MetaFilter posts tagged with Space and spacecraft

Watching the world go by from orbit

Brandon Blatcher — Fri, 10 May 2013 05:49:29 -0800

Serene and hypnotizing video of a Russian Progress spacecraft docking with the International Space Station.

belters expanse trajectory: working up the Epstein Drive

kliuless — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 23:11:41 -0800

How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 "moon rocket" engine back to life - "The story of young engineers who resurrected an engine nearly twice their age."

The question, though, is whether or not the practical side of the equation can balance the romantic. The Advanced Booster competition will run through 2015, at which point a winner will be chosen, solid or liquid. The F-1B could be the engine sending astronauts to Mars—or it could wind up as one more Wikipedia footnote.

also btw... -NASA's Space Launch System -NASA's Space Launch System Advanced Booster -Comparison of orbital rocket engines -Comparison of orbital launch systems oh and How NASA's Nuclear Rockets Will Take Us Way Beyond Mars &c. Almost 40,000 People Have Signed up to Go to Mars—One Way

Landing on Titan, now in full color!

Brandon Blatcher — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 14:00:15 -0800

It's been just over eight years since the Hugyens space probe separated from the Cassini spacecraft and drifted down to the surface Saturn's moon Titan. Along the way it provided video and sounds of its descent.

Now a 3D visualization of its landing, based on data from the spacecraft itself, has been created.

Rendezvous with Neptune

Blasdelb — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 02:18:50 -0800

In case you felt that your week was missing an interview of Carl Sagan by Sidney Poitier during the 1989 Voyager Neptune encounter, you're welcome. (via) The rest of the one-hour TV special featuring Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and many others, aired on August 27, 1989 on TBS SuperStation to commemorate Voyager 2's rendezvous with Neptune can be found here. Voyager 2's closest approach to Neptune occurred on August 25, 1989. Since this was the last planet of our Solar System that Voyager 2 could visit, the Chief Project Scientist, his staff members, and the flight controllers decided to also perform a close fly-by of Triton, the larger of Neptune's two originally known moons, so as to gather as much information on Neptune and Triton as possible, regardless of what angle at which Voyager 2 would fly away from Neptune. This was just like the case of Voyager 1's encounters with Saturn and its massive moon Titan. Through repeated computerized test simulations of trajectories through the Neptunian system conducted in advance, flight controllers determined the best way to route Voyager 2 through the Neptune-Triton system. Since the plane of the orbit of Triton is tilted significantly with respect to the plane of the ecliptic, through mid-course corrections, Voyager 2 was directed into a path several thousand miles over the north pole of Neptune. At that time, Triton was behind and below (south of) Neptune (at an angle of about 25 degrees below the Ecliptic), close to the apoapsis of its elliptical orbit. The gravitational pull of Neptune bent the trajectory of Voyager 2 down in the direction of Triton. In less than 24 hours, Voyager 2 traversed the distance between Neptune and Triton, and then observed the northern hemisphere of Triton as it passed over the moon's north pole. The net and final effect on the trajectory of Voyager 2 was to bend its trajectory south below the plane of the Ecliptic by about 30 degrees. Voyager 2 is on this path permanently, and hence, it is exploring space south of the plane of the Ecliptic, measuring magnetic fields, charged particles, etc., there, and sending the measurements back to the Earth via telemetry. While in the neighborhood of Neptune, Voyager 2 discovered the "Great Dark Spot", which has since disappeared, according to observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. Originally thought to be a large cloud itself, the "Great Dark Spot" was later hypothesized to be a hole in the visible cloud deck of Neptune. Neptune's atmosphere consists of hydrogen, helium, and methane. The methane in Neptune's upper atmosphere absorbs the red light from the Sun, but it reflects the blue light from the Sun back into space. This is why Neptune looks blue.

Launching and catching Dragons

Brandon Blatcher — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:40:58 -0800

SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday morning, after a slightly problematic launch on Sunday. Following on the successful test flight in May, this mission marks the first official supply run to the ISS by a private company. SpaceX is also working on the capability to send humans to the ISS, slated to occur in 3 or 4 years. Meanwhile, other American companies are also working on being able to send resupply missions to the ISS. Orbital Sciences Corporation plans to send its unmanned Cygnus spacecraft to the ISS in early 2013. The Sierra Nevada Corporation continues testing the Dream Chaser, a manned spacecraft. As for NASA, its focused on deep space missions and continues to develop the Orion Spacecraft.

How To Steal The Space Shuttle: A Step-By-Step Guide

Egg Shen — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 14:19:06 -0800

How To Steal The Space Shuttle: A Step-By-Step Guide

Space fail?

IvoShandor — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:20:54 -0800

Yesterday, Russia's first interplanetary mission in 15 years launched sucessfully from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. It ran into serious problems almost immediately. In jeopardy are a sample return mission from the Martian satellite Phobos, The Planetary Society's Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment (LIFE), and China's Yinghuo-1 Mars orbiter.

Dawn orbits Vesta

Argyle — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 17:49:21 -0800

Dawn spacecraft now orbits asteroid Vesta - After almost 4 years of space travel, the Dawn spacecraft successfully entered orbit around Vesta, an Arizona sized rock. Dawn tweets, takes pictures, and there is a Vesta Fiesta party to celebrate. After hanging out at Vesta for a year, Dawn will head off to visit the Ceres asteroid next, a three year trip. Amazing achievement of engineering, innovation and accuracy.

This thing went to space.

CunningLinguist — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:38:22 -0800

The 2010 Brooklyn Space Program. Here is Luke Geissbuhler's homemade spacecraft. It is made of awesome.

Space geeks rejoice!

Salvor Hardin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 05:36:23 -0800

Up above the world so high, what's that spacecraft in the sky? The National Space Science Data Center, a division of NASA, provides a searchable catalog of all spacecraft launched from the planet Earth. The catalog provides access to a wealth of data and information about the spacecraft, the science and people involved, and info about the fruit of the missions. For your convenience: - Search for spacecraft by name, mission type, or launch date (by far this is my favorite part of the site) - Search for experiments aboard spacecraft - Search for (records of) data collections - Search for personnel involved in space missions - Search for publications derived from space missions - Search for (records of) maps made by spacecraft of Mars, Venus or the Moon (by lat/lon) - sorry, no actual maps online - Search for recent data - Search for significant space-mission-related events by keyword or date Not sure where to start having fun? - Try searching for spacecraft launched in 1969 to read about the vehicles involved in the space race! - Check out the spacecraft launched recently in your favorite space-research area, and get a taste of what's to come when they reach their destinations. - Or how about searching for all military spacecraft launched in 2009 and speculate on their classified and indubitably nefarious purposes. - Try searching for all spacecraft-related events in your birth year!

"The planet . . . was scarcely any larger than a house!"

IvoShandor — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 23:00:46 -0800

The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla has prepared a scale image of every asteroid and comet ever visited by a spacecraft. The Planetary Society's blog is always a treat but The Planetary Society's website offers up other content too. You can explore various Society projects, extrasolar planets, various spacecraft, there's Planetary Radio, SETI, and a wealth of other content.

The Lunar Orbiter's Kodak moment

prinado — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:16:01 -0800

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has returned its first images of the Apollo moon landing sites. The spacecraft’s onboard camera photographed Lunar Module descent stages at five of the six Apollo sites—11, 14, 15, 16, and 17. The Apollo 12 site will be photographed in coming weeks. The Apollo 14 image is particularly interesting: ideal lighting conditions resolve additional details, including the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package and the tracks left by the astronauts’ footprints and/or the Modularized Equipment Transporter, a 2-wheeled, rickshaw type cart for carrying around tools, cameras and sample cases on the lunar surface. These first images were captured before the spacecraft reached its final mapping orbit—future images of the Apollo sites will have two to three times greater resolution.

Space: 1989

dersins — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 09:20:46 -0800

Some photo galleries (and youtube video) of Buran, the USSR's space shuttle program (previously) from the 1980's, long since abandoned. Bonus: A comparison between Buran and the US space shuttle. Double Bonus: More on Buran from russianspaceweb.com, which is awesome. Combo breaker: An official page with NASA's take on Buran, (and their photos), frozen in time a decade ago.

Dear Earth: Send More Chuck Berry

Hadroed — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:29:11 -0800

The Golden Record: Hear what the aliens will hear.
30 years ago today, a collection of images and sound recordings engraved on a record was launched toward the stars. The playlist covers an amazing collection of music, and has been called the Mix Tape of the Gods.

Amazons in space?

eparchos — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 13:39:57 -0800

Amazon founder test-launches spacecraft. Want to get a job at Blue Origin? For some reason, he didn't use the relatively nearby and somewhat innacurately-named Spaceport America...

Road trip to venus!

Brandon Blatcher — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 06:53:09 -0800

Road trip to venus!

The Venus Express was launched on Nov. 9th, 2005 from Baikonur, the historic spaceport in Kazakhstan. It is the first Venus probe sent by the ESA , and you can follow it's progress on the six month journey to the planet.

Exploration of Venus begin in 1962 with Mariner 2, the first space probe to fly by another planet and other flights, including the Russian Venera 7, which was the first probe to land on another planet. The Soviets took quite an interest in Venus and dominated the exploration of the planet through the '70s and '80s. A lot of the images recorded by those early craft have been reprocessed with modern technology.

In the early '90s the Magellan spacecraft spent several years mapping the surface of Venus, providing us many, many, many images and 3D maps of the planet.

As for Venus Express, it's goal is to spend two years making detailed studys of the planet's clouds and atmosphere.

avast ye maties! set sail for the milky way, yarr!

analogue — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 14:11:39 -0800

Cosmos 1 is officially lost! However, fellow solar sailors, it's not too late to buy a t-shirt. I, however, can't help but focus my attention on this educational BBC News article; I believe I'm having some sort of pavlovian response to that last diagram, but thankfully it seems I'm not the first solar sailing pervert out there.

Cosoms 1

theonetruebix — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 10:36:17 -0800

In just over two hours, Cosmos 1, the world's first experimental "solar sail" spacecraft will launch, and reportedly will be visible "from nearly everywhere on its surface at one time or another".

One small st.... yeah yeah

sourbrew — Mon, 08 Nov 2004 21:07:54 -0800

Move over X-Prize - in order to win the next big space prize($50 million) one will have to build a spacecraft capable of taking a crew of no fewer than five people to an altitude of 400 kilometers and complete two orbits of the Earth at that altitude. Then they have to repeat that accomplishment within 60 days.

Stairway to Heaven

alms — Tue, 23 Sep 2003 18:34:12 -0800

An Elevator to the Stars. The paper of record claims this isn't science fiction, but do we really believe that in ten years we'll be able to build a 60,000 mile long cable capable of supporting 13 ton cargo loads? Would you trust this to take you into asynchronous orbit? (Or maybe you just want to make like Joe Kittinger and jump out at 100,000 feet.)

Galileo Dies.

Ufez Jones — Tue, 16 Sep 2003 14:17:56 -0800

NASA's Official 'Galileo Dies' Page. Galileo is set to crash into Jupiter on Sunday. Responsible for many great images and tons of information, Galileo served well. Find a complete history of the Galileo mission here. Also, don't forget to watch the End of Mission webcast this Sunday at approx. 2 PM EST here.

Swan song for a great explorer.

KirkJobSluder — Sun, 03 Nov 2002 06:54:26 -0800

Swan song for a great explorer. Tomorow, the Galileo explorer will make a flyby of Jovian moon Amalthea ending pehaps the geatest unmanned mission in NASA history. Galileo telemetry may not survive the flyby having already receieved much more radiation than it was designed for. Even if it does survive, this will be its final orbit scheduled to crash into Jupiter in September of next year. In spite of antenna difficulties, the spacecraft returned many beautiful images of Jupiter's moons, along with coverage of the Shoemaker-Levy collision and the first atmospheric probe to decend into Jupiter's weather.

There's something out there

riley370 — Fri, 13 Sep 2002 21:52:40 -0800

There's something out there
Target Body: J002E3 Spacecraft (UNCONFIRMED)
Observer Location: Los Angeles, CA
Coordinates: 118°14'27.6''W, 34°03'15.1''N

Since September 5th, the Minor Planet Mailing List (MPML) has been abuzz with speculation about an unidentified 16th- magnitude object. During the next 10 days the object will be moving rapidly across Aries and then Taurus, passing between the Pleiades and Hyades star clusters.

jjg — Mon, 04 Dec 2000 10:49:53 -0800

Since 1965, the Pioneer 6 space probe has quietly maintained its orbit around the sun between Earth and Venus. This week, in commemoration of the anniversary of its launch, NASA will attempt to re-establish contact with the oldest surviving spacecraft.