Суборбитальные пуски (научные и экспериментальные)

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SISTINE

NASA Wallops‏ Подлинная учетная запись @NASA_Wallops 2 мин. назад
The launch of the SISTINE mission has been rescheduled for August 11 at 2:01 a.m. EDT from White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico.

SISTINE will study gases produced by stars to better understand biomarkers on the planets that orbit them. https://go.nasa.gov/2YksU59

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RocSat-X

 

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RocSat-X

 

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RocSat-X

 

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RocSat-X

Пуск!!!

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RocSat-X

 

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RocSat-X

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RocSat-X. Трансляция завершена

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RocSat-X.

Запись трансляция пуска на Мордокниге

Video (37:39)

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RocSat-X

 NASA Wallops‏ Подлинная учетная запись @NASA_Wallops 4 мин. назад
The RockSat-X mission has splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean after a successful parachute deployment. A ship is on location to recover the experiments and return them to the students.

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RocSat-X

 NASA Wallops‏ Подлинная учетная запись @NASA_Wallops 7 мин. назад
The RockSat-X mission successfully launched at 5:44 a.m. EDT from Wallops Island, Virginia. The Terrier-Improved Malemute sounding rocket reached 96 miles in altitude. The student experiments on board were successfully recovered in the Atlantic Ocean.

: NASA/Jamie Adkins

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SISTINE
RocSat-X

 NASA Wallops‏ Подлинная учетная запись @NASA_Wallops 2 ч. назад
NASA successfully launched two sounding rocket missions this week!

Aug. 11: The SISTINE mission launched at 2:07 a.m. EDT in White Sands, NM, to an altitude of 161 miles.

Aug. 12: The RockSat-X mission launched at 5:44 a.m. EDT from Wallops Island, VA, reaching 96 miles.

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https://www.nasa.gov/wallops/2019/feature/early-morning-wallops-rocket-launch-brightens-student-s-day

Aug. 12, 2019

Early Morning Wallops Rocket Launch Brightens Students' Day


University of Kentucky students (left to right) Josh Loredo, Shelley Williams and Kirsten Ford performs final checks on their reentry capsule.
Credits: NASA/Berit Bland

The sun begins to rise in the east over the Atlantic Ocean as nearly 100 university and community college students from across the United States wait in anticipation on Wallops Island in Virginia to see their hard work over the past year fly into space.

Finally, the moment arrives as the NASA Terrier-Improved Malemute sounding rocket lifts into the morning sky at 5:44 a.m., Monday, August 12, 2019, from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility.

The launch is followed by cheers as the undergraduate students see the rocket rise through the sky carrying their experiments to an altitude of 96 miles. The experiments descend from space via parachute into the Atlantic Ocean. It has been recovered and early in the afternoon the students will have their experiments in hand to see how they performed.

"This was the ninth RockSat-X payload launched by NASA. The program, conducted in conjunction with the Colorado Space Grant Consortium, has proven to be excellent training for students. The experience they receive through RockSat-X will prove invaluable as they pursue careers in industry, academia, NASA and other government agencies," said John Hickman, deputy chief of the NASA sounding rocket program office at Wallops.


RockSat-X launches at 5:44 a.m. EDT, August 12, from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility.
Credits: NASA

"Thanks to the RockSat-X program I've had the hands-on opportunity to learn the basics of electrical and mechanical engineering - something I don't easily have access to in my university. RockSat was a great way to gain this experience, as was meeting new people and socializing. I've met like-minded people who became my close friends thanks to the program. It has been a surreal experience to travel to Wallops Flight Facility to see the launch and work with NASA engineers," said Amanda Ortiz, a junior mechanical engineering major at the University of Puerto Rico.

Seven projects, some including multiple experiments, flew through the RockSat-X program in conjunction with the Colorado Space Grant Consortium. RockSat-X is the most advanced of NASA's three-phase sounding rocket program for students.  The RockOn launches are at the entry level, then progress to the intermedia level RockSat-C missions and then RockSat-X.

Participating institutions in this flight are the Arapahoe Community College, Littleton, Colorado; Community College of Aurora, Colorado; Red Rocks Community College, Lakewood, Colorado; College of the Canyons, Santa Clarita, California; the University of Puerto Rico, San Juan; University of Kentucky, Lexington; University of Maryland, College Park; University of Nebraska, Lincoln; and Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York.

Additional participants from West Virginia include West Virginia University, Morgantown; Blue Ridge Community and Technical College, Martinsburg; West Virginia State University, Institute; West Virginia Wesleyan College, Buckhannon; and NASA's IV & V Facility in Fairmont.

In addition to enhancing their technical skills, students also experience project management, working in a team environment and mentoring from NASA engineers and technicians.

"Ever since I was a child I knew that my purpose was within the engineering field. I participated in many programs with the hope of gaining the experience to participate with NASA. After attending the Community College of Aurora, I had the opportunity of being part of RockSat-X which was an eye-opener. Diversity, inclusivity, and a wide range of experiences were seen not only in our team but in all the teams. The feeling of "belonging" was something that was felt throughout the project which helped keep me motivated to continue in my career path," said Ruby Martinez Gomez, an aerospace engineering major at the University of Colorado – Boulder.

Josh Loredo, a senior computer science and mathematics major from the University of Kentucky, added "RockSat-X was a great opportunity for me to get experience building a sounding rocket payload. Getting to learn from and network with engineers here at Wallops is an opportunity I will forever be grateful for."

Proposals for the next RocKsat-X flight in August 2020 are now being accepted by the Colorado Space Grant Consortium. The due date for proposals is September 16, 2019.

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Image Caption: The University of Puerto Rico experiment gets a last-minute adjustment from student Amanda Ortiz.  Image Credit: NASA/Berit Bland

Keith Koehler
NASA's Wallops Flight Facility

Last Updated: Aug. 12, 2019
Editor: Patrick Black

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 NASA Wallops‏ Подлинная учетная запись @NASA_Wallops 5 мин. назад
Congratulations to the students and sounding rocket team on a successful launch of the RockSat-X mission!

NASA's next sounding rocket launch from Wallops Island, Virginia is the SubTec-8 mission scheduled for October.

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NASA Wallops island RockSat-X launch

 n3vqh

Опубликовано: 12 авг. 2019 г.

Launch of a NASA two-stage Terrier-Improved Malemute suborbital sounding rocket at 5:44am on Aug 12, 2019 from the Wallops Flight Facility, VA. As view from the visitor center viewing grounds.  Had a fairly sizeable crowd.  Bleachers were full and many people sitting on chairs or standing in grass.

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SISTINE

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/shining-starlight-on-the-search-for-life

UPDATE, Aug. 12, 2019: The Suborbital Imaging Spectrograph for Transition region Irradiance from Nearby Exoplanet experiment, or SISTINE, was launched at 2:07 a.m. EDT, Sunday, Aug.11, from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The experiment flew to an altitude of 161 miles before descending by parachute. The experiment was recovered. The science team is conducting post flight analysis to determine the experiment's performance.

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https://www.nasa.gov/wallops/2019/press-release/rocket-launch-scheduled-september-17-from-nasa-s-wallops-flight-facility

Rocket Launch Scheduled September 17 from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility


Credits: NASA

A Black Brant IX suborbital sounding rocket is scheduled for launch between 5:30 and 8:45 a.m., Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2019, for the Department of Defense from NASA's launch range at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

The back-up launch dates are September 18 through 20. The launch may be visible throughout the mid-Atlantic region.

At the request of DoD project managers, no real-time launch status updates will be available. The launch will not be shown live on the Internet nor will launch status updates be provided during the countdown on social media.  The NASA Visitor Center at Wallops will not be open for viewing the launch.

Keith Koehler
NASA's Wallops Flight Facility

Last Updated: Sept. 12, 2019
Editor: Patrick Black

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К #697

Dave Dickinson @Astroguyz 18 ч. назад

Hearing that this week's sub-orbital rocket launch from @NASA_Wallops was rolled back to not earlier than September 19th, will advise:

https://www.nasa.gov/wallops/2019/press-release/rocket-launch-scheduled-september-17-from-nasa-s-wallops-flight-facility

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NASA Wallops‏ Подлинная учетная запись @NASA_Wallops 2 ч. назад

A @DeptofDefense mission successfully launched aboard a Black Brant IX sounding rocket from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on the morning of Sept. 18, 2019.

: NASA/Chris Perry

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NASA Wallops‏ Подлинная учетная запись @NASA_Wallops 1 окт.

NASA successfully launched the ESIS mission at 2:04 p.m. EDT on Sept. 30 from the White Sands, New Mexico, reaching 153 miles in altitude.

The mission aims to trace the source of certain solar flare eruptions.
https://go.nasa.gov/2l7DA4z

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/rocket-team-are-solar-eruptions-messy-or-neat

Sept. 23, 2019
Rocket Team: Are Solar Eruptions Messy, or Neat?

Update, Oct. 1, 2019: The Extreme ultraviolet Snapshot Imaging Spectrograph, or ESIS, sounding rocket successfully launched at 2:04 p.m. EDT, September 30, from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, ESIS flew to an altitude of 153 miles before descending by parachute and was recovered. The science team reports that "beautiful data" was received from ESIS.

Update, Sept. 26, 2019: The launch of the Extreme ultraviolet Snapshot Imaging Spectrograph, or ESIS, sounding rocket has been rescheduled for 1:32 p.m. EDT (11:32 p.m. MDT), Monday, Sept. 30, 2019, from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. A ground firing circuit issue prevented a launch attempt on Sept. 24.

First all appears quiet. Suddenly, a bright flash lights up the telescope. In an instant, jets of super-heated plasma bloom against the blackness of space.


NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this M7 class solar flare erupting from the Sun on Oct. 2, 2014.
Credits: NASA/SDO/Tom Bridgman

Seen from Earth, solar flares put on an elegant show. But these dancing plasma ribbons are the shrapnel of violent explosions. The energetic process that fuels them, known as magnetic reconnection, doesn't just power flares. Magnetic reconnection shapes the behavior of plasma, or electrified gas, which makes up more than 99% of the observable universe. Yet the antics of magnetic reconnection are only partly understood — and eruptions on the Sun are among the best places to study them.

That's why Charles Kankelborg, space physicist at Montana State University in Bozeman, is launching the Extreme ultraviolet Snapshot Imaging Spectrograph, or ESIS, sounding rocket.

ESIS will take a 15-minute flight above Earth's atmosphere to observe eruptions in a layer of the Sun called the transition region. By watching subtle shifts in light, ESIS will trace these explosions back to their source. The goal is to assess if they bloom from a single point, or instead shoot from many disconnected locations. The NASA-funded rocket will launch from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico on Sept. 24, 2019.

Spying mini-explosions

Solar flares were first documented in 1859, but it was another ninety years before scientists proposed that magnetic reconnection was the trigger.


Magnetic reconnection occurs when two opposing magnetic field lines bump into each other and explosively reconfigure. When it occurs in flares, the result is a bright flash — with effects that can reach Earth. Solar flares emit X-ray light and energetic particles that, if Earth-directed, can endanger astronauts and satellites.


(click to view high-res version)

The trouble with using flares to study magnetic reconnection is just how unpredictable they are. "It's very difficult to schedule a flare during your launch," said Kankelborg, laughing. "But you can launch at any time and see many explosions in the transition region."

The solar transition region is sixty-mile thick sliver of Sun sandwiched between two extremes. On one side is the comparatively cool, 10-thousand-degree Fahrenheit solar surface. On the other, the super-heated outer atmosphere some 300 times hotter. The transition region is home to a slew of magnetic eruptions that, though smaller than flares, occur much more often.

From Earth, most of these eruptions are seen dead-on, a less-than-ideal angle that makes them blend in with many other bright spots on the Sun. To find genuine eruptions, the ESIS team uses an oft-used technique known as the Doppler shift, but in a way tailored to explosive events (see sidebar).

They start with the fact that gases at certain temperatures emit unique wavelengths of light, known as their spectral lines. For example, at about 90,000 degrees Fahrenheit, ionized helium — which has lost one of its two electrons — emits light at a wavelength of 30.4 nanometers. That wavelength is like helium's fingerprint, a way of telling its there from afar.

When gases move, their spectral lines move along with them. This is the Doppler shift. When a gas is approaching you, its wavelength gets blueshifted, or scrunched up towards the bluer end of the spectrum. 30.4 nanometers might become the slightly shorter 30.39 nanometers. Light from a source rapidly moving away is stretched out, or redshifted, becoming slightly more red.

The Doppler shift tells scientists if a light source is coming or going. But what happens when it explodes?

When spectra explode


(click to view high-res version)

Depending on the shape of the explosion, a spectral line can either split into two, or broaden into one large bump. Which one it does will help the ESIS team answer their primary question: whether magnetic reconnection is neat, or messy (see sidebar).

The evidence so far is mixed. On a previous rocket flight, Kankelborg's former student Tom Rust observed explosions that split cleanly into two. The results supported the neat model. "But that's not terribly conclusive, because we were looking at only one wavelength," said Kankelborg. A more diverse dataset might tell a different story. In fact, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph or IRIS satellite, on which Kankelborg is a co-Investigator, has seen evidence for broadening spectral lines, supporting the messy model. Since these were observations of different explosions, making a comparison is difficult.

ESIS's upcoming flight will be the first chance to straighten out exactly what they're seeing. The rocket team is coordinating their observations with NASA's IRIS and the JAXA/NASA Hinode mission to view these explosions from all these observatories at once.

"If we manage to see the same explosive events with all of these instruments, we'll have an incredibly comprehensive view," said Kankelborg.

ESIS will launch on a Black Brant IX sounding rocket to an estimated altitude of 160 miles high, for five minutes total observing time. The rocket will observe spectral lines from three different elements at temperatures between 8,500 degrees F and 1.8 million degrees F. After the flight, the payload's parachute will deploy as it drifts back to the surface for recovery.

Last Updated: Oct. 1, 2019
Editor: Miles Hatfield