Controllers deorbited a stranded Russian-owned communications satellite March 25, after Russian officials rejected a request to keep it operating from a startup company created to salvage the Astrium-built spacecraft for service to scientists in Antarctica.
KOUROU, French Guiana — European Space Agency Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain met with his Chinese counterpart March 22-23 to discuss future cooperation in manned spaceflight, including the potential for a Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station (ISS). The two sides met at Dordain’s request on the sidelines of the European Space Agency’s third Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) launch to the ISS March 23 to further establish a dialogue and lay the groundwork for potential Sino-European cooperation in manned spaceflight.
The European Space Agency’s third Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) resupply spacecraft is speeding toward a docking with the International Space Station (ISS), following a smooth countdown and liftoff from the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, early March 23.
NEW DELHI — India’s Mars Orbiter Mission is getting a boost, with the government allocating 1.25 billion rupees ($25 million) to the effort for the 2012-13 fiscal year. “The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) plans to launch a Mars orbiter as early as November 2013 with a scientific payload weighing nearly 25 kg [55 lb.],” according to the budget document, which was introduced in parliament March 16.
NASA WORK: NASA has selected four Texas companies to perform a range of engineering and architectural services for Johnson Space Center in Houston under five-year contracts worth a combined $49 million. They include PDG Architects; Reynolds, Smith and Hills Inc; and URS Group Inc., all of Houston; and HDR Architecture of Dallas. The agreements, announced March 22, cover feasibility studies; conceptual design work; engineering reports; budget estimates; and designs for alterations, new construction, repairs and refurbishment.
INTELSAT 22: The Intelsat 22 communications satellite is slated to launch on an International Launch Services Proton rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, on March 25 at 8:10 a.m. EDT (6:10 p.m. local time). Based on Boeing’s 702MP satellite bus, the 6,200-kg (13,700-lb.) spacecraft will carry two Ku-band mobility beams providing coverage of the Indian Ocean region. From its position at 72 deg. East, it will serve the Middle East and eastern Africa with its Ku-band capacity.
HOUSTON — Researchers could be at work soon on new techniques for the detection and treatment of vision problems found in astronauts assigned to long-duration missions aboard the International Space Station (ISS). A report earlier this month in the journal Radiology, based on magnetic resonance imaging studies on 27 long-duration astronauts, found some with symptoms similar to idiopathic intercranial hypertension, including swelling of the optic nerve and an outward pressure on the eyeballs (Aerospace DAILY, March 15).
HOUSTON — NASA and its longtime partner, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), are positioning themselves to fund and restart the production of plutonium-238 within “six to seven years” as a power source for a range of possible missions to the outer Solar System, including those assigned to support the search for extraterrestrial life.
FORT EUSTIS, Va. — As it prepares to launch a technology demonstration for the next generation of rotorcraft, the U.S. Army’s aviation research arm has a series of smaller programs getting under way that will feed technology into the Joint Multi Role (JMR) effort. From avionics to engines, and airframes to weapons, the Aviation Applied Technology Directorate (AATD) at Fort Eustis, Va., has had an array of science and technology (S&T) programs ongoing since 2004 to lay the foundations for the Army’s next rotorcraft.
Two members of the House Appropriations subcommittee that sets NASA funding — a Democrat and a Republican — blasted the agency’s proposal to take a deep cut in its planetary-science accounts, and to drop out of its joint robotic Mars exploration effort with the European Space Agency (ESA).
NASA has selected 24 suborbital space technology payloads to fly this year and next on a mix of reusable commercial launch vehicles, high-altitude balloons and aircraft flying parabolas to briefly simulate weightlessness. Under the agency’s Flight Opportunities Program, 16 of the payloads will fly on the Zero-G parabolic aircraft; two will go on balloons from Near Space Corp. that fly above 65,000 ft.; five will fly on suborbital, reusable launch vehicles; and one will fly both on a balloon and a suborbital launch vehicle.
A revision of the 2004 U.S. space transportation policy is likely to include “directive language” designed to boost the commercial space industry, according to a former official who helped draft the broad policy that the revision will illuminate.
HOUSTON — NASA’s planetary science program, faced with a steep cut in President Barack Obama’s proposed 2013 budget, is counting on a successful landing of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) and closer ties to the better-funded human space exploration initiative to support a timely rebound, top agency science officials said during the opening session of the 43rd annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) here.
HOUSTON — Thanks to a final shuttle mission in July 2011, the International Space Station is well provisioned to sustain a six-person crew and a full research agenda well into 2013, NASA Program Manager Mike Suffredini said March 20. The outlook as Atlantis touched down after the 13-day STS-135 mission on July 21 was that the station had enough supplies for a year.
A dozen NASA software patents are scheduled to go on the auction block next week, covering potential applications in software development, telecommunications, smart grids, robotics, wireless sensor networks and cybersecurity. Goddard Space Flight Center’s Innovative Partnerships Program Office will offer the software at auction in three lots at the 15th ICAP Ocean Tomo IP Auction in Palos Verdes, Calif. Successful bidders will receive exclusive licensing rights and time with the technologies’ NASA inventors.
Members of the Aeronautical Repair Station Association (ARSA) voted overregulation as their number one long-term concern in the association’s annual member’s survey, but uneasiness about skilled worker shortages was close behind at the number two spot, said Christian Klein, EVP, ARSA, at the association’s symposium last week in Arlington, Va. The workforce issue came in as the second most important long-term threat to the aviation maintenance industry, tied with high fuel prices and grievances with the FAA.
Government payloads riding piggyback on commercial spacecraft are likely to win only 1% of the worldwide satellite-market revenue in the next few years, as bureaucratic inertia and a “not-invented-here” mentality work against the potential cost savings.
Power-saving integrated circuits that extend battery life in portable electronics, and are being applied to military radios and investigated for avionics, are the overall winner of Aviation Week's 2012 Innovation Challenge, organized to bring new technologies and processes to the attention of aerospace and defense leaders.
In the uncertain funded world of human spaceflight, the habit of die-hard propulsion engineers to never throw anything away is becoming increasingly useful as NASA looks for crew transports.
The world has changed in the slightly more than three years since the Kepler planet-finding spacecraft was launched into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit on a Delta II rocket. For starters, the Earth has 61 new cousins scattered around the universe, and another 2,321 new candidate-planets awaiting confirmation by astronomers as the real things.
In 1989, when Paul Graziani and two friends dreamed up what has become Analytical Graphics Inc., they sat in his living room envisioning a work environment where people could do their best work, creating new and bold things at a speed that would keep them happy and challenged. They would create commercial off-the-shelf analysis software for the security and space sectors, driving down cost while bringing the power of current and dynamic software to a non-consumer market.
Some astronauts who have spent extended periods in microgravity on the International Space Station (ISS) have developed abnormalities in their eyes and pituitary gland/brain connectors that are similar to a type of intracranial hypertension that occurs on the ground. The finding may help Earth-bound physicians understand what causes the potentially serious condition, but it already has NASA flight surgeons pondering how they can mitigate it when astronauts travel into deep space.
The space shuttle Discovery passes its sister ship Atlantis (see photo) March 9 as Kennedy Space Center prepares the retired orbiter fleet for transport to their new museum homes. Discovery is scheduled to arrive at the National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center at Washington Dulles International Airport on April 19. It will replace the Enterprise atmospheric test article now on display inside the James S. McDonnell Space Hangar.
Field scientists studying global climate change, marine biology, astronomy and other subjects in Antarctica may gain a robust satellite link to colleagues at home if a Russian working group permits salvage of a state-of-the-art communications satellite stranded in a useless orbit last summer. A working group of Russian agencies and companies is expected to decide later this month what to do with Express-AM4, which has been declared a total loss by its insurance underwriter after a Proton launch mishap last Aug. 18.
