Space

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Synopsis: Space: Space:

The smallest spacecraft in orbit As I type this, there a satellite sitting on the desk in front of me.

but this spacecraft is little bigger than a postage stamp, and around the width of a slice of processed cheese.

It may not look much like a typical spacecraft, but next month, 100 miniature satellites like this one will be blasted into orbit.

through the Kickstarter crowdfunding website to enable people to have their own personal spacecraft, known as a sprite.

It also required careful thinking about how to safely launch a hundred tiny bits of potential space debris without them posing a danger to bigger orbiting spacecraft.

squeezed into a Falcon 9 rocket alongside an International space station (ISS) Dragon supply capsule. here typically a bunch of space left little nooks and crannies

The slight delay is to avoid a space debris disaster like the movie Gravity. It be a risk

if 100 tiny satellites end up pinging around the world at high speed in exactly the same orbit as the space station.

The mothership will spend at least seven days in orbit before the sprites themselves are released. here are some space debris mitigation concerns

and a bit of know-how, will be able to follow all the spacecraft from the ground. hat wee been able to do with Kicksat is tap into the developments in consumer electronics,

For most of them, this will be the first space mission where they have direct involvement. We can all be rocket scientists now and that certainly not a little thing

creates some unique challenges. ne of the most important aspects of any AR system is the ability to track image, space environments, objects,

a nation waits with baited breath as a spacecraft door is opened. Slowly an astronaut emerges, the blackness of space behind him.

what is known in space exploration as an EVA (extra vehicular activity). The man in the suit, Zhai Zhigang, joined Russia's Alexey Leonov and America's Ed white in the history books as his nation's first space walker.

since the US and Soviet union to put exploratory spacecraft on the Moon#the last time being the Soviet Luna 24 mission in 1976.

deep space and human space flight#completing EVAS, space rendezvous and dockings. According to Pollpeter,"by the end of the decade the Chinese say they want to move from being

Within a little more than a decade, the only working space station in orbit could be Chinese. It announced plans to take international astronauts aboard its larger space station,

scheduled for completion at the end of the decade#a time when the International space station may be out of service. While Apollo was about the Cold war,

it is harder to glean the exact motives for China's lunar programme. Pollpeter thinks it is"mainly for symbolic reasons#.

"Ninety-five percent of space technology is considered dual use, meaning of value to both the civilian and military communities,

#Earlier this year, for example, China's space agency said it launched three satellites to clean up space debris orbiting the Earth:

Yet the idea of seeing another Apollo-type event may just be a case of wishful thinking, a consequence of perceiving it as the epiphany of the space exploration agenda.

Last year, Ghana launched its Space science and Technology Center, to"foster teaching, learning, commercial application of space research,

#as a precursor to a full-blown space agency by 2016, intended to lead the nation's civilian space exploration efforts.

Yet Joseph Akinyede, director of the African Regional Centre for Space science and Technology Education in Nigeria, an education centre affiliated with the United nations Office for Outer space Affairs,

says that the application of space science technology and research to"basic necessities#of life#health education, energy, food security,

chairman of the Ethiopian Space science Society argues that enhancing local expertise via space research is vital."

"Almost every sector here in Ethiopia is using space science technology, #he says, citing mobile phones, agricultural activities, and aviation."

doughnut-shaped spaceship sitting in the middle of a large green field. Get much closer and youl find researchers trying to better understand how modern car engines work,

developing a spaceplane that could one day fly between these cities, but other concepts are being investigated.#

which could make space travel a long-haul passenger's reality. In the UK, a company called Skylon has attracted just#60m ($110m) of government funding to develop a futuristic type of engine known as a"reaction engine#.#

However, these flights are likely to run from dedicated spaceports and it will be some time before mixed-mode airports that can operate both spacecraft

and aircraft become possible. The early space systems will probably involve gliding back to Earth

The futuristic visions of the 1950s and 60s imagined neighbourhood airports and helicopters in our back gardens-but space travel is more likely.

Behind them are huge posters of the Curiosity rover on Mars. Nasa's Jet propulsion laboratory used a portfolio of design software made by Siemens to digitally design,

The french-led Corot spacecraft, launched in 2006, greatly outlived its original two-and-a-half year mission of spotting terrestrial-sized exoplanets,

Nasa's $600 million space observatory Kepler, launched in 2009, has also been crippled recently. Kepler has helped spot thousands of potential exoplanets#over 130

Persephone aims to build a synthetic biological interior for the spaceship, working with teams from the fields of science, technology, architecture

the firm that stands as the only private company to ever return a spacecraft from low-Earth orbit.

#Rare molecule found in space hints at life s origins The discovery of an unusual carbon-based molecule near the galactic center of the Milky way suggests that the complex molecules needed for life may have their origins in interstellar space.

This detection opens a new frontier in the complexity of molecules that can be formed in interstellar space

The find was made using an instrument aboard Europe s Herschel Space observatory. The molecule argon hydride was seen in the crab nebula the remains of a star that exploded 1000 years agothe noble gases

what happens in these stellar explosions. ast year we used the European space agency s Herschel Space observatory to study the intricate network of gas filaments to show how exploding stars are creating huge amounts of space dust. urther measurements

000 kilometers away from Gale crater where the Curiosity rover is now roamings covered in ridge-like features called inverted channels.

By taking pictures from different points in its orbit, the spacecraft was able to make stereo images that have allowed scientists to determine the topography of the martian surface.

It has become increasingly important to be able to understand the Sun#s magnetic activity as it is the changes in its magnetic field that are responsible for#space weather#phenomena including solar flares and coronal mass ejections.

When this weather heads in the direction of Earth it can damage satellites endanger astronauts on the International space station and cause power grid outages on the ground.

#NASA probe will reveal 3d architecture of forests from space NASA is developing a laser-based instrument for deployment on the International space station that will probe the depths of Earth's forests from space in a bid to reveal more about their role in the planet's carbon cycle.

ever since the first Lunar rover went for a spin during the Apollo 15 mission in 1971.

including the nuclear-powered Curiosity Mars rover, which is essentially a semi-autonomous 4x4 with six wheels."

but it will also speed up the prototyping process As well as ISAAC begins work on the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate Advanced Composites Project and the Space technology Mission Directoratecomposites for Exploration Upper Stage,

##explained NASA Apollo 11 lunar landing vehicle manager Hubert Davis, a member of#the Solar High Study Group#of nine former NASA and Apollo program scientists and retired

according to#August 2012 calculationsby NASA Apollo program engineer Philip Chapman, would be $0. 10 to $0. 11 per kilowatt-hour.

Historically, space missions have been ower paupersconstrained in design by the limitations of power and the high cost of getting that power.

e already have the ability to perform docking maneuvers with large objects like docking the International space station,

"I believe there's a tremendous potential to use these methods to build machines for situations where you need deployability, for example space exploration,

and will share the data with the CSA for possible use on future space missions and other applications.

but says it could be used on the International space station during future missions. The orbiting complex is expected to last until at least 2024.

Scientists with the European space agency and other institutions, for example, are working on a tight-fitting"skinsuit"that could help astronauts combat the back problems that are a common consequence of long-term spaceflight l

The group now hopes to put the Hi-C on a next-generation spacecraft that will monitor the Sun for longer periods of time e

That is not a surprise, given the map of hydrogen (a stand-in for water) generated by an instrument on the Mars Odyssey orbiting spacecraft and the presence of small amounts of water in younger Martian meteorites

The researchers used NASA s Kepler space telescope to identify the three planets orbiting Kepler 37, a star some 200 light-years away that is somewhat smaller than the sun. The spacecraft monitors more than 150,000 stars in the Milky way

Such things have included everything from spare parts for the International space station above to the beef on our dinner plates to the organs inside our bodies.

Where the Planck spacecraft, watching the sky from a vantage point 1. 5#million kilometres away,

NASA/WMAP SCIENCE TEAMIT was not until the launch of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) spacecraft that astronomers could begin to see variations in the background, at levels of 1 part in 100,000.

Next Mars rovers get a speed boost IT'S time for Martian rovers to put the pedal to the metal.

the Curiosity rover our best on the Red planet only covers about 200 metres per day. That's because when a rover encounters an obstacle it can't negotiate by itself it must wait for instructions from its minders On earth a huge waste of time.

If all goes well Seeker could help the European space agency's Exomars rover which is planned for launch in 2018 find its way across vast stretches of Martian soil.

Next Mars rovers get a speed boost IT'S time for Martian rovers to put the pedal to the metal.

the Curiosity rover our best on the Red planet only covers about 200 metres per day. That's because when a rover encounters an obstacle it can't negotiate by itself it must wait for instructions from its minders On earth a huge waste of time.

If all goes well Seeker could help the European space agency's Exomars rover which is planned for launch in 2018 find its way across vast stretches of Martian soil.

#China set to launch probe on round trip to the moon China is planning to launch an uncrewed spacecraft on a quick jaunt around the moon in a test of technology designed to return rocks from the lunar surface to Earth.

The spacecraft will also carry experiments to test what happens to bacteria and plants exposed to radiation beyond low Earth orbit.

China has partnered also with a Luxembourg-based firm called Luxspace to send a tiny spacecraft called the Manfred Memorial Moon Mission around the moon.

#Spacecraft seek geysers without human help When the Rosetta spacecraft sends its lander to the surface of a comet on 12 november the lander will follow prearranged orders from Earth to touch down safely

and send data home for analysis . But future spacecraft may be able to do it all on their own.

Kiri Wagstaff and her colleagues at the Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena California have developed software that can identify a plume of water

The more the spacecraft can do without waiting for communication with Earth the better they can explore especially

#Mini MRI to check bone health on space station Astronauts may soon have a portable MRI machine to keep an eye on their muscles and bones during a spell on the International space station.

So Sarty and his colleagues at MRI manufacturer MRI-Tech Canada of Calgary Alberta and space flight hardware maker Com Dev International of Cambridge Ontario have developed a technique called Transmit Array Spatial Encoding

which saves us considerable weight making it suitable for space flight Sarty told New Scientist. It also leaks very little magnetism outside of its enclosure so it won't interfere with other experiments on the ISS.

The hypersensitive methane detector on NASA's Mars rover curiosity is being repurposed to ferret out gas leaks On earth.

As part of the European space agency's EXPOSE mission the team sent some of the crater rocks to the International space station (ISS.

and coloured lights Spacex CEO Elon musk gave the world its first glimpse of the upgraded Dragon spacecraft.

NASA is already using an unpiloted version of Dragon to send cargo to the International space station and return valuable gear and scientific experiments.

The spacecraft can dock itself to the ISS without help from the space station's robotic arm.

which will allow astronauts to set the spacecraft down on solid ground. The current version of Dragon deploys a parachute as it descends

which brings Spacex a step closer to realising its goal of developing spacecraft that are fully and rapidly reusable.

and spacecraft we will never have true access to space says Musk. Like passengers in today's commercial aeroplanes riders of the Dragon V2 won't get much leg room in the capsule's tight quarters.

But the craft does include touchscreen interfaces to control the spacecraft as well as manual buttons for critical functions that would be needed in case of emergency.

When the Dragon V2 does launch with its first commercial crew the face of space travel is going to change.

Now Sandra Chapman of the University of Warwick UK and her colleagues have examined the solar wind's behaviour using NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft.

although the International space station was excluded from the ban. NASA only has a few smaller-scale joint activities with Russia such as an instrument aboard its Curiosity Mars rover

but there are no signs these have been affected by the boycott t

#Supernova found aligned with galactic magnifying glass A perfectly arranged exploding star and distant galaxy have created together a cosmic magnifying glass that could improve our understanding of the universe's expansion and dark matter.

This is not a trailer for an alien invasion movie NASA is gearing up to conduct the first test flight of a disc-shaped spacecraft designed to safely land heavy loads

and crashing is stopping says Allen Chen at NASA's Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena California who oversaw the successful landing of the one-tonne Curiosity rover in 2012.

which is just 1 per cent as dense as Earth's. Unfortunately rocket-powered landings are out of the question too as the atmosphere is still just thick enough to buffet incoming spacecraft with more turbulence than thrusters can accommodate.

These areas have even less air available for slowing down a spacecraft via drag and so have been inaccessible with current technology.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft flew through the geysers and detected water salts and carbon-based molecules.

which makes it difficult for spacecraft to operate. For now Europa is slightly ahead in terms of funding.

An internal memo made public this week revealed the space agency has suspended contact with Russia except for that concerning International space station (ISS) operations.

and human spaceflight programme and works with many other countries including Russia in space. When the Soviet union collapsed

and the cold war ended the US pragmatically merged its human spaceflight programme specifically the ISS programme with the Soviet Mir space station programme inherited by the new Russian state.

After all space technology is largely dual use of value to both military and civilian communities. The basics of rocket technology and missile technology are largely symbiotic.

Then after spending decades building the ISS the US cancelled the space shuttle the vehicle originally intended for transport to the ISS as part of its post-Apollo programme.

The first resident crew arrived at the ISS in 2000 aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft

and watched how the spacecraft was accelerated by the moon's gravity. This allowed them to map the distribution of mass in the moon's interior.

However Cassini team member Carolyn Porco at the Space science Institute in Boulder Colorado has written a paper (soon to appear in the journal Astrobiology) arguing for a mission to collect samples from Enceladus and return them to Earth.

Medical emergency For now, the only humans in space venture no further than the International space station.

And space capsules can only carry a certain amount of weight, so medical tools need to be relatively light but capable of handling many kinds of situations."

because the further away a spaceship gets, the greater the time delay in communications signals.

It's changed our thinking about how the system operates says Joe Borovsky at the Space science Institute in Boulder Colorado who was involved not in the research.

and saw a tendril of increased electron density curling away from the north pole indicating that a plume of plasma was veering off towards the sun. At the same time three of NASA's THEMIS spacecraft

To measure things with spacecraft we have to have them in just the right place

But what about our own future Mars colonies or space probes millions of kilometres away? Spacecraft currently use radio waves to beam information back home.

Laser signals carry more data but the light is almost undetectable by the time it reaches Earth. Now a nanoscale light detector could make such deep-space missives easier to read.

#Japan's huge magnetic net will trawl for space junk SOMEWHERE in Earth's orbit a satellite explodes into a terrifying cloud of debris. Moments later Sandra bullock

and George Clooney are left scrambling to dodge the deadly space junk. This problem isn't confined to the Oscar-nominated space thriller Gravity#scientists are struggling with it in real life.

It is one of many possible solutions that have been proposed to deal with space debris (see Catch'em drag'em blast'em.

Hundreds of thousands of pieces of spacecraft satellites and other equipment from human spaceflight zip around our planet some travelling faster than the speed of sound.

One just 1 centimetre across could disable a spacecraft. The worst-case scenario is the Kessler syndrome proposed by astrophysicist Donald Kessler in the 1970s.

and steel wires that hangs from an uncrewed spacecraft. The net is fitted with sensors that look for light reflecting from small pieces of debris

and deorbit allowing the debris spacecraft and net to burn up as they enter Earth's atmosphere.

He has reservations about the net's ability to deal with space junk. In particular he believes it could actually generate debris

After that three robotic Soviet spacecraft made it to the surface the final one in 1976.

But the moon is more than a test bed for space missions. China's Yutu rover will venture a few kilometres away from its landing site to snap images take stock of minerals with onboard spectrometers and probe below the surface with radar.

and evolution of the moon is to know those of Earth says Tatsuaki Hashimoto of the Japan aerospace exploration agency the lead scientist for a proposed lunar rover called SELENE-2. The moon is thought to have coalesced from the debris of an impact between a Mars-sized world and Earth

The Google Lunar X Prize is offering $20 million to the first private team that by the end of 2015 launches a lunar spacecraft that can land on the moon travel 500 metres

and now has plans for further probes to study the moon and space weather. These projects may seem divorced from India's development goals

That is no small feat more than half of all Mars missions so far have failed. It's a stretch goal says Scott Pace director of the Space Policy Institute at George washington University in WASHINGTON DC.

One big challenge will be making sure the spacecraft's electronics function reliably in the harsh temperature

or perhaps water in Mars's and recently NASA's Curiosity rover added to the scepticism by finding no methane when it breathed in the Martian air.

To have India executing a successful orbiter mission would be great for space science says Mustard d

Dubbed Space Race it is one of three space-based reality TV SHOWS that could be gracing our screens in the coming years assuming producers can get their hands on a working spacecraft.

and viewers will get a behind-the-scenes look at Spaceport America in New mexico. Space Race is not Burnett's first attempt to televise space flight.

In 2000 he announced Destination Mir a programme that would have seen contestants train for a mission to the Russian space station Mir

but the plans were scrapped after the station was orbited de in 2001. It is also not the only space-related show currently attempting to get off the ground.

Spacecraft normally rely on radio waves to communicate. These can be detected rain or shine but their relatively long wavelengths limit the information they can transmit in a given time period.

Future systems could stream high-definition video from space probes or from human missions to Mars suggests LLCD manager Donald Cornwell.

Joseph Kahn of Stanford university in California also acknowledges the need for higher bandwidth in returning ever larger amounts of data from space missions.

To stabilise its pointing LLCD sits on devices that cancel out any vibrations on the LADEE spacecraft.

China's upcoming spacecraft Chang'e-3 will be the first the country has landed on a celestial body.

China is also aiming to build its own space station by 2020 0

#Japanese probe to sniff out why planets lose gases Update 16 september: Epsilon took off at 2pm local time on 14 september.

It will deploy Sprint-A into low Earth orbit where the spacecraft will take aim at the planets using cameras and sensors that record extreme-ultraviolet light.

#Space station poised to launch open-source satellites Want to do your own space experiment? From next week you will be able to run science projects on the world's first open-source satellites.

Ardusat-1 and Ardusat-X were launched to the International space station (ISS) on 3 august aboard a Japanese resupply vehicle

a public competition is under way to create a crowdsourced design for an open-source 3d-printable rocket engine that commercial spaceflight operators will be able to use

The discovery should help us better understand how our star interacts with the Milky way including how harmful cosmic rays from interstellar space manage to sneak through the solar system's magnetic barrier.

At the same time a stream of particles blowing out from the sun the solar wind inflates a bubble of plasma around the solar system called the heliosphere Astronomers have assumed long that the sun's motion through the galaxy squashes

and spreads the heliosphere into a bullet shape with an extended tail at the back (see image).

Using the first three years of observations from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft astronomers were able to map this heliotail for the first time.

when charged particles from the solar wind collide with other charged particles in the outer heliosphere Some of these neutral atoms are bounced back towards us.

The magnetic field of the heliosphere protects us from the bulk of these galactic high-energy particles. But some manage to impinge on our solar system

and interact with gases in the interstellar medium creating mini versions of these enigmatic astrophysical phenomena in the lab for the first time.

#China inches closer to building its own space station Update 11 june 2013: The China National Space Administration successfully launched its Shenzhou-10 mission to low Earth orbit at 0938 GMT today.

and headed towards the fledgling spacefaring nation's space station Tiangong 1 around which it is expected to test manoeuvres before docking for a 15-day stay on orbit.

Original article published 10 june 2013china will launch the Shenzhou-10 spacecraft on 11 june lofting three astronauts on a 15-day mission to learn how to rendezvous

and operating a space station. If all goes to plan the mission will mark the end of the beginning of China's slow but steady approach to human space flight.

Right now the country is not doing anything revolutionary. But progress so far suggests that more advanced plans such as a moon base

China started with the uncrewed launch of the Shenzhou 1 spacecraft in 1999 and continued with its first crewed launch in 2003.

The ultimate goal is to build a space station by 2020. What China plans to do with the space station is still unclear

and they may need a new heavy launch vehicle called the Long March 5 in order to build it.

The two countries also have different political attitudes towards space exploration. What we have seen more than anything else is a truly long-term commitment to space that dates back at least 25 years

By contrast NASA's human spaceflight programme has struggled under changing budgets and political whims. Plans to return to the moon under George w bush's administration for instance morphed into crewed missions to an asteroid under Barack Obama's presidency.

At about the distance of the Kuiper belt the region past Neptune where comets are born the would-be planet cores can't get much bigger than a millimetre.

The launch sets the stage for a second company to begin resupply missions to the International space station.

Since the space shuttles retired in 2011 NASA has been contracting with private firms to deliver cargo and soon hopefully astronauts to the space station.

Antares built by spaceflight company Orbital Sciences of Dulles Virginia lifted off from the Mid-atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island Virginia at 22.00 GMT.

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