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Pad : ARIANE LAUNCH AREA 1 Location : KOUROU, FRENCH GUIANA Rocket : VEGA Who is Arianespace? Arianespace SA is a multinational company founded in 1980 as the world's first commercial launch service provider. It undertakes the operation, and marketing of the Ariane programme. Their vehicles launch exclusively from French Guiana in South America. What Is Vega? Vega is an expendable launch system in use by Arianespace jointly developed by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the European Space Agency (ESA). Engines P80 The P80 used on the European Space Agency Vega rocket. IT is the largest and most powerful...

The first Russian spacecraft meant to land on the moon in nearly 50 years failed to enter its pre-landing orbit of the moon Saturday, according to Roscosmos, the Russian state space corporation. In a statement, the corporation said that an “abnormal situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the manoeuvre to be performed with the specified parameters.” The spacecraft, Luna-25, was expected to land on the moon on Monday, and it is unclear now whether it will stick to that schedule. Roscosmos said the team was investigating the situation but did not give further details. It...

Most mainstream scientists argue that the possible existence of spacecraft from a non-human origin is an “extraordinary claim” that is not worth a serious study until “extraordinary evidence” falls to their lap. The reason this evidence has to fall into their lap is because they are not engaged in the search for such evidence, and so its non-existence is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The simple answer to Enrico Fermi’s paradox: “Where is everybody?” is “To find out whether you have neighbors, you better use a telescopes or check your backyard for objects that came from the street.” Over the past two...

A newly proposed propulsion system could theoretically beam a heavy spacecraft to outside the confines of our Solar System in less than 5 years – a feat that took the historic Voyager 1 probe 35 years to achieve.The concept, known as 'pellet-beam' propulsion, was awarded an early-stage US$175,000 NASA grant for further development earlier this year.To be clear, the concept currently doesn't exist much beyond calculations on paper, so we can't get too excited just yet.Still, it's attracted attention not only because of its potential to get us into interstellar space within a human lifetime – something that traditional, chemical-fueled...

As soon as 2023, the United States military could have a new spacecraft to transport troops to space and low Earth orbit locations anywhere in the world within three hours. Colorado-based aerospace company Sierra Space announced Sept. 8, 2022 that it signed a research and development contract with the U.S. Transportation Command to develop options to transport military crews and cargo around the world using the “Dream Chaser” space plane. The Dream Chaser space plane is a 7-passenger winged shuttle-like plane that launches to space on a rocket and flies back to Earth, landing on a runway. It’s designed to...

To celebrate the new year, China National Space Administration (CNSA) published astonishing pictures of the Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter above the north pole of the red planet, according to Shanghai Morning Post. CNSA said the images were taken by a detachable sensor equipped with two high-definition cameras. The first picture shows the orbiter above the north pole ice cap of Mars. The second picture is a close-up of the orbiter’s golden exterior skin where high-speed data communication antennas and a solar wing are seen. Beyond the orbiter are ice caps though not the ice we consider on Earth. Mar’s ice caps...

May 13, 2021May 13, 2021 by Nancy AtkinsonExtrasolar Object Interceptor Would be Able to Chase Down the Next Oumuamua or Borisov and Actually Return a SampleWhat if we had the ability to chase down interstellar objects passing through our Solar System, like Oumuamua or Comet Borisov? Such a spacecraft would need to be ready to go at a moment’s notice, with the capacity to increase speed and change direction quickly.That’s the idea behind a new mission concept called the Extrasolar Object Interceptor and Sample Return spacecraft. It has received exploratory funding from NASA through its Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program.“Bringing...

A strange dent in Earth’s magnetic field doses orbiting craft with high levels of radiation. It's caused everything from periodic glitches to total mission failure. The European Space Agency’s Swarm satellites measure the strength of Earth’s magnetic field. In this image, cooler colors (blue) mean lower strength than warmer colors (pink). The large dark region is called the South Atlantic Anomaly Radiation is a colorless, tasteless, and odorless enemy to both humans and electronics alike. And, thanks to a quirk in Earth’s magnetic field, a region called the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) regularly exposes orbiting spacecraft to high levels of...

Two days after touching down on asteroid Bennu, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission team received on Thursday, Oct. 22, images that confirm the spacecraft has collected more than enough material to meet one of its main mission requirements -- acquiring at least 2 ounces (60 grams) of the asteroid's surface material.

Make sure to go to the link and click on the hotlink highlighted as "Touch-And-Go (TAG) sampling event" for a video of the touchdown. A photo sequence is also shown in the last hotlink in the Explanation or by clicking on the image at the link. Explanation: On October 20, after a careful approach to the boulder-strewn surface, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft's arm reached out and touched asteroid Bennu. Dubbed a Touch-And-Go (TAG) sampling event, the 30 centimeter wide sampling head (TAGSAM) appears to crush some of the rocks in this snapshot. The close-up scene was recorded by the spacecraft's SamCam...

The Boeing Starliner didn't see any testing shortcuts before its flawed flight test, officials said Friday, but the company vowed to expand tests in the future. Boeing (BA) stock fell. In December, the Boeing Starliner set off on an uncrewed test, but it failed to reach the International Space Station as planned because a software error prevented it from getting into the proper orbit. It was later revealed that an internal timer on the capsule was off by 11 hours, causing the Boeing Starliner to believe that it was further into the mission. Another software issue was found with the...

Northrop Grumman and NASA are launching a "first-of-its-kind" refueling vessel, the Mission Extension Vehicle, aboard a Russian rocket on October 9th. The inaugural MEV-1 will dock with an Intelsat satellite in three months' time and provide life-extending services over five years. After that, it should be free to help other satellites -- it'll still have 10 years' worth of fuel. A second spacecraft, MEV-2, will help another Intelsat satellite in 2020 and should have the same amount of leftover fuel. Both MEVs are flexible, too. They can dock with 80 percent of current geostationary satellites, even if they weren't designed...

Blue Origin's New Shepard suborbital vehicle will launch on its 11th test flight this morning (May 2), and you can watch the spaceflight action live. The reusable rocket-capsule combo is scheduled to lift off from Blue Origin's West Texas testing ground at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT; 8:30 a.m. local Texas time). The uncrewed flight will carry 38 microgravity research payloads to suborbital space and back, company representatives announced via Twitter Wednesday You can watch live here at Space.com, courtesy of Blue Origin, or directly via the company's website. New Shepard is designed to carry paying customers, offering them great...

“Well we didn’t make it but we definitely tried,” said Morris Kahn the president of SpaceIL, the company that created the lander which appears to have crash landed on the moon today. I was watching the live feed of the attempted landing and with about 30 minutes to go they announced they had reached a point of no return. They were going for it. For a while it seemed everything was going well. The spacecraft dropped from about 23,000 meters above the moon to about 15,000 meters. The ship even snapped a selfie on the way down (that’s it above)....

DART's target Didymos was chosen based on very different criteria. It's a binary asteroid, which means DART can slam into the smaller object of the pair. But scientists can gather robust data about the bodies and their locations from Earth, which will help them track where to target the car-size spacecraft as well as how much the collision knocked the object off course.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was launched in 2016, but today it will begin to orbit its destination: the asteroid Bennu. When it does, Benniu will break the record for the smallest object ever orbited by a manmade spacecraft. NASA will begin a process of learning more about the small asteroids that reside in our part of the solar system. You can watch the livestream of the arrival here:

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is scheduled to rendezvous with its targeted asteroid, Bennu, on Monday, December 3, 2018, at approximately 17:00 UTC (noon EST). Translate UTC to your time. NASA will air a live event from 16:45 to 17:15 UTC (11:45 a.m.to 12:15 p.m. EST) to highlight the arrival of the agency’s first asteroid sample return mission. You can watch on NASA TV, Facebook Live, Ustream, YouTube and NASA Live. NASA TV also will air an arrival preview program starting at 16:15 UTC (11:15 a.m. EST). OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) launched in September 2016 and has been...

Spacecraft and satellites could in future be launched into space without the need for fuel, thanks to a revolutionary new theory. Dr Mike McCulloch, from the University of Plymouth, first put forward the idea of quantised inertia (QI) – through which he believes light can be converted into thrust – in 2007. He has now received $1.3million from the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for a four-year study which aims to make the concept a reality. The QI theory predicts that objects can be pushed by differences in the intensity of so-called Unruh radiation in space, similar...

An optimal shielding configuration has been realized during the phase I study, and it is referred to as a Magnetospheric Dipolar Torus (MDT). This configuration has the singular ability to deflect the vast majority of the GCR including HZE ions. In addition, the MDT shields both habitat and magnets eliminating the secondary particle irradiation hazard, which can dominate over the primary GCR for the closed magnetic topologies that have been investigated in the past. MDT shielding also reduces structural, mass and power requirements.... During the phase I study MSNW developed 3-D relativistic particle code to evaluate magnetic shielding of GCR...

Prototypes ride on satellites in low Earth orbit to test how their circuitry fares in space Spacecraft have gone bite-sized. On June 23, Breakthrough Starshot, an initiative to send spacecraft to another star system, launched half a dozen probes called Sprites to test how their electronics fare in outer space. Each Sprite, built on a single circuit board, is a prototype of the tiny spacecraft that Starshot scientists intend to send to Alpha Centauri, the trio of stars closest to the sun. Those far-flung probes would be the smallest working spacecraft yet. “We’re talking about launching things that are a...