Kentucky Space

Hitching an Asteroid ride to Mars

Finishing a conference in Italy on outer solar system and deep space exploration, Paul Gilster reports on one of the many papers he pledges to blog about in the future - using near Earth objects (NEOs), asteroids in this case, as convenient transfer points:

"The idea here is that the astronauts can use the NEO as a radiation shield, digging in to its surface and exploiting its resources on the way to the red planet. Greg presented a table showing candidate objects that could fill the bill, including two — 1999YR14 and 2007EE26 — that have one Earth-Mars transit time amounting to one year or less."

See the entire post at the highly recommended blog Centauri Dreams.

Reading Paul's entry, my mind immediately wandered to the mission to the moon Phobos, which may or may not be an asteroid captured by Mars, and the Rosetta mission to orbit and land on Comet 67 P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. Rosetta has already flown past the asteroid 2867-Steins (video is available on YouTube) and will encounter 21-Lutetia at roughly this time next year.

And the artist's image of the lander, Philae, lashed to the comet (above) has to be one of my favorite space images ever. Click to enlarge.

Now for a bit of housekeeping: Kentucky Space blog will be on hold for the next week as I spend some time away from the computer monitor on vacation with my family. See you a bit later.

Wayne

Credits: ESA, image by AOES Medialab

Space prize roundup

Space Prizes has a series of posts this month on a variety of space-related competitions and awards. Check it out.

Wayne

Space

"Free Spirit" update

JPL has just posted this video on YouTube about its efforts to free a stuck Spirit on Mars using a sandbox on Earth.

Wayne

Mars

Innovative picosats to fly on Endeavor, Saturday launch scheduled

Laden with an addition to Japan's Kibo lab that will function as a kind of "space porch" for experiments that need the exposure to space and the first of four innovative missions that could culminate in the autonomous docking of picosatellites, Endeavor is now set for launch on Saturday.

Wayne

CubeSat, picosat, space shuttle

Four CubeSats set soon for launch on Indian PSLV

An August launch will take four more cubesats to orbit aboard an Indian PSLV, according to this news item.

Besides Rubin 9.1 and Rubin 9.2 nano satellites from Germany, the four cubesats lined up for the mission on board India's workhorse rocket Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle are: Beesat, built by Technical University Berlin, UWE-2 (University of Wuerzburg Germany), ITU-pSat (Istanbul Technical University Turkey) and SwissCube-1 (Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, Switzerland).

According to southgatearc.org, BeeSat "will demonstrate the use of coin sized micro reaction wheels for attitude control of pico satellites in orbit...." More about SwissCube may be found here. There is also some video available on YouTube, here and here.

Wayne

CubeSat

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

"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: 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