Category Archives: Space Systems

Living in Space, Simulators, Space Systems

Univ. North Dakota Lunar Mars Analogue Habitat simulation passes midway of 10 day program

The Lunar/Mars mission simulation by the North Dakota UND Human Spaceflight Laboratory is into the 7th day of the 10 day project. (See earlier posts here and here.)

Education, Simulators, Space Systems

10 day simulation of mission in inflatable planetary habitat underway at Univ. North Dakota

The 10 day Lunar/Mars mission simulation by the North Dakota UND Human Spaceflight Laboratory  has been underway since Sunday. (See earlier post.)

Three graduate students are living

 inside an Inflatable Planetary Module, using a Pressurized Rover and two NDX-2AT space suits. All these elements were developed at the UND Space Suit Laboratory www.human.space.edu under a 3-year NASA grant.

You can follow their activities on the NDX Space Suit Projects. Here are their reports so far:

And a local newspaper story: UND starts a ten day lunar habitat experiment – WDAY | Fargo, ND (includes video news report):

Contests and Games, Space Systems

International SunSat Competition – Over $40k in prizes to be awarded

An announcement from the National Space Society and the Space Journal at Ohio University:

Participate in the International SunSat Competition
Over $40,000 in Prizes Will Be Awarded! 

The National Space Society in affiliation with Ohio University is pleased to announce that the International SunSat Design Competition is now registering competitive teams.  This two-year project is designed to link global scientific communities with university-based (and other) digital media labs for the purposes of advancing knowledge of space-based solar power satellites (SunSats) and illustrating their many Earth-energy applications.

SunSat Design Competition Logo

If you are a space scientist, engineer, academic, business or digital media professional with an idea for moving space solar power closer to implementation, consider forming a team to join in this effort. And please forward this message to others.

In the first cycle of this competition, two First Place prizes of $10,000 and three Second Place prizes of $5,000 are expected to be awarded at the May 2014 International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles. For registered teams successfully completing the Feb. 2014 “significant progress point,” an additional $1,000 incentive can be earned, and $1,000 travel assistance will be awarded to winners.

Winning entries of 2014 and 2015 will be published in the Space Journal as Issue No.18: Top SSP Designs.

To learn more, check  the SunSat Visualization Guidebook [pdf] and look at the SunSat Design Competition website.To see where the idea of a SSP Design Competition came from, take a look at SpaceJournal Issue No.16: Solar Power Satellites.To see how Ohio University’s Game Research in Immersive Design (GRID) Lab, with the help of Georgia Institute of Technology, University of North Dakota and others in academia, has experimented with making the advanced science and technology concepts of SSP more accessible to the public, view SpaceJournal Issue No.17: Creative Visualization of Space Solar Power.This competition is managed by Ohio University, the host institution for the Online Journal of Space Communication, but guided and juried by members of the National Space Society and the Society of Satellite Professionals International.

Satellite Watching, Space Systems

European ATV cargo module departs from the ISS

The European Space Agency’s ATV cargo vessel, which has been docked to the International Space Station since June, departed from the station today:

The ATV, which is named Albert Einstein, will de-orbit on November 2nd and burn up in the atmosphere. They are providing a track of the vehicle until then at ATV-4: Follow the ground track – Albert Einstein.

Here’s advice on how to image the spacecraft : Guide to photographing ATV Albert Einstein from your backyard – Albert Einstein