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.
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The Space Review: Review: See You in Orbit?
See You in Orbit? Our Dream of Spaceflight
by Alan Ladwig
To Orbit Productions, 2019
paperback, 500 pp., illus.
ISBN 978-1-7332657-0-6
US$18.00
Last week marked a new era in space tourism, as Virgin Galactic started trading on the New York Stock Exchange Monday after its merger with special-purpose acquisition company Social Capital Hedosophia closed the preceding Friday. The stock exchange building was wrapped in company banners, and there was a celebration inside that included company founder Sir Richard Branson. He was walking around the floor of the exchange in a blue flight suit he and other customers will wear on SpaceShipTwo flights starting next year, a suit developed by athletic apparel company Under Armour but looking like something from the set of Star Trek: Enterprise . He and others were ebullient as shares rose in early trading.
Air Force spaceplane lands after two years orbiting Earth | FOX13
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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."
Not to change the topic here:
Kilometer-Long Space Tether Tests Fuel-Free Propulsion - Scientific American
A massive cloud of space junk —containing more than 23,000 pieces larger than 10 centimeters across—is currently zooming around Earth with an average speed of about 36,000 kilometers per hour. And as companies such as SpaceX and OneWeb plan to launch tens of thousands of new satellites over the next few years, this hazardous clutter will likely pose an increasing threat to space missions and astronauts. One possible solution may be an electrodynamic tether, a device that could help prevent future satellites from becoming abandoned wrecks. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory plans to test this technology in the next few weeks.
In early November the Tether Electrodynamic Propulsion CubeSat Experiment (TEPCE), already in orbit, is set to make its move under the watchful gaze of telescopes on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The Earth-bound control team is waiting for an ideal 10-minute period at dawn or dusk, when the dim sunlight will offer the best possible view of the shoebox-size spacecraft involved. Once the crew triggers the process, TEPCE should separate into two identical minisatellites joined by a kilometer-long tether as thick as several strands of dental floss.
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.
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.
Nobel prize in physics for discovery of exoplanet orbiting a star | New Scientist
The Nobel prize in physics has been awarded to James Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for their contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth's place in the cosmos.
One half of the award went to James Peebles at Princeton University for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology, and the other half was jointly awarded to Michel Mayor at the University of Geneva and Didier Queloz at the universities of Geneva and Cambridge for their discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star.
Peebles' research over two decades has formed the basis for our understanding of the universe's history after the big bang. He made theoretical predictions about the shape of the universe and the matter and energy that it contains. These were later validated by measurements of background radiation.
Happening on Twitter
We spent last week studying stars forming in our own Milky Way galaxy and other nearby galaxies. ✨ We're ready for… https://t.co/bwTi3wbGrt SOFIAtelescope (from California) Mon Nov 04 19:22:50 +0000 2019
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
The Wind spacecraft has logged 25 years in space studying the solar wind, and its quarter century of data has produ… https://t.co/1KRYQqc0s8 NASAGoddard (from Greenbelt, MD USA) Fri Nov 01 19:19:00 +0000 2019
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