Mapex

Archive for September, 2010

This image from testing of ChemCam shows a ball of luminous plasma erupting from the surface of an iron pyrite crystal in the sample chamber approximately 10 feet from the instrument. The laser beam itself is invisible. The ChemCam instrument, built for NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, uses a pulsed laser beam to vaporize a pinhead-size target, producing a flash of light from the ionized material — plasma — that can be analyzed to identify chemical elements in the target. ChemCam was designed and built by a U.S.-French team led by Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N. M.; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.; the Centre National d’Études Spatiales (the French government space agency); and the Centre d’Étude Spatiale des Rayonnements at the Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées, Toulouse, France. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL

The following is a statement from NASA Administrator Charles Bolden regarding Wednesday’s action by the House of Representatives on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2010.

Following extensive testing in India, the Hylas-1 telecommunication satellite has been given the go-ahead for shipping to Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana for its November flight.

Lightning lights up the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida during thunderstorms on Monday, Sept. 27, 2010. The Vehicle Assembly Building, or VAB, is one of the largest buildings in the world. Originally built for assembly of Apollo and Saturn vehicles, it was later modified to support space shuttle operations. High Bays 1 and 3 are used for integration and stacking of the complete Space Shuttle vehicle. High Bay 2 is used for external tank (ET) checkout and storage and as a contingency storage area for orbiters. High Bay 4 is also used for ET checkout and storage, as well as for payload canister operations and solid rocket boster contingency handling. Image Credit: Tom Moler (used by permission)

NASA will preview the next space shuttle mission, the final flight of shuttle Discovery and the next to last scheduled shuttle flight, during a series of news briefings Thursday, Oct. 21, at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

ESA’s Cluster and China’s Double Star have been awarded the Laurels for Team

Achievement by The International Academy of Astronautics (IAA). Between 2004

and 2007, the two missions returned fundamental new insights into magnetic

physics, and built a bridge for future collaborations.

This photograph shows the Laser Ranging Facility at the Geophysical and Astronomical Observatory at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The observatory helps NASA keep track of orbiting satellites. In this image, the lower of the two green beams is from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s dedicated tracker. The other laser originates from another ground system at the facility. Both beams are pointed at the moon — specifically at LRO in orbit around the moon. Image Credit: NASA

NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT, on Wednesday, Sept. 29, to discuss new information about the boundary of our solar system obtained from the agency’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft.

The Soyuz TMA-18 spacecraft is seen as it lands with Expedition 24 Commander Alexander Skvortsov and Flight Engineers Tracy Caldwell Dyson and Mikhail Kornienko near the town of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan on Saturday, Sept. 25, 2010. Russian Cosmonauts Skvortsov and Kornienko and NASA Astronaut Caldwell Dyson, are returning from six months onboard the International Space Station where they served as members of the Expedition 23 and 24 crews. Photo Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Expedition 24 Commander Alexander Skvortsov and Flight Engineers Tracy Caldwell Dyson and Mikhail Kornienko landed their Soyuz TMA-18 spacecraft in Kazakhstan on Saturday, Sept. 25, wrapping up a six-month stay aboard the International Space Station.