|
|
|
Commercial spaceflight took another step forward this past Sunday, 10 October 2010. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, named Enterprise, was dropped from its mother ship at 45,000 feet and successfully completed maneuvers and landing at the test facilities in the Mojave Desert. Enterprise is designed to carry two pilots and six passengers to an altitude of over 100 kilometers. Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, who was present during the first successful flight, commented that “This was one of the most exciting days in the whole history of Virgin. The flight was designed to test the release mechanics from the mother ship and then verify the handling and stall characteristics as well as the lift to drag ratio. A complete set of landing maneuvers were executed at a high altitude, and the ship then made its final descent and landing. Scaled Composites pilot, Pete Siebold, said “The VSS Enterprise was a real joy to fly, especially when one considers the fact that the vehicle has been designed not only to be a Mach 3.5 spaceship capable of going into space but also one of the worlds highest altitude gliders.” Virgin Galactic will continue testing the new rocket ship during the coming year, and expects to fly its first commercial passengers within 18 months. George Whitesides, former Executive Director of the National Space Society and current CEO of Virgin Galactic, was also present at the historic flight. Whitesides said, “To see the world’s first manned commercial spaceship landing on a runway is a sight I always dreamed I would behold. Now, our challenge going forward will be to complete our experimental program, obtain our FAA license and safely bring the system into service at Spaceport America, New Mexico.” |
|
|
Archive for the ‘Space’ Category
Virgin Galactic - First Free Flight
Monday, October 11th, 2010
The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe
Saturday, October 9th, 2010|
|
|
Scientists announced this week that the mission of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has been completed. The last set of observations were downloaded on 20 August 2010, and researchers are compiling the final results. The satellite was placed in a permanent parking orbit around the sun on 8 September 2010. WMAP was launched on 30 June 2001 and placed into an orbit around SEL-2, the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point. SEL-2 lies 1,500,000 kilometers beyond the Earth on a line from the Sun to the Earth. WMAP was the first spacecraft to occupy this location. SEL-2 is extremely cold, shaded from the Sun’s activity by the Earth’s shadow and ideal as an astronomical location in space. In 2009, the Herschel Space Observatory and Planck space observatory took up residence at SEL-2. They will be joined in 2014 or 2015 by the James Webb Space Telescope. First detected in 1964, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation (television “snow” - before cable), is the remnants of the extremely hot radiation from the big-bang, now cooled to almost absolute zero after 13.73 billions years of the expansion of the universe. It is a pattern frozen in place when the cosmos was only 380,000 years old. WMAP The Planck observatory is currently making high resolution measurements of both the total intensity and polarization of the primordial CMB anisotropies that were first observed by COBE and WMAP. The observations made by WMAP are the most accurate to date and have allowed scientists to rule out several “inflation” models about what happened in the first trillionths of a second during the birth of the cosmos, while supplying support for several other models:
Dark energy is the force driving the galaxies in the universe apart at an ever increasing rate. At some point in the future, inhabitants of the Milky Way will not be able to see any other objects in the sky. These entities will conclude that they are at the center of the universe, and will have no information about the big bang and the creation of the cosmos as we know it today. |
