Elon Musk has released images showing the final seconds of the Falcon 9 first stage as it attempted to land vertically on a floating barge last week.
The rocket can be seen tilted as it falls and explodes. I am more amazed that they got this close to a success on their very first try.
The competition heats up: Orbital Sciences has inked a deal with the Russian company Energomash to buy 20 rocket engines for its Antares rocket, with options to buy 40 more.
If Orbital ends up buying all 60 engines the deal will be worth one billion dollars to the Russians, which for them is a lot of money.
The science team running Rosetta has released an image (cropped by me on the right) from the probe’s high resolution camera showing the fine structure of Comet 67P/C-G’s plumes.
I call them plumes rather than jets, which is the word the scientists use as well as everyone else, because it appears to me that they really aren’t jets, tightly confined flows of material coming from a nozzle-like opening. Instead, the image makes me think of very fast-rising plumes of smoke rising from an extinguished fire.
This image was taken in November, and is one of only a very tiny handful of images released from the high resolution camera. Rosetta’s science team has been very possessive of images from this camera, holding them back for their own research papers to follow in the future. Even here, the image is not very detailed. I wonder what cool stuff this camera has snapped close in that they have not yet shown us.
Worlds without end: Using Kepler astronomers have discovered a red dwarf star 150 light years away with three Earth-like exoplanets, one of which is in the habitable zone.
The three planets are 2.1, 1.7 and 1.5 times the size of Earth. The outermost planet, at 1.5 Earth radii, is the smallest of the bunch and orbits far enough from its host star that it receives levels of light from its star similar to those received by Earth from the sun, said UC Berkeley graduate student Erik Petigura, who discovered the planets Jan. 6 while conducting a computer analysis of the Kepler data NASA has made available to astronomers. He calculated that the three planets receive 10.5, 3.2, and 1.4 times the light intensity of Earth. “Most planets we have found to date are scorched. This system is the closest star with lukewarm transiting planets,” Petigura said. “There is a very real possibility that the outermost planet is rocky like Earth, which means this planet could have the right temperature to support liquid water oceans.”
These planets were found by Kepler in its present reconfigured mission, which once again illustrates the incredible effectiveness of an optical telescope in space. If only we were building some.
After a decade the British Mars lander Beagle 2 has been located on Mars by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
It is believed from the images that the lander is only partially deployed, which would explain why the lander never sent any signal after landing.
In the heat of competition: Recent problems during two Soyuz rocket launches has caused ESA to hesitate using the Russian rocket in the future.
Instead, they might use Ariane 5 to put their European GPS Galileo satellites into orbit.
Though she is now in Russia, Sarah Brightman has delayed the start of her astronaut training by one week due to the onset of a head cold.
Update: Russian officials now say it was a family illness, not a head cold, that forced this delay.
The competition heats up: A commercial effort to build a 648 constellation of satellites to provide worldwide intenet access has secured funding from Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and Qualcom.
Not surprisingly, Branson was immediately saying that his LauncherOne concept will be launching many of these satellites, though I think he’s got to get it built and tested first.
In preparing for its July 14 fly-by of Pluto, New Horizons will take its first images of the planet on January 25.
Snapped by New Horizons’ telescopic Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager, known as LORRI, those pictures will give mission scientists a continually improving look at the dynamics of those moons. And they’ll play a critical role in navigating the spacecraft as it covers the remaining 135 million miles (220 million kilometers) to Pluto. “We’ve completed the longest journey any craft has flown from Earth to reach its primary target, and we are ready to begin exploring!” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Over the next few months, LORRI will take hundreds of pictures of Pluto against star fields to refine the team’s estimates of New Horizons’ distance to Pluto. Though the Pluto system will resemble little more than bright dots in the camera’s view until May, mission navigators will use those data to design course-correction maneuvers that aim the spacecraft toward its flyby target point this summer. The first such maneuver could occur as early as March.
…watch a video of its descent.
The video is posted below the fold. This anniversary also celebrates the tenth anniversary of Cassini orbiting Saturn.
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The competition heats up: The Indian government has picked a career space engineer, Alur Seelin Kiran Kumar, to run ISRO, its space agency.
Expect India to increase its focus on planetary and manned space exploration as well as it launch rocket industry under Kumar.
The competition heats up: Within three years SpaceX hopes to establish a new satellite operation in Seattle, Washington, employing 1,000 people and focused on the design of smaller, cheaper satellites.
The key quote from the article perhaps is this: “Musk said the office would focus on developing satellites but could also be a base for rocket-design talent uninterested in moving to SpaceX’s base in the Los Angeles area.” To put it another way, California’s socialist and highly restrictive state government has forced Musk to consider an alternative location for the expansion of his company.
His effort should also strike fear into the established satellite makers, who have done relatively little innovative design changes in the past four decades. As SpaceX has done with the launch industry, I expect SpaceX will do with the satellite industry: force them to lower costs while developing new technologies.
