Copernical Team
Blue Origin rocket test will monitor capsule access by humans
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Jeff Bezos' space company, Blue Origin, plans to launch Wednesday morning from Texas what may be the last test flight for its New Shepard rocket before it carries people later this year. But people will be getting into and out of the capsule atop the 60-foot-high rocket as part of the test.
Liftoff is planned for 11:15 a.m. EDT from the company's spaceport near Van Horn, about 120 miles so Russia space chief blasts US for omitting Gagarin in post
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The head of Russia's space agency used strong language to criticise US State Department members for failing to mention Yuri Gagarin in a post marking 60 years since his historic spaceflight.
On Monday, Russia led by President Vladimir Putin marked the 60th anniversary of the legendary flight that made Gagarin the first human in orbit.
The US State Department issued a Facebook post commem China to develop aerospace as strategic emerging industry
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China will continue to exert great efforts to boost aerospace as a strategic emerging industry in the next five years, a senior aerospace official said.
The China National Space Administration (CNSA) is drawing up a plan for the country's space development during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025), said Zhang Kejian, head of the CNSA.
During this period, China will promote pr Lavrov calls for talks on binding treaty to prohibit weapons in space
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Russia has called for talks to create a legally binding international instrument that would ban the deployment of any type of weapons in space, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on the 60th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic space flight.
The anniversary of the first Soviet cosmonaut's flight, marking the beginning of humanity's space era, is celebrated every year in Russia a China sets up expert advisory committee for lunar samples
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China has set up an expert committee for lunar samples, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said Tuesday.
According to the regulations on lunar sample management, the CNSA established the committee as an expert advisory institution for the management of lunar samples.
The committee aims to give full play to the scientific value of lunar samples and standardize their manage NASA will continue working with Russia on space despite China plan
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Russia and NASA will continue to cooperate in space in the near future, even as Russia moves to work with China on lunar exploration, experts said.
Russia and China announced March 9 they will cooperate on China's planned International Scientific Lunar Station, while the United States will have no involvement in the Chinese space program under a law passed in 2011.
But ultimately NASA delays Mars helicopter flight again for software update
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NASA has postponed the flight of the Mars helicopter Ingenuity, the first controlled flight on another planet, to work through a software problem.
The flight had been planned for Thursday and then delayed to Sunday. NASA didn't immediately set a new target date for the flight.
"Our best estimate of a targeted flight date is fluid right now, but we are working toward achieving the Drone test of Hera mission's asteroid radar
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Drone test of Hera mission asteroid radar Video: How to clear Earth's orbit of space debris
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On 20 April 2021, ESA will host the 8th European Conference on Space Debris from Darmstadt, in Germany. Scientists, engineers, industry experts and policy makers will spend the virtual four-day conference discussing the latest issues surrounding space debris. They will exchange the latest research, try to come up with solutions for potential problems and define the future direction of any necessary action.
There are currently over 129 million objects larger than a millimeter in orbits around Earth. These range from inactive satellites to flakes of paint. But no matter how small the item of debris, anything traveling up to 56,000 km/h in an orbit is dangerous if it comes into contact with the many satellites that connect us around the world, be it for GPS, mobile phone data or internet connectivity. The solution is to take action before it's too late. This is why ESA has commissioned ClearSpace-1—the world's first mission to remove space debris—for launch in 2025.
This film contains interviews with ESA Head of Space Debris Office Tim Flohrer; ESA Head of Clean Space Office Luisa Innocenti; and Xanthi Oikonomidou, ESA Space Debris Office.
Researchers study collective behavior of nanosatellites
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Scientists from the Skoltech Space Center (SSC) have developed nanosatellite interaction algorithms for scientific measurements using a tetrahedral orbital formation of CubeSats that exchange data and apply interpolation algorithms to create local maps of physical measurements in real time. The study presents an example of geomagnetic field measurement, which shows that these data can be used by other satellites for attitude control and, therefore, provided on a data-as-a-service basis. The research was published in the journal Advances in Space Research.
SSC is the research lead within the Nanosatellites Swarm project ("Roy MKA") performed by a consortium of several Russian universities and included in the ISS experimental program led by RSC Energia. "Roy MKA" aims to deploy autonomous groups of CubeSats and verify their swarm behavior.
For one of the "Roy MKA" experiments, SSC researchers suggested a tetrahedral formation, which provides an ability to measure the geomagnetic field at any point on orbit. The system is fully autonomous, which means that satellites can process and update measurement data on board and predict magnetic field values by interpolation.
"We use the Kriging interpolation which helps to select the magnetic field values in accordance with its characteristics (autocorrelation).