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  1. #201
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    Absolutely amazing!

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    Quote Originally Posted by ENT View Post
    Absolutely amazing!
    I think you mean Cassini. Yes that spacecraft and its scientific results are outstanding.

    NASAs manned performance was not that successful. But their robotic space probes from Voyager to Cassini to the Mars rovers are unrivaled.

    I am curious what comes out of this discovery in the rings. Hopefully Cassini has still some years of operation. It has long passed its intendet life time and the mission keeps getting extended. There is still fuel available for necessary corrections.
    "don't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence"

  3. #203
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    The SpaceX launch I mentioned a few days ago was slightly delayed but yesterday it took off.



    The first stage successfully reentered and landed softly in the ocean as planned. However as there were 20ft waves at the location likely it was destroyed shortly afterwards. Stages are not built to withstand waves of that kind. Even the salvage ship was not able to be in the planned location under these conditions.

    It is still a huge success to bring it down softly. With a few more flights hopefully they will get permission to touch down on land. They hope to land stages this year and to refly stages next year.

  4. #204
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    Here is a gif of the launch. A lot of dirt because of the bad weather that day. At first glance many though this is a catstrophic launch failure.


  5. #205
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    What are they messing about with V2-sized rockets again? They once built the Saturn5 and the Russians the Energia. What are the little rockets supposed to transport to outer space, a cigarette-pack sized payload? The SpaceX rockets are supposed to be reusable. Can't do this now with the thing at the bottom of the ocean, can they? Fail. It appears this commercialization of space travel achieves nothing, but costs more than the NASA before. What it's designed to do.
    Boon Mee: 'Israel is the 51st State. De facto - but none the less, essentially part & parcel of the USA.'

  6. #206
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    Nasa's robotic moon explorer, Ladee, is no more.

    Flight controllers confirmed Friday that the orbiting spacecraft crashed into the back side of the moon as planned, just three days after surviving a full lunar eclipse, something it was never designed to do.

    Researchers believe Ladee likely vaporized when it hit because of its extreme orbiting speed of 3,600 mph, possibly smacking into a mountain or side of a crater. No debris would have been left behind.

    "It's bound to make a dent," project scientist Rick Elphic predicted Thursday.

    By Thursday evening, the spacecraft had been skimming the lunar surface at an incredibly low altitude of 300ft. Its orbit had been lowered on purpose last week to ensure a crash by Monday following an extraordinarily successful science mission.

    Ladee, short for Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, was launched in September from Virginia. From the outset, Nasa planned to crash the spacecraft into the back side of the moon, far from the Apollo artifacts left behind during the moonwalking days of 1969 to 1972.

    It completed its primary 100-day science mission last month and was on overtime. The extension had Ladee flying during Tuesday morning's lunar eclipse; its instruments were not designed to endure such prolonged darkness and cold.

    But the small spacecraft survived – it's about the size of a vending machine – with just a couple pressure sensors acting up.

    The mood in the control center at Nasa's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, was upbeat late Thursday afternoon, according to project manager Butler Hine.

    "Having flown through the eclipse and survived, the team is actually feeling very good," Hine told the Associated Press in a phone interview. But the uncertainty of the timing of Ladee's demise had the flight controllers "on edge", he said.

    As it turns out, Ladee succumbed within several hours of Hine's comments. Nasa announced its end early Friday morning.

    It will be at least a day or two before Nasa knows precisely where the spacecraft ended up; the data cutoff indicates it smashed into the far side of the moon, although just barely.

    Ladee did not have enough fuel to remain in lunar orbit much beyond the end of its mission. It joined dozens if not scores of science satellites and Apollo program spacecraft parts that have slammed into the moon's surface, on purpose, over the decades, officials said. Until Ladee, the most recent man-made impacts were the LCross crater-observing satellite that went down in 2009 and the twin Grail spacecraft in 2012.

    During its $280 million mission, Ladee identified various components of the thin lunar atmosphere – neon, magnesium and titanium, among others – and studied the dusty veil surrounding the moon, created by all the surface particles kicked up by impacting micrometeorites.

    "Ladee's science cup really overfloweth," Elphic said earlier this month. "Ladee, by going to the moon, has actually allowed us to visit other worlds with similar tenuous atmospheres and dusty environments."

  7. #207
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    Quote Originally Posted by Rainfall View Post
    What are they messing about with V2-sized rockets again? They once built the Saturn5 and the Russians the Energia. What are the little rockets supposed to transport to outer space, a cigarette-pack sized payload? The SpaceX rockets are supposed to be reusable. Can't do this now with the thing at the bottom of the ocean, can they? Fail. It appears this commercialization of space travel achieves nothing, but costs more than the NASA before. What it's designed to do.
    What a surprise. Wrong on all accounts.

    This rocket as it is can lift 13 tons to LEO. At a price that got both the Chinese and the Russians declare they can't compete. About a third of what present NASA used launch vehicles cost.

    The Dragon spaceship launched yesterday has capabilities lost since the end of the SpaceShuttle. Not matched by the only manned vehicle flying to the ISS, the Sojus. It is not yet ready to fly people but will soon.

    They are the only ones working on reusability and they are almost there, at least for the first stage. Second stage would be next but a small company with very limited resources can do only so much at a time.

    Next year they expect to launch a new vehicle that will be smaller than Saturn V and Energiya but the largest present launch vehicle at cost per kg the lowest ever. Energiya was cancelled after two flights because it was too expensive.

    They are also in the early stages of developing a new launch vehicle that will exceed the capabilities of both Saturn V and Energiya. That development is being done without any government money on their own expense.

  8. #208
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    I wouldn't be so optimistic, since there is no example in the unhappy history of capitalism that privatization made a product or service formerly run by the government cheaper. It's always the promise of course, otherwise people wouldn't buy it. Couple of years later, they don't remember.

    There seem to be more issues, why couldn't the NASA make those SpaceX vehicles? How could a private corporation starting from scratch compete against the might and experience of the NASA? Free technology transfer, sort of a subsidy? What about security? If that's a private corporation, it might relocate next year to Russia. If it can't it's pseudo private, favourism and corruption to make a billionaire owner and millionaire executives richer. If they really will outcompete foreign launch systems and attract a lot of customers from them, why could not the NASA and behind it the American government take advantage from it?

  9. #209
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    Quote Originally Posted by Rainfall View Post
    I wouldn't be so optimistic, since there is no example in the unhappy history of capitalism that privatization made a product or service formerly run by the government cheaper. It's always the promise of course, otherwise people wouldn't buy it. Couple of years later, they don't remember.

    There seem to be more issues, why couldn't the NASA make those SpaceX vehicles? How could a private corporation starting from scratch compete against the might and experience of the NASA? Free technology transfer, sort of a subsidy? What about security? If that's a private corporation, it might relocate next year to Russia. If it can't it's pseudo private, favourism and corruption to make a billionaire owner and millionaire executives richer. If they really will outcompete foreign launch systems and attract a lot of customers from them, why could not the NASA and behind it the American government take advantage from it?
    They did get financing for their development. They also got some technical support. But there isn't a single rocket in the world that was not developed with government support. The support for SpaceX was the lowest ever.
    They did get already many orders from private satellite operators. Ariane, the Russians and probably the Chinese are losing launches to them and those losses will only increase.

    It's hard to believe, I know. But Elon Musk is not in it for the money. Or he is because he needs money to support his goals. That is building the largest and by far cheapest launch vehicle ever. He is certifiably crazy, he wants to go to Mars and because no one else is doing it he decided to do it himself. As his fortune is nowhere near enough to do it he needs to bring the cost down first. By a lot. Ten times cheaper than his presently cheapest rockets is the bare minimum to achieve that. He may fail but he has a shot. If he only would get 15% of what the large manufacturers like Boeing, Lockheed Martin and ATK get in subsidies, success would be almost sure. And those with all that government money build rockets too expensive to compete on the world market. They get only launches by NASA and the military because they are obliged by law to buy american rockets. But they too start losing contracts to SpaceX despite massive lobbying and influence they have in Congress.

  10. #210
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    A fascinating story about some enthusiasts who saved (and enhanced) thousands of early lunar photos. A chemical substitute for Whale Oil, who'd have thought you'd have needed that!





    Sitting incongruously among the hangars and laboratories of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley is the squat facade of an old McDonald’s. You won’t get a burger there, though–its cash registers and soft-serve machines have given way to old tape drives and modern computers run by a rogue team of hacker engineers who’ve rechristened the place McMoon’s. These self-described techno-archaeologists have been on a mission to recover and digitize forgotten photos taken in the ‘60s by a quintet of scuttled lunar satellites.

    The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has since 2007 brought some 2,000 pictures back from 1,500 analog data tapes. They contain the first high-resolution photographs ever taken from behind the lunar horizon, including the first photo of an earthrise (first slide above). Thanks to the technical savvy and DIY engineering of the team at LOIRP, it’s being seen at a higher resolution than was ever previously possible.

    “We’re reaching back to a capability that existed but couldn’t be touched back when it was created,” says Keith Cowing, co-lead and founding member at LOIRP. “It’s like having a DVD in 1966, you can’t play it. We had resolution of the earth of about a kilometer [per pixel]. This is an image taken a quarter of a fucking million miles away in 1966. The Beatles were warming up to play Shea Stadium at the moment it was being taken.”

    Between 1966 and ’67, five Lunar Orbiters snapped pictures onto 70mm film from about 30 miles above the moon. The satellites were sent mainly to scout potential landing sites for manned moon missions. Each satellite would point its dual lens Kodak camera at a target, snap a picture, then develop the photograph. High- and low-resolution photos were then scanned into strips called framelets using something akin to an old fax machine reader.

    The images were beamed in modulated signals to one of three receiving stations in Australia, Spain, or California, where the pictures–and collateral chatter from the NASA operators–were recorded straight to tape. After finishing their missions, the satellites were unceremoniously dashed against the moon rocks, clearing the way for Apollo. The brilliant and ballsy engineering was typical of NASA during its golden age, a time when it was also more closely linked to other government agencies with an interest in taking pictures from space.

    “These guys were operating right at the edge,” Cowing says with a reverence for these NASA engineers that’s shared by his team. “There’s a certain spy program heritage to all this, but these guys went above that, because those spy satellites would send their images back. These didn’t. They couldn’t. They were in lunar orbit.”

    The photos were stored with remarkably high fidelity on the tapes, but at the time had to be copied from projection screens onto paper, sometimes at sizes so large that warehouses and even old churches were rented out to hang them up. The results were pretty grainy, but clear enough to identify landing sites and potential hazards. After the low-fi printing, the tapes were shoved into boxes and forgotten.

    They changed hands several times over the years, almost getting tossed out before landing in storage in Moorpark, California. Several abortive attempts were made to recover data from the tapes, which were well kept, but it wasn’t until 2005 that NASA engineer Keith Cowing and space entrepreneur Dennis Wingo were able to bring the materials and the technical know how together.

    When they learned through a Usenet group that former NASA employee Nancy Evans might have both the tapes and the super-rare Ampex FR-900 drives needed to read them, they jumped into action. They drove to Los Angeles, where the refrigerator-sized drives were being stored in a backyard shed surrounded by chickens. At the same time, they retrieved the tapes from a storage unit in nearby Moorpark, and things gradually began to take shape. Funding the project out of pocket at first, they were consumed with figuring out how to release the images trapped in the tapes.

    “We’re both Apollo babies, so the moon to us was something that’s unfinished business,” says Cowing. “These tapes were sealed for history by somebody who cared, and it was astonishing the condition they were in. So we started buying used parts on eBay, Radioshack–I was sitting at a black tie reception at one point buying something on my iPhone. We just buy and reassemble these things bit by bit.”

    The drives had to be rebuilt and in some cases completely re-engineered using instruction manuals or the advice of people who used to service them. The data they recovered then had to be demodulated and digitized, which added more layers of technical difficulties.

    The resulting framelets had to be individually reassembled in Photoshop. After kluging through countless engineering problems (try finding a chemical substitute for whale oil to lubricate tape heads), the LOIRP team was able to single out and reproduce the famous earthrise image. This proof of concept brought the first NASA funding in 2008, and the team recently completed processing the entire tape collection.

    “We’re the first people out of a generation or more to see this,” says Cowing. “No human eye had ever seen this. All they saw was something that had already been through one generation of copying. We’re seeing something one order of magnitude more precise right on the screen.”

    Since the ’60s, a series of Earth and Moon imaging satellites have launched, including the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2009. Despite the advances in computing power and optics, Cowing says the terabytes of images recovered at LOIRP are often even more detailed than those taken by LRO, capable of being blown up to billboard size without losing resolution.

    “A lot of the images they’re taking today, our imagery from 1966 and ‘67 has sometimes greater resolution and greater dynamic range because of the way the pictures were taken. So sometimes you look into a shadow in a picture that LRO’s taken, and you don’t see any detail–with ours, you do.”

    Officially named Building 596, McMoon’s flies a flag bearing the distinct Skunkworks skull and crossbones, signaling the team’s hacker ethic. The seven or so people tinkering away inside maintain an open-source mentality about their work, making all images and their technological discoveries free to the public. They also have plans for a decommissioned Titan ICBM that’s sitting outside (for students, of course).

    McMoon’s has grown into a highly specialized operation, stuffed with a melange of old and new technology now put to use in decoding various NASA and Library of Congress tapes that no one knows what to do with. With a built-in ability to handle hazardous chemicals, the old McDonald’s made practical sense, but it also gave them a layer of distance to carry out their weird work.

    “I had a choice between the barbershop and this building–we didn’t really care what sort of building they gave us, we just didn’t want to pay for it,” Cowing says. “The surplus folks at NASA Ames where all the old computers and stuff go, they love us because we come over and make all the old stuff work. The safety guys come by and we usually either make them our friends or bark at them and they don’t come back.”

    The images gathered at LOIRP have been coerced into providing even more information than they were intended to. Their data have been used to correct figures from the time about Earth’s arctic ice levels, and have helped identify an El Nińo-type event in the ’60s. All the images and the information gathered from them are being fed into the Planetary Data System, an official repository where mission data from LRO, Mars Observer, Climate Orbiter, and many others are documented.

    Started by the same Nancy Evans that provided the tape drives, the Planetary Data System didn’t exist when the Lunar Orbiter pictures were initially taken. The images and information that LOIRP has recovered will be submitted as the official record of the original sattelite mission. It’s a testament to the lasting work of the engineers who designed the orbiter missions, and the tenacity of the modern techno archaeologists who are bringing that work to full fruition.

    “Back then things were designed, even if they failed, to still do something. Today, most jet fighters would fall out of the sky if they didn’t have computers adjusting their surfaces and their pattern thousands of times a second. Back then they just had to engineer stuff elegantly so that it worked,” he says. “We feel that we’re completing the Lunar Orbiter 1 through 5 missions. They never formally submitted their stuff for the archives so we’re doing it.”

    All photos courtesy of LOIRP

  11. #211
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    Space rocket debris found floating in Amazon

    A BRAZILIAN fisherman has reeled in the most unusual catch of his career, snagging a section of a space rocket.
    The panel measuring larger than a car was found floating in a remote river in the municipality of Salinopolis by 73-year-old local Manuel Alves Dos Santos.
    But the find was so bizarre authorities didn’t believe him.





    The fishy catch was no UFO; in a report by the BBC the panel has been identified as debris from a European communications satellite launched in French Guiana.
    It has been easy to track down its owner, UK Space Agency, as it their name and logo are plastered over it.



    Julia Short, a spokesperson for the UK Space Agency told the BBC:
    “It is the launch vehicle payload shroud from the Alphasat launch last year. It probably landed in the Atlantic and then floated inland.”



    The Alphasat took off for space on July 25 and is described as Europe’s most sophisticated satellite. According to the report it took more than 10 people to retrieve the panel from the river.
    Authorities finally responded to the find to recover the object and have contacted the UK to let them know they can come collect their space litter.

    Space rocket debris found floating in Amazon | News.com.au

  12. #212
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    Seems we had a lucky escape....

    Astronomers spot bus-sized asteroid hurtling past Earth 0
    BY DESCRIER STAFF ON MAY 5, 2014 SCIENCE
    Nasa astronomers spotted a double-decker bus-sized asteroid just in time to see it speed past Earth, passing closer than the moon.

    Over the weekend, the seven-metre wide HL129 asteroid came within 186,000 miles of Earth, 50,000 miles closer than the moon’s orbit.

    The asteroid was first discovered on Wednesday by scientists from Nasa’s Asteroid Watch project in California, and is the most recent asteroid seen coming within a close proximity to Earth after DX110 in March.

    A video of the asteroid’s orbit has been produced by Space.com:


    Astronomers spot bus-sized asteroid hurtling past Earth | Descrier News

  13. #213
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    Quote Originally Posted by harrybarracuda
    Seems we had a lucky escape....
    They "missed the bus" on that one...

    Rat-at-at...Ching...

  14. #214
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    4 days notice. How much are US tax payers spending for this?

  15. #215
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    Quote Originally Posted by kingwilly View Post
    4 days notice. How much are US tax payers spending for this?

    Virtually nothing.
    I think current funding allows for coverage of about 3% of the sky.

  16. #216
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    Not really space NEWS but very exciting for me.

    Through a german space forum meeting I was able to get a tour through the DLR Lampoldshausen facility.

    There is a production facility where they produce components for satellites including small to very small thruster engines that stabilize satellites while in space. The smallest I have seen had an engine bell smaller than a thimble. We were able to have a view into the workshops. No photos allowed though.

    They have also test stands for the largest european engines including the vulcain engine that launches the european Ariane V launchvehicle. Attached a video of the facility showing the control center of that teststand. I was in there for a good view and was also standing right at the position where the engine would fire when ready for a test as you can see in that video.

    The video is in german but still worth a look.


  17. #217
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    Found a photo of one of those tiny engines I mentiond produced in Lampoldshausen.



    This is a bigger one of the series of small engines. It produces 10 Newton thrust, app. 1kg for those not too familiar with the standard Newton for force.

  18. #218
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    Wolf-Rayet Star Linked to Supernova SN 2013cu

    A group of astronomers led by Dr Avishay Gal-Yam from Weizmann Institute of Science has identified a mysterious Wolf-Rayet star as the likely progenitor of SN 2013cu, a Type IIb supernova recently discovered in a distant galaxy known as UGC 9379.



    This image from the 1.5-m robotic telescope at Palomar Observatory shows SN 2013cu in the galaxy UGC 9379. Image credit: Avishay Gal-Yam et al.

    Wolf-Rayet stars are more than 20 times as massive as our Sun and at least 5 times as hot. Because they are relatively rare and often obscured, astronomers don’t know much about how they form, live and explode.

    These stars are notable for having strong stellar winds and being deficient in hydrogen when compared with other stars. Taken together, these two factors give Wolf-Rayet stars easily recognizable stellar signatures.

    Astronomers have long wondered whether Wolf-Rayet stars are the progenitors of certain types of stellar explosions – type IIb, Ib or Ic supernovae.

    Yet, direct evidence linking such supernovae to their progenitor stars has been missing.

    Now, Dr Gal-Yam’s team applied a new technique called flash spectroscopy to identify the likely Wolf-Rayet progenitor of the Type IIb supernova SN 2013cu just over few hours after it exploded.

    “Newly developed observational capabilities now enable us to study exploding stars in ways we could only dream of before. We are moving towards real-time studies of supernovae,” said Dr Gal-Yam, who is the first author of a paper published in the journal Nature .

    When SN 2013cu exploded in the galaxy UGC 9379 (located in the Bootes constellation, about 360 million light years away), its flash ionized its immediate surroundings, giving the astronomers a direct glimpse of the progenitor star’s chemistry.

    This opportunity lasts only for a day before the supernova blast wave sweeps the ionization away. So it’s crucial to rapidly respond to a young supernova discovery to get the flash spectrum in the nick of time.

    The astronomers triggered ground- and space-based telescopes to observe the event about 5.7 hours and 15 hours after it self-destructed.

    The observations found evidence of composition and shape that aligns with that of a Nitrogen-rich Wolf-Rayet star. What’s more, the progenitor star likely experienced an increased loss of mass shortly before the explosion, which is consistent with model predictions for Wolf-Rayet explosions. These techniques shed fresh light on the poorly understood evolution of massive stars.

    “This discovery was totally shocking, it opens up a whole new research area for us. With our largest telescopes you might have a chance of getting a spectrum of a Wolf-Rayet star in the nearest galaxies to our Milky Way, perhaps 4 million light years away. SN 2013cu is 360 million light years away – further by almost factor of 100,” said study co-author Prof Peter Nugent of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

    “When a Wolf-Rayet star goes supernova, the explosion typically overtakes the stellar wind and all information about the progenitor star is gone. We got lucky with SN 2013cu – we caught the supernova before it overtook the wind. Shortly after the star exploded, it let out an ultraviolet flash from the shock wave that heated and lit up the wind. The conditions that we observed in this moment were very similar to what was there before the supernova.”

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    Yesterday SpaceX announced their new manned spacecraft the Dragon 2. It is supposed to fly astronauts to the ISS in 2017 as requested by NASA. But SpaceX is quite confident they can do it by 2016.

    I am quite sure if NASA requests it and increases the payments they can do it in early 2016, maybe even 2015.

    This spacecraft looks hot, like designed by an italian designer for some SF series.





    For the demo yesterday those seats were actually genuine leather. Not sure the seats will be the same when it flies to the ISS. The capsule displayed was real flight hardware, not some mockup. The walls are blank metal, no covers yet. It will look very different inside when finished.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf_-g3UWQ04

    Look at the powered landing. Dragon 2 will do that soon. Though maybe not on the first manned flight. It is capable of landing under parachutes in the ocean or on land too. But an extensive test program for powered land landing is already proposed and permission to do those flights by the FAA is already given. Those will be helicopter drops and ascend and descend of the vehicle under its own power.

    Spaceflight Now | Breaking News | SpaceX reveals new-look passenger spacecraft

    .

    BTW the main engines used for landing are 3D-printed.
    Last edited by Takeovers; 30-05-2014 at 11:40 PM.

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    Citizen astronomers and engineers get control of an old satellite from 1978

    Posted on May 29, 2014 by Anthony Watts
    Success! We Are Now In Command of the ISEE-3 Spacecraft
    Thanks to the many WUWT readers that contributed to make this a success! These guys didn’t disappoint. They pulled it off against the odds. Congratulations to them. There’s a great backstory coming related to the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” that I’ll share as soon as I get clearance. – Anthony
    The ISEE-3 Reboot Project is pleased to announce that our team has established two-way communication with the ISEE-3 spacecraft and has begun commanding it to perform specific functions. Over the coming days and weeks our team will make an assessment of the spacecraft’s overall health and refine the techniques required to fire its engines and bring it back to an orbit near Earth.
    First Contact with ISEE-3 was achieved at the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico. We would not have been able to achieve this effort without the gracious assistance provided by the entire staff at Arecibo. In addition to the staff at Arecibo, our team included simultaneous listening and analysis support by AMSAT-DL at the Bochum Observatory in Germany, the Space Science Center at Morehead State University in Kentucky, and the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array in California.
    Of course this effort would not have been possible without the assistance of NASA and the Space Act Agreement crafted by NASA Headquarters, NASA Ames Research center, and the System Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI).
    For further information on the ISEE-3 Reboot Project please visit our website at Space College: ISEE-3 Archives A much more detailed description of our First Contact efforts and future plans will be published on our website next week.


    Citizen astronomers and engineers get control of an old satellite from 1978 | Watts Up With That?

  21. #221
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    That's what I call recycling!

    Description

    Our plan is simple: we intend to contact the ISEE-3 (International Sun-Earth Explorer) spacecraft, command it to fire its engines and enter an orbit near Earth, and then resume its original mission - a mission it began in 1978. ISEE-3 was rechristened as the International Comet Explorer (ICE). If we are successful it may also still be able to chase yet another comet.

    Working in collaboration with NASA we have assembled a team of engineers, programmers, and scientists - and have a large radio telescope fully capable of contacting ISEE-3. If we are successful we intend to facilitate the sharing and interpretation of all of the new data ISEE-3 sends back via crowd sourcing.

    NASA has told us officially that there is no funding available to support an ISEE-3 effort - nor is this work a formal priority for the agency right now. But NASA does feel that the data that ISEE-3 could generate would have real value and that a crowd funded effort such as ours has real value as an education and public outreach activity.

    Time is short. And this project is not without significant risks. We need your financial help. ISEE-3 must be contacted in the next month or so and it must complete its orbit change maneuvers no later than mid-June 2014. There is excitement ahead as well: part of the maneuvers will include a flyby of the Moon at an altitude of less than 50 km.

    Our team members at Morehead State University, working with AMSAT-DL in Germany, have already detected the carrier signals from both of ISEE-3's transmitters. When the time comes, we will be using the large dish at Morehead State University to contact the spacecraft and give it commands.

    In order to interact with the spacecraft we will need to locate the original commands and then develop a software recreation of the original hardware that was used to communicate with the spacecraft. These are our two greatest challenges.

    The funding we seek will be used for things we have not already obtained from volunteers. We need to initiate a crash course effort to use 'software radio' to recreate virtual versions all of the original communications hardware that no longer physically exists. We also need to cover overhead involved in operating a large dish antenna, locating and analyzing old documentation, and possibly some travel.

    This activity will be led by the same team that has successfully accomplished the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) SkyCorp and SpaceRef Interactive. Education and public outreach will be coordinated by the newly-formed non-profit organization Space College Foundation.

    Our trajectory efforts will be coordinated by trajectory maestro Robert Farquhar and his team at KinetX. We are also working in collaboration with the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center, and the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) at NASA Ames Research Center.
    ISEE-3 Reboot Project by Space College, Skycorp, and SpaceRef | RocketHub

  22. #222
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    Nice thread, but how do I give greens for it?

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    Impossible engine works.!

    A few years ago some Chinese scientists built an engine for space called an EmDrive which just about everyone thought was a fake or a hoax.
    Now NASA says it has also built an EmDrive that works, but they don't know exactly how it works.
    This could be the future of spaceflight and how we can propel our Borg selves to infect the far flung reaches of the Universe.


    Until yesterday, everyone in the international community was laughing at this engine and its inventor, Roger Sawyer. It's called the EmDrive and everyone said it was impossible because it goes against classical mechanics. But the fact is that the quantum vacuum plasma thruster works and scientists can't explain why.

    Sawyer's engine is extremely light and simple. It provides a thrust by "bouncing microwaves around in a closed container." The microwaves are generated using electricity that can be provided by solar energy. No propellant is necessary, which means that this thrusters can work forever unless a hardware failure occurs. If real, this would be a major breakthrough in space propulsion technology.

    NASA: New "Impossible" Engine Works, Could Change Space Travel Forever | Gizmodo UK
    Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!"

  24. #224
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    Quote Originally Posted by Neo
    But the fact is that the quantum vacuum plasma thruster works and scientists can't explain why.
    I edited the beginning of my post. It was really not my intention to critisize Neo's post, it is a good one.

    A group of scientists has made an experiment that seems to indicate it works. An exciting development for sure, worthy of follow up verification by another group of scientists. But there are plenty of potential flaws in the experiment.

    One being that they measure a force by the thruster but they should really measure the combined set of thruster and the accompanying power supply. Not unlikely it is a completely different effect with equal but opposing forces on drive and power supply.

    Another possibility is a simple observation error as the forces measured are reallly, really minute.

    Also it is not really like scientists have no idea how it works. Speculation on vacuum quantum fluctuation is quite old. Quantum physics is really weird but also really true. For example Solid State electronics prove they exist.

    For a first glimpse on quantum physics read about Schroedinger's cat. Worth to google for it. But of course most of you are aware of Schroedinger's cat already.

    The theory of vacuum quantum fluctuation is not new btw. A quantum fluctuation drive is used in a spaceship in the masterpiece novel The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarce, published 1986. One of my very favorite authors from my youth though this novel was written later and I read it only recently.
    Last edited by Takeovers; 03-08-2014 at 02:03 PM.

  25. #225
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    Comet-chaser nears duck-shaped prey


    AFTER a decade-long quest spanning six billion kilometres, a European probe is about to come face to face with a comet.

    The moment on Wednesday will mark a key phase of the most ambitious project ever undertaken by the European Space Agency (ESA) — a 1.3 billion euro ($1.95 billion) bid to get to know one of the Solar System’s enigmatic wanderers.
    More than 400 million km from its March 2004 launch site, the spacecraft Rosetta will meet its prey, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (C-G).
    To get there, Rosetta has had to make four fly-bys of Mars and Earth, using their gravitational force as a slingshot to build speed, and then enter a 31-month hibernation as light from the distant Sun became too weak to power its solar panels.
    It was awakened in January.
    The three-tonne craft should on Wednesday be about 100km from the comet.
    “It’s taken more than 10 years to get here,” spacecraft operations manager Sylvain Lodiot said.
    “Now we have to learn how to dock with the comet, and stay with it for the months ahead.” Astrophysicists believe comets are clusters of the oldest dust and ice in the Solar System, the rubble left from the formation of the planets 4.6 billion years ago.
    These so-called dirty snowballs could be the key to understanding how the planets coalesced after the Sun flared into life.
    One theory, the pan-spermia hypothesis, is that by bombarding the fledgling Earth with water and organic molecules comets helped kickstart life.




    Comet-chaser nears duck-shaped prey | News.com.au

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