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Weekly Links

Down to Earth

Elon Musk was busy this week entertaining his fans with tidbits about future SpaceX plans, including the tweet below, as well as this picture on Instagram of a tool for their next larger rocket, the BFR.

NASA’s Planetary Science Division Director, Jim Greene, is now the agency’s new chief scientist.

Check out this music video by Snow Patrol which uses imagery from the ISS and was partially filmed at ESA.

In Orbit

There were three orbital rocket launches since my last post:

On Monday, April 16th, A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch carrying NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) space telescope.

Around the Solar System

The International Astronautical Union (IAU) has approved official names for features on Pluto’s moon Charon, some named after iconic sci-fi figures such as Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke.

Because images of Saturn are just so damn stunning, here’s Saturn’s moon Dione as imaged by the late Cassini spacecraft.

Moon Dione and Saturn’s rings edge-on

Posted in Atlas V, Cassini, China, ESA, Falcon 9, Friday Links, India, NASA, Pop Space, PSLV, Rockets, SpaceX, ULA | No Comments »

Weekly Links

Down to earth

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may see another launch slip.

The world’s largest airplane, built by Stratolaunch in Mojave, California, was rolled out for runway tests.

NASA’s next Mars lander, InSight, was delivered to the launch site in California.

The Orion crew access arm was installed on the SLS mobile launcher at KSC.

In Orbit

Alexander Misurkin, Joe Acaba, and Mark Vande Hei returned to Earth safely in their Soyuz last week. There are only three crew onboard the ISS until a new crew launches in two weeks.

Two rocket launches last week:

Around the solar system

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is still operating normally after its safe mode scare in February.

The amazing engineer’s at NASA’s JPL have figured out how to use the Mar rover Curiosity’s drill, despite the failure of the device in December 2016. The rover should resume scientific drill operations now that the technique has been demonstrated on Mars.

Out There

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered a distant water-rich planet, Wasp-39b. The planet is not Earth-like – it is a large planet like Saturn. However, the technique used to detect the atmospheric make-up of Wasp-39b is the best spectrum yet taken of an exoplanet.

Posted in astronomy, Extrasolar planets, Friday Links, InSight, ISS, Japan, JWST, MRO, MSL, NASA, Planetary science, Rockets, Soyuz, Stratolaunch, ULA, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Weekly Links

Down to Earth

Virgin Galactic conducted their first glide flight of SpaceShipTwo since last August.

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy has been attempting to conduct a static fire test ahead of launch, but has scrubbed three days in a row. It has been rescheduled for Monday.

In Orbit

Launches this past week included:

In the case of the SpaceX launch, there have been many reports from reliable journalists over the past week that the classified Zuma payload perhaps did not reach orbit. However, no official statement has yet been forthcoming.

Upcoming launches of interest include a ULA Atlas V from Florida on Jan 19, the next Rocket Lab Electron launch attempt on Jan 20, and SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy test flight (possibly on Jan 25?).

On the ISS, the 13th SpaceX Dragon mission ended successfully with release and splashdown. SpaceX ships are currently retrieving the capsule to return its science samples.

Posted in China, Falcon Heavy, Friday Links, India, ISS, NASA, New Space, PSLV, Rocket Lab, Rockets, SpaceX, ULA, Virgin Galactic | No Comments »

Weekly Links

Down to Earth

Andy Weir, author of the smash hit The Martian released his second novel, Artemis.

Sierra Nevada released video of last week’s successful glide flight of their Dream Chaser space plan:

A long-lost Omega astronaut watch from the Apollo era has been recovered and returned to the Smithsonian.

In Orbit

The Cygnus cargo freighter that launched last week, arrived at the ISS successfully on November 14.

Two rocket launches last week:

Around the Solar System

A new study in Nature analyzes Pluto’s hazy atmosphere and offers an explanation for the planet being colder than expected ( minus 300 deg F instead of minus 280 deg F).

Out There

A newly discovered exoplanet, Ross 128 b, is only 11 light years away and could be in the habitable zone of the red dwarf star it orbits.

Posted in Apollo, China, Extrasolar planets, Friday Links, History, ISS, NASA, New Horizons, Orbital Sciences, Planetary science, Pluto, Pop Space, Rockets, Sierra Nevada, ULA | No Comments »

Weekly Links

Down to Earth

LEGO is releasing a “women of NASA” set.

The Apollo 11 capsule Columbia has started its around the country tour with a new exhibit at Space Center Houston: Destination Moon.

This Lyft commercial referencing the Apollo program is cute, but is missing a shout out to Michael Collins.

Jeff Bezos’ company, Blue Origin, conducted the first test fire of their new BE-4 rocket engine.

In Orbit

The ISS Expedition 53 crew completed the second and third spacewalks in their October series. All planned tasks were completed successfully, leaving the space station with some new cameras and a repaired robotic arm. The rest of the year on ISS will be focused on science research, with some critical deliveries onboard a Cygnus resupply and SpaceX Dragon resupply.

Since my last post on October 9th, there have been four orbital rocket launches:

  • October 11 – SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying two geostationary communication satellites. The first stage was a previously flown booster and was recovered on a droneship.
  • October 13 – A Russian Rokot launched carrying an Earth obesrvation payload for ESA.
  • October 14 – A Soyuz rocket launched from Baikonaur carrying an unmanned Progress resupply bound for the ISS.
  • October 15 – ULA launched an Atlas V rocket carrying a national security payload for the NRO.

The Progress freighter docked successfully two days after launch.

Below are a few of the best pictures taken onboard the ISS from the past two weeks. If you want to help maintain the amazing archive of millions of pictures of Earth taken from ISS, now there’s a way! Check out Cosmo Quest’s new Image Detective project.

https://twitter.com/astro_paolo/status/920369795111051264

ISS astronauts tried to capitalize on a cultural craze down here on Earth with this recent video:

Out There

Hot on the heels of the Nobel Prize in Physics announcement, LIGO made another big discovery using gravitational waves: the first signal from the collision of two neutron stars was detected and confirmed. Phil Plait has a wonderful poetic post explaining what this means for our understanding of the universe.

Posted in Blue Origin, Earth photography, ESA, Futurist, ISS, Mission Control, NASA, Orbital Sciences, Pop Space, Rockets, Russia, SpaceX, ULA | No Comments »

Weekly Links

Not as much news as usual this week. To tide you over, don’t forget to check out all the tweets from the crew of the ISS from time to time! Here is a direct link to a feed of all of their tweets.

Down to Earth

Aerospace giant Northrop Grumman has purchased Orbital ATK in an enormous $9.2 billion deal.

Australia announced at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide that they will be establishing their  space agency.

https://twitter.com/exploreplanets/status/912108822663020544

In Orbit

Two orbital rocket launches since last week:

On September 22nd, a Russian Soyuz rocket launched carrying a new GLONASS navigation satellite.

On September 24th, a ULA Atlas V rocket launched from California carrying a payload for the National Reconnaissance Office.

Around the Solar System

Check out this amazing image of Jupiter from NASA’s Juno probe.

NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex asteroid explorer conducted a close flyby of Earth to set up its orbital transit out to the asteroid belt, where it should reach its target next year.

Posted in Australia, Friday Links, ISS, NASA, Orbital Sciences, Osiris-Rex, Rockets, Russia, ULA | No Comments »

Weekly Links

Down to Earth

SpaceX’s latest Dragon capsule left the ISS on March 19th and was successfully recovered by the company at sea.

A new exhibit about Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, has opened at the Science Museum in London.

The White House released their budget proposal for 2018, including proposed spending on NASA. The proposal funds NASA at $19.1 billion, which is a slight cut. Taking into account inflation, it comes out to a few percent less than what NASA is working under in 2017. If you really really love reading about budgets, here is a super long post from Casey Dreier at the Planetary Society breaking down the proposal.

The European Space Agency is having trouble with their only orbital launch site down in French Guiana as a general strike is causing most of society in the small French territory to grind to a halt. There had been an Ariane 5 rocket launch planned for last week that continues to be delayed.

In Orbit

There have been three successful orbital rocket launches since my last post on March 12th:

Meanwhile, SpaceX is working towards their next rocket launch. The next Falcon 9 rocket will be a commercial launch of the SES-10 communications satellite. The exciting part of this mission is that it will be the first flight of a reused first stage booster. The static fire test was completed today, with launch scheduled for Thursday evening.

On the International Space Station, the Expedition 50 crew is very busy with a series of spacewalks that will serve as Commander Shane Kimbrough’s send off before he comes home in early April. The first spacewalk was conducted last Friday, March 24th, when Kimbrough and Thomas Pesquet spent six and a half hours outside conducting various repairs and upgrades.

One of the spacewalk’s tasks was to disconnect Pressurized Mating Adapter 3 (PMA-3) before it was robotically moved this past Sunday to its new home on top of Node 2 for future dockings of the Dragon and Starliner spacecraft.

The next spacewalk is this coming Thursday. here is an hour long briefing from last week that describes the spacewalk plans in detail (keep in mind the discussed arrival of the Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo craft has since slipped):

Next up is your weekly dose of awesome Twitter photos from the ISS crew (and go check out Oleg Novitskiy who posts exclusively to his Instagram account).

Posted in ESA, Friday Links, History, ISS, Japan, Mission Control, NASA, Rockets, Russia, SpaceX, ULA | No Comments »

Weekly Links

Down to Earth

NASA has finalized an agreement with Boeing to use the extra seats on two Soyuz flights to the ISS over the next year and a half for additional US astronauts. There is some contractual stuff going on here, but basically NASA is going to use seats that Roscosmos was going to leave empty to save money.

Virgin Galactic has spun off its LauncherOne program into a new company called Virgin Orbit.

Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin is now getting in on the new moon missions also. According to the Washington Post (owned by Bezos), Blue Origin has floated a proposal to the new US presidential administration that they want to help support NASA missions to the moon with their Blue Moon concept.

PBS News Hour did a brief segment on all of this new interest in lunar missions:

In Orbit

Two rocket launches since my last post:

It’s hard to keep up with the current ISS crew, the members of Expedition 50, as they tweet like its all they do in what little spare time they have. Here’s a selection of the best pictures from just the last week.

 

Around the Solar System

NASA’s MAVEN probe in orbit of Mars executed an avoidance maneuver of about 0.4 m/s to avoid colliding with the moon Phobos. That velocity change is small, about on the order of the debris avoidance maneuvers we do with the ISS.

Check out these dust devils spotted by Curiosity rover on Mars.

Did you know that Saturn’s moon Enceladus is half cratered and half smooth? Check out this recent image from NASA’s Cassini probe to see for yourself.

Posted in astronauts, Blue Origin, Boeing, Cassini, China, commercial crew, Earth photography, Enceladus, Friday Links, ISS, Mars, Moon, MSL, NASA, New Space, Orion, politics, Rockets, Saturn, Space Tourism, SpaceX, ULA, Virgin Galactic | No Comments »

Weekly Links

Down to Earth

Legendary astronaut Gene Cernan has died at the age of 82. Captain Cernan had an incredible career in the Navy and then at NASA, where he flew on three important missions: Gemini 9, Apollo 10, and Apollo 17. Gemini 9 had Cernan’s harrowing spacewalk (the second for an American); Apollo 10 was the dress rehearsal for the moon landing, in which Cernan and Stafford got to within just miles of the lunar surface before a planned abort; Apollo 17 is of course known as the final mission to the surface of the moon. If you haven’t read Cernan’s autobiography or seen the recent biography about him (both called The Last Man on the Moon) you should put them both on your list.

NASA administrator Charlie Bolden resigned last Thursday – as is tradition for most presidential appointees – the day before inauguration of president Donald J. Trump. NASA is currently being run by acting administrator Robert Lightfoot.

Andy Weir, author of The Martian, announced on social medial that he will be working with CBS on a new show set in Houston’s mission control.

In Orbit

A small Japanese rocket, which would have been the smallest ever to make orbit, failed during a launch attempt last Saturday, January 14th. The rocket was carrying a single small cubesat.

However, two rockets did make successful launches within the last week. First, SpaceX had a spectacular return to flight on Saturday, January 14th, placing 10 satellites into orbit for Iridium after a flawless launch of a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg in California. They even stuck the landing on the first stage recovery.

Lastly, on January 20th, United Launch Alliance launched an Atlas V carrying a USAF satellite, GEO 3.

Meanwhile, a failure investigation has narrowed down the loss of a Russian Soyuz rocket last month to an oxidizer pump, leading the Russian space agency to make some part replacements on both the next manned and unmanned flights. Hopefully we will see Soyuz rockets flying to the ISS again soon!

Around the Solar System

The Japanese probe in orbit of Venus, Akatsuki, has made observations of a massive standing wave in the planet’s atmosphere.

Posted in Apollo, astronauts, Friday Links, History, Japan, NASA, Planetary science, politics, Pop Space, Rockets, SpaceX, ULA, Uncategorized, Venus | No Comments »

Weekly Links

Down to Earth

The crew of three Chinese taikonauts finished their 30-day stay aboard the Tiangong-2 space staion and returned to Earth last month.

A planned cargo resupply flight (with no astronauts aboard) launched from Kazakhstan on December 1 on its way to the ISS, but did not make orbit and crashed somewhere in a remote part of Asia. The next ISS resupply is a Japanese HTV vehicle launching next week.

Virgin Galactic continued their flight test program for the new SpaceShipTwo vehicle (named VSS Unity) with a captive carry flight on November 30 and then a glide drop test on December 3. Powered flights should be happening soon, but no specific dates are public. Here’s a photo gallery of the flight test.

In Orbit

Four other rockets launched since my last post on November 16, all successfully placing their payloads in orbit:

The ISS has had a very busy month, notwithstanding the loss of Progress 65. After the last three members of Expedition 50 arrived, they got quickly to work with last-minute packing of the Cygnus freighter, which they released two days later.

Since the Cygnus departure, the crew has been furiously working on their long list of on-orbit experiments. Thomas has someone found the time to tweet every day. Some of his best are below:

Around the Solar System

Radar measurements on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have discovered a vast deposit of frozen water under the Northern mid-latitudes of Mars.

Posted in China, Earth photography, ESA, ISS, Japan, Mars, NASA, New Space, Orbital Sciences, Planetary science, Rockets, Space Tourism, ULA, Virgin Galactic | No Comments »
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