Continuing a run of military satellite deployments this summer, United Launch Alliance has begun stacking the Atlas 5 rocket that will boost the Navy’s next mobile communications craft.
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.
A video released by the National Transportation Safety Board shows the SpaceShipTwo rocket plane drop from its carrier aircraft, ignite its motor, and prematurely engage its braking system just before disintegrating high above California’s Mojave Desert last October.
The icy plains of Pluto resolved by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft stretch as wide as Texas, enveloping mountain ranges and bizarre hilly outcrops in a mosaic revealing one lobe of the distant world’s heart-shaped reservoir of exotic frozen carbon monoxide, nitrogen and methane.
The fatal in-flight breakup of Virgin Galactic’s futuristic SpaceShipTwo rocket plane during a test flight last October was the result of pilot error, possibly triggered by a high workload, unfamiliar vibration and rapid acceleration, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded Tuesday.
Images obtained during the New Horizons spacecraft’s July 14 encounter with Pluto show apparent glacial ice flows wrapping around barrier islands and towering mountain ranges, all under a haze layer suspended up to 100 miles above the distant world’s frozen surface.
Two Chinese satellites lifted off Saturday on top of a Long March 3B rocket and rode into orbit nearly 14,000 miles above Earth to expand the country’s space-based navigation network.
This is the launch highlights reel from United Launch Alliance of the Delta 4 rocket carrying the seventh satellite for the Air Force’s Wideband Global SATCOM constellation.
Investigators have traced the cause of an in-space disintegration of a U.S. Air Force weather satellite in February to a battery fault and identified six other spacecraft in orbit prone to the same failure.
View photos of Thursday’s spectacular sunset launch from Cape Canaveral of a United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket with the U.S. Air Force’s seventh Wideband Global SATCOM communications platform.