The Space Report

Space News, updated every weekday

Space News From SpaceDaily.Com

LockMart Awarded Concept Development Contract For USAF Space Fence

Moorestown NJ (SPX) Jul 03, 2009 - The U.S. Air Force has awarded Lockheed Martin a $30 million contract to begin concept development for Space Fence, a system of land-based S-Band radars and supporting operations centers that will detect and report on objects and debris orbiting the Earth. Lockheed Martin was one of three industry teams to receive contracts.

Indonesia launches rocket into space

Jakarta (AFP) July 2, 2009 - Indonesia successfully launched a home-grown rocket into space on Thursday as part of plans to send a satellite into orbit by 2014, officials said.

Interview With ISRO's Madhavan Nair

New Delhi, India (PTI) Jul 03, 2009 - How do you assess cooperation of India and Russia in space?
ISRO has had a long standing and successful co-operation with the erstwhile USSR in Space with the active participation of USSR in setting up the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) in early Sixties, Joint meteorological studies using more than 1000 meteorological sounding rockets launched from Thumba supplied from USSR and launching for India's Aryabhata, Bhaskara-I and 2 and for IRS-1A, 1B and IRS-1C in addition to the Tracking support for several Indian satellites.

XMM-Newton Discovers A New Class Of Black Holes

Paris, France (ESA) Jul 03, 2009 - Astronomers using ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory have discovered a black hole weighing more than 500 solar masses, a missing link between lighter stellar-mass and heavier supermassive black holes, in a distant galaxy. This discovery is the best detection to date of a new class that has long been searched for: intermediate mass black holes.

Satellite Successfully Performs Post-Launch Maneuvers

Palo Alto CA (SPX) Jul 03, 2009 - Space Systems/Loral (SS/L) has announced that the satellite it built for TerreStar Networks is successfully performing post-launch maneuvers. The world's largest commercial satellite deployed its solar arrays Wednesday evening, following its launch aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from the European Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.

Rocket Launch Helps Prepare MSU Faculty For Training Students

Bozeman MT (SPX) Jul 03, 2009 - Three Montana State University instructors who want to help future scientists and engineers develop experiments for space recently launched experiments of their own.

Largest Ever Survey Of Very Distant Galaxy Clusters Completed

Riverside CA (SPX) Jul 03, 2009 - An international team of researchers led by a UC Riverside astronomer has completed the largest ever survey designed to find very distant clusters of galaxies.

LRO Sends First Lunar Images To Earth

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Jul 03, 2009 - NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has transmitted its first images since reaching lunar orbit June 23. The spacecraft has two cameras - a low resolution Wide Angle Camera and a high resolution Narrow Angle Camera. Collectively known as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, they were activated June 30.

ISS Appearing Nationwide Over July 4 Weekend

Houston TX (SPX) Jul 03, 2009 - As America celebrates its 233rd birthday this holiday weekend, there will be an extra light in the sky along with the fireworks. Across the country, Americans will be treated to spectacular views of the International Space Station as it orbits 220 miles above Earth.

IYA2009 Raises Millions Of Eyes To The Skies

Washington DC (SPX) Jul 03, 2009 - As the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009) reaches its six-month milestone, over a million people have already looked at the sky through a telescope for the first time, and even more have newly engaged in astronomy. This is just one of many achievements, as countless ongoing projects and planned initiatives indicate that the IYA2009 is well on the way towards achieving many of its goals.

Festive Ceremony Inaugurates University Programs At NASA Ames

Moffett Field CA (SPX) Jul 03, 2009 - The first International Space University (ISU) Opening Ceremony held at a NASA center drew more than 500 guests for a multimedia celebration of exploration at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts on Monday, June 29, 2009.

Canada's Space Telescope Celebrates Birthday Number Six

Mississauga, Canada (SPX) Jul 03, 2009 - Microsat Systems Canada is delighted to announce the sixth birthday of the MOST Microsatellite - Canada's First Space Telescope. The MOST (Microvariability and Oscillations of Stars) microsatellite was launched June 30, 2003 from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome with a 12-month mission to study the vibration of distant stars and draw inferences about their hidden composition - a technique called asteroseismology.

Boeing Team To Develop Revolutionary Spacecraft Power System

Huntington Beach CA (SPX) Jul 03, 2009 - An industry team led by Boeing has received a contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for work on Phase 2 of the Fast Access Spacecraft Testbed (FAST) program. The $15.5 million cost-plus-fixed-fee contract is currently funded to $13.8 million.

Universe Today

Happy Fourth of July!

Astronomers working with the Subaru Telescope have released these new images of a "fireworks display" in a�near-infrared image of the Helix Nebula, showing comet-shaped knots within. (...)Read the rest of Happy Fourth of July! (560 words) © anne for Universe Today, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Perchlorates and Water Make for Potential Habitable Environment on Mars

Scientists say that the Arctic region studied by Phoenix lander may be a favorable environment for microbes. Just-right chemistry and periods where thin films of liquid water form on the surface could make for a habitable setting. "Not only did we find water ice, as expected, but the soil chemistry and minerals we [...]

First Images from LRO

Woohoo! NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken its first images of the Moon! There are two cameras on board which combine to create the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC. They were both activated June 30, and their "first light" images were of a region in the lunar highlands south of Mare [...]

By Gamma-Rays Alone: Fermi Raises the Curtain on 16 New Pulsars

For the first time, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has spotted a new group of pulsars using only their gamma-ray emissions, in the absence of radio signals beamed to Earth. The 16 new objects are reported in this week's edition of Science Express, in a study based out of the University of California in Santa Cruz. (...)Read the [...]

Phoenix Lander Team: It Snows at Night on Mars

It snows on Mars. This occurs, at least in the northern arctic region where the Phoenix lander set up camp in 2008. Science teams from Phoenix were able to observe water-ice clouds in the Martian atmosphere and precipitation that fell to the ground at night and sublimate into water in the morning. [...]

Messier 87 Shows Off for Hundreds of Earth-bound Astronomers

When the giant radio galaxy Messier 87 (M 87) unleashed a torrent of gamma radiation and radio flux, an international collaboration of 390 scientists happened to be watching. They're reporting the discovery in this week's issue of Science Express. (...)Read the rest of Messier 87 Shows Off for Hundreds of Earth-bound Astronomers (762 words) © anne for [...]

Test-Bed Rover is Now Stuck — Which is a Good Thing!

Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have intentionally driven their engineering rover into soft soil in a sandbox testbed, to simulate how the Spirit rover is stuck on Mars. And they did a good job of it, too, as the test rover, called SSTB1, is stuck, too, with its wheels spinning and going nowhere. [...]

WiFi in Space Coming Soon?

Although current astronauts are Twittering and blogging from space, it's a cumbersome process as the ISS, shuttle and Soyuz do not have internet access. Instead, they have to downlink their information to mission control, where someone posts it to the web. But if future commercial space travelers or astronauts living on the Moon [...]

Where In The Universe #60

Ready for another Where In The Universe Challenge? Here's #60! Take a look and see if you can name where in the Universe this image is from. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. As usual, we’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer [...]

Astronomers Discover Medium-Sized Class of Black Holes

It's the Goldilocks variety of black holes: not too big and not too small. The new�source HLX-1, �the light blue object to the top left of the galactic bulge, is the ambassador for a new class of black holes, more than 500 times the mass of the Sun. It lies on�the�periphery of the edge-on spiral galaxy [...]

Your New Guide to the Inner Galaxy

All you galactic hitchhikers take note: a new atlas of the inner regions of the Milky Way was released today, showing thousands of previously undiscovered dense knots of cold cosmic dust — the potential birthplaces of new stars. This new map of the home galaxy was made using observations from the APEX telescope [...]

Mars Will NOT Look as Big as the Full Moon, But You Can Watch it Get Closer

or criminy's sake, I just got one of those "Mars as big as the full Moon in August" emails. For one more time: this is completely false and it couldn't possibly happen. Besides, in 2009 Mars is all but unobservable until the end of the year, and even next year it won't [...]

Get Your Own Personal UFO

I'm always amazed at what you can find on You Tube. Type "UFO" in the search panel, and you get all sorts of wacky stuff. But this one is really quite cool. It's called the X-Jet and was created by the US Air Force. It is kind of like your [...]

Faster, Cheaper (and Better?) Way to the Moon

The word this morning from several NASA Twitterers is that the stacking of the new Ares I-X rocket for its upcoming test flight is temporarily on hold. Everyone is waiting for word from a NASA executive session reconsidering the plan. And perhaps it might have something to do with an alternative plan to [...]

Fly Me To The Moon…

"Fly me to the Moon and let me play among the stars… Let me see what life is like on…" Oh, hi there! I'll just bet you know what's up with the double image, don't you? That's right. A little "stereo magic" by Jukka Metsavainio. But this time you're in [...]

Device Makes Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light

A scientist has created a gadget that can make radio waves travel faster than light. Einstein predicted that particles and information can't travel faster than the speed of light, but phenomena like radio waves are a different story, said John Singleton, who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The polarization synchrotron combines the waves [...]

NASA, Japan Release Most Complete Topographic Map of Earth

Topographic maps are some of the most used and valuable maps for both government and the general public. Now, NASA and Japan have released a new digital topographic map of Earth Monday that covers more of our planet than ever before and was created from nearly 1.3 million individual stereo-pair images collected by [...]

Book Review: Cold War Tech War

When is the best answer not the right answer? Assuredly many historical events epitomize this dilemma. Randall Whitcomb digs into Canada's Avro Arrow story and delivers up such an event in his book, "Cold War Tech War – The Politics of America's Air Defense". In it, he shows how a plane, successfully designed and built [...]

Carnival of Space #109

This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Jennifer Oullette at Discovery Space's Twisted Physics. Click here to read the Carnival of Space #109. And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an [...]

First Conclusive Signature for Lunar Uranium

Using data obtained from the gamma ray spectrometer on the Kaguya spacecraft scientists have found signatures of uranium, an element not seen in previous moon-mapping efforts. In addition to uranium, the Kaguya GRS data also is showing clear signatures for thorium, potassium, oxygen, magnesium, silicon, calcium, titanium and iron. "We've already gotten uranium results, which [...]

Watch Live Webcast of Ulysses Spacecraft Switch-off

UPDATE: Use this link to watch the webcast (the other one isn't working very well!) It's the spacecraft that just won't quit. We ran a story about a year ago that the Ulysses spacecraft was dying of natural causes (running out of power to keep the spacecraft warm and functional) and its mission would [...]

Book Review: Keep Watching the Skies

We work hard to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. If lucky, we've got some time left over for other activities. Patrick McCray's book "Keep Watching the Skies – The Story of Operation Moonwatch and the Dawn of the Space Age" is the story of a program that took advantage [...]

Landforms Indicate "Recent" Warm Weather on Mars

Remember the polygon-shaped landforms at Mars north polar region that the Phoenix lander studied? The polygons are produced by seasonal expansion and contraction of ground ice, and these shapes have been found in other regions on Mars as well. New studies of images from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter indicates [...]

Book Review: How To Live On Mars

With all the probes recently landing on Mars, it's no wonder we feel that the planet is close enough to vacation there. Robert Zubrin has such a scheme already in place for his book entitled "How to Live on Mars – A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet". Though vacationers are [...]

Book Review: To a Distant Day

Being part of a series on a "people's history of spaceflight", Chris Gainor's book entitled "To a Distant Day – The Rocket Pioneers" relives the onset of humankind's age of rocketry. Though starting from a broad, distant vantage point that includes Galileo and Copernicus, this book quickly jumps to Tsiolkovsky and other recent rocket luminaries. [...]