Ball Aerospace – Page 3 – Spaceflight Now

Watch a 4K video replay of Falcon Heavy’s static fire test (members only)

June 20, 2019 Stephen Clark

SpaceX test-fired a Falcon Heavy rocket Wednesday night at the Kennedy Space Center in preparation for launch June 24 with a stack of weather observation and technology demonstration satellites.

Watch time-lapse of Falcon Heavy going upright (members only)

June 19, 2019 Spaceflight Now

In this time-lapse video, a Falcon Heavy rocket is lifted into position atop launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in readiness for a pre-flight test firing of its 27 Merlin main engines.

Live coverage: Falcon Heavy engines test-fired for launch next week

June 18, 2019 Stephen Clark

SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy launch for the U.S. Air Force took a major step closer to liftoff with a hold-down engine firing Wednesday night at launch pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Liftoff with a cluster of experimental satellites and weather monitoring craft is set for June 24.

First Falcon Heavy night launch slips to June 24

June 7, 2019 Stephen Clark

The first nighttime launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, and the first Falcon Heavy flight for the U.S. military, is set for no earlier than June 24 from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Air Force officials said Friday.

NASA selects mission to probe the history of galaxies

February 14, 2019 Stephen Clark

NASA has selected a space telescope named SPHEREx for launch in 2023 on a mission to survey the sky in near-infrared wavelengths, collecting spectral data to study the origins of the universe and ices in our own galaxy that could help seed life on planets.

Q&A with Jamie Bock, principal investigator of NASA’s SPHEREx mission (members only)

February 14, 2019 Stephen Clark

Jamie Bock, a professor of physics at Caltech, is principal investigator of the SPHEREx astrophysics mission selected by NASA on Feb. 13 as the next medium-class mission in the agency’s line of Explorer probes.

Hubble’s premier camera resumes observations

January 25, 2019 Stephen Clark

The most-used instrument on the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope is back in business after engineers on the ground determined a fault that halted the camera’s science observations earlier this month was caused by erroneous telemetry data, and was not a symptom of a hardware failure as initially suspected.

Controllers troubleshoot problem with Hubble camera

January 10, 2019 Stephen Clark

The partial shutdown of the U.S. government could complicate efforts to troubleshoot a suspected hardware problem with the Hubble Space Telescope’s premier science instrument, but officials are optimistic the camera will eventually be restored to operations, the head of the observatory’s science operations team said Wednesday.

NASA says goodbye to Kepler planet-hunter

November 18, 2018 Stephen Clark

Ground controllers have beamed the final commands to NASA’s Kepler telescope, turning off the spacecraft’s transmitters and disabling the craft’s automatic recovery software after the planet-hunting observatory ran out of fuel last month.

NASA’s trailblazing Kepler telescope ends planet hunt

October 30, 2018 Stephen Clark

NASA’s Kepler telescope has run out of fuel and ended science operations, closing out a pioneering decade-long mission that showed planets are commonplace across our galaxy, agency officials said Tuesday.