Space: The New Frontier

Astronauts and Cosmonauts train and study for years to work and live aboard the International Space Station. We have seen countless hours of their activities live on television and in the media. With this wealth of experience and insight behind them what do they think when they return to Earth? Without exception these space farers can not wait to get back into space.

The tenuous envelope of gas surrounding our planet is an unbelievably complex machine that protects us from the vacuum of space, shelters us from harmful radiation and allows us and the biosphere to breath; it is our atmosphere and we need to learn much more about it so we can better it.

New projects are advancing slowly, moving hardware into the testing phase, new designs, new capabilities. The next 12 months will see an intense rise in flight tests, demonstration launches and high priority flights some are on time others are not. We check the flight status of some of this new hardware and these new capabilities.

For over 50 years we have bombarded Mars with our probes and landers. Spying from orbit to map the terrain, finding her strengths and weaknesses. The time nearing for the full scale invasion of the planet- when humans walk on Mars and claim it for their own.

The Amazing Cassini spacecraft and its sibling lander, Huygens, have now concluded their scientific studies, bringing back years of data to be combed through by scientists, plotting their next journey to Saturn's space. Now, Juno piercing the cloak of Jupiter and her distant relative New Horizons at the edge of the solar system.

The Soviet Era Luna 3 was the first spacecraft to utilize gravity to change course to photograph the dark side of the Moon. The NASA Mariner 10 mission used the technique to swing by Venus to target Mercury. The gravity assist or sling shot maneuver has become a standard for navigating the solar system. With our probes reaching further, faster and more accurately than ever before.

Space is vast; yet it is full of collisions; gas and dust electrotatically flock together, gravity takes over coalescing grains into rocks, rocks into boulders then asteroids colliding again and again, striking planets and each other. Stars collide creating monsters of light and energy even galaxies collide over millions of years, space is a rough place to be.

We know it's there, and we usually pay it little mind. Gravity the all encompassing forces keeping us on the ground, and the planets in their orbits, yet we notice it when it's not there. In space we are merely cheating gravity; falling just as fast but missing the ground; an orbit and so called condition of micro gravity. Now this fundamental universal force is slowly giving up its secrets.

The interface between Earth and space is the Ionosphere, a region of rarified gas and charged particles. It is very important for radio communications, radar, satellite signals and global positioning. Yet we know so little about it especially when it disrupts all these signals in a regular fashion. Too high for planes or balloons, it's up to satellites to study this rarified region.

We have been observing Earth for 40 years now, in the last 20 we have focus with intensity on the planet with new technologies and capabilities, we have accumulated a mass of data that is now revealing a complex and ever changing living planet.