New findings from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (Lcross) confirm the presence of water ice in both the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions as well as areas that receive occasional sunlight. Analysis of data captured by LRO and Lcross, when the latter mission purposely crashed its spent Centaur upper stage into the Moon’s Cabeus crater, show that volatiles including methane, hydrogen gas, carbon dioxide and monoxide made up more than 20% of the resulting impact plume.
I admired your Green Aerospace issue (AW&ST Sept. 20/27, pp. 56-69), but caution that the environmental footprint of any biomass production process is directly connected with the area of land required, primarily because of emissions problems associated with land use change plus the loss of biodiversity. Terrestrial plants are, at best, 1% efficient at transforming solar energy into biomass (chemical energy). That is what Brazil is getting out of its sugarcane crop, a C4 vegetable that is among the most efficient in hot climates.
Carriers around the Persian Gulf are angrily rejecting European and U.S. airlines’ complaints that they receive unfair export credit financing, and they are venting their frustration over the looming implementation of the European Union’s emissions trading scheme (ETS).
The Pentagon push to cut costs and rely on existing assets is forcing the Army to focus on recapitalizing and upgrading its stalwart rotorcraft fleet, ravaged by years of rough service in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army rotorcraft plan includes major overhauls and upgrades of its CH-47 Chinooks, AH-64 Apaches and OH-58 Kiowa Warriors. “It’s been more than just a remanufacturing,” says Raymond Haddad, Boeing’s worldwide Chinook programs director.
France’s Thales is developing a new product policy that it hopes will give it a leg up in the competition to provide cockpits for the next-generation Airbus and Boeing narrowbody airliners, and improve its ability to compete against such rivals as Honeywell and Rockwell Collins.
Boeing and a Lockheed Martin/Kaman team have submitted bids to provide cargo resupply services to the U.S. Marine Corps in Afghanistan using unmanned helicopters. Boeing has proposed new-build A160T Hummingbirds, while Lockheed and Kaman have offered the K-Max.
Britain is increasingly looking to France to help sustain its ability to remain a player on the global stage in the face of big spending cuts emerging from the newly unveiled Strategic Defense and Security Review (SDSR).
Russian technicians are running electrical checks on the Soyuz TMA-20 capsule at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, after replacing its descent module as a precaution against damage it may have sustained in a rail mishap en route to the launch site.
A concept for combining fixed- and rotary-wing aviation almost as old as powered flight is being revisited under the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s DiscRotor program.
The next big air-launched weapons battle is about to heat up with the U.S. Army’s expected solicitation to replace Hellfire, Maverick and TOW missiles in one fell swoop with the Joint Air-to-Ground Missile (JAGM). JAGM will be worth billions of dollars and consolidate the markets for three workhorse weapons into a single manufacturing house. It will also be integrated onto six platforms—including fixed- and rotary-wing—for the Army and Navy: the F/A-18E/F, AH-1Z and MH-60R/S, Apache Block III, MQ-1C Gray Eagle and OH-58D.
NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft will hurtle past comet 103P/Hartley 2 on Nov. 4, the second comet flyby in its extended mission. The flyby is part of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory-directedEpoxi (Extrasolar Planet Observation and Characterization/Deep Impact Extended Investigation of comets) mission. The mission team is using the Deep Impact spacecraft that fired a copper-tipped projectile into the comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005, to image comets and study extrasolar planets. Deep Impact began to approach Hartley 2 on Sept. 5.
Uncertainty will continue to hang over parts of Britain’s military spending plan after a sweeping review left several important program and defense industrial issues unaddressed. But what’s already clear is that the Strategic Defense and Security Review (SDSR), which recommends cutting defense spending by 8% over four years, will leave the country’s military facing a future bereft of several key capabilities.
Much remains to be done on the regulatory and technical side of achieving performance-based navigation, but airlines are discovering that they need to pay attention to the basics, especially local sensitivity to jet noise, when they implement it.
The latest update to Aviation Week’s Top-Performing Airlines (TPA) rankings reveals the remarkable improvement the industry has seen in the six months since the last report. The brightening demand environment is lifting all carriers, but some are faring better than others. The theme from the previous update still holds true—smaller and independent airlines remain a significant presence among the leaders, and their models work just as well in recovery as in recession.
Many of the avionics advances required for future-generation U.S. and European air traffic systems already exist or are in development, but equipment and system manufacturers warn that the battle for timely implementation has barely begun.
Leland D. Melvin has been selected by NASA as the agency’s new associate administrator for education, effective immediately. He succeeds James L. Stofan, who has served in an acting capacity since the spring.
Inflight entertainment equipment manufacturers are consolidating in an effort to replicate in the executive aviation industry the spread of high-speed broadband among the airlines. ViaSat, which will equip JetBlue Airways aircraft with Ka-band onboard Internet service, will acquire Skylink, a bizjet airborne broadband service owned by Arinc. The service will be combined with ViaSat’s Yonder Ku-band bizjet Internet offering.
The Lunar Lander Project Office at Johnson Space Center will spend as much as $30.1 million over the next five years buying data from companies trying to develop private lunar landers, including those vying for the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize (AW&ST Oct. 11, p. 37). NASA will use the data as it develops its own landers for human and robotic missions to the Moon. Among winners of the contracts are Astrobotic Technology Inc. of Pittsburgh; the Charles Stark Draper Lab of Cambridge, Mass.; Dynetics Inc. of Huntsville, Ala.; and Moon Express Inc.
Joe Hof has been named director-business development for global ATM operations at Metron Aviation , Dulles, Va. He was national operations manager of international operations at the FAA’s Control System Command Center.
Korean Air expects to take delivery of its first Airbus A380 next May and to have five in service by the end of 2011. The first aircraft was rolled out in Toulouse last week to await flight testing for systems checks.
Globalstar has launched the first six of 24 new-generation satellites intended to renew its low-Earth-orbit mobile satellite service network. The launch, on a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome by Arianespace affiliate Starsem, will be followed by three others next year under the $2-billion Globalstar 2 program, which is designed to extend the life of the network another 25 years.
A second attempt to shoot down a ballistic missile using the Boeing YAL-1 Airborne Laser testbed failed on Oct. 21 when the system did not transition from tracking the target missile’s rocket plume to active tracking. The megawatt-class chemical laser was not fired, says the U.S. Missile Defense Agency. The test objective was to destroy a solid-fuel short-range ballistic missile target—a Terrier Black Brandt sounding rocket—while its rocket motors were still thrusting. MDA says it is also investigating the “intermittent performance” of a valve in the laser system.
The U.S. Army is making strides in improving its intelligence-collection capability as anti-insurgency efforts intensify in Afghanistan. Two key programs are moving forward: The Enhanced Medium-Altitude Reconnaissance and Surveillance System (Emarss), optimized for real-time intelligence, and the Constant Hawk, a forensic intelligence-collector optimized to counter improvised explosive devices, which is managed by the Army’s Task Force ODIN.
Rockwell Collins is in the final stages of certifying its Pro Line Fusion avionics system, which is designed to enable corporate and air transport users to slot into a fully fledged U.S. NextGen or European Sesar performance-based air traffic environment.
Revenues at Boeing’s Commercial Airplanes (BCA) unit rose 11% in the third quarter from a year earlier, and the company recorded its highest order total since early 2008, providing fresh evidence that a recovery in demand for commercial jets is gaining momentum. BCA reported 221 net orders during the three months ended Sept. 30, well above the 151 taken during the two previous quarters combined and a vast improvement from the first half of 2009, when the company recorded just one net order.
