Book passage to the final frontier with host Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Leighann Lord. Get tourism tips from Neil, including what to visit on Mars (Olympus Mons and Valles Marineris are must-sees) and what he really thinks of the Martian moons. Learn more than you ever wanted to know about why we puke in space, how to avoid it, and why there’s less vomit on the Vomit Comet these days. Find out how Space Elevators work and why they’re not feasible… yet. Plus, listen to an in-depth discussion about the forces that drive space tourism, and what role government, NASA and private industry will play. You’ll discover what space tourism has in common with the growth of the American railroad system and the exploitation of near-Earth asteroids for mineral wealth, and whether humanity could end up like the Ferengi from Star Trek (don’t worry – super-geek Leighann will explain it all).
Neil deGrasse Tyson was on the Bill Moyers show to talk about his upcoming new miniseries on Fox TV titled Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey, which updates Carl Sagan’s famous Cosmos program:
The FUNcube nanosat (now officially designated AO-73) reached orbit last November via a Russian Dnepr rocket. The FUNcube project is led by AMSAT-UK and is intended as
a complete educational single CubeSat project with the goal of enthusing and educating young people about radio, space, physics and electronics.
The project encompasses the FUNcube Dongle, which is a low cost device that plugs into a USB port and turns your computer into
the “ground segment”, or a radio receiver designed to allow anyone to try their hand at reception of satellites like FUNcube anywhere on Earth as part of a global educational collaboration project collecting information from space.
The satellite has materials on the external surface of the satellite configured with temperature sensors to provide an experiment to study heat radiation and to demonstrate telemetry collection and space research methods. There is now a teachers guide available on how to combine this on-board experiment data with the ground station:
Commercial communications satellites, weather satellites and other spacecraft are often put into a high equatorial orbit (36000 km high) called the geostationary orbit where the satellite will revolve at the same angular velocity as the earth turns, thus keeping it always above a given spot on the equator. Here is an explanation of geostationary and also of geosynchronous orbits and of how an orbit can be made circular : How to get a satellite to geostationary orbit – The Planetary Society
Putting a spacecraft into geostationary orbit typically starts by a rocket putting it into a highly elliptical orbit with the apogee at 36,000 km. This is called the geostationary transfer orbit. The animation below illustrates how the perigee of a highly elliptical orbit is raised by firing the spacecraft’s own engine at the apogee of the orbit:
NASA will participate in the fifth annual Zero Robotics SPHERES Challenge Friday, Jan. 17, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus in Cambridge, Mass.
The event will be broadcast live on NASA Television beginning at 7:30 a.m. EST.
The agency will join in the event with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, MIT, the European Space Agency, the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, IT consulting firm Appirio, and high school student teams from the United States and abroad.
For the competition, NASA will upload software developed by high school students onto bowling ball-sized spherical satellites called Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites, or SPHERES, which are currently aboard the International Space Station. From there, space station Expedition 38 Commander Oleg Kotov and Flight Engineer Richard Mastracchio will command the satellites to execute the teams’ flight program.
During a simulated mission, the teams will complete a special challenge called CosmoSPHERES, a competition in which students must program their satellites to alter a fictional comet’s earthbound trajectory.
A video of two SPHERES docking
Student finalists will be able to see their flight program live on the televised finals, where NASA’s Associate Administrator for Science, John Grunsfeld, and retired NASA astronauts Gregory Chamitoff, Gregory Johnson and Barbara Morgan will make a special appearance. The team with the best software performance over several rounds of the competition will win the challenge. The winning team will receive certificates and a SPHERES flight patch flown aboard the space station.
In addition to their use in this competition, SPHERES satellites are used on the space station to conduct formation flight maneuvers for spacecraft guidance navigation, control and docking. The three satellites that make up SPHERES fly in formation inside the space station’s cabin. The satellites provide opportunities to affordably test a wide range of hardware and software.
NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., operates and maintains the SPHERES National Laboratory Facility aboard the space station.
