ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti: Soyuz TMA-15M Launch

Soyuz TMA-15M spacecraft launch.

Credit: ROCOSMOS

The Soyuz TMA-15M spacecraft was launched from Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 23 November 2014 with ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti and her crewmates to the weightless research centre where they will live and work for five months.

Credit: ROCOSMOS

ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti is all set for her five-month mission on the International Space Station. 

She will leave Earth on Sunday from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with NASA astronaut Terry Virts and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov.

Watch the international crew of astronauts board their Soyuz TMA-15M spacecraft strapped to 274 tonnes of rocket propellants, accelerate to 28 800 km/h and dock with the Space Station orbiting Earth in just six hours.

The programme will include images of Expedition 42/43 suiting up, walking to their spacecraft and a last wave as they board.

The hatch opening will include commentary by ESA’s Space Station Programme Manager Bernado Patti and ESA’s Head of the Astronaut Corps and former astronaut Frank De Winne.

Docking with the Space Station will happen early Monday morning at around 02:53 with coverage returning at 02:30.

Oleg Ivanovsky: Designer of Yury Gagarin's Vostok spaceship died today

A spaceship designer who worked on Yury Gagarin's Vostok spaceship and was the last to shake his hand before liftoff, Oleg Ivanovsky, died on Thursday at 92, the Russian space agency said.

Ivanovsky was a senior designer at the facility codenamed OKB-1 which built the Vostok spaceship that blasted Gagarin into orbit in 1961.

"He participated directly in preparing the flight of the world's first cosmonaut," Roscosmos said in a statement.

"The last to shake the hand of the world's first cosmonaut before blastoff was Oleg Genrikhovich Ivanovsky. After that he closed the hatch of the ship," Roscosmos said, using his patronymic.

Photographs published by Roscosmos show Ivanovsky, a slight man in blue overalls over a shirt and tie, helping Gagarin climb the stairs up to the spaceship and get into his seat.

"I squeezed into the cabin. I hugged him, shook his hand and gave him a slap on the helmet before getting out. A moment later and the hatch swung closed onto its locks," Ivanovsky remembered in a 2007 interview with Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily.

A tense moment followed as the chief designer, Sergei Korolyov warned that there was a glitch: the hatch's locks were not registering as hermetically sealed.

Ivanovsky recalled he swiftly had to remove and replace the hatch, attached by 32 bolts, as Gagarin watched him in a mirror sewn onto his sleeve, while quietly whistling a song with the lyrics: "The motherland hears, the motherland knows..."

It turned out later that the hatch was in fact fine—one of the light bulbs at mission control was simply faulty and flashed an error message by mistake, Ivanovsky said.

The engineers had a secret code they planned to use if Gagarin fell unconscious or started raving.

"Out of seven flights of Vostok ships before Gagarin's, only three were successful. And only two returned to Earth. So it was a big risk, of course," he recalled.

"But we did everything we could to make the flight safe according to the level of knowledge and the capabilities we then had."

Ivanovsky was born in Moscow and fought in World War II, taking part in the Victory Parade on Red Square.

After the war, he studied at Moscow Energy Institute. He began working as a senior engineer in spaceship construction in 1957 and later worked on the Soviet Union's unmanned lunar missions.

"He was an incredible person, a hero who lived his life in the name of science and to benefit the motherland," Roscosmos said in a statement.

ISEE_3: NASA Spacecraft Buzzes the Moon Today After 36 Years in Space

ISEE-3, a 36-year-old NASA spacecraft will begin a new interplanetary science mission today (Aug. 10) when it makes a close pass by the moon.

The privately controlled International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 spacecraft, also called ISEE-3, will fly by the moon at 2:16 p.m. EDT (1816 GMT).

You can follow the lunar flyby live in a Google Hangout beginning at 1:30 p.m. EDT (1730 GMT) on the website SpacecraftforAll.com.

The ISEE-3 spacecraft is under the control of ISEE-3 Reboot Project, a private team of engineers took control of the probe earlier this year under an agreement with NASA.

The team initially hoped to move the NASA probe into a stable orbit near the Earth. But attempts failed when the team discovered that the spacecraft, which NASA launched in 1978, was out of the nitrogen pressurant needed to get the job done.

A vintage NASA spacecraft, the International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 launched in 1978, will fly by the moon on Aug. 10, 2014 after 36 years in space. 

The volunteer ISEE-3 Reboot Project and Google Creative Lab have teamed up to offer a live webcast of the 36-year-old spacecraft's lunar flyby. 

Credit: SpacecraftforAll.com

Now, ISEE-3 Reboot Project engineers are focusing their efforts on an interplanetary science mission, since at least some of the probe's 13 instruments are still working.

By using a network of individual radio dishes across the world, the team will listen to the ISEE-3 spacecraft for most of its orbit around the sun.

Officials announced this week that they would collaborate with Google to offer live spacecraft data at the site SpacecraftForAll.com.

Financial terms were not disclosed. Chris Lintott, of the BBC's "The Sky at Night," will moderate the Google Hangout on ISEE-3 today.

"The main feature of this is a new website developed by Google Creative Lab in collaboration with the ISEE-3 Reboot Project team that features a history of the ISEE-3 mission as well as a presentation of data currently being received from ISEE-3," co-founder Keith Cowing said in a statement.

The spacecraft was originally launched in 1978 to study the sun, and was retasked for other science missions such as looking at comets.

NASA put ISEE-3 into hibernation in 1998, where it remained until the private group reactivated it this year under a Space Act Agreement.

Members raised about $160,000 through crowdfunding, most of which is gone due to the need to rent dish time at NASA's Deep Space Network to listen in, and to fly team members to the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico for communications.

ESA Rosetta Comet Chaser catches up with comet 67/P today

After an epic, decade-long trek across the solar system, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft will finally catch up to its target comet early Wednesday (Aug. 6). If all goes according to plan, Rosetta will become the first probe ever to orbit a comet, and you can watch the historic rendezvous live online.

Rosetta is expected to meet up with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko at 4:45 a.m. EDT (0845 GMT) Wednesday, with a crucial 6.5-minute-long engine burn propelling the spacecraft into the comet's orbit.

You can watch a live webcast of all the action at ESA.int beginning at 4 a.m. EDT (0800 GMT), courtesy of the European Space Agency (ESA).

Once Rosetta is in the gravitational grip of the comet, the spacecraft will execute a series of triangular loops around the comet.

Each loop will be about 62 miles (100 kilometers) long and take a few days to complete, mission officials said.



Rosetta blasted off from French Guiana in March 2004. During its 4-billion-mile (6.4-billion-kilometer) chase, the spacecraft zoomed around Earth three times and Mars once for "gravity assists" that helped the spacecraft pick up speed. Rosetta also got up close and personal with two asteroids during its travels.

When Rosetta reached Jupiter's orbit in 2011, ESA engineers put the spacecraft into a deep-space slumber that lasted more than 2.5 years.

Rosetta woke up in January this year for the final phase of its journey to Comet 67P, which is about 2.5 miles (4 km) wide and takes roughly 6.5 years to complete one lap around the sun.

Rosetta has since performed a series of complex maneuvers to slow down and match the comet's pace.

Now, the probe is poised to enter the comet's orbit and travel with it around the sun. Rosetta is also carrying a lander called Philae that's expected to touch down on the comet in November to take samples and study the comet's surface and composition.

NASA MAVEN launch today: Another US Robotic explorer heading to Mars

This photo provided by NASA shows a full moon rising behind the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft onboard at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Space Launch Complex 41, Sunday, Nov. 17, 2013, Cape Canaveral, Florida. 

NASA's next Mars-bound spacecraft, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, is the first spacecraft devoted to exploring and understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. 

AP Photo/NASA, Bill Ingalls

NASA's newest Martian explorer is on its launch pad in Florida, ready to soar.

The Maven spacecraft was scheduled to blast off aboard an unmanned Atlas V rocket Monday afternoon.

NASA is sending Maven to Mars to study its upper atmosphere. Scientists want to know why Mars went from being warm and wet during its first billion years, to the cold and dry place it is today.

The early Martian atmosphere was thick enough to hold water and possibly support microbial life. But much of that atmosphere may have been lost to space, eroded by the sun.

"Something clearly happened," the University of Colorado's Bruce Jakosky, the principal Maven scientist, said on the eve of Maven's flight.

"What we want to do is to understand what are the reasons for that change in the climate."

Maven—bearing eight science instruments—will take 10 months to reach Mars, entering into orbit around the red planet in September 2014. The mission costs $671 million.

A question underlying all of NASA's 21 Mars missions to date is whether life could have started on what now seems to be a barren world.