Category: Aerospace

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From Wired Top Stories: It’s Do or Die For Military’s Mach 5 Missile

On Tuesday, an Air Force B-52 bomber will take off from Edwards Air Force Base in California and fire off an experimental hypersonic missile. If all goes well for the military’s flight test, the missile will accelerate past Mach 5, rush more than 300 miles in less than five minutes, and usher in a new chapter in high-speed warfare. If it fails — and the last two tests of this X-51A Waverider have fallen short — then the Pentagon will have sent something on the order of $300 million to the bottom of the Pacific.

from Wired Top Stories

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From Engadget: MIT researchers develop highly agile autonomous plane

MIT researchers develop highly agile autonomous plane

If you’re flying a robot indoors, chances are it’s a quadrocopter. The ability hover and maneuver on a dime is essential to whipping around the confined spaces of a lab. Researchers have figured out a way to overcome such obstacles with a fixed-wing aircraft, using laser range finders, sensors and an Intel Atom processor to churn through all the data. To demonstrate just how accurate the on-board navigation systems are, the team of scientists took the autonomous plane to a parking garage with ceilings just 2.5 meters high. Why is that important? The vehicle has a wingspan of two meters — leaving little room for error. To see the plane in action, check out the video after the break.

 

from Engadget

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From Geeks are Sexy Technology News: For the Space Exploration Haters

Lots of people are critical of the money spent on space exploration, especially the Curiosity’s mission to Mars. Just to put it in perspective:

Of course, one could argue that the Olympics is worth spending money on because its philosophy is about uniting the world through sport instead of war, to foster peace and international relations.

It’s just funny how that argument can hardly hold up when someone smashes a record and wins an Olympic gold only to have the sore losers accuse them of doping. Or for an article to come out in the news entitled “The Shame of the Silver Medal”.

I would think that the International Space Station has resulted in more positive cooperation than this year’s Olympics, but that is just my opinion. After all, I wanted to be an Astrophysicist at some point in my life, so it might be just a little biased.

What’s the geek community’s opinion? Space exploration is worth the money or is it a waste of the taxpayer’s dollar?

[Via I f* love science]

 

from Geeks are Sexy Technology News

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From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: Russian Robotic Spacecraft Completes First Same-Day Docking at ISS, Just Six Hours After Launch

Progress 48 on Approach to the ISS Just Hours After Launching NASA TV

Russia just set a speed record for a sprint that took place a long way from London. An unmanned Russian Progress cargo ship launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan yesterday and docked with the International Space Station just six hours later, marking the first same-day docking ever performed at the ISS.

Launched aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket, the robotic Progress 48 performed additional firings of its own onboard engines early in the mission to boost it toward the ISS in a shorter period of time. This isn’t a completely novel maneuver–back in the Gemini days NASA docked spacecraft together on obit on the same day they were launched, and Russia has done the same. But it does require more precise calculations and a tighter margin of error.

Spacecraft usually spend two days catching up to the ISS in orbit, making the approach much slower (and safer). For same-day docking, spaceflight engineers have to execute that famous “striking a speeding bullet with a speeding bullet” math and physics. But it does come with unique benefits, especially if the maneuver is extended to manned Soyuz capsule missions as it is expected to be.

With manned missions, docking at the station within hours reduces the amount of food and water that must be packed aboard a spacecraft and provides for far greater crew comfort (spacious the Soyuz capsule is not). And of course, while no one is saying it out loud, it also could prove an important capability if something should go wrong aboard the station. Though there’s really no such thing as an emergency space launch–it takes time to fuel up a rocket and place a mission on a launchpad–the ability to shave two days off the arrival time of people or supplies at the ISS could make a difference should things ever get hairy up there.

[SPACE]

 

from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now