WEATHER DELAYS RETURN FROM SPACE OF RUSSIAN TORCHBEARERS, U.S. ASTRONAUT - An American astronaut and two Russians who carried a Sochi Olympic torch into open space will have to stay in orbit one day longer than planned because of bad weather on the steppes of Kazakhstan, officials said on Monday. Cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergei Ryazansky had been scheduled to leave the International Space Station (ISS) along with NASA's Mike Hopkins early on Tuesday and touch down in Kazakhstan at 0924 local time (2324 EDT Monday). Instead, their Soyuz TMA-10M craft is now expected to depart about a day later and land on Wednesday at about 1015 (0015 EDT), Russian news agencies cited officials at the Gagarin cosmonaut training centre outside Moscow as saying.   More
(Source: Reuters - Mar 11)

SOYUZ CREW CLEARED FOR ON-TIME LANDING IN KAZAKHSTAN - Despite strained relations over Russian actions in Ukraine, superpower cooperation in space continues unabated with two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut set for a fiery plunge back to Earth late Monday aboard a Russian Soyuz ferry craft to close out a 166-day stay in space. "One of the great things about leaving home is coming home," Mike Hopkins, who left a wife and two sons behind on Earth last September, said in a NASA interview. "Being reunited with my family, I think, is going to be absolutely wonderful."    More
(Source: SpaceFlight Now - Mar 11)

SPACEX FIRES FALCON 9 ROCKET ENGINES FOR PRELAUNCH CHECK BY STEPHEN CLARK - SpaceX fired up the nine-engine first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket Saturday in a major preflight rehearsal before the March 16 launch of nearly 5,000 pounds of experiments and supplies to the International Space Station. The brief ignition of the Falcon 9's nine Merlin 1D engines occurred with the rocket firmly fastened to SpaceX's Complex 40 launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla. The engines generate about 1.3 million pounds of thrust at sea level.    More
(Source: SpaceFlight Now - Mar 10)

NASA TEAMS DEPLOY TO KAZAKHSTAN FOR SOYUZ LANDING - As diplomatic tensions flare over Russia's armed incursion into Ukraine, preparations for Monday's landing of two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut continue unabated as recovery crews converge on the Kazakhstan touchdown zone. Nearly two dozen NASA officials and medical personnel are on the way to Kazakhstan to greet the three-man crew, led by veteran Russian commander Oleg Kotov, a native of the Crimea region at the center of a standoff between Russian forces and the Ukrainian government.    More
(Source: SpaceFlight Now - Mar 9)

NAVIGATIONAL SATELLITE IRNSS 1-B LAUNCH SET FOR MARCH 31 - India’s latest navigational satellite IRNSS 1-B would be launched onboard PSLV C-24 rocket from the spaceport at Sriharikota on March 31. There would be a two-and-a-half day countdown which would be preceded by a launch rehearsal on March 26, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) sources said today. “The launch of IRNSS 1-B from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre atPSLV C-24 rocket is scheduled at 5.20 pm on March 31,” they told PTI.   More
(Source: Indian Express - Mar 8)

RECORD-SETTING 33 TINY 'CUBESATS' LAUNCHED FROM SPACE STATION - A record release of 33 CubeSats from the International Space Station ended Friday after a methodical series of deployments of miniature Earth imaging satellites for San Francisco-based Planet Labs Inc. The CubeSat constellation, released in pairs over a 17-day period, included 28 satellites for Planet Labs and five spacecraft for private engineering research firms and institutions in Lithuania and Peru.   More
(Source: Space.com - Mar 8)

BOLDEN DOWNPLAYS IMPACT OF UKRAINE CRISIS ON NASA - The Obama administration's $17.5 billion budget request for NASA in fiscal 2015 will maintain American leadership on the high frontier, agency Administrator Charles Bolden said Tuesday, urging Congress to fully fund development of commercial manned spacecraft to end U.S. reliance on Russia to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Bolden said he did not expect the current crisis in Ukraine to impact space station operations, adding that "right now, everything is normal in our relationship with the Russians."    More
(Source: SpaceFlight Now - Mar 6)

SPACE STATION ORBIT TO BE RAISED AHEAD OF NEW MANNED MISSION - The orbit of the International Space Station will be raised next week by 1.5 kilometers to ensure safe docking of a Russian manned spacecraft, a space industry source said Tuesday. The thrusters on Russia’s Progress space freighter, currently docked with the ISS, will be fired up at 7:54 a.m. Moscow time [3:54 GMT] on March 13 and will work for 218 seconds, giving the station a boost of 0.49 meters per second, the source said. As a result, the average altitude of the ISS, which currently vacillates between 412 and 430 kilometers, will be increased by 1,500 meters, the official said.   More
(Source: RIA Novosti - Mar 6)

SA SATELLITE ENCOUNTERS SPACE DEBRIS - After three months in orbit, SA's first cube satellite, developed by the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) and launched from Russia on 21 November 2013, experienced two very close encounters with defunct satellites in the last two days of its trip. The US Joint Space Operations Centre in California notified the South African National Space Agency (Sansa) last week that the Zacube-1 (TshepisoSat) nano-type satellite was on "close approach" with the defunct (Russian) Cosmos 2151 satellite.   More
(Source: ITWeb - Mar 5)

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