Aerospace

The first Orion spacecraft launch is just days away, so the excitement grows in America for this maiden flight, which will pave the way for future U.S. deep space missions. When NASA asked people earlier this year to show their support for Orion's first mission, the nation confirmed that Americans are really "On Board" for space exploration. "On Board" is the name of the agency's campaign to engage people in the spaceflight issues, letting everyone to share the enthusiasm about the upcoming manned space missions. NASA proposed some ways to express support for the Orion mission. People were…

As we move closer to the highly anticipated first ever test flight of the Orion spacecraft, there's an aerospace company which would be keeping its fingers tightly crossed during this nail-biting moment for the U.S. spaceflight. Lockheed Martin which built the manned capsule that will take American astronauts far beyond Earth, is much more than excited about the milestone flight. "We live for this kind of project. We will tell our kids and our grandkids about this," Allison Rakes, Lockheed Martin spokesperson told me. The company's hard working crew literally lives for this…

According to NASA’s official blog a leak of the khladon gas (Freon-218), used in the air conditioning system has occurred at the Zvezda service module of the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS). "Samokutyaev and Serova performed steps to release pressure in the Russian Segment Air Conditioner System [СКВ] by venting Khladon (Freon 218) overboard. However, several of the quick disconnects that were actuated during the procedure exhibited leaks," NASA's blog entry reads. "As a result, the Khladon was vented into the cabin instead." But according to Irina Zubareva, the…

"Dark matter" is a blanket term for inferred matter that is undetected but must exist in order for gravity at very large scales to make any sense at all. Based on inference, 27 percent of the universe is generally acknowledged to be dark matter, even though it is not visible and eludes direct detection and measurement. Whatever dark energy might turn out to be gets a number of about 68 percent of the universe. The rest of the universe, what we can detect and feel, is what we know to be matter.   Andrei Derevianko, of the University of Nevada, Reno, and Maxim Pospelov, of the…

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has made the space news headlines a couple of times recently. The office released a report in July that warned of cost and schedule risks to NASA’s newly designed Space Launch System (SLS). That wasn’t the first time this year when NASA received criticism from GAO. In May, the office slammed the agency’s cost estimating for SLS and the Orion spacecraft. Despite the fact that recommendations detailed in the reports are not mandatory for NASA, the agency “is required to respond to the Congress on how it plans to address the recommendations,”…

Hang on? Oh, there you are… ESA, Author provided By Monica Grady, The Open University Phew, what a day it was yesterday. Ended up having a quiet drink at the hotel. Last drink of the day – a nice cup of tea! Slept well – no nightmares about flying through space looking for somewhere to land. Open my eyes, open my twitter feed. Don’t usually launch into social media so quickly, but had to see what I had missed overnight. And I’d missed some good news – radio link to Philae had been restored more-or-less on schedule – that Philae is still alive. Joy, and first coffee of the day. Share in…

Most of the world that has access to the Internet knows two things about the Rosetta mission - it landed on a comet and a European engineer wore an ugly shirt that offended a lot of American women on Twitter. The least interesting news is that the ESA now knows that if women can't wear bathing suits to represent them on television, then male project scientists cannot wear bowling shirts and shorts. The important news, however, is that mankind has shown we can go on a 10 year, 4 billion mile journey through the solar system and land on a rock the size of Cork City, Ireland. @DrStuClark Here's…

On the eve of establishing its own space agency, Poland is showing off its rebirthed ambitions to explore the final frontier. The new European Space Agency (ESA) member state will host a space industry conference entitled“Poland in space yesterday, today and tomorrow”. The event will be held in Warsaw on Nov. 13-14 with the main idea of exchanging thoughts and information regarding the national space industry. The conference takes place just one year after the launch of the first Polish scientific satellite named "LEM” and when a scientific instrument made in Poland, makes history, landing…

Hey, does anyone want this comet? For the first time, mankind has successfully landed on a comet - a journey over 10 years in the making. After a seven-hour final descent, Rosetta’s Philae probe signaled from the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and the message arrived on Earth at 16:03 GMT, completing the longest part of a 4 billion mile journey through the solar system. The landing site, named Agilkia and located on the head of the bizarre double-lobed object, was chosen based on images and data collected at distances of 30–100 km from the comet. Those first images soon revealed…

Rosetta: Firing harpoons in space. ESA/ATG medialab By Alan Fitzsimmons, Queen's University Belfast The first attempted landing on the surface of a comet is a huge landmark in the history of space exploration that will not only uncover further details about comets but could unlock further clues about the origins of our solar system and the development of life on Earth. Comets are the icy remnants of the phase of planet building in our solar system, some 4.5 billion years ago. Thousands of them have been seen orbiting our sun and hundreds have been studied by Earth-based astronomers. From…