MEXICAN COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE PUT ABOARD ATLAS 5 ROCKET FOR LAUNCH - A 12,000-pound Mexican mobile communications satellite was hoisted atop its Atlas 5 rocket today as crews finished assembling the vehicle for United Launch Alliance’s 100th liftoff next week. The Friday, Oct. 2 launch will deliver into a high-perigee geosynchronous transfer orbit the Morelos 3 spacecraft on its way to a parking spot 22,300 miles above Earth. The craft is designed to provide 3G+ cellular voice and data services to Mexican military forces, emergency responders, rural educators and hospitals in remote parts of the country. Boeing built the satellite for the Secretaria de Comunicaciones y Transportes of Mexico. It carries a 72-foot-diameter unfurlable antenna to be expanded once in space.   More
(Source: SpaceFlight Now - Sep 26)

HIS MISSION: FIX THE SPACE STATION TOILET - This spaceman is reaching for the stars but landing in the toilet. British astronaut Tim Peake told London schoolchildren recently that his upcoming stint aboard the International Space Station will include critical latrine duty. “So it might not seem like a very glamorous task for an astronaut but we do spend an awful lot of time fixing the loo," he said in the interview from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, per the Irish Examiner.   More
(Source: Huffington Post - Sep 26)

ESA INVITES RADIO AMATEURS TO LISTEN FOR AAUSAT-5 CUBESAT - The AAUSAT-5 amateur radio CubeSat built by students at the University of Aalborg, Denmark is planned to be released from the International Space Station sometime in the week of October 5. The European Space Agency (ESA) is inviting radio amateurs to listen out for the signals from the satellite. The first to send in a recorded signal from AAUSAT-5 will receive a prize from ESA’s Education Office. Launched on August 19, 2015 to the ISS, the Danish student CubeSat is now waiting for its deployment from the Japanese Kibo module’s airlock. An astronaut will manipulate the Kibo robotic arm to lift AAUSAT-5 from the airlock and place it in orbit.   More
(Source: AMSAT-UK - Sep 26)

RUSSIA’S ‘ROKOT’ CARRIER LAUNCHES 3 MILITARY SATELLITES INTO ORBIT - Three Russian military communication satellites were successfully guided into orbit early Thursday morning, the Russian Defense Ministry has reported. The satellites were launched via a Rokot carrier. At 1 am Moscow time on Thursday (22 GMT Wednesday), Russia’s Aerospace Forces successfully launched a Rokot space launcher with a Briz-KM booster stage from the Plesetsk Space Center, which is located in Arkhangelsk Region in northwestern Russia. It carried three military satellites into space for Russia’s Defense Ministry.   More
(Source: RT - Sep 24)

IS THE NEXT SPACE STATION GOING TO BE COMMERCIAL? - All good things must come to an end, and that's true even of the International Space Station. The orbital laboratory, which has been remarkable on many levels (including getting the US and Russia to get along, sort of), is set to be decommissioned in 2024. Russia already has plans ​ for its own space station, but the American space program hasn't put forward anything new. At a meeting sponsored by the Secure World Foundation and the Alliance for Space Development​, though, one solution was proposed: a privately owned or commercial space station, utilizing corporate (rather than national) stakeholders. Charles Miller, president of NexGen Space LLC, says that space industries will need a place for refueling, orbital assembly, and research in microgravity, and that needs to happen with or without a nationalized space station, according to Marsha Smith at Space Policy Online. Many CubeSat missions additionally utilize the ISS currently (rather than expensive, single serve rocket launches) and would need an in-space launch platform.   More
(Source: Popular Mechanics - Sep 24)

NORTH KOREA'S SPACE RACE: SATELLITE LAUNCH IMMINENT, OFFICIAL SAYS - It looks like the Starship Enterprise from the outside, a futuristic complex surrounded by landscaped gardens in a quiet residential area of Pyongyang. This is North Korea's newly opened satellite control center. CNN had been given an exclusive interview with the senior officials who run it, though the front door is as close as we're permitted to get. Just weeks before a major national holiday widely thought to be a target date for the reclusive nation's first rocket and satellite blast-off in nearly three years, two senior directors of the National Aeronautical Development Association (NADA) tell us a launch is "imminent" and final preparations are underway to send rockets and "multiple satellites" into space.   More
(Source: CNN - Sep 23)

NASA TV TO BROADCAST CARGO SHIP DEPARTURE FROM SPACE STATION - Five weeks after delivering approximately five tons of supplies and experiments to the International Space Station, an unpiloted Japanese cargo ship is scheduled to depart the station Monday, Sept. 28. NASA Television will provide live coverage of the departure beginning at 11 a.m. EDT. Robotic flight controllers in the Mission Control Center at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston will begin preparing the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) H-II Transport Vehicle-5 (HTV-5) for unberthing from its port on the station's Harmony module several hours before its release. Expedition 45 Flight Engineer Kimiya Yui of JAXA, backed up by NASA Flight Engineer Kjell Lindgren, will command the station's Canadarm2 robotic arm to release HTV-5, loaded with station trash at about 11:20 a.m. A few hours after its release, the cargo ship will fire its engines to begin a controlled deorbit and entry through Earth's atmosphere, where it will burn up over the Pacific Ocean.   More
(Source: PR Newswire - Sep 23)

SPACE STATION ASTRONAUTS GOT AN AWESOME AURORA SHOW THIS WEEKEND - The crewmembers on the International Space Station got quite the cosmic show this weekend when bright green and red aurora sparked by a solar storm danced above Earth. NASA astronauts Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren posted psychedelic photos of the celestial light show on Twitter Sunday, sharing their incredible views of auroras from space with people that may not have been able to see the curtains of light covering the planet. Saturday and Sunday's auroras were likely sparked by a powerful solar storm that impacted Earth over the weekend. A burst of super-heated plasma called a coronal mass ejection shot out from the sun on Sept. 18, arriving at Earth over the weekend, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center.    More
(Source: Mashable - Sep 22)

ISRO TO LAUNCH ASTROSAT ON-BOARD PSLV-C30 ON SEPT 28 AT 10 AM - ISRO has announced that the ASTROSAT it has been building and assembling for a while now is ready for launch. The space & research organisation will be blasting off the astronomical observation satellite from PSLV-C30 on September 28th (Monday) at 10 am from Satish Dhawan Space Centre, SHAR. Along with Astrosat, ISRO is launching 6 other international satellites (4 from the US, 1 from Indonesia and 1 from Canada) as well. It is important to note here that Astrosat is India's first dedicated multi-wavelength space observation satellite. Some are even calling it India's Hubble - the US-European joint space observatory that has been successful in discovering new galaxies. ASTROSAT is the fourth such satellite in space after Hubble, Japan's Suzaku and Russia's Spektr R.    More
(Source: CrazyEngineers - Sep 21)

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