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Category: satellites – Page 90

In the wee morning hours of Tuesday (Nov. 16), the seven-person crew of the International Space Station (ISS) awoke in alarm. A Russian missile test had just blasted a decommissioned Kosmos spy satellite into more than 1,500 pieces of space debris — some of which were close enough to the ISS to warrant emergency collision preparations.

The four Americans, one German and two Russian cosmonauts aboard the station were told to shelter in the transport capsules that brought them to the ISS, while the station passed by the debris cloud several times over the following hours, according to NASA.

Ultimately, Tuesday ended without any reported damage or injury aboard the ISS, but the crew’s precautions — and the NASA administrator’s stern response to Russia — were far from an overreaction. Space debris like the kind created in the Kosmos break-up can travel at more than 17,500 mph (28,000 km/h), NASA says — and even a scrap of metal the size of a pea can become a potentially deadly missile in low-Earth orbit. (For comparison, a typical bullet discharged from an AR-15 rifle travels at just over 2,200 mph, or 3,500 km/h).

A Russian missile test blasted a Kosmos spy satellite into more than 1,500 pieces of space debris.

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“We know of no asteroids that are coming in to hit the Earth,” Rivkin emphasizes. DART, he says, is part of a multi-pronged effort to examine the asteroid collision problem. “Asteroid impacts are really the only natural disaster that humanity can see coming years or decades in advance and do anything about.”

NASA calls DART its “First Planetary Defense Test Mission.” Rivkin is the DART investigation team lead at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, which is running the experiment for NASA.

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Andy Rivkin remembers going to the arcade in the early 1980s to play the iconic video game “Asteroids.” Later this month, the team he leads is scheduled to launch a satellite aimed at an asteroid 7 million miles away to prove that Earthlings can save themselves from an asteroid impact by shooting first, Atari-style.

The launch window for NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission opens next week. DART is an experiment to see if by crashing a spacecraft directly into an asteroid, the asteroid can be nudged off its trajectory. If intercepted and struck far enough away, even a slight alteration in the path of an asteroid could cause it to miss Earth, avoiding a potentially catastrophic impact.

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The United States said Monday it was investigating a “debris-generating event in outer space” after astronauts on the International Space Station were forced to prepare for a possible evacuation. It came amid unconfirmed reports that Russia had carried out an anti-satellite weapon (ASAT) test…

“US Space Command is aware of a debris-generating event in outer space. We are actively working to characterize the debris field and will continue to ensure all space-faring nations have the information necessary to maneuver satellites if impacted,” the agency said.

“We are also in the process of working with… the State Department and NASA, concerning these reports and will provide an update in the near future.”

NASA has not yet commented, but its Russian counterpart Roscomos, downplayed the incident.

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SpaceX shot 53 Starlink internet satellites into orbit on top of a Falcon 9 rocket Saturday from foggy Cape Canaveral, commencing a new phase of deploying the global broadband network with the first launch into a new “shell” some 335 miles above Earth.

The mission was the 31st Falcon 9 launch in two-and-a-half years dedicated to carrying satellites for the Starlink internet network, bringing the total number of Starlink spacecraft launched to 1,844.

Veiled in fog, the Falcon 9 lifted off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral at 7:19:30 a.m. EST (1219:30 GMT) Saturday. Nine Merlin main engines throttled up to produce 1.7 million pounds of thrust, powering the launcher off the pad and quickly through the ground-hugging fog layer.

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China is building a specially designed ship for launching rockets into space from the seas in an effort to boost its capacity to launch satellites and recover rocket stages.

The 533 feet (162.5 meters) long, 131 feet (40 meters) wide “New-type rocket launching vessel” is being constructed for use with the new China Oriental Spaceport at Haiyang, Shandong province on the Eastern coast.

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In a nutshell: In the 21st century, there’s a new space race, primarily between Tesla (SpaceX) and Amazon (Blue Origin). Both are concentrating on traditional methods of launching satellites into space—namely, big rockets. However, a small space startup called SpinLaunch is developing a cheaper and environmentally cleaner way of launching satellites.

SpinLaunch is using a gigantic centrifuge to shoot stuff into space. By “stuff,” we mean things that can withstand the G-force created by being spun at 5,000 miles per hour (over 10,000 Gs), which is a category of stuff that does not yet include satellites. However, it did launch a missile-like projectile tens of thousands of feet into the air last month, using only 20 percent of the accelerator’s power.

The design is relatively simple. A carbon fiber tether holds the projectile inside a span vacuum chamber as it spins up to speed. Once the centrifuge has reached the desired velocity, the launch vehicle is released out a tube taller than the Statue of Liberty (50.4 meters). It is not unlike launching your friends off the merry-go-round when you were a kid. A more mature and controlled application of the principle would be the hammer throw event in the Olympics.

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It is interesting to see Starlink evolve and move towards massive expansion. Currently, Starlink has only launched 64 laser satellites but this number should grow dramatically in the coming months. (All future Starlink satellites will include lasers.)

Their new Starlink dish will be a lot cheaper to produce which is important as originally the first Starlink dish cost $3,000 to make and SpaceX was selling it for $500. It has already gone through multiple generations and this rectangular dish should cost around $650 to make. (With the original dish, if they had sold a million of them, they would have lost 2.5 billion dollars which would have been painful.)

SpaceX has unveiled a new Starlink satellite dish, sporting a new rectangular design for customers in the United States. The company’s website is showing the new design for visitors showing U.S. IP addresses.

Canadian visitors, for example, are still seeing the old design, as the new dish is not available outside the U.S. yet.

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O,.o.

A near-Earth asteroid known as Kamo‘oalewa might be made of a stray chunk of the Moon, scientists have said.

Kamo‘oalewa is one of a mysterious and little-understood set of objects called quasi-satellites. It is an asteroid that orbits around the Sun but remains close to the Earth.

As with all objects of that type, Kamo‘oalewa is difficult to observe. Though it is relatively close to the Earth – it comes as close as 9 million mile away – it is also very faint, about 4 million times darker than the faintest star humans can see in the sky.

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Sandia National Laboratories is developing an avocado-sized vacuum chamber made out of titanium and sapphire that could one day use quantum mechanical sensors to provide GPS-grade navigation without the need for satellites.

In only a few short decades, GPS has gone from a military technology to finding so many everyday applications that modern society is now dependent on it. However, GPS is not always available in places like high polar latitudes or in deep mountain valleys, and it can be jammed or spoofed.

The vulnerability of GPS and similar systems lies in their dependence on constellations of satellites that orbit the Earth. These satellites emit time-stamped signals that are synced to atomic clocks. Using these signals, a GPS receiver in something as small as a wristwatch can use the Doppler effect on the satellite signals as they pass overhead to make an extremely precise fix on the receiver’s position and velocity. If these signals are interrupted or corrupted, the system fails.

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