SpaceX’s Mars rocket makes test flight
Penguin poop spotted from space reveals hidden colonies
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla, Aug 6, (AP): SpaceX launched a prototype of its Mars rocketship hundreds of feet into the air, then landed it upright in a successful test flight.
The flight lasted barely 45 seconds and reached just 500 feet (150 meters) Tuesday night at the southeastern tip of Texas near Brownsville, but was an important first for SpaceX’s Starship. Some earlier tests ended in explosions on the pad.
“Mars is looking real,” SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk tweeted after the short hop. “Progress is accelerating.”
Musk said several more short hops are planned before a test version of Starship aims for a high altitude. The latest test model is relatively plain: It stands a full-scale 100 feet (30 meters) tall and resembles a steel silo – or stretched-out can – with a cap on top.
The private company plans to launch reusable Starships atop stillin-the-works rockets, carrying cargo or crew not only to low-Earth orbit but also the moon and Musk’s most desirable destination, Mars. The entire stack will stretch nearly 400 feet (120 meters).
On Sunday, SpaceX safely returned two NASA astronauts from the International Space Station following a two-month test flight. Their Dragon capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off the Pensacola, Florida, coast.
SpaceX is now the only private company to fly people to and from orbit.
“We’re going to go to the moon. We’re going to have a base on the moon. We’re going to send people to Mars and make life multi-planetary,” Musk said following splashdown. “This day heralds a new age of space exploration. That’s what it’s all about.”
Meanwhile, SES, the leader in global content connectivity solutions, announced today that American launch provider SpaceX will provide launch capability for up to 3 of its C-band satellites over two launches as part of the company’s accelerated C-band clearing plan. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will launch two C-band satellites built by Northrop Grumman as well as provide enhanced protection to rapidly launch a contingency satellite from Cape Canaveral, Florida in 2022 allowing SES to meet the Federal Communications Commission’s time-critical objective to roll out 5G services across the United States.
In June, SES announced it contracted American companies Northrop Grumman and the Boeing Company to deliver four C-band satellites in accordance with SES’s accelerated C-band clearing plan. These satellites will enable SES to clear 280MHz of mid-band spectrum for 5G use while seamlessly migrating SES’s existing C-band customers and ensuring the continued delivery of digital television to nearly 120 million American TV homes and other critical data services.
In the last few months, SES has been increasingly working with US businesses across the country and investing in America in the C-band transition plan, and its long-standing relationship with SpaceX signifies its latest commitment to the US SpaceX has launched six SES satellites in the last seven years.
Protecting
“Clearing mid-band spectrum and protecting our broadcast customers to ensure business continuity is a significant undertaking and we absolutely need to be working with the right partners,” said Steve Collar, CEO at SES. “We have a deep and trusted relationship with SpaceX having been the first to launch a commercial satellite with them and subsequently the first commercial company to adopt the flightproven booster and we could not be more confident in their ability to deliver on this time-critical mission.”
A fundraising drive has reached its goal of bringing in $1.5 million to save Space Camp from closing because of the coronavirus pandemic, organizers said.
A corporate donation of $250,000 by the technology company SAIC Inc. pushed the effort over the top, officials said in a statement Tuesday.
Nearly 8,000 people and companies from three dozen countries contributed to the “Save Space Camp” drive in the week it took to reach the goal, and donations will continue to be accepted.
Located in Huntsville, Alabama, Space Camp is an internationally known educational program run by the state-owned US Space and Rocket Center. Leaders said the pandemic has hurt revenues so badly that donations were needed to continue operating the museum and to reopen Space Camp in the spring.
Nearly 1 million youths and adults have attended Space Camp since it opened in 1982, and a dozen people who went on to become astronauts or cosmonauts participated.
The Space and Rocket Center was closed from mid-March through late May because of the shutdown to slow the spread of COVID-19, and Space Camp, which features students working in groups on simulated space missions, did not reopen until late June with a limited capacity.
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BERLIN: British scientists say there are more emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica than previously thought based on evidence of bird droppings spotted from space.
A study published Wednesday by scientists at the British Antarctic Survey counted 61 emperor penguin colonies dotted around the southernmost continent, 11 more than the number previously confirmed.
Scientists used images from Europe’s Sentinel-2 satellite mission to look for smudges on the ice that indicated large amounts of guano, or penguin poop.
The majestic emperor penguin breeds in remote areas where temperatures can drop as low as minus 50 degrees Celsius (minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit). Researchers have long relied on aerial photographs and satellites to spot colonies of the flightless marine birds.
Peter Fretwell, a British Antarctic Survey geographer and the study’s lead author, called the latest count “good news” but noted that the newly spotted colonies were small.
“(They) only take the overall population count up by 5-10% to just over half a million penguins or around 265,500 - 278,500 breeding pairs,” he said.
Emperor penguins are vulnerable to the loss of sea ice predicted to occur because of man-made global warming. Some researchers suggest the number of colonies could drop by more than 30% by the end of the century.