Orion is on its way to Florida after its successful launch and re-entry

Dear reader and followers,

After its successful launch last week , and its splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, the Orion spacecraft has been loaded on the USS Anchorage. The spacecraft is nestled inside the well deck of the amphibious ship during the trek from its splashdown point about 970 kilometers southwest of San Diego. Orion’s flight tested many of the systems most critical to crew safety, including key separation events, parachutes and its heat shield. During Orion’s re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft endured speeds of 8400 meters per second and temperatures near 2200°C.

Credit images: +NASA 

President Obama, spoke to Julie Kramer White, the Orion’s chief engineer, for the successful Orion flight test. He also noted the spacecraft’s mission, saying that “when a human is the first to set foot (on Mars), they will have Julie and her team to thank and at that point, I’ll be out of the presidency and I might hitch a ride.” 

The Orion spacecraft was off-loaded from the well deck of the USS Anchorage on Monday December 8th. The ship’s crew along with NASA and Lockheed Martin teams retrieved the spacecraft from the Pacific Ocean at the end of the highly successful Orion flight test that saw the Orion fly about 5800 km above Earth in a 4.5-hour evaluation of critical systems. Now Orion spacecraft , will perform a trip cross-country back to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Credit image: +NASA 

Source: +NASA

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ISRO released pictures of comet Siding Spring taken by Mars Orbiter Mangalyaan

Dear readers an followers,

While the +European Space Agency, ESA  had placed a robot Philae on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) released images of Comet Siding Spring, taken by its Mars Orbiter 'Mangalyaan' on October 2014. ISRO's Mars Orbiter had the opportunity to witness the Comet Siding Spring approach Mars on October 19th, for which the spacecraft repositioned itself for its safety.

The Mars Colour Camera on board ISRO's Mars Orbiter has captured the Coma (top bright portion) of the comet partly, as it approached MOM during last 40 minutes of the imaging session before Mars-Comet close encounter, ISRO said in its social networking site along with the pictures.

Credit image: ISRO

The India's Mars Orbiter Mission, the Mangalyaan probe is a spacecraft powered by solar arrays and packed with five instruments to study the surface and atmosphere of Mars. The 1350 kg of the spacecraft has been launched with success from a pad at the agency's Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on November 5th 2013. India was particularly proud that MOM was developed with homegrown technology and for a bargain price of about $75 million, a cost that Modi quipped was lower than many Hollywood film budgets. By comparison, NASA's much larger Maven mission cost nearly 10 times as much at $671 million.

Credit image: ISRO

It also will search Mars for methane, a key chemical in life processes on Earth that could also come from geological processes. None of the instruments will send back enough data to answer these questions definitively, but experts say the data will help them better understand how planets form, what conditions might make life possible and where else in the universe it might exist India wanted the spacecraft, also called Mangalyaan, meaning "Mars craft" in Hindi, to show the world its ability to design, plan, manage and operate a difficult, deep-space mission. India has already conducted dozens of successful satellite launches, including sending up the Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, which discovered key evidence of water on the Moon in 2008 and validated few month ago.

The country's space scientists are already planning new missions, including putting a rover on the Moon. But space agency chief K. Radhakrishnan said their main focus would be to continue developing technologies for commercial and navigational satellite applications.

Source: ISRO

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