The first of three cargo ships scheduled to arrive at the International Space Station over an exceptionally busy three week time-frame arrived over the weekend. On Saturday, the Orbital ATK Cygnus Cargo Ship S.S. Rick Husband successfully berthed with the Station, carrying, 7,700 lbs. of routine supplies as well as 250 science and research experiments, […]
Update: The U.S. Strategic Command’s Joint Space Operations Center has indicated that Astro-H has broken up. Update: Analysis shows ASTRO H breakup occurred 26Mar @ 0142z+/- 11mins. JSpOC confirmed breakup @ 0820z. @JAXA_en @SpaceTrackOrg — JSpOC (@JointSpaceOps) March 28, 2016 Original story: The Japanese Space Agency, JAXA has lost communications with the Astro-H X-ray astronomy […]
A slew of recent discoveries point to our solar system being a much wetter place than we once thought it was. From permanently shadowed ice on the Moon, to seasonal Recurrent Slope Linea evidence on Mars, and subsurface oceans on outer planet moons, space offers an abundant supply of life’s most vital element. Melting a […]
Its hard to feel like your’re living in the space age during those increasingly unpleasant hours you spend flying the “friendly skies.” That it happens at speeds which are no faster than they were when the commercial jet age got underway, and only begin after an excruciating journey to and through the airport, only add […]
For anyone who was paying extraordinarily close attention to the ULA/Orbital ATK launch of an Atlas V rocket to the International Space Station on Tuesday night, a slight discrepancy in the timing of first stage main engine cutoff might have been noticeable. And if you caught that, then a burn of the Centaur upper stage’s […]
ULA Press Release: United Launch Alliance Completes Preliminary Design Review for Next-Generation Vulcan Centaur Rocket Centennial, Colo., (March 24, 2016) – United Launch Alliance (ULA) successfully completed the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) for the Vulcan Centaur launch vehicle with dual Blue Origin BE-4 engines. The PDR, a major milestone in development of the Vulcan launch […]
The journal Nature has published a fascinating paper which provides convincing evidence that the Moon’s axis shifted by roughly 5 degrees some 3 billion years ago. What makes the work more than a matter of scientific curiosity however, is the fact that the shift was traced by using data from a variety of spacecraft to […]
Cue Dennis DeYoung and the rest of 1980’s mega band Styx, because for those who just love rockets, this may really be “The Best of Times.” Besides the ongoing phenomenon that is SpaceX, and as well as Blue Origin, which suddenly seems a bit restless proceeding at the pace of a tortoise as its motto […]
When European Space Agency mission controllers received confirmation that the the ExMars probe had successfully separated from the upper stage of the Proton rocket which boosted it to orbit, they no doubt breathed a particularly deep sigh of relief. Everyone had to be aware that the decision to use Russia’s Proton as the launch vehicle, […]
From the European Southern Observatory comes a series of images of what is described as a “lonely galaxy,” a description which may be as fitting as it is evocative. The images, which were taken by ESO’s OmegaCAM on the VLT Survey Telescope, shows the dwarf galaxy Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte (WLM) which was first discovered in 1909 but not […]
Recent Comments