New England Public Radio

If ET wants to phone home, this is not the week to do it. NASA’s phone lines are down, as is its website and many twitter feeds. All have been silenced by the government shutdown, whose far-reaching consequences are now stretching into space.

The shutdown began on Tuesday, after Republicans and Democrats in the House of Representatives failed to come to an agreement over the federal budget. Most of the government’s nonessential services have ground to a halt, and among the hardest-hit agencies is NASA.

One of the few lines of communication that remains open is with the International Space Station, where six astronauts, including two from NASA, are still working in orbit. A skeleton crew remains at Mission Control in Houston, talking to the astronauts and trying to keep them occupied.

“We just have some new people up on the space station getting used to the environment and I think it’s good for them to know they’ve got full support from the ground,” Mike Trenchard, a contractor working at Mission Control, told NPR member station KUHF.

NASA’s other space missions are all unmanned. Many are run by outside institutions, and so for the moment, they’re unaffected. Curiosity is still driving across Mars, thanks to researchers employed by the California Institute of Technology and other universities. Probes to study Pluto, Mercury and the Sun are all also up and running. And then there’s the Hubble Space Telescope.

“The Hubble is open for business and doing science as we speak,” says Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which runs the Hubble for NASA. The Institute has enough cash on hand to keep Hubble going for a few more weeks, provided nothing goes wrong. But in space, things can go wrong. Stray radiation can strike at any time.

“One of these very high energy particles from the sun can cause a spike in the electronics,” Mountain says. It happens several times a year, and when it does Hubble goes into a protective, safe mode.

“It swings the space craft away from the sun and closes down all the instruments and just sits there,” he says.

The only way for the Hubble to resume observations is for ground control to reboot it. But ground control is run by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which is currently closed. So if something happens, Hubble will just have to sit there, in orbit, until the shutdown ends.

The shutdown is hardest is for space probes preparing to leave the planet. Bruce Jakosky is in charge of a mission to Mars called MAVEN. The $671 million orbiter will study Mars’s atmosphere. This mission can only launch when the planets Mars and Earth are aligned.

“We have a 20-day period in which we can launch, this time around, and that runs from Nov. 18 to Dec. 7,” Jakosky says.

Researchers were working feverishly at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, getting MAVEN ready to go. But yesterday the shutdown started. They had to turn everything off and leave the building. Now nobody can get in. The only way Jakosky can see his spacecraft is via a webcam they set up before they left.

“We’re anxious to get back to work, we’re anxious to get back on track,” he says. “After about a week I’m going to get really concerned.”

If the shutdown runs longer, they could miss their launch window. The next one won’t come until 2016.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Scrutinizing the books of government agencies can turn up lavish parties or illicit trips at the taxpayers’ expense. But not every investigation turns out that way. And when they don’t, the hunt for waste can appear to be a waste itself.

Such appears to be the case with a recent inquiry involving NASA and Viking re-enactors. This whole saga began with an idea from Ved Chirayath, an aeronautics graduate student at Stanford University who loves photography. He was talking over what to shoot one day with a colleague, and thought of Vikings.

“In the San Francisco Bay there’s all these marshes, and so for some reason both of us had in our heads a picture of one of these Viking ships landing in this marsh,” Chirayath says.

Chirayath had a small grant from Stanford to take science-themed portraits. He was also working nearby at NASA’s Ames Research Center. NASA and Vikings are sort of related — both are known for exploration (NASA’s first Martian landers were named Viking I and Viking 2).

And the Ames center had another connection to Vikings: Pete Worden, the center’s director, likes to dress like one.

“I had once seen Dr. Worden give a monthly talk at NASA Ames on sort of the state of all things cool at NASA, and he gave that talk in a Viking costume,” Chirayath says.

Worden likes all sorts of costumes, actually. He and a few other officials were game with Chirayath’s plan for a Viking portrait in the marshes, so Chirayath rounded up some Viking re-enactors from the Internet. They agreed to do it for free. “We had all these Vikings come out that were just really enthusiastic about NASA and were just willing to help in any way they could,” he says.

They all gathered on a December afternoon last year for the shoot. The photos may have been a bit random, but it was a lot of fun.

Until last month. An anonymous concerned citizen contacted Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley with a lot of questions about the Viking photos: Were the people on the clock when they were doing this? Was there any taxpayer money involved?

Around the same time, Chirayath got a long telephone call from an investigator. NPR has learned that the call was actually part of a second investigation by NASA’s independent Office of Inspector General.

“It was multiple phone calls,” he says. “I had to surrender all the emails pertaining to the shoot, communications with the Viking group, communications with virtually everyone involved in that process.”

Jack Garrett, who leads the Vikings of Bjornstad re-enactor troupe, denies receiving any inappropriate booty from NASA officials: “From a Viking standpoint, there wasn’t much pillaging involved,” Garrett says. “The full extent of our compensation was some greeting cards that Ved had made of his own photographs, and some bottled water.”

Chirayath adds that he scrupulously avoided using any NASA resources for the shoot. “I was very careful to dot all my i’s and cross all my t’s,” he says.

The inspector general won’t discuss how much all this cost, but Chirayath did a quick calculation, totaling up the number of interviews, multiplied by the work hours, multiplied by the salary of the investigator and others involved. “I came to a lower-end budget of around $40,000, and an upper end of around $600,000,” he says. That’s far more than the cost of a professional photo shoot, even if NASA had paid for it, he says.

Grassley says that these sorts of inquiries are not part of a Viking witch hunt, but that asking questions like this are part of his job as a senator.

“I have a constitutional responsibility for oversight, to make sure that the laws are faithfully executed and that the money is spent according to congressional intent,” he says.

NASA declined to go on a recording, but a spokesperson told NPR that their investigation has just concluded and found no government resources were used in the shoot. Grassley’s office tells NPR they’re largely satisfied with the outcome, though they’re planning to speak to investigators later this week.

Garrett says a Viking investigation would have gone far differently: “I bring my sword; you bring your sword; we both bring three shields,” he says. “The winner is obviously correct.”

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Imagine winning the World Series, the lottery and a Nobel Prize all in one day. That’s pretty much how scientists and engineers in mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., felt one year ago when the one ton, six-wheeled rover named Curiosity landed safely on Mars.

Within minutes, the rover began sending pictures back to Earth. In the last year it has sent back a mountain of data and pictures that scientists are sorting through, trying to get a better understanding of the early climate on Mars.

The landing site in Gale Crater was chosen because it looked like a spot where ancient rivers once spilled out onto a plane. One of Curiosity’s objectives was to answer the question whether such a place could once upon a time have been hospitable to life.

The answer seems to be yes. The rover drilled into a rock dubbed “John Klein” and performed a chemical and mineral analysis of what it was made of.

“The minerals that were present in this drilled sample were the kind that form only in the presence of water, and in fact form in the presence of water that’s friendly to life,” says Ashwin Vasavada, deputy project scientist for Curiosity.

The next question on the rover will be trying to answer is, When was the water there? To do that, Curiosity has begun a 5-mile trek to the foothills of Mt Sharp, a 3.4-mile-high mountain in the center of Gale Crater. Vasavada says the exposed rocks at the base of the mountain should help scientists assign dates to Mars’ watery past.

Even though the landing phase of the mission has been over for a year, the landing team’s work has continued. NASA engineer Adam Steltzer and his team have been analyzing telemetry data the rover sent back while it was descending to Mars.

“We found that we landed more slowly than we anticipated. Now it’s not that much more slowly — one or two inches a second more slowly than we anticipated — but maybe it’s a mark of how sharp our pencil was that that’s a big deal for us,” Steltzner says. “When we went back and looked at why that was, we’ve concluded that there was a gravity anomaly where we landed.”

The anomaly means the tug of gravity at the landing site is slightly less than it is for the rest of the planet. According to Steltzner, the possibility of such an anomaly hadn’t been considered by the landing team. “And that’s sort of where pride cometh before a fall,” says Steltzner. “We felt that we knew something that clearly we didn’t know well enough.”

In this case, what they did know was more than enough to allow Curiosity to land safely on Mars.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

A dispute over the names of two new moons of Pluto is highlighting a broader battle over who names what in our solar system and beyond. On one side is the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a venerable consortium of astronomers that has set the naming rules for more than a century. On the other side, a growing number of astronomers who feel the IAU has unfairly designated itself as the intergalactic naming police.

The moons were discovered in 2011 and 2012 by the Hubble Space Telescope. When first spotted they were given lengthy numerical identifiers; but until yesterday, they didn’t have names. In astronomy, naming rights go to the finders, and in the case of the two moons, that honor went to a team led by Mark Showalter, a researcher at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

Showalter decided to put the names to a public vote. “We opened up a website that included a ballot page where people could just check the boxes of the names they liked best,” he says.

The team also took suggestions. On Twitter, William Shatner, who played Captain James Kirk on the TV series Star Trek, offered up “Vulcan,” the name of Mr. Spock’s home planet. Trekkies around the world got online and voted Vulcan way up — it was the runaway choice.

“I actually liked the name and we did propose it to the International Astronomical Union,” Showalter says. “But yeah, I kind of knew all along this was going to be a hard sell.”

Vulcan was the name given to a hypothetical planet astronomers thought they had discovered between the Sun and Mercury back in the 1800s. “Vulcan had already been used in the scientific literature, so it’s a name that had already been taken,” says Thierry Montmerle, the IAU’s general secretary.

There were other problems. Under IAU moon rules, Pluto’s moons should be named after mythical underworld figures. Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and volcanoes, didn’t qualify. Also, Vulcan might have infringed on the copyright of the original Star Trek series. Montmerle says the team should have checked with the IAU before starting the competition.

Pluto’s Moons were eventually named for the numbers two and three choices in the online vote: Kerberos and Styx. But many astronomers think it’s time to take another look at the whole naming process.

“We have an explosion these days of various places to name,” says Mark Sykes the director of the Planetary Science Institute, a non-profit dedicated to planetary exploration. Powerful telescopes are turning up new objects like the moons around Pluto. Spacecraft are mapping craters and mountains on Mars, and Jupiter’s moon Titan. And now astronomers are finding hundreds of planets orbiting other stars.

These extra planets are where the real fight is headed. Right now, they have numerical identifiers, but no popular names. Montmerle says the IAU is now drawing up rules to involve the public. The rules would keep the naming of planets orderly and be globally inclusive, he says.

But astronomers have started giving the planets popular names themselves, says Jason Wright, an astronomer at the Pennsylvania State University. “These sorts of popular names come up in press releases or even acknowledgements of a paper,” he says. Copyright isn’t apparently an issue for many of them. “There’s been least one planet that’s been dubbed ‘Tatooine’ because it orbits a pair of stars like the stars in Star Wars.”

Others are trying to involve the public in ways similar to the Pluto vote. One start-up company called Uwingu allows the public to nominate and vote for names of planets outside the solar system — in exchange for a small fee. “We’re using those funds to fuel grants in astronomy and space exploration,” says Alan Stern, a planetary scientist and Uwingu’s CEO.

Stern think the IAU does have a role in regulating the official, scientific designations of planets. But he feels the organization is going too far. “Even in the IAU’s bylaws, it’s pretty clear that the IAU is there to serve the astronomy community, he says. “It’s certainly not a police force for the public.”

Sykes, who holds a small stake in Uwingu, agrees: “The IAU can try to claim the Universe, but lots of star systems will be falling through its fingers,” he says.

Astronomer Jason Wright says he understands the name battle will continue, but he hopes people the public will keep it all in perspective. What matters most about the objects astronomers discover is what they can teach us about our place in the Universe. “In the grand scheme of things what we call these things is not that important,” he says.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Visitors to the new Atlantis exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center walk into the building under a big orange external fuel tank like the one the shuttle rode into space.

The tank’s a replica — but the shuttle inside is the real deal.

People who worked on the shuttle program, like retired technician Tom Boarman, are looking forward to reuniting with Atlantis.

“Well it will be a very familiar sight to me,” Boarman said. “I’ve seen it on the pad many times — all the shuttles.”

Inside the hall, the shuttle looks like it’s floating, weightless, against the dark walls and ceiling, while a video showing the curve of the earth from space plays behind the towering tail fin.

Astronaut Jim “JR” Reilly took his first spacewalk from Atlantis in 2001. Seeing the display for the first time was emotional for him.

“Because it took me back to that moment where I looked back and there’s the earth,” Reilly said. “That is a pretty powerful moment, to see the earth and everything you know right there, and it’s flying behind Atlantis.”

Unlike the other retired orbiters on display in California and Virginia, Atlantis is tilted on an angle. Visitors can see right inside the open cargo bay, with its robotic arm extended, then walk around and look at the belly, where re-entry has scorched the thousands of grey-black thermal tiles.

It’s a view Reilly remembers well after returning from space.

“And it would still be hot,” he said. “So you could put your hand up next to it and feel the heat radiating from the tiles and from the nose cap after we’d do our walk-around.”

Atlantis flew 33 missions, but it was built to fly 100 times, so this museum display is bittersweet for people who worked and flew on the shuttle.

The exhibit includes interactive displays. Visitors can crawl through a miniature model of the international space station, or zip down a slide mimicking the shuttle’s landing path.

There was stiff competition among museums for the retired orbiters after the shuttle program ended. But astronaut Reilly says the Kennedy Space Center is the right place for Atlantis.

“Ah, it had to be here. One of them had to be here, because this is where they lived.”

Copyright 2013 WMFE-FM. To see more, visit http://www.wmfe.org.

Smartphones can check e-mail, record videos and even stream NPR. Now NASA has discovered they make pretty decent satellites, too. Three smart phones launched into space this past Sunday are orbiting above us even now, transmitting data and images back to Earth. The PhoneSats, which cost just a few thousand dollars each, could usher in big changes for the satellite industry.

The PhoneSats started as a project among young engineers working at the NASA Ames Research Center in California. Jim Cockrell, the project’s manager, says it began as a hallway conversation. One noted that smartphone microprocessors are cheaper than those in satellites. So why not just use a smartphone as a satellite?

“It was sort of a whimsical notion,” Cockrell says. But it also made sense. Modern satellites are used for communication and navigation, and so are smartphones. And the phones have things that satellites have, too, like accelerometers, gyroscopes and cameras.

At 53 years old, Cockrell is the self-described “graybeard” of the small team of 20-somethings. With decades of experience, he had good reason to think the project might not work. The phones would have to survive the violent shaking of their launch into orbit. Once in space, they would need to withstand extreme temperatures and intense radiation that doesn’t exist on the Earth’s surface.

“I was really skeptical at first, because I said, ‘OK, there’s a reason why NASA develops these expensive satellites and tests them extensively,’ ” he says.

But the team’s younger members were more optimistic. “The mobile phones are designed to be thrown around the room and for people to drop them in water. They’re really robust bits of technology,” says Jasper Wolfe, a 22-year-old engineer on the project.

Wolfe, Cockrell and the rest of the team got a couple of Nexus smartphones from Amazon. They added extras, like plus-sized batteries and a powerful transmitter. They put it all in a metal case about the size of a Kleenex box. But the phones were still ordinary smartphones; they still had games on them. “We played around with Angry Birds on the ground,” Wolfe says.

The PhoneSats hitched a ride on the very first flight of a commercial rocket called Antares, which NASA hopes will soon be resupplying the International Space Station.

“Within the first orbit after being released from the launch vehicle, we started receiving signals,” Cockrell says. The signals from the satellites, which are named “Alexander,” “Graham” and “Bell,” are actually picked up by ham radio operators all over the world, who send them to the team at NASA Ames. The team is now in the process of using the small data packets to piece together photos taken by the different PhoneSats’ cameras.

The achievement could mark big changes in the satellite business. Peter Platzer, CEO of NanoSatisfi, a startup company that’s about to launch a small satellite into space using money raised on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, sees a world in which satellites aren’t owned solely by powerful corporations and governments.

“The same way the computer morphed into becoming a personal computer, we could see a future where the satellite morphs into becoming a personal satellite,” he says.

The satellite he’s working on will actually take apps. Users can program them here on Earth and beam them up into orbit. They might make the satellite take a customized photo of the Earth’s surface. Or they could turn it out toward space to watch for asteroids.

“I think whenever you create this flexible platform that you let people program and decide what their own use is, it becomes really, really hard to predict where the combined genius of mankind will lead that platform,” Platzer says.

The PhoneSats will eventually run out of juice and re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. But Cockrell’s going to keep working with Wolfe and the young team — “the kids,” he calls them. He finds it inspirational.

“They don’t know what they can’t do; they haven’t been told it’s not possible,” he says. “That really opens up a lot of creative thinking that somehow tends to go away with time.”

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.