Kentucky Space

Images being posted from MESSENGER'S third Mercury flyby

Swooping by at an altitude of just 141.7 miles, images from MESSENGER'S third flyby of Mercury this week are now being posted. The surface in the lower right corner of this image is near Mercury's terminator, the line between the day and night side of the planet.

The craft will settle into orbit around Mercury beginning on March 18, 2011.

Wayne

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Peter Diamandis: Moon water "petroleum of space flight"

Chairman and CEO of the X-PRIZE Foundation, Peter Diamandis, writes that finding water on the Moon could be a turning point in human history. 

Revealing water in significant quantities on the Moon could truly be a turning point in space exploration. Who will set up the first water mining plants? Given low-cost availability of water, hydrogen and oxygen, what type of off-Earth economies and exploration will this enable? The question is not too dissimilar to those questions asked when oil was discovered buried deep under the Earth or under the oceans. We eventually designed the technology to mine and extract this precious resource. It's what we do as humans and entrepreneurs.

Wayne

Masten "rocketcam" video from Xombie

Masten Space Systems recorded yesterday's Northrop-Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge attempt from its on-board "rocketcam". Check it out.

Alan Boyle at Cosmic Log also has a nice write-up.

Wayne

Tracking SwissCube live

Southgate Amateur Radio Club is reporting that SwissCube, one of four cubesats scheduled for a Sept. 23 launch from India, has debuted a website to track the satellite after launch. Along with Google Earth and the tracker provided by the space services company Solenix, you can also watch the progress of SwissCube in 3D.

For events prior to launch, check out the blog hosted by ISIS Launch Services.

Wayne

CubeSat, Kentucky Space, Software, Space, SwissCube

Video of flux-pinning technology in microgravity

Thanks for your comment yesterday, Joseph! Kentucky Space readers, check out the video demonstration below by the Cornell Space Systems Design Studio of its flux-pinning technology, an emerging science that one day may lead to radically reconfigurable spacecraft. Cornell:

Flux pinning describes the interaction between a high temperature superconductor (HTSC) and a magnetic field. The magnetic field induces current vortices in the HTSC, which are sensitive to and resist the change in magnetic flux through the HTSC surface. This effect creates mechanical stiffness and damping that influence the motion of the magnetic field’s source in multiple degrees of freedom. In a multibody space system, HTSC/magnet pairs placed on individual vehicles tie the dynamics of each body to that of its neighbors, creating a non-contacting virtual structure.

Joseph Shoer also demonstrated the technology in the lab in this August, 2008 video.

I also twittered it yesterday in case you're not yet following Kentucky Space.

Wayne

CubeSat, Kentucky Space, picosat, Robotics

Four cubes slated for Sept. 21 launch

It looks as if SwissCube, BeeSat, UWE-2 and ITUpSat may now be slated for a September 21 launch.

Wayne

CubeSat, Kentucky Space

Vint Cerf on the Interplanetary Internet

It's not a bad gig being known as the father of the Internet, but Vint Cerf is not ready to settle for an ubiquitous terrestrial network, raising, as well, the issue of an interplanetary internet in this video. Part two may be viewed here.

The video, by the way, is from Sputnik Observatory, an intriguing new site documenting contemporary thought on a wide variety of scientific issues.

Wayne

Kentucky Space, Vint Cerf

Slow and steady to 200,000 mph

Paul Gilster's post today on new developments in Ion propulsion pairs nicely with an update from the Project System Engineer for Dawn on that ion-powered spacecraft's journey to Ceres and Vesta. Compared to the Space Shuttle's orbital speed of 18,000 mph, modern ion propulsion can reach 200,000 mph.

Wayne

Credit for artist's image of Dawn at Ceres: NASA/JPL

Picking out the Past

[Cross-posted from the IdeaFestival blog]

Having discarded a key idea about his work on Black Holes - that they can lock away the past forever - Stephen Hawking is hard at work on a theory about everything, or more precisely a theory about a theory about everything. Because one key lesson of quantum theory is that the constituents of reality have many possible futures, the latest issue of Discover says that Hawking

is now pushing a different strategy, which he calls top-down cosmology. It is not the case, he says, that the past uniquely determines the present. Because the universe has many histories and just as many possible beginnings, the present state of the universe selects the past. 'This means the the histories of the Universe depend on what is being measured,' Hawking wrote in a recent paper, 'contrary to the usual idea that the Universe has an objective, observer-independent history.'

I'm guessing that author and columnist for Astronomy magazine, Bob Berman, might have something to say about this at IdeaFestival 2009. You are coming aren't you?

Wayne

cosmology, Space

Carnival of Space 113

The very latest Carnival of Space has been posted at Dynamics of Cats.

Wayne