SPUTNIK AT SIXTY: FIVE FACTS TO KNOW ABOUT THE WORLD’S FIRST SATELLITE - The launch of Sputnik on October 4th, 1957, started the space race between the Soviet Union and United States. Both countries were working fast to see how they could send man-made objects into orbit, and in response to US President Dwight Eisenhower’s pledge to send an American satellite into orbit in 1957 to celebrate the International Geophysical Year, the Soviet space engineers raced to launch their satellite first. More (Source: euronews - Oct 4)
NEW SATELLITE TO HELP FORECASTERS BETTER TRACK, MONITOR ARIZONA WILDFIRES - The National Weather Service will be able to be able to more easily and reliably forecast wildfires in Arizona, thanks to new satellite imaging data. The National Weather Service will be able to use the GOES-16 satellite to help monitor wildfires. The satellite has already made news for forecasting recent hurricanes with its Advanced Baseline Imager. The imager, also known as the ABI, is “much improved for monitoring wildfires,” said Tim Schmit, a satellite research meteorologist with NOAA. More (Source: KTAR.com - Oct 3)
NASA PHOTOS OF PUERTO RICO SHOW HOW MARIA WIPED OUT POWER ON THE ISLAND - Puerto Rico’s extensive power loss in the wake of Hurricane Maria has been captured in newly released images from one of NASA’s Earth-orbiting satellites. The intense Category 4 storm left practically all of the 3.4 million US citizens in the country without access to electrical power, and many are still waiting for the lights to come back on. These new before and after nighttime photos show just how much of Puerto Rico’s biggest cities remained in the dark up to a week after Maria. The photos were taken by NASA and NOAA’s Suomi-NPP satellite, a weather probe that monitors the long-term effects of climate change, natural disasters, air pollution, and more. More (Source: The Verge - Oct 3)
SATELLITE COMMUNICATIONS GO TACTICAL - U.S. military satellite communications is expanding to provide greater coverage of the tactical environment as part of its overall mission to serve the land, sea and air domains. Broadening tactical coverage requires new types of satellites with a larger variety of capabilities, and these spacecraft must be shielded against threats ranging from cyber attack to on-orbit interference. This expansion also means speeding up the development-to-orbit time for complex military satellites so that capabilities can be brought to warfighters without delay. More (Source: Signal Magazine - Oct 2)
MONTHS AFTER ROCKET FAILURE, CHINA SENDS SPY SATELLITES INTO SPACE - China successfully put three new reconnaissance satellites into orbit using a Long March-2C rocket on Friday – its first launch in nearly three months. All launch activities had been put on hold after two failures in June and July that have delayed Beijing’s ambitious space programme, which includes lunar exploration. The three Yaogan-30 satellites were launched from a centre in Sichuan province. More (Source: South China Morning Post - Oct 1)
ILS DECLARES MISSION SUCCESS AFTER PROTON LAUNCH OF ASIASAT 9 - AsiaSat’s most powerful communications satellite, built by Space Systems/Loral in California to reach developing markets in Myanmar, Indonesia and other parts of the Asia-Pacific, rode a Proton rocket and Breeze M upper stage Thursday into orbit ranging more than 22,000 miles above Earth. The 191-foot-tall (58-meter) Proton rocket took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 1852:16 GMT (2:52:16 p.m. EDT) Thursday, soaring into an overcast sky at the historic Central Asia spaceport, the site of the Space Age’s first satellite launch 60 years ago next week. More (Source: SpaceFlight Now - Sep 30)
ARIANE 5 ROCKET DEPLOYS SATELLITES FOR INTELSAT AND B-SAT - Recovering from a last-second launch abort earlier this month, an Ariane 5 rocket climbed into space Friday night from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana to place two U.S.-built communications satellites in orbit for Intelsat and Broadcasting Satellite System Corp. of Japan. After a nine-minute delay, the Ariane 5 rocket took off with 2.9 million pounds of thrust at 2156 GMT (5:56 p.m. EDT; 6:56 p.m. French Guiana time) Friday, heading toward the east over the Atlantic Ocean with the Intelsat 37e and BSAT 4a communications satellites. More (Source: SpaceFlight Now - Sep 30)
NEW NASA SATELLITE WILL BE 'ON A MISSION TO TOUCH THE SUN' - The $1.6-billion mission aims to improve forecasts of major space weather events that impact life on Earth, as well as astronauts in space, NASA said. Space weather can also change the orbits of satellites, shorten their lifetimes, or interfere with onboard electronics. “Parker Solar Probe is going to answer questions about solar physics that we’ve puzzled over for more than six decades,” said project scientist Nicola Fox of the APL. The probe will fly through the sun’s atmosphere as close as 3.9 million miles to the star’s surface, well within the orbit of Mercury. More (Source: USA Today - Sep 30)
SPACEX’S ELON MUSK UNVEILED A ROCKET THAT CAN FLY TO THE MOON, MARS—AND SHANGHAI - If Elon Musk has to make his big rocket smaller, he’s going to make sure it still has enormous ambitions. SpaceX’s chief executive updated his company’s plans to colonize Mars at a global space conference in Australia. He described a rocket and spacecraft suitable for transporting humans safely to the surface of the moon in 2022, to a Martian colony by 2024—and from New York to Shanghai in less than 40 minutes. The serial entrepreneur’s speech at the International Astronautical Congress is a sequel to one delivered in 2016 that described the architecture for a rocket system that could take humans to Mars at $200,000 a ticket. More (Source: Quartz - Sep 30)
Previous Next
