Latest Hypervelocity Stories

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Like many of his colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., Shyam Bhaskaran is working a lot with asteroids these days. And also like many of his colleagues, the deep space navigator devotes a great deal of time to crafting, and contemplating, computer-generated 3-D models of these intriguing nomads of the solar system. But while many of his coworkers are calculating asteroids' past, present and future locations in the cosmos,...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online An article coming out in the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets pitches ideas to attempt to remove orbital debris with less risk. The article, authored by Kerry Nock and Dr. Kim Aaron, of Global Aerospace Corporation (GAC), and Dr. Darren McKnight, of Integrity Applications Incorporated, Chantilly, VA, compared in-orbit debris removal options regarding their potential risk of creating new orbital debris or disabling working satellites...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online In the wake of the recent meteor explosion above Russia, the European Space Agency (ESA) has announced the selection of a target for their proposed Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA). The AIDA mission, which is a joint project headed up by European and American astronomers, will attempt to intercept asteroid Didymos, which the ESA says is a “binary,” featuring two asteroids – one approximately 800 meters...

Idan Ginsburg, a graduate student in Dartmouth's Department of Physics and Astronomy, studies some of the fastest moving objects in the cosmos. When stars and their orbiting plants wander too close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, their encounter with the black hole's gravitational force can either capture them or eject them from the galaxy, like a slingshot, at millions of miles per hour. Although their origin remains a mystery and although they are...

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researchers have determined that some planets are flying around in space at 30 million miles per hour. These hypervelocity planets are produced in the same way as the hypervelocity star that was found seven years ago traveling around the Milky Way Galaxy at 1.5 million miles per hour. "These warp-speed planets would be some of the fastest objects in our Galaxy," astrophysicist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in...

PASADENA, Calif., March 1, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. (NYSE: JEC) announced today that it received a test, evaluation and support team (TEST) contract from NASA in support of NASA's White Sands Test Facility located in Las Cruces, N.M. The award includes a three-year base period with two one-year options and represents a potential maximum value of $500 million if all options are exercised. Under the terms of the contract, Jacobs is providing propulsion systems...

NASA has contracted with ERC Inc., of Huntsville, Ala., for space technology research and development activities at the agency's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. The contract has a maximum value of $45 million.This is a cost-plus, fixed-fee, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract. The base contract lasts one year and has three one-year options.ERC Inc. will support the Space Technology Division in the Office of the Director of Exploration Technology at Ames. The...