Shyster's thread of Spaaaace.

[Shyster]

SpaceX this weekend is scheduled to launch the JCSAT-16 communications satellite for the SKY Perfect JSAT Group. Liftoff is scheduled for 1:26am EDT Sunday from LC-40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. A barge landing will be attempted. SpaceX successfully launched the JCSAT-14 satellite for the same customer back in May.

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell revealed at a recent conference that the company has shipped its first Raptor engine to its test site in McGregor, Texas. The Raptor burns liquid methane and liquid oxygen and is projected to produce about the same amount of thrust as a Space Shuttle main engine. A cluster of Raptor engines will power the future super-heavy-lift Mars Colonial Transporter in the same way that a cluster of nine Merlin engines powers the current Falcon 9. Elon Musk has said all along that he founded SpaceX with a goal of getting people to Mars, and this is a sign that progress is under way on that goal.

In other space news, Orbital has pushed back the return-to-flight launch of the Antares rocket with the next Cygnus unmanned cargo vehicle. Orbital had been aiming for the end of August, but the launch of the OA-5 cargo mission is now planned for the "second half of September."

The Japanese space agency has also delayed the next launch of its HTV-1 unmanned cargo vehicle to the ISS. A recent pressure test uncovered a “slight leak,” which is obviously Very Bad for something you want to send into space. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), which is Japan's version of NASA, launches the HTV cargo vehicles using the Mitsubishi-built HII-B rockets from the Tanegashima Space Center on Tanegashima Island, Kagoshima Prefecture. Japan, the U.S., and Russia are the only countries that presently launch missions to the ISS.

[Shyster]

In a couple hours at roughly 12:45 am ET United Launch Alliance will be launching a pair of Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) satellites for the United States Air Force. These satellites are used by the Air Force to spy on other satellites. The launch should be streamed on ULA's web site.

The launch vehicle is the Delta IV rocket flying in the Medium+(4,2) configuration. Medium+(4,2) configuration means that the RS-68A-powered first stage is augmented by two GEM-60 solid rocket motors (the "2" after the comma) , and the second stage, which is powered by an RL10B-2 engine, had a 4-meter payload fairing (the "4" before the comma). The Delta IV uses liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to fuel both stages.

Of the two comparable vehicles offered by ULA—the Atlas V and Delta IV—the Delta is by far the less popular, and it has flown roughly half the number of missions to date as the Atlas V even though both were introduced at pretty much the same time. That is largely because the hydrolox-fueled Delta IV is much more expensive to build, buy, and fly than the Atlas V with is Russian-built and kerosene-fueled first-stage RD-180 engine. Pretty much the only reason the military is still buying any version of the Delta IV other than the Heavy version (which has no Atlas V counterpart) is because anti-Russia members of Congress had included riders in defense bills limiting the number of Atlas V launches the military can purchase.

[Viva la Ben]

Possible Earth-like planet discovered in the Proxima Centauri system...4 light years away

The newfound exoplanet, aptly named Proxima b, lies within the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri and is believed to have a suitable surface temperature that would allow for the presence of liquid water. This means that this rocky, Earth-like world has the potential to support life.

http://www.space.com/33837-earth-like-p ... mbers.html

[Viva la Ben]

A probe similar to New Horizons, which recently went to Pluto, would take around 100 years to reach Proxima Centauri.

[Shyster]

NASA has managed to get back in contact with a solar-observation probe that went silent two years ago:

http://www.businessinsider.com/stereo-b ... ion-2016-8

[shafnutz05]

For any of you with a clear southern sky, there is a nice conjunction with Antares (brightest star in Scorpius), Mars, and Jupiter.

[PFiDC]

NASA has managed to get back in contact with a solar-observation probe that went silent two years ago:

http://www.businessinsider.com/stereo-b ... ion-2016-8

Directed by: Ridely Scott

[Shyster]

United Launch Alliance just completed a successful "wet dress rehearsal" for the upcoming launch of NASA's Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission on September 8. If the everything goes as planned, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will rendezvous with asteroid 101955 Bennu in 2018 and then spend about a year and a half mapping and scanning. After mapping, the spacecraft will approach the surface, extend a robotic arm, and grab a sample. The plan is to return the sample to Earth for analysis. It would take until 2023 to bring it back. OSIRIS-REx is the third mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program, which has the goal of investigating bodies in the Solar System. The New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Juno mission to Jupiter are prior New Frontiers missions.

The launch vehicle will be a Atlas V flying in the 411 configuration, with a 4-meter payload fairing, a single strap-on SRB, and a single-engine upper stage. If you're wondering about how that "single booster" thing works, the Atlas V's RD-180 main engine has a larger-than-usual range of gimbal motion, and that lets the main engine adjust enough to compensate for the asymmetric configuration. It looks totally "wrong," but it flies just fine. In fact, the Atlas V can use up to five strap-on SRBs, and in none of those configurations are they actually arranged symmetrically (there are fuel lines on the exterior of the tank that get in the way of symmetric arrangements):



Here's a video of the 2006 launch of the Astra 1KR satellite, which was also the 411 configuration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dME5amgp0Ug

[Shyster]

The Dragon cargo vehicle SpaceX launched to the ISS last month returned to Earth today and successfully splashed down in the Pacific off the coast of Baja California. It was carrying a number of science experiments, including a dozen mice that have been living on the station for the past month.

At the moment, the Dragon is the only vehicle that has any ability to return any significant amount of cargo from the ISS. The manned Soyuz capsules have always been cramped, and they can only hold a tiny bit of cargo. All of the other unmanned cargo vehicles (HTV, Cygnus, Progress) aren't designed to survive reentry. Instead, those vehicles are filled up with the station's trash and incinerate on reentry.

[Viva la Ben]

SETI investigating possible extraterrestrial signal

An international team of researchers has announced the detection of “a strong signal in the direction of HD164595” in a document now being circulated through contact person Alexander Panov. The detection was made with the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, in the Karachay–Cherkess Republic of Russia, not far from the border with Georgia in the Caucasus.

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=36248

[Gaucho]

"Prepare to die"

[Sam's Drunk Dog]

"All your base belong to us"

[Freddy Rumsen]

[Shyster]

Neato on the SETI signal. That looks like one of the most promising signals the program has ever received.

On a similar front, everyone remember reports last year of a star that some scientists were saying could have a "megastructure" around it? KIC 8462852 (also nicknamed "Tabby's star" after astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, who led the project that found its weirdness) exhibited dimming at a rate that cannot be explained by any natural phenomena that astronomers know of. A pair of astronomer jusr reanalyzed all of the Kepler Space Telescope observations that included Tabby's star, and they found that from 2009 through 2013 the star decreased in total luminosity by 3 percent—with two-thirds of that drop occurring in just one 200-day period—and there were transitory dips in brightness of up to 20%.

We just got even weirder results about the 'alien megastructure' star
http://www.sciencealert.com/we-just-got ... cture-star.

[Shyster]

SpaceX to launch SES-10 on previously flown Falcon 9 this year
http://spacenews.com/spacex-to-launch-s ... years-end/

Luxembourg-based satellite-communications company SES will be the first customer to try out a "certified pre-owned" Falcon 9 first stage for the launch of its SES-10 satellite. That launch is currently penciled in for October. The core used will be the same one that launched the CRS-8 resupply mission to the ISS back in April. That was the first stage to land successfully on the autonomous spaceport drone ship. While I'm confident in SpaceX's ability to re-fly its first stages, I also bet SES is getting a screaming deal on that launch.

[eddy]

In unprecedented observations made earlier this year, Rosetta unexpectedly captured a dramatic comet outburst that may have been triggered by a landslide.

Nine of Rosetta’s instruments, including its cameras, dust collectors, and gas and plasma analysers, were monitoring the comet from about 35 km in a coordinated planned sequence when the outburst happened on 19 February.

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space ... t_outburst

[Shyster]

Looks like that signal the Russian SETI researchers recently found most likely came from an orbiting Russian military satellite:

http://www.space.com/33922-mysterious-s ... cause.html

Ah well.

[Gaucho]

Crap.

[columbia]

I want aliens!

[Kaiser]

One signal spike wasnt much of an indicator of life anyway.

[Sam's Drunk Dog]

I want aliens!

[Freddy Rumsen]

https://twitter.com/tlrd/status/771341240654635008

[PFiDC]

Looks like that signal the Russian SETI researchers recently found most likely came from an orbiting Russian military satellite:

http://www.space.com/33922-mysterious-s ... cause.html

Ah well.

lol

[Shyster]

Video of the SpaceX explosion from US Launch Report:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BgJEXQkjNQ

[Gaucho]

yoi