- UAE, Russia Space Cooperation Reaching New Heights
- China's Lunar Probe Tests Orbit for Moon Sampling
- UK Mission to Unveil Exoplanet Atmospheres
- Student-led Mission to Mars Completes Systems Architecture Study at MIT
- Japanese Akatsuki Spacecraft to Be Re-injected into Venus Orbit on Dec. 7
- China's Rocket Plans Reveal Ambitious Space Program
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Posted: 08 Feb 2015 06:56 AM PST
Russia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are taking space technology cooperation to new heights, according to the Russian ambassador. The country is now one of the UAE’s major partners in this field, primarily regarding the delivery of Emirati satellites to space. “The establishment of the UAE Space Agency and the announcement of some ambitious projects like the Mars probe in 2021 for sure will contribute to bringing the cooperation in this field to a new height,” Alexander Efimov, the ambassador, said. “The bilateral relations between Russia and the UAE are witnessing dynamic growth and steady trend for diversification.” He said trade, energy, culture and sports were other fields included in that cooperation.
“We have considerable positive experience of fruitful economic ties with the UAE and these relations do not face any serious administrative problems or economic restrictions,” Mr Efimov said. “Even more, our bilateral cooperation is not affected by fluctuations of global environment. I would rather say that current political and economic turbulence on the world arena, desire of Western countries, as they call it, to ‘isolate Russia’, only creates new opportunities for our Emirati partners in the Russian market.”
The UAE has been investing in space and satellite technology in a bid to shift away from an oil-based economy. In November 2013, it launched DubaiSat-2, a satellite created under the Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology (EIAST), using the Russian Dnepr rocket launcher along with the Russian International Space Company (Kozmotras).
DubaiSat-3 has a launch date of 2017.
“Russia has a very broad base of space exploration history,” said Bas Lansdorp, chief executive of Mars One in The Netherlands. “And, at the moment, the Russians and the Chinese are the only countries that can send humans to space so they are a very significant player in this field. Russia is a great partner for enhancing the Emirates space programme as they are good with anything around Earth orbit.”
The UAE is also working on a number of projects to be implemented within the framework of a US$2 billion investment fund by Russian Direct Investment Fund and Mubadala. “[These include] the expansion of the road network in Russia, building “intelligent” electricity grids and installation of broadband internet access in sparsely populated areas of the country,” Mr Efimov said. “The UAE is very attractive for the investors from our country, too. Russian business appreciates a favourable social and economic climate, sense of security, stability, confidence in the future maintained by the wise policy of the UAE leadership.”
Last October, the Russian minister of industry and trade, Denis Manturov, said Moscow hoped to open a trade mission in the UAE by the end of 2015.
“All the necessary arrangements are being made to open the Trade Representative Office of the Russian Federation in the UAE in Abu Dhabi within the time-frame mentioned,” Mr Efimov said. “The positions of Moscow and Abu Dhabi on a wide range of regional and international issues are close or coincide. Regular meetings of the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, contacts between our foreign ministers and other governmental bodies are the best illustration for my words.”
The UAE has approximately 25,000 Russian nationals, most of whom live in Dubai and Sharjah. The entire Russian-speaking community comprises almost 40,000 people.
Credit: thenational.ae
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Posted: 08 Feb 2015 06:39 AM PST
The service module of China's unmanned test lunar orbiter has finished tests of orbiting technologies needed in a future sampling mission on the Moon. The orbiter conducted three times of tests between Friday and Saturday to modulate the speed, height and orbit in a simulative moon sampling mission, according to a statement of the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense on Sunday. Such technologies will possibly be used in the country's next lunar probe mission, Chang'e-5.
The Chang'e-5 probe, expected for launch in 2017, will be tasked with landing on the moon, collecting at least 2 kilograms of lunar samples and returning to Earth.
Unlike earlier Soviet missions, the mission will make an automatic rendezvous and docking with the return module in lunar orbit before flying back to the Earth.
The current lunar orbiter was launched on Oct. 24, 2014. The orbiter's return capsule has returned to Earth in November after circling the moon during an eight-day mission while the service module continues its moon flight to carry out some preset scientific tasks.
Credit: xinhuanet.com
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Posted: 08 Feb 2015 03:39 AM PST
A team of UK scientists and engineers have announced plans for a small satellite, named ‘Twinkle’, that will give radical new insights into the chemistry, formation and evolution of planets orbiting other stars. The mission, which is being led by University College London (UCL) and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL), will be launched within four years. An overview of the science case and instrument design will be presented today at an open meeting at the Royal Astronomical Society. "Twinkle is a very ambitious mission," said lead scientist, Prof. Giovanna Tinetti of UCL. "Nearly two thousand exoplanets – planets orbiting stars other than our Sun – have been discovered to date, but we know very little about these alien worlds. We can measure their mass, density and distance from their star. From that, we can deduce that that some are freezing cold, some are so hot that they have molten surfaces, some are vast balls of gas, like Jupiter, or small and rocky, like Earth. But beyond that, we just don’t know… Twinkle will be the first mission dedicated to analysing exoplanets atmospheres, and will give us a completely new picture of what these worlds are really like."
When an exoplanet passes in front of the star that it orbits, a tiny amount of starlight is filtered through the molecules and clouds in the planet’s atmosphere. Twinkle will measure this light and pick out the characteristic spectral ‘fingerprints’ that show if gases like water vapour or methane are present on the planet.
Tinetti played a key role in the team that pioneered this technique through observations with the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes. Knowledge of the chemical composition of exoplanet atmospheres is essential for understanding whether a planet was born in the orbit in which it is currently observed or whether it has migrated from a different part of its planetary system. The make-up, evolution, chemistry and physical processes driving an exoplanet’s atmosphere are strongly affected by the distance from its parent star. The atmospheres of small, terrestrial type-planets may have evolved quite dramatically from their initial composition. The loss of lighter molecules, impacts with other bodies, such as comets or asteroids, volcanic activity, or even life can significantly alter the composition of primordial atmospheres. Atmospheric composition is therefore a tracer of an exoplanet’s history as well as whether it might be habitable – or even host life.
Twinkle will analyse at least 100 exoplanets in the Milky Way. Its infrared spectrograph will enable observations of a wide range of planet types including super-Earths (rocky planets 1-10 times the mass of Earth) and hot-Jupiters (gas giants orbiting very close to their suns). Some of the target planets are orbiting stars similar to our Sun and some are orbiting cooler red-dwarfs. For the largest planets orbiting bright stars, Twinkle will even be able to produce maps of clouds and temperature.
"The light filtered through the planet’s atmosphere is only about one ten thousandth of the overall light from the star," said Tinetti. "That’s a big challenge and one that requires a very stable platform outside the screening effects of Earth’s atmosphere."
While the construction of Twinkle’s scientific instrument is led by UCL, the spacecraft itself will be built by SSTL, based in Guildford, Surrey. SSTL has innovated the concept of rapid and cost-effective spacecraft development, which has resulted in a significant export market for commercial and government Earth Observation missions.
"This is an exciting opportunity to adapt the high-performance capacity we have developed at SSTL to deliver ground-breaking science," said Dr. Susan Jason, lead engineer from SSTL.
Twinkle will be launched into a polar low-Earth orbit. The spacecraft will be built to operate for a minimum of three years, with the possibility of an extended lifetime of five years or more.
The mission will be funded through a mixture of private and public sources. With a total mission cost of around £50 million, including launch, Twinkle is a factor of 10 times cheaper to build and operate than other astrophysical spacecraft developed through international space agency programmes. The short development timescale and low budget are made possible through expertise already developed at UK institutions and the use of off-the-shelf components.
"The UK has already made an outstanding contribution to exoplanet detection with the WASP survey programme. Twinkle is a unique chance for the UK to build on this and take the world lead in understanding exoplanet science, as well as to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers," said Prof Jonathan Tennyson, senior advisor for the Twinkle mission.
Twinkle is a project led by UCL and will be built on a platform designed by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. Our industrial and technical partners include: Cardiff University, MSSL, RAL, Selex ES and UKATC. Our science partners include: Cardiff University, University of Hertfordshire, Imperial College London, Keele University, University of Leicester, University of Manchester, The Open University, Oxford University, Royal Holloway and the Royal Observatory Edinburgh.
Credit: twinkle-spacemission.
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Posted: 08 Feb 2015 02:46 AM PST
An audacious plan by eight universities for a student-led mission to Mars took a big step forward with the completion of a key technical review of systems requirements at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in January, with the team targeting a launch within the next few years, mission organizers say. Time Capsule to Mars (TC2M) hopes to deliver to Mars, by 2019, a “time capsule of humanity” carrying digital content from millions of people from around the world for future human explorers to recover. University teams from across the US are collaborating to design, build, and ultimately operate a CubeSat-based spacecraft that will deliver its payload to the Mars surface. Time Capsule to Mars is a project of Explore Mars, Inc. “The technical efforts of such a vibrant team – eight universities at this point – are moving this mission forward,” says Professor Paulo Lozano, TC2M adviser and Director of MIT’s Space Propulsion Lab, where students are leading the technical development of the propulsion system. “We’re in that stage of any mission where there is a lot of planning and calculation, and to work through the whole spacecraft subsystem by subsystem is a tremendous effort that required everyone on the project to contribute. It’s a wonderful milestone.”
The multi-week effort at MIT, which took place during MIT’s “Independent Activities Period (IAP),” focused on developing the systems architecture and systems-level requirements that would allow for technical designs and construction to begin in earnest. The study, led by graduate students Dianna Velez and Iulia Jivanescu, successfully completed initial concepts for the architecture, its systems, and their interfaces. Jonathan Brent Parham, Associate Technical Staff at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, served as a consultant on the study.
“The past three weeks have set the direction for the rest of the mission,” said Emily Briere, Mission Director and senior at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering. “By developing systems-level requirements and functional requirements for each subsystem, we’ve defined a clear path forward that our university teams can follow. The energy and enthusiasm for TC2M coming out of this study is overwhelming. This team is willing itself Marsward.”
The $25 million TC2M mission will be funded in large part by people around the world who upload personal digital media in the form of images, text, audio and video clips for a small fee. For those in the developing world, digital media uploads to the capsule will be offered free of charge and underwritten by corporate sponsors and individual philanthropists.
The team is being advised by a management team from Boeing’s executive Emerging Leaders Development Program. “The ability to transfer knowledge and to teach these students core systems engineering, mission management and technical project management skills is a huge win for me, for Boeing, and for the industry,” says Richard Barrow, Senior Project Engineer at The Boeing Company and a member of the Boeing team.
Student participation in TC2M includes undergraduate and graduate students from Duke University, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Florida Institute of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Colorado at Boulder, and University of Connecticut. Veteran aerospace project management mentors for TC2M Ron Schlagheck, formerly NASA, and Laurent Sibille of Enterprise Advisory Solutions, Inc. advised the student teams during the IAP study.
The students are being supported in their mission efforts by an extensive array of industry talent from such aerospace stalwarts as ATK, Aerojet Rocketdyne, The Boeing Company, Deep Space Industries, Draper Laboratory, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Lockheed Martin, MIT, NASA, Remarkable Technologies, and others. Charlie Precourt, vice president and general manager of ATK Space Launch Division and former NASA chief astronaut, and Kent Rominger, vice president, business development of ATK and former NASA chief astronaut, are special advisors to this project.
“Draper has always had a role in preparing the future leaders of American aerospace,” says Seamus Tuohy, Director of Space Systems at Draper Laboratory, one of the key sponsors of the MIT IAP Study. “We had more than 30 students contributing to finalizing the mission specifications, and these students received an excellent introduction to the challenges of using small systems to explore another planet.”
TC2M’s vision and goals have already inspired similar mission concepts from NASA and others.
“This continues to be the mission for everyone, not just in the space industry but worldwide too,” says Chris Carberry, Executive Director and co-founder of Explore Mars, Inc., a nonprofit that was created to advance the goal of sending humans to Mars within the next two decades. “This is a mission for all humankind, and we are excited to have so many people involved, with more joining each week.”
To date, more than $1 million in donations and in-kind support has been raised for the mission. To upload images and become part of this historic mission to Mars, visit www.timecapsuletomars.com/#
Credit: exploremars.org
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Posted: 07 Feb 2015 03:03 PM PST
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has decided the schedule for the Venus Climate Orbiter Akatsuki to be re-injected into the Venus orbit, as well as its observation plan. The robotic spacecraft has spiraled around the inner solar system since it missed Venus in December 2010, as engineers on the ground meticulously planned for another chance to loop into orbit around Earth’s sister planet this year. Akatsuki, which means dawn in Japanese, is on track for a critical maneuver Dec. 7 to position the spacecraft for capture by planet’s gravity, allowing the probe to enter an egg-shaped orbit stretching several hundred thousand miles from Venus at its farthest point — up to five times the planet’s diameter.
After being injected into the orbit, the Akatsuki will observe the atmosphere of Venus, which is often referred to as a twin sister of the Earth, through remote sensing. Its observations are expected to develop “Planetary Meteorology” further by elucidating the atmospheric circulation mechanism and studying the comparison with the Earth.
The orbit now planned for Akatsuki is much higher than the orbit originally selected for the mission. Instead of taking about 30 hours to complete a lap around Venus — as was planned after the botched 2010 arrival — Akatsuki will complete one orbit every eight or nine days.
Akatsuki will use its less powerful attitude control thrusters for the orbit insertion maneuver in December. Its main engine is offline after it overheated and switched off early during the mission’s December 2010 encounter with Venus.
Japanese engineers narrowed the cause of the anomalous engine burn, which lasted less than three minutes of a planned 12 minutes, to a blockage in a check valve inside the spacecraft’s propulsion system.
The probe will employ infrared light to observe and elucidate the mysteries surrounding the atmosphere under the clouds and the conditions on the planet's surface. In addition, it will confirm the presence of active volcanoes and thunder.
Credit: JAXA, spaceflightnow.
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Posted: 07 Feb 2015 01:09 PM PST
Beijing has shipped its liquid-fuelled carrier rocket, the Long March 7, to its Wenchang Satellite Launch Center in Hainan province for tests in preparation for the rocket's first launch next year, reports China's Global Times. The rocket is fueled by a non-toxic and non-polluting liquid diesel and its modular design allows for modification of the engine and propeller to accommodate various spacecraft. The country has also scheduled a test launch of the Long March 5 this year, touted to have the same payload as the US launch systems Delta IV, Atlas V and Falcon 9.
Beijing considers its billion-dollar space program as a sign of its rising international status and technological improvement as well as evidence that its ruling party has successfully turned the country's fate around, reported the Japan Times. The People's Liberation Army has plans to establish a permanent space station in 2020 and eventually launch a manned mission to the moon.
China has already been evaluating the possibilities and requirements for the Long March 7's next generation, new multi-stage rocket named Long March 9. The rocket aims to have a payload equivalent to the US launch vehicle Jupiter, with a maximum payload of 130 tons, according to Liang Xiaohong, vice director of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology. The rocket's first test launch has been planned for 2028.
The Long March 9 suggests China has a long-term, methodical strategy toward space programs and Chinese space program planners believe that they will continue to receive funds and political support from President Xi Jinping, said Asia Pacific Defense Forum, a magazine sponsored by the US Pacific Command.
Ralph Winnie, who leads Eurasian Business Coalition's China program, said during the forum that China's space programs have won the support of the country's public and leaders and have a dramatic impact on public opinion, boosting Chinese society's confidence and instilling a belief that China and its people can overcome any challenge or difficulty.
Credit: wantchinatimes.com
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