Month: September 2021

NASA picks SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy to launch GOES-U weather satellite

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SpaceX’s big Falcon Heavy rocket just got another gig. NASA has picked Falcon Heavy to launch the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-U (GOES-U), with a planned liftoff in April 2024 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, agency officials announced on Friday (Sept. 10). The total launch cost for NASA will be about $152.5 million, they added. “GOES-U will provide advanced imagery and atmospheric measurements of Earth’s weather, oceans and environment, as well as real-time mapping of total lightning activity and improved monitoring of solar activity and space weather.” NASA officials said…

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Russian Soyuz rocket sends classified military payload to orbit

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Russia’s ministry of defense sent a classified payload into orbit on a Soyuz rocket Thursday (Sept. 9), according to state media outlet TASS. The spacecraft lifted off Thursday (Sept. 9) at 3:59 p.m. EDT (1959 GMT or 10:59 p.m. local time in Moscow) from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia, a Russian-language TASS report stated. “The Soyuz-2.1v light-class launch vehicle successfully launched a spacecraft into the calculated orbit in the interests of the Russian Ministry of Defense at the appointed time,” TASS said in the terse report (machine-translated from Russian).…

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NASA’s Perseverance rover has taken the 1st steps in decades-long dream of Mars sample return

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NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars has begun its out-of-this-world rock collection. The rover, which is designed to search for signs of ancient life on Mars and to package up material for a future sample-return mission, made its first two successful sampling maneuvers on Monday and Wednesday (Sept. 6 and Sept. 8). NASA scientists describing the collection said they’re thrilled with what they know so far about the two rock cores. “This is a truly historic achievement, the very first rock cores collected on another terrestrial planet — it’s amazing,” Meenakshi…

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NASA’s Gateway moon-orbiting space station explained in pictures

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(Image credit: ESA) 11) Waystation for Mars? Gateway’s design is still evolving, and it is hard to make predictions about how it will support lunar exploration, let alone Mars exploration. In 2020, for example, media reports indicated that Gateway would be removed from the “critical path” to Artemis exploration. However, NASA maintains that many of the “lessons learned” from Artemis and Gateway will be useful for eventual Mars exploration, ranging from how to supply astronauts from far away, to keeping crew members safe, to learning to “live off the land”…

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Launch of SpaceX’s private Inspiration4 mission slips by 24 hours

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Inspiration4, SpaceX’s first all-civilian mission, will launch at least a day late. The three-day mission will now launch from the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida no earlier than 8 p.m. EDT Wednesday, Sept. 15 (1200 GMT Thursday, Sept. 16) due to a combination of weather conditions and technical requirements, Inspiration4 said Friday (Sept. 10) in a mission update. Inspiration4 is a private mission to Earth orbit purchased by Jared Isaacman, the billionaire founder of Shift4 Payments. He’ll be joined on the flight by Hayley Arceneaux, Sian Proctor…

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