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India ready for own space mission: K Radhakrishnan, former Isro

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The author has posted comments on this articleTNN | Feb 22, 2015, 02.57AM IST

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Calling human space flight the next logical step, he said the mission is targeting a weeklong journey.

"Human space flight is in our plans. In 2006-07 a feasibility study began on the capability of India to launch a human space flight. The spacecraft will travel 275 to 400 million kilometres around the earth for a week and on its return will launch in the ocean. We found it is feasible," Radhakrishnan told the D D Kosambi Festival of Ideas.

He added that constructing a spacecraft reliable enough to carry humans is the biggest challenge for Isro.

"A vehicle should be such that only one failure in 100 flights can be tolerated. Several things have to be taken care of in the design. If some failure is taking place in the vehicle, we have to know at least nine seconds before so that the crew can be ejected out safely."

He said the GSLV-MK-IIIthe Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle Mk-III, India's largest rocket to dateis suitable for the human space flight mission as its lower section can carry a weight of up to 10 tonnes, which amounts to around 2-3 crew members.

Asked if the country is also working towards a programme that can send humans as tourists to and from Mars, Radhakrishnan indicated that such a plan is far off for the country for now.

Speaking about India's Mars Orbiter Mission, he said ISRO had plan B in place if the onboard liquid engine of Mangalyaan failed to start for the Mars orbit insertion after being in sleep mode for 300 days. "If the main rocket refused to fire, we had plan Bto fire the small thrusters for a very long time. But we didn't have to use plan B."

He said Mangalyaan has now provided a great amount of technology to feed other missions for the country.

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India ready for own space mission: K Radhakrishnan, former Isro

Space travel still big business, despite Virgin mishap

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XCOR will offer suborbital flights that will reach the edge of space, about 100km above the ground.

There are a number of misconceptions about space tourism, the most significant being that it doesn't exist yet.

In fact, it's been around since 2001, when Dennis Tito reportedly stumped up $US20 million ($25.6 million) to tag along on the Russian Federal Space Agency's ISS EP-1 mission. The NASA rocket scientist-turned-entrepreneur spent almost eight days orbiting the earth.

It won't be long until people are saying 'travelling into space is so last year'.

Another widespread misapprehension is that Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is the only company offering extra-terrestrial travel. As we'll get to shortly, there is actually a healthy field of commercial space travel companies developing a diverse range of trips.

An artists' impression of the World View capsule suspended from a balloon at the edge of space. Photo: World View

The good news for aspiring astronauts is that it should soon be possible to travel into space for as little as $75,000. The bad news is the fare will still translate to a minimum of $250 for every minute spent aloft - and that's without even considering the inescapable dangers involved.

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Commercial space travel can be divided into three categories: orbital, suborbital and what might be labelled sub-suborbital.

Space tourist Dennis Tito (left) on the Russian Federal Space Agency's ISS EP-1 mission in 2001. Photo: AP

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Space travel still big business, despite Virgin mishap

Hubble gets best view of circumstellar debris disk distorted by planet

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IMAGE:The 2012 image (bottom) is the most detailed picture to date of a large, edge-on, gas-and-dust disk encircling the 20-million year-old star Beta Pictoris. The 1997 Hubble image (top) shows... view more

Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to take the most detailed edge on picture to date of a large disk of gas and dust encircling the 20 million-year-old star Beta Pictoris.

Beta Pictoris is the only star to date where astronomers have detected an embedded giant planet in a directly-imaged debris disk. The planet, which was discovered in 2009, goes around the star once every 18 to 20 years. This allows scientists to study in a comparably short time how a large planet distorts the massive gas and dust encircling the star. These observations should yield new insights into how planets are born around young stars.

The new visible-light Hubble image traces the disk to within about 650 million miles of the star. The giant planet orbits at 900 million miles, and was directly imaged in infrared light by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope six years ago.

"Some computer simulations predicted a complicated structure for the inner disk due to the gravitational pull by the giant planet. The new images reveal the inner disk and confirm the predicted structures. This finding validates models that will help us to deduce the presence of other exoplanets in other disks," said Daniel Apai of the University of Arizona, Tucson. These structures include a warp in the inner disk caused by the giant planet.

When comparing the latest 2012 images to Hubble images taken in 1997, astronomers find that the disk's dust distribution has barely changed over 15 years despite the fact that the entire structure is orbiting the star like a carousel. This means the disk's structure is smooth and continuous, at least over the interval between the Hubble observations.

In 1984 Beta Pictoris was the very first star discovered to be surrounded by a bright disk of dust and debris. Since then, Beta Pictoris has been an object of intense scrutiny with Hubble and ground-based telescopes.

The disk is easily seen because of its edge-on angle, and is especially bright due to a very large amount of starlight-scattering dust. What's more, Beta Pictoris is 63 light-years away, closer to Earth than most of the other known disk systems.

Though nearly all of the approximately two-dozen known light-scattering circumstellar disks have been viewed by Hubble to date, Beta Pictoris is the first and best example of what a young planetary system looks like.

For one thing, the Beta Pictoris disk is exceptionally dusty. This may be due to recent major collisions among unseen planet and asteroid-sized objects embedded within the disk. In particular, a bright lobe of dust and gas on the southwestern side of the disk may be the result of the pulverization of a Mars-sized object in a giant collision.

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Hubble gets best view of circumstellar debris disk distorted by planet

ORCA prototype ready for the open ocean

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IMAGE:From left to right: Gerhard Meister, Bryan Monosmith and Chuck McClain are shown here with the ORCA prototype, which is a strong contender for a NASA Earth science mission. view more

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Bill Hrybyk

Its name refers to one of the biggest animals in the sea, but ORCA, the Ocean Radiometer for Carbon Assessment instrument, will be observing the smallest.

If selected for a flight mission, ORCA will study microscopic phytoplankton, tiny green plants that float in the upper layer of the ocean and make up the base of the marine food chain.

Conceived in 2001 as the next technological step forward in observing ocean color, the ORCA-development team used funding from Goddard's Internal Research and Development program and NASA's Instrument Incubator Program (IIP) to develop a prototype. Completed in 2014, ORCA now is a contender as the primary instrument on an upcoming Earth science mission.

Should it be chosen, ORCA will take ocean-color monitoring to the next level, helping scientists to more precisely measure marine photosynthesis, which is key to the carbon cycle and the ocean food chain.

Like its predecessors that also measured ocean color, the instrument will observe phytoplankton, which blooms en masse, covering hundreds of square miles of the sea surface at once and leaving a trail that is clearly visible from space. In particular, researchers will observe global changes in ocean color to estimate concentrations of chlorophyll, the pigment plants use for photosynthesis -- the process during which the tiny plants convert energy from the sun and carbon dioxide into organic compounds that support life.

About a fourth of man-made carbon dioxide ends up in the ocean, said Chuck McClain, former ORCA principal investigator with Goddard's Ocean Color Group. "The ocean is a big sink for CO2 and part of that sink involves ocean biology."

ORCA builds on the work Goddard scientists and engineers pioneered in the development of ocean color sensors. Goddard's proof-of-concept -- the Coastal Zone Color Scanner that flew on Nimbus-7 from 1978 to 1986 -- was the first sensor to demonstrate that ocean chlorophyll could be measured from space. NASA's Sea-Viewing Wide Field-of-View Sensor mission, which collected data from 1997 to 2010, was the first flagship mission to routinely observe ocean color for long-term climate research. Currently, researchers employ the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA's Terra and Aqua spacecraft, and the Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite aboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite.

ORCA's Distinguishing Characteristics

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NASA team develops new Ka-band communications system to break through the noise

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IMAGE:In this photo, Huang is holding a test board upon which her Ka-band/microwave design is mounted and bonded. Marrero-Fontanez is on her right. view more

Credit: NASA/W. Hrybyk

The radio frequency band that many NASA missions use to communicate with spacecraft -- S-band -- is getting a bit crowded and noisy, and likely to get more jammed as science missions demand higher and higher data rates.

A team of NASA technologists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, just may have a solution, particularly for potential missions that plan to operate in low-Earth orbit and have limited real estate to accommodate communications gear.

Under two different research and development projects, technologists Mae Huang and Victor Marrero-Fontanez have collaborated to test and verify components of a prototype end-to-end Ka-band space communications system, which promises significantly higher data rates -- a whopping 2.4 gigabits of data per second (Gbps) -- over more traditional S-band systems, which theoretically could achieve data rates of 90 megabits of data per second (Mbps).

Huang is working with Goddard's Jeffrey Jaso -- a pioneer in Ka-Band communications -- to develop a Ka-band transmitter. Marrero-Fontanez, meanwhile, is designing Ka-band antennas to receive the Ka-band signals. Huang and Marrero-Fontanez plan to assemble a prototype in 2015.

Huang also will be delivering an engineering test unit of her transmitter to a Goddard team that is considering the technology's use on the proposed Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). WFIRST, a next-generation observatory proposed for launch in the mid-2020s. WFIRST would carry out wide-field imaging and slitless spectroscopic surveys of the near-infrared sky, with an emphasis on studying dark energy and exoplanets. Due to its heavy data-rate requirements, the project provided Huang with some funding to advance her technology, she said.

WFIRST isn't the only mission looking for a compact, low-power, end-to-end system. Future Earth-observing missions also are expected to generate higher and higher data rates that could overwhelm the S-band allocations that are shared by space missions using NASA's Near-Earth Network and Deep Space Network and Federal and commercial operations.

"In a sense it's like rush-hour traffic. When you start your morning commute, you may notice fewer cars, but before you know it, you're in stop-and-go traffic as more cars merge onto the highway. The world's frequency bands are beginning to look a lot like bumper-to-bumper traffic," she said. "Cell phones, streaming video, and data communications are all placing big strains on available bandwidth. Meanwhile, commercial businesses are putting pressure on the government to free up other bands, pushing more Federal operations into the S-band that NASA uses. Couple that with NASA's expected need to transmit and receive greater and greater amounts of mission data, something will have to give."

Although NASA has had the Ka-band allocation for years and has used the frequency on past missions, the band has remained underused for a variety of reasons, mainly because of limited technology development, perceived technical challenges, among other things," Marrero-Fontanez said. "However, NASA has always had a strong interest in using this frequency allocation," he added, particularly because it can significantly increase data throughput by a factor of more than 100 as compared with S-band.

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NASA team develops new Ka-band communications system to break through the noise

From the International Space Station, Astronauts Talk Beyonce's Grammy Snub, Alien Life

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The last few years have seen a rekindling of imagination and interest in space exploration and the loopy fundamentals of our understanding of the universe, from the mind-bending Interstellar to Neil deGrasse Tyson's Seth MacFarlane-assisted reboot of Cosmos.

According to rough estimates, 108 billion people in total have walked the Earth since we emerged from the murk of unconsciousness 200,000 years ago. Of those 108 billion, only 547 have been blasted off of our comfortable rock to explore, gingerly, the cold vastness that we float amidst and to conduct experiments (and be living experiments themselves...) that will help us explore ever further.

Billboard had the honor of speaking to Colonel Terry Virts and Commander Butch Wilmore, two astronauts currently aboard the International Space Station, orbiting the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour. These are people confronted every moment with the majesty of the heavens and the ego-destroying scale of the Earth, in relief against the cosmos.

With such a holistic worldview, what better time to ask whether or not Beyonce got robbed at the Grammys, and what music they prefer while changing the world? Watch the highlights right here, and read our full transcript below.

You guys actually had to deal with the "desert island disc" question -- so what were your "vastness of space" discs?

Terry Virts: The question is what music did we bring, is that the question? I brought a lot of different kinds of music. I have a lot of contemporary country music like Brandon Heath, Casting Crowns, I've got some pop and some dance music that I use when I work out. I brought some country music, I got come classical stuff that I just chill out to. I really like a lot of different kinds of music and it depends on what mood I'm in and what I'm doing. Barry "Butch" Wilmore: Yeah I'm about the same, I've got some contemporary Christian some mercy me and that type of stuff. I also really like the big band kind of movie score music with Audiomachine and Thomas Bergersen and that type of genre as well. I listen to a lot of that. Do you guys ever fight over who gets to pick the music? Virts: No, we haven't. [Laughs] I actually like his music, and he seems to like mine too.

Courtesy of Nasa

Who would you say has the best taste in music? For some reason my guess was Elena [Serova, a Russian astronaut on the same mission]. Yeah that's a good guess. Her and Samantha [Cristoforetti, an Italian astronaut also on the mission], they've both got very good taste in music. If you could pick on artist live or dead to send into space -- either to learn from the experience or just to entertain you -- who would it be? Virts: I would send Brandon Heath. He's a good friend of mine; he's a contemporary Christian artist. He was actually at my space shuttle launch -- he came to Russia to Kazakhstan for my launch a few months ago. He wrote a song after my shuttle launch which was kind of inspired by that. It would be really cool to have him up there, somebody who's an artist, not just a fighter pilot like me and butch are, someone who could communicate the wonder of space flight, I think that would be really cool. Wilmore: I honestly could not choose one. There's so many that I enjoy, and it would be narrowing it too narrow to pick one. I can't do it. Piggybacking off what you just said, how are you relieved that Chris Hatfield and his guitar aren't there anymore? Virts: Oh we've heard Chris play many times -- he's quite good. And he's made up some songs that are quite humorous as well. We kind of enjoy that. It's not bad.

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From the International Space Station, Astronauts Talk Beyonce's Grammy Snub, Alien Life

Space to Grow

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Science and politics have both benefited from humanitys journey into space. And we really might just be getting started

Credit: almir1968/Thinkstock

Editor's note: The following is the introduction to the February 2015 issue of Scientific American Classics: Conquering Space.

I was eight years old when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. As Apollo 11 touched down on that gray, cratered surface, I was already dreaming of following those astronauts into space. The moon missions made meand millions of others around the worldfeel as though we could do anything, go anywhere.

Twenty-five years after that first moon landing, I was flying onboard the space shuttle Columbia on a 15-day mission during which we conducted some 80 experiments in microgravity.

Space travel was unlike anything I could have imagined when I was a boy. It remained fantastic even after two more shuttle flights, a Soyuz flight and six months on the International Space Station (ISS).

I remember taking a space walk on the ISS. There I was, wrench in hand, tightening bolts on a new module. It was such a mundane task. But when I looked in one direction, there was Earth floating in vivid blues and greens. In the other direction, I could see the blackest black conceivable, punctured by unwavering pinpoints of starshine. It was intense and surreal.

You might have heard about a transformation that can occur when someone first sees Earth from spacehow it becomes harder to think about my country or my people and harder not to think about our planet.

I can tell you, that transformation is real.

I came home with a different sense of our world. And I would wager that every single one of the 500-plus men and women who have traveled into space came home transformed as well. It is one of the reasons why I continue to believe that we need to keep sending humans into space as well as robots. The results are tangible: I have seen firsthand how projects such as the ISS can foster cooperation among countries and cultures that otherwise might find it easier to be enemies.

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Space to Grow

ESAs wingless space plane successfully performed its first test flight

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Having successfully landed a space probe on comet 67P/ChuryumovGerasimenko, the European Space Agency (ESA) is turning its attention closer to home. Today, the ESA launched its new space plane on its very first suborbital test flight. While the flight was only projected to last around 100 minutes, the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV) flew almost completely around the planet and reached a maximum altitude of 256 miles (412 kilometres). Not bad for a plane without any wings.

The fully autonomous IXV looks a bit like a smaller, stubby Space Shuttle with the wings sheared off. Instead of relying on wings for lift, it has a full body-lifting design and a pair of flaps toward the rear of the craft for steering in the atmosphere. Its five meters long and has a wingspan (well, width) of 2.2 meters. The underside is covered in protective carbon fiber panels woven into a ceramic matrix. One of the main goals of this test launch is to monitor the performance of these panels during reentry with an array of 300 sensors.

Getting a handle on how the craft performs on reentry is crucial because the IXV will eventually form the heart of Europes planned Program for a Reusable In-Orbit Demonstrator for Europe (PRIDE) system. The space plane would be launched into low-Earth orbit to deposit a satellite or other payload, then descend into the atmosphere for landing on a standard runway. SpaceX is planning a reusable launch system as well, but even its first stage rocket would come back down and land under its own power.

The IXV test began with a launch from French Guiana aboard a Vega rocket. This is a relatively new rocket design with only three launches under its belt. The IXV was planned to separate from the Vega launch vehicle 18 minutes after liftoff at an altitude of 333 kilometers, but the IXV will continue upward in an arc to the maximum altitude of 412 kilometers.

The IXV then flew over the Atlantic Ocean, Europe, and Asia before landing somewhat softly in the Pacific ocean. As the space plane descended, it picked up a tremendous amount of speed, traveling at about 7.5 km/s by the time it reached 120 kilometers above the surface. Thats a fair approximation of reentry speed when coming in from orbit, and should be a good test of the heat tolerance. This was basically the entire point of the test get the IXV up high enough that it falls into the atmosphere at reentry speeds.

It was recovered by a ship after the mission ended, but future versions will obviously shoot for a runway landing. The splashdown is merely a safety precaution for this first flight. The reentry phase of the mission happened entirely over open water, just in case.Check out the launch replay below:

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ESAs wingless space plane successfully performed its first test flight

JAW-DROPPING FIND Astronaut's spacesuit turns up in thrift shop for $40

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File photo. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield (R) attends a news conference behind a glass wall at the Baikonur cosmodrome Dec. 18, 2012.(REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov)

Remember that astronaut who sang David Bowie's "Space Oddity" on the International Space Station? Chris Hadfield is making headlines againor rather, his flight suit is. Somehow the blue outfit ended up in a Toronto thrift store, CBC reports.

"I thought, wow, what is a flight suit like that doing up there?" says Dr. Julielynn Wong. When she saw the "Chris Hadfield" badge on the jumpsuit, "My jaw just dropped," she says.

She bought the suit for a mere $40. To make the find even more incredible, Wong, who studied space medicine, actually knows Hadfield, ABC News reports: "I trained with him; we actually had lunch," she says.

She contacted him on Facebook and was able to confirm the suit's identity with a photo and some detailed information. So how did it end up in a thrift store? The former ISS commander himself doesn't know, telling Wong it's "a mystery to me." He's "had many flight suits over the years," Wong tells ABC.

"It's possible that it inadvertently got placed in a donations bag when he moved back to Canada after living abroad for 20 years." Now, she plans to use it in lectures she gives on space supplies.

"This way, the flight suit is much more inspiring for the next generation of space pioneers and innovators," she says. (Click to watch Hadfield's version of "Space Oddity.")

This article originally appeared on Newser: 'Space Oddity' Astronaut's Suit Turns Up in Thrift Shop

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JAW-DROPPING FIND Astronaut's spacesuit turns up in thrift shop for $40

U.S. astronauts make renovations to ISS for space taxis

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WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 (UPI) -- Two U.S. astronauts took the first of three spacewalks outside the International Space Station today to create parking spots for so-called space taxis that will ferry crew to and from the station.

Station commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore, 52, and flight engineer Terry Virts, 47, started the spacewalk shortly before 8 a.m. ET for the 6 1/2 hour venture. This is the first of three spacewalks in the next eight days to install wiring for two docking mechanisms for crewed commercial capsules built by Boeing and Space X. It is the first major overhaul of the station since it was completed in 2011.

"We're doing a lot of reconfiguration this year," Kenneth Todd, NASA's International Space Station operations integration manager, said earlier this week. "We are really trying to take the station into this next phase in support of the commercial industries and providers."

The astronauts worked on Saturday to install electrical wiring, new antennas and cables at the station's Harmony module in preparation for the Boeing-built International Docking Adapters. The IDAs will allow the Boeing and Space X spacecraft to dock at the top and front of Harmony beginning in 2017. NASA is hoping to end its dependance on Russia for rides to the ISS since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.

Wilmore and Virts are expected to continue the work on Wednesday and March 1.

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Fancy a Balloon Trip to the Edge of Space?

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World View's successful test of a high-altitude parafoil brings the dream closer to reality.

Fancy a trip to the edge of space in a high-altitude balloon? World View and United Parachute Technologies (UPT) brought that dream one step closer to reality on Friday with the successful flight of a parafoil from a record-breaking height of 102,200 feet.

World View aims to one day take passengers to dizzying heights in hot air balloons, making Friday's parafoil test flight a major milestone for the company. The plan is to begin near-space flights in a balloon and then use a parafoil for "easing passengers gently down to Earth from the stratosphere."

The test flight above Arizona also marked the official start of World View's partnership with UPT, which co-designed the parafoil technology with Performance Designs. The parafoil system tested this week will be used for unmanned research flights and passenger trips to the edge of space.

"The accomplishments of this flight further our two main objectives of manned spaceflight and advancing research," World View chief technology officer Taber MacCallum said in a statement. "The successful flight of the parafoil at this altitude brings us closer to flying private citizens safely to the edge of space and also allows us to continue our research and education program by providing safe access to the near-space environment."

The uncrewed test flight carried a payload of experiments. Montana State University researchers tested a computer system "designed to achieve increased reliability in extreme environments" and video equipment which is to be used to capture a 2017 solar eclipse. Researchers from the University of North Florida supplied a nanocrystalline gas sensor array for measuring the stratosphere's ozone gas profile.

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Kerbal Space Program and Payday 2 – Friday Night Live: QnA, Explosions And More! – Video

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Kerbal Space Program and Payday 2 - Friday Night Live: QnA, Explosions And More!
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Dawn Spacecraft Captured Into Orbit Around Ceres, The Largest Object in the Main Asteroid Belt

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Orbital ATK, Inc. (NYSE: OA), a global leader in aerospace and defense technologies, today announced a major milestone in a deep space science mission aimed at uncovering the mysteries of the solar system. NASA's Dawn spacecraft has arrived at and is now orbiting the dwarf planet Ceres. Dawn, designed and built by Orbital ATK, accomplished this feat with the innovative use of solar electric ion propulsion, the world's most advanced and efficient space propulsion technology. Ceres, located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is the largest unexplored world of the inner solar system. Dawn, now in its eighth year of a nearly nine-year-long mission, has already advanced human understanding of planetary formation by giant leaps with the data it has returned to date.

"Orbital ATK's flight-proven technology and extensive experience played key roles in integrating the ion propulsion system provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory," said Frank Culbertson, Orbital ATK Space Systems Group president. "This technology is revolutionizing solar system exploration and made Dawn's historic journey to two planetary bodies possible. We were committed to developing this spacecraft in an innovative way that was reliable and affordable. To see the Dawn flight system enter into this complex science phase fully functional is quite a testament to the design and workmanship."

Launched in September 2007, Dawn has been traveling toward Ceres since its September 2012 departure from Vesta, the second most massive object in the main asteroid belt and the first destination on this two-stop planetary mission. The spacecraft spent nearly 14 months orbiting and mapping Vesta, returning more than 30,000 images and other measurements about the protoplanet.

Since January, Dawn has returned increasingly sharper images of Ceres, showing a heavily cratered surface with multiple intriguing, bright features. Dawn's image quality now exceeds the best available from the ground-based W.M. Keck Observatory and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. In its lowest science orbit around Ceres, Dawn will return images more than 800 times the resolution of Hubble. The images will provide mission scientists with data to understand how Ceres evolved so differently from Vesta.

"This is the world's first chance to get an up close look at two bodies which date back to the formation of the solar system, but evolved very differently," said Mike Miller, Orbital ATK vice president, Science and Environmental Programs, Civil and Defense Division. "Ceres is thought to contain substantial water, perhaps up to 27 percent of its mass, a quantity roughly equivalent to the fresh water on Earth. It's expected to be mostly in the form of ice, but there may also be a liquid subsurface ocean. The Dawn detailed image and compositional data will help us understand this very exciting prospect."

Orbital ATK's Space Systems Group designed and built Dawn over the course of four-and-a-half years at the company's facilities in Dulles, Va. Measuring 65 feet in length and weighing nearly 2,700 pounds at launch, Dawn melded features of Orbital ATK's earth science and commercial communication spacecraft technology.

Dawn's mission is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK, Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team.

About Orbital ATK

Orbital ATK is a global leader in aerospace and defense technologies. The company designs, builds and delivers space, defense and aviation systems for customers around the world, both as a prime contractor and merchant supplier. Its main products include launch vehicles and related propulsion systems; missile products, subsystems and defense electronics; precision weapons, armament systems and ammunition; satellites and associated space components and services; and advanced aerospace structures. Headquartered in Dulles, Virginia, Orbital ATK employs more than 12,000 people in 20 states across the U.S. and in several international locations. For more information, visit http://www.orbitalatk.com.

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Dawn Spacecraft Captured Into Orbit Around Ceres, The Largest Object in the Main Asteroid Belt


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