Jean-Yves Le Gall, the newly named president of France's Centre Nationale d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), is Aviation Week's 2014 Laureate for Space, based on his work as chairman and CEO of Arianespace. Named to the helm of Europe's world-beating launch service provider in 2007, Le Gall turned around the performance of the Ariane 5 during his tenure at the company. Under his leadership, Arianespace accomplished 54 consecutive successful missions.
Ariane 5 has been successfully launched from Kourou, French Guiana, for the 59th time in a row, further underlining the reliability of the European launcher developed and built by its prime contractor Airbus Defence and Space, number two worldwide in space technologies.
HOUSTON — Significant cost uncertainty and seemingly optimistic scheduling are just two of the concerns raised over NASA’s proposed Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) by members of the near-Earth object (NEO) community in a new report. The report is the result of the Target NEO 2: Open Community Workshop organized last year in response to the exploration initiative unveiled by the space agency in April 2013.
SOLAR ORBITER: NASA has negotiated a $172.7 million contract with United Launch Services LLC, the contracting arm of United Launch Alliance, to prepare and launch the U.S./European Solar Orbiter Collaboration mission in 2017 on an Atlas V. Under the deal, the company will handle spacecraft processing, payload integration, launch and related services for the mission, which will study the Sun and its outer atmosphere with high-resolution imagery and in-situ measurements in orbit. The mission will use an Atlas V 411 flying from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral.
NASA’s planned Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (Wfirst) would be greatly enhanced with optical systems donated by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), although such upgrades will introduce greater complexity and cost, according to a National Research Council (NRC) assessment. Wfirst is a flagship-level mission intended to follow the James Webb Space Telescope for studies of dark energy, planetary architectures of other solar systems and stellar evolution.
Commercial remote-sensing-services provider DigitalGlobe has confirmed that the satellite images it provided to Australian search-and-rescue authorities in the hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 were captured on March 16 by its WorldView-2 satellite at a panchromatic resolution of approximately 50 cm. “Working with our customers, DigitalGlobe continues to task our satellites to collect imagery of a wide area that includes the waters around where the possible debris was identified yesterday,” the company said in a March 20 statement.
India is making headway toward launching Astrosat, the country’s first satellite devoted to astronomy, which will look at the universe in X-ray, ultraviolet and visible light bands, a senior space scientist says. Astrosat, a multi-wave-length observatory in space, will be launched with six instruments aboard India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Chairman K. Radhakrishnan says. “It is getting ready now,” Radhakrishnan says. “It will be integrated by 2015.”
HOUSTON — NASA’s ongoing studies of a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa include evaluating the use of the agency’s Space Launch System to showcase the heavy lifter’s utility for the robotic exploration of the outer Solar System, according to James Green, the agency’s director of planetary sciences.
The third SpaceX commercial cargo mission to the International Space Station has been delayed until no earlier than March 30 because of payload contamination that may require some new parts to be installed. Originally set for March 16, the Falcon 9 launch was delayed on March 14 to “ensure the highest possible level of mission assurance and allow additional time to resolve remaining open items,” according to a NASA update that quoted SpaceX and referred additional questions to the Hawthorne, Calif., commercial-cargo launch service provider.
ViviSat, a satellite-servicing startup developing life-extension vehicles for end-of-life commercial communications satellites in geostationary orbit, has signed three customers and expects to begin building its specialized spacecraft by the end of 2014.
HOUSTON — U.S. and Russian flight control teams coordinated the first debris avoidance maneuver for the International Space Station in 16 1/2 months late March 16, to avoid a debris fragment from Meteor 2-5, a weather satellite launched by the former Soviet Union in October 1979. The ISS crew — commander Koichi Wakata, of Japan; NASA’s Rick Mastracchio, and Russia’s Mikhail Tyurin — were asleep and in no danger as the debris of unknown dimensions passed at 12 p.m. (Midnight on Sunday, EDT March 16), NASA spokesman Josh Byerly said.
A specialized telescope at the South Pole has detected what scientists say is the first direct evidence of the dramatic expansion of the Universe an instant after the Big Bang, according to scientists who spent three years examining their data before making the announcement in Cambridge, Mass., today. Known at BICEP2, the instrument takes advantage of the still, dry environment at the South Pole to avoid interference that might obscure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background, an artifact of the Big Bang that is the oldest light there is.
