Latest Space News 2011-09-17

On 17 September 1976, NASA‘s space shuttle Enterprise rolled out of the Palmdale manufacturing facilities and was greeted by NASA officials and cast members from the ‘Star Trek’ television series. Today, Enterprise is on display at the Smithsonian

Apollo 11 Mission – First Humans on the Moon. The Space Race, and competition to land on the moon was a product of the Cold War. Not only was it an effort to prove technological superiority, but there was also a real fear on both sides that the other might place weapons of mass destruction in space

Astronauts in the early days of the space race were true pioneers. It took the right stuff and more to join the group of astronauts known as the Mercury 7 Astronauts. Discover more about Project Mercury and the Mercury 7 astronauts

Astronomy 101 – Lesson 4 – Big Numbers For a Big Universe. Learn how we use astronomical units to measure our solar system – light years for our galaxy and parsecs and scientific notation for the universe. Discover the meaning of big numbers like astronomical units light years and parsecs and how to write them in scientific notation for the measurement of our universe

Man, Vesta is weird. It’s a 500 km (300 mile) wide asteroid, the second biggest, so its gravity should be strong enough to crush it into a sphere. But it’s not a ball; it’s lumpy and stretched out and, weirdest of all, has an enormous circular depression at its south pole which flattens that entire

The prototype shuttle Enterprise was revealed to the public on Sept. 17, 1976.

Tucson AZ (SPX) Sep 15, 2011 Every six years, asteroid 1999 RQ36 nears the Earth – by cosmic standards – and researchers are launching a global observation campaign to learn as much as possible in preparation for the OSIRIS-REx, the first U.S.-led mission to bring back a sample of pristine asteroid material. Astronomers working on the U.S

Paris (AFP) Sept 15, 2011 An unmanned European-Japanese mission to Mercury will be launched by Ariane 5 rocket in July 2014 under a contract announced on Thursday by Arianespace. The BepiColombo mission, named after a 20th-century Italian mathematician who studied the rotation of Mercury, comprises two probes that will enter orbit around the closest planet to the Sun after a six-year trek

Moscow (AFP) Sept 16, 2011 Three spacemen made a safe delayed return from the International Space Station on Friday as Russia again pushed back the launch of their replacement crew because of a recent rocket crash. Space officials said the Soyuz capsule landed on its side in the wind-swept steppes of the ex-Soviet republic of Kazakhstan at 0400 GMT. “A bull’s-eye landing for the Soyuz TMA-21

Washington DC (SPX) Sep 16, 2011 NASA has selected the design of a new Space Launch System that will take the agency’s astronauts farther into space than ever before, create high-quality jobs here at home, and provide the cornerstone for America’s future human space exploration efforts. This new heavy-lift rocket-in combination with a crew capsule already under development

Evry, France (SPX) Sep 16, 2011 Arianespace will launch two satellites for DIRECTV and has the option of launching another two satellites for one of the world’s leading providers of television entertainment services. All four satellites will weigh in at over 6 metric tons and will be a part of a fleet expansion and replenishment program. The new satellites will strengthen DIRECTV’s direct-to-home

Paris, France (ESA) Sep 16, 2011 After a final thruster firing last week to deplete its remaining fuel, ESA’s venerable ERS-2 observation satellite has been safely taken out of service. Ground controllers also ensured the space environment was protected for future missions. The mission ended on 5 September, after the satellite’s average altitude had already been lowered from 785 km to about 573 km

Irvine CA (SPX) Sep 16, 2011 UC Irvine astronomers have shown how the Milky Way galaxy’s iconic spiral arms form, according to research published in the journal Nature. A dwarf galaxy named Sagittarius loaded with dark matter has careened twice through our much larger home galaxy in the past two billion years, according to telescope data and detailed simulations, and is lined up to do it again. As

Santa Barbara CA (SPX) Sep 16, 2011 UC Santa Barbara astrophysicist Avi Shporer is part of the NASA team that has found the first known planet with two “suns,” an idea popularized by the 1977 movie “Star Wars.” The discovery is published this week in the journal Science. In the iconic scene from “Star Wars,” Luke Skywalker gazes into the distance as two suns set on the horizon. This type of planet

NASA announced a shift Friday in how it would partner with companies designing commercial spacecraft to taxi astronauts to the International Space…

The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent state of health and with the exception of one science instrument being powered off, all subsystems are operating normally.

The selections are part of the agency’s efforts to pursue revolutionary technology required for future missions, while proving the capabilities and lowering the cost of government and commercial space activities

As it turns 50, the ultra-secretive National Reconnaissance Office is putting a multibillion-dollar misstep behind it and casting its spy satellites…

One more piece of NASA‘s shuttle program has been retired.

Scientists think rivers of water used to flow on Mars.

AURA Applauds Senate Action on JWST

> NASA‘s robotic probe named Dawn has beamed back close-up images of asteroid Vesta, the second most massive object in the Asteroid Belt. From dusty landslides to towering mountains, the new images reveal unprecedented details of the roughly 328-mile-wide, 4.6-billion-year-old rock. Planetary scientists have waited nearly four years for Dawn to reach its first target after launching Sept. 27, 2007

The Dawn team released today a nice little video that flies around a shape model of Vesta produced by DLR, the German Aerospace Corporation, who built and operate Dawn’s camera. What’s a shape model? It describes Vesta’s topography — every lump and bump visible at the resolution obtainable from Dawn’s high-altitude mapping orbit. The link goes to a narrated video; below is an animated GIF version

A Senate panel approved almost $18 billion for NASA.

NASA photographer Bill Ingalls catches key moments in a spaceship landing.

NASA refined its forecast for an old satellite’s death plunge to just three days.

Almost a quarter of Kepler’s new found 1300 exo planets are thought to be Super-Earths. New research by Sergei Nayakshin of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom proposes a new theory for planetary formation known as “tidal downsizing

NASA Solicitation: Small Business Event 0 4th Annual NASA Small Business Symposium and Awards Ceremony

This image is shown in a polar stereographic projection, with the south pole at the center, 0° longitude at the top, and 90° E longitude to the right.

The islands that make up the Italian city of Venice and the surrounding Venetian Lagoon are pictured in this image from the Ikonos-2 satellite.

Observing Saturn through even a small telescope is amazing. The rings are so obvious and clear that sometimes, when I would show people the planet through my own ‘scope, they thought I was faking the view! But it really is that easy to see them. Well, usually. Saturn, like the Earth, is tilted. That is

A new Senate measure would offer $530 million next year for the overbudget JWST.

Forget the twin stars of Tatooine, the best sci-fi precedent for astronomy’s latest discovery is a sinister story called Nightfall Reports of the discovery of Kepler-16b, a planet that inhabits a binary star system, have been quick to compare it with Tatooine in the film Star Wars. Apparently the image of Luke Skywalker contemplating his planet’s double sunset for the last time before escaping to

Black Holes Pictures Gallery – X-Rays Emanate From Heated Material Falling Into Black Hole – Astronomers unveiled the deepest images from NASA‘s new Spitzer Space Telescope today, and announced the detection of distant objects including several supermassive black holes that are nearly invisible in even the deepest images from telescopes operating at other wavelengths. – NASA, ESA, A. M. Koekemoer

There are many things we take for granted here on Earth that take on a whole new aspect when you’re orbiting the Earth in microgravity. One of the most asked questions that NASA receives involves bathroom rituals. Let’s see what a trip to the bathroom in the shuttle entails

Black Holes Pictures Gallery – Giant Disk of Cold Gas and Dust Fuels Possible Black Hole at the Core of NGC 4261 – Astronomers using NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) have gotten their best look yet at the disk of material that surrounds and is being pulled into a suspected black hole. – Walter Jaffe/Leiden Observatory, Holland Ford/JHU/STScI, and NASA

A Soyuz spacecraft carrying two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut departed from the International Space Station tonight and landed safely…

The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact. NASA‘s Kepler mission has made the first unambiguous detection of a circumbinary planet — a

Using the Hubble Space Telescope to probe the distant universe, astronomers have found supermassive black holes growing in surprisingly small galaxies, suggest that central black holes formed at an early stage in galaxy evolution. “It’s kind of a chicken or

Human spaceflight fans have a new computer desktop wallpaper. NASA has officially revealed the design of the much-anticipated Space Launch System, the next “exploration-class” human spaceflight vehicle for missions beyond Earth orbit. Outfitted in a pearly white paint scheme with black pinstripes

Joint USAF/NOAA Report of Solar and Geophysical Activity 15 September 2011

The NASA team, who provided medical, survival and engineering expertise to help the miners trapped underground in Chile last year, received the National Security and International Affairs Medal from the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service

NASA and its international partners have agreed to a tentative launch schedule with crew flights to the International Space Station resuming on Nov. 14.

British business magnate Richard Branson hopes to launch a vessel into space within the next 12 months, kicking off an era of commercial space travel. “The mother ship is finished… The rocket tests are going extremely well, and so I think that we’re now on track for a launch within 12 months of today,” he told CNN’s Piers Morgan late Wednesday. “This could be the beginning of a whole new era of

The Kepler 16 system is just 200 light-years away, in the constellation Cygnus (the Swan).

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk today applauded a Senate committee’s approval of $500 million in NASA funding next year to help develop commercial crew taxis for trips to the International Space Station. “The investments made by this legislation will accelerate efforts to return America to launching astronauts and reduce our dependency on Russia,” Musk said in a statement. “With the failure of the Soyuz

The American astronaut and two cosmonauts will touch down around midnight Eastern time.