Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known
Founder: Joseph Barone
Contributors: crookedindifference, bumerangue, propagandery, rocketmagic, rostenbach
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Pollution over China can be seen from space
Fog and haze blanketed the North China Plain on January 10, 2012, making travel difficult. The Beijing airport cancelled 43 flights and delayed 80 more in the morning hours, when visibility dropped to 200 meters, according to state news reports. Provinces across the plain reported low visibility.
The haze decreased visibility in satellite images too. A milky, gray pall entirely blocks the ground from view in the top image, taken in the early afternoon by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Aqua satellite. Patches of white fog or low cloud hang below the gray haze. Winds had already begun to push the haze out of Beijing in the north, but the rest of the North China Plain still suffered from poor air quality. By the next day, when Aqua MODIS acquired the lower image, skies were mostly clear across the region.
Exhibition about China’s space programme at Shanghai Science and Technology Museum.
On 8 November the Russian Fobos-Grunt and Chinese Yinghuo 1 spacecraft are set to embark on their joint mission to Mars and its moon Phobos. The two probes will blast off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan atop a Zenit2-Fregat launch vehicle.
The spacecraft will arrive at Mars in the autumn of 2012. Fobos-Grunt will enter Martian orbit, studying the planet for some months then landing on Phobos in the spring of 2013. A sub-probe will collect samples from Phobos over a few days, before departing to return them to Earth with a planned arrival in August 2014.
Yinghuo 1 is the first Chinese mission to Mars. It will operate in Martian orbit for one year, studying the planet and its external environment, including the interaction of its magnetic field with the solar wind.
The Fobos-Grunt sample return capsule includes the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment (LIFE) developed by the Planetary Society. LIFE carries 10 types of organisms selected for their ability to withstand harsh conditions. The organisms will travel from Earth to Phobos and back with a similar exposure to the space environment that they would have inside a rock. The experiment aims to test the premise that simple life could survive the journey from one planet to another, if that rock was thrown into space through a meteorite impact.
Fobos-Grunt mission home page
http://phobos.cosmos.ru/index.php?id=618&L=2
Roscosmos (Russian Space Agency)
http://www.federalspace.ru/main.php?lang=en
Source: Roscosmos Facebook page
A New Space Race? What China’s Tiangong 1 Launch Means for NASA
China has launched Tiangong 1, a prototype for its proposed orbital space laboratory. While a successful mission will be a significant step forward for China, it’s unclear what (if anything) it will mean for NASA and the United States’ long-standing dominance in space.
China takes first step towards space station
China is about to take the first step towards building its own space station with the launch of Tiangong 1, or Heavenly Palace, in a further sign of its race to catch up with the US and Russia.
State media on Tuesday reported that China would next week launch an unmanned craft from the Chinese western Gobi desert that will be used for practising operations at a future space station. The launch comes as the US is cutting funding for its space programme, having retired its space shuttle fleet after a last flight of the Atlantis in July.
Chinese Scientists Plan to Pull an Asteroid into Orbit Around Earth
Last week Chinese scientists wanted to divert an asteroid away from Earth. This week, they want to pull one into orbit around the Earth. What’s possible objections could anyone have to this idea?
China and Europe Both Have Plans To Prevent Deadly Asteroid Apophis from Hitting Earth in 2029 (or 2036)
Apophis is a 46 million tonne asteroid that will pass within a hair’s breath of Earth in 2029. However, Apophis’s trajectory is likely to take it through a region of space near Earth known as a keyhole that will ensure the asteroid returns in 2036.
Nobody knows how close Apophis will come on that pass. But if there’s a chance of a collision, we’ll have only 7 years to work out how to avoid catastrophe.
Researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing say their preference is to use a solar sail to place a small spacecraft into a retrograde orbit and on collision course with Apophis. The retrograde orbit will give it an impact velocity of 90km/s which, if they do this well enough in advance, should lead to a collision large enough to do the trick.In 2002, the European Space Agency began a program called Don Quijote to find out how best to perform such a deflection.
Don Quijote involves sending two spacecraft to a near Earth asteroid; one to smash into it and the other to watch while in orbit above the impact crater. The goal is to change the asteroid’s semimajor axis by more than 100 metres and to measure the change with an accuracy greater than 1 per cent.
Inside FAST, Soon to be the World’s Biggest and Baddest Radio Telescope
Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory will soon be the world’s largest radio telescope no more. After years of planning, China has broken ground on the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), a massive bowl-shaped radio signal collector that will be the world’s most sensitive when it opens for business in 2016.
China’s Chang’e-2 Craft Is Done Orbiting the Moon, Now Taking Off From There for Interplanetary Space
Boldly going where no lunar orbiter has gone before.
China jumped into the space race a few decades too late for the original moon race, but the State Administration of Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND) is feverishly working to close the space technology gap with Russia and the United States. As part of that effort, China’s Chang’e-2 moon orbiter left its moon orbit today (06.09) and set a heading for interplanetary space, with a destination more than 930,000 miles from Earth.
What China's New Space Station Means For The World
Once in space, it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to the moon… and Mars. And the Chinese aren’t thinking small.
Chinese space officials have confirmed plans to build a 60-ton space station by 2020 and develop a space freighter for hauling supplies to the station, the China Daily newspaper said on Tuesday.
Source: Roscosmos Facebook page.
China Gears Up for Lunar Space Race With World’s Biggest Rocket Factory
The U.S.-Russian space race that led to the Apollo lunar landings is the stuff of legend. But now a new race is emerging, as China gears up with the world’s biggest rocket-production factory. And we’re not talking about fireworks.
Early rockets were based on old Russian designs, but China’s space industry has developed extraordinarily quickly since then. Chinese science and engineering teams launched an astronaut on the Shenzhou V mission in late 2003, then completed a spacewalk in 2008 on the Shenzhou 7 launch (see the video on the link). Though much of the nation’s space efforts are shrouded in mystery, the deputy head of the Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology just revealed that the world’s biggest facility for designing, building, and testing rockets is under construction in the Tianjin area of northern China.
