WASHINGTON (AFP) — The irregular landing of a Russian space capsule last week is not a “major problem,” a top NASA official said, despite reports that the astronauts on board could have died.

“I don’t see this as a major problem, but it is clearly something that should not have occurred,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Space Operations.

He added: “I think there is inherent reliability in this (Soyuz) system.”

In an interview with a group of journalists Tuesday, whose transcript was obtained by AFP, he said NASA had heard nothing from the Russians suggesting the lives of the Russian, American and South Korean astronauts onboard were at risk.

“They’re concerned about the event, but the relative danger to the crew, we’ve had no discussion on that at all,” he said. “They’ve not conveyed to us or conveyed to me any concerns at this point.”

Russian media said Tuesday the astronauts were lucky to survive Saturday’s dangerous re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, when their Russian-designed Soyuz landing capsule landed hundreds of kilometres (miles) off target.

“The fact that the crew members remained unharmed, in one piece, was very lucky. Everything could have ended much worse,” Interfax news agency quoted an unnamed source close to the investigation as saying.

Gerstenmaier said the Russians had launched an investigation into the incident and he would wait for that, adding: “We need to get the capsule back to understand what occurred. I don’t want us to speculate.”

He said officials from NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) would probably discuss the results of the probe with their Russian space agency counterparts before the next launch of the Soyuz TMA-12 in May.

“It may be a month or so before we start hearing anything definitive back from the commission,” he added.

Meanwhile, in a transcript of an audio recording made after Saturday’s landing, American astronaut Peggy Whitson is heard describing the descent as “pretty dramatic,” adding that she was stuck in her seat the whole time.

The landing subjected the crew to huge gravitational forces, and Whitson said: “Gravity is not really my friend right now and 8Gs (a force eight times that of on Earth) was especially not my friend.”

South Korean scientist Yi So-Yeon and Russian cosmonaut Yury Malenchenko were also on board, coming back from the International Space Station.

The Soyuz, long considered a reliable workhorse for human space travel, has had two similar incidents in recent years.

KAZAKH STEPPE (Reuters) - A Russian space capsule landed about 420 km (260 miles) off course in Kazakhstan on Saturday but South Korea’s first astronaut and the other two crew were safe.

The Soyuz capsule landed west of the target area and about 20 minutes past the scheduled time after it adopted a so-called “ballistic landing,” space officials said. Rescue helicopters rushed to the site.

“The capsule landed with an overshoot. Such things happen,” said mission control spokesman Valery Lyndin.

He said the crew had begun leaving the capsule, which carried Yi So-yeon, a 29-year old nanotechnology engineer from Seoul, U.S. commander Peggy Whitson and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko.

A Reuters photographer, who traveled to the landing site in a helicopter with rescue crews, saw plumes of smoke rising from the capsule, which was lying in its side stamped about 30 cm into the ground with its parachute burning.

The photographer said the U.S. astronaut was not fit enough to take part in a news conference later on Saturday. He said the Korean and the Russian looked fine as they traveled in a helicopter from the site to the Kazakh city of Kustanai.

He said the Korean had been dozing in the helicopter most of the way back to Kustanai but started smiling and made a flower drawing on the wall after she was served tea and had her blood pressure measured.

Russian space officials at mission control in Moscow had waited nervously before confirmation came that all three were safe and their health was satisfactory.

STEEPER TRAJECTORY

The capsule landed so far off course because of a ballistic landing when the capsule follows a much steeper and shorter trajectory to earth, Anatoly Perminov, head of Russia’s Federal Space Agency, told reporters.

A ballistic landing puts much higher gravity loads on the astronauts as the capsule spins towards earth.

“The crew did not report that they had taken the ballistic landing course on re-entry,” Perminov told a news conference, adding that the incident will be investigated.

Russian space officials said the capsule landed close to the Kazakh border, just south-east of the Russian city of Orsk.

Yi became the first South Korean aboard the International Space Station earlier this month.

In October last year, the Soyuz capsule carrying Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, an orthopedic surgeon from Kuala Lumpur, touched down about 200 km (125 miles) off course in a similar ballistic landing caused by a cable glitch.

A U.S.-Russian crew lost radio contact on re-entry and landed almost 500 km off target during a Soyuz landing in May 2003. The crew had to wait for over two hours before they were located by rescue groups.

The Soyuz is the world’s longest-serving manned space capsule. It was an early version of the craft, the Vostok, that took the world’s first cosmonaut into orbit in 1961.

MOSCOW (AFP) - South Korea’s first astronaut, Yi So-Yeon, was to star Saturday in celebratory sing-song aboard the crowded International Space Station (ISS) as back on Earth Russia marked the 47th anniversary of sending the first man in space.

Yi, 29, docked Thursday along with Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko after a successful Soyuz space capsule journey from the Russian cosmodrome at Baikonur in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan.

The excited South Korean space debutante promised to celebrate her arrival and Russian Cosmonauts’ Day with a song and a dinner of traditional South Korean food — albeit adapted to the rigours of eating in zero-gravity.

Yi was guaranteed a full house of five other crew members on the International Space Station, a permanently staffed orbiting home for US, Russian and other astronauts.

Back on Earth, Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated space sector employees with the 47th anniversary of Soviet legend Yury Gagarin’s 1961 mission to become the first man in orbit.

“We are proud that our country in particular paved humanity’s road to the stars,” Putin said in a statement.

Officials laid flowers at Gagarin’s tomb under the Kremlin wall in Red Square.

But schoolchildren in Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains found a more unusual way to mark the anniversary by writing a letter of greeting to extra-terrestrials, Interfax reported.

The city’s post office agreed to accept the envelope, but had not quite decided how to make the delivery, the agency said.

In a video link-up with the ISS from mission control outside Moscow, the head of Roskosmos space agency, Anatoly Perminov, jokingly urged the station’s crew to “help Yi So-Yeon do her scientific experiments. You promise?”

“They’ve already helped me,” a smiling Yi replied, RIA Novosti news agency reported.

Perminov laid out optimistic plans, including for a new generation of heavy space rockets to replace the current Soyuz workhorse for manned flights.

He suggested a possible space-based “factory” to “put together a heavier kind of spacecraft than now and use them for flights to other planets, to the Moon or Mars,” Interfax reported.

Yi and the two Russians accompanying her joined the current crew consisting of US commander Peggy Whitson, another NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman, and Russian cosmonaut Yury Malenchenko.

Yi, whose expedition is touted by South Korea as the cornerstone of the Asian nation’s growing space ambitions, was to return to Earth on April 19 along with Whitson and Malenchenko.

Reisman, who arrived at the ISS on the US space shuttle on March 13, will remain aboard with Volkov and Kononenko.

Volkov’s arrival meant the start of the first father-son space dynasty, as his father is Alexander Volkov, a cosmonaut famous for having launched from the Soviet Union and returned following the 1991 Soviet collapse to modern Russia.

After years of financial difficulties, Russia is now awash in profits from gas and oil exports — a perfect time, Putin said, to put the space programme on a new footing.

Putin told a meeting Friday of the Kremlin security council that Russia was ready to switch from Soviet-era space programmes to “new, truly ambitious projects,” Interfax reported.

“Conquering space at the same time means defence of Russia, modernised communications, navigation, the possibility for early warning of global cataclysms,” Putin was quoted as saying.

One priority for Russia is completion of the GLONASS navigation system, which is touted as a potential rival to the US Global Positioning System or GPS and a planned European navigation satellite network.

The other is to build the new Vostochny space centre in Russia’s southeast, near the Chinese border, to end reliance on Baikonur, a Soviet-era base that Russia must now rent from Kazakhstan.

“We must ensure guaranteed Russian access to space,” Putin said in comments broadcast on national television.

Perminov said that all manned space flights would take off from Vostochny by 2020.

BOULDER, Colo. - Scientific and technical teams from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are fleshing out ideas for the next mission to fly to an outer planet - either to Jupiter or Saturn. A decision on which of those two exploration targets will be the destination for the space agency’s next multibillion-dollar flagship mission is expected by year’s end.

“We have the outer planet flagship mission in the [NASA] budget … I do believe it will happen,” said Fran Bagenal, a professor of astrophysical and planetary sciences at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “I couldn’t have said that four years ago … now I have great confidence that this will happen.”

Bagenal is chair of the Outer Planets Assessment Group (OPAG), which was established by NASA in late 2004 to identify scientific priorities and pathways for exploration in the outer solar system.

In 2007, NASA completed a series of studies for flagship missions, honing down the list to the two candidate missions that now are under further study by both NASA and ESA.

Down-selection this year

During a two-day OPAG meeting in late March, officials provided a status report on the two outer planet exploration concepts now on the table: a Europa-Jupiter System Mission and a Titan-Saturn System Mission. Each of those mission scenarios has multiple components with both ESA and NASA contributing to whichever outer planet investigation is down-selected.

The Europa-Jupiter mission involves two orbiters with instruments designed to operate in the severe radiation environment of Jupiter. In addition to ESA and NASA, Russia also has expressed interest in the mission, proposing a Europa lander.

The Titan-Saturn flagship entails a main spacecraft that would orbit Saturn and deployment of secondary spacecraft to the surface of Titan. For the secondary spacecraft, there are proposals that would include elements such as a balloon for exploring the atmosphere, surface probes and even a mini-submarine for exploring lakes on Titan.

“We are no longer doing studies … we are now getting ready for a mission,” said Curt Niebur, program officer for outer planets research at NASA headquarters in Washington. Money to push forward on an outer planets flagship, he said, is contained in NASA’s 2009 budget - with ESA conducting a down-select process through its Cosmic Vision process.

Potential partners

“There are between one and five different spacecraft elements that comprise these missions,” Niebur noted, along with potential contributions from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, as well Russia’s Federal Space Agency.

“At this point we have firm agreement with ESA. We don’t have firm agreements with other potential partners,” Niebur added.

For NASA, the outer planet flagship mission is cost-capped at $2.1 billion, Niebur said. “That’s all the money we have … that’s all the money NASA has to put towards this.”

NASA and ESA will both down-select to one outer planet mission this fall, Niebur explained. The mission to the outer planet would be launched via an Atlas 5, a Delta 4 Heavy or an Ares V no later than 2017. The launch would be designed to send the spacecraft on a lengthy cruise toward its destination but one that would be no longer than seven years.

Leonard Dudzinski, NASA’s program officer for radioisotope power capability, said the outer planet flagship would make use of Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators.

At present, there is enough plutonium-238 dioxide allocated for 800 watts of power for an outer planet flagship mission - although due to the shortfall of the nuclear fuel, “we’ve encouraged studies this year to look at reduced power requirements to save some of that plutonium,” Dudzinski advised the OPAG attendees.

Eyes wide open

NASA and ESA also are planning to issue a joint Announcement of Opportunity for scientific experiments to fly on the mission. The first of three NASA-hosted Outer Planet Flagship Mission Instrument Workshops is to be held June 3-5 in Pasadena, Calif., Niebur said.

“Whether or not it’s Europa or Titan as the major target isn’t at all clear,” Bagenal said. Two large science definition teams are working hard to make these missions happen, she said.

Bagenal emphasized that by careful, early study of these missions it is hoped that any cost overrun can be short-circuited.

“There’s no point in having an outer planet flagship mission that ends up costing so much that we can’t afford to go to another target in the outer solar system for another 15 years or 20 years,” Bagenal pointed out. “So we really have the pressure on us to make sure that we can do something that is technically and fiscally responsible.”

Whatever outer planet target is chosen - likely to occur this November - getting to that locale is tough, Bagenal told SPACE.com, be it taking a payload to the surface of Titan or going into orbit around Europa.

“The technologies are being worked … they are being lined up,” Bagenal said.

“It’s just an issue of can you be clever and squeeze things down and do things very efficiently to save money. And it’s money, money, money,” Bagenal said. “All these studies are being done to make sure we’re going in carefully … with our eyes wide open.”

The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft’s mission at Saturn has been extended by two years, NASA announced today, allowing the plucky probe to continue scouting the planet and its exotic medley of moons.

Launched in October 1997, the nuclear-powered Cassini spacecraft spent seven years journeying to Saturn and has orbited the ringed planet since June 2004. The mission’s end was originally set for July 2008.

“This extension is not only exciting for the science community, but for the world to continue to share in unlocking Saturn’s secrets,” said Jim Green, director for NASA’s Planetary Science Division in Washington.

“New discoveries are the hallmarks of its success, along with the breathtaking images beamed back to Earth that are simply mesmerizing,” Green added.

Extra innings

Titan, Saturn’s orange-tinged moon that is now thought to harbor a hidden ocean, will receive 26 more close encounters while ice-spewing Enceladus — also suspected of hiding liquid water — is slated for seven more visits.

Cassini’s latest flyby of Enceladus took the spacecraft within 32 miles (52 km) of the moon’s surface, but an upcoming visit is expected to outdo that encounter at a mere 15 miles (24 km) from its crust.

Scientists think Titan and Enceladus may help construct a picture of what Earth was like before life appeared here, as both moons have been shown to harbor precursors of life.

“When we designed the original tour, we really did not know what we would find, especially at Enceladus and Titan,” said Dennis Matson, the JPL Cassini project scientist. “This extended tour is responding to these new discoveries and giving us a chance to look for more.”

In addition to one flyby a piece for the moons Dione, Rhea and Helene, the extension also includes more planned peeks at Saturn, its mysterious rings and the gas giant’s magnetosphere.

Built to last

Aside from a few instrument glitches, mission managers said the probe is in good shape.

“The spacecraft is performing exceptionally well and the team is highly motivated, so we’re excited at the prospect of another two years,” said Bob Mitchell, Cassini program manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

If mission managers decide to extend Cassini’s journey yet again in 2010, the craft should have enough propellant to handle a third mission phase.

Since arriving at Saturn, Cassini has beamed back nearly 140,000 images during 62 revolutions around the planet and more than 50 flybys of its moons.

Although operated by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency, NASA rounded up the $160 million to fund the extension that will nearly double Cassini’s orbits around Saturn as well as moon flybys.

The space agencies have spent a collective $3.27 billion designing, launching and operating the spacecraft, which sent the Huygens probe to Saturn’s moon Titan in early 2004. NASA contributed the lion’s share of the Cassini-Huygens program’s cost at $2.6 billion.

• VIDEO: Enceladus, Cold Faithful
• IMAGES: Cassini’s Latest Discoveries
• Special Report: Cassini’s Mission to Saturn

• Original Story: NASA Extends Cassini Probe’s Mission at Saturn