Keeping the Light Attitude: Kepler’s Balancing Act

Near the middle of last year, the planet-hunting satellite, Kepler, looked like it would never Keple again. On May 11, 2013, the second of Kepler’s four reaction wheels went out, which made precision pointing, a requirement for Kepler’s scientific mission, nearly impossible. Some of this site’s posts have covered Kepler’s calls for ideas about how to use […]

Spacesuits Through The Years

Special/extreme clothing supplier REI has nothing on spacesuits. Whether US, Soviet, Russian, or Chinese; whether used for space-walks, shuttle flights, capsules, or moon-walks; whether they looked like flight suits, robots, or Fat Tron, spacesuits are important to the people who wear them while working. Space.com has an excellent picture gallery of spacesuits from different spacefaring countries throughout the […]

DIY Space: More NASA Space Kits

NASA and the website Littlebits.cc are working together to get an actual working “space kit” out to the public. The kit, which costs $189, can be used to build all sorts of projects (at least 10, according to the website). Do you want to build an International Space Station replica? This kit will help you do […]

Why Space Matters: HEO Satellite Operations, Part 3–What’s the Frequency, Komrade(th)?

The previous lesson left you hanging, maybe even perturbed, with the question of why anyone would want to use a satellite in a highly elliptical orbit (HEO). After all, a HEO satellite requires a ground station or two with a moveable (steerable) antenna to speak to it (or the satellite’s antenna has to be gimbaled […]

DIY Space: Google’s LEGO Moonbot Challenge

The deadline for registration is closing in for people, age 9 through 17, interested in building “moonbots” for Google’s Lunar XPrize Lego Mindstorms Challenge. The final day for initial registration is 15 May at 11.59.59PM PST. The challenge has two phases. The first is fairly simple, requiring a team video that answers the question “Why should we […]