Isar Aerospace wins three-way DLR microlauncher competition
Thursday, 06 May 2021 14:29
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VALLETTA, Malta — German launch startup Isar Aerospace beat out Rocket Factory Augsburg and HyImpulse Technologies to win a DLR endorsement that clears the way for it to secure 11 million euros from the European Space Agency’s Boost! program.
First Ariane 6 fairing at Europe’s Spaceport
Thursday, 06 May 2021 13:29 Write a comment
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First Ariane 6 fairing at Europe’s Spaceport Space Force tells troops to focus on digital skills
Thursday, 06 May 2021 12:47 Write a comment
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force on May 6 released a vision document that calls on its military and civilian workforce to embrace a “digital culture.”
The Space Force’s “Vision for a Digital Service” says the service will need people who are digitally minded and technology savvy.
Space weather is difficult to predict—with only an hour to prevent disasters on Earth
Thursday, 06 May 2021 12:13 Write a comment
Recent developments at the forefront of astronomy allow us to observe that planets orbiting other stars have weather. Indeed, we have known that other planets in our own solar system have weather, in many cases more extreme than our own.
Our lives are affected by short-term atmospheric variations of weather on Earth, and we fear that longer-term climate change will also have a large impact. The recently coined term "space weather" refers to effects that arise in space but affect Earth and regions around it. More subtle than meteorological weather, space weather usually acts on technological systems, and has potential impacts that range from communication disruption to power grid failures.
Image: NASA's Lucy high gain antenna up close
Thursday, 06 May 2021 11:25 Write a comment
Lucy's epic journey to observe Jupiter's Trojan asteroids requires a reliable communications link back to Earth, and so the spacecraft is outfitted with a 6.5-ft. (2-meter)-wide high gain antenna for this task.
Designed and built by Lockheed Martin, this same style antenna has been used to return science data from Mars and transfer back photos of asteroid Bennu. Lucy's antenna will send back the first-ever close up images and spectra of Trojan asteroids.
The signal from the antenna will also help determine the mass of these never-before-visited space objects revealed by tiny changes in frequency caused by the Doppler effect.
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NASA's On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing 1 (OSAM-1) mission ready for spacecraft build
Thursday, 06 May 2021 11:21 Write a comment
NASA is one step closer to robotically refueling a satellite and demonstrating in-space assembly and manufacturing thanks to the completion of an important milestone.
In April 2021, NASA and Maxar Technologies successfully completed the On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing 1 (OSAM-1) mission spacecraft accommodation Critical Design Review (CDR). This milestone demonstrates that the maturity of the design for the OSAM-1 spacecraft bus is appropriate to support proceeding with fabrication, assembly, integration, and testing.
OSAM-1 will, for the first time ever, robotically refuel a U.S. government satellite not designed to be serviced. The spacecraft will consist of a servicing payload, provided by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with two robotic arms that will be attached to the spacecraft bus. The bus will also incorporate a payload called Space Infrastructure Dexterous Robot (SPIDER) that will demonstrate in-space assembly and manufacturing. SPIDER will use a third robotic arm to assemble a communications antenna and an element called MakerSat built by Tethers Unlimited to manufacture a beam. The spacecraft bus and SPIDER are being built by Maxar Technologies.
Lunar crater radio telescope: Illuminating the cosmic dark ages
Thursday, 06 May 2021 11:14 Write a comment
After years of development, the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) project has been awarded $500,000 to support additional work as it enters Phase II of NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. While not yet a NASA mission, the LCRT describes a mission concept that could transform humanity's view of the cosmos.
The LCRT's primary objective would be to measure the long-wavelength radio waves generated by the cosmic Dark Ages—a period that lasted for a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, but before the first stars blinked into existence. Cosmologists know little about this period, but came the answers to some of science's biggest mysteries may be locked in the long-wavelength radio emissions generated by the gas that would have filled the universe during that time.
"While there were no stars, there was ample hydrogen during the universe's Dark Ages—hydrogen that would eventually serve as the raw material for the first stars," said Joseph Lazio, radio astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and a member of the LCRT team.
Masked campaign
Thursday, 06 May 2021 09:32 Write a comment
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Researchers take a group photo in front of the Air Zero G aircraft to mark the end of the 75th ESA parabolic flight campaign. The campaign was the third to take place under Covid-19 restrictions, and ran from 21 to 30 April in Bordeaux, France.
Participants and coordinators adjusted to a new way of flying: PCR tests were required to enter France, as well as rapid antigen or RT LAMP tests each day for every participant. Facilities on the ground as well as on board were adapted to allow for social distancing and cleanliness requirements. Surgical masks were worn
US watching Chinese rocket's erratic re-entry: Pentagon
Thursday, 06 May 2021 07:37 Write a comment
The Pentagon said Wednesday it is following the trajectory of a Chinese rocket expected to make an uncontrolled entry into the atmosphere this weekend, with the risk of crashing down in an inhabited area.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is "aware and he knows the space command is tracking, literally tracking this rocket debris," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.
China on Thursday launched the first of three elements for its space station, the CSS, which was powered by the Long March 5B rocket that is now being tracked.
The body of the rocket "is almost intact coming down," Kirby said, adding that its re-entry is expected sometime around Saturday.
Space startup Quasar takes off with CSIRO Tech
Thursday, 06 May 2021 07:02 Write a comment
New Australian space startup Quasar Satellite Technologies is set to revolutionise space communication, allowing ground stations to talk to hundreds of satellites at once using technology developed by CSIRO, Australia's national science agency.
Over the next decade, more than 57,000 satellites will be launched worldwide to support a surge in demand for space-derived data, from environmenta Researchers create new lunar map to help guide future exploration missions
Thursday, 06 May 2021 07:02 Write a comment
A new map including rover paths of the Schrodinger basin, a geologically important area of the moon, could guide future exploration missions.The map was created by a team of interns at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, including Ellen Czaplinski, a University of Arkansas graduate student researcher at the Arkansas Center for Planetary Sciences and first author of a paper published in The Planet Start of a new series of tests for plant cultivation on the Moon and Mars
Thursday, 06 May 2021 07:02 Write a comment
Nine weeks of darkness and temperatures down to minus 50 degrees Celsius. Under these harsh conditions of Antarctica, NASA and the German Aerospace Center have begun a joint series of experiments on vegetable cultivation techniques for use on the Moon and Mars. Until early 2022, NASA guest scientist Jess Bunchek will research how future astronauts could grow lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers US must embrace human augmentation or fall behind competitors
Thursday, 06 May 2021 07:02 Write a comment
Mixing human ingenuity with machine efficiency, power, and speed can create superhuman capabilities in the coming decade, and the US must embrace this change in technological era or fall behind global adversaries, Dr. Joel B. Mozer, the Chief Scientist of the US Space Force, said on Wednesday.
He was speaking at the Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL) Inspire event.
"In the last c Blue Origin opens online auction for seat on 1st crewed flight
Thursday, 06 May 2021 07:02 Write a comment
Washington-based spaceflight company Blue Origin opened up an auction Wednesday for a seat on its first crewed flight to the edge of space in July.
The New Shepard suborbital space tourism rocket is expected to be launched July 20 from the company's spaceport near Van Horn, Texas, about 120 miles southeast of El Paso.
Blue Origin, which is owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, said the a