50 years since Valentina Tereshkova flew to space

Today is the 50th anniversary of the spaceflight of Valentina Tereshkova, the first women to go to space:

Video highlights of her trip to space:

Lone Signal – using a big dish to broadcast messages to ET

The LONE SIGNAL project, which officially opens on June 18th,  wants to send messages to an extraterrestrial intelligence (METI) using a former NASA radio dish near Carmel, California : Lone Signal: METI Teams Up With Citizen Science To Try And Make First Contact – Science 2.0

Lone Signal is going to start firing off messages on a recurring basis and its first target is Gliese 526 in the constellation Boötes, just under 18 light years from us. And they are going to let the public decide what those messages are, no prime numbers or atomic elements dictated by committees. It can be pictures of your cat, though if you just sign up you can only send one short text message – all the electricity to fire up a 97 foot dish and transmit into space doesn’t come cheap – and more elaborate stuff is only available if you contribute money to the cause. After it’s sent, you can monitor how far it has gone and discuss with other people in the Lone Signal community.

The article includes an interview with Jamie King of Lone Signal.

Pluto probe to stay on course despite dust/debris collision worries

The New Horizons probe heading towards Pluto will stay on course despite concerns of a possible collision with orbital dust and debris that have been found to be greater that expected since the launch of the mission (link via Twitter / jeff_foust):

New Horizons Team Sticking to Original Flight Plan at Pluto

 Unless significant new hazards are found, expect NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to stay on its original course past Pluto and its moons, after mission managers concluded that the danger posed by dust and debris in the Pluto system is less than they once feared.

The New Horizons team recently completed an 18-month study of potential impact hazards – mostly dust created by objects hitting Pluto’s small satellites – the spacecraft would face as it speeds some 30,000 miles per hour (more than 48,000 kilometers per hour) past Pluto in July 2015. The team estimated that the probability of a mission-ending dust impact was less than 0.3 percent if the spacecraft followed the current baseline plan, far below some early, more conservative estimates. So, with the concurrence of an independent review panel and NASA, the project team expects to keep New Horizons on this baseline course, which includes a close approach of about 12,500 kilometers (nearly 7,800 miles) from the surface of Pluto.

Image of Pluto system
Safe passage: With the dust-impact hazard less than once feared, the
New Horizons team plans to keep its spacecraft on the baseline trajectory
through the Pluto system

“We found that loss of the New Horizons mission by dust impacting the spacecraft is very unlikely, and we expect to follow the nominal, or baseline, mission timeline that we’ve been refining over the past few years,” says New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “Still, we’ll be ready with two alternative timelines, in the event that the impact risk turns out to be greater than we think.”

Those alternate plans (called SHBOTs, short for Safe Haven by Other Trajectories) are being developed should new information – gathered from New Horizons camera observations during the approach to Pluto, for example, or new dust-dynamics analyses – indicate less-than-smooth sailing for New Horizons.

One plan, the Generic Inner SHBOT, is essentially the same as baseline trajectory, but with the spacecraft turned so that its 7-foot dish antenna faces the incoming dust particles; this “Antenna-to-Ram” (or ATR) configuration would protect the spacecraft underneath. The Deep Inner SHBOT also employs ATR protection, but would additionally dip the trajectory to within just 3,000 kilometers (nearly 1,900 miles) of Pluto’s surface, where atmospheric drag tends to sweep out lingering dust.

New Horizons managers recently presented their impact-hazard outlook and if-necessary mitigation plans to an independent NASA review panel and to the NASA Science Mission Directorate Program Management Council – receiving endorsements from both.

New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, says the mission team is now finalizing plans for the Pluto encounter. In early July, the team will rehearse the most critical nine-day segment of the baseline encounter plan, putting itself and the spacecraft through the paces of the flight toward and just past Pluto and its moons.

Stern adds that the spacecraft remains on target for a close approach to Pluto in 2015, all subsystems are performing nominally, and “the anticipated science observations will revolutionize our understanding of dwarf planets and the Kuiper belt, and excite a whole new generation of the public to the first reconnaissance of a planet on the very frontier of our solar system.”

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More at The PI’s Perspective: Encounter Planning Accelerates – New Horizons

New Horizons trajectories passed Pluto
The New Horizons team studied numerous alternate flybys, called SHBOTs, before
recommending to NASA a pair of backups to protect New Horizons from
possible impact hazards in the Pluto system.

LEGO to produce fan-designed Curiosity Rover model

The  Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover LEGO model designed by Stephen Pakbaz is to be become an official LEGO product: LEGO to roll out Mars rover Curiosity as toy model in fan-created line – collectSPACE

See also his page at Rebrickable.com and the earlier posting about Pakbaz here: New LEGO space models by Stephen Pakbaz – Space-for-All.

PerijoveMSLmodel_thumb640x360

Everyone can participate in space