LOGAN, Utah — Small satellites, including tiny cubesats, are gaining wider acceptance across NASA as growing spacecraft capabilities interact with declining budgets. At the annual small satellite conference at Utah State University here, Space Technology Associate Administrator Michael Gazarik outlined the agency’s efforts to stretch its $600 million in funds by using and supporting the smallsat community.

MIDWAY POINT: NASA’s $1.1 billion Juno mission reached the midpoint in its circuitous, 1.76 billion-mi. journey to Jupiter on Aug. 12. With an anticipated arrival at Jupiter of July 4, 2016, the spacecraft will maneuver into a polar orbit to probe the structure and atmosphere below the cloud cover and search for evidence of a solid core. Juno was launched on Aug. 5, 2011, and will fly past the Earth in October of this year for a gravity boost.

A NASA-assembled Science Definition Team (SDT) is backing a Europa lander as the centerpiece for a U.S. mission to assess the habitability of the ice-covered Jovian moon. Top lander mission priorities should include an investigation of the composition and chemistry of the ocean beneath Europa’s vast ice shell; characterization of the thickness, uniformity and dynamics of the ice layer; and studies of Europa’s human-scale geology.

A budget crunch brought on by sequestration has pressured the U.S. Air Force to discontinue operations of its Space Fence, which has been surveilling objects in space since 1961. The Air Force Space Surveillance System (AFSSS), dubbed the Space Fence (and formerly operated by the Navy), consists of three transmitters and six receivers designed to form a radar line, or fence, across the 33rd parallel along the southern U.S.

Visiona Tecnologia Espacial S.A. has selected satellite manufacturer Thales Alenia Space of France and Italy and launch services provider Arianespace of Evry, France, to build and launch a geostationary broadband satellite system for the government of Brazil. Sao Jose dos Campos-based Visiona, a joint venture between Embraer and Telebras, was established to integrate Brazil’s Geostationary Satellite Defense and Strategic Communications (SGDC) system in support of the government’s National Broad Band Program (PNBL) and strategic defense communications.

LOGAN, Utah — The global groundswell of cubesat projects promises to generate more data than the ad hoc communications systems originally devised for the tiny spacecraft can handle, and the community is working on how to accommodate the flow. The issue is expected to become more critical as the short-lived cubesats launched by universities, government labs and private companies worldwide give way to swarms of tiny spacecraft carrying cameras, telescopes and other high-data sensors.

LOGAN, Utah - ATK will develop and build the largest composite case solid-fuel rocket motors ever flown for the planned Stratolaunch Systems Air-Launch Vehicle (ALV), which will drop from the largest aircraft ever built to orbit payloads as heavy as 15,000 lb. (Image: Stratolaunch)

HOUSTON — Michael Foale, long NASA’s most senior active astronaut, has retired from the space agency after three decades and a half-dozen spaceflights. One of them—a 145-day flight to Russia’s former Mir space station in 1997—was interrupted by a harrowing collision with an out-of-control Progress cargo capsule. During his 2003-04 command of the eighth expedition to the International Space Station, Foale became the first American to accumulate a year in space on his way to logging a pre-retirement total of 375 days.