Category: Space
Russian Mars-Bound Probe Stuck in Earth Orbit
The craft successfully launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 9 November (Moscow time), and separated from its Zenit–2 booster rocket some 11 minutes later. But its engines failed to kick in, and it’s now trapped in Earth’s orbit.
The Russian space agency says that it now has three days to correct the probe’s fault remotely, turn on its engines and break out of Earth’s orbit, before the £105-million craft’s batteries run dry.
Shame on You, NASA
The elaborate mission to recover a moon rock led NASA agents to one of the most down-to-earth places: a Denny’s restaurant in Riverside County.
But at the end of the sting operation, agents were left holding a speck of lunar dust smaller than a grain of rice and a 74-year-old suspect who was terrified by armed officials.
[…]
The target, Joann Davis, a grandmother who says she was trying to raise money for her sick son, asserts the lunar material was rightfully hers, having been given to her space-engineer husband by Neil Armstrong in the 1970s.
‘Rival the Saturn V’
One Last Time
[via NASA Gives up on Silent Spirit Rover
Spirit’s final troubles began in April 2009, when it got stuck in a patch of Martian sand. Engineers worked for eight months attempting to free the rover, but to no avail. In its stationary position, Spirit’s solar panels weren’t able to tilt toward the sun and so it lost power during the winter of 2009 and 2010.
When Spirit lost power, its internal temperature plunged to minus 67 degrees Fahrenheit — the coldest it had ever experienced — and it likely sustained electronic damage that prevented it from powering back up last spring.
NASA Mission STS-51-L
Twenty-five years ago today, the space shuttle Challenger exploded just 73 seconds after lift-off, due to an O-ring failure on one of its right-side solid booster engines. This caused a plume of fire that burned through the large external fuel tank, which disintegrated moments later, breaking up the space shuttle in the process. There was no large-scale explosion, just structural failures that were made far worse due to the velocity of the vehicle through the atmosphere.