X-Prize

The launch of the ISS Progress 39 cargo craft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan was postponed for 48 hours Wednesday due to high winds at the launch pad. The launch of the spacecraft was rescheduled for Friday at 6:22 a.m. EDT. Docking to the aft port of the Zvezda service module has been rescheduled for Sunday at 7:58 a.m. with NASA TV coverage set to begin at 7:15 a.m. According to Roscosmos, the upper limit launch commit criteria for winds at the Baikonur launch pad is  [...]

Lockheed Martin Commercial Launch Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Lockheed Martin Corporation [NYSE: LMT], announced today that it has been selected by GeoEye, Inc. (NASDAQ: GEOY) to launch the company's next-generation, high-resolution Earth-imaging satellite, GeoEye-2, on an Atlas V rocket. Financial terms are not being disclosed at this time.Jack Zivic, general manager of Lockheed Martin Commercial Launch Services, said, “We appreciate GeoEye’s recognition of the overall value  [...]

Cruising past Saturn's moon Dione this past weekend, NASA's Cassini spacecraft got its best look yet at the north polar region of this small, icy moon and returned stark raw images of the fractured, cratered surface. The new images also show new views of the long, bright canyon ice walls, which scientists working with NASA's Voyager spacecraft called "wispy terrain" in the early 1980s. These ice walls thread along the surface of the moon's trailing hemisphere and cut across craters.  [...]

Two asteroids, several meters in diameter and in unrelated orbits, will pass within the moon's distance of Earth on Wednesday, Sept. 8. Both asteroids should be observable near closest approach to Earth with moderate-sized amateur telescopes. Neither of these objects has a chance of hitting Earth. A 10-meter-sized near-Earth asteroid from the undiscovered population of about 50 million would be expected to pass almost daily within a lunar distance, and one might strike Earth's atmosphere a [...]

ESA’s GOCE gravity mission has recovered from a glitch that prevented the satellite from sending its flow of scientific data to the ground. News of the recovery comes earlier than expected, thanks to the fervent efforts of a team of experts. Volker Liebig, Director of ESA's Earth Observation Programmes, said, "We are very glad that one of the most innovative missions of ESA is back on track. I would like to congratulate and thank the teams from ESA and especially industry. "I often get [...]

Arianespace is poised to build on its successful 30-year track record as the world’s leading launch services provider – benefitting from a robust payload order book that ensures more than three years of mission activity, and supported by the extension of its launcher family with the introduction of Soyuz and Vega during 2011 at the Spaceport in French Guiana. This was the outlook provided by Chairman & CEO Jean-Yves Le Gall at Arianespace’s traditional 2010 World Space Business W [...]

The launch campaign for Arianespace’s upcoming Soyuz mission for Globalstar has entered a new phase as all six spacecraft are now at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The mission’s three remaining satellites were delivered last week – joining the initial three that have been at the Cosmodrome since August 11 for their final checkout, and fueling. One of the spacecraft has already completed these steps, and is now integrated on the conical-shaped dispenser that will carry the six [...]

Today, the Rocket City Space Pioneers - a group of Huntsville businesses, educational institutions and non-profit organizations - announced their official entry into the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a $30 million competition that challenges space professionals and engineers from across the globe to build and launch to the Moon a privately funded spacecraft capable of completing a series of exploration and transmission tasks. Headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama, Team Rocket City Space Pioneers is compr [...]

The sands of time are running out for the central star of this the Hourglass Nebula. With its nuclear fuel exhausted, this brief, spectacular, closing phase of a sun-like star's life occurs as its outer layers are ejected and its core becomes a cooling, fading white dwarf. In 1995, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to make a series of images of planetary nebulae, including the one above. Here, delicate rings of colorful glowing gas (nitrogen-red, hydrogen-green, and oxygen- [...]

Saturn's moon Enceladus, imaged at high phase, shows off its spectacular water ice plumes emanating from its south polar region. This image was captured at a phase, or sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, angle of 159 degrees so that sunlight would reveal the backlit plumes. See Bursting at the Seams to learn more. Sunlight brightly illuminates terrain on the left. Light reflected off Saturn illuminates the rest of the moon more dimly. This view looks toward the trailing hemisphere of Enceladus (5 [...]

The most prominent feature in the image is a ring with dozens of bright spots. A shock wave of material unleashed by the stellar blast is slamming into regions along the ring's inner regions, heating them up, and causing them to glow. The ring, about a light-year across, was probably shed by the star about 20,000 years before it exploded. An international team of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope reports a significant brightening of the emissions from Supernova 1987A. The result [...]

Just as we grow used to satellite navigation in everyday life, media reports argue that a coming surge in solar activity could render satnav devices useless, perhaps even frying satellites themselves. Is it true? No. It is a fact that variations in the gigantic unshielded fusion reactor we call the Sun have effects that extend far out into the Solar System. And the solar activity follows a roughly 11-year ‘sunspot cycle’. That means the next ‘solar maximum’ – solar max for short  [...]

The Space Show, hosted by David Livingston under www.TheSpaceShow.com, will have the following guests this week: 1. Tuesday, September 7, 2010, 7-8:30 PM PDT (September 8, 2-3:30 GMT) Dan Adamo returns to discuss propellant depots and Earth-Lunar departure points and more. Dan Adamo is a graduate of the University of Rochester (BS Optical Engineering, 1975) and the University of Houston, Clear Lake City (MS Physical Sciences, 1981). From 1979 to 2008, he was employed as a contractor  [...]

Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover that will be on Mars two years from now, has been flexing the robotic arm that spacecraft workers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory attached to the rover body in August 2010. The arm will be crucial for putting samples of soil or powdered rock into analytical instruments inside the rover. A camera and spectrometer to be installed at the end of the arm will also examine rocks and soils in place. The Mars Science Laboratory will launch from [...]

The Expedition 24 crew members are preparing for the arrival of the ISS Progress 39 cargo craft to replenish the orbiting laboratory with food, fuel, supplies and other cargo. The Progress 39 will dock to the aft end of the Zvezda service module Friday, Sept. 10. It is replacing the trash-filled Progress 38 which undocked Aug. 31 and is poised to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere Monday for a fiery destruction over the Pacific Ocean. The crew also will have an off-duty day Monday due to a frenet [...]

The universe is still an arcane place that scientists know very little about, but a new NASA Solar Terrestrial Probe mission is going to shed light on one especially mysterious event called magnetic reconnection. It occurs when magnetic lines of force cross, cancel, and reconnect releasing magnetic energy in the form of heat and charged-particle kinetic energy. On the sun, magnetic reconnection causes solar flares more powerful than several atomic bombs combined. In Earth's atmosphere, magnet [...]

PASADENA, Calif. -- Experiments prompted by a 2008 surprise from NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suggest that soil examined by NASA's Viking Mars landers in 1976 may have contained carbon-based chemical building blocks of life. "This doesn't say anything about the question of whether or not life has existed on Mars, but it could make a big difference in how we look for evidence to answer that question," said Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. McKay coauthored a study [...]

Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center (KhSC), headquartered in Moscow, a Federal State Unitary Enterprise (FSUE), has been a longstanding leader in the advancement of space programs. Its varied product lines include launch vehicles and launch vehicle upper stages, communication and earth observation satellites, rocket engines and Space Station modules. Over time, KhSC has emerged as one of world’s largest space production centers, serving the international satellite telecom [...]

MOSCOW - A team of Russian cosmonauts working at the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS) are unhappy about the absence of hot showers onboard, a Russian cosmonaut said on Thursday. The U.S. segment of the station has a shower cabin that was delivered by the Endeavor shuttle in 2008. "There are wipes and towels onboard instead of a shower. It is not so easy to do without it for six months. Besides, it turned out that the towels we wipe ourselves with are not only damp,  [...]

After taking part in Thursday’s daily planning conference with flight control teams on Earth and performing some routine morning inspections, Expedition 24 Commander Alexander Skvortsov and Flight Engineer Fyodor Yurchikhin worked in the Russian segment of the station, cleaning ventilation components and monitoring its environmental and life support systems. Flight Engineers Shannon Walker and Doug Wheelock began their day by collecting blood samples for an experiment that studies the decr [...]