Stumble It!
NASA News
- Micro-satellite tested onboard ISS - NASA astronaut Jeffrey Williams has tested a super-small satellite, the SPHERES, onboard the International Space Station (ISS).
- NASA may have problems in the future with the Deep Space Network and the Vision.
- While Opportunity continues to the Victoria Crater, it is seeing exposed bedrock.
- NASA has named Charles H. Scales as the new associate administrator for the Office of Institutions and Management.
- NASA and ATK are jumping on the Linux wagon:
ATK's system will consist of a cluster of 110 nodes running at 2.24 teraflops, or more than 2.2 trillion operations per second. The system will perform aerodynamic simulations and structural-integrity evaluations on launch systems and solid propulsion rockets.
NASA's system, a 128-node version announced May 1, will be at Goddard Space Flight Center. It will run at 3.3 teraflops and will be used to accelerate and expand data processing for applications tracking things such as weather changes and astrophysical
phenomena. - ILC Dover LP was awarded a 5-year IDIQ contract for advanced development of airbag landing attenuation systems for Earth entry capsules by NASA Langley Research Center.
- Jeffery Bell comments on NASA's design changes for the ESAS.
- According to Aviation Now, part of the reason the RS-68 was chosen was that it could handle a 33' Saturn V tank.
International News
- ExoMars is training on the volcano El Teide in Tennerife.
- Japan's Akari infrared sky surveyor has produced it's first pictures.
New Space News
- The Sydney Morning Herald has a pretty good article on Space Tourism.
- The Antelope Valley Press thinks Mojave is the only private spaceport needed.
- Space Systems/Loral is continuing on their Aquarius System, despite losing out on the COTS contract.
1 comment:
Just thought I'd offer a clarification to your comment about why NASA went with the RS-68 (because it could handle the 33' tank). The RS-68 was selected because it would be cheaper to make and throw away after each use than the SSME, but in order to use it (and probably a major reason why it wasn't selected in the first place) is that the current external tank size would not hold enough fuel to power the RS-68's. Once they realized that in the long term, it would actually be cheaper to make the modifications to RS-68 and build wider tank, they found that they also gained a significant increase in overall performance of the CaLV. Less fuel efficient, but more mass can now be thrown to the moon.
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