Month: September 2022

Small fire breaks out at Artemis 1 moon rocket’s hurricane shelter

NeRD

NASA’s Artemis 1 moon rocket left its launch pad for safety’s sake last night (Sept. 26), only to encounter a bit of drama shortly after arriving at its designated shelter site. Mission team members rolled the Artemis 1 stack from Kennedy Space Center’s (KSC) Launch Pad 39B to the facility’s huge Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to protect the valuable hardware from Hurricane Ian, should the storm end up hammering Florida’s Space Coast. Artemis 1 completed the nearly 10-hour trip to the VAB at about 9:15 a.m. EDT (1315 GMT) today…

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DART’s impact won’t make asteroid Dimorphos hit Earth — but here’s what would happen if it did

NeRD

NASA’s DART spacecraft didn’t nudge its target asteroid toward Earth, but there might be other space rocks of a similar size on a collision course with our planet — and that’s why DART’s mission is so important. DART smashed into the 525-foot-wide (160 meters) asteroid moonlet Dimorphos as planned Monday evening (Sept. 26), successfully demonstrating the “kinetic impact” strategy of planetary defense. The dramatic impact sparked lots of speculation on the internet that NASA may have inadvertently sent an otherwise harmless space rock toward Earth. Such speculation is groundless, of…

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Startup Vast Space wants takes artificial gravity station concept for a spin

NeRD

A new space station artificial gravity startup is in the field. A cryptocurrency-backed company, called Vast Space, announced plans to pursue artificial gravity space stations to improve “human productivity” in orbit, as the company termed it. Vast Space is founded by Jed McCaleb, a billionaire behind the launch of three large crypto firms, such as bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox. Critics have said that cryptocurrency is not a stable form of financing and that only a few people profit from the exchange of digital currencies. McCaleb is also the founder of…

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NASA to Provide Media Update on Artemis I Rollback

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NASA will host a media teleconference at 2 p.m. EDT Tuesday, Sept. 27, to discuss the agency’s decision to roll the Artemis I Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Artemis I is a flight test to launch SLS and send Orion beyond the Moon and back to Earth

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‘Quantum Leap’ jumps into space shuttle history in ‘Atlantis’ on NBC

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Something in space shuttle history needs changing. Or so that seems to be case in the second episode of “Quantum Leap” airing Monday (Sept. 26) on NBC. Titled “Atlantis,” the episode finds physicist Ben Song (Raymond Lee) headed into orbit aboard the space shuttle Atlantis in 1998 (opens in new tab). A continuation of the original series that ran from 1989 to 1993, the new show picks up 30 years after Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanished. Now, a new team, led by…

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When will we know how much DART changed the orbit of asteroid Dimorphos?

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All eyes will be on asteroid Dimorphos tonight (Sept. 26) as NASA’s DART spacecraft slams into it with the goal of changing the asteroid’s orbit around the larger space rock Didymos. But we will not know immediately whether or not the first-of-its-kind experiment succeeded? After the impact, all eyes will keep watching Dimorphos for several weeks, increasing the suspense of this mock apocalypse-averting exercise.  When observed from Earth, the Didymos-Dimorphos binary asteroid appears like a single tiny dot of light amid a star-studded sky. The dot periodically brightens and dims…

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SpaceX rocket launch with Starlink fleet thrills stargazers along US East Coast

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The latest SpaceX launch created a striking view along the U.S. East Coast. A Falcon 9 rocket launched 52 Starlink spacecraft from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station Saturday at 7:32 p.m. EDT (2332 GMT). Due to clear conditions across the coastline, it was visible at least as far north as Long Island. Viewers close by the launchpad witnessed Falcon 9’s first stage falling back to Earth for a soft landing atop the SpaceX “droneship” A Shortfall of Gravitas, which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.  SpaceX is working on expanding its Starlink megaconstellation, which is now…

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