Ariane 6 | Thales Alenia Space | Xilinx | Eutelsat | Euroconsult | Crew Dragon | Konnect Africa | Soyuz | NASA
issue 18
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Hi friends 🖖;
I just finished Bill Bryson's book “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. An extraordinarily well-written popular science book that I highly recommend. The author takes us on a journey through all ages and through all kind of sciences, and romances the greatest scientific discoveries and principles in a light, exciting, and epic way. In this issue, I would like to share with you some space-related passages and information that caught my attention:
We can see up to 10^(-34) s after the Big Bang 🤯
The Pole Star or Polaris, is a cepheid variable. A cepheid is a giant red star that is 4 to 15 times more massive than our Sun and 100 to 30,000 times brighter.
Several asteroids travel very close to the Earth two or three times a week and we are unable to detect them because the sky is too big to observe and they blow up very quickly.
The mass of the Earth is increasing as every year the earth accumulates 30,000 tons of cosmic dust. Compared to the mass leaving the Earth, such as satellites, Earth is getting fat!
An asteroid launched at cosmic speed would enter in the atmosphere so fast that the air underneath would compress as in a pump (and thus heat up to 60,000K). Everything underneath will melt like cellophane in a flame. This temperature will kill everything far before the crash.
After the Bing Bang, 98% of all matter in our universe was created in the first 3 minutes.
And last but not least, there are around 600 species (plants, insects, and animals) extinction per week 😔!
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🛰 Here is what you missed
👉 Thales Alenia Space won a contract with the ESA to continue the research and the development of EGNOS, the European Geostationary Navigation augmentation system…[+]
👉Konnect Africa, a subsidiary of the French operator Eutelsat, is offering for free its services to South African authorities to help face the COVID-19 pandemic...[+]
👉Xilinx announced the industry’s first 20-nanometer space-qualified FPGA, providing radiation tolerance and achieving ultra-high throughput and bandwidth performance. Full specs at [+]
👉Plans for the first flight of the new Ariane 6 rocket is postponed to 2021. The first launch was scheduled this summer to put into orbit 30 OneWeb Satellites. Now this latter went on bankruptcy and because of the lack of a commercial payload due to the pandemic, the inaugural launch is scheduled next year...[+]
👉Euroconsult, one of the leading global consulting firms specializing in space markets, projects that the growing maritime-satellite connectivity market will experience a significant decline due to the Covid-19 pandemic...[+]
👉Astronauts perform last dress and vehicle rehearsals for the long-awaited SpaceX Dragon Crew launch next week. It will be the first astronaut’s launch into space from the U.S since 2011. “An exciting couple of days here at NASA Kennedy! Crew arrival in Florida was awesome, seeing our vehicle roll to 39A was epic, and watching our SpaceX Falcon 9 1st-stage fire one more time before our mission still has a smile on my face!”. President Trump will travel to Kennedy Space Center for this historic SpaceX launch. Do not miss the Demo-2 mission on May 27 at 4:33 p.m. EDT...[+]
👉The Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket took off carrying a Ministry of Defense spacecraft; "At 10:31 Moscow time, the Aerospace Forces’ Space Forces crew successfully completed the launch of a Soyuz-2.1b middle-class carrier rocket with a Ministry of Defense spacecraft from launchpad 4 of site 43 of the Plesetsk Cosmodrome," the Ministry reported...[+]
👉NASA hiring motivated participants between 30-55 years old for a social isolation study for 8 months, in order to study various aspects of the confinement on the Moon and Mars Missions...[+]
👉OneWeb is asking bankruptcy court $8.8 million to provide bonuses to its remaining staff in order to prevent them from leaving. Actually, the minimal staff is maintained waiting for the firm to sell its spectrum...[+]
👉In order to monitor space debris, the DLR, the German space agency, starts the construction of an observatory: a multi-spectral large aperture telescope with a 1.75m diameter mirror mounted on a 15m dome...[+]
🍪 Cookie of the week
Civilization VI, the best RTS game for me with Age of Empires, is free for download at Epic Games until Thursday here. What does it have to do with space?…well, we don’t care, it is Civilization VI 😃… But you can build spaceports if you insist. Thank me later!
Here you are debriefed 👌. Rendezvous next week!
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