More than hardware: Discovery flying "new business model" to space station
Aviation Week has published a terrific article on the Shuttle Discovery flight, STS-131, that will take the innovative microgravity research NanoRacks platform and two "Cubelabs" to the International Space Station next month.
The flight is more than a simple delivery of hardware built right here in Kentucky, exciting as that is, but "could be a harbinger of how the U.S. hopes to do business in space in the years to come."
In addition to space station work, NanoRacks also also discussion with a other space companies about the use of the standard interface across several different space vehicles, orbital and suborbital, "so the customer can concentrate on developing the experiment or other hardware to be flown."
That's key. A focus on something other than the sheer technical challenge of getting to and staying in space represents an exciting new development in the commercialization of space. Working with NanoRacks, Kentucky Space is not only carving out a place for Kentucky-built and integrated suborbital and orbital payloads, but participating directly in the growth of space as a business frontier.
The managing partner for NanoRacks, Jeffrey Manber, also spoke on camera recently while in Lexington about the upcoming flight. Please check it out.
Wayne
Video: Titan's "Canyon Country"
Recently released by the Jet Propulsion Lab, this video is the result of work by an amateur researcher working with surface data produced by the Cassini mission. Such terrain bears strong similarities to the Karst topography of Utah, and might even suggest caves below the surface.
For Kentucky Space readers interested in the concept of "citizen science," astronomer Dr. Pamela Gay will be at the Kentucky Center on Friday, April 2 for a brief lecture sponsored by the IdeaFestival that will touch on this new phenomenon. Astronomy and planetary sciences are areas where amateurs can, and do, make significant scientific contributions. Follow @ideafestival on Twitter for more.
Wayne
Video: "SOCEM" merges Cubesats with sounding rockets
The launch is a unique marriage of Cubesats with the sounding rocket program at the NASA Wallops facility, the first, perhaps, of many such flights.
As mentioned in the video, free software is available for download to amateur radio enthusiasts wanting to collect packets from ADAMASat during its time in space.
Wayne
Confirmed: "millions of tons" of water ice are on the Moon
"Finding "more than 40 small craters with water ice," a NASA radar, Mini-SAR, that flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft has confirmed the presence of substantial water ice deposits, perhaps as much as 600 million metric tons.
'The emerging picture from the multiple measurements and resulting data of the instruments on lunar missions indicates that water creation, migration, deposition and retention are occurring on the moon,' said Paul Spudis, principal investigator of the Mini-SAR experiment at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. 'The new discoveries show the moon is an even more interesting and attractive scientific, exploration and operational destination than people had previously thought.'
The NASA news release is here.
The Discover blog 80beats writes:
Scientists estimate that this amount of water could easily sustain a moon base, or, if the oxygen in the ice was converted to fuel, could fire one space shuttle per day for 2,200 years. Last year, scientists found almost 26 gallons of water ice on the moon’s south pole, by crashing a rocket hull into a cold, dark crater. The crash produced a plume of material that provided evidence of water ice on the moon’s surface.
Wayne
Image source: NASA
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