17562636
submission
japan_dan writes:
The European Space Agency will host a friends, family and media ceremony at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne to mark the completion of basic training for the new class of six European astros recruited in 2008.
17181166
submission
japan_dan writes:
This week ESA is hosting a closed-door meeting of the Association of Space Explorers, a grouping of ex-astronauts, that will study asteroid impact scenarios. This is one in a series of meetings of the ASE's Mission Planning Operations Group (MPOG) and the ultimate aim is to recommend deflection or destruction mission profiles to UNCOPUOS, given a future threat. Apollo 9 astro Rusty Schweickart will take part; he was also in USA Fox news on Friday commenting on NASA's Advisory Council report proposing five recommendations on how the agency should organize, acquire, investigate, prepare, and lead national and international efforts in planetary defense against near-Earth objects.
14104036
submission
japan_dan writes:
It looks like two ESA spacecraft will observe 21 Lutetia during Rosetta's flyby on 10 July: Rosetta from 3160 km and Herschel from 450 mn km. Herschel's PACS and SPIRE spectrometers will view Lutetia in far IR, while Rosetta will gather data in a variety of wavelengths. Since the observations will be coordinated during and at closest approach, scientists will later be able to correlate the data to produce a map of the thermal radiation emitted by Lutetia. There are a pair of animations modelling the expected temperature distribution over Lutetia in the Rosetta Blog: http://www.esa.int/blog. The joint observations are part of a series of 8 sessions planned in the next couple of years by Herschel scientists of objects that will be visited by spacecraft.
6987142
submission
japan_dan writes:
ESA published a report yesterday on their hopes that today's Rosetta earth fly-by may help provide more date for those studying the Earth fly-by anomaly problem: Since 1990, scientists and mission controllers at ESA and NASA have noticed that their spacecraft sometimes experience a strange variation in the amount of orbital energy they exchange with Earth during planetary swingbys. The unexplained variation is noticed as a tiny difference in speed gained or lost during the swingby when comparing that predicted by fundamental physics and that actually measured after the event.
6444173
submission
japan_dan writes:
An interesting way to enable Earth-Mars communication even when the Sun occults the direct radio line-of-sight: ESA proposes placing a pair of continuous-thrusting relay sats — one in front and ahead, one behind and below — Mars, with both following so-called 'B-orbits' (non-Keplerian). This means the direction of thrust is perpendicular to the satellites' direction of flight, allowing them to 'hover' with both Earth and Mars in view.
5009745
story
Dusty writes
"After several false alarms, the Ulysses Mission is finally ending. According to the Spacecraft Operations Manager's latest status report, the last track will be on 30th June 2009 from 15:25 until 20:20 UTC. 'We've tried to bolster our dwindling tracking allocation with some success
by grabbing antenna time released on short notice (mostly by the Spitzer Project). However, weekly data return figures are now typically 10% or less. And soon, even 512 bps from 70m antennas will be a thing of the past.'
Further details about Ulysses' 18-year mission are available from NASA and the ESA. We discussed the failing spacecraft last summer when it looked like its fuel was going to freeze, but through clever engineering, experts managed to squeeze out another year.
