CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla — Providing a strong showing for itself, United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV medium rocket thundered off of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 37 (SLC-37) at the opening of its launch window at 8:27 p.m. EDT Friday, May 24. In so doing, it returned the launch vehicle to service after an issue cropped up during the Delta IV’s previous launch. Unique angles, incredible imagery, and an epic return to flight were all part of a day’s work.
Continue reading Photo Feature: ULA Returns Delta IV to Service
Artist’s conception of the Dream Chaser launching on an Atlas V rocket. Image Credit: Sierra Nevada Corporation
With the ending of the Space Shuttle program, NASA is now turning to private companies to design and build new spacecraft to take astronauts into orbit. One of the most interesting concepts, the Dream Chaser, is now ready to starttesting, and it is hoped that this will help usher in a new era of commercial human spaceflight.
Continue reading New ‘Dream Chaser’ Space Plane Ready to Start Testing
Helen Sharman’s Sokol launch and entry suit, today housed at the National Space Centre in Leicester, United Kingdom. Photo Credit: Alan Saunders
Aside from issues of politics and finance—discussed in yesterday’s article—the choice of Helen Sharman as the first Briton in space came on 19 February 1991, when Air Vice Marshal Peter Howard—former commandant of the Royal Air Force’s Institute of Aviation Medicine, aerospace physician, and veteran of the world’s first rocket-propelled ejection seat, who had been placed in charge of the Project Juno astronaut selection—arrived in Moscow for separate discussions with the two candidates. “They told me I was to be in the prime crew,” Sharman recalled in her autobiography, Seize the Moment. “This would be subject to a medical examination in March and another immediately before the launch.” Her backup, Army Air Corps Major Tim Mace, was characteristically gracious and the pair continued to work together, side by side, until, on 23 April, their formal training concluded. Less than a month remained before the launch of Soyuz TM-12.
Continue reading ‘No Experience Necessary’: The Story of Project Juno (Part 2)
Remembering Apollo 10 — Sunrise in the South Pacific Ocean provides the backdrop for splashdown and recovery of Apollo 10 on May 26, 1969. Astronauts Tom Stafford, John Young, and Gene Cernan landed their spacecraft 400 miles east of American Samoa. They were soon brought aboard the U.S.S. Princeton.
This image shows the HR 8799 planets with starlight optically suppressed and data processing conducted to remove residual starlight. The star is at the center of the blackened circle in the image. The four spots indicated with the letters b through e are the planets. This is a composite image using 30 wavelengths of light and was obtained over a period of 1.25 hours on June 14 and 15, 2012. Image Credit: Project 1640
Gone are the days of being able to count the number of known planets on your fingers. Today, there are more than 800 confirmed exoplanets—planets that orbit stars beyond our sun—and more than 2,700 other candidates. What are these exotic planets made of? Unfortunately, you cannot stack them in a jar like marbles and take a closer look. Instead, researchers are coming up with advanced techniques for probing the planets’ makeup.
Continue reading Sifting Through the Atmospheres of Far-off Worlds
Surrounded by Soviet cosmonauts Musa Manarov, Sergei Krikalev, and Viktor Afanasyev, the first Briton in space enjoys the weightless environment. Helen Sharman’s flight was mired in controversy, as well as political and financial difficulty, from the outset and was seen by many as little more than a publicity stunt. Photo Credit: Joachim Becker/SpaceFacts.de
Few British space enthusiasts can possibly forget the famous plethora of posters, newspaper advertisements, and radio and television announcements which materialised nationwide throughout the summer of 1989. Astronaut Wanted, they crowed, No Experience Necessary. It was typically indicative of the understated humour of an island kingdom whose imperial history, wealth, and technological prowess in the 19th and 20th centuries had given way to a surprising dearth of activity in the human space flight sphere. Although the United Kingdom had become the sixth nation to launch a homegrown satellite into the heavens—tiny “Prospero,” atop a Black Arrow rocket from Woomera, South Australia, in October 1971—its aspirations in space exploration almost exclusively focused upon unmanned research, with particular emphasis upon the Earth sciences. During the course of the 1980s, despite the formation of the British National Space Centre (BNSC), the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher virtually gutted any chance of a human space programme.
Continue reading ‘No Experience Necessary’: The Story of Project Juno (Part 1)
Astronaut Pete Conrad leads fellow Skylab 2 astronauts Paul Weitz and Joe Kerwin into the crew transfer van at Kennedy Space Center on the morning of May 25, 1973. The flight of the first manned crew to Skylab had been delayed 10 days while NASA and contractor officials developed plans and equipment for repairing the Skylab space station after it was damaged during its launch on May 14, 1973.
In this computer simulation, the sheer amount of orbital debris becomes apparent—as does the need to find a way to prevent it. Image Credit: NASA
There’s a lot of junk up there. Around 20,000 bits and pieces of satellites and old rocket parts, bigger than 5 cm (2 inches) across, are floating around in orbits less than 2,000 km high—and that’s just the stuff that can be tracked from Earth. It’s estimated that there’s another half a million unwanted items, up to 1 cm across, orbiting in regions where there’s a danger of collision with active spacecraft. Even an object as small as a dime, traveling at a relative speed of several thousand kilometers per hour, could knock out a valuable functioning satellite or pose a threat to astronauts in low-Earth orbit.
Continue reading Countering the Threat Posed by Orbital Debris
Tonight’s launch is the second launch in just eight days for United Launch Alliance. The Delta IV 5,4 medium launch vehicle lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 37 at 8:27 p.m. EDT. Photo Credit:Jeffrey J. Soulliere
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla — Barely eight days after it boosted an Atlas V aloft with the GPS IIF-4 satellite, United Launch Alliance (ULA) has successfully returned its workhorse Delta IV rocket to flight, following a lengthy hiatus. Launch took place at 8:27 p.m. EDT Friday May 24, from Space Launch Complex 37 (SLC-37) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., precisely on the opening of a 32-minute “window”. The Delta IV lofted the U.S. Air Force’s fifth Wideband Global Satcom (WGS-5), which is expected to provide a “quantum leap” in military communications capability. It will provide deployed U.S. and allied forces with unprecedented access to bandwidth-intensive applications – such as video streaming, teleconferencing, real-time data transmission and high-resolution imaging – as well as supporting the next generation of unmanned aerial vehicles.
Continue reading WGS-5 Launch Marks Delta IV’s Triumphant Return to Flight
It turns out that the moons of the outer solar system are shaping up to be some of the most dynamic destinations in terms of planetary exploration. Image Credit: NASA / JPL
Far from the warm inner regions of the solar system, in orbit around the great gas giants are moons full of surprises. One has a riot of active volcanoes and a surface that is red, yellow, and brown because its blanket of sulfur compounds. Another has a thick atmosphere of nitrogen and lakes of methane. At least one has a deep watery underground ocean. There is even talk of life on some of these remote, icy satellites, and scientists would love to send out probes to target them.
The Soyuz TMA-09M spacecraft is rolled out by train to the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch pad, Sunday, May 26, 2013, in Kazakhstan. Expedition 36/37 Soyuz Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin of the Russian Federal Space Agency, Flight Engineer Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency, and Flight Engineer Karen Nyberg of NASA, are set to launch to the International Space Station Tuesday night Eastern U.S. time, Wednesday in Kazakh time. Yurchikhin, Nyberg, and, Parmitano, will remain aboard the station until mid-November. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls Read More
