Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko / Image credit ESA The weekend brought great news for the European Space Agency’s Rosetta/Philae mission. From ESA’s Rosetta blog: “Rosetta’s lander Philae is out of hibernation! The signals were received at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt at 22:28 CEST on 13 June. More than 300 data packets have been analysed […]
Deployed! Image Credit The Planetary Society It was hard won, but after series of scares involving low battery readings, software glitches and communication dropouts, the Planetary Society has declared its cubesat based LightSail experiment a success. The 3U cubesat launched into space as a secondary payload aboard an Atlas V on May 20th, the same […]
Spire, the San Francisco based smallsat company which began through the educational cubesat venture Ardusat, announced yesterday that it has been awarded $2.9 million in grants from the Scottish government. The award comes as Spire announced that it is opening a Glasgow, Scotland office to focus on its fleet of GPS Radio Occultation (GPS-RO) cubesats. […]
In the latest of what has become a string of incidents, some serious and some minor, for the Russian space program, Roscosmos reported yesterday that a “glitch” with a Soyuz spacecraft attached to the International Space Station resulted in an inadvertent thruster firing. The firing, which took place at 10:27 AM CDT, occurred during a […]
Image Credit: NASA After waiting out a week of bad weather in the recovery area, NASA’s Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) test vehicle finally caught its ride to the upper atmosphere over the Hawaiian islands today, but the unfortunate result was much the same as last year. Following a successful balloon loft, payload release and solid […]
Adeline: Image Credit Airbus Ever since SpaceX changed the focus of its quest for launch vehicle re-usability from parachute recovery to powered first stage landings, observers have wondered just what response might be offered by uber competitor and market leader Arianespace. At first, the French led consortium scoffed at the potential threat posed by Elon […]
Credits: NASA/ESA/A. Feild (STScI) NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is still 6 weeks away from its Bastille Day flyby of former planet Pluto, but based on new data gathered by researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope, it will have an opportunity to provide an up close view of the strange dance being called by the former […]
Image Credit: NASA Update: NASA has once again postponed the LDSD test due to high waves in the recovery area. The next window opens tomorrow, June 4th, at 7:30 AM HST (1:30 PM EDT). Last year, NASA conducted the first of series of tests of a new method for landing larger payloads on Mars. The […]
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