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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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Everything Space

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.

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Everything Space

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.

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Everything Technology

Written by Newstream

Sep 22, 2004 at 04:31 AM

September 2004 (Newstream) -- Active Power, Inc. (NASDAQ:ACPW), a leading manufacturer of battery-free backup power products, on September the 20th announced the details behind its latest breakthrough in alternative energy storage. The new technology, based upon the innovative combination of several mature technologies, constitutes a monumental achievement in energy storage by providing the extended runtimes of lead-acid batteries without any of the well-known shortcomings of these cells. This Thermal and Compressed Air Storage (TACAS) technology will be incorporated into Active Power's newest product that will begin shipping as an alpha unit late this year, the CleanSourceÂ® XR.

CleanSource XR, based on Thermal and Compressed Air Storage (TACAS) technology, represents the latest technological breakthrough from battery-free backup power leader Active Power.

CleanSource XR stores energy in the form of heat and compressed air. During a utility outage, the compressed air is routed through a thermal storage unit to acquire heat energy. The heated air spins a simple turbine-alternator to produce electric power. Air that exits this small turbine is below room temperature and can be used to cool the protected load. Tanks that store the compressed air become cold during discharge, absorbing heat from the ambient environment and ultimately converting this heat into additional backup power. CleanSource XR also contains a small, continuous-duty flywheel that handles small fluctuations in power and supports the critical load during the brief period required for the air turbine to reach full speed in the case of an extended outage.

"Our technical team created a product that is truly revolutionary: it provides minutes to hours of instantaneous backup power without batteries while simultaneously providing backup cooling to a protected load. CleanSource XR transforms what customers don't want - heat in their data centers or telecom huts - into the reliable backup power they do want," said Joe Pinkerton, Chairman and CEO of Active Power. "We believe CleanSource XR will set a new standard in the $10 billion backup power industry."

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