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| Credits: The British Interplanetary Society |
Carnival of Space #129 is hosted by Tracy Zollinger Turner at Tiny Mantras.
The blog posts cover topics like the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Rosetta spacecraft, Olympus Mons, Neptune’s dark spot, water ice found by LCROSS, the Leonid meteor shower, Project Icarus, microsatellites designed and built at the University of Kentucky, and much more.
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| Credits: ESA – S. Corvaja, 2009 |
Arianespace is getting closer to the first Soyuz launch from Kourou, in French Guyana.
On November 7, 2009, two Soyuz launchers were loaded on MN Colibri, which transports them from Russia to French Guyana. The journey of the two Soyuz 2-1A launchers from St. Petersburg to Kourou takes two weeks.
Each launch vehicle is loaded in ten containers, which hold the four first-stage strap-on boosters, the Block A core stage, the Block I third stage, the Fregat upper stage, and the Soyuz 2-1A ST-type payload fairing. MN Colibri is also carrying the refined kerosene propellant used by the boosters, the Block A and Block I stages, as well as the unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) and the nitrogen peroxide (N2O4) needed to fuel the Fregat upper stage.
The Soyuz launch site at Kourou is in its final stage of construction. While sharing common features with the cosmodromes at Baikonur in Kazakhstan and Plesetsk in Russia, the launch site at Kourou will have a fifty-two meter tall mobile gantry, which will be used for vertical payload integration and final pre-liftoff processing.
If you ask yourself how safe is Soyuz, it has been in production since 1957, continuously upgraded, and has more than 1,740 successful launches on record to date. Soyuz will become the medium-size launcher in the Arianespace family of launch vehicles. Taking advantage of the low latitude of the European spaceport, Soyuz will be able to deliver three-ton payloads to geostationary orbits.
Space Shuttle Atlantis docked to Harmony on November 18, 2009, at 11:51 AM EST. The hatchway between Atlantis and the International Space Station opened at 1:18 PM EST. STS-129 has three EVAs scheduled.
STS-129 Space Shuttle Atlantis launched on November 16, 2009, at 2:28 PM EST. The members of the crew are Commander Charlie Hobaugh, Pilot Barry Wilmore, astronauts Leland Melvin, Mike Foreman, Robert Satcher and Randy Bresnik, all mission specialists.
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| Credits: ESA OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA |
On November 13, 2009, at 8:45 AM CET, ESA’s comet chaser Rosetta swung by Earth. Rosetta passed just South of the Indonesian island of Java at an altitude of 2481 km. Its speed relative to Earth was 13.34 km/s. The maneuver provided a boost of 3.6 km/s.
Rosetta’s OSIRIS (Optical Spectroscopic and Infrared Remote Imaging System) narrow-angle camera was used to image the Earth once every hour for 24 hours.
Rosetta will meet asteroid 21 Lutetia in 2010. The final destination of Rosetta is the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which the spacecraft will reach in 2014. Rosetta will deploy a lander to the surface of the comet, and will also orbit the nucleus of the comet and fly alongside as it heads towards the inner Solar System. Most of the time, the probe will hibernate with the majority of its systems shut down in order to optimize the power consumption.
You can find more information about Rosetta’s swing by on ESA’s Rosetta Blog website.
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| Credits: General Dynamics C4 Systems |
Carnival of Space #128 is hosted by Peter Lake at AARTScope Blog.
The blog posts cover topics like a race in Spain to build a space hotel, the Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge competition, commercial space satellites, various forms of space travel being researched and proposed, NASA’s Fermi Gamma ray telescope, the Sun’s gravitational lens, naming of the Martian meteorites found by the Opportunity and Spirit rovers, the Space Station Crew Return Vehicle, and much more.
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