Rosetta Mission a Success

Rosetta's last image

On Friday October 2016, the Rosetta spacecraft's historic mission concluded with Rosetta descending to the surface of Comet 67P.

Rosetta was commanded to make a final series of unique images  of its final resting place.

After Rosetta took the final images, the spacecraft mission was described a success.

NASA Has a Near Perfect Launch of the The OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft

      

The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft, started it's mission 7:05pm EDT Thursday September 22nd. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft  is designed to rendezvous with, study, and return a sample of the asteroid Bennu to Earth. Asteroids like Bennu are remnants from the formation of our solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists suspect that asteroids may have been a source of the water and organic molecules for the early Earth and other planetary bodies. 

NASA's first asteroid sampling mission could revolutionize our understanding of the early solar system.

OSIRIS-REx separated from its United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at 8:04 p.m. The solar arrays deployed and are now powering the spacecraft.

For more, please click HERE

The ESA's comet lander Philae is probably dead.

Philae arrived at the surface of comet 67P, (also known as Churyumov-Gerasimenko) in 2014 - delivered there by ESA's Rosetta probe.

Philae and Rosetta communicated for 57 hours after-which Philae became sporadic and finally silent.


ESA has sent a "last-ditch" message to the lander in hopes of triggering a response-the bad news is that it seems to have failed.

click here for complete Wired Article

  

Voyager1's Last Engineer Retires

Here is a sceanerio worth putting your mind to.  
Imagine you're in charge of a computer that is 40 years old. That's right, a computer right out of the Atari age.

As fantastical as it sounds, that is exactly the problem facing NASA's voyager mission now that the last remaining engineer Larry Zottarelli is retiring at the age of eighty.

We have established that Voyager1 (which in 2013 left the the solar system completely) is indeed old, (it is amazing that the craft is operational at all!) but it is also an amagingly far from Earth at somewhere near 15 billion miles!

Suzy Dodd, Voyager1's present project manager, says flying voyager1 is like flying an Apple II computer.

At launch Voyager1 hefted a beefy 64kb of memory. Not megabytes, not gigabytes but sixty four Kilo Bytes!  It's data is recorded on an eight track tape!

There are so many more nothing short of amazing data points about Voyager1, one is a wonder the

craft continues to fly at all!

Check out the Fox 40 online article HERE to get to the original article.   

Orion Spacecraft is one Weld Closer to it's Next Mission

NASA is one step closer to sending astronauts to Mars. Engineers at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans welded together the first two segments of the Orion crew module that will fly atop NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on a mission beyond the far side of the moon.

The primary structure of Orion’s crew module is made of seven large aluminum pieces that must be precisely welded together.  The first weld connects the tunnel to the forward bulkhead, which is at the top of the spacecraft and houses many of Orion’s critical systems, such as the parachutes that deploy during reentry. Orion’s tunnel, with a docking hatch, will allow crews to move between the crew module and other spacecraft. 

During the coming months as other pieces of Orion’s primary structure arrive at Michoud from machine houses across the country, engineers will inspect and evaluate them to ensure they meet precise design requirements before welding. Once complete, the structure will be shipped to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida where it will be assembled with the other elements of the spacecraft.

Read the complete article HERE

Dawn Spacecraft of Ceres Shows Towering Mountain

Each orbit of Ceres made by the Dawn spacecraft tells us just a bit more of the dwarf planet. Earlier this week, NASA released a fantastic new image of Ceres’ terrain, with a resolution of 1,400 feet per pixel. The image shows some new features, including a 3 mile tall mountain!



Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA