Latest news with #LaunchServicesProgram
Business Wire
6 days ago
- Business
- Business Wire
Impulse Space Selected by NASA to Deliver Orbital Transfer Vehicle Studies
REDONDO BEACH, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NASA has selected Impulse Space, the in-space mobility leader, to produce two orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) service studies that explore lower-cost ways to deliver spacecraft to important but hard-to-reach destinations in space. These studies will provide NASA with insight into the commercial capabilities of OTVs, aiding future mission planning. Impulse was selected for the studies by NASA's Launch Services Program via the agency's VADR (Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare Launch Services) contract. Impulse's studies will focus on how the Mira and Helios vehicles could meet NASA's objectives to more easily and cost-effectively reach these difficult-to-access orbits. This may include deploying multiple payloads to various destinations with a single launch, or enabling a single payload to access destinations beyond the reach of current launch services. Mira is a high-thrust, highly maneuverable spacecraft for payload hosting and deployment. It is capable of operating in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), Geostationary Orbit (GEO), cislunar space, and beyond. Mira has flown two successful missions already, demonstrating its ability to host or deploy small payloads anywhere within a given orbit. Helios is a high-energy kick stage built to rapidly deliver payloads to MEO, GEO, and beyond. It can lift over 5 tons from LEO to GEO in less than 24 hours. By pairing a standard medium-lift rocket with access to higher-energy orbits, Helios offers significant cost savings compared to traditional GEO launches. 'Mobility is the next great unlock for space,' said Tom Mueller, founder and CEO of Impulse Space. 'We're proud to support NASA's efforts to explore how commercial in-space mobility can increase mission flexibility, reduce cost, and expand the envelope of what's possible in orbit.' This work builds on Impulse's mission to accelerate our future beyond Earth by enabling responsive, reliable, and cost-effective movement within and beyond Earth's orbits. About Impulse Space Impulse Space, the in-space mobility leader founded by Tom Mueller, is opening access beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) with its fleet of cost-effective, high-performance space vehicles. The flight-proven Mira enables precise maneuverability and rapid responsiveness for hosting, deployment, and rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) from LEO to GEO. The high-energy Helios unlocks orbits beyond LEO with its powerful Deneb engine, rapidly transporting payloads from LEO to MEO, GEO, heliocentric, lunar, and other planetary orbits. Led by the team that delivered the most reliable rockets in history, Impulse provides in-space movement by reliably and rapidly getting customers where they want to go. For more information, visit
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
2 NASA missions will carpool on a SpaceX rocket this Friday to help map the cosmos
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Friday (Feb. 28) is shaping up to be a delightful day for space explorers, as not one but two major NASA missions are expected to take to the skies — and interestingly, though the spacecraft associated with these missions are pretty different from one another, you might say they all have the same profession: cosmic cartography. Cartographer one, named PUNCH, will map the sun's dynamics, while cartographer two, named SPHEREx, will kind of map the rest of the universe. "How does the universe work? How did we get here within that universe? And are we alone in that universe?" Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, pondered while speaking with reporters on Tuesday (Feb. 25). "Those are big enough where we can't answer them with one instrument. We can't even answer them with one mission. We need a full fleet to do that, and every time we fly a new telescope, we make sure that it adds to that fleet in ways that are unique from everything we've built before." At present, launch is scheduled to take place from Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California no earlier than Friday at 10:09 p.m. EST (7:09 p.m. local time, and 0309 GMT on March 1). PUNCH's four-satellite system and SPHEREx's single conical structure will be riding atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of NASA's Launch Services Program, which connects space missions with appropriate commercial launch vehicles. "Heliophysics is catching a ride," Joe Westlake, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, said during the Tuesday press conference. "[It's] going along with the SPHEREx launch, and really providing over and over again that value to the American taxpayer, having these two missions go up together." The PUNCH mission, which stands for Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, is made of four small satellites — three wide-field imagers and a narrow-field imager — that'll be stationed around Earth. Together, they're built to create 3D views of the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, as it turns into the solar wind that fills up our cosmic neighborhood's enormous bubble, known as the heliosphere. Moreover, it'll be doing so by tapping into polarized light patterns, which basically means it can reveal the directions of different features within the heliosphere. "I think PUNCH is going to revolutionize our physical understanding of space weather events and how they propagate through the inner heliosphere on their way to the Earth," Nicholeen Viall, PUNCH mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told reporters during the press conference. For example, sometimes solar eruptions — blips of plasma that erupt from our star's surface — can break off and shoot into space. This is called a coronal mass ejection, or CME. And due to its polarized light capabilities, the PUNCH mission will be able to understand the direction such a CME is moving in. As Viall explained, its satellite vigilantes stationed around our planet should be able to paint a picture of whether a CME is coming toward Earth or if it's headed elsewhere within our solar system. It won't be the first spacecraft to deal with polarized light — the PUNCH team has emphasized that the STEREO spacecraft certainly have done so — but it could have the best polarized-light-related resolution. "STEREO has looked in polarized light and has looked at the whole inner solar system, but not with this kind of resolution — not even close," Viall said. "We're doing 100 times better than what STEREO did, and we're going and looking over the poles, and that requires a tremendous amount of sensitivity." Then, on the other hand, you have the SPHEREx mission, which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer. Scientists like to compare SPHEREx to something you're more than likely familiar with: the James Webb Space Telescope. Here's why. Like the JWST, SPHEREx will be peering out into the infrared universe. This means it'll be working with infrared light wavelengths coming from arcane sections of the cosmos in order to illuminate what happened during the chaotic first several moments of time. However, unlike the JWST, which creates highly in-depth portraits of relatively small sections of the sky, SPHEREx is going bigger. It'll manage to capture sweeping, wide-angle images of the entire night sky. "Imagine you're a photographer that wants to capture wildlife in a forest," Domagal-Goldman said. "You may take a camera designed to zoom in on a tree, or maybe even a nest and the eggs inside a nest on a tree — that's what James Webb does. What SPHEREx does is, it's the panoramic lens. It's going to give us not that egg in a nest in a tree. It's going to give us the forest and all the trees within it." "We're going to produce 102 maps in 102 wavelengths every six months," Phil Korngut, SPHEREx instrument scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, told reporters during the Tuesday press conference. With such a goal, Domagal-Goldman says SPHEREx should be able to help answer three key questions in astronomy. The first has to do with cosmic inflation, or the extreme way our universe seemed to "inflate" just after the Big Bang provoked the beginning of time. In short, how – and why — did the universe expand a trillion trillion fold, going from the size of an atom to the expanse we see today, in fractions of a second? "If we can produce a map of what the universe looks like today and understand that structure, we can tie it back to those original moments just after the Big Bang," Korngut said. "So the largest scales imaginable on billions of light-years across are tied to the smallest scales imaginable, just a tiny fraction of an atom." The second question, meanwhile, has to do with the evolution of galaxies, and the final one surrounds the origins of water and ice in our universe. Related Stories: — SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket debris creates dramatic fireball over Europe, crashes in Poland (video) — NASA's 'SPHEREx' infrared space telescope is launching this week. Here's why it's a big deal — NASA's launching a new sun mission this month: 'PUNCH is going to see a total solar eclipse' "Where is all the water? On Earth, we know that every living creature needs water to survive, but how and when did that water get here? And how might that work for planets around other stars?" Rachel Akeson, SPHEREx science data center lead at Caltech/IPAC, said during the press conference. As I'm sure this article makes clear, both PUNCH and SPHEREx's mere existence has already started to spur endless questions among scientists — and if these space explorers manage to fulfill their destinies and lead humanity to some long-awaited answers, I hope their creators will remember the delightful day that was Feb. 28, 2025.
