FLYING FIRE: NASA plans to fly an experimental fire safety payload aboard Orbital Sciences Corp.’s Cygnus during one of the cargo spacecraft’s planned visits to the International Space Station in mid-2015. Known as the Spacecraft Fire Experiment (Saffire), the effort is aimed at improving spacecraft fire safety for future space exploration vehicles. Built by NASA’s Glenn Research Center, Saffire will test the flammability of large samples of various types of materials in microgravity.

Thales Alenia Space of France and Italy says it will no longer advertise certain variants of its Spacebus 4000 communications satellite as free of components and materials controlled by the U.S. Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).

HOUSTON — International Space Station astronaut Karen Nyberg successfully grappled Japan’s unpiloted H-II transfer vehicle (HTV-4) early Aug. 9 using the orbiting lab’s Canadian robot arm. NASA ground control teams then took over the robotic operations to berth the 33-ft.-long freighter and its 3.6 tons of cargo to the U.S. segment after the initial capture.

Boeing controllers in California are operating the newest Wideband Global Satcom (WGS-6) military communications satellite following its launch on a Delta IV Aug. 7.

A National Research Council panel is calling on policymakers to establish a sustained and enhanced land imaging program to ensure data continuity from the 40-year Landsat effort. Stable follow-on efforts would end a chaotic history of federal oversight of Landsat, while assuring spacecraft continuity, technically advanced sensors and data management, and the widest possible distribution of the imagery, according to the panel’s Aug. 8 report.

Click here to view the pdf

July 2 failure destroyed three Glonass-M navigation satellites

Recent observations with the Hubble Space Telescope point to highly energetic mergers of binary neutron stars or neutron/black hole pairs as the source of mysterious, short-duration gamma-ray bursts. The findings, published online Aug. 3 in the journal Nature, address a mystery dating to the detection of powerful but unsourced gamma-ray flashes by U.S. Vela satellites placed in Earth orbit during the 1960s to document violations of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (signed by the U.S., the former USSR and the U.K.).