HOUSTON — NASA and startup Planetary Resources, Inc. have formed the first public/private partnership under the space agency’s Asteroid Grand Challenge (AGC) initiative to accelerate the search for near-Earth objects (NEOs) that pose a collision threat by using government sky surveys and crowdsourced algorithms. The Solar System’s population of known asteroids is 620,000, but that is estimated to be less than 1% of the actual total.

NASA has engaged in “a number of questionable practices” in the organization’s long-running use of award fees to motivate its contractor ranks to improve the quality of their performance, according to the agency’s inspector general.

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) has postponed the Falcon 9 v1.1’s first mission to geostationary transfer orbit until Nov. 28, as mission managers sort out a liquid-oxygen pressurization issue on the rocket’s first stage. The planned Nov. 25 mission was to carry the Orbital Sciences Corp.-built SES-8 satellite to a supersynchronous transfer orbit of 295 km x 80,000 km altitude and an inclination of 20.75 deg. for Luxembourg-based SES, the world’s second-largest commercial fleet operator by revenue.

HOUSTON — NASA’s recently concluded Asteroid Initiative Idea Synthesis workshop is providing the agency’s Asteroid Retrieval Mission (ARM) planners with new momentum for the agency’s two-phase strategy to resume U.S. human deep-space exploration while demonstrating capabilities to find and deflect asteroids that pose an impact threat.

NEW DELHI — India’s Mars probe, currently orbiting Earth before it embarks on a nine-month journey to the red planet, has activated its Mars Color Camera (MCC) and sent back its first images. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has shared a single image of India and the surrounding region taken on Nov. 19 at 13:50 (IST) at a resolution of 3.53 km from an altitude of 67,975 km. The photo clearly shows India, the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, the Himalayas and the Indo-Gangetic plain.

HIGH THROUGHPUT: Euroconsult says 33 High Throughput Satellite (HTS) systems will be launched between 2014 and 2016, compared to the total 31 HTS systems that were launched over the last decade. “The growing popularity of HTS systems will bring the total cumulative investment to over $12 billion,” the consultancy says. Euroconsult predicts global HTS capacity supply will nearly triple over the next three years to reach 1,400 Gbps in 2016.

HOUSTON — Russia’s unpiloted Progress 53 cargo capsule will test upgraded rendezvous system hardware over a four-day journey to the International Space Station that began Nov. 25 with a liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The automated linkup with the station’s Russia segment Zvezda service module is expected on Nov. 29 at 5:28 p.m. EST.

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) founder Elon Musk says he expects the company’s new Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket to force greater competition and innovation in the launch industry as it captures market share. Musk’s comments came the day before the Falcon 9 v1.1 was due to launch its first commercial payload to supersynchronous transfer orbit on Nov. 25 from SpaceX’s Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral AFS, Fla.