The competition heats up: SpaceX on Monday successfully launched its second geosynchronous commercial satellite.
I expect the company to now step up the pace of its launches.
The competition heats up: After more than a decade of failed attempts, India has finally successfully launched its Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV).
Moreover, this rocket was entirely built in India. It now gives that country a rocket competitive in the international communications satellite launch market.
Boeing is moving its X-37B operations to the Kennedy Space Center.
A spy plane used by the U.S. Air Force is about to get a new home: a garage at Kennedy Space Center that once housed NASA orbiters during the space shuttle era. The move was announced Friday by Boeing, the Chicago-based company that built the X-37B spy plane and is in charge of repairing the spacecraft whenever it returns to Earth. Previously, Boeing had refurbished the 29-foot-long spacecraft at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, but the company decided to relocate its fix-up shop in Florida, where the vehicle now launches.
NASA and Orbital Sciences have rescheduled the Cygnus freighter launch to ISS until January 8 because of cold weather.
The second commercial launch on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has been delayed three days until January 6 because an unspecified issue with the rocket’s fairing.
It appears the company wants to do some additional inspections of the rocket, just to be sure all is well. They haven’t been more specific then this,
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted China’s Yutu rover on the Moon’s surface.
These images confirm that the rover landed in Mare Imbrium, not Sinus Iridum, the originally announced landing site and the site that many Chinese news sources continue to report as the landing site.
The geological history of Venus: What’s known, not known, and unknown.
This is a very clearly written overview by James Head, one of the world’s preeminent planetary geologists, of what has been learned about the geology of Earth’s sister planet, the planet of a million volcanoes. Key quote:
Many features on Venus (folded mountain belts, rift zones, tesserae) were like Earth, but there were few signs of Earth-like plate tectonics, so that Venus seemed to have a single lithospheric plate that was losing heat conductively and advectively. But the cratering record presented a conundrum. First, the average age of the surface was <20% of the total age of the planet, and second, the average was not a combination of very old and very young surfaces, such as Earth’s continents and ocean basins. Third, the lack of variability in crater density, and of a spectrum of crater degradation, meant that all geological units might be about the same age. This implied that the observed surface of Venus must have been produced in the past hundreds of millions of years, possibly catastrophically, with very little volcanic or tectonic resurfacing since then! Suddenly, Venus was not like Earth, nor like the Moon, Mars, or Mercury.
Some scientists even believe that Venus was essentially resurfaced in a massive volcanic event about a half billion years ago. Others disagree. Meanwhile, the European probe Venus Express has gotten hints that volcanic activity is still going on.
As Head concludes, it has been 20 years since the last spacecraft arrived at Venus to do geological research. It is time to return.
The Chinese rover Yutu, before going into hibernation for the long lunar night, successfully took its first spectrum of the Moon’s surface.
Virgin Galactic has released video of SpaceShipTwo’s second powered flight.
Messier notes how strained the pilot’s voices are, indicating that this test flight was “one wild ride.” I have put the video below the fold.
» Read more
Elon Musk outlines the upcoming test program for the development of the man-rated Dragon capsule.
The bottom line is that they are planning two major unmanned flight tests in 2014, followed by a manned flight test in 2015. The manned flight would use their employees, not NASA astronauts.
Mars One narrows its applicant pool of would-be Martian colonists from 200,000 to just over a 1000.
People started applying for a voyage to the red planet in April 2013 through Mars One, a Netherlands-based private venture that wants to land humans there by 2025. By the time the company stopped taking applications, more than 200,000 people had submitted one. Today, Mars One announced that it’s made a short(er) list of 1,058 applicants.
These are individuals willing to make a one way trip.
Mars Express buzzes Phobos.
Analysis of the data will allow scientists to better estimate the mass of the Martian moon, which in turn will tell us a great deal about its make-up.
And no, there is no evidence the spacecraft was attacked by the Phobosians. But then, this is not a Russian spacecraft.
The company for the high resolution cameras that the Russian astronauts were unable to install on ISS during their spacewalk last week has issued an update.
The installation of the cameras proceeded according to plan and without incident. During a spacewalk, Russian cosmonauts were able to transport the cameras to their mounting position and install them quickly and efficiently. However, soon after installation, the Mission Control Centre (MCC) outside of Moscow was unable to receive any data from either camera (contrary to what was reported during the live transmission of the spacewalk). Without this data, engineers in the MCC were not able to confirm that the cameras were receiving the power necessary to allow them to survive the temperature fluctuations of the space environment. As a consequence, senior technical personnel from UrtheCast and RSC Energia (UrtheCast’s Russian partner) jointly decided that the safest and most prudent course of action was to uninstall the cameras and bring them back inside the ISS to be reinstalled at a later date, once the data transmission problem has been solved.
UrtheCast’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr. George Tyc, was present at the MCC throughout the operation, along with the Company’s Chief Engineer for Space Systems, Mr. Greg Giffin. Said Dr. Tyc, “The fact the neither camera could communicate with the MCC strongly suggests that the problem lies inside the ISS and it is not a problem with the cameras or external cables. This kind of issue has been encountered before on the ISS and can be fixed in the near-term. Bringing the cameras back inside to be installed another day was simply the right engineering decision.”
No word on what caused the problem, but as this commercial project is being done in partnership with the Russians and the Russians are whom the company is working to solve the technical problem it was almost certainly on the Russian portion of ISS.
The competition heats up: SpaceX successfully completed a static fire engine test Saturday in preparation for its next commercial satellite launch on January 3.
It will be a busy next two months for commercial space. Cygnus is scheduled to launch on January 7, while Dragon makes its next flight on February 22. During that same time period a Russian Progress freighter will be launched. Also, there will be two Ariane 5 launches and one Proton launch, plus one commercial launch by India along with that country’s first launch of its home-built GSLV rocket.
As I say, the competition is heating up.
The competition heats up: The Russians today launched their new upgraded Soyuz 2 rocket, successfully putting three payloads into orbit.
The rocket appears to be more powerful. It also appears designed for significant future upgrades that will increase its power even more.
The competition heats up: India has now set January 5 as the date for the test launch of its homebuilt powerful GSLV rocket.
India’s needs this more powerful rocket if they are going to be a serious player in the new colonial movement in space. They have had many problems over the past decade trying to get it operational. Maybe now they will finally succeed.
Today’s spacewalk by two Russian astronauts on ISS set a new Russian duration record though one of the two commercial cameras installed was unable to transmit its data to the ground.
For reasons that are unclear, the astronauts were then instructed to disconnect both cameras and bring them back inside ISS. This caused the cancellation of a number of other tasks and was the reason the spacewalk was the longest ever by Russian astronauts.
The Russians on ISS are doing their own spacewalk today, for profit.
They are installing two cameras for a Canadian company that will beam down high resolution commercial images of the Earth’s surface.
Another successful Proton rocket launch took place today in Russia, putting a Russian communications satellite into orbit.
This is the fourth successful Proton launch since July’s spectacular failure, suggesting that the Russians have gotten the rocket’s manufacturing process back on track.
The competition heats up: The Russians have delayed the first launch of a new Soyuz rocket for at least a week.
No reason for the delay was announced. The rocket is an entirely new design, with an upper stage expected to cost less to make.
Today’s spacewalk on ISS is complete with the successful installation of a replacement coolant pump.
The installation means that a third spacewalk to finish the job is no longer needed.
Every image taken during the Apollo program is now available online.
I especially like this image, taken by Frank Borman, seconds before Bill Anders took the more famous version, which you will note is oriented here correctly, as Anders took it, with the horizon vertical.
The companies building manned spacecraft for the United States all appear to be on track.
The report gives a nice overview of the recent achievements of all three companies, and suggests that the U.S. will once again have a manned spacecraft capability before the decade has ended coming from more than one design.
Mars Express will do an extremely close flyby of the martian moon Phobos on December 29.
Late this month, ESA’s Mars Express will make the closest flyby yet of the Red Planet’s largest moon Phobos, skimming past at only 45 km [28 miles] above its surface. The flyby on 29 December will be so close and fast that Mars Express will not be able to take any images, but instead it will yield the most accurate details yet of the moon’s gravitational field and, in turn, provide new details of its internal structure.
China’s rover is about to go to sleep for the long lunar night.
According to Wu Fenglei of the Beijing Aerospace Control Center, the lander will “go to sleep” at about 7 a.m. on Christmas Day and the moon rover, Jade Rabbit, will fall asleep at about 1 a.m. on Boxing Day. The forthcoming lunar night, expected to begin on Dec. 26, will last for about two weeks, experts with the center estimated. During their “sleep”, both lander and rover will have to tolerate minus 180 degrees Celsius. Scientists tested the lander early Tuesday to ensure it can stand the temperature drop. Both lander and rover are stable, said Wu, adding they have completed a series of scientific tasks in the past two days.
This report states the rover landed in Sinus Iridum, the original announced landing site, contradicting other reports that said the lander came down in Mare Imbrium.
Preparing for today’s second spacewalk to replace the coolant pump on ISS.
The spacewalk has begun. Realtime coverage can be found here.
This news report, confirmed by no other source, claims that the spacewalk this week was cut short because of water in the astronauts’ spacesuits.
I report this story but am very puzzled. If a water leak was the cause of the shortened spacewalks, I would have expected others to report that fact as well. No one has, however. (See this nasaspaceflight.com article, for example, which outlines the entire engineering situation quite thoroughly but says “both suits performed well during the EVA.”) Moreover, the ABC particular story above is written by someone who is not a space reporter, and contains some incongruities that reflect that, making me even more skeptical.
Yesterday’s spacewalk on ISS, though successful, was cut short because of spacesuit discomfort issues unrelated to the earlier water leak problems.
No story on the spacewalk is entirely clear on the issues. Astronaut Rick Mastracchio was cold, but it seems he also had other problems that have not been outlined clearly. Interestingly he was not using the spacesuit that flooded in July. Michael Hopkins was using that suit and apparently had no problems.
In order to resize the spare suit on the station for Mastracchio they have delayed the next spacesuit for one day.
Today’s spacewalk on ISS to replace a coolant pump is ahead of schedule.
The link gives live updates.
Update: the spacewalk is over and a complete success, with no problems.
It seems Curiosity’s wheels are wearing out faster than expected and engineers want to know why.
The increasedwear recently appears to be because the rover was traveling over rougher terrain. Nonetheless, JPL engineers are going to monitor the rover’s travel and wheel damage more closely in order to gauge that wear better for future travel.
