Ex Astris Scientia — for-all-mankind: sagansense: ...

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Scenes from today’s launch failure when an Antares rocket exploded as it blasted off from Wallops Island, Virginia. The unmanned spacecraft was carrying 5,000 pounds of gear for the crew of the International Space Station.

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Just as an aside, the aerospace companies I’ve been working with (via the film 'I want to be an Astronaut') manufacture and design the first (Aerojet Rocketdyne) and second (ATK) stages for the Antares rocket. Bad day. Thankfully, only cargo, scientific experiments, food, and launch pad architecture were the only collateral damage in this anomaly.

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It’s always heart-wrenching to see an anomaly such as this. While there were not crewmembers on board, nor any high-profile experiments, it’s never easy seeing a rocket fail. It’s even harder knowing that this happened to a private company, who will have a harder time recovering from this mishap than a government agency. 

While it’s easy to speculate, we must remember that there can be numerous causes, some not so obvious, and that we must wait for the facts when they come in. Orbital is a company with a long history in the aerospace industry. There are bound to be mistakes. Escaping the pull of Earth’s gravity is far from easy; sometimes we can be used to everything working properly that we forget there can be errors. Orbital will find the problem, implement a solution, and carry on better than before.

Source: humanoidhistory

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The victims of the 1986 Challenger Shuttle explosion likely did not die on initial failure of the rocket, but instead were probably alive and conscious until their fuselage crashed into the ocean some time later. Six astronauts and one civilian schoolteacher died.

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The failure was due to malfunctioning O-Rings, a known problem to both NASA and the contractor hired to build the shuttle. Several NASA engineers warned against the launch and were concerned about the integrity of said O-Rings. Several chief engineers, most notably Roger Boisjoly, pleaded for the launch to be rescheduled, but was ignored by the administration.

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Today marks 25 years since NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft saw Earth as “a pale blue dot.” “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever...

Today marks 25 years since NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft saw Earth as “a pale blue dot.”

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” -Carl Sagan

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pennyfornasa: “ While today may belong to the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, it’s important not to forget another important anniversary for NASA - the landing of the Viking 1 spacecraft on Mars! On July 20th, 1976, the Viking 1...
pennyfornasa

While today may belong to the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, it’s important not to forget another important anniversary for NASA - the landing of the Viking 1 spacecraft on Mars!

On July 20th, 1976, the Viking 1 lander separated from the orbiter and touched down at Chryse Planitia, a flat lowland region in the northern hemisphere of Mars. Immediately following touchdown, the lander made history by taking and transmitting the first complete photograph taken from the surface of Mars. The image (http://goo.gl/6C5L6m) was of the Viking 1 lander’s foot as an indication of how far it had sunk into the Martian surface. Between itself and its companion, Viking 2, this historic photograph was just the first of more than 50,000 images taken from the Martian surface, as well as from orbit, and transmitted back to Earth.

What makes Viking 1 especially worth noting is that it was not only the first attempt by the United States at landing on Mars, but it was also the first spacecraft to successfully do so and perform its mission. While the Soviet Mars 3 mission was the first to achieve a soft landing of a spacecraft on Mars it stopped transmitting data 15 seconds after landing. During those few seconds of transmission, it sent the first partial photograph taken from the surface of Mars although nothing was identifiable in it.

During its operation on the Martian surface, Viking 1 became the record holder for longest Mars surface mission at 2307 days, until Mars Rover Opportunity took the record in 2010.

To read more about Viking 1:
http://goo.gl/NOxjpM
http://goo.gl/iKPlJ6
http://goo.gl/6klaq9

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spaceplasma: “To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before “ Whether and when NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, humankind’s most distant object, broke through to interstellar space, the space between stars, has been a thorny issue. For the last year, claims...
spaceplasma

To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before

Whether and when NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, humankind’s most distant object, broke through to interstellar space, the space between stars, has been a thorny issue. For the last year, claims have surfaced every few months that Voyager 1 has “left our solar system”.

Voyager 1 is exploring an even more unfamiliar place than our Earth’s sea floors — a place more than 11 billion miles (17 billion kilometers) away from our sun. It has been sending back so much unexpected data that the science team has been grappling with the question of how to explain all the information. None of the handful of models the Voyager team uses as blueprints have accounted for the observations about the transition between our heliosphere and the interstellar medium in detail. The team has known it might take months, or longer, to understand the data fully and draw their conclusions.

Since the 1960s, most scientists have defined our solar system as going out to the Oort Cloud, where the comets that swing by our sun on long timescales originate. That area is where the gravity of other stars begins to dominate that of the sun. It will take about 300 years for Voyager 1 to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud and possibly about 30,000 years to fly beyond it. Informally, of course, “solar system” typically means the planetary neighborhood around our sun. Because of this ambiguity, the Voyager team has lately favored talking about interstellar space, which is specifically the space between each star’s realm of plasma influence.

Voyager 1, which is working with a finite power supply, has enough electrical power to keep operating the fields and particles science instruments through at least 2020, which will mark 43 years of continual operation. At that point, mission managers will have to start turning off these instruments one by one to conserve power, with the last one turning off around 2025.

The spacecraft will continue sending engineering data for a few more years after the last science instrument is turned off, but after that it will be sailing on as a silent ambassador. In about 40,000 years, it will be closer to the star AC +79 3888 than our own sun. (AC +79 3888 is traveling toward us faster than we are traveling towards it, so while Alpha Centauri is the next closest star now, it won’t be in 40,000 years.) And for the rest of time, Voyager 1 will continue orbiting around the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, with our sun but a tiny point of light among many.

For more information about Voyager, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/voyager and http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov.

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Layers and Dark Dunes on the Surface of Mars This image of a circular depression on the surface of Mars was acquired on Jan. 5, 2015 by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The...

Layers and Dark Dunes on the Surface of Mars

This image of a circular depression on the surface of Mars was acquired on Jan. 5, 2015 by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The spacecraft has been orbiting Mars since March 2006 and completed its 40,000th orbit around Mars on Feb. 7, 2015. Open in new tab for full resolution.

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Why isn’t anybody on my dash, like, super pumped about the Orion launch this morning? This ship is built to go farther than any manned ship ever built before. This is the ship that takes humans to deep space. This is the ship that takes humans to Mars. It had its test launch this morning and its kind of a big deal because this is the ship that’s gonna bring in a new era of space travel. Welcome to the Mars age.

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