KERBAL SPACE PROGRAM (With Misan) Part 12: Safe and sound
Kerbal Space Program is a space flight simulator developed by Squad currently in public beta development for release on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. You can get the game on steam.
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KERBAL SPACE PROGRAM (With Misan) Part 12: Safe and sound - Video
Recovering from one New Year's Eve can be bad enough. Imagine experiencing 16 of them all in one day. Such is the case for the crew on the International Space Station, which is in orbit about 220 miles above Earth. In one orbital day, as the space station zooms around the globe at 17,500 miles an hour, the crew will pass 16 times over a part of the planet where the clock is striking midnight. No need for a designated driver, however: Cmdr. Barry "Butch" Wilmore and his crew, which includes NASA's Terry Virts, Russian cosmonauts Elena Serova, Alexander Samoukutyaev and Anton Shkaplerov, and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, plan to celebrate with fruit juice toasts, NASA says. The new year starts officially for the crew at 7 p.m. EST Jan. 31, which is midnight by the Universal Time Clock (UTC), also known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). In a prerecorded video greeting from space, Wilmore and Virts sent best wishes from space. "Happy New Year's and a safe New Year's down there, and we'll enjoy our 16 New Year's Eve celebrations here on board the space station," Virts said.
It's not all fun and games. The crew spent much of New Year's Eve day working on a variety of experiments and preparing for the arrival of the next cargo supply ship. Launch of the Dragon resupply vehicle on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is schedule for 6:20 a.m. EST Tuesday.
First published December 31 2014, 12:26 PM
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Good news for all you couch potatoes out there: You don't have to be in peak physical condition to make it to space.
The vast majority of people who want to fly to suborbital space and back are medically fit to do so, according to researchers at Virgin Galactic, which is developing the commercial spaceliner SpaceShipTwo.
"We have encountered only one or two [customers] for whom we have recommended that they do not take a flight with us," Virgin Galactic Chief Medical Officer James Vanderploeg said during a talk at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS), which was held in October in Las Cruces, New Mexico. [Rise of SpaceShipTwo: The Test Flight Photos]
Vanderploeg's ISPCS talk came before the tragiccrash of SpaceShipTwoduring an Oct. 31 test flight, which killed co-pilot Mike Alsbury and injured pilot Peter Siebold. But in an email exchange following the accident, Vanderploeg told Space.com that he did not have anything to add or change from his earlier comments.
SpaceShipTwo is designed to be lofted to an altitude of 50,000 feet (15,000 meters) by a carrier plane called WhiteKnightTwo. At that point, the two-pilot, six-passenger spaceliner will be released and will fire its onboard rocket motor for about 1 minute to zoom up to an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers).
SpaceShipTwo will accelerate to approximately 3.5 times the speed of sound, producing moderate G-forces on pilots and passengers. As the vehicle coasts up into space, passengers can leave their seats to experience weightlessness and view the Earth and the blackness of space for several minutes from the space plane's 12 large cabin windows.
The passengers will then strap back into their seats for the ride home, which will end with an airplane-style tarmac touchdown.
Virgin Galactic isn't the only company selling seats on suborbital flights. XCOR Aerospace is developing a one-passenger space plane called Lynx; tickets currently go for around $100,000.
The price of a ticket for a ride aboard SpaceShipTwo is currently $250,000. Hundreds of people have put down a deposit to reserve a seat.
Vanderploeg and his team have been researching the health requirements for these customers. For example, Virgin Galactic has collected data from a number of future passengers during centrifuge training runs, which began with 77 participants in 2007 to 2008 at the National Aerospace Training and Research (NASTAR) Center in Southampton, Pennsylvania.
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ON AN ISLAND - DAVID GILMOUR (EARTH JOURNEY)
A visual description of our Isolation and likeness to an island that our planet has.
By: Space Flight
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Low altitude orbit achieved
Space flight is crucial to wilderness survival.
By: Adam Accivatti
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The World is Educated about Ozone Depletion - Paul Newman
Dr. Paul Newman, Chief Scientist for Atmospheres, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
By: NASA Goddard Science
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The World is Educated about Ozone Depletion - Paul Newman - Video
Really, did you have any doubt about which space story would clinch the #1 spot? The touch-down of the Rosetta missions Philae lander on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Nov. 12 was nothing short of epic. After catching up with the icy cometary mass, Rosetta carried out a series of maneuvers that set the mission up for its dramatic attempt to make a soft landing on a comet for the first time in history. But Rosetta wouldnt be landing on the comet itself. Attached to the spacecraft was Philae, a small lander. With the help of ESAs expertise on social media and continuous blog updates, Philae quickly captivated the world as the little lander that was about to conquer a massive comet. And conquer it did, but not before one of the most dramatic landings in space history. After analyzing Philaes telemetry, mission scientists realized that Philae had bounced three times before coming to rest against the slope of a crater rim. Although the lander had enough batter power for a couple of days, for the lander to survive any longer, its solar panels needed to be correctly positioned so they could charge. Sadly, Philae was caught in a shadow and after several attempts to optimize the sunlight across the solar array, Philaes batteries drained and the lander dropped into hibernation. However, Philae feverishly collected as much data as it could before power loss and scientists will be busy for some time understanding the nature of Comet 67P, the first comet a robot has ever grabbed.
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Rosetta's Landing: When Philae Grabbed a Comet
Rosetta's Philae Bounced on Landing, But Seems Healthy
Philae's Batteries Have Drained, Comet Lander Sleeps
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Taking time off for the holidays, the crew of the International Space Station is preparing for a busy start to the new year, with the arrival of a SpaceX cargo ship next week and three U.S. spacewalks in February to begin work needed to add docking ports for new commercial crew ships.
Space station commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore celebrated his 52nd birthday Monday, enjoying gifts from his crewmates, including a bag of Reese's Pieces candy from flight engineer Terry Virts, and congratulatory notes from flight controllers around the world.
While there is no champagne on board to celebrate the New Year holiday in space, "we'll break open a grapefruit juice or tropical punch, whatever we have on board," Wilmore told CBS News Tuesday in a space-to-ground interview.
"And the birthday yesterday was very special, my crewmates made it very special for me, mission controls across the globe made it very special, they actually sang to me, sent me some cards, so it was a great day. Great and very memorable."
Floating in the U.S. segment of the station, joined by European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, Wilmore said his New Year's resolution was to pay more attention to experiment instructions and procedures to avoid mistakes.
"One thing you think about constantly is, don't let me mess this up!" he said. "Because there are people on the ground who put a lot of effort into getting it up here and we don't want to be the ones to mess it up. So my New Year's resolution is to try to pay better attention to every step of every procedure so we get it all right."
Launched Sept. 25, Wilmore, a shuttle veteran, has spent the past three-and-a-half months aboard the station. Cristoforetti, making her first spaceflight, arrived Nov. 23. She said her New Year's resolution is to spend more time shooting video to share the experience of spaceflight with the public.
One aspect of spaceflight that is difficult to share is the sensation of weightlessness. While she expected spectacular views of Earth, Cristoforetti said living in microgravity was much more thrilling than she anticipated.
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Astronaut Chris Hadfield provides some end of year motivation about invention, innovation and the spirit of being optimistic about the year ahead...
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Space station crew enjoys holidays, preps for busy start to 2015
Rocky planets like Earth start out as microscopic bits of dust tinier than a grain of sand, or so theories predict.
Astronomers using the National Science Foundations (NSF) Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have discovered that filaments of star-forming gas near the Orion Nebula may be brimming with pebble-size particles -- planetary building blocks 100 to 1,000 times larger than the dust grains typically found around protostars. If confirmed, these dense ribbons of rocky material may well represent a new, mid-size class of interstellar particles that could help jump-start planet formation.
"The large dust grains seen by the GBT would suggest that at least some protostars may arise in a more nurturing environment for planets," said Scott Schnee, an astronomer with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Virginia. "After all, if you want to build a house, its best to start with bricks rather than gravel, and something similar can be said for planet formation."
The new GBT observations extend across the northern portion of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, a star-forming region that includes the famed Orion Nebula. The star-forming material in the section studied by the GBT, called OMC-2/3, has condensed into long, dust-rich filaments. The filaments are dotted with many dense knots known as cores. Some of the cores are just starting to coalesce while others have begun to form protostars -- the first early concentrations of dust and gas along the path to star formation. Astronomers speculate that in the next 100,000 to 1 million years, this area will likely evolve into a new star cluster. The OMC-2/3 region is located approximately 1,500 light-years from Earth and is roughly 10 light-years long.
Based on earlier maps of this region made with the IRAM 30 meter radio telescope in Spain, the astronomers expected to find a certain brightness to the dust emission when they observed the filaments at slightly longer wavelengths with the GBT.
Instead, the GBT discovered that the area was shining much brighter than expected in millimeter-wavelength light.
"This means that the material in this region has different properties than would be expected for normal interstellar dust, noted Schnee. In particular, since the particles are more efficient than expected at emitting at millimeter wavelengths, the grains are very likely to be at least a millimeter, and possibly as large as a centimeter across, or roughly the size of a small Lego-style building block."
Though incredibly small compared to even the most modest of asteroids, dust grains on the order of a few millimeters to a centimeter are incredibly large for such young star-forming regions. Due to the unique environment in the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, the researchers propose two intriguing theories for their origin.
The first is that the filaments themselves helped the dust grains grow to such unusual proportions. These regions, compared to molecular clouds in general, have lower temperatures, higher densities, and lower velocities -- all of which would encourage grain growth.
The second scenario is that the rocky particles originally grew inside a previous generation of cores or perhaps even protoplanetary disks. The material could then have escaped back into the surrounding molecular cloud rather than becoming part of the original newly forming star system.
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With Improved Phase Noise and Unmatched Radiation Performance the PE97240 Builds Upon the Successful Space Heritage of Peregrine's PLL Products
SAN DIEGO, Peregrine Semiconductor Corp., founder of RF SOI (silicon on insulator) and pioneer of advanced RF solutions, announces the UltraCMOS PE97240, an integer-N phase-locked loop (PLL) that offers superior phase noise performance for signal precision and frequency stability. Designed for commercial space applications, the PE97240 is radiation tolerant to 100 krad (Si) total ionizing dose (TID) that allows the part to perform for 10 or more years in harsh space conditions. Built on Peregrine's UltraCMOS technology on a sapphire substrate, the PLL is naturally radiation hardened and immune to single-event latch-up (SEL).
"Peregrine has a proud heritage of over 15 years of space-flight PLL products," says Kinana Hussain, senior marketing manager. "Our space customers trust the high reliability of UltraCMOS products, and PE97240 extends our successful PLL product family with improved phase-noise and superior rad-hard performance."
Peregrine's PE97240 Attains Industry-Leading Phase Noise Performance for Space Applications Peregrine's PLL has an integer-N frequency synthesizer that generates multiple output frequencies from a single reference input frequency. This divided down output enables reference and phase detection at lower frequency, and it handles both frequency and phase lock. With PLLs phase noise is an important measure of the signal's spectral purity. Superior phase-noise performance significantly reduces phase jitter and noise, which offers RF engineers high signal precision and solid frequency stability. Phase noise is a product of thermal noise - expressed by the floor figure of merit (FOM(floor)) - and low-frequency flicker noise - expressed by the flicker figure of merit (FOM(flicker)) - within the system. The PE97240 achieves an industry-leading maximum FOM(floor) of -227 dBc/Hz with the 5/6 prescaler and -225 dBc/Hz with the 10/11 prescaler; the PLL also sets the bar with a FOM(flicker) of -265 dBc/Hz with the 5/6 prescaler and -259 dBc/Hz with the 10/11 prescaler.
Features, Packaging, Pricing and Availability Peregrine's UltraCMOS PE97240 is a rad-hard PLL designed for high-reliability space applications. It consists of a dual modulus prescaler, counters, a phase detector and control logic. The component can perform with high reliability due to its 100 krad (Si) TID radiation tolerance. The frequency range is 4 GHz in 5/6 prescaler modulus and 5 GHz in 10/11 prescaler modulus. The PLL has a low power consumption of 75 microamperes at 2.7V, enabling RF engineers to better allocate power resources, and its counter values are programmable through a serial interface or by directly hard-wiring. In addition, the component is immune to single-event latch-up (SEL) due to heavy ions in radioactive environments. Offered in a RoHS compliant, 44-lead, hermetically sealed CQFP package, the PE97240 is available now.
Visit Peregrine's newsroom for a product image and datasheet.
The Peregrine Semiconductor name, logo, and UltraCMOS are registered trademarks of Peregrine Semiconductor Corporation in the U.S.A., and other countries. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.
Editorial Contact: Elizabeth Brown Peregrine Semiconductor Phone: 619.993.4648 pr@psemi.com
Web Site: http://www.psemi.com
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Slipping the Surly Bonds of Kerbin, A New Kerbal Space Program Campaign, Part 3
In the wake of tragedy, we endure and make a great accomplishment for our space program. This is the first step to traveling to distant worlds as we get into actual space flight around Kerbin....
By: Vickriman
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Slipping the Surly Bonds of Kerbin, A New Kerbal Space Program Campaign, Part 3 - Video
Wormhole Attempt #3
Made in Blender 2.72 with a 16K resolution skymap of the Milky Way. Tycho Catalog Skymap courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.
By: Jon Fischer
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DJI Phantom 2 - First Space Flight
First flight.
By: Federico Gemelli
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Faced with the complicated job of putting together the $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope, NASA and lead contractor Northrop Grumman are starting to run practice assembly tests using a "pathfinder" telescope.
The technique was used during the construction of NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which launched in 1999, and was apparently quite successful because the telescope remains scientifically productive today, said Jon Arenberg, James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) chief engineer at Northrop Grumman.
"It helps us do a number of things, obviously how to handle such a large structure, how to attach the mirrors," Arenberg told Space.com. "So this allows us to wring out a 140,000-lb. [63,500 kilograms] stand and robot assembly process." [Photos: Building the James Webb Space Telescope]
"This is an example of practice makes perfect, so we practice, practice, practice so when we get the flight hardware, it goes off as smoothly as possible," he added.
The pathfinder's design is fairly similar to that of the actual JWST, but there are some differences, Arenberg said. For example, the pathfinder lacks two winglike parts on either side of a backplane that holds a large part of the telescope together.
Hardware tests
JWST is the highly anticipated successor to NASA's iconic Hubble Space Telescope. When it's up and running, the infrared-optimized JWST will probe the atmospheres of exoplanets, study the universe's first galaxies and investigate how stars and planets form, among other things, NASA officials say.
But the telescope has received criticism for cost and development overruns. Around the turn of the century, JWST was projected to cost up to $3.5 billion and launch no later than 2011, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report released in 2014.
The coming months will be crucial to the success of JWST, as components are starting to be completed and shipped for testing and assembly.
One major sign of success came in July, when load testing was finished on the observatory's primary mirror backplane support structure, the device that holds the telescope's mirror segments and science instruments. The backplane support was scheduled to be shipped to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland at the end of 2014 to be placed in its clean room and begin receiving mirrors.
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Space fans have a lot to look forward to next year.
Closely watched spacecraft are expected to start pumping out science, whileprivate spaceflightcompanies have a number of launches on the books for 2015. A Mars rover will celebrate its third anniversary chugging along on the Red Planet, and a Japanese spacecraft will have another chance to make it into orbit around Venus. Next year could also mark the return of Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Cygnus spacecraft to the International Space Station after a launch accident in October 2014.
Here are Space.com's major missions to keep an eye out for next year: [The Most Important Spaceflight Stories of 2014]
XCOR Aerospace and the Lynx space plane: Through 2015
XCOR Aerospace the company building the Lynx space plane has been making steady progress with the Lynx for the last few years. The plane is designed to take commercial customers and science payloads on flights to suborbital space. Lynx has room for one pilot and one passenger (as well as scientific experiments) on each flight, which reaches 330,000 feet (100 kilometers) into the air.
SpaceX reusable rocket landing on ocean platform: No earlier than Jan. 6
The private spaceflight company SpaceX is planning to land the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean no earlier than Jan. 6, after launching an uncrewed Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station. This will mark the first time anyone has ever attempted this kind of reusable rocket test, SpaceX representatives have said. SpaceX is also planning three more cargo launches in 2015 under a contract with NASA.
DSCOVR satellite launching to space: No earlier than Jan. 29
The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) is set for launch on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket on Jan. 23. The satellite is designed to monitor solar wind from about 900,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth. The DSCOVR mission is a partnership among NOAA, NASA and the U.S. Air Force, and some version of the mission has been in process for more than 10 years.
Europe's IXV space plane prototype test flight: Feb. 11
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Alcoholic Space Flight (Original Mix)
Alcoholic Space Flight (Original Mix) KnukS 2013 High Chai Released on: 2013-02-18 Auto-generated by YouTube.
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Cousin Silas + musicformessier: Cygnus
https://soundcloud.com/musicformessier https://www.facebook.com/pages/Musicformessier/265098000323339 Download: http://musicformessier.bandcamp.com/album/dreaming-the-i-s-s-ep Photo: ...
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KERBAL SPACE PROGRAM (With Misan) Part 2: Upgrades!
Kerbal Space Program is a space flight simulator developed by Squad currently in public beta development for release on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. You can get the game on steam.
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BANGALORE, India In a two-in-one mission, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully conducted the first experimental flight of itsnext-generation launch vehicle and demonstrated the re-entry and recovery of a prototype crew capsule.
The Dec. 18 maiden flight of theGeosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark 3(GSLV-3) began with a liftoff at 9:30 a.mlocal time from the Satish Dhawan Space Centeron the southeastern coast of India and was over in 20 minutes.
ISRO said in a statement that this "suborbital" experimental mission was intended to test the vehicle performance during the critical atmospheric phase of its flight. The vehicle carried a passive, or nonfunctional, cryogenic upper stage. [See photos from India's space capsule test flight]
The rocket carried a 3,775-kilogram unmanned crew module built by Indian industry. The module, designed to accommodatethree astronauts, separated from the rocket at an altitude of 127 kilometers and, after being slowed by parachutes, splashed down in the Bay of Bengal.
The 42.4-meter tall GSLV-3 is a three-stage vehiclewitha liftoff weight of 630 metric tons. The first stage consists oftwo solid-rocket motors, each with 200 tons of propellant. Its second stage uses two restartable engines, with 110 tons of liquid propellant.
As designed, the cryogenic upper stage of the rocket features a propellant loading of 25 tons of liquid-oxygen and -hydrogen. But in this flight only the first two stages were fired; the cryogenic upper stage was inert. Themissionobjective was to test the first two stages they had never flown before and validate the rockets aerodynamic stability during the ascent phase through the atmosphere.
ISRO said in a statement that the flight aimed "to validate the re-entry technologies envisaged for crew module and enhance the understanding of blunt body re-entry aerodynamics and parachute deployment in cluster configuration." Withthe success the rocket "has moved a step closer to its first developmental flight with the functional cryogenic upper stage."
"It has been a significant day for ISRO," the agency's chairman, Koppilli Radhakrishnan, said in a post-launch speech. "The performance of solid and liquid stage motors and the unmanned crew module was as expected."
Radhakrishnan said the rocket's cryogenic upper stageis still in development and that he is confident the first full-fledged flight will take place in two years. Once ready, he said, the GSLV-3will be able to launch satellites weighing 4 tons and could be used for the Indian manned spaceflight program.
The GSLV-3, indevelopment since 2002, was initially expected to become operational by 2010 or 2011, with its first flight in 2009 or 2010. The demonstrationflight was pushed back several times, one reason being the failure of the home-made cryogenic upper stage during a2010 flight of the current-generation GSLV.
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Space Flight Cosmic Multi Nebulae Looped Background. Stock Footage
"This is a preview video. Download high quality footage at: http://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/33475475?ref=silverstepper More stock media here: http://www.p...
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Space Flight Cosmic Multi Nebulae Looped Background. Stock Footage - Video