27 March 2013
NASA Scientists Find Moon, Asteroids Share History
Scientists from NASA's Lunar Science Institute (NLSI) in Moffett Field, Calif., discovered that the same population of high-speed projectiles that impacted our lunar neighbor four billion years ago, also hit the giant asteroid Vesta and perhaps other large asteroids.
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26 March 2013
Russia May Build Own Space Station From New Modules – Energia
Russia may use future modules of its segment of the International Space Station (ISS) to build its own orbital station, a senior space industry official said on Tuesday. Russia is planning to launch four new ISS modules – a multirole laboratory module (MLM), a node module and two science-power modules – by 2020, when the time comes to de-orbit the existing international outpost in space.
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26 March 2013
Russia Extends Space Cooperation With US
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree set to extend the U.S.-Russia agreement on cooperation in the use and exploration of outer space till 2020, the government reported on Saturday. "The agreement extention corresponds with Russia's interests and will help promote effective implementation of its space programs as well as joint U.S.-Russian space projects, including exploration of the Moon and Mars," the government said in a statement on its official web site.
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26 March 2013
Miners shoot for the stars in tech race
A self-sustaining mechanised colony that mines and exports resources from the Moon could be a reality within a generation, helping to meet demand for materials key to innovation on Earth. That was the view of a recent gathering in Sydney aimed at bringing together some of the top minds in space exploration with firms hoping to cash in on the final frontier of mining: astronomical bodies.
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26 March 2013
China's Next Women Astronauts
In mid-2013, China's second woman in space is expected to lift off. Wang Yaping, a former air force pilot, is expected to be aboard the crew of the Shenzhou 10 spacecraft, which will fly to a rendezvous with China's Tiangong 1 space laboratory on a 15-day mission. This will represent the second launch of a Chinese woman into space.
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22 March 2013
New Space Station Crew Members to Launch and Dock the Same Day
Three new crew members are set to launch to the International Space Station on a six-hour flight to travel from the launch pad to their destination. Chris Cassidy of NASA, along with Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), are scheduled to launch in their Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 3:43 p.m. CDT, Thursday, March 28, (2:43 a.m. March 29 Baikonur time).
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22 March 2013
NASA Memo: Suspend All Education and Public Outreach (Update)
NASA circulated two internal memos on the subject of Education and Public Outreach on Friday. These memos have begun to circulate outside of the agency as well. What's clear here is that NASA's handling of the issue has been disorganized at best. One memo makes a broad statement "Effective immediately, all education and public outreach activities should be suspended, pending further review." and the follow-up statement says "First, I am exempting the following activities from immediate suspension". NASA knew that these memos would get out given their distribution, but they clearly did not plan for these memos to get out as fast as they did.
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21 March 2013
NASA's LRO Sees GRAIL's Explosive Farewell
NASA's twin GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) spacecraft went out in a blaze of glory Dec. 17, 2012, when they were intentionally crashed into a mountain near the moon's north pole. Fortunately, GRAIL had company -- NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is orbiting the moon as well, busily making high-resolution maps of the lunar surface. With just three weeks notice, the LRO team scrambled to get LRO in the right place at the right time to witness GRAIL's fiery finale.
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related:
20 March 2013
GRAIL craters seen by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
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20 March 2013
NASA denies report that Voyager left solar system
The US space agency on Wednesday denied a claim made in a scientific study that its Voyager 1 spacecraft had left the solar system, describing the report as "premature." Researcher Bill Webber, one of the authors of a scientific paper that addressed Voyager is leaving the Solar System, acknowledged that the actual location of the spacecraft - whether in interstellar space or just an unknown region beyond the solar system - remained a matter of debate.
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20 March 2013
NASA's next Mars mission invites public to come aboard
NASA's next Mars mission is giving students and the public worldwide an opportunity to have a personal connection with space exploration through a new education and public outreach effort called the "Going to Mars" campaign. The campaign is led on behalf of the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN mission, by the University of Colorado Boulder.
Starting today, an art contest will give participants ages 5 to 17 the chance to create artwork in support of the upcoming November 2013 launch of MAVEN, which will explore the Martian upper atmosphere in unprecedented detail. The winning artwork, chosen by the public via online voting, will be announced May 20. The winning artwork will be carried aboard the spacecraft to Mars.
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20 March 2013
Apollo Moon Rocket Engines Raised from Seafloor by Amazon CEO
Long thought to be lost forever on the ocean floor, massive engines that launched astronauts to the moon more than 40 years ago have been recovered by a private expedition led by the founder of Amazon.com. "We found so much," said Jeff Bezos, the online retailer's CEO, in an update posted Wednesday (March 20) on the Bezos Expeditions website. "We have seen an underwater wonderland – an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program."
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19 March 2013
ISS Cosmonauts Model Manually Controlled Landing on Mars
For the first time, two Russian cosmonauts simulated a manually controlled landing from the orbit on Mars after they spent half a year in the space, a deputy head of the Russian Space Training Center said on Monday. Cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Yevgeny Tarelkin, who returned from the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday after spending there 143 days, used a centrifuge at the Space Training Center in Moscow Region’s Star City, to successfully imitate a manually controlled landing on Mars.
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19 March 2013
Russia Delays New Soyuz Launch
"The first launch of the Soyuz-2.1V rocket has been preliminarily scheduled for the second half of this year," Progress design bureau's general director Alexander Kirilin said, without specifying the reasons for the delay. The new rocket is a modernized version of the Soyuz-2.1B, from which the Soyuz rocket's trademark four external booster rockets have been removed.
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16 March 2013
Sara Brightman’s Space Trip Under Question – Roscosmos
Russia’s space agency Roscosmos and NASA may opt against sending music star Sarah Brightman to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2015, Russian agency’s head Vladimir Popovkin said on Saturday. Brightman’s trip to orbit depends on the duration of the 2015 visiting flight to the ISS, Popovkin told journalists.
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14 March 2013
Russia, Europe Sign Mars Probe Project Deal
Russia's space agency Roscosmos and the European Space Agency (ESA) signed a final agreement on Thursday giving the green light to the ExoMars project to send unmanned probes to Mars, Roscosmos spokesperson Anna Vedishcheva said. The agreement, which gives both agencies an equal share in the project, was signed by Roscosmos head Vladimir Popovkin and ESA boss Jean-Jacques Dordain.
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14 March 2013
China sets moon mission re-entry test
China says it will conduct re-entry tests before 2015 of a spacecraft to be used in a mission to have a lunar explorer probe bring lunar soil samples to Earth. The Chang'e-5 sample mission will be carried out sometime before 2020, said Hu Hao, chief designer of the lunar exploration program's third phase. The three-step lunar exploration mission features "circle, land and return," phases, he said. "Scientists believe we need to launch the spacecraft to prove that our current technical plan can actually bring Chang'e-5 home safely," Hu told China Daily at the annual session of the National People's Congress.
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11 March 2013
Space station to get special telescope
NASA says it's giving $4.4 million to five U.S. universities to help the agency build a telescope for deployment on the International Space Station in 2017. University scientists along with researchers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama will join an international project to build an 8-foot ultraviolet telescope, the Extreme Universe Space Observatory, to search for the mysterious source of the most energetic particles in the universe from the space station's Japanese Experiment Module.
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25 March 2013
NASA’s Gemini Program: a “stepping stone” to Mars?
The space community has debated various precursor missions for a human Mars expedition, including trips to the Moon and near Earth asteroids. Harley Thronson notes, however, that these proposals are in sharp contrast the Gemini program, a precursor to Apollo driven entirely by what was needed to support the ultimate goal of landing humans on the Moon.
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25 March 2013
Price, reliability, and other challenges facing the launch industry
Customers of commercial launches are expressing concerns about the reliability of some vehicles, while the US government is worried about the growing costs of launch. Jeff Foust reports on those issues and possible solutions, including a return to commercial service of a vehicle that primarily serves government users.
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25 March 2013
Bringing space resources into the human economy
Recent events have raised awareness of, and interest in, near Earth objects and their resource potential. Greg Anderson discusses the roles banks can play to enable accessing those resources for use in space and on Earth.
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25 March 2013
Review: A Single Sky
The field of radio astronomy emerged after World War II as scientists turned technologies developed during the war towards the skies. Jeff Foust reviews a book how this field developed far more collaboratively than many other scientific endeavors.
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18 March 2013
A tragedy’s lessons for the future
NASA took the lessons from the Columbia accident ten years ago and used them to help safely fly out the remaining shuttle missions, but what about future spacecraft? Jeff Foust reports on the views about safety of future human spaceflight vehicles, particularly those being developed commercially, discussed at a recent symposium.
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18 March 2013
Using “rocket science” to understand North Korea’s space and missile efforts
Determining just how advanced North Korea's space and missile technologies are can be difficult, even when a mission like last December's launch appears successful. James Oberg estimates that country's progress, and future challenges, based on those reported successes and apparent failures.
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18 March 2013
India’s French Connection in space
The launch last month of an Indo-French ocean science satellite on an Indian rocket is just the latest sign of cooperation between the two nations in space. Ajey Lele discusses the strategic implications of Indian and French space cooperation.
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18 March 2013
“A lot of anticipation”: cosmologists await Planck’s views of the universe’s first light
Later this week ESA will release data from its Planck mission, offering astronomers their best view yet of the cosmic microwave background. Jeff Foust examines what makes astronomers so excited about Planck's data.
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18 March 2013
Space industrialization and the G20
Last month's Russian meteor was a reminder of the threat that near Earth objects pose, while recent commercial developments also highlight the resource potential of NEOs and other solar system bodies. Three authors make the argument that the G20 nations should make space industrialization, and planetary protection, a priority.
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