Tweeting Astronaut Chris Hadfield To Retire

Commander Chris Hadfield – the Canadian astronaut who shot to fame with his tweets from space – is to retire from the Canadian Space Agency.

Making unique use of social media to report on his work and to send amazing pictures of Earth from the perspective of space, 53-year-old  Hadfield managed to capture and captivate the world’s attention, and also to reignite people’s interest in space exploration.

However, it was on his last “day” in space, when he sang a rendition of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”, when the song went viral and he became something of a superstar of space exploration. Since returning to Earth, Hadfield has remained very much on top of his game, continuing to tweet and post about matters relating to the planet, and its “role” within the greater context of space.

Hadfield announced his retirement at a press conference outside Montreal yesterday after having received a visit from Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and will return to live in Canada shortly. Speaking of his space venture, Hadfield said that “it has been an incredible adventure”, and commented on his ISS project, which saw him achieve international fame, as being “a kind of pinnacle of my entire career… since I was a little dreaming kid of nine years old thinking of flying into space.”

Indeed it is true that Hadfield’s ambition has seen him become the first at many endeavours, including being the first Canadian to spacewalk, and the first Canadian to visit the Russian Space Station MIR in 1995.

Of course, more recently, Hadfield has become both the first man to tweet from space – thereby proving that it can actually be done – and the first man to film a music video in space (albeit a relatively low budget one).

Now that he has become, essentially, a multi-record breaker in space exploration, Hadfield has certainly earned a break from his hard work, promising his wife that they would move back to Canada one day when his space work was complete.

However, as he has declared plans to continue giving presentations and promoting space exploration, it is apparent that this is not the last we will be hearing from Hadfield, and he will continue to be a prominent figure in the space industry.

First Mars Colony On The Horizon

The search for potential astronauts to help create the first Mars colony is well underway.

On Monday, Dutch company Mars One officially launched a reality-show type bid on Twitter and YouTube to recruit volunteers to be part of the pioneering space missing, and so far they have been contacted by up to 10,000 people.

The trip will leave Earth in 2022, with a view to reaching Mars in 2023. It will involve four people spending seven months in a small capsule during the journey, and the trip will be one way, with no reasonable expectation of return. But the sheer popularity of this mission upon its launch shows that there is no shortage of people willing to be the first ambassadors in the next step of space exploration.

It will be a unique test to see if humans really are capable of living and even populating outside Earth, but another key motive for sending people to live there is to determine, more accurately, is Mars is capable of sustaining other forms of life.

Executive director of Explore Mars, an organisation devoted to exploring life on Mars, said that “there is a strong, growing body of evidence that there could be subsurface life on Mars. However, we may not be able to confirm that unless we send people.” Simply, there are limits to what current robots can achieve physically compared to humans, in terms of drilling and digging, and humans could most likely undertake in a few minutes what a current make of man-made robot can do in an entire day.

However, for the advantage of sending human explorers to Mars, there is a disadvantage. People will inevitably bring with them billions of microbes and bacteria which will potentially compromise the eco-balance of Mars and any life that may be found there. This is a risk of which the Mars pioneers are well aware, and the general consensus is that every precaution will be undertaken to minimise the biological impact of the primary Mars colony.

Certainly, the mission will not be without risk to either the human colony or to existing life on Mars, but now that the limits to current robot exploration are drawing close, to send people to Mars as a next step makes sense.

Switzerland Takes a Break from Making Watches to Clean Up Space

Finally the Swiss have put down their watches and they are now entering the field of science once again. Currently space researchers within the small European state are seeking funds to build a spacecraft which can grab pieces of space garbage and drag them down into the atmosphere so it automatically burns up in a colossal ball of fire.

Clean Space One

So far the researchers at the Swiss Space Centre of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have been working on their master plan for three years, according to the director Volker Gass. They have the technology, they are seeking the funds, and they have their first possible target of a picosatellite named ‘SwissCube’ which was launched back in 2009.

The only problem is that to build the spacecraft, which has been prematurely named as ‘CleanSpaceOne’, will require a whopping $11 million to create and then another three to five years until launch. Clearly there is no austerity in Switzerland then!

Even though it sounds crazy, something does have to be done as space rubbish is becoming a large problem for humanity as more and more fragments of our junk is now heading back towards earth or coming into contact with some of our existing space structures. At the moment NASA is tracking 16,000 objects which are larger than 10cm, and that’s not forgetting the numerous smaller objects which could easily kill someone if they didn’t burn up whilst re-entering our atmosphere.

The new spacecraft will be used to remove larger pieces of space debris which are causing problems for astronauts. The Swiss space module will use a semi-automatic probe and a highly-technical guidance system to latch on to targets which could be travelling at speeds of up to 28,000 km/h, before its ion microthrusters will bring the craft alongside it. And that’s when the Swiss gripper will cuddle the object like a murderous Swiss octopus before the object’s final fiery destruction.

This all sounds pretty simple when it’s written down in front of you, however there are other problems which Gass outlines. The main problems, according to Gass, is that once the piece of debris has been snagged the combination of debris and craft will then have a different centre of gravity which could cause it to spin out of control. In order to survive, the probe will have to be able to stabilise itself so it can guide itself back on to the atmosphere’s curve.

The final result, Gass hopes, is that there will be a number of these craft which can act as a battalion of space maids, however at the rate we release garbage it’s doubtful that they would be able to keep up. If we can’t clean our own planet then how are we going to clean space? But, hey, maybe we can send it on to someone else instead in the true human spirit?