Posts Tagged ‘russian space agency’
Russia Postpones Mission to the ISS, Could Leave Station Unoccupied for the First Time in a Decade
If only we had invented a reliable American-made reusable transport system
The reason for the delay is pretty simple: when a spacecraft crashes into the ground due to some kind of unforeseen engine trouble, it's just good sense to perform as many tests as needed to ensure whatever caused the crash can't cause another. According to unnamed space official sources, that'll entail two test launches of the unmanned Soyuz rocket.
As it stands, three of the remaining crew--Alexander Samokutyayev, Ron Garan (who likes to take ), and mission commander Andrey Borisenko--are due to come home on September 16th, pushed back from September 8th. Three additional crew were supposed to blast off on September 22nd, but with this delay, that's been pushed to late October or early November. If there are any further delays, Roskosmos will have to decide whether to bring the remaining three astronauts back home, leaving the ISS unmanned.
It's no simple thing to leave the ISS unmanned; it can be controlled remotely from Earth, but not nearly as easily or effectively. In the wake of the delay, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is said to be calling for extra security checks and analyzing the state of the beleaguered space agency. Times like this we wish we still had , right?
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Russian Space Telescope Lifts Off, Will Be Biggest Telescope Ever
The has a 10-meter antenna, a tenth of the size of the biggest radio telescopes on Earth, but when combined with ground-based observatories it will be huge — with a resolution up to 10,000 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope.
Interferometry is widely used to create huge telescope arrays on Earth, connecting individual observatories into a larger network with a much higher effective resolution. RadioAstron is not even the first space-based telescope for interferometry — about 15 years ago the Japanese space agency launched the Highly Advanced Laboratory for Communications and Astronomy (HALCA). But HALCA was only designed to last a few years, and fell silent in 2005. And RadiAstron, also known as Spektr-R, will be 10 times more sensitive than HALCA.
The telescope is designed to unfurl in orbit, with 27 carbon fiber petals unfolding to form a 10-meter-wide dish.
It will have a highly elliptical orbit, allowing the moon’s gravitational pull to shift its path. This highly variable orbital route, along with more powerful computers on the ground, will allow Russian scientists to develop high-resolution images of distant galaxies, according to a report by the .
will be able to resolve celestial objects separated by an angle of 7 microarcseconds, which is 10,000 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope, New Scientist notes. Scientists hope it will be able to peer at the event horizon of a black hole at the center of the galaxy M87; study radio waves emitted by water masers, which are clouds of water molecules found in galaxy discs; and study pulsars, among other missions.
But first Roscosmos will have to collect all the telescope’s data, New Scientist says. So far only one dish has been built to receive signals from the spacecraft, and others will be needed so the telescope’s 144 megabits per second of data is not lost.
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Video: New Movie Reenacts Scenes From the First Human Spaceflight
What Yuri Gagarin saw, in HD
ESA astronaut Pablo Nespoli and British filmmaker Christopher Riley made a new film, “First Orbit,” splicing together archival footage and audio from Gagarin’s flight with HD video shot from the cupola window on the International Space Station.
Check out the dramatic trailer below.
The ISS follows Vostok 1’s orbital path, at the same time of day, about every six weeks. Nespoli, who is listed as the film’s director of photography, pointed his camera out the cupola window to film the same vistas the first cosmonaut would have seen.
Gagarin launched from Baikonur near dawn on April 12, 1961, passing over a Pacific Ocean shrouded in darkness and watching the sun rise over the tip of South America. He landed north of the Caspian Sea almost two hours later.
Riley co-produced the award-winning Apollo documentary “In the Shadow of the Moon,” and has been creating space-related films for most of his career, including with the BBC and as an independent filmmaker. “First Orbit” features original music by composer Philip Sheppard, whose space bona fides also include writing the score for “In the Shadow of the Moon” and the National Geographic special “Inside the Milky Way.”
The full video , on YouTube and at more than 120 parties sponsored by the Yuri’s Night project, a “world party for space” held on April 12.
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As Debris Threatens ISS, NASA Releases Top-Ten List of Space Junk Culprits
The Fengyun satellite that China blew up in 2007 is space enemy number one
This month, NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office naming the top ten incidents contributing to the space junk problem. The Fengyun fiasco is hands down the largest single contributor to the growing space junk crisis. NASA has identified some 19,000 objects larger than four inches that are running loose in orbit at extremely high rates of speed just waiting for a functioning satellite, a spacecraft, or the ISS to get in their paths. Of those, 2,841 are thought to have come from the destruction of Fengyun 1C.
Most of the garbage hurtling through space belongs to China and the Soviet Union, the report says, though Western commercial interests and space agencies also shoulder their shares of the blame. Some of the blame can even be divvied up; last year an operational Iridium communications satellite collided with a spent Russian Cosmos spacecraft, spawning nearly 2,000 pieces of smaller debris.
But Europe could soon take the top spot on the space junk tally. When the European Space Agency's Envisat Earth observation satellite goes defunct in three years, the ESA will be the proud owner of the piece of junk out there: a nearly 9-ton, $2.9 billion piece of orbiting detritus that won't be pulled into Earth's atmosphere for 150 years. The danger isn't that the massive satellite might slam into the ISS -- the chances of that are quite slim. But if it collides with another large piece of junk at high speed -- say, a rocket stage or another retired satellite -- the impact could release 10 times as much junk as the Iridium-Cosmos smash up.
With so much junk up there, the DoD has even warned of a scenario in which such a massive collision could trigger a in which one impact begets another and then another until entire orbits are unusable. Unlikely, sure, but some insist it's possible. The good news is we're working on the problem. Northrop Grumman is working with DARPA to develop a ground-based radar system to help track space debris from the ground, and the U.S. Air Force is planning to launch a Space-Based Space Surveillance satellite in the near future that will help direct traffic in space. Assuming, of course, a piece of orbiting junk doesn't knock it clean out of the sky.
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Russia Building New $800-Million-Dollar Spaceport for Commercial Space Industry
The site will be smaller than Baikonur, which is the largest and oldest launch facility on the globe, but it will boast brand-new launch pads, a cutting-edge residential complex, and updated research facilities clustered within the 270-square-mile site. Up to 30,000 specialists could be brought in to build the new cosmodrome.
But the cosmodrome is just a start for Russia's new space ambitions. The U.S.'s old space rival plans to nurture its own private space industry while at the same time building state-owned next-gen deep space launch vehicles and crew capsules. The cosmodrome will augment the development of private industry, the space agency's deputy chief says, because it will ensure the stability of the Russian space industry by centering it on Russian soil.
The first launch will take place as soon as the facility is completed in 2015, with its first manned flight slated for 2018.
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