Category: Solar System

  • India’s Mars Orbiter Mission successfully insert into Orbit

    Today India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) spacecraft arrived at Mars and was successfully placed into orbit.  Launched 5th November, 13 days before NASA’s Maven the spacecraft, it took a slightly different route to Mars resulting in it arriving three days after MAVEN.  This is the first spacecraft from India to travel this far from Earth and it…

  • NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft reaches Mars

    Following a ten month, 442 million miles journey NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) successfully entered into orbit of Mars this evening.  The orbit insertion maneuver began with six thruster engines firing briefly to damp out deviations in pointing. Then, the six main engines quickly ignite and burn for 33 minutes to slow the craft,…

  • Exciting times in Space

    A lot has happened in Space or related to Space recently and the future is looking very bright. Below is a summary of some of the recent news and upcoming events. SpaceX and Boeing awarded CCtCap contracts – We now have two companies contracted to build manned spacecraft to deliver crew to the ISS.  Currently…

  • Power Generation on Mars

    While researching a longer blog post, to come soon, on Mars we were struck by the question of Power Generation, from most mission previews we have seen they plan to use Nuclear generators. While there are benefits to Nuclear generators there are also problems, the biggest of which is the public’s negativity towards launching anything that mentions…

  • Rosetta arrives at Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko

    After a 10 year, 5 month, 4 day journey the European Space Agencies Rosetta spacecraft has arrived at Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.  Having spent the last few weeks refining it’s approach and returning amazing images (see below) of the Comet it finally arrived in it’s initial orbit earlier this morning.  Due to the small size and low…

  • The Little Rover that could

    This week the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity broke the off-world driving record previously held by the Soviet Union’s Lunokhod 2 rover. Opportunity which has been operating on the surface of Mars for 10 years, 6 months has now traveled more than 25.01 miles. Opportunity and it’s twin Spirit were originally expected to last 90 sol’s…

  • Weekly Space News 6/27

    This week in space… SpaceX causes a stir and has another delay Last Saturday SpaceX caused quite a stir on the Internet when they announced there would be no live web-cast of the Orbcomm OG2 launch attempt that evening.  A spokesperson for SpaceX said they had been planning to move away from web-casting because launches…

  • Weekly Space Blog 6/13

    Orbital ISS Launched Delayed again The ORB-2 Cygnus cargo mission to the International Space Station (ISS) has been delayed again due to the on-going investigation into an AJ26 engine failure last month during testing.  The Antares rocket which launches the Cygnus spacecraft uses two of the AJ26 engines on the first stage to orbit. The…

  • Weekly Space Blog 5/23

    SpaceX Dragon completes successful mission Last Sunday at 3:05pm the SpaceX Dragon capsule successfully completed it’s CRS-3 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) with a splashdown in the Pacific ocean. Launched on April 18th aboard a Falcon 9 rocket the Dragon spacecraft, carrying nearly 5,000 lbs of supplies and payloads including two in the…

  • Weekly Blog 5/9

    This week in Space News SpaceX launch of Orbcomm OG2 satellites delayed The planned launch of six commercial communications satellites for Orbcomm has been delayed.  The planned static fire test on Thursday was called off after SpaceX ran into technical trouble during the countdown.  The static fire test was rescheduled for Friday but was stopped while the rocket…