Here is the latest episode of The Virtual SpaceTV 3D show with Amanda Bush. The programs are created by BINARY SPACE (www.binary-space.com) with story content from HobbySpace.com.
In this show, Amanda Bush talks about the following topics: 01:27 – 04:32 A better Dragon on Stage 04:33 – 06:09 Virgin Galactic likes Nylon 06:10 – 07:36 Google to fill the Sky with Satellites 07:37 – 09:06 A new Look in NASA Space Suits 09:07 – 10:01 A new Mars Crater
These videos are intended as educational programs and as demonstrations of an experimental technique for generating animated presentations. The show was generated autonomously by software according to a text script. The project is described in the Virtual Producer whitepaper (Release 1.1, Oct.2013, pdf). For further information contact info@binary-space.com.
I posted recently about the rocket week at NASA Wallops involving over 60 college students and faculty who were learning to build and prepare science payloads for rocket flights. Today their experiments flew successfully on a sounding rocket. There will be another launch on Saturday (webcast here). Here is a report from NASA:
The sounding rocket carrying the RockOn student-built payloads launches from the Wallops Flight Facility. Image Credit: NASA/G. Qian
The RockOn Terrier-Improved Orion sounding rocket containing multiple student-built experiments launched successfully at 7:21 a.m. EDT on June 26, 2014 from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The payload was recovered and has been returned to Wallops. The students will conduct their preliminary analysis on their experiments later this afternoon. According to the preliminary information, the payload flew to an altitude of 73.3 miles and landed via parachute 43.9 miles from Wallops Island in the Atlantic Ocean 12.16 minutes after launch.
The next launch from Wallops will be a Terrier-Improved Malemute sounding rocket carrying the SubTec-6 payload between 4 and 5 a.m., Saturday, June 28. Backup launch days run through July 2. More information on the SucTec-6 mission is available at: www.nasa.gov/wallops. Ustream coverage of the mission will begin at 3:30 a.m. on the Wallops Ustream site at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-tv-wallops
On June 30th it will be 10 years since the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, built by a US/Europe collaboration, went into orbit around Saturn. Huygens successfully landed on the moon Titan in 2005 and Cassini has continued to provide tremendous information and imagery of Saturn, its rings and moons. Here is a NASA video about the day it arrived at Saturn:
WASHINGTON–At a press conference Monday, Time Capsule to Mars™ (TC2M), a project of Explore Mars, officially launched the largest crowdfunding campaign in history to realize the world’s first privately-funded and student-led interplanetary mission to Mars. The team will design, launch, fly and land a CubeSat-based spacecraft on the surface of Mars, carrying digital content from tens of millions of people across the globe for future colonists of the Red Planet to discover.
The $25 million mission will be funded by people across the globe that upload their personal digital media in the form of images, text, audio and video clips at the cost of 99 cents each (up to 10 megabytes). For those in the developing world, digital media will be free of charge and underwritten by corporate sponsors.
The mission has also garnered support from leading organizations and individuals in government, academia and the private sector including ATK, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Deep Space Industries, Draper Laboratory, Duke University, Lockheed Martin, MIT, NASA, Remarkable Technologies, Stanford University, UConn and Uwingu. Charlie Precourt, vice president and general manager of ATK Space Launch Division and former NASA chief astronaut, and Kent Rominger, vice president, business development of ATK and former NASA chief astronaut, are special advisors to this project.
“We will make history by connecting humanity’s shared experience with the first pioneers to walk on Mars,” said Emily Briere, Time Capsule to Mars™ founder, mission director and Duke University senior student. “This mission is bigger than any one University, one company, or one country. We have come together to unite and inspire humanity under one mission, as one race, in the spirit of global cooperation and peace as we collectively seek to colonize the first off-world planet.”
The mission will also be the first of its kind to test critical new technologies in propulsion and networking. TC2M will incorporate the use of “quartz storage technology” to preserve and protect the data for potentially several millions of years. The mission will also trial Ion Electrospray propulsion developed at MIT, which was designed to reduce travel time to Mars. Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) will also be deployed to begin testing for a future deep space Internet communications network.
Said Jon Tidd, Time Capsule to Mars™ director of fundraising and marketing, recent production intern at Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Fuqua School of Business and Duke University graduate student, “We hope to inspire and educate young people worldwide by enabling them to personally engage and be part of the mission. The distributed approach to funding and personal engagement will ultimately guarantee our success.”
Engaging young students is a critical part of the TC2M mission strategy. Students will be able to access their own personalized “Mission Control” portals to play a virtual role in the mission, while tracking vehicle data across deep space to its landing point on Mars.
The world’s first student-led interplanetary mission, Time Capsule to Mars™ (TC2M), has a goal to design, launch and land intact a time capsule on Mars containing data that memorializes the digital keepsakes of the human race on Earth in the current decade as we set out to colonize the first off-world planet in humanity’s history. Time Capsule to Mars™ (TC2M) intends to be the largest-ever crowdfunded science endeavor, aiming to raise an estimated $25 million to accomplish the mission. TC2M is a project of the non-profit Explore Mars (www.exploremars.org). Read more about our mission here, follow us @TimeCapsuleMars or #TC2M, and on Google+.
During our session with Arecibo today we came very, very close to firing the thrusters on ISEE-3 for its spin-up maneuver. But we were not able to complete the process and fire the thrusters. The spacecraft was completely configured for a thruster firing during today’s pass. We reduced the number of pulses from 11 to 1 to make certain that we had the proper commands in place. If that engine firing proceeded successfully we’d follow with the remaining 10 pulses so as to spin up the spacecraft to the required rotation rate. As it happened we were unable to get confirmation on the very last command and put a halt to the procedure.
The spacecraft is in a safe mode – one that has been verified by telemetry. You can follow the real time Tweets of this session by looking at our Twitter account at @ISEE3Reboot. We are waiting for word of our next window at Arecibo. We are now confident that we will be able to perform the required thruster firings to spin up the spacecraft during the next opportunity.
