NASA can stretch its budget for deep-space human exploration by working in partnership with private companies, much as it hopes to do with international partners as it moves beyond low Earth orbit (LEO) to cislunar space and beyond, according to a report prepared for the agency by Bigelow Aerospace.
NEW DELHI — A day after an engine anomaly slowed its progress, India’s Mars Orbiter successfully raised its orbit to an apogee above 118,000 km (73,000 mi.) on Nov. 12. The country’s first Mars orbiter suffered a setback on Nov. 11 as attempts were made to raise the spacecraft’s orbit around Earth to built momentum for its trip to Mars. A minor problem with the liquid fuel thruster caused the 1,350-kg (3,000-lb.) vehicle to fall short of the mark.
PARIS — Europe’s Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) re-entered Earth’s atmosphere at around 7 p.m. EDT Nov. 11 on a descending orbit pass that stretched across Siberia, the western Pacific Ocean, the eastern Indian Ocean and Antarctica. As expected, most of the satellite disintegrated in the upper atmosphere and no damage to property has been reported, according to the European Space Agency (ESA), though the agency says fragments reached Earth’s surface over the southernmost regions of the South Atlantic.
HOUSTON — Russia’s Soyuz TMA-09M descended to Earth late Nov. 10, returning a two-man, one-woman crew after 166 days aboard the International Space Station, along with a potentially faulty component suspected in the mid-July U.S. spacesuit failure that flooded the helmet of European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano with leaking water, prompting a suspension of NASA-sponsored spacewalks.
For the second time, Lockheed Martin has tested the unique fairings that will shield radiators and other delicate hardware on the Orion crew capsule’s service module during launch, using pyrotechnics and release mechanisms to jettison the hardware with simulated ascent heating. Engineers at the company’s facility in Sunnyvale, Calif., heated one of the three fairings to 200F and achieved what they termed “successful separation of all three fairings while under flight-like thermal and structural conditions.”
It is a commonplace that any future attempts to explore outer space will of necessity be an international effort. No single nation can afford the price of admission, and even with everyone pulling together, it will be difficult and dangerous. A recent television schedule for upcoming activities on the International Space Station brought that home.
Paul Anderson B.S. in Aerospace Engineering, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; Ph.D. candidate in Aerospace Engineering Sciences, University of Colorado. GPA: 4.0 Research: Evolution of the geosynchronous orbital debris environment. Undergraduate Research: Development of Stability Conditions of Oblique Wave Trains
YouTube goes a long way in highlighting the creativity and delight some of today's university students take in being . . . well, a nerd. Whether at Purdue University creating an over-engineered automated soft-drink dispensing system or at the University of Michigan putting a fresh take on dance-a-thon turned hack-a-thon, present-day engineering students add to the tradition of poking fun at who they are while reveling in what they do.
Since he was appointed CEO of Thales earlier this year, Jean-Bernard Levy has repeatedly proclaimed that there is nothing wrong with the company's business portfolio, because all of its operational units are profitable, if only marginally. Unfortunately, this view is symptomatic of the way most European aerospace and defense (A&D) players fail to understand the value of dynamic business portfolio management.
International Space Station occupancy temporarily surged to nine people on Nov. 7, with the launch and docking of the Soyuz TMA-11M spacecraft. Onboard was a crew of three, including veteran aerospace engineer Koichi Wakata, who is slated to become the first Japanese commander of the orbiting science lab in March.
HOUSTON — Staffing of the International Space Station (ISS) temporarily surged to nine astronauts on Nov. 7, with the launch and docking of the Soyuz TMA-11M spacecraft carrying three astronauts, including Japan’s first ISS commander.
The 3G-like capability that will eventually be available to warfighters from the U.S. Navy’s Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) is U.S.-only for now, but the spacecraft’s legacy UHF payload will remain available for allied use, according to U.S. Strategic Command. The Lockheed Martin-built MUOS satellites feature both the Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) payload and Boeing’s legacy UHF payload flying on the military’s existing Ultra High-Frequency Follow-On (UFO) satellites.
The 19-meter meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, was a fragment from a main-belt asteroid that broke up long ago and was too faint for detection by existing asteroid surveys, according to a new analysis of the Feb. 15 event.
FLOCKing BIRDS: An average of 115 satellites will be launched annually worldwide over the next 10 years (2013-2022), according to a new report from Euroconsult. “Revenues from the manufacture and launch of these 1,150 satellites over the decade will be worth $236 billion, up 26% from those generated by the 810 satellites launched in the past ten years (2003-2012),” Euroconsult says in a statement. Governments will be responsible for two-thirds of the 1,150 satellites to be launched and nearly three-quarters of the expected revenues.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins started a series of on-orbit tests Monday that could lead to large “sparse arrays” of satellites in space maintaining their relative position using electromagnetic fields generated by superconducting coils.
Observations from Japan’s Suzaku X-ray astronomy satellite indicate that iron and other heavy elements that make life possible were spread throughout the universe during a violent period of stellar explosions and super-massive black hole outbursts 10 billion years ago. The findings come from a U.S.-Japanese research team that bases its conclusions on observations of the massive Perseus galaxy cluster.
Hundreds of applications for aircraft operations and repair stations are held up, stymied by the FAA's inefficient certification processes, a government watchdog finds. FAA is juggling 1,029 such applications, Jeffrey Guzzetti of the Transportation Department's Inspector General's office, recently told Congress. The situation is so bad, one applicant has been in limbo since August 2006. And it is about to get worse, as requests from NextGen technologies and unmanned aircraft flow into the system.
