October 2011

31 October

• China successfully launched their Shenzhou-8 unmanned spacecraft aboard a Long March-2F (Y8) rocket. The mission is to practice docking with the Tiangong-1 module, which was launched on 29 September.
• The School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University will assemble the OSIRIS Thermal Emission Spectrometer, or OTES. OTES will be responsible for capturing roughly 2 ounces of dust, soil and debris from a designated area the asteroid 1999 RQ36. The OSIRIS-REx mission is set to launch in September 2016.

30 October

• A Soyuz rocket successfully placed a Progress cargo spacecraft into orbit Sunday, two months after a similar launch failed, thus clearing the way for a crewed Soyuz launch next month. The Soyuz rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 6:11 am EDT (1011 GMT, 4:11 pm local time) and placed the Progress M-13M spacecraft into orbit nine minutes later. NASA is happy.

29 October

• In its last currently-scheduled launch, a Delta 2 rocket placed an Earth sciences satellite into orbit on Friday. The Delta 2 7920 lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 5:48 am EDT (0948 GMT) Friday and released the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) satellite into a sun-synchronous orbit nearly one hour later.
• The Progress 45 cargo vessel is scheduled to blast off from Kazakhstan at 3:11 M Phoenix time (1011 GMT) Sunday. If anything goes wrong with the flight, the launch of three new station crewmembers, currently scheduled for 14 November, would likely be delayed, because both missions use similar Russian Soyuz rockets.

28 October

• Chinese hackers are suspected of having interfered with the operation of two US government satellites on four occasions via a ground station, according to a report being prepared for the US Congress.

27 October

• Aviation Week discusses the Washington hearings on the Commercial Crew programs by NASA.
• ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft has revealed asteroid Lutetia to be a primitive body, left over as the planets were forming in our Solar System. Results from Rosetta’s fleeting flyby also suggest that this mini-world tried to grow a metal heart.

26 October

• Virgin Galactic has selected former USAF test pilot Keith Colmer as the first astronaut pilot to join the commercial spaceline’s flight team. Colmer will join Chief Pilot David Mackay to begin flight training and testing, leading to operational missions to space with Virgin Galactic’s revolutionary vehicles, WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo.

25 October

• A supernova that exploded in 185 CE expanded much faster than expected. NASA scientists have resolved the unusual remnant.

24 October

• Fast and Furious – criticism of the Senate Launch System – “Propellant depots: the fiscally responsible and feasible alternative to SLS”
• Aviation Week discusses the problems facing the Senate Launch System – “NASA Tries To Squeeze SLS Into Flat Budget”
• Here There Be Dragons: SpaceX’s Spacecraft Arrives at Launch Complex 40

23 October

• After years of exhaustive work, Curiosity, the most technologically advanced surface robotic rover ever to be sent beyond Earth has been assembled into the flight configuration.
• Dead ROSAT Satellite Reenters Over South-East Asia

22 October

• NASA rejected the Propellant Depot study’s most radical conclusion: that NASA could forgo the heavy-lift and use existing smaller rockets, combined with fuel depots, to reach its targets more quickly and less expensively.

21 October

• A Soyuz rocket, launching from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana for the first time, placed two Galileo navigation satellites into orbit on Friday. The Soyuz-STB rocket lifted off from the spaceport near Kourou, French Guiana, at 6:30 am EDT (1030 GMT) Friday carrying the first two Galileo In Orbit Validation (IOV) satellites.
• NASA, external review committees and SpaceX have gone back and forth with the software designed to take the Dragon resupply vehicle to the International Space Station and back.
• It may be hard to imagine who will own the unofficial* land rights to the moon in the not-so-distant future, but a Russian space official thinks the future of manned lunar settlement will begin inside moon caves.

20 October

• Space Exploration Technologies, SpaceX, announced it has successfully completed the preliminary design review of its revolutionary launch abort system
• The launch debut of a Russian rocket from a European-run spaceport in South America was delayed Thursday, 20 October, by a fueling glitch.

19 October

• International Launch Services (ILS) have launched their Proton-M rocket on Wednesday. The launch was on schedule at 18:48 GMT from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, with the Proton tasked with deploying the ViaSat-1 telecommunications satellite – the highest throughput satellite ever built – into its GEO transfer orbit, after what will be over nine hours of flight.

18 October

• The veteran aerospace company Boeing is wrapping up a series of key wind-tunnel tests on a scale version for a new spaceship designed to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
• Aviation Week discusses Robonaut 2 (R2), the legless humanoid developed by NASA and General Motors. The Robot has moved for the first time since its launch to the International Space Station in February aboard the STS-133 mission.

17 October

• The U.S. Defense Department and National Reconnaissance Office plan to spend $15 billion on rocket booster cores without enough information to determine whether they’re getting a “fair and reasonable” price, according to government auditors. A Government Accountability Office report released today questioned aspects of an Air Force and National Reconnaissance Office plan to buy eight booster cores a year from fiscal 2013 to 2017, a total of 40, to stabilize production. The booster core is the main component of a rocket.
• Sir Richard Branson has dedicated the launchpad for his space tourism venture in the New Mexico desert – with his usual eye for a photo opportunity.

16 October

• NASA reviews TPS nose cap damage to STS-135/Atlantis

15 October

• Virgin Galactic announced a pair of coups. It received an order to conduct at one manned suborbital experimental flights on its SpaceShipTwo vehicle for NASA, with the option for two more and hired former NASA executive Mike Moses as vice president of Operations.

14 October

• The U.S. Air Force issued a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the NRO and NASA that serves as a joint agreement on the process they will use to allow new companies to compete to provide launch services.

13 October

• A top NASA official told Congress on Wednesday an independent engineering team agrees with Russia’s findings in an investigation into a failure of a Soyuz rocket’s third stage in August, affirming plans to resume crewed flights to the International Space Station in November.
• International space cooperation will be highlighted in a historic event on 20 October: the launch of Europe’s first Galileo navigation satellites on Russia’s first Soyuz rocket to depart from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. Liftoff is scheduled for Thursday, 20 October at 1134 UTC, 07:34 local time).

12 October

• An Indian rocket successfully launched a joint Indo-French Earth sciences satellite on Wednesday. The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) lifted off from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Center at 1:30 am EDT (0530 UTC, 11:00 am local time) and placed the Megha-Tropiques satellites into an 867-kilometer orbit.

11 October

• New images released by NASA’s Dawn mission feature a mountain three times the height of the tallest mountain on Earth.
• Astronomers have discovered more than two dozen previously unknown failed stars. The newfound objects are brown dwarfs, strange bodies that are larger than planets but too small to trigger the internal nuclear fusion reactions required to become full-fledged stars. Astronomers discovered the objects in two young star clusters using Japan’s Subaru Telescope in Hawaii and the Very Large Telescope in Chile. One of the brown dwarfs is just six times the mass of Jupiter.

10 October

• Is OMB wiping out planetary exploration?
• Orion managers are becoming more interested in the idea of the European Space Agency (ESA) taking over a role in NASA’s exploration future. Adhering to the international cooperation angle for the Agency’s future, managers have told their teams they are “serious” about ESA building the Service Module (SM) for Orion, via Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) hardware.

9 October

• A Long March rocket launched a European communications satellite on Friday, marking the first Chinese launch for a Western company in over a decade. The Long March 3B rocket lifted off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center at 1:21 am Phoenix time (0821 UTC, 4:21 pm Beijing time) Friday and placed the Eutelsat W3C satellite into orbit.

8 October

• NASA’s Dawn mission, which has been orbiting Vesta since mid-July, has revealed that the asteroid’s southern hemisphere boasts one of the largest mountains in the Solar System. Other results show that Vesta’s surface, viewed at different wavelengths, has striking diversity in its composition particularly around craters. The surface appears to be much rougher than most asteroids in the main asteroid belt. Preliminary results from crater age dates indicate that areas in the southern hemisphere are as young as 1-2 billion years old, much younger than areas in the north.

7 October

• A communications satellite went into safe mode early Thursday, interrupting phone and data services over portions of North America. Telesat reported its Anik F2 communications satellite suffered an unspecified “technical anomaly” shortly after 6:30 am EDT (1030 GMT) Thursday, causing a disruption in the communications services it provided. Telesat reported that the satellite is healthy and should be returned to service, perhaps as soon as Friday.
• Negotiations between the numerous International Space Station (ISS) partners are starting to result in an exciting 2012 manifest, as Agency vehicles play tag team with new commercial resupply craft. From a Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) standpoint, three – or four, if the C2/C3 demo slips to 2012 – SpaceX Dragon flights are set to head to the ISS, along with three Orbital Cygnus missions.
• A France-made W3C communications satellite, carried by China’s Long March-3B rocket carrier, was launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in the southwest China’s Sichuan Province, on 7 October 2011. The European Eutelsat-W3C satellite will provide new capacity for broadcasting, telecommunications and broadband services.
• The Mars Science Laboratory was matched up with its heat shield at Kennedy Space Center’s Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility on Wednesday, 5 October 2011.

6 October

• A land-based Zenit rocket launched a commercial communications satellite early Thursday. The Zenit-3SLB rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 5:00 pm EDT Wednesday (2100 GMT Wednesday, 3:00 am local time Thursday) and released its payload, Intelsat-18, into transfer orbit six and a half hours later.
• Where did Earth get its Oceans? Comet 103P/Hartley 2, which made its closest approach to the sun last October, contains water with virtually the same chemical signatures as water in the oceans, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Nature.

5 October

• A NASA camera that scans the night sky for meteors caught a stunning double feature when it spotted a fiery meteor breaking apart while a piece of an old Russian rocket zoomed overhead.
• Europe’s space science decision-making body on 4 October selected a satellite to be developed with NASA to fly closer to the sun than any previous spacecraft (Solar Orbiter) and a telescope to explore the universe’s expansion (Euclid) for development and launch in 2017 and 2019, respectively.

4 October

• NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is getting up close and personal with the giant asteroid Vesta, revealing rift valleys, mountainous uplifts and a belt of grooves near its equator.
• The shocking discovery that the universe is expanding at a faster and faster rate has taken the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics. Three American-born astrophysicists will divide the $1.5 million prize, announced October 4 in Stockholm, for their discovery of Dark Energy.
• The first elements of Europe’s new Vega small launcher left Italy last Thursday to begin their long journey to Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, marking the final step towards its inaugural flight in January.

3 October

• The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), has officially opened for astronomers. The first released image, from a telescope still under construction, reveals a view of the Universe that cannot be seen at all by visible-light and infrared telescopes.

2 October

• Russia has successfully launched the Kosmos (Glonass-M) satellite into orbit, following lift-off of their Soyuz 2-1B launch vehicle from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia, marking the first Soyuz launch since the August failure, which resulted in the loss of Progress M-12M. Launch occurred at 20:15 UTC on Sunday, with spacecraft separation over three hours later.
• The launch of the GLONASS-M navigation satellite that was due last night is postponed for 24 hours because of bad weather conditions. This is the second time when the launch is being delayed.
• The launch date of the next Falcon 9 rocket with its Dragon Spacecraft payload has been announced to occur no-earlier-than 19 December 2011.

1 October

• Zach Rosenberg comments on “The Problems of Reusable Rockets” concerning SpaceX plans for a totally reusable Falcon 9 launch vehicle.
• The world is a safer place today after it was announced that 93 percent of all near-Earth asteroids larger than a kilometre have been identified, and none of the them pose a risk to Earth. The findings are the result of NEOWISE: a survey with NASA’s orbiting Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)
• Astronomers are lining up to use a powerful new NASA telescope called SOFIA. The telescope has unique capabilities for studying things like how stars form and what’s in the atmospheres of planets.