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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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.
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.
Star Students: ASU Team Watches As Its Project Is Launched Into Orbit | Phoenix, AZ Patch
WALLOPS ISLAND, VA. – A concussive boom radiated out from the launch pad at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility as nine Arizona State University students watched four years of their work ascend into space Saturday.
"I kind of thought my head would be like a jumble of internal screaming," said Sarah Rogers, the project manager for the ASU student team. But when the launch came, she said, "My mind was very clear, because you're just there in the moment sharing it with everybody."
The students' project was one of seven so-called CubeSats that were packed into the Cygnus spacecraft as part of a resupply mission to the International Space Station. All seven of the microsatellites launched Saturday were produced by student teams at schools across the U.S.
Rogers is now a graduate student studying aerospace engineering, but started the project as a freshman in 2015. She said the students who have rotated through the project over the years, more than 100 in all, have gained myriad opportunities academically, but stressed what they learned about themselves was equally important.
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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.
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.
Happening on Twitter
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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