Tag: Spacecraft

It is an ambitious plan of NASA to send humans to the Moon for the first time in over five decades.

Meanwhile, it said all other system is working well and both of the solar arrays are producing power and charging the battery.

Washington: When Cassini ends its 13-year tour of the Saturn system with an intentional plunge into the planet on Friday, the spacecraft’s speed will be approximately 113,000 kms per hour, NASA has said. The final plunge will take place on the day side of Saturn, near local noon, with the spacecraft entering the atmosphere around […]

Washington: NASA is all set to launch its historic small car-size probe to “touch the Sun” from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 3.33 am EDT (1 pm India time) on Saturday. The probe is named after Eugene Parker, a solar physicist who in 1958 first predicted the existence of the solar wind, […]

Beijing: China has successfully developed and tested a cutting-edge hypersonic aircraft that rides its own shock waves, authorities said on Monday. The China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics here announced that the first flight-test of its Starry Sky 2-which it calls the nation’s first hypersonic experimental waverider vehicle was conducted last week at an unidentified testing […]

Washington: Indian-origin astronaut Sunita Williams is among the nine astronauts named by NASA on Friday for its first human spaceflight programme since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011. The astronauts will fly on spacecraft developed by SpaceX and Boeing as part of the the US space agency’s Commercial Crew programme to send humans […]

Washington: NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, which aims to find alien worlds with capacity to harbour life is scheduled to launch on April 16 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. On March 15, the spacecraft passed a review that confirmed it was ready for launch, […]

Washington: While NASA continues to learn about the state of its newly rediscovered IMAGE mission, the US space agency has said that the spacecraft proved to be a “discovery” machine and during nearly six years in operation, it provided robust research about the space around Earth. The data collected during its years of operation led […]

New York: NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which flew past Pluto in 2015, will encounter the most primitive and most distant object in the history of space exploration, on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day in 2019. New Horizons’ next mission — the Kuiper Belt object, referred to as MU69 — is an icy world […]

New York: Using newly calibrated data taken from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, which flew aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists have created the first global map of water in the Moon’s soil. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, builds on the initial discovery in 2009 of water and a related molecule — hydroxyl, which […]

Washington: As NASA’s asteroid-bound spacecraft OSIRIS-REx approaches Earth for its September 22 gravity assist, a ground-based telescope has captured images of the spacecraft. This is the first Earth-based view of OSIRIS-REx since its launch on September 8, 2016, NASA said on Friday. The images were taken on September 2, by the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory […]

Washington: Scientists at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida are developing a system that acts like a sensory skin to help astronauts to know exactly when the outside of their spacecraft has been damaged. The “Flexible Damage Detection System” technology may offer a possible solution to NASA’s problem of figuring out in real-time where a spacecraft […]

Moscow: Russia on Thursday successfully launched a Progress MS-11 unpiloted cargo resupply spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS), the Russian state space corporation Roscosmos said in a statement. The launch of the spacecraft by the Soyuz-2.1a carrier rocket was carried out at 14.01 Moscow time (1101 GMT). The spacecraft, scheduled to dock with the […]

Chennai: Even as the city’s thirst is being quenched by transporting potable water by train from Jolarpettai, the Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (Chennai Metro Water) is seeking water from the moon. Congratulating the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for successfully putting into orbit the Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft, Chennai Metro Water tweeted: “Congrats @isro […]

Bengaluru: In a significant milestone for India’s Moon mission, ISRO will fire Chandrayaan2’s liquid engine on Tuesday to insert the spacecraft into a lunar orbit. “It’s tomorrow morning (tentatively between 8.30 am and 9.30 am). It’s challenging,” Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation K Sivan told PTI on Monday on the operation to put the […]