Omnibus bill cuts funding for future weather satellites
Appropriators cut funding for a new generation of weather satellites while increasing funding for the Office of Space Commerce for fiscal year 2022.
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Voters block agreement for planned Georgia spaceport
Voters in a Georgia county have dealt a potentially fatal blow to a proposed spaceport, a move that may provide lessons for other prospective spaceports.
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The long goodbye IMPERIAL: 3D printing’s new dimension
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ESA’s new IMPERIAL 3D printer can print parts much larger than itself, overcoming one of the main constraints of the process – limited build volume.
What is also known as ‘Additive manufacturing’ is an essential enabling technology for deep space crewed missions. Accordingly this printer has been specially designed with ‘out-of-Earth’ manufacturing in mind, enabling future space explorers to produce structures, tools and spare parts as needed. Built to operate in weightlessness – meaning it can work upside down on Earth – the printer is capable of printing high performance polymer parts of unlimited dimensions along a single direction.
DoD space agency funds development of laser terminal that connects to multiple satellite at once
The Space Development Agency awarded BridgeComm and Space Micro a $1.7 million contract to demonstrate point-to-multipoint communications
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Chinese official calls for protection of space assets, international coordination mechanisms
China needs to accelerate the development of space asset protection policies and related international coordination mechanisms, according to a space industry official.
Slingshot Aerospace closes $25 million fundraising round
Slingshot Aerospace, a company that develops technologies for space situational awareness, announced March 10 it has raised $25 million in Series A-1 funds.
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Imagining an Earthly neighbor
We do not yet know whether the sun-like stars closest to us, the α Centauri A/B binary, harbor an Earth-like planet. However, thanks to new modeling work, we now have a good sense of what such a planet, should it exist, would look like and how it might have evolved.
These are exciting times for exoplanet research, moving from demography towards detailed characterization. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), successfully launched in December 2021, is projected to detect the atmospheres of rocky exoplanets transiting in front of M dwarfs—stars that are fainter than the sun—orbiting within the habitable zone. The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in Chile, will be set up to directly image rocky exoplanets around nearby sun-like stars by the end of the decade. Looking even further ahead, ambitious future space mission concepts are currently being explored, including the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets (LIFE), which targets habitable-zone rocky exoplanets and their atmospheres.
ETH Zurich is leading or significantly involved in these and other observational infrastructures. Complementary research at the Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics in the Department of Physics concerns numerical modeling, which is indispensable for understanding habitable-zone rocky exoplanets and in guiding the future observations and instrumentation development.
Backbone of Hera asteroid mission for planetary defense
In a Swiss cleanroom, this historic object has been taking shape. Made of carbon fiber reinforced polymer, this is the central core of ESA's Hera asteroid mission for planetary defense.
NASA's DART spacecraft is currently on its way to the Didymos asteroid pair in deep space, to test the kinetic impact technique of asteroid deflection on the smaller of the two bodies on 26 September this year.
Hera will fly to the same asteroid system in the aftermath of the impact to perform a close-up "crime scene investigation," including close-up mapping of DART's crater and assessing the asteroid's make-up and internal structure.
The stiff, strong core serves as a backbone to the spacecraft, built for ESA by a team from RUAG Space in Switzerland and OHB in the Czech Republic. Once current "static load" testing confirms its performance, the core will be shipped to OHB in Germany to assemble the spacecraft's primary structure around it.
It will then be passed on to Avio in Italy to integrate its propulsion module. The bottom aluminum cone includes the Launcher Interface Ring, providing all necessary connections with the launcher.
Ukraine war: How it could play out in space, with potentially dangerous consequences
Nearly three decades of close collaboration in space between Russia and the western world seems to be coming to an end. With increasing tensions over Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, Russia has arguably threatened to crash the International Space Station and refuse to launch satellites for western countries. A few months ago, Russia blew up one of its own defunct satellites, creating space junk that threatened the safety of astronauts at the ISS.
So how is the war likely to impact on operations in space going forward, and what are the consequences?
Aggression in space could directly affect boots on the grounds. Imagery from space has become a regular feature in coverage of the invasion of Ukraine, showing long columns of armor moving inexorably towards Kyiv or Kharkiv.
While chilling in its content, it has offered a boost to the embattled Ukrainian resistance by helping it work out where the enemy is, where it is coming from and how it is configured.
