Copernical Team
Image: This camera will be the eye of the ESA's asteroid mission
This is the main camera that ESA's Hera mission for planetary defense will be relying on to explore and maneuver around the Didymos asteroid system.
Hera—named after the Greek goddess of marriage—will be, along with NASA's Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) spacecraft, humankind's first probe to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system, a little understood class making up around 15% of all known asteroids.
The DART spacecraft—due for launch this November—will first perform a kinetic impact on the smaller of the two bodies. Hera will follow-up with a detailed post-impact survey to turn this grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and repeatable asteroid deflection technique.
Produced by Jena-Optronik in Germany, this lightweight camera is being supplied to OHB System AG, leading the Hera industrial consortium for ESA. The camera will be used both for spacecraft navigation and scientific study of the two asteroids' surfaces.
The camera is based on Jena-Optronik's existing ASTROhead design. ASTROhead has already been proven in space, aboard Northrop Grumman's Mission Extension Vehicle, MEV-1 in 2019, helping it perform a historic autonomous docking with a geostationary telecommunication satellite in order to extend the satellite's working lifetime.
A small satellite with a solar sail could catch up with an interstellar object
When 'Oumuamua, the first interstellar object ever observed passing through the solar system, was discovered in 2017, it exhibited some unexpected properties that left astronomers scratching their heads. Its elongated shape, lack of a coma, and the fact that it changed its trajectory were all surprising, leading to several competing theories about its origin: was it a hydrogen iceberg exhibiting outgassing, or maybe an extraterrestrial solar sail (sorry folks, not likely) on a deep-space journey? We may never know the answer, because 'Oumuamua was moving too fast, and was observed too late, to get a good look.
It may be too late for 'Oumuamua, but we could be ready for the next strange interstellar visitor if we wanted to. A spacecraft could be designed and built to catch such an object at a moment's notice. The idea of an interstellar interceptor like this has been floated by various experts, and funding to study such a concept has even been granted through NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. But how exactly would such an interceptor work?
Suspected secret satellite launched from ISS was just Japanese CubeSat
The US Space Command has clarified recent reports of a "secret satellite" launched from the International Space Station which actually was a Japanese CubeSat mistakenly registered by the space tracking service as an American object, USSPACECOM Director of Public Affairs, Lieutenant Colonel Erin Dick told Sputnik on Friday.
Sputnik reported on 1 July that the United States had secretly laun Department of Space's commercial arm NewSpace India can also lease ISRO assets
The NewSpace India Ltd, the commercial arm of Department of Space (DOS) apart from buying satellites from Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) can also lease assets from the latter, said K. Sivan, Secretary, DOS.
Sivan, also the Chairman of ISRO told IANS: "NSIL will acquire three communication satellites- GSAT 20, GSAT 22 and GSAT 24- made by ISRO. The company will be the owner and o AFRL holds high power electromagnetic wargaming event
The Air Force Research Laboratory Directed Energy Directorate held its second in a series of wargaming, modeling, and simulation events June 21 - 25 at Kirtland AFB.
The latest Directed Energy Utility Concept Experiment, or DEUCE, focused on the use of high power electromagnetic (HPEM) weapons as part of an integrated air defense system, whereas the DEUCE held in January concentrated on th Northrop Grumman Delivers ESPAStar bus to L3Harris for Air Force NTS-3 Mission
Northrop Grumman has reported the successful delivery of an ESPAStar-D spacecraft bus from Gilbert, Ariz., to L3Harris in Melbourne, Fla. The platform supports the Navigation Technology Satellite-3 (NTS-3) mission for the Air Force Research Laboratory set to launch from Cape Canaveral in 2022.
Built to provide affordable, rapid access to space, ESPAStar-D can accommodate combinations of ho Exolaunch Delivers One Ton of Small Satellites into Orbit on SpaceX's Transporter-2 Rideshare Mission
Exolaunch, the launch, deployment and integration services provider for the New Space industry, announced a successful launch of 29 satellites totaling one metric ton for its customers from the United States, South America and Europe on a dedicated rideshare mission of SpaceX's SmallSat Rideshare Program.
The mission, named 'Fingerspitzengefuhl', lifted off on June 30 at 19:31 UTC on Falco Proximity to Sun's magnetic field influenced Mercury's hefty iron core
For decades, many scientists argued that hit-and-run collisions with other bodies during the formation of our solar system blew away much of Mercury's rocky mantle and left the big, dense, metal core inside. But new research reveals that collisions don't explain the planet's composition-the sun's magnetism does.
William McDonough, a professor of geology at the University of Maryland, and T Observation, simulation, and AI join forces to reveal a clear universe
Japanese astronomers have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) technique to remove noise in astronomical data due to random variations in galaxy shapes. After extensive training and testing on large mock data created by supercomputer simulations, they then applied this new tool to actual data from Japan's Subaru Telescope and found that the mass distribution derived from using this metho China launches five new satellites
China sent five satellites into planned orbits from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in northern Shanxi Province on Saturday.
The satellite Jilin-1 01B, Xingshidai-10 and three Jilin-1 Gaofen 03D satellites were launched by a Long March-2D rocket at 10:51 a.m. (Beijing Time).
This was the 376th flight mission of the Long March rocket series, the launch center said.
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