Space and astronomy news
[/caption] On April 19, 2001, space shuttle Endeavour’s STS-100 mission launched to the space station, and in the payload bay was Canadarm2, a larger, more robust successor to the shuttle’s Canadarm. The Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS) is a sophisticated “construction crane,” and is responsible for much of the successful building of the ISS …
Continue reading “Gallery: 10 Years of Canadarm2, Construction Crane in Space”
In a true display of international cooperation, American flight engineer Nicole Stott, using Canada’s Canadarm2, captured the Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV), with help from Belgium’s Frank DeWinne and Canada’s Robert Thirsk, under the direction of Russian ISS commander Gennady Padalka. The unpiloted HTV arrived at the International Space Station Thursday and later was attached …
There are plenty of problems that spacecraft designers have to consider. Getting smacked in the sensitive parts by a rock is just one of them, but it is a very important one. A micrometeoroid hitting the wrong part of the spacecraft could jeopardize an entire mission, and the years of work it took to get …
Continue reading “NASA has a New Database to Predict Meteoroid Hazards for Spaceflight”
NASA is in the business of launching things into orbit. But what goes up must come down, and if whatever is coming down doesn’t burn up in the atmosphere, it will strike Earth somewhere. Even Florida isn’t safe.
After a journey spanning almost two decades, Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Dream Chaser reusable spaceplane, named Tenacity, is officially undergoing environmental testing at NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility located at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in anticipation of its maiden flight to the International Space Station (ISS), currently scheduled for April 2024. The environmental testing consists of …
On one particular day in 2021, astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the ISS must have felt a pin-prick of fear and uncertainty. On November 15th of that year, Russia fired an anti-satellite missile at one of its own defunct military satellites, Tselina-D. The target weighed about 1,750 kg, and when the missile struck its target, the …
Human technology is crossing another threshold. Tractor beams have been common in science fiction for decades. Now a team of researchers is working on a real-life tractor beam that could help us with our burgeoning space debris problem.
Robots will be one of the keys to the expanding in-space economy. As launch costs decrease, hopefully significantly when Starship and other massive lift systems come online, the most significant barrier to entry for the space economy will finally come down. So what happens then? Two acronyms have been popping up in the literature with …
For most of us, this would be a nightmare. Imagine being curled up inside a 90 cm (36 inch) fabric sphere with a small window and a small air tank while dangling from the Canadarm. As your tiny sphere shifts, you’d see Earth out your tiny window, then the Space Shuttle, damaged by some accident …
Continue reading “This is How NASA Wanted to Rescue Space Shuttle Astronauts”
A Russian spacecraft docked with the ISS has reportedly suffered a coolant link for the second time in just a few months.