Space weather is difficult to predict - with only an hour to prevent disasters on Earth
Tuesday, 11 May 2021 01:54
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 After Chinese rocket reentry, DoD calls for countries to ‘behave responsibly’
Monday, 10 May 2021 20:38
WASHINGTON — Less than two days after parts of an uncontrolled Chinese rocket fell into the Indian Ocean, the Pentagon said allowing a large booster to free fall toward Earth is “irresponsible behavior.
Crew training begins soon for first private trip to ISS
Monday, 10 May 2021 20:08
Training of the crew for the first entirely private trip to the International Space Station (ISS) is to begin soon, Axiom Space, the company behind the flight, said Monday at a joint press conference with NASA.
Four astronauts are to be launched to the ISS in late January aboard a rocket built by another space company, Elon Musk's SpaceX.
Only one of the four—NASA veteran Michael Lopez-Alegria—has been in space before.
The other three are businessmen—Larry Conner, an American, Mark Pathy, a Canadian, and Eytan Stibbe, an Israeli.
The mission dubbed Ax-1 is to last around 10 days, said Axiom Space president and CEO Michael Suffredini.
The astronauts will work and live in the American section of the space station and plan to conduct a number of scientific experiments while in orbit.
"We'll be starting what I would call serious training next week," said Lopez-Alegria, the Ax-1 commander.
"From there the pace will pick up, and we'll all be immersed essentially full time in ISS systems and Crew Dragon training starting in the fall.
NASA spacecraft begins 2-year trip home with asteroid rubble
Monday, 10 May 2021 20:06
With rubble from an asteroid tucked inside, a NASA spacecraft fired its engines and began the long journey back to Earth on Monday, leaving the ancient space rock in its rearview mirror.
The trip home for the robotic prospector, Osiris-Rex, will take two years.
Inmarsat heading to administrative court over Dutch 3.5 GHz auction
Monday, 10 May 2021 19:52
TAMPA, Fla. — Inmarsat is pivoting to an administrative court in its battle to stop the Netherlands from auctioning 3.5 GHz spectrum, which the British satellite operator says it does not want to cede to bandwidth-hungry 5G networks.
Orbcomm gets no offers after contacting more than 50 potential buyers
Monday, 10 May 2021 19:47
TAMPA, Fla. — Satellite operator Orbcomm said May 10 it did not get any alternative proposals in its 30-day “go-shop” period, which followed private equity firm GI Partners’ $1.1 billion acquisition offer.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft Heads for Earth with Asteroid Sample
Monday, 10 May 2021 18:22
After nearly five years in space, NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft is on its way back to Earth with an abundance of rocks and dust from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. OneWeb creating government subsidiary after buying TrustComm
Monday, 10 May 2021 15:34
TAMPA, Fla. — OneWeb, the U.K.-headquartered low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband operator, is buying Texas-based managed satcoms provider TrustComm to create a new government subsidiary.
The deal comes soon after the U.S.
A new era of spaceflight? Promising advances in rocket propulsion
Monday, 10 May 2021 13:20
The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has recently commissioned three private companies, Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin and General Atomics, to develop nuclear fission thermal rockets for use in lunar orbit.
Such a development, if flown, could usher in a new era of spaceflight. That said, it is only one of several exciting avenues in rocket propulsion. Here are some others.
Chemical rockets
The standard means of propulsion for spacecraft uses chemical rockets. There are two main types: solid fuelled (such as the solid rocket boosters on the Space Shuttle), and liquid fuelled (such as the Saturn V).
In both cases, a chemical reaction is employed to produce a very hot, highly pressurized gas inside a combustion chamber. The engine nozzle provides the only outlet for this gas which consequently expands out of it, providing thrust.
The chemical reaction requires a fuel, such as liquid hydrogen or powdered aluminum, and an oxidiser (an agent that produces chemical reactions) such as oxygen.
South Korea’s space agency sets sight on missions that ‘won’t pay off until 2050’
Monday, 10 May 2021 13:05
SEOUL, South Korea — The chief of South Korea’s space agency has vowed to spin off near-term applications to the private sector and refocus the agency on long-term investments that “won’t pay off until 2050.
Op-ed | The World Below: The need for free and open data in Earth observation activities
Monday, 10 May 2021 13:00
With President Joe Biden in the Oval Office, the United States is set to reestablish its global influence on environmental and climate studies for the coming years. The renewal of the country’s participation in the Paris Agreement is among the clearest examples of the distancing of the Biden administration from former President Donald Trump’s approach to the subject.
With a focus on the low-Earth orbit economy, Voyager eyes more acquisitions
Monday, 10 May 2021 12:00
WASHINGTON — Voyager Space Holdings said May 10 it has closed a deal announced in December to acquire a majority stake in XO Markets, the parent company of commercial space services provider Nanoracks.
Op-ed | Getting Serious About the Office of Space Commerce
Monday, 10 May 2021 12:00
In the absence of an active push, attempts to create organizational change and improvement tend to revert to the way things used to be. After three years of an active push to increase the role of the Office of Space Commerce (OSC) in promoting and enabling commercial space activities, that vision is beginning to revert to the way things used to be.
ESA competition to springboard SMEs into international markets
Monday, 10 May 2021 12:00
Today, ESA opened its Global Space Markets Challenge. This competition is intended to be a springboard into international markets for small promising space-based companies in Europe, specialised in upstream and downstream activities.
From iron rain on exoplanets to lightning on Jupiter: 4 examples of alien weather
Monday, 10 May 2021 11:40
When Oscar Wilde said "conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative" he was unaware of some of the more extreme weather on planets and moons other than Earth.
Since the discovery of the first exoplanet in 1992, more than 4,000 planets have been discovered orbiting stars other than our own.
The continuing research with exoplanets involves trying to identify their atmospheric composition, specifically to answer the question of whether life could exist there. In this search for life though, astronomers have found a huge variety of potential worlds out there.
Here are four examples of bizarre weather on other astronomical bodies—to show how varied an exoplanet atmosphere could be.
1. Iron rain on WASP-76b
WASP-76 is a large, hot exoplanet discovered in 2013. The surface of this monster planet—roughly twice the size of Jupiter—is about 2,200℃ (4,000℉). This means a lot of material that would be solid on Earth melts and vaporizes on WASP-76b.
As described in a particularly famous 2020 study, these materials include iron.