** The Official Space Flight Thread - The Space Station and Beyond **

Cosimo

Cosimo

Cosimo

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With the Space Shuttle program having ended many people have expressed a desire not to lose touch with missions into space. So here we are with one thread to cover:

  • Missions
  • Technology
  • Research
  • Anything else spaceflight related
Now that Juno mission is on the way we can look forward to these:


All important but the big one is Mars Science Laboratory (MSL):

 
Meanwhile life continues on the International Space Station. On August 3rd Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Alexander Samokutyaev carried out a spacewalk on the Russian segment of the space station:

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They moved a cargo boom, installed a prototype laser communications system and deployed an amateur radio micro-satellite. The spacewalk took six hours and twenty three minutes.
 
Another one of Endeavour and Discovery at KSC:

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Discovery will go to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia and Endeavour to the California Science Center in Los Angeles.
 
Another one of these amazing pictures of earth taken from the ISS, this time Southern Italy. The image has been rotated through 180 degrees:

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This astronaut photograph highlights the nighttime appearance of the southern Italian Peninsula. The toe and heel of Italy’s “boot” are clearly defined by the lights of large cities such as Naples, Bari, and Brindisi, as well as numerous smaller cities and towns. The bordering Adriatic, Tyrrhenian, and Ionian Seas appear as dark regions to the east, west, and south. The city lights of Palermo and Catania, Sicily, are also visible.

The International Space Station (ISS) was located over an area of Romania, close to the capital city of Bucharest (approximately 945 kilometers to the northeast) at the time this image was taken. Part of a solar panel array on a docked Russian spacecraft is visible in the foreground. The distance between the image subject area and the position of the photographer, as well as the viewing angle looking outwards from the ISS, contributes to the foreshortened appearance of the Italian Peninsula and Sicily.
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GRAIL

Coming up is the Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission. It will produce the most accurate gravitational map of the Moon to date. Scheduled for launch on 8th September from Cape Canaveral.

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This will be the first time two robotic spacecraft will be placed into the same precise orbit around a planetary body other than Earth so that they can fly in formation. It will also be the first time that there will be cameras (MoonKAM) whose sole aim will be to photograph targets chosen by educational establishments.

Mission overview:

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/578754main_grail.pdf

Mission Site:

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/grail/home.cfm
 
PermaBanned said:
How is everybody missing literally the first sentence in that article? This is like that time when NASA scrapped the Shuttle and everybody was like "omg so the ISS is abandoned now?".
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Skim and assume is the name of the game.

Don't panic folks:

(Reuters) - Moscow no longer sees manned spaceflight as its top priority but remains committed to its International Space Station obligations, the head of Russian space agency Roskosmos said on Wednesday
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PermaBanned said:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14653371

Roscosmos haven't had much luck with getting into the right orbit lately... still, the article implies that it's in an orbit, i wonder if there'l be some sort of rescue mission mounted, be it from the ground or from the station using the Soyuz' docked there as runabouts.
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Looks like it came back down and crashed:

August 24, 2011 18:40

Progress spacecraft wreckage falls in unpopulated area in Altai
MOSCOW. Aug 24 (Interfax) - The wreckage of the Progress resupply spacecraft came down in the Republic of Altai, causing no destruction.

"The Progress resupply vehicle that failed to reach the target orbit crashed in the Choisk region of the Republic of Altai," a source in the regional law enforcement agencies told Interfax.

The crash caused neither loss of life nor destruction. There are no populated areas near the crash site, he said.

sd eb
(Our editorial staff can be reached at [email protected])
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http://www.interfax.com/newsinf.asp?id=268143
 
As we near GRAIL launch the payload fairing has been added to the booster:

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The GRAIL twins are each about the size of a washing machine.

​

Launch is scheduled for September 8 at 13:37 BST (08:37 EDT).
 
Watched another documentary (Discovery Channels “Last Shuttle”) about the last shuttle mission last night and still find it hard to believe that it's all over.

I know we’re looking at the present and to the future but I couldn’t resist this trip down memory lane with this great picture of the shuttles first night flight. It was Challenger, STS-8 on 30th August 1983.

583134mains8339513900.jpg

Back to the present and eight more days before GRAIL launch.
 
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