India’s first Mars orbiter suffered an engine anomaly Nov. 11

PARIS — Europe’s Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) re-entered Earth’s atmosphere at around 7 p.m. EDT Nov. 11 on a descending orbit pass that stretched across Siberia, the western Pacific Ocean, the eastern Indian Ocean and Antarctica. As expected, most of the satellite disintegrated in the upper atmosphere and no damage to property has been reported, according to the European Space Agency (ESA), though the agency says fragments reached Earth’s surface over the southernmost regions of the South Atlantic.

HOUSTON — Russia’s Soyuz TMA-09M descended to Earth late Nov. 10, returning a two-man, one-woman crew after 166 days aboard the International Space Station, along with a potentially faulty component suspected in the mid-July U.S. spacesuit failure that flooded the helmet of European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano with leaking water, prompting a suspension of NASA-sponsored spacewalks.

For the second time, Lockheed Martin has tested the unique fairings that will shield radiators and other delicate hardware on the Orion crew capsule’s service module during launch, using pyrotechnics and release mechanisms to jettison the hardware with simulated ascent heating. Engineers at the company’s facility in Sunnyvale, Calif., heated one of the three fairings to 200F and achieved what they termed “successful separation of all three fairings while under flight-like thermal and structural conditions.”

HOUSTON — Staffing of the International Space Station (ISS) temporarily surged to nine astronauts on Nov. 7, with the launch and docking of the Soyuz TMA-11M spacecraft carrying three astronauts, including Japan’s first ISS commander.

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The 3G-like capability that will eventually be available to warfighters from the U.S. Navy’s Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) is U.S.-only for now, but the spacecraft’s legacy UHF payload will remain available for allied use, according to U.S. Strategic Command. The Lockheed Martin-built MUOS satellites feature both the Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) payload and Boeing’s legacy UHF payload flying on the military’s existing Ultra High-Frequency Follow-On (UFO) satellites.

The 19-meter meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, was a fragment from a main-belt asteroid that broke up long ago and was too faint for detection by existing asteroid surveys, according to a new analysis of the Feb. 15 event.