SAN FRANCISCO — NASA reports “a great insertion orbit” for its newest orbiting telescope for studying the Sun’s dynamic temperature bands, which was drop-launched from a former airliner off the central California coast at 7:28 p.m. PDT June 27.
It is a golden instrument, in more ways than one. NIRcam, the Near-Infrared Camera for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), is wrapped in a gold insulating foil, the better to maintain its operating temperature of 35K (-397F). But it also will play a golden role for the three other instruments on the $8 billion mission, which is to put astronomy's largest orbiting observatory into service in 2018.
PARIS — Thales Alenia Space of France and Italy will lead development of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) new Euclid cosmology satellite under a contract valued at €322.5 million ($420 million), the company announced June 27. Scheduled to launch in 2020 atop a European variant of Russia’s Soyuz, Euclid will explore dark energy and dark matter using a payload module to be built by EADS Astrium of Toulouse that includes a silicon-carbide telescope for infrared measurements and a 1.2-meter-dia. mirror to observe distant galaxies.
The medium Earth orbit constellation designed to bring broadband satellite service to the “other 3 billion” (O3b) customers in the developing world is taking shape above the equator with the June 25 launch of the first four spacecraft on an Arianespace Soyuz flying from the Guiana Space Center on the north coast of South America. Another set of four satellites is scheduled for launch later this year, and the third and final group of four is set to go up in the first half of next year.
Shenzhou 10, China’s longest human mission to date, ended safely early Wednesday with a landing on a Mongolian steppe. Touchdown of the mission’s return capsule with its crew of two men and a woman came at 8:07 a.m. local time (8:07 p.m. Tuesday EDT), 15 days after it was launched from the Jiuquan launch site on a Long March 2F rocket.
HOUSTON — Celestis, Inc., the post-cremation memorial spaceflight company, is offering to send a small sample of a loved one’s ashes into deep space in November 2014, accompanying a solar-sail mission flying as a secondary payload to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Deep Space Climate Observatory (Dscovr). Planned for launch from Cape Canaveral aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Dscovr will head for the Earth-Sun L-1 Lagrangian point, where the NOAA spacecraft will serve as a solar weather sentry.
President Barack Obama's Brandenburg Gate call to eliminate up to a third of the U.S. nuclear arsenal has few ardent champions. And the remaining discontent may matter, since the cuts aren't likely to materialize while Obama is still in office. Republicans denounce the plan to reduce beyond the New Start treaty's limit of 1,550 deployed strategic warheads, and promise to set up procedural roadblocks in the Senate.
In late April, the FAA trumped the National Transportation Safety Board by approving a redesign and return-to-flight plan for the Boeing 787's troubled lithium-ion batteries. It came the same week NTSB held an investigative hearing in which participants made it clear that the root cause for the smoking batteries had not been found. The usually loquacious NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman played it cool at the time, but public comments she provided in the FAA's airworthiness directive (AD) docket for the 787 fix earlier this month reveal she might yet have the last word.
A “discussion draft” of a two-year NASA reauthorization bill is running into bipartisan opposition in its originating House space subcommittee, illustrating how lawmakers' divergent opinions about NASA spending are inhibiting progress. Democrats are complaining about cuts in Earth Science funding. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), the panel's vice chairman, promises to vote against the bill unless more money is provided for the Space Launch System program in his district.
Reauthorization of the Commercial Space Launch Act (CSLA)—and its federal indemnification coverage and potential mandates over seeking informed-consent waivers from launch participants and crew—could be hot topics as U.S. lawmakers and industry prepare to update the nearly decade-old law. The Republican chairman of the House space subcommittee, Rep. Steven Palazzo (Miss.), says he is eager to work for reauthorization and he knows that industry has a long list of desired changes, including the Federal Communications Commission's regulatory reach into space.
A “discussion draft” of a two-year NASA reauthorization bill drew fire in its originating congressional committee June 19, with Democrats complaining about cuts in Earth Science funding, one Republican leader promising to vote again the bill unless funds are added to a project under way in his district, and two witnesses warning that NASA may have to choose between the International Space Station and human exploration beyond low Earth orbit.
HOUSTON - With eight new candidates, NASA intends to sustain the number of U.S. astronauts at 45 to 55 men and women for the foreseeable future, well down from an all-time high of 139 fliers in 2000, when the agency was launching five to six shuttle missions annually and beginning to continuously staff the International Space Station.
LE BOURGET — The European Space Agency (ESA) and its industrial partners need to reduce the weight of a service module they are developing to fly on NASA’s Orion multipurpose crew exploration vehicle in 2017, a hurdle that will delay preliminary design review of the project by a little more than three months.
The U.S. Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im Bank) has authorized a $343.3 million direct loan to Asia Satellite Telecommunications Co. Ltd. (AsiaSat) to finance the purchase of two Space Systems/Loral (SS/L) communications satellites, plus launch services. SS/L is building AsiaSat 6, a C-band satellite, and AsiaSat 8, a mixed Ku/Ka-band satellite, under a contract announced in November 2011. The launches, to be carried out by SpaceX, are planned for the first half of 2014. To date in fiscal 2013, the Ex-Im Bank has authorized $891 million in support of U.S.
An Orbital Sciences Corp. Pegasus XL air-launched rocket is in final preparation to send a NASA scientific satellite into polar orbit to study a poorly understood region of the Sun's atmosphere in unprecedented detail. The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) (see image) will combine an ultraviolet telescope and a multi-channel imaging spectrograph to study the interface region between the visible surface of the Sun and its upper atmosphere, which is the source of most of the Sun's UV radiation.
NASA's long-lived Opportunity rover is rolling toward a new destination at Endeavour Crater on Mars, following one of the nine-year mission's most striking discoveries, a rock rich in clay minerals that points to an early, biologically friendly era dominated by water with a neutral chemistry. Opportunity's internal examination of the rock Esperance in a region known as Cape York on the crater's rim has produced findings strikingly similar to those from rock analysis by NASA's Curiosity rover at the Yellowknife Bay region of distant Gale Crater.
