OrbitalHub

Wikipedia dixit:

“ICESat-2 (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite 2), part of NASA’s Earth Observing System, is a planned satellite mission for measuring ice sheet elevation, sea ice freeboard as well as land topography and vegetation characteristics. ICESat-2 is a planned follow-on to the ICESat mission. It will be launched in 2018 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California into a near-circular, near-polar orbit with an altitude of approximately 496 km. It is being designed to operate for 3 years, and will carry enough propellant for 7 years.

The ICESat-2 mission is designed to provide elevation data needed to determine ice sheet mass balance as well as vegetation canopy information. It will provide topography measurements of cities, lakes and reservoirs, oceans and land surfaces around the globe, in addition to the polar-specific coverage.

The ICESat-2 project is being managed by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The sole instrument is being designed and built by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the bus is being provided by Orbital ATK. The satellite will launch on a Delta II rocket provided by United Launch Alliance. As of November 2017 this is the last planned launch of the Delta ll launch vehicle.

The sole instrument on ICESat-2 will be the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS), a space-based LIDAR. ATLAS will time the flight of laser photons from the satellite to Earth and back; computer programs will use the travel time from multiple pulses to determine elevation. The ATLAS laser will emit visible laser pulses at 532 nm wavelength. The laser is being developed and built by Fibertek, Inc. As ICESat-2 orbits, the ATLAS will generate six beams arranged in three pairs, with the pairs 3.3 km apart, in order to better determine the surface’s slope and provide more ground coverage. ATLAS will take elevation measurements every 70 cm along the satellite’s ground path. The laser will fire at a rate of 10 kHz. Each pulse sends out about 20 trillion photons, almost all of which are dispersed or deflected as the pulse travels to Earth’s surface and bounces back to the satellite. About a dozen photons from each pulse return to the instrument and are collected in a beryllium telescope.”

Music: “Cristal Delight,” Fred Dubois, Killer Tracks

Ryan Fitzgibbons (USRA): Lead Producer

Kate Ramsayer (Telophase Corp.): Lead Writer

Ryan Fitzgibbons (USRA): Writer

Ryan Fitzgibbons (USRA): Lead Animator

Adriana Manrique Gutierrez (USRA): Animator

Thorsten Markus (NASA/GSFC): Lead Scientist

Thomas A. Neumann Ph.D. (NASA/GSFC): Lead Scientist

Ryan Fitzgibbons (USRA): Lead Editor

Ryan Fitzgibbons (USRA): Lead Narrator

Jefferson Beck (USRA): Lead Videographer

Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC): Lead Visualizer

John Caldwell (AIMM): Lead Videographer

Chris Meaney (KBRwyle): Lead Animator

Video credit: NASA Goddard

NASA dixit:

“When the Hubble Space Telescope observed Mars near opposition in May, 2016, a sneaky companion photobombed the picture. Phobos, the Greek personification of fear, is one of two tiny moons orbiting Mars. In 13 exposures over 22 minutes, Hubble captured a timelapse of Phobos moving through its 7-hour 39-minute orbit.”

Music credit: “Neighborhood Conspiracy” by Brice Davoli [SACEM]; Koka Media [SACEM], Universal Publishing Production Music (France) [SACEM]; Killer Tracks Production Music

Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Katrina Jackson

NASA dixit:

“Several cameras on the International Space Station (ISS) have eyes on NICER. Since arriving to the space station on June 5 – aboard SpaceX’s eleventh cargo resupply mission – NICER underwent robotic installation on ExPRESS Logistics Carrier 2, initial deployment, precise point tests and more. This video shows segments of NICER’s time in space. Scientists and engineers will continue to watch NICER, using these cameras, throughout the mission’s science operations.”

Credit: Music Credits: KillerTracks, Strange Reality

Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Clare Skelly

ESA dixit:

“[This is a] Video showing a test of the mechanisms steering the four solar electric propulsion thrusters on BepiColombo’s Mercury Transfer Module (speeded up by 20 times). The module will use a combination of electric propulsion and multiple gravity assists at Earth, Venus and Mercury to carry BepiColombo’s two scientificorbiters – ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and Japan’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter – to the innermost planet in our Solar System.

The test is designed to demonstrate that the mechanisms can reach their full steering range. The thruster mechanisms control the steering of the spacecraft during the long thrust arcs of the 7.2 year cruise to Mercury and as such are used for navigation, attitude control, and reaction wheel off-loading. Together with the onboard software, the mechanisms will update the direction of the thrust vector every five minutes relative to the spacecraft’s evolving centre of gravity. The thrusters will be fired for several months at a time between the gravity assist flybys.

This particular test was conducted in April 2017, before the spacecraft was put into the composite stack configuration. The same test will be repeated again later in the year to verify performance after the stack level vibration test campaign.”

Video credit: ESA

ESA dixit:

“The high performance of ESA’s new generation ‘Planetary and Asteroid Natural scene Generation Utility’ or Pangu software enables real-time testing of both landing algorithms and hardware. Entry, descent and landing on a planetary body is an extremely risky move: decelerating from orbital velocities of multiple km per second down to zero, at just the right moment to put down softly on an unknown surface, while avoiding craters, boulders and other unpredictable hazards.

But Pangu can generate realistic images of planets and asteroids on a real-time basis, as if approaching a landing site during an actual mission. This allows the testing of landing algorithms, or dedicated microprocessors or entire landing cameras or other hardware ‘in the loop’ – plugged directly into the simulation – or run thousands of simulations one after the other on a ‘Monte Carlo’ basis, to test all eventualities.

Seen here is a Pangu recreation of the Mars Curiosity’s rover’s approach to Mars, using original telemetry, and then a view of Mars moon Phobos. This is followed by another recreation the Japanese Hayabusa probe’s encounter with the rubble-strewn Itokawa near-Earth asteroid, and finally a telemetry-based recreation of the field of view of the New Horizons mission as it performed its rapid flyby of Pluto.

This new generation of Pangu was developed for ESA by the University of Dundee in Scotland.”

Video credit: ESA

NASA dixit:

“At any given moment, as many as 10 million wild jets of solar material burst from the sun’s surface. They erupt as fast as 60 miles per second, and can reach lengths of 6,000 miles before collapsing. These are spicules, and despite their grass-like abundance, scientists didn’t understand how they form. Now, for the first time, a computer simulation — so detailed it took a full year to run — shows how spicules form, helping scientists understand how spicules can break free of the sun’s surface and surge upward so quickly.

This work relied upon high-cadence observations from NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, and the Swedish 1-meter Solar Telescope in La Palma. Together, the spacecraft and telescope peer into the lower layers of the sun’s atmosphere, known as the interface region, where spicules form.”

Music credit: ‘Solar Dust’ by Laurent Levesque [SACEM], ‘Games Show Sphere 05’ by Anselm Kreuzer [GEMA] from Killer Tracks

Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab