Is there profit in outer space?
A detailed look at Orbital Sciences’ effort to provide cargo to ISS.
In a paper published today in the Journal for Geophysical Research, Planets, the science team for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter describe how they have used starlight to peer into the permanently shadowed craters of the Moon’s north and south poles. Looking only during the lunar night, they measured the dim albedo of the Moon from reflected starlight. From this very weak signal they were able to cull two interesting facts about these very cold and very dark places.
India moves ahead with the construction of its own reusable spaceship.
Opportunity has settled into its winter haven.
NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity will spend the next few months during the coldest part of Martian winter at Greeley Haven, an outcrop of rock on Mars recently named informally to honor Ronald Greeley, Arizona State University Regents’ professor of planetary geology, who died October 27, 2011.
I met and interviewed Greeley a number of times in writing articles for magazines like Sky & Telescope and Astronomy. For years he was a central figure in the field of planetary geology, and his life effort is one of the prime reasons the United States has dominated this field for most of the past half century, with a fleet of planetary missions presently at Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto, with many more to come.
The article notes that the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has the job of naming objects in space, and could take years to honor Greeley. I say that if these scientists, the true explorers of Mars, want to name something for him, then they should go ahead, and future generations should honor that choice, regardless of what the IAU says.
ArianeSpace will make a profit in 2011, the first time in three years.
Helped by the two Soyuz campaigns, which occurred in October and December, Arianespace in 2011 apparently averted a third consecutive year of losses. Its financial accounts are not finalized until June, but Le Gall said the company expects to report a slight profit on about 985 million euros in revenue.
In other words, it was the addition of the Russian low-cost Soyuz rocket to their fleet that helped avoid another year’s loss. This doesn’t reflect well on the profitability of the Ariane 5 rocket.
Is the Air Force using the X-37B to spy on China’s first space station?
Power grab: A NASA inquiry into the ownership of a variety of space artifacts, including Jim Lovell’s Apollo 13 checklist, has halted their sale at auction.
In other words, it appears that NASA management has decided that everything ever built by NASA belongs to NASA, forever, even if NASA would have thrown it away at some point.
Ecliptic, the company that puts cameras on rockets. And now, its cameras will look down at the Moon from the Grail spacecraft.
Check out the company’s youtube channel here.
The second Grail space probe has entered lunar orbit.
The first of two Grail space probes has entered lunar orbit.
Volcanic activity in the Red Sea is producing a brand new island.
China today issued a white paper on space, outlining its future goals. In addition to additional launches of its manned Shenzhou manned capsule,
China also plans to launch space laboratories, manned spaceship and space freighters, and will start a research on the preliminary plan for a human landing on the moon, the document said.
As an important part of deep-space exploration, the country’s lunar probe projects follow the idea of “three steps” — orbiting, landing and returning. In next five years, the country plans to launch orbiters for lunar soft landing, roving and surveying to implement the second stage of lunar exploration, then it will start the third-stage project of sampling the moon’s surface matters and get those samples back to Earth, the white paper said.
You can download the full white paper here [pdf]. Hat tip to Spaceref.com.
Good news: A Russian Soyuz-2 rocket successfully launched six satellites into orbit today, less than a week after a differently configured Soyuz-2 rocket had failed.
China has activated its own GPS satellite system.
China had so far launched 10 satellites for the Beidou system, including one this month, and planned to put six more in orbit in 2012 to enhance the system’s accuracy and expand its service to cover most of the Asia Pacific region.
Russia has scrubbed the launch of a Proton rocket today due to “technical problems.”
After the launch failure on Saturday of a Soyuz rocket, I suspect that top management got gun shy about doing another launch so soon thereafter.
Engineers say the mysterious sphere that crashed in Africa is a hydrazine tank from a rocket.
Fragments from yesterday’s failed Russian launch crashed onto “Cosmonaut Street” in Siberia.
The view of Comet Lovejoy from ISS. With video.
The NASA shuttle simulator for training astronauts is going to Texas A&M.
Valasek said it won’t be a static display for viewing but a functional flight simulator. Visitors will be able to sit in the seats and cockpit and manually fly a simulated re-entry as the shuttle astronauts did. “When operational again, the SMS will be the centerpiece of many educational, outreach, and research activities for a long time to come,” Valasek said. “And it will be accessible. Until now, 355 astronauts have trained on the Shuttle Motion Simulator and flown on a space shuttle mission. Now the rest of us can experience at least a part of the excitement of space exploration, just the way the astronauts trained for it.”
The simulator will be used in aerospace engineering courses and accessible to all Texas A&M students, staff, and faculty. Spaceflight enthusiasts and fans of technology, whether affiliated with the university or not, will also be able to enjoy it.
Now, this is what an engineering school should be focused on, rather than the skin color of its students.
Doing the work NASA can’t do: Russia successfully launched three astronauts to ISS this morning.
Russia’s GPS system, Glonass, has returned to full operational capability, lost shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Seven predictions made in 1931 for the year 2011.
A Spanish company has announced it will build a space hotel by 2012.
The story suggests that Virgin Galactic will providing the tourist ferry to their orbital hotel, which is puzzling as that company is only building a suborbital spacecraft at this time.
Using the spacecraft’s last drops of fuel, engineers are attempting to aim Deep Impact to a 2020 rendezvous with near Earth asteroid 2002 GT.
Virgin Galactic isn’t the only one building a suborbital spaceplane: Europe plans to test fly its own suborbital spaceship in 2014.
