Kentucky Space

109th Carnival of Space posted

The latest Carnival of Space has been posted at Jennifer Ouelette's Discovery Channel blog, Twisted Physics.

Wayne

Space

Bob Twiggs lecturing Kentucky Space students at Morehead St. this week

The incoming class of Kentucky Space students will be at Morehead State University's brand new Space Sciences Facility for an immersive introduction to KySat ground ops and spacecraft design this week. MSU is the home of a 21-meter astrophysics and space tracking antenna.

In addition to Kentucky Space faculty and presentations from current students, Bob Twiggs will be attending and lecturing on spacecraft design.

Wayne

Incenting space technologies

Citing the potential demise of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, The Launch Pad points out that funding for NASA's Centennial Challenge program could be zeroed out.

To reduce the budget for these programs to zero would be to allow a great opportunity to pass. Each of these three programs provides an incredibly amount of value to NASA, and helps stimulate the American economy by creating or retaining high tech employment opportunities. To cite one example among many, the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, one of seven incentive prizes offered by the Centennial Challenges programs, encourages innovative American teams to develop, build, and perfect vertical takeoff and landing rocket technology of the sort that will provide tangible benefits both to NASAs return to the Moon and to a variety of other civil, commercial, and military space applications. To date, NASA has paid out $350,000; and with the X PRIZE Foundation, the Northrop Grumman Corporation, and their partners supplying the operational funding, that $350,000 is a close representation of the total cost of the program to date. For that amount of money, NASA has incentivized approximately 75,000 person hours and the equivalent of about $12,000,000 in research and development--an astonishing 35-to-1 return on each taxpayer dollar invested to date. Along the way, teams have developed impressive subsystems, helped improved our nation's regulatory regime, and generated unique data for engineers.

Jeff Foust has an update.

Wayne

"Briny Breath of Enceladus"

Salt in Saturn's E ring and evidence in the form of spectacular geysers on the moon itself suggests that Enceladus could have an underground ocean. The video below also contains some of the best photographic stills of the moon from Cassini's imaging team, CICLOPS. Have a look.

Wayne

Video: Aborting Space Shuttle launches

Rescheduled for July 11 after a couple of aborted countdowns because of hydrogen gas leaks, Endeavor and its cargo, including two cubes, will just have to wait it out. But thinking about aborted launches, Switched documented with video four "spine-chilling" space shuttle launch aborts, three of which were at T-10 seconds. One, incredibly, came after launch.

Wayne

Video of WhiteKnightTwo

Jeff Foust has posted some video of a flight of WK2. Check out the HD version.

Wayne

Kentucky Space, Virgin Galactic

Video: Deployable cubesat solar array

Here's video of work on a University of Hawaii at Manoa deployable solar array, uploaded in just the past few days. More on Hawaii's cubesat program may be found in several presentations made at the CubeSat Developers' Workshops.

CUBESAT university of hawaii deployable solar array - More related videos from Asterpix

Wayne

CubeSat

LRO/LCROSS launch video

Video of yesterday's LRO/LCROSS successful launch and NASA's return to the moon has been embedded below. For the latest, follow @NASA and @LRCROSS_NASA. Flickr pix are here.

LRO will reach the moon on Tuesday at 5:43 a.m., according to NASA. LCROSS and the Centaur rocket will remain together for the next four months, then separate and send LCROSS crashing into the moon in search of water ice on Oct. 9.

Wayne

LCROSS

Video of LRO/LCROSS mission

Today's scheduled launch of NASA's moon return is accompanied by quite a few video clips of LRO/LCROSS on YouTube. The mission consists of two parts. LRO will map the moon's surface in great detail, while LCROSS will seek a definitive answer to the question of whether water ice exists.

The animation below traces the mission from start to finish. 

Wayne

Augustine Commission, LCROSS and Endeavor updates

The Augustine Commission on the future of human spaceflight is going on now. NASA TV is broadcasting, but for those of you out and about follow the hearings with the #hsf hashtag on Twitter. Jeff Foust is also tweeting.

The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission, which is intended to confirm the presence or absence of water ice in a permanently shadowed crater at the Moon’s South Pole, is being rolled out for a launch tomorrow. Follow it on Twitter.

Endeavor has been scrubbed for a second time, the culprit being another leak. While in orbit, a couple of Texas cubesats are slated to be released from the Shuttle, the first of four missions planned over eight years that may culminate in the autonomous docking of very small satellites.

Wayne