The United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The launch was delayed by an hour due to a ground hydraulics issue.
The public viewing area was closed to the public due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Category: space – Page 913
Astronauts experience these common, Earth-like symptoms in space
But as we prepare for longer journeys that will return humans to the Moon and possibly send them to Mars within the near future, scientists are working hard to measure the effects of spaceflight on the human body in order to help mitigate them for those longer missions.
Astronomers Just Created The Most Powerful Artificial Star in The Sky
To see distant stars and planets, astronomers must first calibrate their equipment to compensate for Earth’s blurry atmosphere — and that’s a whole lot easier said than done. In fact, to pull it off, they have to actually create artificial stars, dubbed ‘guide stars’, using really, really big lasers.
Now, researchers from the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Paranal Observatory in Chile have created the most powerful one to date — a system they call the Four Laser Guide Star Facility (4LGSF).
The new system, which has been tested since last September, works by shooting four 29.9-centimetre (11.8-inch), 22-watt beams into the atmosphere to basically mark the sky.
This is why Elon Musk wanted to avoid Parachutes
By Bill D’Zio Originally published on www.westeastspace.com
Parachutes are plaguing space programs. SpaceX doesn’t like Parachutes. They are difficult to design, hard to package, and easy to damage. The larger the mass of the spacecraft, the more effort to slow down. Larger, more efficient, complex parachute systems are needed. Several failures have hit the industry over the last few years, including SpaceX Crew Dragon, ESA ExoMars, Boeing CST-100, and the NASA Orion to name a few.
How do parachutes work and why are they hard?
The idea of a parachute is simple. All falling objects fall the same when under the same conditions… that is so long as no outside force is exerted on it. So two objects dropped from the same altitude, one a feather and hammer will fall equally. Don’t believe me? NASA tested it on the Moon. During Apollo 15 moon walk, Commander David Scott performed a live demonstration for the television cameras. Commander Scott did the Apollo 15 Hammer and Feather test. He held out a geologic hammer and a Falcon feather and dropped them at the same time. Because there is not an atmosphere on the Moon, they were essentially in a vacuum. With no air resistance force, the feather fell at the same rate as the hammer. Ironically, Apollo 15 had a second demonstration of falling objects when one of the parachutes failed to function as planned.
COVID19 Impact Part II – SpaceX , SLS and NASA
By Bill D’Zio March 25, 2020
SpaceX Crew Dragon on approach Credit NASAPart 2 of the Life in Space with COVID19 we will delve into Crew demo-2 where NASA and SpaceX are planning a launch within two months. There are a lot of pre-launch milestones and activities to cover to ensure a safe flight for the Astronauts. If anything goes wrong, there are lives at stake. Now NASA and SpaceX have to contend with another potential setback, COVID19 pandemic. (Click here for part I)
The Dipole Drive: A New Concept for Space Propulsion
Electric dipole propulsion bigsmile
One reason we look so often at sail technologies in these pages is that they offer us ways of leaving the propellant behind. But even as we enter the early days of solar sail experimentation in space, we look toward ways of improving them by somehow getting around their need for solar photons. Robert Zubrin’s work with Dana Andrews has helped us see how so-called magnetic sails (magsails) could be used to decelerate a craft as it moved into a destination system. Now Zubrin looks at moving beyond both this and solar wind-deflecting electric sails toward an ingenious propellantless solution. Zubrin presented the work at last April’s Breakthrough Discuss meeting, and today he fills us in on its principles and advantages. Read on for a look at a form of enhanced electric sail the author has christened the Dipole Drive.
by Robert Zubrin
The dipole drive is a new propulsion system which uses ambient space plasma as propellant, thereby avoiding the need to carry any of its own. The dipole drive remedies two shortcomings of the classic electric sail in that it can generate thrust within planetary magnetospheres and it can generate thrust in any direction in interplanetary space. In contrast to the single positively charged screen employed by the electric sail, the dipole drive is constructed from two parallel screens, one charged positive, the other negative, creating an electric field between them with no significant field outside. Ambient solar wind protons entering the dipole drive field from the negative screen side are reflected out, with the angle of incidence equaling the angle of reflection, thereby providing lift if the screen is placed at an angle to the plasma wind. If the screen is perpendicular to the solar wind, only drag is generated but the amount is double that of electric sail of the same area.