Category Archives: news-hub

Rocket Lab to resume Electron launches in August

Rocket Lab has received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to resume launches this month, after identifying an anomalous electrical connection as the cause of an in-flight failure on July 4, 2020. With corrective measures underway, the next Electron launch has been scheduled for August from Launch Complex 1. Over the past month, Rocket Lab has collaborated on an investigation with the support of the FAA, the primary federal licensing body for commercial space launch activity. Rocket Lab’s Accident Investigation Board (AIB) worked through an extensive fault tree analysis to examine all potential causes for the anomaly that took place late into Rocket Lab’s 13th launch.

On July 4, 2020, the Electron launch vehicle successfully lifted-off from Launch Complex 1 and proceeded through a nominal first stage engine burn, Stage 1-2 separation, Stage 2 ignition, and fairing jettison as planned. Several minutes into the second stage burn, the engine performed a safe shutdown resulting in a failure to reach orbit. Due to the controlled way the engine shut down, Rocket Lab continued to receive telemetry from the vehicle, providing engineers with extensive data to conduct a robust investigation into the issue.

Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO stated that the Rocket Lab team is immensely grateful for the continued support of their customers and the FAA as the company worked meticulously through the flight investigation. “It’s a testament to Electron’s track record of reliability that the FAA has approved us for return to flight already. Electron was the 4th most frequently launched rocket in the world last year and prior to the anomaly we had deployed 53 customer payloads to orbit without fail. Returning to the pad with an even more reliable vehicle for our mission partners is our top priority.”

Rocket Lab is now set to return to the pad in August to launch a dedicated mission from Launch Complex 1 Pad A on New Zealand’s Māhia Peninsula. Specific details of the launch window will be provided. Read the full story for details of the investigation.

SpaceX Crew Dragon makes historic 1st splashdown to return NASA astronauts home

SpaceX’s first astronaut mission for NASA is in the books. A Crew Dragon capsule carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley splashed down off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, at 2:48 p.m. EDT (1848 GMT) August 2, bringing an end to SpaceX’s historic Demo-2 mission to the International Space Station. “Welcome back to planet Earth,” SpaceX’s mission control radioed the two astronauts aboard the capsule, which is named Endeavour. “Thanks for flying SpaceX.”

“It was truly our honor and privilege,” Hurley radioed back. Just hours earlier, while still in space, Hurley said the experience is one he won’t soon forget. “It’s hard to put into words just what it was like to be a part of this expedition — Expedition 63,” Hurley said during a farewell ceremony aboard the space station on Saturday (Aug. 1), the day Endeavour undocked and began its journey home. “It’ll be kind of a memory that will last a lifetime for me.”

The SpaceX recovery ship GO Navigator met Endeavour and hoisted the capsule aboard shortly after splashdown. After a series of checkouts, recovery teams opened Endeavour’s hatch at 3:59 p.m. EDT (1959 GMT) and extracted the two astronauts about 10 minutes later. Medical personnel can now begin assessing Behnken and Hurley, making sure the two spaceflyers are in good shape after their journey home from orbit. We haven’t seen such activity at sea for more than four decades. The most recent crewed ocean return occurred in July 1975, when NASA astronauts Tom Stafford, Vance Brand and Deke Slayton wrapped up the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project by splashing down in the middle of the Pacific.

The First UK Mission to the Moon

Learn about Spacebit Mission One: the United Kingdom’s first moon rover launch scheduled for 2021. The rover they are planning to send to the moon will be the world’s first walking rover. Asagumo rover is built on a single-unit CubeSat frame that is usually used for tiny satellites. Moon rover weighs just 1.3 kilogrammes, is solar-powered and instead of wheels or tracks, is equipped with four arachnid-like legs. The mission will be launched by the first ULA Vulcan mission in Q3 2021. The walking rover will be delivered to the Moon by Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander spacecraft. During the first demo mission the walking rover will move 10 meters from the Peregrine lander and send Full HD video plus 3D LIDAR data from its onboard sensors. It will be a flight of firsts — the first mission for both Peregrine and its rocket, United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan Centaur; the first trip to the moon’s surface by a UK-built craft; and the first time a legged robot has explored another world.

Working in partnership with Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall, Spacebit is also building a new ecosystem for ground based elements in space missions, including radio communications, ground networks and eventually components of mission control and they will be utilising Goonhilly’s existing network of over 60 dishes to run our pilot projects.

Thomas Pesquet named as the first ESA astronaut to ride a Dragon to space

ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet has officially been assigned to the second operational flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, launching in spring 2021 from Cape Canaveral, USA, to the International Space Station. Thomas’ second mission to the International Space Station will be called Alpha. This is after Alpha Centauri, the closest stellar system to Earth, following the French tradition to name space missions after stars or constellations.

“I am thrilled to be the first European to fly on the new generation of US crewed spacecraft,” says Thomas. “It will be extra interesting for me to compare with my first flight as a Soyuz pilot, and to bring this experience to the team. The Dragon spacecraft is a modern machine with amazing new capabilities. On the other hand, the Soyuz has an unbelievable track record which enabled us to reach the International Space Station for many years. It is a privilege to fly on both.”

Virgin Galactic unveils sleek interior of SpaceShipTwo spaceliner

We now know what Virgin Galactic’s suborbital spaceliner looks like, inside and out: SpaceShipTwo passengers will ride in style. The company, part of billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, revealed the cabin interior of the six-passenger SpaceShipTwo, which is designed to carry people and payloads to suborbital space and back. “When we created Virgin Galactic, we started with what we believed would be an optimal customer experience and then built the spaceship around it,” Branson said in a statement today. “We will continue with that ethos as we expand our fleet, build our operations and underpin Virgin Galactic’s position as the spaceline for Earth,” he said. “This cabin has been designed specifically to allow thousands of people like you and me to achieve the dream of spaceflight safely — and that is incredibly exciting.”

The six seats can recline, a feature that SpaceShipTwo’s two pilots will manage to minimize g-forces on passengers during the boost and re-entry phases of each suborbital flight. Every seat boasts a screen that will display flight data, and passengers will have personal communications systems that give them access to the pilots, Virgin Galactic representatives said. SpaceShipTwo is hauled aloft by a big plane called WhiteKnightTwo, which drops the spacecraft at an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters). SpaceShipTwo’s onboard rocket motor then kicks on, blasting the vehicle up to suborbital space. Passengers will get to see the curvature of Earth against the blackness of space and experience a few minutes of weightlessness before they come back home for a runway landing. The cabin is designed to accentuate this dramatic and (for most people) once-in-a-lifetime experience, company personnel said.

NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover will use some of the best Martian maps ever made

NASA’s next Mars rover, Perseverance, will explore the Red Planet with the aid of some of the most precise Martian maps ever created. The rover will be able to identify and avoid hazards during its harrowing touchdown. Perseverance, the centrepiece of NASA’s $2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, is scheduled to launch from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Thursday morning (July 30). If all goes according to plan, the car-sized rover will touch down inside Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021. The 28-mile-wide (45 kilometres) Jezero hosted a lake and a river delta in the ancient past, making it an ideal destination for the life-hunting, sample-caching Perseverance. Ideal scientifically, anyway. The crater is covered in rough and rugged terrain, especially in the delta region so enticing to mission researchers, posing a challenge for the engineers tasked with getting the six-wheeled robot down safely.

Mars 2020 will meet that challenge with the help of several new technologies. One of the most important is Terrain-Relative Navigation (TRN), which will allow the mission’s sky-crane descent stage to assess the Jezero landscape for hazards during its landing approach and change course autonomously if need be. That’s where the ground-breaking cartography comes in. Mars 2020 will take advantage of two maps that United States Geological Survey (USGS) researchers created using imagery captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Mars 2020 will snap photos of the Jezero landscape as it descends through the Red Planet sky next February. Its onboard TRN system will then compare this imagery to the precisely aligned maps, in a manner similar to that employed by facial-recognition software. “It can then identify, ‘Are we going to be landing on a red pixel?’ and, if we are, fire its retrorockets and navigate to the closest green pixel possible,” Robin Fergason, a research geophysicist at the USGS’ Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona, told Space.com. “If we didn’t have Terrain-Relative Navigation, the probability of landing safely at Jezero Crater is about 80 to 85%. But with Mars 2020, we can actually bring that probability of success of landing safely at Jezero Crater all the way up to 99% safe every single time,” Mars 2020 guidance and control engineer Swati Mohan, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a 2019 NASA video about TRN. (JPL built Perseverance, developed its TRN system and will manage mission operations on the Red Planet).

NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance launches this week if all goes according to plan

The car-sized Perseverance rover, the centrepiece of NASA’s $2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, is scheduled to launch Thursday (July 30) during a two-hour window that opens at 7:50 a.m. EDT (1150 GMT). The spacecraft will lift off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Mission team members have some wiggle room if technical issues or bad weather scuttle the Thursday attempt. Mars 2020 can still make its way to the Red Planet as long as it launches by Aug. 15, NASA officials have said. After that, the mission would have to wait 26 months, until Mars and Earth are properly aligned again for interplanetary journeys.

Mars 2020 will be the third and final mission to launch toward the Red Planet during this year’s window. The United Arab Emirates’ Hope orbiter and China’s ambitious Tianwen-1 mission launched on July 19 and July 23, respectively. A fourth spacecraft, the European-Russian ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin, was supposed to join the launch party this summer. But that mission suffered technical issues that could not be fixed in time and now must wait until 2022.

Read the full story to see the schedule of daily press conferences and briefings leading up to the launch and find out how you can watch the spaceflight live.

Southern Launch prepares for spaceflight in South Australia

The development of small-satellite technologies (SmallSats) has ushered in an era of dynamic and responsive space systems. Hundreds, and soon thousands, of these small platforms will be launched into Low Earth Orbits (LEO) every year. LEO are ideal for Earth-Observation missions and other near-earth activities, including internet with global coverage. Approximately half of these SmallSats are projected to be launched into polar orbits, with the other half orbiting around the equator. According to recent estimates by an SSTL study, close to 1000 SmallSats will be launched annually from 2025 onwards. These satellites will be inserted into new and existing LEO constellations, offering innovative services to the world, while actively limiting the proliferation of space debris in orbits. SmallSats in LEO remain there for less than 3 years before burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Historically, launch sites have been constructed closer to the equator to support large satellites launches into equatorial orbit. However, direct launch to polar orbit is achieved most efficiently from launch sites nearer the poles, which have minimal interference from aviation and maritime traffic. Southern Launch, founded in 2017, is developing a multi-user launch complex at the tip of the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia, offering a turn-key launch service solution to polar and sun-synchronous orbit. In addition to providing the complete launch infrastructure, Southern Launch has the ability to undertake flight and range safety, vehicle design, and avionics, while assisting with launch permitting and other support services. The year-round temperate weather, coupled with the skilled local workforce and a robust logistics supply network, enables a launch site that offers high-cadence launch operations at cost-competitive prices.

China’s Tianwen-1 Mars rover mission gets a boost from international partners

Following the completion of multiple integrated rehearsals, China is ready for the launch of its first fully homegrown Mars mission. Tianwen-1, which consists of an orbiter, lander and rover, is scheduled to lift off in late July or early August, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA). Speculation is that the launch is targeted for July 23, the opening of the window. Last Friday (July 17), the fourth Long March-5 rocket — coded as Long March-5 Y4 — was vertically transported to the launching area at the Wenchang Space Launch Center in south China’s Hainan Province.

In a recent interview with China Central Television (CCTV), Tianwen-1 deputy director Zhang Yu said that scientists have conducted joint tests on multiple systems of the Mars mission at all levels and are ready for the launch. “We have carried out multiple coordinated manoeuvres over flight and control together with launching site system, the rocket system and the probe system, which have verified the validity of interfaces between different systems and the flight program, and also indicated that we are capable of conducting the first Mars probe of our country,” said Zhang.

China’s Mars mission is ambitious, aiming to pull off orbiting, landing and roving — a historic all-in-one mission. To do so, the country has beefed up its deep-space monitoring network capability to support the Tianwen-1 mission. Once the probe has entered Earth-Mars transfer orbit, the control centre’s two monitoring stations, in Kashgar of north-western Xinjiang’s Uygur Autonomous Region, and Jiamusi, in north-eastern Heilongjiang Province, will swing into action.

China’s bid to explore Mars involves several other nations for tracking, orbital relay of data and science instrument support. The European, French, Argentine and Austrian space agencies are all helping out. At the Long March-5 rollout, the booster’s protective payload fairing was seen to be adorned with European (ESA), French (CNES), Argentine (CONAE) and Austrian (FFG) space agency logos, in addition to that of the CNSA. “Successful space travel often means pooling resources, and at ESA we are happy to support the new Martian mission with our Estrack network of antennas as well as with our Mars Express spacecraft, currently in orbit at the Red Planet,” ESA’s Beatriz Arias told Space.com.

UAE’s Hope mission on its way to Mars

A Japanese rocket launched the United Arab Emirates’ first mission to Mars July 19, an orbiter that will study the planet’s weather while demonstrating the country’s growing space capabilities. The H-2A rocket lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan at 5:58 p.m. Eastern. The launch was originally scheduled for July 14 but delayed five days by poor weather at the launch site. The rocket’s upper stage released the Emirates Mars Mission, or Hope, spacecraft, nearly an hour after lift-off. The spacecraft contracted controllers shortly after separation.

Hope is a 1,350-kilogram satellite developed by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in the UAE. The spacecraft will arrive at Mars in February 2021 and go into an initial elliptical orbit between 1,000 and 49,380 kilometres above the planet. It will later move into its desired orbit for science observations, with altitudes ranging from 20,000 to 43,000 kilometres. Development of Hope started in late 2013 as the next phase in the country’s effort to grow its space capabilities, after development of a series of Earth observation spacecraft. “They wanted us to take it to the next level,” said Omran Sharaf, project manager for Hope. “They wanted us to create a career path for scientists.”

Hope carries three instruments: a camera, infrared spectrometer and ultraviolet spectrometer. The spacecraft will provide data on the Martian atmosphere, including monitoring weather and climate to a greater degree than past Mars orbiter missions by the United States and other nations. “One of the requirements very early on was to send a mission that does more than capture an image declaring that the UAE reached Mars,” said Sarah al-Amiri, UAE minister of state for advanced sciences and deputy project manager for Hope. “We are the very first weather satellite for Mars.”

NASA delays James Webb Space Telescope launch by seven months

NASA recently announced that it is delaying the launch of its largest-ever space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, by seven months to address both technical issues as well as the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Agency officials said in a media teleconference that the launch of JWST is now projected for Oct. 31, 2021. The agency had previously scheduled the launch for the end of March 2021.

Greg Robinson, the program director for JWST at NASA, said that “three-plus” months of the delay is caused by the pandemic, including effects on the program to date as well as declines in efficiency in future activities because of new procedures that slow down the pace of work on the telescope at a Northrop Grumman facility in Southern California. That work briefly halted in March because of the pandemic, then continued at a slower pace for a couple months before the company was able to resume “near-full” shifts. Another two months of the delay is to add schedule reserve to the program. Robinson said that the mission, which had two months of schedule reserve remaining at the beginning of the year, now had three months to comply with agency best practices for program management. “We think we have a robust reserve,” he said. The rest of the delay is to provide additional time for remaining test activities, including acoustics and vibration testing and a deployment test of the spacecraft’s sunshield. That additional time, Robinson said, was based on “learning how to do certain activities” from earlier phases of the program.

Agency officials emphasized in the media call the valuable science that JWST will perform is worth this delay, the latest in a series of delays that pushed back the launch of the space telescope by several years. “We’re opening up an entirely new horizon of discoveries about our universe with the Webb Telescope,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said. “Our important work provides inspiration to everyone.”

Join the National Space Society for ‘A Day in Space,’ a celebration of spaceflight, this week

On July 16, 2020, a unique online presentation from the National Space Society (NSS) will bring the solar system to your doorstep. “A Day in Space” is a day-long virtual forum that promises some truly unique spaceflight and exploration experiences. The presentation will be co-hosted by Geoffrey Notkin, president of the National Space Society and television personality, and Dr Sian Proctor, college professor, geoscientist and NASA astronaut finalist.

In an exclusive interview Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin will take you back into the heady years of the Space Race and plunge you into the future of the exploration of our solar system. Planetary scientist Alan Stern will take you on a journey to Pluto and beyond to tiny Arrokoth (formerly known as Ultima Thule). NASA engineer and NSS Senior Operating Officer Bruce Pittman tells us about the merging of Wernher von Braun and Gerard O’Neill’s visions to form the National Space Society. Billionaire NewSpace financier Steve Jurvetson tells the thrilling tale of investing in SpaceX in some of their darkest moments, supporting disruptive innovation with Planet Labs, and the future of orbital space tourism and investing in the space business. Jet Propulsion Laboratory chief engineer Rob Manning and space author Rod Pyle square off for a smackdown over the character of Mars.

The UAE wants to rewrite what we know about weather on Mars

A nagging problem with planets is that they are just so large: Send a spacecraft to one patch of a planet and inevitably, some of the things you learn will apply only right there. That struggle is particularly difficult when scientists ponder a planet’s atmosphere and weather. By definition, these are global phenomena, and they interact with other global phenomena in intricate ways. That conundrum is why, despite a rich history of spacecraft observations of Mars, scientists are still puzzling over how the planet’s atmosphere really works — from top to bottom, pole to pole, and dawn to dusk and back again.

If all goes well, a mission from a country that’s a newcomer to planetary science will soon begin to gather the data scientists need for a truly global understanding of the Martian atmosphere. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) plans to launch its first interplanetary spacecraft, called the Emirates Mars Mission or Hope, on Tuesday (July 14), with lift-off scheduled for 4:51 p.m. EDT (2051 GMT). Then, the $200 million mission will embark on a seven-month cruise to Mars, slipping into orbit around the Red Planet in early 2021. Hope is scheduled to observe Mars for at least a full Martian year (a bit less than two Earth years) as it works to understand the Martian atmosphere. If the spacecraft successfully arrives — which the team well knows is a difficult proposition — the UAE will become the fifth or sixth entity to orbit Mars, depending on how the mission’s timeline compares with that of China’s Tianwen-1 Mars lander, also launching this summer.

A dozen orbiters have worked at Mars before, and Hope was purposefully designed with an eye to the half-century-long history of spacecraft sent to Mars. Nevertheless, mission personnel wanted to avoid the risk of staying within the limits of what other projects have done. “We always learn from previous missions,” Mariam Al Shamsi, director of the space science department at the UAE’s Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center, which runs the Hope mission, told Space.com. “There is no perfect mission, so every mission that comes up learns from the previous missions.” In the case of Hope, the mission learned particularly from NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter, scientists said. “The science of the mission is very complimentary to other missions that went to Mars,” Hessa Al Matroushi, science data and analysis lead for the mission at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center, told Space.com. “But it complements them, it adds more understanding to the gaps that had been shown.”

NASA astronaut Stephanie Wilson on going to the moon, Mars and leading the next generation

NASA astronaut Stephanie Wilson is ready and excited for the future of space exploration. Earlier this year (before the COVID-19 pandemic) Space.com met up with NASA astronaut Stephanie Wilson, a veteran of three spaceflights who has logged more than 42 days in space, at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Long Island, New York. Wilson, who is one of 17 NASA astronauts eligible to become the first woman to step foot on the moon in 2024 as part of NASA’s Artemis program, shared her thoughts on the future of space exploration and her advice for new explorers dreaming of joining the Artemis generation.

With regard to her lunar prospects, Wilson said, “I am of course excited to be included among the group and look forward to whoever the first woman is and the women who follow as part of the Artemis program to continue our studies of the moon, continue to descend down to the surface in a lander and hopefully to build a lunar base there on the moon and continue our journey from the Gateway orbiting laboratory.” The “Gateway,” Wilson refers to the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a proposed NASA program that would orbit around the moon and allow astronauts to more easily travel back and forth from the lunar surface. She added that the fact that Artemis explicitly includes women is “a wonderful testament to the progress that women have made” in human spaceflight since women were first allowed to apply to the astronaut corps in 1978.