TOP NEWS
Vintage NASA Satellite Falls To Earth, Meets Fiery Doom After 56 Years In Space
A long-retired NASA satellite burned up in Earth’s atmosphere over the weekend, the agency has confirmed.
NASA launched the satellite, called Orbiting Geophysics Observatory 1, or OGO-1, in September 1964, the first in a series of five missions to help scientists understand the magnetic environment around Earth. OGO-1 was the first to launch but the last to fall out of orbit; the satellite had circled Earth aimlessly since its retirement in 1971.
Read more at: Space.com
Crew Members On The Space Station Are Still Hunting For The Source Of A Leak, Though NASA Says Most Areas Have Been Ruled Out
A tiny bit of air always leaks from the International Space Station — but not quite as much as is leaking now.
Officials first noticed a leak last September, but they didn’t do anything about it for nearly a year, since the leak wasn’t major. Plus, station operations like space walks and crew exchanges kept crew members too busy to collect enough data about the issue.
Recently, however, technicians detected an increase to the already elevated leak rate. So NASA announced on August 20 that the three men aboard the station — NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Roscosmos cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner — would begin a hunt for the source.
Read more at: Business insider
What The International Space Station Teaches Us About Our Future In Space
Flying some 240 miles above Earth’s surface at 17,500 miles an hour, the International Space Station (ISS) is a science laboratory dedicated to helping humans learn how to live in space. Crucially, that means figuring out how the space environment affects biology–and human bodies, especially. Other onboard experiments are aimed at better understanding how the cosmos works, from the highest-energy particles that streak through our solar system to the faraway, extremely dense corpses of former stars.
Continuously occupied by rotating crews since November 2000, the space station is the work of five space agencies: NASA, Russia’s Roscosmos, the European Space Agency, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency.
Read more at: National Geographic
NEW SPACE
Why The Private Space Industry Embraces Risk
The space industry has always accepted some level of risk and failure, but as the commercial space industry matures, companies are using failure to their advantage to try to help their businesses succeed.
Why it matters: By taking on more risk and pushing their systems to the limits, space companies may be able to reach ambitious goals — like building a city on Mars or mining the Moon for resources.
Read more at: Axios
Future Of Space Station Commercialization Needs Fresh Ideas And Support, Panel Finds
Pushing commercialization on the International Space Station to the next level will take a combination of government will, tax incentives and regulatory clarity, said panelists at an online panel onThursday (Aug. 27).
Participants in the “Building the [low Earth orbit] LEO Economy” panel at the ISS R&D (Research and Development) conference explored how the space station is benefitting business here on Earth and what could be done to make space even more appealing to companies.
Read more at: Space.com
Space Hazards and STM
The Menace Of Space Debris
For most of the time India has participated in the space industry, it has played with one hand firmly tied behind its back. But with the introduction of the Self-Reliant India Movement (Aatma Nirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan), private companies hold the baton along with the government organizations to operate in the entire range of space activities. The Indian space industry now has unrivaled possibilities in the sectorial dimensions that constitute the field of space research and exploration. This raises the question of how privatization in the new space economy has increased the threshold of accountability for state actors involved in the operations.
Read more at: Jurist
NASA To Study Impact Of ‘Space Weather’ On Earth
Nasa is to fund concept studies on five mission proposals that aim to study the dynamic nature of the sun and the changing space environment this causes around Earth.
Such information will help understand how the “space weather” affects satellites in orbit, which provide navigation and communications; technology on Earth, such as power stations; and the health of astronauts on interplanetary voyages
Read more at: Guardian
SPACE WEEK: Is Space Junk Cluttering Up The Final Frontier?
Since the dawn of Sputnik in 1957, space-faring nations have been filling Earth’s orbital highways with satellites: GPS, weather forecasting, telecommunications.
Decades later, orbital debris is a growing problem.
Orbital debris, commonly known as “space junk,” exists at all levels of orbit, but is especially concentrated in low Earth orbit. Space junk has the potential to damage working satellites and crewed spacecraft, including the International Space Station.
Read more at: NPR
Who Gets To Manage Traffic In Space?
Yogi Berra would have gotten it wrong when it comes to the space surrounding Earth. It’s gotten so popular people are still flocking there. It raises serious questions: Which federal agency should take charge of space traffic management? Congress couldn’t figure that one out. So it hired the National Academy of Public Administration. For what NAPA concluded, Federal Drive with Tom Temin turned to study fellow and former NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe.
Read more at: federalnewsnetwork
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