Copernical Team
Space Coast bustling with 4 crew launches on tap from SpaceX, Boeing
Before summer, 14 more humans could launch from U.S. soil as SpaceX has three missions set to lift off from Kennedy Space Center on Crew Dragons while Boeing looks to send its CST-100 Starliner up to the International Space Station for the first time with people on board.
"We're heading into, I would say one of the busiest increments in the history of station," said Kathryn Lueders, NASA's associate administrator for the Space Operations Mission Directorate at press conference last week. "We have a string of critical missions coming up."
That includes not only crewed flights from the Space Coast, but a replacement Soyuz capsule to be sent up from Russia to the station for one damaged by micrometeorites and resupply missions from SpaceX, Northrop Grumman and Russia in the next four months.
The first crewed flight, though, coming no earlier than Feb. 26 is the Crew-6 mission flying on SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour taking up NASA astronaut and mission commander Stephen Bowen, flying for the fourth time, and first timers pilot Woody Hoburg of NASA, United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan AlNeyadi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
Successful in-flight demonstration of the ADEO braking sail
The Drag Augmentation Deorbiting System (ADEO) breaking sail was successfully deployed from the ION satellite carrier in late December 2022.
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Curious comet’s rare close approach
Turning astronauts into Moon explorers
Astral alchemy
The Standard Model of particle physics tells us that most particles we observe are made up of combinations of just six types of fundamental entities called quarks. However, there are still many mysteries, one of which is an exotic, but very short-lived, Lambda resonance known as ^(1405).
For a long time, it was thought to be a particular excited state of three quarks-up, down, and strange- Setting sail for safer space
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Setting sail for safer space New telescope project completion in sight
The construction of the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) being developed by CCAT Observatory Inc., an international consortium of universities led by Cornell, is drawing to a close.
Work is poised to begin on a defining feature of the telescope—the "elevation" part that supports the upper structure and will contain the telescope's mirrors. Unlike almost any other telescope to date, the part will be constructed from Invar, a special formulation of steel that has an extremely low coefficient of thermal expansion.
"This means that it doesn't get bigger when it's hot and it doesn't shrink when it's cold," said Jim Blair, FYST project manager in the Department of Astronomy, in the College of Arts and Sciences. "At least, it's greatly, greatly reduced with Invar compared to regular steel. And that's important for the science, because at the wavelengths we are looking at, thermal expansion would actually affect the data and could ruin it.
Studies on hibernating squirrels may help astronauts
Can studying sleeping Arctic ground squirrels help astronauts and further NASA's mission? Dr. Kelly Drew and her students studied hibernating squirrels and their ability to retain muscle and bone mass during extended hibernation and they think it could apply to astronauts.
Drew, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks in Fairbanks, Alaska was awarde D-Orbit launches ION's first mission into a midinclination orbit
Space logistics and orbital transportation company D-Orbit launched Starfield, the eighth commercial mission of their proprietary orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) ION Satellite Carrier (ION), and the first one in a midinclination orbit.
The OTV lifted off January 31st, 2023, at 8:15 a.m. PT (16:15 UTC) aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from the Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space