Fort Collins CO (The Conversation) May 29, 2022
A century ago, English mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson proposed a startling idea for that time: constructing a systematic process based on math for predicting the weather. In his 1922 book, "Weather Prediction By Numerical Process," Richardson tried to write an equation that he could use to solve the dynamics of the atmosphere based on hand calculations. It didn't work because not enoug

Los Angeles AFB CA (SPX) May 29, 2022
Space Systems Command (SSC) ordered eight National Security Space (NSS) launch services under the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 Launch Service Procurement contract Friday; five to United Launch Alliance (ULA) for GPS III-7, USSF-23, USSF-43, WGS-11+, and USSF-16 using the Vulcan Centaur launch vehicle, and three to Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) for USSF-124, USSF-6

Wright Patterson AFB OH (SPX) May 29, 2022
Air Force Research Laboratory research sponsorship recipient, United Semiconductors, LLC (USLLC), is one of eight companies selected to work on a three-year, $21 million NASA contract to manufacture tools in space. Almost two decades ago, AFRL's photonic materials branch began collaborating with Professor Partha Dutta at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and sponsoring his research on t

Image: Vacuum soak for satellite brain

Nanjing (XNA) May 29, 2022
China's space tracking ship Yuanwang-3 Thursday set sail for its first voyage this year from a port in east China's Jiangsu Province. The vessel will carry out its 100th maritime mission during this voyage. Yuanwang-3 has become the first ship of China's Yuanwang fleet to embrace its 100th mission. Commissioned on May 18, 1995, Yuanwang-3 is a second-generation Chinese space tracking

Paris (ESA) May 29, 2022
The world's first mission to remove several small telecommunications satellites from orbit once they reach the end of their operational service is about to start building and testing its prototype spacecraft. British-based in-orbit servicing company Astroscale - working in an ESA Partnership Project with satellite operator OneWeb - will begin manufacturing the first commercial "servicer" p

Daytona Beach FL (SPX) May 29, 2022
Tyler Grinnell ('08) worked at Kennedy Space Center while he was still an Aerospace Engineering student at Embry-Riddle, juggling a full load of classes. "That was a dream come true for me to be able to work on the space shuttle program while I was just out of my sophomore year," he said, at the university's latest Presidential Speaker Series event. That real-world experience propell

Greenbelt MD (SPX) May 29, 2022
Astronomers are excited about the possibility of a new meteor shower May 30-31. And that excitement has sparked a lot of information about the tau Herculids. Some has been accurate, and some has not. We get excited about meteor showers, too! But sometimes events like this don't live up to expectations - it happened with the 2019 Alpha Monocerotid shower, for example. And some astronomers p

Pasadena CA (JPL) May 29, 2022
Our intrepid rover engineers again successfully navigated Curiosity a little higher up Mount Sharp (~5 m) and ~40 m on the ground, away from our previous location. The terrain beneath the rover included striated, dusty bedrock and sand ripples with coarse lag deposits. As a member of the geology/mineralogy planning team and the APXS payload uplink lead today, I chose several interesting ar

Chicago IL (SPX) May 29, 2022
Mars once ran red with rivers. The telltale tracks of past rivers, streams and lakes are visible today all over the planet. But about three billion years ago, they all dried up - and no one knows why. "People have put forward different ideas, but we're not sure what caused the climate to change so dramatically," said University of Chicago geophysical scientist Edwin Kite. "We'd really like