Tag: Space
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Police are investigating an Indian actor for joking about the country’s Moon lander
Three years ago, India sought to land a small spacecraft on the Moon, Chandrayaan 2. However, due to a series of problems, including software errors, the lander crashed into the gray and lonely lunar surface during its final descent. This failure hit a sore spot for the country, which takes pride in its burgeoning space…
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Russia’s Luna 25 spacecraft has crashed into the Moon
Sunday 8:15 am ET update: Russian space officials have confirmed the loss of the Luna 25 spacecraft on the Telegram social media network. The failure occurred during a burn of the vehicle’s propulsion system to move the spacecraft into a “pre-landing” orbit on Saturday morning. However, due to an unspecified problem, the propulsion system instead…
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Mobile User Objective System (MUOS)
A major development effort in the design of the Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) is the waveform used in software defined radios (SDR) to provide terminal and manpack UHF communication radios. Due to the complexity of using Spectrally Adaptive Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (SA-WCDMA) in the MUOS environment, Satellite Link Emulator test systems were…
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Intuitive Machines says it is ready to fly to the Moon
A Houston-based company that is one of several US firms building private lunar landers, Intuitive Machines, says its 3-meter-tall Nova-C lander is finally ready to take to the skies. “Our Nova-C lander is completely built,” said Steve Altemus, co-founder and chief executive of Intuitive Machines, in an earnings call on Monday. “We will deliver a…
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Virgin Galactic just flew again, but is the company going anywhere?
SPACEPORT AMERICA, New Mexico—I’m standing on a spaceport runway at the ass end of nowhere. The sun has started to creep over the craggy San Andreas Mountains, illuminating the massive, alien spaceship-like building here in New Mexico that Virgin Galactic calls home. I have traveled all this way in early August to find a little…
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It’s finally time—Virgin Galactic is flying private astronauts into space
SPACEPORT AMERICA, New Mexico—On Thursday morning, Virgin Galactic plans to fly private citizens into space for the first time. The company’s VSS Unity spacecraft is due to be released from its carrier aircraft after 9 am local time (15:00 UTC), and it will then rocket above an altitude of 80 km. The vehicle will carry…
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The helicopter on Mars just flew again after surviving an emergency landing
By the standard of some of its previous flights, the most recent voyage of NASA’s intrepid Ingenuity helicopter on Mars was nothing special. Over a period of 24 seconds, the small helicopter rose to an altitude 5 meters above the red planet’s dusty surface and then touched back down in the same spot. During some…
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SpaceX conducts a mostly successful test of its Super Heavy booster
SpaceX on Sunday performed a static fire test of a new Super Heavy booster at its launch site in South Texas. The ignition of 33 engines proved to be a spectacle, and there were positives and negatives to be taken away from the short-duration test firing. On the plus side, the rocket—dubbed Booster 9, as…
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A look at the surprising history of the earliest rocket pioneers
When did spaceflight begin? There is no single answer. For newcomers to space, the beginning of time can be traced to as recently as December 2015. That’s when SpaceX landed its Falcon 9 rocket successfully for the first time, opening the modern era of rapid, reusable spaceflight. Increasingly, anything that came before feels anachronistic. But…
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Voyager 2 phones home and says everything is cool
NASA lost contact with its Voyager 2 spacecraft—the second-most distant object ever built by humans and flung into space—nearly two weeks ago due to an errant command sent to the probe. This caused Voyager to point its antenna slightly away from Earth. At the time, the space agency said it wasn’t panicking. The mission’s scientists…