FAA delays completion of Starship environmental review
The Federal Aviation Administration says it needs at least two more months to complete an environmental review of SpaceX Starship orbital launches from its Boca Chica, Texas, facility.
Webb Telescope Aft Sunshield Pallet Deployed
Webb is beginning to resemble the form it will take when it is fully deployed - now that the mission operations team has successfully deployed and latched into place the observatory's forward and aft Unitized Pallet Structures.
The team began working through the deployment of the forward pallet this morning, concluding at approximately 1:21 p.m. EST. The team then moved on to the aft palle Perseverance Samples in Review: 2021
As the 2021 calendar year comes to a close, it's nice to sit back and reflect on all the progress we've made on Mars this year. It's been a busy ~300 sols for both Perseverance and our helicopter sidekick, Ingenuity!
One of Perseverance's mission objectives is to collect and store samples of the martian surface for eventual return back to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return campaign. T NASA's Webb Telescope Keeping Cool with Ultra-thin DuPont Kapton Polyimide Films
After 30 years in development, the National Aeronautics Space Administration's (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched on December 25, 2021, from the European Space Agency's launch site at Kourou in French Guiana. DuPont technology, in the form of ultra-thin Kapton polyimide films, is the crucial material protecting the JWST from the light and the heat of the sun, enabling it to fu AFRL, Northrop Grumman demonstrate solar to radio frequency conversion
The Air Force Research Laboratory's and Northrop Grumman's Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research (SSPIDR) Project have successfully conducted the first end-to-end demonstration of key hardware for the Arachne flight experiment.
A ground demonstration of novel components for the "sandwich tile" were used to successfully convert solar energy to radio frequency (RF) - a fu An icy spring at the Martian South Pole
In addition to its enormous volcanoes, huge rift valley systems, and dried-up crater lakes and river valleys, the ice caps at the north and south poles of Mars have been the subject of intensive scientific investigations. These ice caps, which grow in the winter and shrink in the spring and summer, are also a distinctly aesthetic sight. This image, created using data acquired by the German Aeros JWST begins sunshield deployment
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has started the process of deploying the sunshield required to keep the spacecraft cold enough to operate, a process that is one of the riskiest aspects of the mission.
Virgin Orbit raises far less than expected from SPAC merger
Virgin Orbit will get less than half the money it originally expected from its merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) as that deal wins shareholder approval.
Blue Origin joins U.S. military ‘rocket cargo’ program
Blue Origin has signed a cooperative agreement with the U.S. military to explore the possibility of using its rockets to transport cargo and people around the world.
With its single 'eye,' NASA's DART returns first images from space
Just two weeks after launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft has opened its "eye" and returned its first images from space—a major operational milestone for the spacecraft and DART team.
After the violent vibrations of launch and the extreme temperature shift to minus 80 degrees C in space, scientists and engineers at the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, held their breath in anticipation. Because components of the spacecraft's telescopic instrument are sensitive to movements as small as 5 millionths of a meter, even a tiny shift of something in the instrument could be very serious.
