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Category: satellites – Page 171

That failure, and another one last year involving another type of Long March rocket, slowed China’s space efforts. Officials had hoped to launch around 30 rockets of one type or another in 2017 but only managed 18 (there were 29 launches in America and another 20 of Russian ones—see chart). But they promise to bounce back in 2018, with 40-or-so lift-offs planned this year. These will probably include a third outing for the Long March 5—assuming its flaws can be fixed in time—and missions that will greatly expand the number of satellites serving BeiDou, China’s home-grown satellite navigation system.

NATTY yellow carts whizz tourists around Wenchang space port, a sprawling launch site on the tropical island of Hainan. The brisk tour passes beneath an enormous poster of Xi Jinping, China’s president, then disgorges passengers for photographs not far from a skeletal launch tower. Back at the visitor centre there is a small exhibition featuring space suits, a model moon-rover and the charred husk of a re-entry capsule that brought Chinese astronauts back from orbit. A gift shop at the exit sells plastic rockets, branded bottle openers and cuddly alien mascots.

The base in a township of Wenchang city is the newest of China’s four space-launch facilities. It is also by far the easiest to visit—thanks in part to the enthusiasm of officials in Hainan, a haven for tourists and rich retirees. Wenchang’s local government has adopted a logo for the city reminiscent of Starfleet badges in “Star Trek”. It is building a space-themed tourist village near the launch site, with attractions that include a field of vegetables grown from seeds that have been carried in spaceships.

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Earth-i, a mapping service based in England, has launched a prototype of the world’s first full-colour, full-motion video satellite constellation.

worlds first colour video from satellites

British company Earth-i has successfully launched a prototype of its upcoming satellite constellation into orbit. The new network – known as Vivid-i – will be the first of its kind to provide full-colour motion video and the first European-owned constellation able to provide both video and still images.

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In a technology first, a team of NASA engineers has demonstrated fully autonomous X-ray navigation in space—a capability that could revolutionize NASA’s ability in the future to pilot robotic spacecraft to the far reaches of the solar system and beyond.

The demonstration, which the team carried out with an experiment called Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology, or SEXTANT, showed that could be used to accurately determine the location of an object moving at thousands of miles per hour in —similar to how the Global Positioning System, widely known as GPS, provides positioning, , and timing services to users on Earth with its constellation of 24 operating satellites.

“This demonstration is a breakthrough for future deep space exploration,” said SEXTANT Project Manager Jason Mitchell, an aerospace technologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “As the first to demonstrate X-ray navigation fully autonomously and in real-time in space, we are now leading the way.”

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The first in a series of four advanced polar-orbiting satellites launched to space on its third try early Saturday (Nov. 18), turning its watchful eye to improving the accuracy of weather forecasts and Earth observations.

The new Joint Polar Satellite System-1 satellite, or JPSS-1, launched into orbit atop a United Launch Alliance-built Delta II rocket at 4:47 a.m. EST (0947 GMT), lighting up the predawn sky over its Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The successful liftoff came after two scrubbed launch attempts earlier this week due to high winds and boats inside the launch range restriction zone offshore.

“Things went absolutely perfect today,” NASA launch manager Omar Baez said after the JPSS-1 launch. “The nation’s got another wonderful weather asset up in space.” [The JPSS-1 Weather Satellite’s Mission in Pictures].

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Yes I agree.very good resource for this job!

In our efforts to understand the Universe, we’re getting greedy, making more observations than we know what to do with. Satellites beam down hundreds of terabytes of information each year, and one telescope under construction in Chile will produce 15 terabytes of pictures of space every night. It’s impossible for humans to sift through it all. As astronomer Carlo Enrico Petrillo told The Verge: “Looking at images of galaxies is the most romantic part of our job. The problem is staying focused.” That’s why Petrillo trained an AI program to do the looking for him. Petrillo and his colleagues…

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As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, China has built the world’s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose.

Last January, the Chinese Academy of Sciences invited Liu Cixin, China’s preeminent science-fiction writer, to visit its new state-of-the-art radio dish in the country’s southwest. Almost twice as wide as the dish at America’s Arecibo Observatory, in the Puerto Rican jungle, the new Chinese dish is the largest in the world, if not the universe. Though it is sensitive enough to detect spy satellites even when they’re not broadcasting, its main uses will be scientific, including an unusual one: The dish is Earth’s first flagship observatory custom-built to listen for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence. If such a sign comes down from the heavens during the next decade, China may well hear it first.

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