'Tis the season for NORAD to track Santa

It's the time of year when space-based military assets on the lookout for national security threats engage in a happier form of surveillance: tracking Santa.

Continuing a tradition that dates to 1955, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, promises to alert families around the globe to the whereabouts of Santa and his reindeer, now with the aid of radars, satellites and fighter jets.

Visit noradsanta.org to follow the countdown to the journey's Dec. 24 start.

How does NORAD track Santa? One method utilizes infrared sensors housed on satellites more than 22,000 miles up, whose primary mission is to provide warnings of missile launches.

In a strange mingling of defense technology and innocent holiday merriment, NORAD says those sensors are ideal for spotting Rudolph's glowing nose.

"Rudolph's nose gives off an infrared signature similar to a missile launch," the tracking Web site explains. "The satellites detect Rudolph's bright red nose with no problem."

From the Space Notebook, a Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Asteroid update

NASA officials met last week to review two options for how to robotically retrieve an asteroid that astronauts could visit by the mid-2020s, but couldn't settle on one as planned.

Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot deferred a decision on whether to try to capture a small, free-floating asteroid or to pry a boulder from a larger asteroid.

"It was a lot to digest," Lightfoot told reporters about the meeting. "I need to get some more clarification on some areas."

Lightfoot now expects to choose the preferred option for the Asteroid Redirect Mission early next year, in advance of a more comprehensive review planned in late February that will officially commit to a mission strategy and cost.

The goal for any robotic mission is to steer an asteroid to an orbit near the moon where astronauts could reach it an Orion spacecraft launched from Kennedy Space Center by the agency's Space Launch System rocket. Crews could perform that mission in a few weeks, but would need four years to visit an asteroid in its "native" orbit.

Commercial crew progress

Boeing and SpaceX have completed their first milestones under NASA contracts, worth nearly $7 billion combined, to fly astronauts to the International Space Station starting in 2017.

The companies' established road maps for certifying Boeing's CST-100 capsule and SpaceX's Dragon capsule for human flight and detailed how they would get astronauts up and down from the station.

Sierra Nevada Corp. protested NASA's award of those contracts in September, but NASA exercised its authority to proceed with the work anyway. A ruling on the protest is due by Jan. 5.

SpaceX wins NASA launch contract

NASA last week awarded SpaceX an $87 million contract to launch a planet-hunting satellite from Cape Canaveral in August 2017.

The Launch Services Program, based at Kennedy Space Center, selected SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket to launch the $378 million Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission, or TESS.

The planned three-year mission led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology aims to survey hundreds of thousands of nearby bright stars to detect passing planets the size of Earth or "super-Earths."

Lunar prize X-tension

As expected, the deadline to win the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE last week was extended by a year, to Dec. 31, 2016.

"We know the mission we are asking teams to accomplish is extremely difficult and unprecedented, not only from a technological standpoint, but also in terms of the financial considerations," said Robert Weiss, XPRIZE vice chairman and president, in a statement. "We firmly believe that a whole new economy around low-cost access to the moon will be the result of the Google Lunar XPRIZE."

The revised timeline requires at least one team to document that it has a launch scheduled by Dec. 31, 2015.

One contender to win the prize, Moon Express Inc., in recent weeks has been testing a prototype lander at Kennedy Space Center's simulated moonscape north of the shuttle runway.

MoonExpress hoped its tests at KSC would qualify it to collect more than $1 million in preliminary prize money. Another contender, Astrobotic, was the first to claim $750,000 for completing milestones demonstrating technical progress.

Webb challenges

The observatory NASA is developing to succeed the Hubble Space Telescope has little margin for error to reach a targeted launch date now less than four years away, auditors warned last week.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office said the $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope project is on budget and schedule, but technical challenges have reduced a much-needed cushion in the schedule and increased risk of delays.

One subsystem called a "cryocooler," designed to chill science instruments, was cited as posing the most difficulty.

"The JWST project will need to address many challenges before the telescope's planned launch in October 2018," the report said. "The success of JWST hinges on the ability of NASA and its contractors to adjust and respond to these challenges in a timely and cost-effective manner. With future NASA missions and exploration depending on the success of JWST, its ultimate outcome will have effects for many years into the future."

Contact Dean at 321-242-3668 or jdean@floridatoday.com. Follow on Twitter at @flatoday_jdean.