January 31 News Items

Virginia Spaceport Facelift Underway (Source: DelMarVaNow.com)
Infrastructure improvements are under way at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in preparation for Orbital Sciences Corp.'s planned demonstration flight in late 2010 of a new rocket system designed to supply cargo to the International Space Station. "We're beginning the process of developing the infrastructure at the launch site," said an Orbital Sciences official. The project is still in its early stages, but with a launch set for late 2010, it is anticipated all improvements should be in place by early fall that year.

A gantry at the launch site has been torn down to make way for a new launch pad, NASA officials said. Work is nearing completion on the design of the launch pad, which must accommodate liquid fueled rockets as opposed to the solid fueled rockets previously launched there. Designs for a new horizontal integration facility and for a road to connect the facility to the launch pad are also nearing completion, NASA officials said. The building is where the stages of the new rocket, which will use a combination of four different fuels, will be put together horizontally. Previous rockets launched from the spaceport have been stacked vertically. (1/31)

Is There a Planet X in Our Solar System? (Source: New Scientist)
Lurking in the solar system's dark recesses, rumour has it, is an unsighted world - Planet X, a frozen body perhaps as large as Mars, or even Earth. Studies of the Kuiper belt have suggested the planet's existence. Some Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) travel in extremely elongated orbits around the sun. Others have steep orbits almost at right angles to the orbits of all the major planets. "Those could be signs of perturbation from a massive distant object," says Robert Jedicke, a solar system scientist at the University of Hawaii.

Over the past 20 years, huge swaths of the sky have been searched for slowly moving bodies, and well over 1000 KBOs found. But these wide-area surveys can spot only large, bright objects; longer-exposure surveys that can find smaller, dimmer objects cover only small areas of the sky. A Mars-sized object at a distance of, say, 100 Astronomical Units (AU) would be so faint that it could easily have escaped detection. One AU represents the distance between the Earth an the Sun.

That could soon change. In December 2008, the first prototype of the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) was brought into service in Hawaii. Soon, four telescopes - equipped with the world's largest digital cameras, at 1.4 billion pixels apiece - will search the skies for anything that blinks or moves. Its main purpose is to look out for potentially hazardous asteroids bound for Earth, but inhabitants of the outer solar system will not escape its all-seeing eyes. (1/31)

New Mexico 'Chileworks' To Focus on Operationally Responsive Satellites (Source: Space News)
The Pentagon's Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) office is seeking to set up a permanent workshop and warehouse in New Mexico where it can rapidly assemble satellites in response to urgent needs. The ORS office's Rapid Small Satellite Assembly Facility, nicknamed Chileworks, will be focused on building spacecraft in a matter of days, ORS Director Peter Wegner said in an interview. Wegner described his vision for Chileworks as analogous to a U-2 reconnaissance wing, where dedicated professionals are trained and ready to assemble the appropriate platforms and payloads to meet specific needs. The office hopes to award one overarching systems engineering and integration contract this year. (1/31)

U.S. Firm Has Big Plans for Selling Radar Imagery Abroad (Source: Space News)
A U.S.-based start-up company that claims to have major, unidentified investors in the Middle East and North Africa has contracted to spend more than $200 million over 10 years to access Italy's civil-military Cosmo-SkyMed radar satellite constellation before it buys two radar satellites of its own. The company, 4C Controls Inc. of New Jersey, expects to use the Cosmo-SkyMed imagery to serve its customers immediately before purchasing two high-resolution X-band radar spacecraft from Thales Alenia Space of France and Italy. (1/31)

Firm Seeks Payout for Payload That Survived Columbia (Source: Space News)
Six years after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, a commercial space company is fighting NASA for $8 million in compensation for a biomedical experiment that crash-landed in a Texas parking lot. Without that compensation the company, Instrumentation Technology Associates (ITA), will be forced to give up promising cancer research, according to ITA's president. ITA's shuttle payload was experimental hardware designed to grow high-quality urokinase crystals. ITA had been studying urokinase, an enzyme that plays a key role in cancer metastasis, for 14 years through ground-based studies and research in space.

After analyzing the results of previous experiments, ITA officials determined that a longer period in microgravity and an extremely pure protein solution were needed to achieve the goal of growing crystals so large that scientists would be able to create a 3-D model of the molecule. In addition to the $8 million claim related to Columbia, ITA claims NASA owes the company approximately $12 million because the space agency failed to honor a 1996 agreement to carry ITA payloads on multiple shuttle flights. Spacehab, another company that lost equipment on the Columbia flight, received $8.2 million in compensation from NASA for the loss of a pressurized research module destroyed in the accident. (1/31)

Navy Solicits Bids for Payload to Fill Potential UHF Gap (Source: Space News)
The U.S. Navy has issued a final request for proposals to build an Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) communications payload that will launch aboard a commercial communications satellite around 2012 to mitigate a potential gap in coverage. Meanwhile, the Australian military is pursuing a similar procurement, according to industry sources. The Navy is concerned its current UHF satellite communications capabilities — primarily the UHF Follow-On constellation — are deteriorating and may not provide adequate service until the next-generation Mobile User Objective System constellation is operational. (1/31)

Europe Renews Interest in Microgravity Research (Source: Space News)
With fresh money from its member governments and an apparently renewed enthusiasm among Europe's microgravity scientists, the European Space Agency (ESA) expects to send out requests for ideas by midyear on how to use Europe's Columbus laboratory module in the coming years. The arrival of Columbus to the international space station in February 2008, and the successful docking and undocking of Europe's Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) cargo carrier, have rekindled enthusiasm for microgravity experiments. "What we have seen is a rapid increase in the number of experiment proposals compared to several years ago," said an ESA official.

ESA governments in November agreed to spend 285 million euros ($370.3 million) on microgravity missions between 2009 and 2011. In addition to funding hardware to be sent to the space station, the money will pay for parabolic flights of candidate experiments aboard Europe's Airbus 300 Zero-G jet aircraft, and for other ground-based experiment settings. (1/31)