Over 3 tons of food, fuel, water, oxygen and supplies stands ready for a sky high delivery to the International Space Station late tonight. Meanwhile, the three-person Expedition 44 crew is at work on a variety of space science and orbital maintenance as they await the two-day space cargo mission.

Russia’s ISS Progress 60 spacecraft is poised atop its launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome for a 12:55 a.m. EDT launch Friday from Kazakhstan. The resupply ship will arrive Sunday at 3:13 a.m. and dock automatically to the Pirs docking compartment. The space station is currently well-stocked through October and the crew is fine despite the loss of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Sunday morning.

With just two weeks to go before its historic July 14 flight past Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft tapped the accelerator late last night and tweaked its path toward the Pluto system.

The 23-second thruster burst was the third and final planned targeting maneuver of New Horizons’ approach phase to Pluto; it was also the smallest of the nine course corrections since New Horizons launched in January 2006. It bumped the spacecraft’s velocity by just 27 centimeters per second – about  one-half mile per hour – slightly adjusting its arrival time and position at a flyby close-approach target point approximately 7,750 miles (12,500 kilometers) above Pluto’s surface.

[…]

New Horizons is now about 10 million miles (16 million kilometers) from the Pluto system – some 2.95 billion miles (4.75 billion kilometers) from Earth. 

<me> oh, io9 is reporting space garbage re-entered over the southern us last night

<me> wonder what it was from

<me> *checks seesat-l*

From: Ted Molczan via Seesat-l <seesat-l_at_satobs.org>
Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2015 12:00:51 -0400

As Jonathan McDowell reported earlier, the re-entry of 1973-084D / 6939 was seen from the southeastern U.S.A. on 2015 Jun 29 near 05:30 UTC (01:30 EDT). It was the Blok-L stage of the Cosmos 606 launch. Empty mass 1160 kg.

Satevo propagates the final three USSTRATCOM TLEs to decay within several minutes of the reported sighting times. Satevo depends on the ndot/2 decay term, which has been truncated at 1.0 rev/d in those TLEs. I estimated the actual much higher values from the B* decay term.

The American Meteor Society has nearly 130 sighting reports. I have confirmed sightings from at least 8 states: Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, North Carolina, West Virginia

<me> thank fuck for obsessive sky watchers

Astronomers from Leiden University in the Netherlands and the University of Arizona have successfully commissioned a new type of optic that can reveal the image of an exoplanet next to its parent star. The “vector Apodizing Phase Plate,” or vector-APP, coronagraph was installed at the 6.5-m Magellan Clay telescope in Chile in May, and the first observations demonstrated an unprecedented contrast performance very close to the star, where planets are more likely to reside.