Search The Skies for Objects Out to get You

One of my favorite sites, TheVerge.com, covered this year’s SXSW (South By SouthWest) activities. They posted this article about an application NASA and Planetary Resources released during SXSW for public downloading. The application, called Asteroid Data Hunter (ADH-not the greatest name), will allow people to upload images of the stars. Then the application will sift […]

On Time, On Target? The Rosetta Mission

The next few hours or so will be interesting and hopefully history-making. The European Space Agency (ESA) team has come so far with the Rosetta mission. If you don’t know what Rosetta is, in short: the Europeans have sent a spacecraft, Rosetta, to successfully intercept a comet over 400,000,000 km (about 250,000,000 miles) from Earth, and […]

Russia’s Fregat: What Mission Assurance?

Placing a satellite in the wrong orbit. It’s what the delightful world of mission assurance is supposed to prevent. If you talk to any space operator, mission assurance is the sexiest profession in the space realm…JK–not really! If anything, the typical space operator falls asleep at the first fishbone chart presented in the omnipresent and snore-inducing […]

Groovy Man! Satellite Helps with Earthquake

The European Space Agency (ESA) announced the results of a decision to use California’s Napa Valley earthquake as an opportunity to show how satellites might be able to provide information. In this case, the ESA tasked their low earth orbiting (LEO) Sentinel-1 satellite‘s Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry payload to take a look at the affected area. The […]

Intercepting a Comet

“[T]he sexiest, most fantastic mission ever,” those are the words of an obviously very sexually confused European Space Agency scientist about the Rosetta satellite’s interception and orbiting of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The quote comes from Gizmodo’s post about the current successes of the Rosetta satellite exploration mission. And while the scientist might be sexually confused, thankfully […]