The future of space exploration imagined by Robert McCall.
Scientists using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have made the first detections of X-rays from Pluto. These observations offer new insight into the space environment surrounding the largest and best-known object in the solar system’s outermost regions.
While NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft was speeding toward and beyond Pluto, Chandra was aimed several times on the dwarf planet and its moons, gathering data on Pluto that the missions could compare after the flyby. Each time Chandra pointed at Pluto – four times in all, from February 2014 through August 2015 – it detected low-energy X-rays from the small planet.
This page features a tool to find spacecraft trajectories to planets and small-bodies. For ideas of what to search for, view the example queries page. A user guide is also available explaining search constraints, the methodology behind trajectory computations and the important limitations of the tool.
Chinese officials have announced that this morning’s launch of the Tiangong-2 space station was successful. For more on this mission, read Andrew Jones’ coverage:
China will take another step on its long march to a permanent orbital outpost with the launch of the Tiangong-2 orbital module from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. The launch, to be conducted by a Long March 2F – is set to take place at XX:XXUTC from the 921 Launch Pad of the LC43 Launch Complex. The new orbital outpost will enable the crews to remain in orbit for 30-day missions.
The vortex at Saturn’s north pole, observed by the Cassini space probe on December 30, 2013.
Jeff Bezos is not screwing around with his plans to colonize space
Earlier this year, Blue Origin’s founder Jeff Bezos promised to unveil details about his company’s orbital rocket “later this summer,” and on Monday morning he delivered. In an e-mail, Bezos released some preliminary details about the “New Glenn” rocket which will employ seven of the company’s next generation BE-4 rocket engines, making for a powerful rocket indeed. The rocket is named for the first American to reach orbit, John Glenn.
According to Bezos, the two-stage variant of New Glenn will measure 23-feet in diameter and stand 270 feet tall, with a sea-level thrust of 3.85 million pounds. The engines will burn liquefied natural gas and liquefied oxygen. The three-stage variant of New Glenn will be 313 feet tall, with a single BE-3 engine powering its upper stage. “New Glenn is designed to launch commercial satellites and to fly humans into space,” Bezos wrote. “The three-stage variant—with its high specific impulse hydrogen upper stage—is capable of flying demanding beyond-LEO missions.”
Blue Origin, which is in the midst of building launch and production facilities at Cape Canaveral, Florida, plans to fly New Glenn for the first time by the end of this decade, Bezos said. The new rocket and its engines, like the smaller BE-3 and New Shepard Propulsion module upon which it is based, will be reusable. The first stage of the booster is being designed to fly a minimum of 25 missions. This does not seem an idle boast, either, as Blue Origin has already flown and landed a single New Shepard rocket four times.
Asteroid 2016 RB1 has hit the news because of a peculiar close passage on 7 September 2016 at 19:20 CEST. About the size of a cottage, the asteroid flew past our planet at an altitude of 34000 km, roughly the same as the so-called “geostationary ring” where most telecommunication satellites reside. Yet it posed no hazard neither to our planet nor to the satellite operators. Despite having been discovered only 24 hours before closest approach, the orbit became quickly so well constrained to ensure that the computation of the incoming flyby had the necessary accuracy to rule out any Earth impact solution. As a matter of facts already in the morning of 7 September 2016 RB1 was present in our close approaches list but not in the updated Risk List, which ranks the objects for which a non-zero impact probability is detected.
2016 RB1 animation based on images taken at the OASI observatory [Credits: F. Monteiro, H. Medeiros, P. Arcoverde, D. Lazzaro, R.Souza, T. Rodrigues]
Earlier this year, scientists announced the detection of gravitational waves—Einstein’s ripples in spacetime—for the first time on Earth. Those ripples are now reverberating through NASA, nudging the agency to mend fences with the European Space Agency (ESA) and rejoin an ambitious mission, called the Laser Interferometry Space Antenna (LISA), to study gravitational waves from space.
This week, at the 11th LISA symposium in Zürich, Switzerland, a NASA official said he was ready to rejoin the LISA mission, which the agency left in 2011. Meanwhile, ESA says it is trying to move the launch of the mission up several years from 2034. “This is a very important meeting,” says David Shoemaker, a gravitational wave physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “It feels like a turning point.”
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