Posted by Ray Katz in NASA, current
Those great pictures of Saturn we saw from the Cassini spacecraft were brought to us, in part, by Carolyn Porco. She’s the head of NASA’s Cassini imaging team.
In the current issue of Wired, she’s got some space policy advice for the next president. She’s never much cared for the shuttle. Porco wants big rockets and big robots.
Read it.
A new kind of space vehicle, 27.5 feet long with a 15 foot wingspan, will be launched next year—possibly in January—if all goes well. Drone space plane It will be NASA’s X-37B unmanned space plane, designed by Boeing. As a test vehicle, NASA hopes it will be the forerunner of future space planes. An earlier [...]
We’ve been told that NASA will launch an exciting mission, sending astronauts to land on an asteroid. Nobody’s excited. Why not? The “plan” has no destination (which of the thousands of asteroids?), no deadline (uh, maybe 2020…but who knows?), no launch vehicle and spacecraft (they’re talking about quickly building and designing a new heavy launch [...]
Japan’s Hayabusa space probe, which visited an asteroid and scooped up sample material may not make it back to earth. Launched in May 2003, the spacecraft uses some amazing experimental ion thrusters, which have been failing one by one. It is now down to a single thruster which is in questionable shape. Whether or not [...]