In Today’s Deep Space Extra… U.S. Vice President Pence tours Lockheed Martin facilities near Denver for a look at work on NASA and national security satellite projects.
Human Space Exploration
Coalition Member in the News (Lockheed Martin)
Denver Post (10/26): Vice President Mike Pence toured Lockheed Martin’s Space Systems facilities near Denver last Thursday. America will lead in space again, Pence pledged. Lockheed is NASA’s prime contractor for the Orion crew capsule that will be paired with the Space Launch System to start human explorers on new missions of deep space exploration.
Top Pentagon contractors keen on space business
Coalition Members in the News (Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Orbital ATK)
Space News (10/26): Mars InSight lander and U.S. military GPS satellites were among the space hardware that U.S. Vice President Mike Pence was scheduled to examine as he toured Lockheed Martin’s Space Systems facilities near Denver last week. In response to its civil and military space business, Lockheed plans significant new investments in its current facilities. Boeing and Northrop Grumman are positioning themselves to compete as well.
Why exploring space and investing in research is non-negotiable
Forbes.com (10/26): America’s reach into space will require research and technical advances that promise to improve life on Earth for all, wrote a top Apollo-era NASA rocket scientist when pressed to explain the benefits to one immersed in concerns for the impoverished.
How does your space garden grow?
NASA (10/27): Efforts to develop techniques for growing plants in space as part of a life support and nutrition strategies for future human deep space explorers are moving ahead aboard the International Space Station with the installation by astronauts of an Advanced Plant Habitat.
Japanese astronaut ready to take off
NHK World of Japan (10/25): Japanese astronaut Norisheghe Kanai is to launch to the International Space Station on December 17 with NASA and Russian astronaut colleagues. Kanai will be his nation’s 12th astronaut, but he could be the last for a while because of plans by the Space Station partnership to halt operations in 2024. Kanai, however, remains hopeful the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will soon recruit a new class of astronauts.
Space Science
James Webb Space Telescope’s laser-focused sight
Physics.org (10/26): Scheduled to launch in early 2019, the NASA led James Webb Space Telescope features an array of advanced technologies to enable efforts to observe the oldest star systems and study the atmospheres of exo-planets. Among them is a laser technology to help the observatory continuously correct its focus while one million miles from Earth.
With downsizing of WFIRST, CAA asks if chronograph is really needed
Spacepolicyonline.com (10/27): WFIRST, a space telescope planned for the 2020’s will explore dark energy, dark matter and planets orbiting other stars. The Wide-Field Infrared Space Telescope (WFIRST) is high on a list of evolving priorities set by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. But its costs may exceed estimates because of technical challenges, one of them a chronograph, an internal disk shaped assembly intended to block the primary light source of a star so the surroundings can be studied. A NASA assessment questions whether the chronograph is necessary.
For the first time, astronomers are tracking a distant visitor streaking through our solar system
Science (10/27): It was October 19 that Hawaii’s PanSTARRS-1 telescope spotted a very fast moving asteroid, or comet moving through the solar system with indications it could be an interstellar object, the first detected by astronomers. A/2017 U1, as the object was catalogued, is about 1,300 feet in diameter.
Wow! Asteroid/dwarf planet Ceres once had an ocean
Universe Today (10/28): NASA’s Dawn mission spacecraft has been orbiting the large asteroid Ceres since March 2015. Findings of water bearing minerals suggest the largest object in the main asteroid belt once had a global ocean. Ceres, it appears, was once, and possibly recently, geologically active.
Update: Satellites measuring Earth’s melting ice sheets go dark
Science (10/27): The joint U.S. and German twin satellite Grace mission has reached the end of its Earth observing mission. Launched in 2002, the two satellites were to operate for five years as a primary mission. The two countries plan to launch Grace Follow On in 2018. An aging battery power source and diminishing fuel supplies prompted the end of mission science.
Planetary Society (10/25): A nice history of the search for extraterrestrial Intelligence.
NASA’S Hubble discovers wobbling galaxies that could reveal nature of dark matter
Newsweek (10/27) Wobbling galaxies studied with the Hubble Space Telescope are helping to refine a dark matter model.
Other News
Spacepolicyonline.com (10/27): Mike Griffin led NASA from 2005 to 2009, leading efforts to stand up the Constellation program, which was to re-establish a U.S. human presence on the moon at the south pole.
Major Space Related Activities for the Week
Major space related activities for the week of October 30 to November 3, 2017
Spacepolicyonline.com (10/29): Lots of U.S. space policy discussion is planned this week, The U.S. Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hosts a hearing Wednesday at 10 a.m., EDT, on the nomination of Jim Bridenstine, the Oklahoma congressman and Navy aviator, to become NASA’s Administrator.