2015 – Page 79 – Spaceflight Now

Power system failure likely cause of military satellite explosion

March 4, 2015 Stephen Clark

The U.S. Air Force says a temperature spike in the power system of a nearly 20-year-old weather satellite may have led to the spacecraft’s explosion in orbit, scattering more than 40 fragments of debris that could be flying around Earth for decades.

Liftoff of Indian navigation satellite postponed

March 4, 2015 Stephen Clark

The launch of a satellite for India’s indigenous navigation network has been postponed to resolve a problem with one of the spacecraft’s radio transmitters, officials said Wednesday.

Photos: Last look at Sunday’s launch by SpaceX

March 4, 2015 Stephen Clark

Sunday’s liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket marked the 16th flight of SpaceX’s workhorse launcher, and its third mission of the year. Here is another set of launch photos from SpaceX.

Could Delta rockets soon be a thing of the past?

March 4, 2015 Justin Ray

With as few as 15 more launches on the calendar over the next five years, the rocket name “Delta” that has been serving the U.S. and international customers since 1960 could permanently fade into history.

Photos: Shroud installed around satellite quartet, connected to Atlas 5

March 4, 2015 Justin Ray

NASA’s four Magnetospheric Multiscale mission spacecraft were encapsulated Feb. 23 in the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket’s nose cone at the commercial Astrotech processing campus in Titusville. Delivery of the payload to the Atlas 5 assembly building for mating occurred on Friday, Feb. 27.

On this date…March 4 launch of STS-62

March 4, 2015 Justin Ray

#OTD in 1994, the launch of Columbia on the STS-62 microgravity research mission

Rosetta glimpses its own shadow on comet 67P

March 3, 2015 Stephen Clark

The sharp-eyed science camera on Europe’s Rosetta comet orbiter caught a view of the probe’s fuzzy shadow when controllers guided the spacecraft just a few miles over its subject’s nucleus last month.

NASA eyes ion engines for Mars orbiter launching in 2022

March 3, 2015 Stephen Clark

NASA officials want the agency’s next Mars orbiter to pull double duty as a communications relay station for a fleet of surface landers and as a trailblazer for a future round-trip sample return mission and human expeditions to the red planet.

Reader-submitted shots of Falcon 9 launch

March 2, 2015 Stephen Clark

Spaceflight Now readers sent in photos of Sunday’s blastoff of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, which lit up a late-night moonlit sky over Florida’s Space Coast on the way to orbit with two communications satellites.

NASA probe closes in on dwarf planet Ceres

March 2, 2015 William Harwood

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is closing in on the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest body in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, beaming back increasingly sharp pictures revealing a heavily cratered world with unexpected spots of light that may be reflections off exposed ice or some other material.