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
India plans to send craft to orbit Mars next year
India plans to send a spacecraft to Mars next year on a scientific mission critics say shows the governing party’s skewed priorities when people lack electricity and safe drinking water.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced the 4.5 billion rupee ($82 million) mission during a speech Wednesday marking the 65th anniversary of India’s independence from British rule.
“This spaceship to Mars will be a huge step for us in the area of science and technology,” he said.
Preparations for Juno’s deep space maneuvers continues! This week, flight controllers commanded the spacecraft to initiate pre-heating of its propellant tanks. (Here’s labeled photo of the propulsion module during assembly and testing.)
Source: Juno Mission to Jupiter.
First Look: Venus
Date: 22 Oct 1975
The Soviet Union’s Venera 9 lander snapped this photo of Venus during its 53-minute mission on the planet’s hellish surface. It is one of the first photos sent back from the surface of another planet.
The image is of the surface of Venus at about 32 S, 291 E. The lander touched down at 5:13 UT( with the sun near zenith) on 22 October 1975 and operated for 53 minutes, allowing return of this single image.
The white object at the bottom of the image is part of the lander. The distortion is caused by the Venera imaging system. Angular and partly weathered rocks, about 30 to 40 cm across, dominate the landscape, many partly buried in soil. The horizon is visible in the upper left and right corners.
Source: Solar System NASA.
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
Visit To Pluto.
The GRAIL mission will place two spacecraft into the same orbit around the Moon. As they fly over areas of greater and lesser gravity, caused both by visible features such as mountains and craters and by masses hidden beneath the lunar surface, they will move slightly toward and away from each other. An instrument aboard each spacecraft will measure the changes in their relative velocity very precisely, and scientists will translate this information into a high-resolution map of the Moon’s gravitational field.
This gravity-measuring technique is essentially the same as that of the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE), which has been mapping Earth’s gravity since 2002.
Juno is now nearly 8 times farther away than the Moon (about 1.8 million miles away) and moving at a speed of around 12,400 mph relative to us.
Source: Juno Mission Facebook page.
Soviet Luna 9: First ever lunar lander.
Asteroid Dust Successfully Returned by Japanese Space Probe
A Japanese spacecraft that touched down on a space rock during a billion-mile mission successfully returned the first ever samples from the surface of an asteroid, Japan’s space agency said today (Nov. 16).
The samples are in the form of tiny dust grains collected directly from the asteroid Itokawa in 2005 by Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft, which returned to Earth in June. It was a 1.25 billion-mile (2 billion-kilometer) trip that took seven years to complete.
The dust was found inside a sample return capsule that landed in Australia and was flown back to Japan for analysis.
Engineers dressed in Self-Contained Atmospheric Protective Ensemble, or SCAPE suits, fuel Planck with liquid hydrazine on 15 April 2009.
Planck will use its thrusters, propelled by liquid hydrazine, for manoeuvres once in orbit. This is a volatile and toxic substance, commonly used as rocket fuel. The critical fuelling operations required plenty of preparation, including safety training exercises for the fuelling team, and was executed with great care.
(via ESA)
Kepler Observatory atop a Delta II rocket, ready for launch TONIGHT!
Follow along like a pro at NASA’s ELV Countdown Portal.
(via @NASAKepler on twitter)
Location of Soviet Venus landers.
