Four years after a spacecraft flew by Pluto, sending stunning images and data back to Earth, NASA has commissioned a study to explore spending even more time examining and exploring the dwarf planet.
The San Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute announced Wednesday it had received funding from NASA to study the feasibility and cost of a possible future Pluto orbiter mission.
The study will build on the success of the agency’s New Horizons mission, a space probe that launched in 2006. It was the first of its kind to get a close look at Pluto and its five moons, about 3 billion miles from Earth.
The Southwest Research Institute was part of the team that built that spacecraft, which is still exploring the farthest reaches of our solar system, having flown by Ultima Thule — a rock located a billion miles beyond Pluto that is found in the solar system’s Kuiper Belt — in January.
Not to change the topic here:
Why Low-Earth Orbit Satellites Are the New Space Race - The Washington Post
In a world divided between digital haves and have-nots, billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are trying to close the gap. The three entrepreneurs separately aim to launch thousands of small satellites to zip around the globe in what's known as low-Earth orbit, or LEO. Their plan is to prosper by offering high-end data services to stock traders and others willing to pay richly to shave a few milliseconds off their transmission times. The satellites should also deliver high-speed internet coverage for regions too poor or remote to attract it on the ground. Neither result is certain. Startup costs in the billions of dollars are.
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LEO satellites operate from 500 kilometers (310 miles) to 2,000 kilometers above the Earth's surface. Traditional communication satellites are stationed far higher, at roughly 36,000 kilometers: They travel in so-called geosynchronous orbits, moving at the speed of the Earth's rotation and appearing to float motionless above a fixed point.
A French start-up is sending wine to space — Quartz
If the space industry these days really is an opportunity on par with the dawn of the internet, Nicolas Gaume is a businessman built to take advantage.
Gaume believes in the future. He founded his first technology company, which made video games, as a 19-year old in 1990. "I've built nine different companies in very different areas," he told Quartz last year. "I was a millionaire, I was a billionaire, I was bankrupt, I was a millionaire again."
Now, the French entrepreneur and his co-founder Emmanuel Etcheparre have a new company, Space Cargo Unlimited , which aims to perform biological research in the microgravity of Earth's orbit. Begun in 2014, it plans to fly experiments on rockets made by Blue Origin and SpaceX as soon as next year. But, first, on Nov. 2, they will launch a dozen bottles of the finest wine to the International Space Station on a rocket built by Northrop Grumman . They are believed to be the first glass bottles flown to the orbiting laboratory.
Watch: Jupiter-orbiting space probe captures the planet's beauty [photos]
An elderly couple and their son were able to fight-off a group of four farm attackers, who gained access to...
Many things are taking place:
Air Force spaceplane lands after two years orbiting Earth | KIRO-TV
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Officials said the Air Force's X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle Mission 5 successfully landed early Sunday morning at Kennedy Space Center .
The spaceplane was used to improve technology that allows scientists and engineers to recover experiments tested in a long-duration space environment.
Officials said the mission launched Sept. 7, 2017, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on board a Space X Falcon 9 booster. The U.S. Air Force is preparing to launch the sixth X-37B mission in 2020.
Virgin Orbit Could Launch Polish Cubesat Mission to Mars in 2022 | Space
Polish scientists are developing a first-of-its-kind cubesat mission to Mars that could launch as early as 2022.
The Poland-based satellite company SatRevolution, researchers from multiple Polish universities, and Richard Branson's launch company Virgin Orbit have formed a consortium that aims to send a tiny spacecraft to the Red Planet in the next few years.
The mission will follow in the footsteps of NASA's twin MarCO (Mars Cube One) craft, the first-ever interplanetary cubesats. Those briefcase-sized probes flew by Mars in November 2018, beaming home data about the touchdown of the agency's InSight lander . But the Polish effort will break new ground with its commercial component, project team members said.
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"This mission will galvanize the Polish space sector and mark its position on the international arena," SatRevolution co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Grzegorz Zwoliński said in a statement yesterday (Oct. 9). "The project will accelerate the development of small satellites and of lightweight space science instrument technology. We want Poland to be 'the go-to' country for small interplanetary spacecraft."
Simulations explain giant exoplanets with eccentric, close-in orbits
"A giant planet is not as easily scattered into an eccentric orbit as a smaller planet, but if there are multiple giant planets close to the host star, their gravitational interactions are more likely scatter them into eccentric orbits," explained first author Renata Frelikh, a graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.
Frelikh performed hundreds of simulations of planetary systems, starting each one with 10 planets in circular orbits and varying the initial total mass of the system and the masses of individual planets. As the systems evolved for 20 million simulated years, dynamical instabilities led to collisions and mergers to form larger planets as well as gravitational interactions that ejected some planets and scattered others into eccentric orbits.
Analyzing the results of these simulations collectively, the researchers found that the planetary systems with the most initial total mass produced the biggest planets and the planets with the highest eccentricities.
Happening on Twitter
Bright blue patches in this nearby galaxy mark sites of active star formation. Studying the structures of other gal… https://t.co/Or8iGG8pDX NASA360 (from Hampton, VA) Sun Nov 03 13:05:00 +0000 2019
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How do galaxies get fresh fuel for new stars? A new @NASA mission is studying the "circumgalactic medium" >>… https://t.co/ETP0IdQtmh NASA_Marshall (from Huntsville, Alabama USA) Tue Oct 29 21:45:08 +0000 2019
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