Spacecraft

China has now joined the very select group of countries to have succeeded in carrying out an interplanetary probe mission. According to reports from China's official news agency Xinhua, the Chang'E 2 probe passed a mere 3.2 km (2 miles) from the near-Earth asteroid Toutatis at 8:30:09 GMT on December 13, making it the closest asteroid flyby to date.  Read More

At a press conference today, NASA confirmed that its two Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) Spacecraft will crash into a lunar mountain next week. The controlled impact will occur on Monday, December 17 at approximately 5:28 p.m. EST (22:28 GMT). The impact area is at latitude 75.62° N, longitude 26.63° E near the lunar North Pole in the vicinity of Goldschmidt crater.  Read More

A US Air Force X-37B unmanned space plane was launched on its second mission today. The mission,designated OTV-3, was sent into low-earth orbit from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Launch Complex 41 atop an Atlas V rocket at 1:03 p.m. EST (1803 GMT). This is the first time an X-37B has returned to orbit.  Read More

Voyager 1 has reached yet another new frontier on its historic journey towards the edge of our solar system. NASA scientists believe this “magnetic highway” represents the final region the spacecraft must cross before becoming the first man-made object to reach interstellar space, an event they are guessing could be as close as a couple of months away.  Read More

Reaction Engines Ltd. announced on Wednesday the completion of a critical round of testing of its SABRE engine’s precooler system. The SABRE is a radical type of hybrid jet/rocket engine capable of propelling a spacecraft into orbit or an aircraft in the atmosphere, at a velocity of Mach 5 (3,800 mph, 3,300 knots, 6,115 km/h). It’s intended for Reaction Engines’ SKYLON spacecraft and its airliner derivative, the LAPCAT A2 hypersonic aircraft.  Read More

Exploring the regions of deep space beyond Mars means sending probes where solar power isn’t practical. Since the 1960s, NASA has equipped its Apollo missions and unmanned explorers with Radioisotope Thermal Generators (RTGs). These have worked very well, but they run on plutonium 238, which is currently in short supply. Therefore, the Los Alamos National Laboratory is developing a new small nuclear reactor for spacecraft that uses uranium instead of plutonium to power Stirling engines and generate electricity.  Read More

NASA engineers are using a 3D laser printing system to produce intricate metal parts such as rocket engine components for its next-generation Space Launch System (SLS). The method called “selective laser melting “ (SLM) promises to streamline fabrication and significantly reduce production costs.  Read More

A marriage of the tortoise and the hare may be the key to exploring the Solar System. At least, that’s the belief of Nathan Strange, a mission formulation systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who has outlined a plan to use hybrid chemical/solar-electric propulsion systems for the manned exploration of the Moon, Mars and the asteroids.  Read More

SpaceX has completed the first three performance milestones for the manned version of its Dragon/Falcon 9 spacecraft and launch system. In an announcement at its Hawthorne, California, headquarters, SpaceX said that the milestones are part of NASA's Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) initiative, which is intended to develop privately owned and operated manned spacecraft capable of taking passengers into low Earth orbit for NASA and private customers.  Read More