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Category: satellites

‘How far will future rockets go?’

The SpaceX Starship might be the next rocket to take humans to the moon, but it won’t be the first, and likely not the last.

Starting in the mid-20th century, humanity has explored space faster than ever before. We’ve launched satellites, telescopes, space stations, and spacecrafts, all strapped to rocket-propelled launch vehicles that helped them breach our atmosphere.

This infographic from designer Tyler Skarbek stacks up the many different rockets of the world side-by-side, showing which country designed them, what years they were used, and what they (could) accomplish.

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Roaming isn’t available in space, so network access is an issue as satellites and spacecraft orbit the Earth. This will soon change as NASA develops a new Wideband Ka-band communications terminal, which is a transceiver that operates over government and commercial Ka-band spectrum allocations (17.7 GHz – 31 GHz).

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LOMPOC, Calif. — Rocket Lab announced Sept. 1 that it is expanding production of satellite components to meet demand from companies developing satellite constellations.

The company said it is increasing production of reaction wheels, components used for attitude control of spacecraft. The company started offering those components after acquiring Sinclair Interplanetary, a smallsat component manufacturer, in April 2020.

The new production line will be able to produce up to 2,000 reaction wheels a year. “When we took over Sinclair Interplanetary, on a good year they were doing between 100 and 150 wheels,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in an interview. “Going to a couple of thousand is a serious move up.”

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Of the more than 55,000 jobs, Jassy announced, over 40,000 will be in the United States, while others will be in countries such as India, Germany and Japan via its job fair ‘Amazon Career Day.’ In order to learn about Amazon job opportunities, click on their job page: amazon.jobs/in.

Amazon Career Day is a free event on September 16 2021 at 10:00am IST. “This interactive experience is for all job seekers, regardless of your level of experience, professional field, or background – whether you are interested in working at Amazon or elsewhere,” the company said in. a statement.

Jassy, in his first press interview since he ascended to Amazon’s top post in July, said the company needed more firepower to keep up with demand in retail, the cloud and advertising, among other businesses. He said the company’s new bet to launch satellites into orbit to widen broadband access, called Project Kuiper, would require a lot of new hires, too.

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The iPhone 13 will feature low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communication connectivity to allow users to make calls and send messages in areas without 4G or 5G coverage, according to the reliable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. In a note to investors, seen by MacRumors, Kuo explained that the ‌iPhone 13‌ lineup will feature hardware that is able to connect to LEO satellites. If enabled with the relevant software features, this could allow ‌iPhone 13‌ users to make calls and send messages without the need for a 4G or 5G cellular connection.

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The Bernese theoretical astrophysicist Kevin Heng has achieved a rare feat: On paper, he has derived novel solutions to an old mathematical problem needed to calculate light reflections from planets and moons. Now, data can be interpreted in a simple way to understand planetary atmospheres, for example. The new formulae will likely be incorporated into future textbooks.

For millennia, humanity has observed the changing phases of the Moon. The rise and fall of sunlight reflected off the Moon, as it presents its different faces to us, is known as a “phase curve.” Measuring phase curves of the Moon and Solar System planets is an ancient branch of astronomy that goes back at least a century. The shapes of these phase curves encode information on the surfaces and atmospheres of these celestial bodies. In modern times, astronomers have measured the phase curves of exoplanets using space telescopes such as Hubble, Spitzer, TESS

Launched on April 18 2018, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a mission to search nearby stars for undiscovered worlds with a gold of discovering thousands of exoplanets around nearby bright stars.

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WASHINGTON — SpaceX performed its first Falcon 9 launch in two months Aug. 29 sending a cargo Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station.

The Falcon 9 lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at 3:14 a.m. Eastern after a one-day delay because of weather. The Dragon spacecraft separated from the rocket’s upper stage about 12 minutes after liftoff and is scheduled to dock with the station at about 11 a.m. Eastern Aug. 30 for an approximately one-month stay.

The launch was the first for a Falcon 9 since the June 30 launch of the Transporter-2 rideshare mission, the longest pause since a three-month gap between launches from August to November 2019. One reason for the hiatus was a delay in Starlink launches to equip those satellites with laser inter-satellite links; the majority of the Falcon 9 launches this year have been Starlink missions.

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Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite-powered internet service, is about to reduce its costs for a key component.

Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service, is about to reduce its costs for a key component, president Gwynne Shotwell revealed at the Space Symposium.

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A Chinese military satellite appears to have gotten smashed by a disintegrating Russian rocket, Space.com reports, in what’s likely the worst orbital collision since 2009.

The collision illustrates the growing danger of derelict spacecraft parts and other jetsam in Earth’s orbit, where they can smash functional equipment — as well as the extraordinary difficulty in figuring out what’s going on in Earth’s orbit.

According to an investigation by Harvard astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, Chinese satellite Yunhai 1–02 likely crashed into a piece of space junk earlier this year.

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