September 28, 2017

CST-100 Starliner Crewed Test Flight Slips to 2019 (Source: Space News)
The first crewed test flight of Boeing's CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle could slip into early 2019. The company said at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) that it is in the "thick of testing" the vehicle and making good progress, with an uncrewed test flight planned for the third quarter of 2018. That will be followed by a flight with crew as soon as the fourth quarter, although the company said that might instead take place early in 2019. Boeing will work with NASA to select the crew for that test flight about a year before launch. (9/27)

Space Council to Meet October 5 (Source: White House)
A long-awaited first meeting of the new National Space Council will take place next week. The White House announced Tuesday that the council will meet for the fist time on Oct. 5 at the National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia. The announcement didn't disclose if the meeting would be open. The meeting will be the first since President Trump re-established the council in an executive order signed in June. (9/27)

Man who Had People Worried About Sept. 23 Apocalypse has a New Doomsday Date (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
The man whose biblical doomsday claim had people worried about Sept. 23, 2017, is not backing down. The world did not end over the weekend, and David Meade, a self-described "specialist in research and investigations," is saying that's exactly what he had expected. Now, he is focusing on another date, Oct. 15, 2017, which he claims is the beginning of the world's destruction.

It is "the most important date of this century or millennium," Meade wrote on his website. The action starts that day, he claimed, when the world will enter what's called a seven-year tribulation period, a fairly widespread evangelical belief that for seven years, catastrophic events would wreak havoc on Earth.

"Hold on and watch - wait until the middle of October and I don't believe you'll be disappointed," Meade wrote, before going on to promote his book, which he claims has all the details. "You don't have long to read it," he added. Click here. (9/27)

Fourth Gravitational Wave Event Detected (Source: Sky & Telescope)
For the first time ever, gravitational waves have been observed simultaneously by three detectors, enabling a relatively accurate localization on the sky. GW170814, as the signal is officially known, was also the very first gravitational wave "felt" by the Advanced Virgo detector of the European Gravitational Observatory near Pisa, Italy.

The gravitational waves that reached Earth on Monday, August 14th, at 10:30:43 UT were unleashed by the collision of two black holes, weighing in at 31 and 25 solar masses. During the merger event, which took place at a distance of some 1.8 billion light-years, the energy equivalent of 3 solar masses was radiated away in the form of gravitational waves, leaving a 53-solar-mass black hole behind. (9/27)

Long-Ago Smashups Could Explain Earth's Weird Composition (Source: Space.com)
Earth and the other rocky planets have a composition that's different from the building blocks that formed them long ago — and scientists may now know why. Collisions among these coalescing building blocks, known as planetesimals, generated enough heat to vaporize large amounts of rock, much of which escaped into space, suggest two new studies published today.

"This vapor mass loss, in turn, drastically changes the composition of planets, which, in fact, explains Earth’s distinct composition," said Remco Hin, of the University of Bristol in England, who led one of the two new studies. That composition is marked by a depletion of volatile rock-forming elements — the ones with a lower boiling point, which are more easily lost — compared to planetesimals. (9/27)

Grave of Europe's 1st Moon Orbiter Finally Found (Source: Space.com)
The final resting place of Europe's first moon orbiter has been found at long last. Astronomer Phil Stooke, of Western University in Ontario, discovered the 65-foot-long scar gouged into the lunar surface by the SMART-1 spacecraft when its controllers brought it down intentionally in September 2006. Stooke spotted the mark in images captured by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). (9/27)

Rapper B.o.B Wants to Launch a Satellite to See if Earth Is Flat (Source: Space.com)
B.o.B may be about to blow the lid off the "round-Earth conspiracy." Unlike the rest of us, the Atlanta-based rapper has not been "tricked" into believing our planet is spherical by thousands of satellite photos, the shape of Earth's shadow on the moon during lunar eclipses, the circumnavigation of the globe, the physics of planet formation or any other such evidence.

Rather, B.o.B — whose real name is Bobby Ray Simmons Jr. — trusts his eyes. And his eyes tell him that Earth's horizon tends to look pretty flat in photos taken from the surface. Indeed, B.o.B posted a bunch of such pictures on Twitter last year via his @bobatl account, along with commentary such as, "I'm going up against the greatest liars in history ... you've been tremendously deceived." (9/27)

Pluto Lander Concept Unveiled by Global Aerospace Corporation (Source: SpaceFlight Insider)
Just two years after New Horizons’ historic Pluto flyby, the Global Aerospace Corporation (GAC), a company that conducts aerospace research and development, is proposing a return mission featuring a Pluto lander. Titled “Pluto Hop, Skip, and Jump” mission, the proposal, which features an integrated “entrycraft” that can decelerate from more than 30,000 miles per hour and safely soft land on Pluto’s surface, was presented by company representatives to the 2017 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Symposium.

The concept was developed with grant funding through NASA’s NIAC program and was inspired by New Horizons’ success. While the primary focus is on a lander, GAC technology could also be used for a Pluto orbiter, the proposal notes. Specifically, it calls for using Pluto’s atmospheric drag to slow down a speeding spacecraft enough to bring it into orbit around the dwarf planet. (9/27)