Aerospace

The End For Envisat

Shortly after celebrating the tenth anniversary of its time in service, engineers have declared the Envisat satellite lost, following numerous attempts to re-establish contact since April 8th. ...

Article - News Staff - May 10 2012 - 11:30pm

Is That A Dragon In Your Berth Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?

Is it cheaper to privatize deliveries?  Sure is, that is why UPS and FedEx are doing well and the US Post Office is now advertising that companies should send more junk mail and waste natural resources.(1) ...

Article - Hank Campbell - May 25 2012 - 4:18pm

Square Kilometre Array Telescope Makes A Decision, Sort Of

The Square Kilometre Array telescope will be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, but it had a bit of a problem most big science projects do not have; multiple countries wanted to host it. ...

Article - Hank Campbell - May 28 2012 - 11:12am

Basic Orbit Mechanics & Space Debris

Today's primer: orbital mechanics, or how we have to manuever to catch debris.  There's a lot of debris in low earth orbit, ranging from paint chips and spare bolts to a heavy toolbox up through entirely dead satellites.  It's tracked, it� ...

Article - Project Calliope - May 29 2012 - 10:40am

How The Transit Of Venus Still Helps Astronomers Today

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012 at 3:03 PM PDT (California), Venus will do something we on Earth will have witnessed for only the eighth since the invention of the telescope- it will cross in front of the sun. This transit is among the rarest of planetary alignmen ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 3 2012 - 1:01pm

NASA Does It Better

The winner picture of the Venus transit must be the one below, whose original version can be found here. Thanks Bente Lilya Bye for posting the link on her Facebook page! The picture was taken by Hinode, a joint JAXA-NASA mission to study the Sun's ma ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 6 2012 - 5:40pm

KELT North- The Little Telescope That Could

Think it takes James Webb Space Telescope money-pit type funding to do (or someday do) astronomy these days? Not so, some astronomers get it done with a lens equivalent to a digital camera. As the saying goes, it's not the size of your aperture, it� ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 13 2012 - 5:31pm

Rockets, Asteroids, Gold Rushes And... Conferences?

A Mojave rocket company, an asteroid hunter, and a web pundit walk into a conference.  The badge person says, "what is this some kind of joke?" Okay, we gotta get to space somehow.  Here's what's new in the private space race industry.  ...

Article - Project Calliope - Jun 15 2012 - 11:34am

Voyager Chases The Final Frontier A Little Farther

NASA's Voyager 1, launched in 1977, was propelled into deep space with the help of Jupiter's and Saturn's gravity. Now it is about to leave the solar system. But exactly when is unclear. Voyager 1 is traveling at a speed of about 3.6 Astrono ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 22 2012 - 11:30am

Derating Off-the-shelf Parts So They Work

If you use off-the-shelf electronics parts instead of expensive, hard-to-find space-rated gear, will your satellite work?  The process of 'derating' will let you do this.  Engineer Amanda Shields contributes today's guest column. I'm b ...

Article - Project Calliope - Jul 3 2012 - 1:31pm