Atlas Launch Facilities Withstand Hurricanes

Everything Space

Meade Instruments to Acquire Coronado Technology Group

Written by Everything Science
Oct 23, 2004 at 12:22 AM
IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 21, 2004--Meade Instruments Corp. (NASDAQ:MEAD) has signed a definitive agreement to acquire all the assets and substantially all the liabilities of privately held Coronado Technology Group, LLC ("Coronado"), the world's leading manufacturer and distributor of solar telescopes and filters, for approximately $2.5 million in cash and an earnout tied to financial performance. The transaction, which is subject to usual contingencies, is expected to close not later than Nov. 30, 2004. Since 1998 Coronado, then doing business as Coronado Instrument Group, has been the world's leading supplier of high-quality hydrogen-alpha filters and dedicated solar telescopes, as well as various related accessories, designed to meet the needs of amateur as well as professional solar observers. The business, to be incorporated as Coronado, Inc. and operated as a wholly owned subsidiary of Meade Instruments, will currently remain headquartered in Tucson, Ariz. "Not only does the acquisition of Coronado take us into a market segment -- solar observation -- in which we do not participate," said Steven G. Murdock, president and CEO, "but it immediately establishes us as the segment leader with a line of products of unsurpassed quality and performance. With the purchase come a number of very attractive assets, including some of the most valuable intellectual property in the field, notably patents issued and pending covering both the design and fabrication of Coronado's novel etalon structure; a highly regarded brand that will, we believe, appeal to many of Meade's existing customers; a wealth of expertise in the design and manufacture of optical instruments and accessories that meet the highest standards for reliability and safety; an experienced and committed workforce; and distribution channels that complement Meade's existing channels and offer numerous opportunities for the cross marketing of products. All told, we view the acquisition as extremely attractive in its own right, and as an important step in Meade's program to become a more broadly based consumer optics company founded on strong engineering and a comprehensive intellectual property portfolio.
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Atlas Launch Facilities Withstand Hurricanes

Written by Newstream

Sep 28, 2004 at 11:22 PM

September 2004 (Newstream) -- International Launch Services (ILS) and Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT) are preparing for the final Atlas mission of the year, having come through a series of hurricanes with launch facilities relatively unscathed.

GREAT LENGTHS -- The 106-foot-long booster portion of an Atlas V rocket is unloaded from a cargo plane at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., Friday morning (September 24), shortly before the area was evacuated for Hurricane Jeanne. The booster was then transported to the state-of-the-art Atlas Spaceflight Operations Center, for mating with its Centaur upper stage. The launch vehicle was built by Lockheed Martin near Denver, Colo., for launch in December by International Launch Services of McLean, Va.

The next vehicle, an Atlas V 521 launcher designated AV-005, arrived at Cape Canaveral last week (September 20-26) from the Lockheed Martin manufacturing center near Denver, Colo. AV-005 is scheduled to launch the Lockheed Martin-built AMC-16 satellite for SES AMERICOM in December. ILS manages all Atlas missions.

"We want to reassure our customers that our facilities are intact and we are pressing ahead to meet our Atlas launch commitments," said ILS President Mark Albrecht.

The booster portion of the rocket was unloaded on September 24, shortly before evacuations were ordered as Hurricane Jeanne approached the Central Florida coast. The vehicle was secured inside the Atlas Spaceflight Operations Center (ASOC), part of the state-of-the-art Complex 41 completed in 2002 to support Atlas V launches. Both the vehicle and the building came through the weekend storm undamaged.

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Written by David McAlary for VOANews

Sep 27, 2004 at 04:20 AM

An international team of astronomers has obtained the clearest images yet of the merger of two distant clusters of galaxies, calling it one of the most powerful cosmic events ever witnessed. The merging clusters bring together thousands of galaxies and trillions of stars into a single, bigger cluster, perhaps destined to merge yet again someday. Such a merger is the eventual fate of our own Milky Way.

Cosmic Head On Collision - This animation details what the scientists are calling the perfect cosmic storm: galaxy clusters that collided like two high-pressure weather fronts and created hurricane-like conditions, tossing galaxies far from their paths and churning shock waves of 100-million-degree gas through intergalactic space. In the bottom animation, tiny dots represent galaxies, each containing billions of stars. The top animation shows only inter-cluster gas; most of the cluster's mass is "free" gas, not galaxies. Credit: NASA

Astronomers see clumps of galaxies everywhere in the sky. Yet they know that at the beginning of time, the universe was relatively smooth. There were no galaxies or even stars, only diffuse gas. They believe that over the ages, gravity brought the gas molecules together into brighter, warmer places that continued to attract matter until the first stars formed within the first several hundred thousand years. Stars are thought to have eventually gathered into galaxies, large gas clouds containing billions of stars.

University of Michigan astronomer August Evrard says the process continued to blend individual star clouds together into bigger clusters, becoming the most massive structures in the universe. "Just as wispy clouds formed in the morning can merge by afternoon into a huge cumulus thunderhead, so small clouds that assembled early in the history of the universe that might contain one galaxy merged together to create larger ones containing many hundreds of galaxies by today," he said.

The process continues. In the Astrophysics Journal, astronomers describe the current merger of a large galaxy cluster named Abell 754 in the constellation Hydra with a smaller cluster that its gravity is attracting. It and previous such mergers observed in the last 25 years confirm the theory of how star structures grew larger into super galaxies. But this observation of an event 800 million light years away is the clearest yet, obtained with the European Space Agency's orbiting XMM-Newton observatory. The researchers estimate that the merger began 300 million years ago.

Written by Newstream

Sep 23, 2004 at 06:53 PM

September 2004 (Newstream) -- SpaceDev (OTCBB:SPDV) has begun designing a reuseable, piloted, sub-orbital space ship that could be scaled up to safely and economically transport passengers to and from low earth orbit, including the International Space Station. The name of the vehicle is the "SpaceDev Dream Chaserâ„¢."

SpaceDev Begins Work on "Dream Chaser" Space Vehicle

SpaceDev's founding chairman and CEO, Jim Benson, recently signed a Space Act Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with NASA Ames Research Center director, Dr. Scott Hubbard. This non-binding MOU confirms the intention of the two parties to explore novel, hybrid propulsion based hypersonic test beds for routine human space access. The parties will explore collaborative partnerships to investigate the potential of using SpaceDev's proven hybrid propulsion and other technologies, and a low cost, private space program development approach, to establish and design new piloted small launch vehicles and flight test platforms to enable near-term, low-cost routine space access for NASA and the United States. One possibility for collaboration is the SpaceDev Dream Chaserâ„¢ project, which is currently being discussed with NASA Ames.

Unlike the more complex SpaceShipOne, for which SpaceDev provides critical proprietary hybrid rocket motor propulsion technologies, the SpaceDev Dream Chaserâ„¢ would be crewed and take-off vertically, like most launch vehicles, and will glide back for a normal horizontal runway landing.

Written by Jessica Berman for VOANews.com

Sep 10, 2004 at 03:37 AM

U.S. space agency scientists have began examining the contents of a canister retrieved from the wreck of the Genesis space capsule, which crashed this week in Utah, after its parachute failed to open. Scientists hope they can salvage some particles from space that could reveal information about the origins of the universe.

The Genesis science canister is inside a clean room at the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. Scientists are hopeful that the recovered Genesis samples will be sufficient to achieve the mission's science goals.
(Image credit: NASA/JPL

On Wednesday, mission controllers watched helplessly as the Genesis capsule tumbled through the air and crashed into the desert. A parachute was supposed to have slowed the descent of the 204 kilogram capsule, so it could be snagged by waiting helicopters and eased to the ground. Instead, the capsule smashed into the Earth at a speed of 310 kilometers per hour.

Among those who watching the Genesis disaster on a TV monitor was astronomer Sten Odenwald of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where he is education manager for the image satellite project.

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