Forget NOAA; NASA’s GRACE Protects You from Floods

Or is that spelled Noah? Anyway, NASA has a pair of 12-year old satellites from their Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE), and it’s NASA’s GRACE that might save you from flooding. The two satellites are orbiting the Earth in a polar Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and are 220 kilometers (140 miles) apart from each other. They […]

Why Space Matters: HEO Satellite Operations, Part 5–Spysats, IR, and MMS

The Molniya orbit, a type of highly elliptical orbit (HEO), was the focus of the last HEO post. And it was noted that the Molniya is an orbit perfectly suited to communication. But what other missions and satellites use the HEO? Believe it or not, the US has organizations that use the HEO for a […]

DIY Space: Build a LEGO NASA Satellite

The stacked “hockey pucks” in the picture above have something in common with the site’s latest HEO lesson. However, they are also LEGO models you can build. In this case, the model is of a NASA satellite that hasn’t been launched yet. The Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) spacecraft model shown on NASA’s very own website looks a little […]

On a Roll: One Small Step for Reusable Rockets

Updated information at the bottom regarding thrusters and fuel!! SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is on a roll. Not literally of course, that would be bad. More importantly, SpaceX noted on their Twitter feed that roll rate of the Falcon 9 first stage booster was close to zero. Why is that so important that SpaceX […]

NASA’s Hovering Mighty Eagle

I’ve been interested in SpaceX’s Grasshopper and the ability to launch, hover, and land it on the same launch pad. You can go to one of my posts, here, to see that feat. But I feel I should give NASA its due. NASA is developing a robotic lander that for now they’ve named the “Mighty Eagle.” The Mighty […]