Now they're saying it may have exploded 6 1/2 minutes into launch, which would've been during its upper stage firing. That would explain the early separation signal.
They did indeed confirm that Progress MS-04 did not make it to orbit. Apparently, the upper stage exploded just under 6 1/2 minutes after launch. The Progress ferry burned up over Tuva Republic, Russia, approximately 2,400 km downrange.
42 years ago today, Soyuz 16 was launched atop a Soyuz-U rocket from Site 1/5, Baikonur Cosmodrome. The crew was Anatoly Filipchenko and Nikolai Rukavishnikov. It was the fourth test flight of the Soyuz 7K-TM spacecraft with the APAS-75 docking system designed for Apollo-Soyuz. The first three test flights were unmanned, and classified as Kosmos flights. The docking system was attached to the Apollo side of the docking ring, so docking procedures could be tested. On the final day of the mission, the entire system was jettisoned by explosive bolts to test emergency procedures in case the Soyuz spacecraft got stuck to the Docking Module. The mission lasted six days, and was a complete success. Landing took place near Arkalyk.
48 years ago today, HEOS-A was launched atop a Thor-Delta E1 rocket from Pad 17B, Cape Kennedy. HEOS was the Highly Elliptical Orbit Satellite. Built by ESRO, it examined data about the area where Earth's magnetic field interacted with the Solar magnetic field. It originally had an apogee of over 225,000 km. But it maintained a low perigee, and re-entered in 1975.
The Cassini Grand Finale has begun. The white orbits are the initial ones. A fly-by of Titan two weeks ago moved its perikrone near the edge of the F ring. It just made the first of those fly-bys. I'm guessing it will be another six orbits before another encounter will pull Cassini so it's perikrone will take place right above the planet, beneath the rings.
So sad. What a great bunch of science it's done, plus (more importantly to me as a non-scientist) sent back some simply fascinating pictures. I will be sad when it's dead in 283 days
Even though the mission proper will be over, they will still be sifting through the data for decades and decades and decades. There's plenty more to come. It would've been cool if they could have it last there for a full Saturn year, but I doubt they had the fuel--either reaction fuel, or nuclear battery fuel--to make it that far.
As part of the announcement of Mercury Mark II/Project Gemini, which was announced 55 years ago today, NASA agreed to launch the new spacecraft with a modified version of the LGM-25C Titan II ICBM, referred to eventually as the Titan II Gemini Launch Vehicle (GLV). Some of the modifications made to the ICBM to make it man-rated: * Rocket systems were updated in general, and redundant systems were added. * The rocket was loaded with an additional 13,000 lbs of fuel. Typical hypergolic ICBMs were not fueled to capacity, so the rocket already had the capacity for the extra fuel. The hypergolic fuel was also chilled at launch for added performance. * The rocket's two stages were burned to depletion, also in opposition to typical ICBM performance. This eliminated a potential failure point involving engine chamber pressure sensors. * First stage engine thrust was reduced slightly to mitigate pogo. This modification was also made to the ICBMs. The rocket had a capacity to LEO of 7,900 pounds. Surplus Titan II ICBMs that were modified into the Titan 23G orbital rocket would have a similar capacity. Launches would be conducted from Pad 19 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, where Titan I and Titan II test launches took place. It would be deactivated after Gemini 12, and hasn't been used since. The Gemini-era White Room used for astronaut ingress in the Gemini capsules is at the Air Force Space and Missile Museum at Pad 26.
"Godspeed, John Glenn." John Glenn died today at Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State after having been there for over a week. He was 95. An exact cause was not yet known. He will lie in state at the Ohio Statehouse for a day, then be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. With his death, all the Mercury Seven are now gone.
18 years ago today, the Mars Climate Orbiter was launched atop a Delta II 7425 rocket from Pad 17A, Cape Canaveral. The probe was supposed to enter an initial highly-eccentric orbit around Mars, and use aerobraking to circularize the orbit. But they miscalculated its approach. It is believed that the initial approach would place the probe less than 60 km above the surface of Mars, well within its atmosphere. Contact was lost four minutes into its 16-minute-long orbital burn. It is believed to have burned up in the Martian atmosphere. As I have stated before, the losses of both this and the 1998 Mars Polar Lander would cause NASA to re-think its approach to interplanetary exploration.
46 years ago today, Venera 7 became the first lander to successfully send data from another planet. In this case, Venus. Of course, they would not know that for about two weeks. During its descent, its parachute partially failed, and its descent accelerated. At landing, it appeared to go silent. But two weeks later, a review of the data tapes discovered a very weak signal that continued for another 23 minutes after landing. It is believed that the lander toppled on its side at landing, leaving its medium-gain antenna to transmit signals directly to Earth. The data pretty much confirmed that Venus is simply too harsh to support life, with a surface temperature measured at 475 °C, and an atmospheric pressure 90 times that of Earth, the equivalent of water pressure 900 m below sea level on Earth.
51 years ago today, the eighth Transtage was launched atop a Titan IIIC rocket from Pad 41, Cape Kennedy. It was the first launch from Space Launch Complex 41. The rocket carried two Lincoln Experimental Satellites, LES-3 and LES-4; and the fourth satellite for Project OSCAR. OSCAR 4 was intended to be a geostationary HAM radio relay. LES-3 was left at an apogee of 4,800 km as intended, and re-entered in April 1968. A separation failure for LES-4 left it just short of a full GTO. The remaining satellites took just over 10 years to all re-enter.
61 years ago today, the NACA launched an X-7 drone rocket plane from a B-29 bomber at White Sands Missile Range. The X-7 was an early test of ramjet technology, and also tested anti-missile technology. It was a predecessor of the AQM-60 Kingfisher drone/cruise missile, which would continue work in the latter. The designer, Lockheed's Kelly Johnson, would go on to design the legendary spy jet, the SR-71 Blackbird, and its interceptor conterpart, the YF-12.
30 years ago today, the Soviet Union conducted a suborbital test flight of BOR-5, a 1/8th-scale model of the Buran space shuttle. The model was launched atop a Kosmos-3M rocket (based on the R-14 Chusovaya IRBM) from Site 107/1, Kapustin Yar Missile Range, Russian SFSR. It reached an apogee of 210 km, then was driven into the atmosphere at a 45-degree angle and a speed of Mach 18.5. It landed 2,000 km downrange. At least five of these scale test launches were conducted, with four of the models being recovered. None were ever re-flown. Two of the models used in the program have known whereabouts (one in Moscow, the other for some reason in the former West Germany). The model in this launch, 503, is not one of them.
The last launch for China got delayed past the new year, so it's time to wrap this shitshow of a year up. Launch attempts: 22 for the United States: 8 Atlas V 8 Falcon 9 4 Delta IV 1 Antares 1 Pegasus 22 for China: 8 Long March 2 7 Long March 3 4 Long March 4 (1 failure) 1 Long March 5 1 Long March 7 1 Long March 11 19 for Russia: 14 Soyuz (1 failure; 2 launched from Kourou) 3 Proton 2 Rokot 9 for ESA 7 Ariane 5 2 Vega 7 for India 8 PSLV 1 GSLV 4 for Japan (H-2) 1 for Israel (Shavit) 1 for North Korea (allegedly) Wikipedia classifies the test malfunction of a Falcon 9 as a "launch failure". As it did not occur during launch operations, I do not. The two actual launch failures were: A Long March 4C rocket carrying a reconnaissance satellite on August 31. Cause unlikely ever to be known. A Soyuz-U launching Progress MS-04 on December 1. It is believed its third stage exploded during firing. In addition, the Japanese X-ray space telescope ASTRO-H Hitomi was destroyed by space debris shortly after achieving its intended orbit. Four manned missions were conducted: Soyuz TMA-20M, as well as MS-01, MS-02, and MS-03. The Year in Space ended in March when Mikhail Korniyenko and Scott Kelly returned to Earth. Cassini has conducted 11 more fly-bys of Titan before proceeding with its Grand Finale. Juno entered a polar orbit around Jupiter on July 4. It has completed three orbits of Jupiter so far. Mars Express completed two close fly-bys of Phobos. The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter entered orbit around Mars on October 19. As for the lander, Schiaparelli... well, MRO did find its crater. The Rosetta mission ended when the probe landed on Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko on September 30. ******** Hopefully, like for the rest of humanity, 2017 will be a better year. With Pad 40 damaged by the explosion during static firing, SpaceX had to accelerate work on Pad 39A to work with Falcon 9 as well as Falcon Heavy. They're hoping to get their first launch done next month. The maiden flight of Falcon Heavy has been pushed back to the Spring. SpaceX has scheduled the first unmanned test flight of Dragon 2, their crewed version, on August 24. Boeing has scheduled the first unmanned test flight of Starliner for "December". Cassini is scheduled to make its swan dive into Saturn on September 15, while OSIRIS-Rex is scheduled for a September 23 fly-by of Earth on its way to asteroid 101955 Bennu.
216 years ago today, the discovery of Ceres was announced by Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi. Yes, I looked that up. It was indeed announced on January 1. Initially classified as a planet in its own right, around 1860 it was demoted to an "asteroid". This was due to the discovery of other minor planets in the same orbital area as Ceres, an area now known as the Main Asteroid Belt. It was at this point that the numerical minor planet designation system was established, with Ceres being reclassified as "1 Ceres". But no exact definition of a "planet" was ever clarified; it was just assumed that there was a difference between major planets and "asteroids". When the same thing happened early in the 21st century as it became clear Pluto should also be demoted, there was a point where it became possible for Ceres to again be defined as a "major" planet. In the end, one of the definitions for a major planet was that it had "cleared the neighborhood" of its orbit of fellow travelers. Thus, in 2006, Ceres was re-classified as a "dwarf planet", along with Pluto, and three more recently-discovered minor planets: Eris, Haumea, and Makemake. Interestingly enough, Ceres is the least massive of the five currently-defined dwarf planets. Its diameter is only 946 km, meaning it barely maintains hydrostatic equilibrium, one of the defining characteristics of a "dwarf planet". (As I have noted before, 4 Vesta does not meet that characteristic.) The most significant feature of Ceres is Occator crater. It is the home of two bright spots created by exposed water ice. The ice is exceptionally shiny due to its composition of some sort of brine, though the exact components have not been narrowed down yet. The bright spots themselves were discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2004. Dawn will reach two years in orbit around Ceres on March 6. It is in a stable orbit that will keep it where it is in perpetuity. A possible third transfer to asteroid 2 Pallas was considered, but its inclination relative to Ceres made a transfer impossible. Though the mission is currently funded only through this year, further extensions are possible as long as the probe is functioning.
First, great info in this post as well as throughout the year, so thanx 2016 especially saw lots of talk on the astrophysicist side of my twitter about the potential wrongness of this bolded word, and seems to have settled on "crewed" instead as more accurate and inclusive That may last until all the robots we're sending out into space decide they need to be included equally and not separately as well
NASA has selected its next two deep-space missions. ******** Scheduled to launch in 2021 is codename "Lucy", which will explore asteroids that are fellow-travelers of Jupiter. There are many asteroids which orbit in the same vicinity of Jupiter in its L4 and L5 Lagrangian points. The L4 asteroids (ahead of Jupiter) are known as the Greek Camp, while the L5 asteroids (behind Jupiter) are known as the Trojan Camp. The plan is to fly-by a Main Belt asteroid in 2025, three Greek asteroids in 2027-28, and a Trojan asteroid in 2033. This would equate to a final heliocentric orbit with an aphelion a good ways beyond Jupiter. The hypothesis is that these asteroids may provide clues as to the conditions and composition of the early Solar system, as early as 10 million years after when the Sun would have begun nuclear fusion. Lucy will utilize camera equipment derived from New Horizons. Several members of the New Horizons team will oversee the Lucy mission. The codename "Lucy" comes from the most complete skeleton of the early hominid species Australopithecus afarensis. ******** The other mission, scheduled to launch in 2023, is codename "Psyche". That codename is based on its target, Main Belt asteroid 16 Psyche. Discovered in 1852, Psyche is extremely dense. Spectral analysis determined it is mostly iron and nickel, a composition unlike any solid body ever seen before. It is believed that Psyche is the remaining metallic core of a much larger body, perhaps as large as 500 km in diameter. Psyche itself is approximately 240 x 185 x 145 km in dimensions. It contains just under 1% of all the matter in the Main Asteroid Belt, placing it as the 11th-heaviest object in the Main Belt by mass. Its mean density, at 6.7 g/cubic centimeter (cc), is higher than any of the terrestrial planets. For comparison, Earth has a mean density of 5.5 g/cc. The Psyche orbiter will take a more leisurely route than Lucy, doing fly-bys of Earth and Mars before arriving for an orbital mission in 2030.
68 years ago today, the Bell XS-1 46-062 Glamorous Glennis was flown by Chuck Yeager to a speed of Mach 1.03, and an altitude of 23,000 metres. What is unique about this particular flight is that it was conducted from a standard ground takeoff, as opposed to being dropped from a B-29 as usual. They were able to achieve the flight with only 50% of its normal fuel capacity. As far as my research goes, I think this is the only time the XS-1, or any of its derivatives, ever took off from the ground. Allegedly, the ground takeoff was a stunt because the Navy was claiming their Douglas D-558-1 Skystreak was the only true supersonic aircraft, as it took off from the ground. That claim was dubious, as it only achieved supersonic flight once, in a dive. Its fastest speed in level flight was Mach 0.99. This flight would put that claim to bed once and for all.
19 years ago today, Lunar Prospector was launched atop an Athena 2 rocket from Pad 46, Cape Canaveral. It was the first launch of Athena 2, and the only Athena rocket to go beyond LEO. After a leisurely cruise of just over 4 days, it was placed into an elliptical orbit around the Moon, with a perilune of 100 km. 2 additional burns would circularize the orbit at 100 km. Due to the Moon's highly variable gravity, it was designed to maintain its orbit if it strayed more than 20 km beyond its nominal orbit. Its primary mission was mapping the gravity fields of the Moon. It also detected the composition of its surface, and mapped localized magnetic fields. One of the experiments, the Alpha Particle Spectrometer, was damaged on launch. While it did partially work, unexpected solar activity scrambled the data. NASA believes they will be able to recover the data someday, but no luck so far. After 11 months in orbit, the orbit was lowered to less than half its original altitude. It was crashed into Shoemaker crater on July 31, 1999. It was hoped that the crash would liberate some of the water ice detected in polar craters on the Moon. It did not. The probe carried some of the ashes of noted astronomer Eugene Shoemaker.
16 years ago today, China conducted a test launch of their Shenzhou manned spacecraft with Shenzhou 2, launched atop a Long March 2F rocket from Pad 4, Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. It carried over 60 experiments, including its first biological payload: a monkey, a rabbit, a dog, several mice, and many others. The orbital module carried several materials experiments, and an external pallet attached to its docking adapter did external experiments, including China's first gamma ray burst detector. The orbital module was separated after 7 days, and the re-entry module returned to Earth at that time. China never officially released any photos of the landing, but leaked photos showed one of the lines to the parachute snapped, leading to a harder than predicted landing. It is unknown if the biological payload survived. The orbital module, which at that time had its own solar panels, remained in orbit until August 2001, when it re-entered over the South Pacific, burning up off the coast of Chile.
39 years ago today, Soyuz 27 was launched atop a Soyuz-U rocket from Site 1/5, Baikonur Cosmodrome. On-board were cosmonauts Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Oleg Makarov. They would be the first crew to visit another crew at Salyut 6, docking with the space station the next day. The two crews would spend five days together before Dzhanibekov and Makarov returned to Earth aboard Soyuz 26. The Expedition 1 crew of Yuri Romanenko and Georgi Grechko would use Soyuz 27 to return to Earth two months later after entertaining a second crew from Soyuz 28. The station would remain vacant for three months afterward before Soyuz 29 brought Expedition 2 in June 1978.
60 years ago today, the USSR decreed that a missile base should be placed at Mimi, Arkangelsk Oblast, Russian SFSR. That site would become Plesetsk Cosmodrome. As Baikonur Cosmodrome had already been compromised by Western intelligence, the Soviets needed a more secretive base for classified launches. It was also a far superior location to launch from to reach polar and Molniya orbit trajectories. UK scientists got evidence of its existence as early as 1959, when they tracked the launch of Kosmos 112. By the mid-1960s, it was as much a "secret" to intelligence officials as Baikonur. The Soviet Union officially acknowledged its existence in 1983. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Plesetsk would see more action. Today, Plesetsk is the host of all classified launches for Russia, with the ending of orbital flights out of Kapustin Yar, and the unwillingness of Russia to launch their classified payloads from an independent Kazakhstan. It also occasionally hosts civilian launches when polar orbits or other high-inclination trajectories are needed. The only rockets that Russia does not launch at Plesetsk are Proton and Zenit. Pad 35/1, where they are currently testing the Angara rocket (above), was originally planned for Zenit, but that fell through as relations with Ukraine soured.
20 years ago today, Atlantis was launched on STS-81 from Pad 39B, Kennedy Space Center. The mission would bring Jerry Linenger to Mir, and return John Blaha. The shuttle would spend five days docked at Mir, conducting joint experiments. They would also deliver 6,000 pounds of logistics (including 200 gallons of water), and return 2,400 pounds of equipment to Earth.
Astronaut Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the Moon, died yesterday, aged 82. Born on March 14, 1934, in Chicago to parents of Central European ancestry, he finished Navy ROTC at Purdue in 1956. Working as a Naval aviator, he would earn a Master's in Aeronautical Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School, and complete over 200 carrier landings. He was selected to NASA in 1963. He initially backed up Gemini 9 with commander Tom Stafford. When its prime crew died in a T-38 training accident, they became the crew of the re-manifested Gemini 9A, flying in June 1966. In the initial Apollo rotation, Cernan would be backup LM pilot for Apollo 7. This put him in prime for Apollo 10, the last dress rehearsal for a lunar landing. He would pilot the LM Snoopy to within 6 km of the lunar surface before the abort system activated as planned, separating the ascent module to return to CSM Charlie Brown. With the mixups caused by cost-cutting in the Apollo program, several of the later flights were canceled. Cernan passed up a repeat performance as LM pilot on Apollo 16 to command a flight of his own, risking his chance to return to the Moon. When all the Scientist flights were culled, the scientific community demanded Dr. Harrison Schmitt get to fly just one of them. While Cernan did not want to break his crew for Apollo 17 up, he agreed to Dr. Schmitt replacing Joe Engle as LM pilot. He felt Schmitt had better skills piloting the LM than Engle anyway. Apollo 17 took place in December 1972. To date, Gene Cernan is the last human to be on the surface of another world. Cernan retired from NASA and the Navy in 1976, and went into private business. In the 1980s, he was a contributor to ABC's Good Morning America.