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SpaceX successfully tests reusable rocket dubbed ‘Grasshopper’ [VIDEO] | Science RecorderSpaceX, the Southern California-based space company, has reportedly successfully tested a reusable rocket that it hopes will reduce the cost of traveling to space.
The company — officially known as Space Exploration Technologies Corporation — released a video Monday showing the test flight of its Grasshopper rocket, which took off and hovered twelve stories off the ground. After launch, it hovers in the air — and lands vertically.
“The 12-story flight marks a significant increase over the height and length of hover of Grasshopper’s previous test flights, which took place earlier this fall. In September, Grasshopper flew to 1.8 meters (6 feet), and in November, it flew to 5.4 meters (17.7 feet/2 stories) including a brief hover,” SpaceX said in statement issued Sunday.
The test was conducted December 17 at SpaceX’s rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas. The company had conducted a number of tests and this was widely seen as its most advanced test to date.
Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of the company, tweeted on Monday, saying the launch was a success.
“To provide a little perspective on the size of Grasshopper, we added a 6ft cowboy to the rocket,” he wrote on Twitter.
SpaceX's Grasshopper takes a 12-story leap towards full and rapid rocket reusability in a test flight conducted December 17, 2012 at SpaceX's rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas. Grasshopper, a vertical takeoff and landing vehicle (VTVL), rose 131 feet (40 meters), hovered and landed safely on the pad using closed loop thrust vector and throttle control. The total test duration was 29 seconds.
Russia completes design for next-gen lunar spacecraft | DVICERussia has been sending Soyuz capsules into space since the late 1960s. As spaceships go, they're simple, cheap, and dead nuts reliable, but the design is old enough that taking a Soyuz capsule much beyond Earth orbit isn't really an option. We've just heard that Russia has finalized the design for a new spacecraft that will be able to take humans all the way to the Moon.
The new capsule is called the "Prospective Piloted Transport System," or PPTS. More officially, it's known as the "New Generation Piloted Transport Ship," or PTK NP, or, if you want to get really fancy about things, the Pilotiruemyi Transportny Korabl Novogo Pokoleniya. The contract to design the PPTS was awarded to RKK Energia (which has been making Soyuz) back in 2009, and it sounds like the PPTS prototype will be ready for its first flight quite soon:
"We have completed the technical design project taking into account the fact that the new spaceship is to fly to the moon, among other places," Energia President Vitaly Lopota said Wednesday. "If we get normal financing, we will start flight tests of the spaceship in 2017."
"The moon among other places" means near-Earth asteroids or perhaps even Mars, suggesting that there will likely be several different versions of the capsule, appropriate for Earth orbit cargo transfer, lunar missions, and beyond. We already know that Russia has plans to send humans to the Moon and Mars between 2020 and 2050, and it's looking like the PPTS is what's going to get them there.
Proving yet again that Star Trek was scarily prescient, NASA has announced that its NEXT ion drive — NASA’s Evolutionary Xenon Thruster — has operated continually for over 43,000 hours (five years). This is an important development, as ion thrusters are pegged as one of the best ways to power long-term deep-space missions to other planets and solar systems. With a proven life time of at least five years, NEXT engines just made a very big step towards powering NASA’s next-gen spacecraft.
Japan's space agency is readying a new asteroid probe for launch, an ambitious mission that aims to build on the victory of the country's first round-trip asteroid mission that sent the Hayabusa spacecraft to retrieve samples of the space rock Itokowa.
The new Japanese asteroid mission, called Hayabusa2, is scheduled for launch in 2014 and aimed at the asteroid 1999 JU3, a large space rock about 3,018 feet (920 meters) in length. It is due to arrive at the asteroid in mid-2018, loiter at the space rock and carry out a slew of challenging firsts before departing the scene at the end of 2019.
If all goes well, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft will return to Earth with samples of asteroid 1999 JU3 at the end of 2020. The probe's name is Japanese for "Falcon2."
Earth microbes can survive on Mars, study finds - SlashGearIn a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences and the University of Florida show that the anaerobic organism Carnobacterium can survive on the Red Planet. This comes after years of belief that any Earth microbes that make their way to Mars via devices sent there, such as the Curiosity rover, won't survive the conditions. In light of this information, scientists have to be more careful than ever to avoid sending microbes to the Martian planet.
Caltech astronomers have estimated that the Milky Way Galaxy contains at least 100 billion planets.
(Phys.org)—Look up at the night sky and you'll see stars, sure. But you're also seeing planets—billions and billions of them. At least.
That's the conclusion of a new study by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) that provides yet more evidence that planetary systems are the cosmic norm. The team made their estimate while analyzing planets orbiting a star called Kepler-32—planets that are representative, they say, of the vast majority in the galaxy and thus serve as a perfect case study for understanding how most planets form.
"There's at least 100 billion planets in the galaxy—just our galaxy," says John Johnson, assistant professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech and coauthor of the study, which was recently accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. "That's mind-boggling."
"It's a staggering number, if you think about it," adds Jonathan Swift, a postdoc at Caltech and lead author of the paper. "Basically there's one of these planets per star."
The planetary system in question, which was detected by the Kepler space telescope, contains five planets. The existence of two of those planets have already been confirmed by other astronomers. The Caltech team confirmed the remaining three, then analyzed the five-planet system and compared it to other systems found by the Kepler mission.
Plan for dragging asteroid into lunar orbit surfaced : Space & The Future : Science World ReportPlans by NASA to utilize a robotic spacecraft to drag a small asteroid to a lunar orbit surfaced today. According to researchers with the Keck Institute for Space Studies in California, such a mission would cost about $2.6 billion and could happen by the 2020s, New Scientist reports.
The plan envisioned by the team from Keck Institute involves a slow-moving spacecraft with an ion-engine, that would catch a rather tiny asteroid the size of a small bus in a bag, and then adjust its trajectory towards a high lunar orbit, a process that could take up to 10 years to complete.
China may be gearing up to perform a controversial anti-satellite test this month, perhaps in the next week or two, some experts say.
For several months, rumors have been circulating within the United States defense and intelligence communities that a Chinese anti-satellite test is imminent, says Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned Scientists. It could even be conducted on Jan. 11, the date on which China performed ASAT operations in both 2007 and 2010.
"Given these high-level administration concerns, and past Chinese practice, there seems to be a strong possibility China will conduct an ASAT test within the next few weeks," Kulacki wrote in a blog post today (Jan. 4). "What kind of test and what the target might be is
Tens of billions of Earthlike worlds are strewn across the Milky Way, many of them circling stars very much like our own sun, astronomers said today.
Earlier research suggested that rocky planets might be much more abundant around small stars than sunlike ones. (Also see "New 'Super Earth' Found at Right Distance for Life.")
But a fresh analysis of data from NASA's Kepler mission, which launched in 2009, suggests this is not the case, according to new research presented at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, California.
"We found that the occurrence of small planets around large stars was underestimated," said astronomer Francois Fressin, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A Starry Night ... Full of Planets
To find planets, Kepler stares at a patch of sky in the constellation Cygnus, made up of about 150,000 stars. The space telescope detects potential alien worlds by watching for telltale dips in starlight created when planets pass in front of, or "transit," their parent stars.
Using their own independent software for analyzing Kepler's potential planet detections, Fressin and his colleagues estimate that about 17 percent, or one in six, of all the sunlike stars in the Milky Way host a rocky planet that orbits closer than the distance at which Mercury orbits our own sun.
Since the Milky Way is home to about a hundred billion stars, that means there are at least 17 billion rocky worlds out there. (See Milky Way pictures.)
When the team expanded their search to Earth-size orbits or larger, they found that half of all sunlike stars may host rocky planets.
"Every time you look up on a starry night, [nearly] each star you're looking at has a planetary system," Fressin said.
.Most of the newest planet candidates are less than twice the size of Earth. Four of these are in "Goldilocks orbits," neither scorchingly close to their host star nor beyond the ice line. And one — evocatively named KOI ("Kepler Object of Interest") 172.02 — orbits in the habitable zone around a Sun-like star every 242 days. This first candidate to satisfy Kepler's goal is 1.5 times Earth's size, with a balmy temperature of 46°F (8°C) — or at least that's the estimate made under certain ideal conditions, such as having the same temperature on its day and night sides.)
Kepler's newest data release also shows an increase in the complexity of these alien arrangements: the spacecraft added 102 new multiples to its previous list of 365, including a trio of five-planet systems. The total tally of Kepler-detected exoplanet candidates now stands at 2,740 planets around 2,036 stars. Follow-up observations with ground-based telescopes haven't kept pace with the spacecraft's rapid-fire discovery rate, but so far 105 candidates stand confirmed as bona fide planets.
Kepler's 461 new candidates come from a much longer list of 13,000 "threshold-crossing events". These TCEs represent the first step in the discovery pipeline, and the vast majority of these won't turn out to be planets, says Christopher Burke (SETI Institute). Nevertheless, Kepler recently released a list of TCEs to the community, in the hope that researchers not on the Kepler team might come up with their own methods of pruning the list. Francois Fressin (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) cautions, "We encourage the community to use these TCEs, but we don't encourage them to make crazy claims!"
Another team looking through Kepler data is Zooniverse's Planet Hunters. This project enlists the aid of citizen volunteers to sort through Kepler's light curves, looking for the characteristic dip that indicates a planet. If enough people observe the same light curve, the team can eliminate false positives — a signal that looks like it's due to a planet, but isn't. So far, the group has found one confirmed planet and 31 planet candidates, 15 of which occupy their star's habitable zone. Even though all of these planets are gas giants, life as we know it could still exist on large moons orbiting one or more of them.
Pruning is an issue for Kepler's planet-candidate list, too; some false positives still slip though. The expectation, Burke says, is a false positive rate between 10% and 20%. But the actual count of impostors depends on the size and orbit of the purported planet — giant planets in close-in, short-period orbits are less likely to be real than small planets in long-period orbits, for example — so getting the pruning right is important for our understanding of the growing exoplanet population.
Fressin and others recently simulated a Kepler-like survey to account for the real survey's shortcomings, such as the planet-search algorithm's inability to distinguish between a planet and a eclipsing binary star in the background. Even with such occasional lapses, Fressin found in his simulation that 90% of Kepler's candidates are genuine planets
(Phys.org)—Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a large asteroid belt around the star Vega, the second brightest star in northern night skies. The scientists used data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, in which NASA plays an important role.
The discovery of an asteroid belt-like band of debris around Vega makes the star similar to another observed star called Fomalhaut. The data are consistent with both stars having inner, warm belts and outer, cool belts separated by a gap. This architecture is similar to the asteroid and Kuiper belts in our own solar system.
What is maintaining the gap between the warm and cool belts around Vega and Fomalhaut? The results strongly suggest the answer is multiple planets. Our solar system's asteroid belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter, is maintained by the gravity of the terrestrial planets and the giant planets, and the outer Kuiper belt is sculpted by the giant planets.
"Our findings echo recent results showing multiple-planet systems are common beyond our sun," said Kate Su, an astronomer at the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Su presented the results Tuesday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, Calif., and is lead author of a paper on the findings accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.
(Phys.org)—Advanced propulsion researchers at NASA are a step closer to solving the challenge of safely sending human explorers to Mars and other solar system destinations.
By using an innovative test facility at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., researchers are able to use non-nuclear materials to simulate nuclear thermal rocket fuels—ones capable of propelling bold new exploration missions to the Red Planet and beyond.
The Nuclear Cryogenic Propulsion Stage team is tackling a three-year project to demonstrate the viability of nuclear propulsion system technologies. A nuclear rocket engine uses a nuclear reactor to heat hydrogen to very high temperatures, which expands through a nozzle to generate thrust. Nuclear rocket engines generate higher thrust and are more than twice as efficient as conventional chemical rocket engines.
The team recently used Marshall's Nuclear Thermal Rocket Element Environmental Simulator, or NTREES, to perform realistic, non-nuclear testing of various materials for nuclear thermal rocket fuel elements. In an actual reactor, the fuel elements would contain uranium, but no radioactive materials are used during the NTREES tests. Among the fuel options are a graphite composite and a "cermet" composite—a blend of ceramics and metals. Both materials were investigated in previous NASA and U.S. Department of Energy research efforts.
California's SpaceX company says it expects to start launching humans into orbit in its Dragon capsule in 2015.
Its intention is to be able to deliver a crew to the International Space Station by the end of that year.
The first flights would carry the company's own test pilots - not US space agency (Nasa) astronauts.
Propellant-free system could accelerate a 1000 kg spacecraft to more than 67,000 miles per hour in one year
The Electronics Research Laboratory at the University of Helsinki has successfully constructed a 1-km-long electric sail (ESAIL), which would interact with the solar wind (charged particles from the sun) to produce long-distance propulsion power for a spacecraft.
Using ultrasonic welding, the feat proves that manufacturing full-size ESAIL tethers is possible. Experts previously considered it impossible to weld together such thin wires.
Invented by Dr. Pekka Janhunen at the Finnish Kumpula Space Centre in 2006, the ESAIL consists of long, thin (25–50 micron) electrically conductive tethers manufactured from aluminum wires. A full-scale sail can include up to 100 tethers, each 20 kilometers long.
Inflatable module approved for ISS, could launch in two years | DVICENASA has just announced a $17.8 million dollar deal with private spaceflight firm Bigelow Aerospace to build and attach an inflatable private module to the International Space Station. The modules, called Bigelow Expandable Activity Modules (BEAM) would be used as a technology demonstration.
In a joint announcement released on Friday, January 11, a NASA official commented:
"This partnership agreement for the use of expandable habitats represents a step forward in cutting-edge technology that can allow humans to thrive in space safely and affordably, and heralds important progress in U.S. commercial space innovation," NASA deputy chief Lori Garver.
The short statement was followed by news that Garver and Bigelow founder and president Robert Bigelow will hold a joint event at Bigelow Aerospace in Las Vegas on January 16 to further discuss the ambitious BEAM project.
Russia's struggling space agency has unveiled a new multi-billion-dollar plan that will see the development of a replacement for the aging Soyuz rocket by 2020.
The $70-billion plan published over the weekend on the website of the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) also envisions the launch of new unmanned missions to the moon and beyond.
But one of the biggest priorities is finding a replacement for the Soyuz -- the backbone of Russian space travel since its development by pioneering Soviet scientists in the 1960s.
NEWS: U.S. Signs New Deal for Soyuz Flights
Both the rocket and its eponymous space capsule for manned missions have served as humans' main link to the International Space Station (ISS) since the scientific orbiter's launch in 1998. But an accident with an unmanned Soyuz cargo ship in August 2011 caused delays to subsequent missions and renewed fears about the safety of space travel.
The Soyuz became the world's only manned link to the ISS following last year's retirement of the US space shuttle program.
Roscosmos did not disclose many details about its post-Soyuz plans or give a specific date by when the vessel might take flight. The agency's outline only called for the introduction of an "energy transportation module with a promising propulsion installation that will be ready for testing by 2018." But Russia will be keen to preserve its status as a vital player in international manned endeavors.
Several private US firms are already working on their own smaller-scale shuttle replacements.
The Russian agency said it also intended to "deploy a program for detailed study of the moon" and launch a series of unmanned missions for studying its soil samples. The plan further called for "the development of an entirely new class of interplanetary travel technology and technology (enabling) human activity on the planets."
Russia plans to double space industry output by 2020 - SlashGearWith the retirement of the US space shuttle fleet the only way American astronauts can get to the ISS is tucked inside Russian Soyuz spacecraft. It seems Russia wants a larger part of the space industry and has announced that it plans to double the output of its space industry by 2020. The plan comes as part of a new state program announced over the weekend.
Russia believes that the increase in output for the space industry would give it a 16% share in the space technology market by 2020. Russia currently has 10.7% of the space technology market according to officials. Part of Russia’s plan is to create a new Angara launch vehicle. Russia also wants to continue development of the Vostochny spaceport in the Russian Far East.
The plan will also see Russia making improvements to its Glonass satellite navigation system. Glonass is the Russian equivalent of GPS satellites used in the US and other countries. The top priority for Russia under the new plan is space industry development with a secondary goal of scientific research. Russia’s third goal with the new program is manned spaceflight.
However, manned spaceflight could move up the hierarchy after 2020 when the International Space Station is expected to end its mission. The new space program will cost Russia $69 billion including private investments, which are virtually nonexistent in Russia’s space program at this time. The Russian government approved the new plan in late December and the plan has only now been published. Reports also indicate that Russia’s plan has a classified section, which was not made public
