The Space Show

2022.06.29 | NASA launches twice down under within 48 hours from Australia and New Zealand

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On The Space Show for Wednesday, 29 June 2022: 

NASA successfully launched the first of three sounding rockets from Equatorial Launch Australia’s Arnhem Space Centre in East Arnhem Land on the weekend. The rocket carried the X-ray Quantum Calorimeter, or XQC, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. XQC contained unique X-ray detectors, cooled to a frigid one-twentieth of a degree above absolute zero, to measure interstellar X-rays with unprecedented precision to better understand the interstellar medium and its influence on the structure and evolution of galaxies and stars. Australia Sounding Rocket Campaign Press Kit.

Successful launch of CAPSTONE on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from New Zealand’s North Island. The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, or CAPSTONE, the NASA CubeSat designed to test a unique lunar orbit, is safely in space and on the first leg of its journey to the Moon. The spacecraft is heading toward an orbit intended in the future for Gateway, a lunar space station built by the agency and its commercial and international partners that will support NASA’s Artemis program, including human landing missions.

Measuring, managing and automating the detection of aircraft wake turbulence: an episode of The Space Story courtesy of NASA.

Planet Earth - Episode 42: 

  • The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) Mission will measure Earth’s changing ecosystems, dynamic surfaces, and ice masses providing information about biomass, natural hazards, sea level rise, and groundwater, and will support a host of other applications.
  • The NASA Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) launched on 15 December 2016, is a NASA Earth System Science Pathfinder Mission that is intended to collect the first frequent space‐based measurements of surface wind speeds in the inner core of tropical cyclones. 
  • The NASA Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) mission, is a constellation of state-of-the-science observing platforms that will measure temperature, humidity and precipitation with microwave spatial resolution but with an unprecedented median revisit time of 50 minutes.
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    The Space ShowBy Andrew Rennie for the Space Association of Australia