24 May 2011
Testing Spacesuits in Antarctica - Part 1
The spacesuit we are testing is a fully pressurized suit which is being developed for future planetary exploration. Testing it in a Mars-relevant environment allows us to really optimize it for the types of activities we will be doing on Mars.
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23 May 2011
Moon satellites arrive in Florida for September launch
Two small spacecraft flew to the Kennedy Space Center in the belly of an Air Force cargo plane Friday, ready to start final preparations for launch to the moon in September.
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20 May 2011
Out-of-this-world photo op approved for space station
Paolo Nespoli aboard a departing Russian Soyuz ferry craft Monday will snap out-of-this-world pictures and video showing the International Space Station with the shuttle Endeavour attached before heading for a landing in Kazakhstan, NASA officials said Friday.
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20 May 2011
AIA Says US Human Spaceflight At Critical Juncture
The future of the U.S. human spaceflight program is at a critical juncture, said Aerospace Industries Association Vice President for Space Frank Slazer.
"Cutting exploration budgets any further threatens our economic growth potential and risks our leadership in space," Slazer said in testimony before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Subcommittee on Science and Space.
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20 May 2011
ISRO begins sounding rocket launches on regular basis
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20 May 2011
Antibody production gets confused during long-term spaceflight
The trip to Mars just got a little more difficult now that French researchers have discovered that antibodies used to fight off disease might become seriously compromised during long-term space flight. To make their discovery, scientists conducted studies using three groups of amphibians. Amphibians were chosen for the work because they use the same cellular mechanisms to produce antibodies as humans do.
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19 May 2011
NASA Denies Entry To Chinese Journalists For Shuttle Launch
China's scientists have played a crucial role in designing and manufacturing some core parts of the AMS. However, Chinese journalists who hoped to cover the launching of Endeavour were simply denied entry to the site by a ban initiated by Frank Wolf, chairman of the Committee of Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies in the House of Representatives. The United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) revoked the media passes granted to journalists from China due to the ban, or the "Wolf Clause", which was regarded as "discriminative" by even Americans themselves.
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18 May 2011
UK teams assess Europe's 2018 Moon lander
A consortium led by the Open University has been asked to spec the Esa lander's volatiles analysis package; a group led by SEA will assess the lunar dust analysis package; and the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL) will work with a number of other groups across Europe in defining the dust environment and plasma package.
The OU's involvement is particularly interesting because it calls on the expertise of Professor Colin Pillinger. Most people will know Colin from the Mars Beagle 2 lander project, but in his younger days he worked on the Moon rocks returned by Apollo and Soviet Luna missions.
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17 May 2011
Bolden Talks About NASA’s Post-shuttle Role [ABC News]
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden offers his thoughts on a range of topics, including reliance on Russia during the post-shuttle era, cancellation of the Constellation program and the future of U.S. space exploration, in an interview with ABC News.
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17 May 2011
NASA Announces Its First Payloads for Commercial Suborbital Spacecraft
NASA has announced its first four payloads to fly on commercial suborbital spacecraft, kicking off a new era of low-cost technology R and D, science, and STEM education enabled by new commercial spacecraft being developed by Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, Virgin Galactic, and XCOR Aerospace.
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16 May 2011
Galileo Data Reveal Magma Ocean Under Jupiter Moon
New data analysis from NASA's Galileo spacecraft reveals a subsurface ocean of molten or partially molten magma beneath the surface of Jupiter's volcanic moon Io.
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16 May 2011
MoonBots Challenges Teams to Conduct Lunar Missions with LEGO Robots
New data analysis from NASA's Galileo spacecraft reveals a subsurface ocean of molten or partially molten magma beneath the surface of Jupiter's volcanic moon Io.
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16 May 2011
Earth's Nearest Neighbor Within Reach
NASA has created a new interactive web-based tool that incorporates observations from past and current lunar missions creating one of the most comprehensive lunar research websites to date. The Lunar Mapping and Modeling Project at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. has created an online set of capabilities and tools that will allow anyone with an Internet connection to search through, view, and analyze a vast number of lunar images and other digital products.
view the internetsite: http://pub.lmmp.nasa.gov/LMMPUI/LMMP_CLIENT/LMMP.html
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16 May 2011
Opportunity Cracks The 18-Mile Mark
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FOR FURTHER READING
23 May 2011
Transition to commercial services for LEO transportation
A major issue of contention for NASA’s near-term plans has been how much reliance it should place on commercial providers for crew transportation to low Earth orbit. Mary Lynne Dittmar presents a paper she prepared last year with the late Mike Lounge on one approach to handle that transition.
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23 May 2011
A transorbital railroad to Mars
The debate about the future development of a NASA heavy-lift launch vehicle drags on in Congress and industry. Lou Friedman warns this process could lead to no NASA human spaceflight program at all.
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23 May 2011
The dangers of a rocket to nowhere
The key payload on the shuttle Endeavour, scheduled to launch Monday morning, is a physics experiment called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS). Jeff Foust reports on what the AMS is supposed to do and how it had to fight for its ride to the ISS.
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23 May 2011
The disappearing shuttle
Last Monday the shuttle Endeavour lifted off on its final mission, but observers were somewhat disappointed when the orbiter soon disappeared through a cloud bank. Jeff Foust describes the launch and how, soon enough, the shuttle program itself will fade from view.
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23 May 2011
You can’t get to heaven on a Pentagon spacecraft
Last week Huntsville hosted the International Space Development Conference (ISDC), the annual conference of the National Space Society. Dwayne Day recalls an earlier ISDC that featured a presentation with a cautionary take on cooperation with military space efforts.
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17 May 2011
UK technology's magnetic space future
The UK at a programmatic level never got involved in AMS, presumably because it was a space station project (and the UK doesn't engage with human spaceflight), but one British company was contracted to build the all-important magnet. Scientific Magnetics (formerly Space Cryomagnetics) of Culham, in Oxfordshire, spent 12 years developing this super-cooled beast, and it was - so the project leaders on AMS told me - a marvel.
But to cut a long story short, the British magnet's super-fluid-helium cooling mechanism meant that it was only ever going to be a short-lived device. And when the space station's life was extended last year to 2020, the AMS project leaders took the decision to remove the UK magnet and replace it with a less powerful, but much longer-lived, Chinese one. Now, as I say, this is a story with some interesting outcomes. The British magnet is currently sitting in store at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) where AMS was assembled and tested, and there's a lot of interest in seeing its technology put to other uses.
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16 May 2011
A new rocket for science
Much of the attention SpaceX’s proposed Falcon Heavy rocket has received has focused on its use in exploration or national security applications. Alan Stern notes that the rocket also has the potential to revolutionize science missions.
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16 May 2011
Opening GAMBIT: The development of the KH-7 reconnaissance satellite
More details are gradually emerging about the development of early satellite reconnaissance programs in the US. Dwayne Day provides some new insights into one of those programs, the KH-7 GAMBIT.
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16 May 2011
The space station’s billion-dollar physics experiment
The key payload on the shuttle Endeavour, scheduled to launch Monday morning, is a physics experiment called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS). Jeff Foust reports on what the AMS is supposed to do and how it had to fight for its ride to the ISS.
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16 May 2011
Collective assurance vs. independence in national space policies
Earlier this year the European Union issued a document outlining its planned space strategy. Christopher Stone compares that document with American policies and finds some interesting distinctions.
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16 May 2011
Review: Realizing Tomorrow
Last month marked the tenth anniversary of Dennis Tito’s trip to the ISS, a milestone in commercial human spaceflight. Jeff Foust reviews a book that recalls the long history of efforts to enable more than just professional astronauts fly in space.
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