Proposal For GIF IT UP 2016

Chris Foss

Rainbow Mountains - 210526

Virgin Galactic completes first powered flight of VSS Unity (April 5, 2018.) Two and a half years after a fatal accident temporarily halted flight activities, Virgin Galactic completed its first powered flight test of the VSS Unity Thursday, April 5. The company’s last powered flight experienced an anomaly during the beginning of its descent phase, resulting in the disintegration of the vehicle midair and the death of one pilot. Shortly after 9am MDT, The Unity, attached to the VSS Eve carrier mothership, took off from Spaceport America in the Mojave Desert. The two vehicles climbed to 14,200 meters where the Unity was released. The Unity’s powered ascent lasted for 30 seconds, 40 seconds shorter than a nominal flight profile, and achieved a speed of Mach 1.87 or 2,309 kilometers per hour. Unity reached a peak altitude of 25,686 meters, or 25.6 kilometers.  By comparison, the Unity’s sister craft, the VSS Enterprise, reached a top speed of Mach 1.4 and a maximum altitude of 21,000 meters during its third powered flight in January 2014. The spacecraft’s descent through the atmosphere and feathering of its wings was performed flawlessly, succeeding where the final, fatal flight of the VSS Enterprise did not in 2014. Unity successfully landed back at Spaceport America’s runway one hour and twelve minutes after takeoff and eleven minutes after separation from Eve.

The Unity coming to a landing at Spaceport America’s runway after its first powered flight test, April 5, 2018. P/c: Virgin Galactic

The company’s last powered flight with the VSS Enterprise experienced an anomaly during the beginning of its descent phase, resulting in the disintegration of the vehicle midair and the death of one pilot.

Almost nearly completed at the time of the incident, the VSS Unity was unveiled to the public in February of 2016. It subsequently underwent a system of ground checks and eleven unpowered flights to validate the modifications made after the 2014 incident. Following Thursday’s flight, Virgin Galactic did not state how long the powered flight test program would last before operational flights with paying customers would begin. CEO Richard Branson tweeted shortly after Unity landed that the company is back on track following the 2014 incident.

P/c: Virgin Galactic.

RAF Light Strategic Bomber Ca. 1971 by Rasmus Poulsen

View these celestial beauties taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released as a set of views in a modern day “Messier Catalog." 

Spotting comets was all the rage in the middle of the 18th century, and at the forefront of the comet hunt was a young French astronomer named Charles Messier. In 1774, in an effort to help fellow comet seekers steer clear of astronomical objects that were not comets (something that frustrated his own search for these elusive entities), Messier published the first version of his “Catalog of Nebulae and Star Clusters,” a collection of celestial objects that weren’t comets and should be avoided during comet hunting. Today, rather than avoiding these objects, many amateur astronomers actively seek them out as interesting targets to observe with backyard telescopes, binoculars or sometimes even with the naked eye.

Hubble’s version of the Messier catalog includes eight newly processed images never before released by NASA. The images were extracted from more than 1.3 million observations that now reside in the Hubble data archive. Some of these images represent the first Hubble views of the objects, while others include newer, higher resolution images taken with Hubble’s latest cameras.

Learn more: https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-s-messier-catalog

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Starbright.

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