Asteroid-Hunting Spacecraft Delivers a Second Year of Data

NASA - NEOWISE Mission logo.

April 5, 2016

Two Years of NEOWISE Asteroid Data

Video above: NASA's asteroid-hunting NEOWISE survey uses infrared to detect and characterize asteroids and comets. Since December 2013, NEOWISE has discovered 72 near-Earth objects and characterized 439 others. Video Credit: NASA.

NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has released its second year of survey data.  The spacecraft has now characterized a total of 439 NEOs since the mission was re-started in December 2013.  Of these, 72 were new discoveries.

Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of the giant planets in our solar system into orbits that allow them to enter Earth's neighborhood. Eight of the objects discovered in the past year have been classified as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), based on their size and how closely their orbits approach Earth.

With the release to the public of its second year of data, NASA’s NEOWISE spacecraft completed another milestone in its mission to discover, track and characterize the asteroids and comets that approach closest to Earth.

Since beginning its survey in December 2013, NEOWISE has measured more than 19,000 asteroids and comets at infrared wavelengths. More than 5.1 million infrared images of the sky were collected in the last year. A new movie, based on the data collected, depicts asteroids and comets observed so far by NEOWISE.

"By studying the distribution of lighter- and darker-colored material, NEOWISE data give us a better understanding of the origins of the NEOs, originating from either different parts of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter or the icier comet populations," said James Bauer, the mission’s deputy principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Originally called the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the spacecraft was launched in December 2009. It was placed in hibernation in 2011 after its primary mission was completed. In September 2013, it was reactivated, renamed NEOWISE and assigned a new mission: to assist NASA's efforts to identify the population of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects. NEOWISE also is characterizing previously known asteroids and comets to provide information about their sizes and compositions.

"NEOWISE discovers large, dark, near-Earth objects, complementing our network of ground-based telescopes operating at visible-light wavelengths.  On average, these objects are many hundreds of meters across," said Amy Mainzer of JPL, NEOWISE principal investigator.  NEOWISE has discovered 250 new objects since its restart, including 72 near-Earth objects and four new comets.

Artist's view of NEOWISE spacecraft. Image Credits: NASA/JPL

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages the NEOWISE mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colorado, built the spacecraft. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about NEOWISE, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/neowise

More information about asteroids and near-Earth objects is at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroidwatch

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Dwayne Brown/Tony Greicius/JPL/DC Agle.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

John Grunsfeld Announces Retirement from NASA

NASA logo.

April 5, 2016

Image above: In this March 2002 image, John Grunsfeld, former astronaut and associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, is shown in space shuttle Columbia's cargo bay. Image Credit: NASA.

John Grunsfeld will retire from NASA April 30, capping nearly four decades of science and exploration with the agency. His tenure includes serving as astronaut, chief scientist, and head of NASA’s Earth and space science activities.

Grunsfeld has directed NASA’s Science Mission Directorate as associate administrator since 2012, managing more than 100 science missions -- many of which have produced groundbreaking science, findings and discoveries.

“John leaves an extraordinary legacy of success that will forever remain a part of our nation’s historic science and exploration achievements," said NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden. “Widely known as the ‘Hubble Repairman,’ it was an honor to serve with him in the astronaut corps and watch him lead NASA's science portfolio during a time of remarkable discovery. These are discoveries that have rewritten science textbooks and inspired the next generation of space explorers."

Geoff Yoder, currently the directorate’s deputy, will serve as acting associate administrator until a successor is named.

“After exploring strange new worlds and seeking out new life in the universe, I can now boldly go where I’ve rarely gone before – home,” said Grunsfeld. “I’m grateful to have had this extraordinary opportunity to lead NASA science, and know that the agency is well-positioned to make the next giant leaps in exploration and discovery.”

Notable science achievements under Grunsfeld’s leadership include the Curiosity rover Mars landing in 2012 – and its remarkable discoveries about the habitability of ancient Mars – and the July 2015 New Horizons Pluto flyby, completing the initial reconnaissance of the solar system.

Grunsfeld managed numerous missions to protect and study our home planet, including the Deep Space Climate Observatory, Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, and Global Precipitation Measurement spacecraft, in addition to numerous Earth science aircraft campaigns. These and other projects have laid the foundation for future missions to better understand how Earth is changing.

Grunsfeld has also been a strong advocate for research with suborbital rockets, high-altitude balloon flights and CubeSats, to enable great science and train the next generation of explorers.

Preparations are well underway for a host of other missions and activities that will continue Grunsfeld’s work. These include the first U.S. mission to return a sample of an asteroid, the first mission to look for signs of life on Jupiter’s moon Europa, a mission to study the sun closer than ever before, participating in a national space weather strategy, and constructing the next rover to Mars, scheduled to launch in 2020.

Additionally, NASA’s fleet of robotic spacecraft are exploring the solar system and beyond, revealing the workings and beauty of the universe, while discovering thousands of new worlds. This pioneering work will continue with the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018, and the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope.

Grunsfeld, a fierce proponent of science education and five-time space shuttle astronaut, was the lead spacewalker during the last Hubble Space Telescope servicing flight in 2009, which successfully upgraded the observatory to the apex of its scientific capability. He’s also the last human to touch the iconic telescope. In April 2015, Hubble celebrated 25 years of operations, vastly outperforming its planned lifetime of 15 years. In 2015, Grunsfeld was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame.

Related link:

Deep Space Climate Observatory: http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/DSCOVR/index.html

For Grunsfeld’s NASA biography, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/about/highlights/grunsfeld_biography.html

Image (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Dwayne Brown/Laurie Cantillo/Karen Northon.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

NASA’s New Horizons Fills Gap in Space Environment Observations

NASA - New Horizons Mission logo.

April 5, 2016

When NASA's New Horizons sped past Pluto on July 14, 2015, it took the best-ever pictures of the rocky world’s surface, giving us new insight into its geology, composition and atmosphere. These stunning images are the most famous result of New Horizons, but the spacecraft also sent back over three years’ worth of measurements of the solar wind – the constant flow of solar particles that the sun flings out into space – from a region that has been visited by only a few spacecraft.  

This unprecedented set of observations give us a peek into an almost entirely unexplored part of our space environment – filling a crucial gap between what other missions see closer to the sun and what the Voyager spacecraft see further out. A new study to appear in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement lays out New Horizons’ observations of the solar wind ions that it encountered on its journey.

Image above: Space environment data collected by New Horizons over a billion miles of its journey to Pluto will play a key role in testing and improving models of the space environment throughout the solar system. This visualization is one example of such a model: It shows the simulated space environment out to Pluto a few months before New Horizons’ closest approach. Drawn over the model is the path of New Horizons up to 2015, as well as the current direction of the two Voyager spacecraft – which are currently at three or four times New Horizons’ distance from the sun. The solar wind that New Horizons encountered will reach the Voyager spacecraft about a year later. Image Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, the Space Weather Research Center (SWRC) and the Community-Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC), Enlil and Dusan Odstrcil (GMU).

Not only does the New Horizons data provide new glimpses of the space environment of the outer solar system, but this information helps round out our growing picture of the sun’s influence on space, from near-Earth effects to the boundary where the solar wind meets interstellar space. The new data shows particles in the solar wind that have picked up an initial burst of energy, an acceleration boost that kicks them up just past their original speed. These particles may be the seeds of extremely energetic particles called anomalous cosmic rays. When these super-fast, energetic rays travel closer to Earth, they can pose a radiation hazard to astronauts. Further away, at lower energies, the rays are thought to play a role at shaping the boundary where the solar wind hits interstellar space – the region of our solar system that Voyager 2 is currently navigating and observing.

Studying the Solar Wind

Though space is about a thousand times emptier than even the best laboratory vacuums on Earth, it’s not completely devoid of matter – the sun’s constant outflow of solar wind fills space with a thin and tenuous wash of particles, fields, and ionized gas known as plasma. This solar wind, along with other solar events like giant explosions called coronal mass ejections, influences the very nature of space and can interact with the magnetic systems of Earth and other worlds. Such effects also change the radiation environment through which our spacecraft – and, one day, our astronauts headed to Mars – travel.

New Horizons measured this space environment for over a billion miles of its journey, from just beyond the orbit of Uranus to its encounter with Pluto.

“The instrument was only scheduled to power on for annual checkouts after the Jupiter flyby in 2007,” said Heather Elliott, a space scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, and lead author on the study. “We came up with a plan to keep the particle instruments on during the cruise phase while the rest of the spacecraft was hibernating and started observing in 2012.”

Animation above: Space environment data collected by New Horizons over a billion miles of its journey to Pluto will play a key role in testing and improving models of the space environment throughout the solar system. This visualization is one example of such a model: It shows the simulated space environment out to Pluto a few months before New Horizons’ closest approach. Animation Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, the Space Weather Research Center (SWRC) and the Community-Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC), Enlil and Dusan Odstrcil (GMU).

This plan yielded three years of near-continuous observations of the space environment in a region of space where only a handful of spacecraft have ever flown, much less captured detailed measurements.

“This region is billions of cubic miles, and we have a handful of spacecraft that have passed through every decade or so,” said Eric Christian, a space scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who studies what's called the heliosphere – the region of our solar system dominated by the solar wind – but was not involved with this study. “We learn more from every one.”

Since the sun is the source of the solar wind, events on the sun are the primary force that shapes the space environment. Shocks in the solar wind – which can create space weather, such as auroras, on worlds with magnetic fields – are created either by fast, dense clouds of material called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, or by the collision of two different-speed solar wind streams. These individual features are discernible in the inner solar system – but New Horizons didn’t see the same level of detail.

The New Horizons data show that the space environment in the outer solar system has less detailed structure than space closer to Earth, since smaller structures tend to be worn down or clump together as they travel outwards, creating fewer – but bigger – features.

“At this distance, the scale size of discernible structures increases, since smaller structures are worn down or merge together,” said Elliott. “It’s hard to predict if the interaction between smaller structures will create a bigger structure, or if they will flatten out completely.”

Image above: New Horizons collected data on the space environment nearly continuously from early 2012 through its flyby of Pluto, shown here in an image mosaic from the spacecraft, on July 14, 2015, shedding new light on space in a relatively unexplored part of the solar system. Image Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI.

Subtler signs of the sun’s influence are also harder to spot in the outer solar system. Characteristics of the solar wind – including speed, density, and temperature – are shaped by the region of the sun it flows from. As the sun and its different wind-producing regions rotate, patterns form. New Horizons didn't see patterns as defined as they are when closer to the sun, but nevertheless it did spot some structure.

“Speed and density average together as the solar wind moves out,” said Elliott. “But the wind is still being heated by compression as it travels, so you can see evidence of the sun’s rotation pattern in the temperature even in the outer solar system.”

Finding the Origins of Space Radiation Hazards

The New Horizons observations also show what may be the starting seeds of the extremely energetic particles that make up anomalous cosmic rays. Anomalous cosmic rays are observed near Earth and can contribute to radiation hazard for astronauts, so scientists want to better understand what causes them.

The seeds for these energetic, super-fast particles may also help shape the boundary where the solar wind meets interstellar space. Anomalous cosmic rays have been observed by the two Voyager spacecraft out near these boundaries, but only in their final stages, leaving questions as to the exact location and mechanism of their origins.

Image above: This figure shows solar wind observations measured by New Horizons from Jan. 1 to Aug. 25, 2015. This measurement of seed particles for anomalous cosmic rays in the solar wind is completely new in this region of space and is key for interpreting Voyager data further out in the interstellar boundary region. Points closer to the top of the graph correspond to higher-energy particles, and red and yellow colors show a larger number of particles hitting the detector. The particle instruments were shut down during certain spacecraft operations and trajectory maneuvers, resulting in brief data gaps. Image Credits: NASA/New Horizons/SwRI.

“The Voyagers can’t measure these seed particles, only the outcome,” said Christian. “So with New Horizons going into that region, this blank patch in the observations is being filled in with data.”

Filling in such a blank patch will help scientists better understand the way such particles move and affect the space environment around them, helping to interpret what Voyager is seeing on its journey.

Comparing New Horizons to Observations and Models

Since New Horizons is one of the very few spacecraft that has explored the space environment in the outer solar system, lack of corroborating data meant that a key part of Elliott's work was simply calibrating the data. Her work was supported by the Heliophysics Research and Analysis program.

She calibrated the observations with pointing information from New Horizons, the results of extensive tests on the laboratory version of the instrument, and comparison with data from the inner solar system. NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer, or ACE, and NASA’s Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or STEREO, for example, observe the space environment near Earth’s orbit, allowing scientists to capture a snapshot of solar events as they head towards the edges of the solar system. But because the space environment in the outer solar system is relatively unexplored, it wasn’t clear how those events would develop. The only previous information on space in this region was from Voyager 2, which traveled through roughly the same region of space as New Horizons, although about a quarter of a century earlier.

Artist's view of New Horizons approach Pluto. Image Credit: NASA

“There are similar characteristics between what was seen by New Horizons and Voyager 2, but the number of events is different,” said Elliott. “Solar activity was much more intense when Voyager 2 traveled through this region.”

Now, with two data sets from this region, scientists have even more information about this distant area of space. Not only does this help us characterize the space environment better, but it will be key for scientists testing models of how the solar wind propagates throughout the solar system. In the absence of a constant sentinel measuring the particles and magnetic fields in space near Pluto, we rely on simulations – not unlike terrestrial weather simulations – to model space weather throughout the solar system. Before New Horizons passed Pluto, such models were used to simulate the structure of the solar wind in the outer solar system. With a calibrated data set in hand, scientists can compare the reality to the simulations and improve future models.

Related Links:

Southwest Research Institute's press release: http://www.swri.org/9what/releases/2016/new-horizons-solar-wind-pluto.htm

Feature story: "NASA Visualizes Space Environment Near Pluto": http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-releases-new-visualization-of-space-environment-at-pluto

NASA's New Horizons website: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html

Academic paper: "New Horizons Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) Observations of the Solar Wind From 11-33 AU": http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.07156

Images (mentioned), Animation (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Sarah Frazier/Rob Garner.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Opportunity's Devilish View from on High

NASA - Mars Exploration Rover B (MER-B) patch.

April 5, 2016

From its perch high on a ridge, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity recorded this image of a Martian dust devil twisting through the valley below. The view looks back at the rover's tracks leading up the north-facing slope of "Knudsen Ridge," which forms part of the southern edge of "Marathon Valley."

Opportunity took the image using its navigation camera (Navcam) on March 31, 2016, during the 4,332nd Martian day, or sol, of the rover's work on Mars.

Dust devils were a common sight for Opportunity's twin rover, Spirit, in its outpost at Gusev Crater. Dust devils have been an uncommon sight for Opportunity though.

Just as on Earth, a dust devil is created by a rising, rotating column of hot air. When the column whirls fast enough, it picks up tiny grains of dust from the ground, making the vortex visible.

During the uphill drive to reach the top of Knudsen Ridge, Opportunity's tilt reached 32 degrees, the steepest ever for any rover on Mars.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

For more information about Opportunity, visit http://www.nasa.gov/rovers and http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov.

Image, Text, Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Tony Greicius.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

NASA Examines El Niño's Impact on Ocean’s Food Source

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center logo.

April 4, 2016

El Niño years can have a big impact on the littlest plants in the ocean, and NASA scientists are studying the relationship between the two.

In El Niño years, huge masses of warm water – equivalent to about half of the volume of the Mediterranean Sea – slosh east across the Pacific Ocean towards South America. While this warm water changes storm systems in the atmosphere, it also has an impact below the ocean’s surface. These impacts, which researchers can visualize with satellite data, can ripple up the food chain to fisheries and the livelihoods of fishermen.

Animation above: Strong El Nino events have a big impact on phytoplankton (in green), especially when the warm water pushes far to the east of the Pacific Ocean, as in 1997.
Animation Credits: NASA/Goddard.

El Niño’s mass of warm water puts a lid on the normal currents of cold, deep water that typically rise to the surface along the equator and off the coast of Chile and Peru, said Stephanie Uz, ocean scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. In a process called upwelling, those cold waters normally bring up the nutrients that feed the tiny organisms, which form the base of the food chain.

"An El Niño basically stops the normal upwelling," Uz said. "There’s a lot of starvation that happens to the marine food web." These tiny plants, called phytoplankton, are fish food – without them, fish populations drop, and the fishing industries that many coastal regions depend on can collapse.

How El Niño Impacts Marine Plant Life

Video above: El Niño years can have a big impact on the littlest plants in the ocean, and NASA scientists are studying the relationship between the two. Ocean color maps, based on a month's worth of satellite data, show El Niño's impact on phytoplankton. Video Credits: NASA's Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio.

With NASA satellite data, and ocean color software called SeaDAS, developed at the Ocean Biology Processing Group at Goddard, Uz has been mapping where these important phytoplankton appear. Orbiting instruments like the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer on the Aqua satellite, and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite on the Suomi NPP satellite collect data on the color of the ocean. From shades of blue and green, scientists can calculate the amount of green chlorophyll – and therefore the amount of phytoplankton present.

The ocean color maps, based on a month’s worth of satellite data, can show that El Niño impact on phytoplankton. In December 2015, at the peak of the current El Niño event, there was more blue – and less green chlorophyll – in the Pacific Ocean off of Peru and Chile, compared to the previous year. Uz and her colleagues are also watching as the El Niño weakens this spring, to see when and where the phytoplankton reappear as the upwelling cold water brings nutrients back to the region.

"They can pop back up pretty quickly, once they have a source of nutrients," Uz said.

Researchers can also examine the differences in ocean color between two different El Niño events. During the large 1997-1998 El Niño event, the green chlorophyll virtually disappeared from the coast of Chile. This year’s event, while it caused a drop in chlorophyll primarily along the equator, was much less severe for the coastal phytoplankton population. The reason – the warmer-than-normal waters associated with the two El Niño events were centered in different geographical locations. In 1997-1998, the biggest ocean temperature abnormalities were in the eastern Pacific Ocean; this year the focus was in the central ocean. This difference impacts where the phytoplankton can feed on nutrients, and where the fish can feed on phytoplankton.

"When you have an East Pacific El Niño, like 1997-1998, it has a much bigger impact on the fisheries off of South America," Uz said.  But Central Pacific El Niño events, like this year’s, still have an impact on ocean ecosystems, just with a shift in location. Researchers are noting reduced food available along the food chain around the Galapagos Islands, for example. And there has been a drop in phytoplankton off the coast of South America, just not as dramatically as before.

Images aboves: Differences in December phytoplankton abundances are visualized for three years: during the strong East Pacific El Nino of 1997 (using SeaWiFS satellite data), during a normal year in 2013 (using data from MODIS on the Aqua satellite), and during the strong Central Pacific El Nino of 2015 (MODIS/Aqua). Images Credits: Uz/NASA Goddard.

Scientists have more tools on hand to study this El Niño, and can study more elements of the event, Uz said. They’re putting these tools to use to ask questions not just about ocean ecology, but about the carbon cycle as well.

"We know how important phytoplankton are for the marine food web, and we’re trying to understand their role as a carbon pump," Uz said. The carbon pump refers to one of the ways the Earth system removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. When phytoplankton die, their carbon-based bodies sink to the ocean floor, where they can remain for millions of years. El Niño is a naturally occurring disruption to the typical ocean currents, she said – so it’s important to understand the phenomenon to better attribute what occurs naturally, and what occurs due to human-caused disruptions to the system.

Other scientists at Goddard are investigating ways to forecast the ebbs and flows of nutrients using the center’s supercomputers, incorporating data like winds, sea surface temperatures, air pressures and more.

"It’s like weather forecasts, but for bionutrients and phytoplankton in the ocean," said Cecile Rousseaux, an ocean modeler with Goddard’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office. The forecasts could help fisheries managers estimate how good the catch could be in a particular year, she said, since fish populations depend on phytoplankton populations. The 1997-1998 El Niño led to a major collapse in the anchovy fishery off of Chile, which caused economic hardships for fishermen along the coast.

So far, Rousseaux said, the phytoplankton forecast models haven’t shown any collapses for the 2015-2016 El Niño, possibly because the warm water isn’t reaching as far east in the Pacific this time around. The forecast of phytoplankton populations effort is a relatively new effort, she said, so it’s too soon to make definite forecasts. But the data so far, from the modeling group and others, show conditions returning to a more normal state this spring.

The next step for the model, she said, is to try to determine which individual species of phytoplankton will bloom where, based on nutrient amounts, temperatures and other factors – using satellites and other tools to determine which kind of microscopic plant is where.

"We rely on satellite data, but this will go one step further and give us even more information," Rousseaux said.

For more information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/Earth

Images (mentioned), Video (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Kate Ramsayer/Karl Hille.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Saturn Askew

NASA - Cassini Mission to Saturn patch.

April 4, 2016

As a convention for public release, Cassini images of Saturn are generally oriented so that Saturn appears north up, but the spacecraft views the planet and its expansive rings from all sorts of angles. Here, a half-lit Saturn sits askew as tiny Dione (698 miles or 1,123 kilometers across) looks on from lower left. And the terminator, which separates night from day on Saturn, is also askew, owing to the planet’s approach to northern summer solstice. As a result, the planet’s northern pole is in sunlight all throughout Saturn’s day, much as it would be on Earth during northern summer.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 7 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 19, 2016 using a spectral filter that preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. North on Saturn is up and rotated 20 degrees to the right.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million miles (1.9 million kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is 68 miles (110 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org and ESA's website: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Cassini-Huygens

Image, Text, Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Tony Greicius.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Pushing the Envelope

Blue Origin logo.

April 4, 2016

Pushing the Envelope (flight 3)

Video above: New Shepard flew again on April 2, 2016 reaching an apogee of 339,178 feet or 103 kilometers. It was the third flight with the same hardware. We pushed the envelope on this flight, restarting the engine for the propulsive landing only 3,600 feet above the ground, requiring the BE-3 engine to start fast and ramp to high thrust fast. Video Credit: Blue Origin.

Image above: The reusable New Shepard space vehicle ascends through clear skies to an apogee of 339,138 feet (flight 2). Image Credit: Blue Origin.

Related articles:

Blue Origin Makes Historic Rocket Landing:
http://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.ch/2015/11/blue-origin-makes-historic-rocket.html

Blue Origin - Launch. Land. Repeat.:
http://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.ch/2016/01/blue-origin-launch-land-repeat.html

For more information about Blue Origin, visit: https://www.blueorigin.com/

Image (mentioned), Video (mentioned), Text, Credit: Blue Origin.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch