Stephen Clark – Page 470 – Spaceflight Now

Scientists plan for New Horizons probe’s second act

August 11, 2015 Stephen Clark

Scientists are about to decide where to send NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft next, and it is down to two candidates at the frozen frontier of the solar system to become the most distant object ever visited by a human-built space probe.

Rosetta gets ringside seat to smelly comet outburst

August 11, 2015 Stephen Clark

Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft has recorded a brilliant beam of gas and dust shooting into space from Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the most spectacular such emission since the probe arrived at the tiny frozen world one year ago.

NASA troubleshoots radar outage on new SMAP satellite

August 10, 2015 Stephen Clark

Engineers have so far been unable to restart a balky radar aboard NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive environmental satellite launched in January, robbing scientists of the most detailed maps of how much water is locked up in the top layers of Earth’s land masses.

Swiss company to move Atlas 5 work to Alabama

August 10, 2015 Stephen Clark

Ruag Space, the Swiss manufacturer of nose shrouds for the Atlas 5 rocket, plans to relocate production of Atlas launcher components to United Launch Alliance’s rocket assembly plant in Decatur, Alabama.

New engines arrive at Antares rocket launch site

August 10, 2015 Stephen Clark

The first pair of new Russian main engines for Orbital ATK’s modernized Antares rocket has arrived at the company’s Virginia launch base as engineers prepare to return the commercial booster to flight after a catastrophic failure last year.

NASA buys Soyuz seats as agency presses for commercial crew funding

August 5, 2015 Stephen Clark

NASA has signed a $490 million agreement with the Russian government to ferry U.S. astronauts to and from the International Space Station in 2018 and 2019 as a hedge in case of delays to Boeing and SpaceX crew capsules.

Watch the moon transit the Earth

August 5, 2015 Stephen Clark

Spectacular views from a NOAA space weather observatory show the sunlit far side of the moon crossing the face of the Earth from a distant vantage point a million miles away.

NASA picks candidates for new space telescope

August 3, 2015 Stephen Clark

NASA has selected three finalists for a new Explorer-class astrophysics satellite mission scheduled to launch by the end of 2020, and two of the proposals aim to fulfill similar goals to an X-ray telescope shelved after cost overruns in 2012.

Orion service module still seen as schedule driver

August 3, 2015 Stephen Clark

The pace of the European Space Agency’s development of a power and propulsion module for NASA’s Orion crew capsule will likely determine when an unpiloted test flight of the spaceship and its heavy-lift rocket will take off, NASA officials said last week.

NASA: Tracking CubeSats is easy, but many stay in orbit too long

July 30, 2015 Stephen Clark

U.S. military radars have little trouble tracking the flux of CubeSats filling orbital traffic lanes, diminishing worries that new commercial CubeSat constellations could generate collision hazards in space, according to a report issued by NASA last week.