult not only to the people who achieved true lasting greatness but an insult to humanity in general.

"The nordic nations, the Netherlands and Finland, in particular, have the best human rights and social development records on earth and they've never engaged in the kind of nationalistic nonsense from which the space race has proceeded (the Swedes have a space program, mind you). Canada (and the United States) should aspire to such progressiveness."

And for your information, all the countries you mentioned DO participate in the European Space Agency, which is actively involved in building large portions of the International Space Station, as well as numerous other projects. Taken from slide 2 of ESA's website presentation ( http://www.esa.int/presentation/ ):

ESA has 15 member States :

Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Canada takes part in some projects under a cooperation agreement.

Well, If they send a few satallites to Mars equipped with communication hardware along with surveying stuff, etc- we would be able to communicate with anything there almost. And if there was multiple satallites doing certain tasks they could get the job done much quicker.

Mars Odyssey has that capability for future lander missions. Mars Climate Orbiter also had, but you know how that ended. Mars Global Surveyor can also provide a limited service, but it won't live there forever. The European Space Agency's Mars Express will also be able to act as a relay.

I think they plan on sending people to mars, that's why they are surveying... or atleast I hope they plan on it :)

Sure, they all like to dream... But IMHO it's going to be a long time before they get the credits for that.

http://www.esa.int/

Just landing on the surface has limited scientific use, any lander which wants to really investigate primordial bodies such as asteroids and comets need to be somewhat more firmly attached. Look at the Rosetta site for an idea of some of the problems that landing on and doing science with a comet can cause.
--

Rosetta will send probes to land softly on the surface of a comet. I've got a few friends on that project.

Well, I dunno. Apparently a Soyuz lifts off with 279.5 tons of fuel (we'll ignore the fact that much of that is LOX and pretend that it's all kerosene), and a 747 going NY to Tokyo takes off with about 125 tons, of which all certainly is kerosene. Roughly speaking, then, he's making the NY to Yokyo run and back in an empty jumbo jet -- extravagant, but hardly earth-shaking.

".global" -- makes sense for multinats orgs/corps.

I think that they should ease up on .int instead. Int is for international organizations formed by a treaty, that's OK, but then, what is meant by an internation organization is then defined to mean only inter-governmental organizations. I'll claim however, that it was never the intention of those who wrote the international law on treatises to come up with a general definition for "international organization". Now, the reason why I'm whining is that YMCA and ESA are not inter-governmental organizations, but yet they've got .int domains. Ain't fair. :-)

Look at one of my replies above. Of course NASA's PR machine advocates the microgravity environment, but so did SSC's PR machine advocate it's own high-energy studies.

The part of your post I had problems with was "and congress chose the boondoggle that will contribute approximately nil to actual science". That's a completely subjective statement. The 'science' that both projects would undertake are completely different. As we both seem to agree, one will advance basic physics knowledge, and another will advance various engineering/technology knowledge.

One aspect of study in microgravity will be astrobiology. Including effects of weightlessness on the human body, which will ultimately be necessary for any future space travel (ie, manned mars mission). Also, strange behaviors of materials without strong grav fields can be studied. Micrograv projects I know are underway are liquid interfaces and lectric arcing. Here's a list of micrograv experiments, but hopefully you don't distrust all of NASA-related reports as PR exaggerations. I'd wager that there are plenty more proposals, too.

YOu may think such studies will contribute nil to science, but many others disagree. I've also heard talks that new semiconductor fab methods may be done in micrograv. So maybe research on the space station can ultimately get you a better front-end detector.

and I do apologize for unsubstantiated claims made in one of the posts above. I posted some hearsay that some HEP physicists told me about LHC being able to do nearly all SSC could have. These physicists were working on the SSC, too. Two other posts responded to mine said SSC would have been higher energy than LHC could deliver. None are substantiated either way, maybe you could also confirm this?

gotta go to math methods class now, we'll talk later.

is that really advertising i see on the side of the rocket ?

I find /. Science/Space news strange at times, they post things like this which is far from news, but my note on the first high-resolution imaging to GRB host galaxies which is truly great stuff, was rejected.

The ESA launcher family Ariane is the leading commercial launcher by far. And it didn't get developed on a shoestring budget.

The ESA is an extremly successful agency, especially considering its origins as a transnational body for a group of nations not know for their large spending on Space affairs.

-----------------------------

But don't get discouraged, the change is more illusion than reality. The fact that the Internet doubles in size very fast has meant that the majority of the population at any given time are newbies. Another large fraction have gotten through the newbie stage and have become dismayed by how many more newbies have come along and ruined things. But in reality, things have stayed about as messed up as they ever were. The "change" most of you are experiencing is just the change in yourself relative to the state of the Internet.

And things may actually stabilize in the forseeable future. Eventually the flood of newbies must end. The global population can't grow as fast as Internet users. So things may actually get better. Maybe someday people won't even post warnings about blue star stamps to the whole world on Usenet.

In reality the Internet is still a place you can go, get some data from a satellite (SOHO) orbiting at the L1 point between the earth and sun in near real-time, and discover new comets the pro's overlooked as they whiz past the surface of the Sun. (here's how) And that's awsome!

a night launch from the Cape is a beautiful sight.

I'm not sure how common it is -- it's probably been published everywhere -- but the picture on the ESA's site is probably the best shuttle picture I've seen. Ever.

First, the Keck observations are on the net at Titan, with plenty of info on the adaptive optics technology they used to get a better view than Hubble or Voyager I.

Next, visit "The Nine Planets" and their page on Saturn or Titan to get a broad view of what is being researched and who is doing it.

This leads us ot Cassini and the expected observations of Titan. Thanks to the Keck observations, there should be a lot of interest in Cassini's Titan probe. As noted on the Huygens Titan Probe site, on their Why Titan page, the peculiar nature of Titan, with its plentiful organics and opaque atmosphere, have been well known and of great interest since Voyager.

But anyone who wanted to know already knew. So why are we makig a slashdot fuss over mass media coverage of anything scientific?

How come this is news now?

Because of this.