Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company has today unveiled a new Kickstarter campaign, which is aimed at raising funds to launch its Arkyd-100 series space telescope. Planetary Resources have offered a number of different rewards for various levels of pledges, ranging from a “space selfie”, up to packages that will allow access to the space telescope for individual schools. Additionally, [...]
Post Tagged with: “spacecraft”
How to Target an Asteroid
Credits: NASA Like many of his colleagues at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., Shyam Bhaskaran is working a lot with asteroids these days. And also like many of his colleagues, the deep space navigator devotes a great deal of time to crafting, and contemplating, computer-generated 3-D models of these intriguing nomads of the solar system. But while many of [...]
Identifying Space Debris: Further Adventures in East Texas
By Merryl Azriel, Tereza Pultarova, and Dean Gentz Ever since Dean Gentz found a 35 cm titanium sphere in his backyard, he’s been on a quest to find out what it is and where it came from. Gentz noted the hand-machining and the safety wire holes around the plug. He photographed the sphere and took it to work to perform [...]
NASA’s New Budget
At NASA these days, money is the talk of the town. On April 10, Us President Obama released his budget request for fiscal year 2014, including the NASA budget. This is just the start of the process: the budget doesn’t reflect the actual funds that will be allocated to NASA, this is just the official ask. Here is NASA’s official [...]
Russia to Launch 5 Lunar Probes Between 2015 and 2022
According to the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti, Russia’s space research program in the coming decades will be driven by landing planetary missions. “We’ve found our direction, our niche,” said the director of the Institute of Space Research at the Russian Academy of Sciences Lev Zelyony. Russia’s plan consists of sending a succession of five unmanned probes to the [...]
SEXTANT: NASA’s “Cosmic Beacon”
A sextant is an old-fashioned tool used for measuring angles between celestial objects. Sextants were used for navigation onboard ships to measure the angle of elevation from the horizon to reference stars, and other variants developed for astronomers to ascertain the positions of stars and planets. Now a team at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center is proposing a new type of [...]
Antares Rolled Out for April 17 Flight Test
Orbital Sciences Corporation has confirmed that the Antares rocket test flight will commence on April 17. In the meantime, the first fully-integrated Antares was rolled out from its assembly at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility (WFF), on April 6. “With the completion of the Antares roll out today,” said Mr. Michael Pinkston, Orbital’s Antares Program Manager, “we are on a clear [...]
Swiss Space System May Build Rocket Plane, Spaceport in Europe
Swiss Space System (S3) has announced a plan to build an unmanned rocket plane by 2017 to launch satellites into orbit. “S3 aims to develop, build, certify and operate suborbital space shuttles dedicated to launching small satellites, enabling space access to be made more democratic thanks to an original system with launching costs up to four times less than at present,” [...]
ATV Entering Final Preparations for June Launch
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) fourth Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) is undergoing its final preparation phase for the planned Ariane 5 launch from Guiana Space Center (CGS) in June 2013. “After fueling has finished (towards end of April) ATV-4 will depart for the ‘Batiment Assemblage Finale’ for the final stage of preparation,” said ATV Operations Interface Manager and Launch Campaign [...]
NASA May Be Requesting $100 Million for Asteroid Mission
According to Aviation Week, NASA’s budget request for 2014 will include $100 million for a robotic asteroid capture mission that will aim not only to find and capture a small asteroid but also to deliver it into the vicinity of the Moon. SPACE.com reported that NASA officials were not allowed to comment on details of the agency’s 2014 budget request until [...]
