Space Station Threshold

Time critical is approaching for the Rosetta spacecraft and it's flyby the asteroid 2867 Steins. Closest approach is expected at on September 5, at 20:58 CEST, (Central European Summer Time), 2:58 pm EDT (US Eastern Daylight Time). To help the public follow the flyby, the Rosetta team now has a blog available, [...]

ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft will make an historic encounter with asteroid (2867) Steins on September 5, 2008 at 20:58 CEST (Central European Summer Time), 2:58 pm EDT (US Eastern Daylight Time.) A few days ago, Rosetta conducted a successful trajectory correction maneuver using images from the spacecraft's cameras to calculate the ...

The big day arrived, and nothing could keep that spacecraft on the ground. At 7:34 am EDT NASA's Dawn spacecraft was lofted into space atop a Boeing Delta 2 rocket, beginning a 3 billion km (1.7 billion mile) journey to meet with two different large asteroids. If all goes well, the spacecraft will make its [...]

You know the cliche: it's not a question of if an asteroid will strike the Earth, it's a question of when. Why wait for the asteroid impact, let's get out there and learn how to prevent an impact in the first place. Part of this learning process will be to study potential Earth-crossing asteroids in [...]

Despite delays and near cancellation, NASA's Dawn spacecraft is now on the launch pad, all ready to begin its mission to two of the largest asteroids in the Solar System. If all goes well, Dawn will blast off as early as September 26th from Cape Canaveral aboard a Boeing Delta II rocket. Next stop, Asteroid [...]

One of my favourite upcoming missions is NASA's Dawn spacecraft, set to go into orbit around two different asteroids. It was originally supposed to blast off this month, but mission planners have decided to push the launch back to September to minimize any potential disruptions to NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander mission, due for launch in ...

A new NASA mission is being proposed to fly out, extract a sample from a nearby asteroid, and return it to Earth. The asteroid is known as 1999 RQ36, and the mission is OSIRIS. The mission’s acronym is a bit of a stretch. It’s “O” for origins, “SI” for spectral interpretation, “RI” for resource ...