X-Prize

The Expedition 24 crew members were busy Wednesday preparing for the next spacewalk of their mission while conducting post-spacewalk procedures following Tuesday’s successful excursion outside the International Space Station. Flight Engineers Doug Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson worked in the Quest airlock to gather tools and configure the spacesuits they will wear during the expedition’s second spacewalk scheduled August 5. Wheelock and Caldwell Dyson will install a power cable [...]

In its six-and-a-half years on Mars, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity had never seen a dust devil before this month, despite some systematic searches in past years and the fact that its twin rover, Spirit, has seen dozens of dust devils at its location halfway around the planet. A tall column of swirling dust appears in a routine image that Opportunity took with its panoramic camera on July 15. The rover took the image in the drive direction, east-southeastward, right after a drive  [...]

A spectacular new image from ESO’s Wide Field Imager at the La Silla Observatory in Chile shows the brilliant and unusual star WR 22 and its colourful surroundings. WR 22 is a very hot and bright star that is shedding its atmosphere into space at a rate many millions of times faster than the Sun. It lies in the outer part of the dramatic Carina Nebula from which it formed. Very massive stars live fast and die young. Some of these stellar beacons have such intense radiation passing throug [...]

LONG BEACH, Calif. – The U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware today approved the Sea Launch Plan of Reorganization (the "Plan"). Sea Launch Company LLC, a leading provider of launch services to the commercial satellite industry, filed the Plan on May 10, in preparation for its emergence from Chapter 11. Court confirmation of the Plan is the culmination of a 13-month restructuring process that was initiated when Sea Launch filed for Chapter 11 protection on June 22, 2009. The Plan will become e [...]

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – Recently, six James Webb Space Telescope beryllium mirror segments completed a series of cryogenic tests at the X-ray & Cryogenic Facility at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. During testing, the mirrors were subjected to extreme temperatures dipping to -415 degrees Fahrenheit, permitting NASA contractor engineers to measure in extreme detail how the shape of the mirror changes as it cools. With those measurements, the mirrors will be shi [...]

Flight Engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and Mikhail Kornienko concluded a six-hour, 42-minute spacewalk Tuesday at 6:53 a.m. EDT. The cosmonauts began their spacewalk when they opened the hatches of the Pirs docking compartment at 12:11 a.m. This was the 147th spacewalk overall in support of station assembly and maintenance. The cosmonauts wore their Russian Orlan spacesuits to outfit the new Rassvet module for a Kurs automated rendezvous system capability for future dockings of Russian vehicles  [...]

The Space Show, hosted by David Livingston under www.TheSpaceShow.com, will have the following guests this week: 1. Monday, July 26, 2010, 2-3:30 PM PDT (21-22:30 GMT) Brian Enke comes to the program. As a Senior Space Research Analyst at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, Brian Enke researches Mars and asteroid science, artificial intelligence and robotics algorithms, and remote sensing technologies. Prior to 2001, he worked for 17 years as a senior integrator and compl [...]

Orion Hardware to be Flown and Tested Aboard NASA’s Last Shuttle Mission, STS-134 BOULDER, Colo -- Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company and NASA conducted a successful technology demonstration of an inventive navigation system that will make docking operations safer and easier for spacecraft flying to the International Space Station (ISS). The demonstration that took place at the Ball facility in Boulder, Colo., showcased the dynamic nature of the s [...]

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. -- Boeing [NYSE: BA] today announced that it met or exceeded all the requirements of the Critical Design Review (CDR) of the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) hosted payload and its host spacecraft, the Intelsat 22 satellite (IS-22). Boeing is building IS-22 for Intelsat, the leading provider of fixed satellite services worldwide. The UHF payload, built by Boeing, is being placed on the satellite by Intelsat to be used by the Australian Defence Force (ADF). When operational, IS-22 al [...]

FARNBOROUGH - Russian NPO Lavochkin intends to send an interplanetary research mission to Mercury in 4-5 years, Lavochkin's deputy general designer said at the Farnborough International Airshow 2010. "[The mission will consist of] a flight to Mercury and a landing on its surface," Maxim Martynov said. "We assume that the device will be a modified Phobos-Grunt satellite." He added that the NPO is currently engaged in a pre-design mission. Martynov also said that similar missions are plan [...]

LONG BEACH, Calif. – Sea Launch Company, a leading provider of launch services to the commercial satellite industry, has signed an agreement with a subsidiary of EchoStar Satellite Services L.C.C., a wholly owned subsidiary of EchoStar Corporation (Nasdaq: SATS), providing EchoStar with the ability to launch up to three satellites on the Sea Launch system. Sea Launch expects to launch the satellites using the reliable Zenit-3SL launch vehicle from its equatorial launch site at 154 degrees  [...]

Cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Mikhail Kornienko will exit the International Space Station Monday night for a six-hour spacewalk. The pair will exit the Pirs docking compartment and work outside the Zarya and Zvezda modules. This will be the first Expedition 24 spacewalk. They will outfit the Rassvet module’s Kurs automated rendezvous system, install cables and remove and replace a video camera. Kurs is a Russian radio telemetry system that allows automated dockings of unmanned spacecraf [...]

Spacecraft: Glory Launch Vehicle: Taurus XL 3110 Launch Site: Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. Launch Date: Nov. 22, 2010 Launch Time: 2:09 a.m. PST Altitude/Inclination: 440 miles/98.2 degrees The Taurus rocket is in Orbital Sciences Hangar 1555 located on north Vandenberg Air Force Base where integration of the vehicle's flight hardware components continues. The launch vehicle was powered on for the first time July 20 to begin electrical tests. Initial testing of the guidance syste [...]

PASADENA, Calif. -- A camera aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft has helped develop the most accurate global Martian map ever. Researchers and the public can access the map via several websites and explore and survey the entire surface of the Red Planet. The map was constructed using nearly 21,000 images from the Thermal Emission Imaging System, or THEMIS, a multi-band infrared camera on Odyssey. Researchers at Arizona State University's Mars Space Flight Facility in Tempe, in collaboration [...]

PASADENA, Calif. - Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered carbon molecules, known as "buckyballs," in space for the first time. Buckyballs are soccer-ball-shaped molecules that were first observed in a laboratory 25 years ago. They are named for their resemblance to architect Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, which have interlocking circles on the surface of a partial sphere. Buckyballs were thought to float around in space, but had escaped detection until now.  [...]

WASHINGTON -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has detected a hypervelocity star – a rare entity moving three times faster than our sun. The star may have been created in a cosmic misstep. A hundred million years ago, a triple-star system was traveling through the bustling center of our Milky Way galaxy when it wandered too close to the galaxy's giant black hole. The black hole captured one of the stars and hurled the other two out of the Milky Way. The two outbound stars merged to form a supe [...]

Scientists have found evidence that a giant black hole has been jerked around twice, causing its spin axis to point in a different direction from before. This discovery, made with new data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, might explain several mysterious-looking objects found throughout the Universe. The axis of the spinning black hole is thought to have moved, but not the black hole itself, so this result differs from recently published work on recoiling black holes. "We think  [...]

Hubble's sharp vision reveals a crisp dust lane dividing the galaxy into two halves. The image highlights the galaxy's structure: a subtle, reddish bulge surrounding a bright nucleus, a blue disk of stars running parallel to the dust lane, and a transparent outer halo. Some faint, wispy trails of dust can be seen meandering away from the disk of the galaxy out into the bulge and inner halo of the galaxy. The outer halo is dotted with numerous gravitationally bound clusters of nearly a mill [...]

Sometimes a problem is so big, one country cannot handle it alone. That's the message scientists are delivering at today's International Living with a Star (ILWS) meeting in Bremen, Germany, and representatives from more than 25 of the world's most technologically-advanced nations have gathered to hear what they have to say. "The problem is solar storms—figuring out how to predict them and stay safe from their effects," says ILWS Chairperson Lika Guhathakurta of NASA headquarters. "We [...]

The International Space Station’s Expedition 24 crew began a new week aboard its high-flying home Monday with robotics work and preparations for two upcoming spacewalks. The complex and novel task of using the Dextre robot to swap out a failed Remote Power Control Module (RPCM) began Monday when Canadarm2 grappled Dextre and maneuvered to the P1 truss worksite. A partial removal and reinstallation demonstration of the failed RPCM is slated for Tuesday, and the actual replacement of the RPC [...]