OrbitalHub

Blue Origin dicit:

We’re currently testing the newest member of the BE-3 family, BE-3U (upper stage), a variant of the BE-3PM propelling New Shepard. With a back-to-back turbine assembly and a larger nozzle, BE-3U is optimized to operate in the vacuum of space and generates 710 kN (160,000 lbf) thrust in vacuum.

Two BE-3U engines power New Glenn’s restartable upper stage, enabling the full range of customer missions including direct injection to geostationary orbit. Building on years of operational experience and rigorous testing, BE-3U will be one of the best understood rocket engines when it launches into space.

Video Credit: Blue Origin

NASA dicit:

Since 2008, the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, or NASS, has drawn on Landsat data to monitor dozens of crops in the lower 48 states as part of NASS’s Cropland Data Layer program. The Cropland Data layer uses Landsat and similar sensors to identify what crop is growing where in the country. Separately, NASS uses NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments aboard the Aqua and Terra satellites to monitor daily vegetation health and growth stage, all indicators of crop yield.

Video Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

NASA dicit:

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission has returned unprecedented data from near the Sun, culminating in new discoveries published on December 4, 2019, in the journal Nature. Among the findings are new understandings of how the Sun’s constant outflow of material, the solar wind, behaves. Seen near Earth — where it can interact with our planet’s natural magnetic field and cause space weather effects that interfere with technology — the solar wind appears to be a relatively uniform flow of plasma. But Parker Solar Probe’s observations reveal a complicated, active system not seen from Earth.

Video Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Wikipedia dicit:

The Progress is a Russian expendable cargo spacecraft. Its purpose is to deliver supplies needed to sustain human presence in orbit. While it does not carry a crew it can be boarded by astronauts when docked with a space station, hence it being classified as manned by its manufacturer. Progress is derived from the manned Soyuz spacecraft and launches on the same vehicle, a Soyuz rocket.

Progress has supported space stations as early as Salyut 6 and as recently as the International Space Station. Each year there are between three and four Progress flights to the ISS. A Progress remains docked until shortly before being replaced with a new one or a Soyuz (which will use the same docking port). Then it is filled with waste, disconnected, and de-orbited, at which point it burns up in the atmosphere. Due to the variation in Progress vehicles flown to the ISS, NASA uses its own nomenclature where “ISS 1P” means the first Progress spacecraft to ISS.

Progress was developed because of the need for a constant source of supplies to make long duration space missions possible. It was determined that cosmonauts needed an inflow of consumables (food, water, air, etc.), plus there was a need for maintenance items and scientific payloads that necessitated a dedicated cargo carrier. Such payloads were impractical to launch with passengers in the restricted space of a Soyuz. As of 1 December 2016 there have been 155 Progress flights with three failures. All three failures have occurred since 2011.

Video Credit: Roscosmos

Wikipedia dicit:

The SpaceX Dragon is a reusable cargo spacecraft developed by SpaceX, an American private space transportation company. Dragon is launched into orbit by the company’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle.

During its maiden flight in December 2010, Dragon became the first commercially built and operated spacecraft to be recovered successfully from orbit. On 25 May 2012, a cargo variant of Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to successfully rendezvous with and attach to the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX is contracted to deliver cargo to the ISS under NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services program, and Dragon began regular cargo flights in October 2012.

On 3 June 2017, the CRS-11 capsule, largely assembled from previously flown components from the CRS-4 mission in September 2014, was launched again for the first time, with the hull, structural elements, thrusters, harnesses, propellant tanks, plumbing and many of the avionics reused while the heat shield, batteries and components exposed to sea water upon splashdown for recovery were replaced.

Video Credit: NASA Kennedy/SpaceX

Wikipedia dicit:

The Kepler space telescope is a retired space telescope launched by NASA to discover Earth-size planets orbiting other stars. Named after astronomer Johannes Kepler, the spacecraft was launched on March 7, 2009, into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit. The principal investigator was William J. Borucki. After nine years of operation, the telescope’s reaction control system fuel was depleted, and NASA announced its retirement on October 30, 2018.

Designed to survey a portion of Earth’s region of the Milky Way to discover Earth-size exoplanets in or near habitable zones and estimate how many of the billions of stars in the Milky Way have such planets, Kepler’s sole scientific instrument is a photometer that continually monitored the brightness of approximately 150,000 main sequence stars in a fixed field of view. These data are transmitted to Earth, then analyzed to detect periodic dimming caused by exoplanets that cross in front of their host star. Only planets whose orbits are seen edge-on from Earth can be detected. During its over nine and a half years of service, Kepler observed 530,506 stars and detected 2,662 planets.

Video Credit: Ethan Kruse/NASA Goddard