Beyond Gravity unveils reusable payload fairing concept
Wednesday, 29 November 2023 02:43
The introduction of a reusable payload fairing by Beyond Gravity represents a significant stride in addressing major industry challenges like affordability and environmental impact.
Beyond Gravity, a leading player in the international space sector, is pushing the envelope of innovation with its latest concept aimed at transforming space launches. Known for its expertise in payload fairing prod China's Mars rover detects irregular wedges beneath red planet
Wednesday, 29 November 2023 02:43
Radars mounted on China's Mars rover Zhurong detected 16 irregular wedges buried underneath a vast plain in the northern hemisphere of Mars.
A collaborative team led by the researchers from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences identified from the radar data the polygonal wedges below a depth of 35 meters within the rover's journey of approximately 1 A satellite's death spiral
Wednesday, 29 November 2023 02:43
Down on the ground, death equals stillness - but not in space. Abandoned satellites are prone to tumble in unpredictable ways and an ESA project with the Astronomical Institute of the University of Bern sought to better understand this behaviour.
ESA's Clean Space initiative has plans to remove dead satellites from highly trafficked orbits. The preferred method of 'Active Debris Removal' i Alien haze, cooked in a lab, clears view to distant water worlds
Wednesday, 29 November 2023 02:43
Scientists have simulated conditions that allow hazy skies to form in water-rich exoplanets, a crucial step in determining how haziness muddles observations by ground and space telescopes.
The research offers new tools to study the atmospheric chemistry of exoplanets and will help scientists model how water exoplanets form and evolve, findings that could help in the search for life beyond China launches tech-experiment satellite
Wednesday, 29 November 2023 02:43
China on Thursday sent a technology experiment satellite into orbit from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China's Sichuan Province.
The experiment satellite for satellite internet technologies was launched at 6:00 p.m. (Beijing Time) by a Long March-2D carrier rocket, and entered its planned orbit successfully.
The launch is the 498th mission of the Long March carrier Industry group opposes White House mission authorization proposal
Tuesday, 28 November 2023 22:51
Millennium Space to build a missile-sensor layer in medium Earth orbit
Tuesday, 28 November 2023 20:46
Amazon’s Project Kuiper nets first broadband partnership in Asia
Tuesday, 28 November 2023 18:29
Space Development Agency satellites in low Earth orbit successfully broadcast data
Tuesday, 28 November 2023 18:28
SpaceX sends up Space Coast's 66th launch of the year
Tuesday, 28 November 2023 18:17
SpaceX chalked up another Starlink mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to mark the Space Coast's 66th launch of the year.
A Falcon 9 with 23 of the company's Starlink internet satellites lifted off from Canaveral's Space Launch Complex 40 at 11:20 p.m. Monday.
The booster flew for the 17th time, the third time SpaceX has flown one of its boosters 17 times, although one has flown 18 missions. It landed safely on the droneship Just Read the Instructions downrange in the Atlantic.
This is the fourth month in a row the Space Coast has shoehorned in seven launches in a month, and the fifth time this year, although only the second time SpaceX has been responsible for all seven of those launches in one month.
SpaceX has flown 62 of the 66 Space Coast missions overall, with Relativity Space making its lone launch of its Terran 1 3D-printed rocket back in March, and United Launch Alliance managing one Delta IV Heavy and two Atlas V rocket launches since June.
SpaceX has also flown 25 times from California's Vandenberg Space Force Station, making this its 87th orbital flight this year, not counting the two failed attempts to launch its Starship and Super Heavy rocket from Texas.
If warp drives are impossible, maybe faster-than-light communication is still on the table?
Tuesday, 28 November 2023 17:28
I'm sure many readers of Universe Today are, like me, fans of the science fiction genre. From the light sabers of "Star Wars" to the neuralyzer of "Men in Black," science fiction has crazy inventions aplenty and once science fiction writers dream it, scientists and engineers try and create it. Perhaps the holy grail of science fiction creations is the warp drive from "Star Trek" and it is fair to say that many have tried to work out if it is even possible to travel faster than the speed of light. To date, alas, to no avail but if the warp drive eludes us, what about faster-than-light communication.
Let's start with the warp drive. The concept is a drive that can propel a spacecraft at speeds in excess of the speed of light. According to the "Star Trek" writers, the speed was described in factors of warp speed where they are converted to multiples of the speed of light by multiplication with the cubic function of the warp factor itself. Got it. Don't worry, it's not crucial to this article.
Aerocapture is a 'free lunch' in space exploration
Tuesday, 28 November 2023 17:22
When spacecraft return to Earth, they don't need to shed all their velocity by firing retro-rockets. Instead, they use the atmosphere as a brake to slow down for a soft landing. Every planet in the solar system except Mercury has enough of an atmosphere to allow aerobraking maneuvers, and could allow high-speed exploration missions. A new paper looks at the different worlds and how a spacecraft must fly to take advantage of this "free lunch" to slow down at the destination.
Aerocapture is an orbital transfer maneuver in which a spacecraft makes a single pass through a planetary atmosphere to decelerate and achieve orbit insertion. On the other hand, aerobraking uses a propulsive burn plus repeated dips into the atmosphere—i.e., atmospheric drag—to gradually slow the spacecraft and reduce the size of the orbit to achieve orbit insertion.
The new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server, by Athul Pradeepkumar Girija from the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University, notes that one of the significant risks associated with aerocapture is the uncertainty in the atmospheric density.
Warming ocean causing rapid glacier retreat
Tuesday, 28 November 2023 15:00
With all eyes about to focus on the COP28 climate conference in Dubai, new scientific findings show, again, that the climate crisis is taking its toll on Antarctica – a continent, up to recently, thought better able to withstand the immediate effects of rising global temperatures.
Using satellite data, scientists have discovered that the ice shelf extending into the ocean from Cadman Glacier on the west Antarctic Peninsula collapsed, leaving the glacier exposed to unusually warm ocean water, which caused the glacier to accelerate and retreat rapidly.
Firefly to launch a Lockheed Martin satellite antenna demonstration
Tuesday, 28 November 2023 13:45
