Space Junk Ball Falls In Brazil. Possibly A Helium Tank From An Ariane 4 Upper Stage

Sao Paulo, Feb 26 (TruthDive): A piece of space junk of a spherical shape, crashed down in the village of Anapurus in the state of Maranhao in Brazil. The object weighed approximately 30kg and measured 1m in diameter.

“I heard the noise and I went out to see what caused it. I thought it was a plane that had fallen or an earthquake,” said Valdir Jose Mendes, 46, a local resident said. Valdir Jose Mendes told police the sphere landed several meters from his house leaving a one-meter-deep hole in the yard.

Some 20 villagers joined Mendes to help him extract the object from the ground and examine it. Mendes says the sphere is hollow and if shaken some sort of liquid can be felt swishing inside. Locals quickly spread the news, as they reached the town of Mata Roma. Over 2,000 people flocked to see the “UFO”.

“It’s highly probable that it’s the helium tank from the Ariane 4 rocket that was launched in 1997. Its return to the atmosphere was scheduled for the morning of February 22, according to the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies,” Gustavo Rojas of the Sao Carlos Federal University was quoted as saying in a third report, by the New Zealand Herald.

In December 2011, a similar incident happened in Namibia, where a metal Teletubby head weighing 5.9 kilograms and measuring 35 centimeters in diameter hit the ground in the village of Omanatunga. Some Russian specialists believe the “head” was part of the third stage of the Soyuz-U rocket, launched on October 30.

Space debris stories made the headlines throughout 2011. In January, media chased the infamous Russian Mars probe Phobos-Grunt across five oceans to keep up with Russia’s space agency, constantly changing the possible impact location.

Earlier in October, the German Roentgen satellite split into 30 chunks, one of which weighed 400 kilograms, but those globs eventually made their way in to the Indian Ocean.

Scientists believe that the ball is a fragment of an old satellite or missile which had been in orbit for a long time and then fell to Earth. However, experts point out that an examination of the object is needed to obtain complete information about what it is exactly.

Landmark launch in rocketry: Centaur makes Flight 200

Spaceflight Now Atlas Launch Report Landmark launch in rocketry: Centaur set for Flight 200

The venerable U.S. upper stage rocket -- the Centaur -- that created the pathway to the Moon and every planet across the solar system will be making its 200th flight next Thursday in a milestone mission to boost the U.S. Navy's sophisticated new mobile communications satellite to orbit.

Originally developed by General Dynamics under the direction of NASA at the dawn of the space age, Centaur was conceived to power payloads with a high-energy cryogenic engine fed with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

"Centaur makes it possible for the U.S. to launch spacecraft of much greater size and weight then ever before," NASA said on the eve of the first launch in 1962. "Hydrogen offers more pounds of thrust per pound of propellant consumed per second than any other fuel possible in chemical rockets."

The stage was at the forefront of advancing rocket technology by conquering cryogenic fuels, a key accomplishment that benefited a host of different space boosters to follow.

"Centaur has been pioneering space launch for the last 50 years. The first launches in the early 1960s demonstrated the extremely high performance that can be achieved with a liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen rocket stage. LH2/LO2 stages were subsequently used for the Saturn I, Saturn V, Space Shuttle, Titan and Delta programs," said Jim Sponnick, United Launch Alliance's vice president for mission operations.

"Centaur developed and flight demonstrated in-flight restarts for LH2/LO2 engines -- a technology that was critical for the Apollo programs and also for enabling a wide variety of flexible mission designs."

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50 years after John Glenn's flight, The US Has To Buy Rides To Space

Reuters/Cape Canaveral, Florida


Fifty years after John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, Nasa no longer has the ability to fly astronauts in space, a decision Glenn lays squarely on the shoulders of the Bush administration.


Glenn’s groundbreaking flight on Feb. 20, 1962, put the US into a heated space race with the Soviet Union, which had launched cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit 10 months earlier.

The retirement of the shuttles last year left the US dependent on its former Cold War foe to get astronauts to and from the jointly owned International Space Station, which flies about 240 miles (385km) above the planet.

“I regret that is the way things have developed,” Glenn told a crowd of current and former Nasa employees and guests at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex on Saturday night, part of a series of celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of his flight.

“We spent over $100bn putting the space station up there. It’s too bad in the previous administration the decision was made to end the shuttle, so now we have to go somewhere else to even get up to our station,” said Glenn, who served as a Democratic senator from Ohio between 1975 to 1999.

The US grounded its ageing shuttles last year due to high operating costs and to free up funds for a new generation of spacecraft that can fly farther from Earth. More money would have been needed years earlier in order for the new ships to be ready by the time the old ones were retired.

Glenn parleyed his political connections into a long-awaited return to space in 1998 when, at age 77, he flew aboard the space shuttle Discovery as a research subject for experiments on ageing sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

Now 90, Glenn, a retired Marine Corps pilot, said research is the most important benefit of the US space programme and lauded the decision to extend the International Space Station’s life to at least 2020 from 2015.

“People say, ‘Well, what good is research?’ I think every bit of progress made by human beings has been made because somebody was curious about the unknown,” Glenn said.

“If there’s one thing we have learned through the history of our country, it’s that money spent on basic research has a way of paying back in the future beyond anything we ever see at the outset,” he said.

Though research was not the reason Glenn and his Mercury Seven colleagues were launched into orbit, scientists had many questions about how the human body would manage in the weightless environment of space.

“The things we were looking at back on those first flights seem so primitive now, they’re almost laughable,” Glenn said. “The doctors were literally concerned that your eyes might change shape and your vision might change enough that you couldn’t even see the instrument panel. We actually put a little miniaturised eye chart on the top of instrument panel.

Scott Carpenter, who followed Glenn into orbit three months later, said he swallowed radioactive food so doctors could see if his body could metabolise food in weightlessness.

“It was senseless, because you can eat food standing on your head and you process it very nicely. Why couldn’t we do it the same way in zero gravity? Well, we had to prove it. I was given some radioactive food in a toothpaste tube and I was told to eat that on the first orbit. It was radioactive so they could trace its movement through my body,” Carpenter said.

Two more Mercury missions followed Glenn and Carpenter’s three-orbit flights, paving the way for the Gemini programme and finally the real goal of the nascent human space programme - sending a crew to the Moon.

“Although we were behind the Soviet Union, we were able to overtake them and do exactly what (President John F) Kennedy told us to do,” Glenn said. “In so doing we would beat the Russians to the Moon.”

Now it is Russia that flies Americans into space aboard its Soyuz spacecraft, a service that costs Nasa more than $300mn a year. The US space agency also is spending about $3bn a year to develop a capsule and rocket that can carry astronauts to the Moon, asteroids, Mars and other destinations beyond the space station. The first manned test flight is expected in 2021.

Meanwhile, in hopes of breaking Russia’s monopoly on station crew transportation, Nasa has invested $365.5mn since 2010 in six companies working to develop commercial space taxis. The agency wants $830mn for the year beginning Oct. 1 to keep work going at two or more firms.