The final pieces of a unique squadron of supersonic fighters arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday, Jan. 19, where they will be reassembled and put to work with a private company aiming to use them for research and microgravity training.
The new planes were part of a group of five F-104 fighters bought by Starfighters Inc. from the Italian Air Force. The company already had four of the aircraft, but that wasn't enough for the company to pursue a number of different opportunities.
With nine aircraft at his disposal, Starfighters owner Rick Svetkoff said there will always be aircraft available to fly missions for a variety of customers. As importantly, the company will have what it needs to fly two aircraft on a single mission, with one serving as a chase plane to photograph experiments.
"Now we're in a position where we can really start operations," Svetkoff said. "Before, we couldn't do a lot of things we wanted to do."
Starfighters operates out of a hangar at the Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy under an agreement with Kennedy. Svetkoff's main goal is to fly research and development missions, ranging from experiments flown for universities to evaluating rocket and spacecraft components in high-stress environments including high-acceleration and microgravity.
Space Florida and Embry-Riddle University already have partnerships with the company.
Because the aircraft can soar to some 70,000 feet and speed past Mach 2, it can be used to launch small satellites into space. The 19-foot-long, 900-pound rocket, about the size of a Sparrow missile, has already been tested in a series of taxi runs hanging from an F-104's wings.
Test flights carrying the rocket but not launching it will be conducted in the next month and the first launch is in works to take place in the summer.
The rocket is meant to take small experiments into space but not into orbit. Instead, the rocket will parachute back to Earth and be recovered from the ocean for reuse. Svetkoff expects to launch about 100 suborbital missions a year from the Starfighters.
In less than a year, though, Svetkoff said he expects to start launching nanosatellites into orbit using a similar approach. After all, an F-104 can match a rocket's launch performance in some areas.
The F-104 Starfighter is a decades-old, supersonic fighter design that was put into service during the Cold War to intercept Soviet aircraft. Known as "the missile with a man in it" because of its high speed and stubby wings, the fighter was developed by Lockheed Martin's Kelly Johnson, the aerospace icon who also developed the SR-71 and U-2 aircraft.
Able to reach a top speed of Mach 2.4 and fly to about 70,000 feet, the F-104 found a second career with NASA in the 1960s. It helped train astronauts for microgravity and to keep their skills up in the demanding world of high-speed flight.
"Anything an F-16 or an F-18 can do, we can do with this aircraft, performance-wise," Svetkoff said.
The Starfighters fleet includes a mix of single-seat versions and two-seaters, each playing specific roles for the company.
Research and development flights are expected to add another 100 missions to the Starfighters' log each year, Svetkoff said.
The experimentation is not expected to end with machinery and experiments, though. As private companies develop their own spacecraft to launch humans into space in partnerships with NASA, some of those companies are already talking about using the Starfighters to train for microgravity and other situations, just as NASA's astronauts did in past decades.
For the moment though, the attention is on getting the new aircraft cleaned and assembled. The engines and other components will be taken apart and cleaned, and then put back together. New avionics packages including digital displays will be added to the new aircraft, too. It will take about three months to complete the first one, but the squadron should be ready in six months.
"This shows a serious commitment," Svetkoff said.
The one best start that you can give yourself on knowing how to make your website get the attention it deserves is by knowing how much Search Engine Friendly it is? You know that your website is good enough to win business when customers visit but, you are left clue less about the reasons for which your site getting only a few visitors. There might be many reasons for this and the right way to know what your site lacks is to contact a Search Engine Optimization company and ask them a Comprehensive site analysis.
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Osteoporosis is a harsh disease that reduces the quality of life for millions and costs Europe around €25 billion ($31 billion) each year. It typically affects the elderly, so the rise in life expectancy in developed countries means the problems inflicted by osteoporosis are increasing.
Fortunately, research done in space may change the game. Astronauts on the International Space Station experience accelerated osteoporosis because of weightlessness, but it is carefully controlled, and they can regain their lost bone mass once they are back on Earth.
Studying what happens during long spaceflights offers a good insight into the process of osteoporosis -- losing calcium and changing bone structure -- and helps to develop methods to combat it.
It has been known since the 1990s that the human body holds on to sodium, without the corresponding water retention, during long stays in space. But the textbooks said this was not possible. "Sodium retention in space" became an important subject to study.
Salt intake was investigated in a series of studies, in ground-based simulations and in space, and it was found that not only is sodium retained (probably in the skin), but it also affects the acid balance of the body and bone metabolism. So, high salt intake increases acidity in the body, which can accelerate bone loss.
The European Space Agency's, or ESA’s, recent SOdium LOad in microgravity, or SOLO, study zoomed in on this question. Nine crew members, including ESA's Frank De Winne and Paolo Nespoli during their long-duration flights in 2010 and 2011, followed low -- and high-salt diets. The expected results may show that additional negative effects can be avoided either by reducing sodium intake or by using a simple alkalizing agent like bicarbonate to counter the acid imbalance.
This space research directly benefits everybody on Earth who is prone to osteoporosis.
For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/benefits/salt.html
Georges Lemaitre teaching at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. In 1927, Georges Lemaitre exposed a family of solutions to Einstein's relativity equations that describe an expanding Universe quite than a static one, and provide the first observational opinion of the Hubble steady. The theory later became much improved known as the Big Bang theory. Identification ESA's fifth Automated Transfer Vehicle after Belgian scientist Georges Lemaitre continue the custom of drawing on great European visionaries to reflect Europe's bottomless roots in science, technology and culture. Credits: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATVs) are a necessary contribution by Europe to organization the International Space Station. Naming the fifth after Belgian scientist Georges Lemaitre continues the custom of drawing on great European visionaries to reflect Europe's deep roots in science, technology and culture.
The first Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), which made a flawless flight in 2008, was sname after French science fiction author Jules Verne. It was follow in 2011 by ATV-2, named in honor of German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler.
It will be the twist of the third ATV, name following the Italian physicist and space pioneer Edoardo Amaldi, to head towards the Space Station on 9 March.ATV-4, aim for launch in early 2013, carries the name of Albert Einstein.Naming the last vehicle of the family, ATV-5, after Belgian physicist Georges Lemaitre, father of the Big Bang theory, continue this approach.
NuSTAR will search the newest, densest and most energetic objects in space, counting black holes and the remnants of exploded stars. It will be the primary space telescope to imprison sharp images in high-energy X-rays, giving astronomers a innovative tool for sympathetic the great side of our universe.
NuSTAR is a little Explorer mission led by the California Institute of Technology and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, both in Pasadena, Calif., for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The spacecraft was build by Orbital Sciences Corporation, Dulles, Va. Its instrument was built by a consortium including Caltech; JPL; Columbia University, New York; NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; the Danish Technical University in Denmark; the University of California, Berkeley; and ATK Aerospace Systems, Goleta, Calif.
NuSTAR will be operated by UC Berkeley, with the Italian Space Agency as long as its equatorial ground station located at Malindi, Kenya. The mission's outreach program is based at Sonoma State University, Calif. NASA's Explorer Program is managed by Goddard. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.
Seeing ESA astronaut Andre Kuipers on the International Space Station is a regular incidence these days. You turn on your TV or check Twitter and there he is. Since present are no cable sprawling from the Station to Earth, just how does this come about?
The reply, of course, is via satellite. While the reply may be simple, the method is more complex. Behind Andre's smiling face is a compound system of jargon-filled amplifiers, multiplexers, antennas, nodes and signal modulation.
Thanks to satcoms, the team can directly take delivery of emails on the Space Station, they can create private calls via IP phones, and we can see them during televise video conference.
The Station is airborne in a low orbit - around 400 km up - which income that shortest communications can happen only when it passes over a ground station. In its place, signals from the Station are primary sent to 'geostationary' satellites balanced 36 000 km above the equator.
Geostationary satellites take precisely a day to circle Earth, creation them appear stationary in our skies. This allows continuous contact with ground stations; enable them to communicate the Station's signals to a middle ground station on Earth additional often.The procedure is upturned when sites such as the Columbus control centre in Munich, Germany, send signal up to the Station.
Robert Strain will leave as director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., to turn out to be chief operating officer of Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. Strain’s last day at Goddard will be March 4, NASA spokesman Mark Hess said. damage, who has detained the top post at Goddard for more than three years, announced his acceptance Jan. 30.
NASA has not yet selected a substitute for Strain, Hess said.
At Boulder, Colo.-based Ball, Strain will be accountable for day-to-day operation of the company’s Civil and Operational Space, Tactical Solutions, National Defense, and system Engineering Solutions units. He will report in a straight line to David Taylor, president and chief executive of Ball Aerospace.
Before taking the wheel of Goddard in 2008, Strain was the head of the Space Department at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Md. Prior to joining Hopkins in 2004, Strain exhausted 10 years at Dulles, Va.-based satellite and rocket maker Orbital Sciences Corp., where he was decision-making vice president of space systems.
Ball is working on more than a few big projects being managed by Goddard. Among these is the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), the next-generation of U.S. civil polar-orbiting weather satellites.
Ball is the prime contractor for the JPSS-1 spacecraft, which NASA is procuring for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric management. Ball has a $248 million fixed-price contract to build JPSS-1, and a separate $82.4 million contract to construct a clone of the Ozone map and Profile Suite instrument.
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