The competition heats up: China says it will by 2015 do a re-entry test of the spacecraft it will use to return a lunar sample from the Moon by 2020..
A small Russian satellite has been struck and damaged by space junk created from a 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test.
For the past two years NASA and JPL have been under heavy hacker attack from China, according to NASA’s inspector general.
The competition heats up: China’s next manned mission is now set for this summer.
The Shenzhou 10 spacecraft will take flight sometime between June and August, the program said in a statement. It will deliver its crew to the Tiangong 1, where it will spend two weeks conducting tests of the station’s docking system and its systems for supporting life and carrying out scientific work.
An update on the Chinese manned program.
The original script called for [the space station] Tiangong 1 to be followed by Tiangong 2, which would have been a module of the same basic design as Tiangong 1. Tiangong 2 was expected to have tested more advanced life-support systems than Tiangong 1, but there would be no major changes to the spacecraft. It was expected that two or three crews would be launched to this module.
Towards the end of the decade, China would then launch Tiangong 3, which was slated to be an entirely different class of spacecraft. It would be larger and more capable. Tiangong 3 was expected by some analysts to be a precursor to the types of modules to be used in China’s future space station, slated for launch around 2020.
According to Yang’s presentation, we can forget about Tiangong 2. Or at least, we can forget about Tiangong 2 as it was originally planned. China still plans to launch a mission with this name, but it would seem that the large laboratory module originally known as “Tiangong 3” has now been designated as the new Tiangong 2.
In other words, China is accelerating the admittedly slow pace of their manned program.
Is the recently discovered Imperial tomb in China too dangerous to enter?
After discovering a secret palace hidden in China’s first emperor massive burial complex, Chinese technicians are nervous. Not because Qin Shi Huang’s tomb is the most important archeological discovery since Tutankhamun, but because they believe his burial place is full of deadly traps that will kill any trespassers. Not to talk about deadly quantities of mercury.
The secret courtyard-style palace tomb is a mind-numbing discovery. Situated in the heart of the Emperor’s 22-square-mile (56-square-kilometer) mortuary compound guarded by more than 6,000 (and counting) full-size statues of warriors, musicians and acrobats, the buried palace is 2,263 by 820 feet (690 by 250 meters). It includes 18 courtyard houses overlooked by one main building, where the emperor is supposed to be. The palace—which has already been partially mapped in 3D using volumetric scanners—occupied a space of 6,003,490 cubic feet (170,000 cubic meters). That’s one fourth the size of the Forbidden City in Beijing—for just one tomb.
Experts believe that the 249-foot-high (76-meter) structure covered with soil and kept dry thanks to a complex draining system, hides the body of the emperor and his courtiers. Nobody knows what’s the state of their bodies, but one of the leading archeologists believes that they are most likely destroyed by now.
China’s Chang’e 2 lunar probe, now out of lunar orbit, did a fly-by of the 3 mile wide asteroid Toutatis as it zipped past the Earth last week, resulting in some spectacular images.
Launched on October 1, 2010, Chang’e 2 orbited the Moon for 8 months before being redirected last year to the L2 Lagrange point, roughly a million miles on the side of Earth opposite the Sun. But when it left L2 last April, Western observers suspected the spacecraft was heading deeper interplanetary space. It didn’t take long to realize that Chang’e 2 was bound for Toutatis.
This is an example of a very smart re-use of a space probe.
By the way, the first fly-by of another planet took place fifty years ago this week.
The competition heats up: China in 2013: another manned flight and an unmanned lunar landing.
The images don’t provide much information, and most of the article is empty speculation. Nonetheless, China is building something.
One of the longest bridges in northern China collapsed on Friday, just nine months after it opened.
This was the sixth major bridge collapse in China since 2011, raising questions about — wait for it … government corruption!
The competition heats up: One of the teams competing for the $30 million Google Lunar X-Prize has signed a launch contract with China.
