Cross section, cutaway, or x-ray illustrations, call it whatever you want, but they’re the best way to understand how things work. They are fascinating. In this new Sploid series we will present some of the best cutaway drawings from around the world. The first collection includes 32 awesome spacecrafts.
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Two and a half years is a long time to sleep—even for a machine. That’s how long Rosetta has slumbered in its decade-long journey towards the comet where it will land. But in the dead of the night, at 2am PST tomorrow morning, Rosetta will awaken. Here’s how its alarm clock works.
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The European Space Agency has been collecting examples of "spacecraft-associated biology" in a small collection housed at the Leibniz-Institut DSMZ in Brunswick, Germany. 298 strains of "extremotolerant" bacteria, isolated from spacecraft-assembly rooms because they managed to survive the incredible methods used to clean spacecraft, are now being studied for their biological insight. How on earth can they still be alive?
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One of the three private space companies that NASA has invested significant money in to develop private spacecraft is Sierra Nevada Corporation. The company has a lifting-body spacecraft called Dream Chaser that reminds me a bit of the retired Space Shuttle. Sierra Nevada conducted the first free flying test of the Dream Chaser this weekend.
While the spacecraft separated from the helicopter that carried it to launch altitude without issue and was able to assume it’s automated glidepath. The spacecraft suffered from what Sierra Nevada calls an “anomaly” during landing. By anomaly, the company means the left landing gear did not deploy correctly, resulting in Dream Chaser skidding off the runway.
The aircraft was damaged in the accident but reports indicate that it should be repairable. While Sierra Nevada is only conducting its first free flight tests, other companies NASA invested money in for private travel to the ISS, such as SpaceX with its Dragon capsule, have already made successful trips into orbit.
[via NBC News]
This little spherical container may look more like a rejected R2-D2 prototype than a piece of cutting-edge technology, but is in fact the vessel in which the European Space Agency hopes to ship Martian samples back to Earth in.
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So much of real science is publishing articles and peer-reviewed studies, so it’s always great to see that crazy, fluorescent, glowing space-plane, movie-type science
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After more than eight years, NASA’s comet-hunting Deep Impact mission has come to an abrupt close. The agency has stopped trying to communicate with the mission probe after losing contact on August 8th. It’s not clear what went wrong, but NASA suspects that it may have lost orientation control, guaranteeing that the Deep Impact vehicle would lose power and freeze. It’s going out on a good note, however. Like NASA’s Mars rovers, Deep Impact easily outlasted its intended lifespan — after successfully intercepting the comet Tempel 1 in 2005, it went on to study three more comets as well as numerous exoplanets. We’ll miss the probe’s continued research, but its legacy should live on through other projects.
Source: NASA
The reusable spacecraft we’ve seen so far haven’t really lived up to their billing: vehicles like the Space Shuttle or SpaceShipTwo require elaborate, expensive launches. If DARPA succeeds with its just-announced XS-1 program, however, spaceflight could be an affordable, everyday occurrence. The agency plans to develop an unmanned spacecraft that requires a minimal ground crew, reaches speeds above Mach 10 and flies at least 10 times in as many days. Provided DARPA meets its goals, XS-1 would both speed up the deployment of small satellites and lower the cost per flight to an “aircraft-like” $5 million or less. Don’t count on seeing a ship in action anytime soon, though. DARPA will only receive some of the first design proposals on October 7th, and someone still has to build the winning project — it will likely be years before XS-1 slips the surly bonds of Earth.
Filed under: Transportation
Source: DARPA
Part of what artists are great at is re-contextualizing technology in weird and often amazing ways. That is exactly what artist Jacob Tonski did for a recent installation that involved balancing a 19th century sofa upright on one leg. The result is Inception-like wonderment.
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Russia’s radio telescope, Speckt-R, currently holds the record for the largest satellite orbiting Earth, weighing in at around 11,000 pounds. But thanks to the magical product designers at Postlerferguson, you can now fit a Speckt-R on your desk—along with three other iconic unmanned spacecraft.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
