NASA Orion multipurpose crew vehicle: Triple Fairings Jettison Test completed successfully

The three panels or fairings encapsulating a stand-in for Orion’s service module successfully detach and fall into the Fairing Catch System during a test Nov. 6, 2013 at Lockheed Martin’s facility in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Image Credit: Lockheed Martin

The three panels or fairing that moments before encapsulated a stand-in for Orion’s service module lay safely in the Fairing Catch System after a test demonstrating their detachment system on Nov. 6, 2013, at Lockheed Martin’s facility in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Image Credit: Lockheed Martin

The three massive panels protecting a test version of NASA's Orion multipurpose crew vehicle successfully fell away from the spacecraft Wednesday in a test of a system that will protect Orion during its first trip to space next year.

The panels, called fairings, encase Orion's service module and shield it from the heat, wind and acoustics it will experience during the spacecraft's climb into space.

The service module, located directly below the crew capsule, will contain the in-space propulsion capability for orbital transfer, attitude control and high-altitude ascent aborts when Orion begins carrying humans in 2021.

It also will generate and store power and provide thermal control, water and air for the astronauts. The service module will remain connected to the crew module until just before the capsule returns to Earth.

Artist's rendering of NASA Orion during Exploration Flight Test (EFT-1)

During Orion's Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), the spacecraft's flight test next year, a test service module will be attached to the capsule.

"Hardware separation events like this are absolutely critical to the mission and some of the more complicated things we do," said Mark Geyer, Orion program manager at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

"We want to know we've got the design exactly right and that it can be counted on in space before we ever launch."

Unlike conventional rocket fairings, these panels are designed to support half of the weight of Orion's crew module and launch abort system during launch and ascent, which improves performance, saves weight and maximizes the size and capability of the spacecraft.

Each panel is 14 feet high and 13 feet wide. The fairings' work is done soon after launch. They must be jettisoned when Orion has reached an altitude of about 560,000 feet.

To make that possible, six breakable joints and six explosive separation bolts are used to connect the fairing panels to the rocket and each other.

In a carefully timed sequence, the joints are fired apart, followed shortly by the bolts. Once all of the pyrotechnics have detonated, six spring assemblies will push the three panels away, leaving the service and crew module exposed to space as they travel onward.

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): NirSpec 'First starlight' instrument complete

Europe has reached another milestone in its contribution to Hubble's successor - the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

An industrial team led from EADS Astrium in Germany has completed the build of the Near-Infrared spectrometer, one of four instruments that will go in JWST.

NirSpec's job will be to determine the age, composition, movement and distance of the objects in its field of view.

The expectation is that some of these targets will include the very first stars to shine in the Universe.

That would mean picking up light signals that have travelled across space for perhaps 13.6 billion light-years - something Hubble cannot do.

JWST will make it possible with a suite of next-generation technologies, including a 6.5m primary mirror (more than double the width of Hubble's main mirror), and a shield the size of a tennis court to guard its keen vision against the light and heat from the Sun.

NirSpec is critical to this new capability, and represents 10 years of design and manufacturing endeavour.

In a short ceremony in Ottobrunn on Friday, the instrument was handed over to the European Space Agency (ESA), which had commissioned NirSpec.

The Paris-based organisation then immediately passed the near-200m-euro instrument to the US space agency (NASA), which leads the JWST venture.

On 20 September, NirSpec will be flown to Maryland's Goddard Space Flight Center for integration into the giant orbiting observatory.

Europe's major industrial commitments to JWST are now complete.

Mid-Infrared Instrument (Miri)
Its other instrument - the Mid-Infrared Instrument (Miri), which was assembled in the UK - was safely delivered to North America last year.

The one outstanding task - and it is a very onerous one - will be to launch JWST in October 2018.

This will be performed by an Ariane 5 rocket from Esa's Kourou spaceport in French Guiana.

When I visited NirSpec in the Ottobrunn clean room last week, there was not much to see because the finished instrument was dressed for shipment in its protective thermal coat.

But if you could lift that covering, you would lay eyes on what appears to be an impossible optical maze.

NirSpec will be mounted just behind JWST's primary mirror and will sample the gathered light via a kind of periscope.

A series of mini-mirrors will then corral and condition this light, moving it towards a grating element where it can be sliced and diced into its component colours - its spectra.

Detectors are positioned at the end of the maze to read these colours and convert them into an electronic signal that can be transmitted to the ground.

All this is done in the near-infrared, in the wavelengths from 0.6 to 5 microns. This is the region of the electromagnetic spectrum where you would expect to pick up starlight that has been stretched on its 13-billion-year journey across an expanding cosmos.

An interesting aspect of NirSpec's design is that nearly half by weight of the instrument is made from ultra-stiff silicon carbide.

"The unique feature of silicon carbide is that it allows us to make structure and mirrors out of the same material," explains Astrium programme manager Ralf Maurer.

"This helps us survive the transition going from warm to cold; there is no deformation. And that gives us a very stable alignment of the optics."

NASA MAVEN Spacecraft: Lockheed Martin Begins Environmental Testing

NASA's MAVEN spacecraft recently completed assembly and has started environmental testing. 

In the Multipurpose Test Facility clean room at Lockheed Martin, technicians installed the orbiter's two solar arrays prior to a modal test.

Lockheed Martin has completed the assembly of NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft.

The orbiter is now undergoing environmental testing at the company's Space Systems facilities, near Denver, Colo.

MAVEN is the next mission to Mars and will be the first mission devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere.

During the environmental testing phase, the orbiter will undergo a variety of rigorous tests that simulate the extreme temperatures, vacuum and vibration the spacecraft will experience during the course of its mission.

Currently, the spacecraft is in the company's Reverberant Acoustic Laboratory being prepared to undergo acoustics testing that simulates the maximum sound and vibration levels the spacecraft will experience during launch.

Following the acoustics test, MAVEN will be subjected to a barrage of additional tests, including: separation/deployment shock, sine vibration, electromagnetic interference/electromagnetic compatibility (EMI/EMC), and magnetics testing.

The phase concludes with a thermal vacuum test where the spacecraft and its instruments are exposed to the vacuum and extreme hot and cold temperatures it will face in space.

Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] has installed the propellant tank on NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft, which it is building at its Space Systems Company facilities near Denver. 

In addition to the large tank, many of the primary propulsion components including all 20 of the spacecraft’s thrusters have been installed.

"The assembly and integration of MAVEN has gone very smoothly and we're excited to test our work over the next six months," said Guy Beutelschies, MAVEN program manager at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company.

"Environmental testing is a crucial set of activities designed to ensure the spacecraft can operate in the extreme conditions of space."

"I'm very pleased with how our team has designed and built the spacecraft and science instruments that will make our measurements," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator from the University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

"We've got an exciting science mission planned, and the environmental testing now is what will ensure that we are ready for launch and for the mission."

MAVEN is scheduled to ship from Lockheed Martin's facility to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in early August where it will undergo final preparations for launch.

Scheduled to launch in November 2013, MAVEN is a robotic exploration mission to understand the role that loss of atmospheric gas to space played in changing the Martian climate through time.

It will investigate how much of the Martian atmosphere has been lost over time by measuring the current rate of escape to space and gathering enough information about the relevant processes to allow extrapolate backward in time.

IRIS: NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph Mission Satellite Completed

The fully integrated spacecraft and science instrument for NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission is seen in a cleanroom at the Lockheed Martin Space Systems Sunnyvale, Calif. facility. 

The solar arrays are deployed in the configuration they will assume when in orbit.

The spacecraft and science instrument integration for the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) - NASA's next Small Explorer (SMEX) Mission - has been completed, and final testing is underway.

NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., is responsible for mission operations and the ground data system.

The Norwegian Space Agency will capture the IRIS data with their antennas in Svalbard, inside the Arctic Circle, in northern Norway.

The science data will be managed by the Joint Science Operations Center of the Solar Dynamics Observatory, run by Stanford and Lockheed Martin.

"The entire IRIS team is enormously pleased that we've reached this crucial milestone," said Gary Kushner, Lockheed Martin IRIS program manager. "

After many months of hard work by the Lockheed Martin team and all of our collaborators and subcontractors in designing, engineering and building the instrument and spacecraft bus, our goal of putting it into orbit is in sight and we look forward to producing great science at a low cost."

Understanding the interface between the photosphere and corona remains a fundamental challenge in solar and heliospheric science.

The IRIS mission will open a window of discovery into this crucial region by tracing the flow of energy and plasma through the chromosphere and transition region into the corona using spectrometry and imaging.

Here all but a few percent of the non-radiative energy leaving the Sun is converted to heat and radiation. The remaining few percent create the corona and solar wind.

Magnetic fields and plasma exert comparable forces in this region, and IRIS is uniquely suited to provide the observations necessary to pinpoint the physical forces at work in this little understood piece of real estate near the surface of the Sun.

"The interpretation of the IRIS spectra is a major effort coordinated by the IRIS Science Team that will utilize the full extent of the power of the most advanced computational resources in the world.

"It is this new capability, along with development of state of the art codes and numerical models by the University of Oslo that capture the complexities of this region, which make the IRIS mission possible.

Without these important elements we would be unable to fully interpret the IRIS spectra," said Dr. Alan Title, IRIS principal investigator and physicist at the ATC Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto.

Russian Cosmonauts Finish 6 Hour EVA

The 6.5 hour extra vehicular activity (EVA) involved cosmonauts Commander Gennady Padalka and Flight Engineer Yuri Malenchenko.

The main objective of the EVA was to move the Strela-2 cargo boom to the Zarya module from the Pirs docking compartment.

Moving the boom is part of a plan to make room for the new Russian multipurpose laboratory module, called Nauka, to dock to the Zvezda nadir port.

Moving the boom will also aid in preparing for undocking and disposal of the Russian Pirs docking module.

Other tasks performed during the EVA were the installation of shields designed to protect the space station from micrometeoroids.

The shields were installed on the outside of the Zvezda service module. Padalka and Malenchenko have previously performed eight and four spacewalks respectively, and this EVA is the 163rd to take place in order to maintain the International Space Station.

Acoustic Tests On New Glonass-K Satellite Completed

Acoustic tests on a new generation Glonass-K navigation satellite have been completed at a plant in southern Russia.

"These types of experimental tests were carried out to confirm the resilience of the Glonass-K satellite to the acoustic pressure which will be applied on it when it is orbited," a statement by the plant said. "The tests were successful."

The Glonass-K, a new generation satellite navigation system, is set for launch later this year.

The satellite is operable for 10 years.

Glonass - the Global Navigation Satellite System - is the Russian equivalent of the U.S. Global Positioning System
, or GPS, and is designed for both military and civilian use. Both systems allow users to determine their positions to within a few meters.

Russia currently has a total of 22 Glonass-M satellites in orbit, but only 16 of them are operational. The system requires 18 operational satellites for continuous navigation services covering the entire territory of Russia and at least 24 satellites to provide navigation services worldwide.