Want a rocket to launch your satellite into orbit. Orbital Sciences has one.
The article essentially outlines the marketing push Orbital is doing to get additional commercial contracts for its Antares rocket.
The image on the right is a cropped close-up of a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image taken in early September that shows a fresh cluster of impacts, all smaller than six feet across. Nearby but not visible in this image are four larger craters about 12 to 15 feet in diameter. The impact cluster is located just northwest of Gale Crater and was not present in images taken before Curiosity’s arrival on Mars. The cluster is also in line with other impact craters produced by other debris dropped by Curiosity as it descended onto the Martian surface.
Scientists are at the moment unsure what spacecraft debris caused these impacts.
Assigning each of the impacts to specific pieces of hardware is a challenging puzzle, but it is thought that the four large craters were produced by two large tungsten weights that broke in half to make these four craters, or by pieces of the cruise stage, which was designed to break up in the atmosphere for planetary protection purposes, to kill any Earthly microbes.
The cluster imaged here adds to the mystery, and may have been produced by a piece of the cruise stage that traveled farther through the Martian atmosphere and was therefore more thoroughly fragmented by the time it crashed onto the surface.
Identifying the source of the debris is a challenging engineering problem that also has scientific interest. Knowing what caused the impacts and then studying how the surface was changed by them will tell geologists a great deal about the make up of that surface.
How to keep an old space telescope in operation and scientifically useful.
A newly discovered half-mile wide asteroid has 1 in 63,000 chance of hitting the Earth in 2032.
That’s the Russian report above, which on these matters tend to be panic-stricken. Here’s the JPL version, which downplays the concern.
The next test flight of a version of SpaceX’s Grasshopper could occur in New Mexico in December.
The story says this test will be with Grasshopper, but I think that is a mistake. Unless SpaceX is using this name for all its vertical landing test vehicles, the company had said the test vehicle to fly in New Mexico would be a full scale Falcon 9 first stage, with nine Merlin engines, not one as has Grasshopper.
Cygnus will be de-orbited one day early, on October 23.
At the same time, preparations move forward for the second Cygnus flight in December, which will be the first operational flight. This quote is interesting:
Neither Orbital nor the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority got locked out of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport as a result of the shutdown, meaning that preparations for the tentative December launch continued while more than 95 percent of NASA’s roughly 18,000 civil servants were on furlough.
Suggests again how unessential a good percentage of NASA’s employees really are. They might be great engineers, but they are apparently wasting their talents at NASA doing unnecessary make-work.
A new woman’s land speed record was set this week.
Back in 1965, Lee Breedlove set the women’s land speed record on Utah’s Salt Lake Flats with an average speed of 308.51 mph (496.49 km/h) over four runs. That record stood for 48 years until this month, when Jessi Combs smashed it in her 52,000 hp North American Eagle Supersonic Speed Challenger with a speed of 392.954 mph (632.39 km/h).
I am puzzled why the gender matters in driving these high speed vehicles.
The government shutdown has put flight testing of Dream Chaser on hold.
It appears that the decision to do these flight tests at Dryden is the problem. As a NASA facility, it has been shut down. If the flight tests had instead been arranged at a private facility, Dream Chaser could still be flying.
On October 7 SpaceX successfully flew and landed Grasshopper on its highest flight yet, 2440 feet.
Video below the fold.
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The test pilots who have been flying SpaceShipTwo report on their work at a test pilot symposium.
Lots of interesting engineering details about the ship’s flight capabilities, including one near disaster that was saved by SpaceShipTwo’s robust design. No details, however, on the state of the ship’s engine, or when further test flights at higher and higher altitudes will be attempted.
Posted from home, Tucson, Arizona.
Among other things, Sarah Brightman talks about her planned trip to space.
Posted from New Mexico.
A collection of new images from Mars by a variety of spacecraft and rovers.
Posted as we approach El Paso and the Texas-New Mexico border.
