Space
Access 12 Conference Review
A report on the annual Space
Access Society's annual conference in
Phoenix, Arizona. The focus, as always, was
on efforts by entrepreneurial companies to
achieve dramatically lower costs for getting
to space..
NewSpace
2011 Conference Review
A report on the annual Space
Frontier Foundation's conference held
at NASA Ames in Mountain View, California.
Topics of discussion ranged from entrepreneurial
space businesses to lunar miing to fully reusable
suborbital space vehicles.
Here is the latest Virtual
SpaceTV 3D show, which was created by BINARY
SPACE with story content from HobbySpace.
Virtual presenter Amanda Bush starts with an update
on the planned launch of the SpaceX
Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station.
She also reports on the final flights of Shuttles Discovery
and Enterprise. Amanda then spotlights the firm Planetary
Resources, which recently laid out its plan for
mining asteroids. Amanda reports on NASA's call for
amateurs to help in finding near earth asteroids and
on a project in which citizen scientists map craters
on the Moon. The program ends with spaceweatherman
James C. Birk discussing the unexpectedly mild peak
in the current phase of the solar cycle.
These videos are intended as demonstrations of an experimental
technique for generating animated presentations. The
show was generated autonomously by software and without
human interaction. The project is described in the Virtual
Producer whitepaper (pdf). For further information
contact info@binary-space.com. (Note that the virtual
voices have taken another step forward towards a more
natural sound.)
A new citizen scientist program
called CosmoQuest
has opened. Their first project for public
participation is Moon
Mappers in which the task is to identify
craters and other surface features in Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter images. This
video describes the Moon Mappers program:
A new company named Planetary
Resources made its debut in April. The
company is backed by Charles Simonyi, James
Cameron, and several other famous moguls.
Many asteroids contain precious metals such
as platinum. Others contain water and organic
materials that will extremelyh useful for
in-space development and settlement. The
firm plans to work incrementally, starting
with low cost spacecraft in earth orbit
that will use telescopes to search for asteroids
that orbit near earth. They will send probes
to investigte the most promising objects.
The third stage will attempt extraction
technques. Here is a video outlining their
project:
Run the Satellite
Tracking Tool from BINARY
SPACE right here at HobbySpace
in your browser. The program allows you to track a large
set of satellites in both low earth and geostationary
orbits. (Note: the program requires Microsoft
Silverlight, Version 5 or higher, as well as the latest
version of your browser. Currently the program works on
the Microsoft® Windows® platform only.) The Satellite
Observing section provides additional information
and web resources about the hobby of satellite tracking
and watching.
Real-Time
Space Viewers
Earth
Weather maps, remote sensing
and spysat images.
Space
Weather
Sun, solar wind, aurora images
and the latest data
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