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OSIRIS-REx probe reaches asteroid Bennu

Asteroid Bennu
An image taken by the OSIRIS-REx probe last month shows the asteroid Bennu from a distance of about 40 miles. (NASA / Goddard / Univ. of Arizona Photo)

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx today made its official rendezvous with a promising and potentially perilous asteroid named Bennu, after two years of closing in on it.

“We have arrived,” telecommunications engineer Javi Cerna announced during a NASA webcast from mission control at Lockheed Martin Space in Colorado.

It’s a major step in OSIRIS-REx’s mission to study a near-Earth object at close range and snag samples for return to Earth in 2023.

The car-sized spacecraft has been creeping up on the 0.3-mile-wide (half-kilometer-wide), diamond-shaped space rock for weeks, but today a 28-second thruster firing stabilized its position at a point less than 12 miles (20 kilometers) away from the asteroid (and more than 75 million miles or 121 million kilometers from Earth).

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New Horizons probe zeroes in on Ultima Thule

Ultima Thule and New Horizons
An artist’s conception shows Ultima Thule with the New Horizons probe silhouetted by the sun. (NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI Illustration)

Act Two of the 12-year-old New Horizons mission to Pluto and the solar system’s icy Kuiper Belt is heating up, with less than a month to go before NASA’s piano-sized spacecraft makes history’s farthest-out close encounter with a celestial object.

The New Year’s flyby of a mysterious Kuiper Belt object (or objects) known as Ultima Thule (UL-ti-ma THOO-lee) follows up on the mission’s first act, which hit a climax three years ago with a history-making flyby of Pluto.

Launched in 2006, New Horizons was never meant to be a one-shot deal. Even before the Pluto flyby, mission managers used the Hubble Space Telescope to identify its next quarry, a billion miles farther out in the Kuiper Belt. Now it’s crunch time for New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern and his team.

Again.

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Spaceflight gears up for satellite extravaganza

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket
A twice-flown SpaceX Falcon booster is readied for its third mission, set for launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Scorch marks make the booster look “sooty.” (SpaceX Photo via Twitter)

Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries is closing in on what’s shaping up as a grand convergence in commercial space.

Spaceflight, which handles launch logistics for small satellites, is nearly ready for its most ambitious mission yet: the “dedicated rideshare” launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will deliver 64 satellites to a pole-to-pole, sun-synchronous orbit.

The SSO-A mission, also known as the SmallSat Express, is due to lift off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Dec. 3, with SpaceX providing a webcast. The launch has been postponed several times, most recently on Dec. 1, due to the need for additional inspections and concerns about high-altitude winds at the launch site.

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Stratolaunch’s rocket preburner hits full power

Stratolaunch preburner test
The preburner for Stratolaunch’s PGA rocket engine blazes during a hot-fire test. (Stratolaunch via Twitter)

Chalk up another milestone for Stratolaunch Systems’ rocket engine development effort: The Seattle-based space company founded by late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen says it ramped up the preburner for its PGA rocket engine to full power this week during hot-fire tests.

Stratolaunch’s 3D-printed preburner, a key component that typically begins a rocket engine’s combustion process, had its first hot firing less than a month ago at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. And just a year ago, the hardware was merely a twinkle in the eye of Stratolaunch’s engineers.

“Per public records, this is the fastest preburner development in U.S. history,” Hanna Steplewska Kubiak, Stratolaunch’s vice president of business development,  tweeted.

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Tweets document damage after 7.0 Alaska quake

Tsunami hazard map
The red area on this map indicates the extent of the tsunami warning about an hour and a half after a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck Alaska. (Tsunami.gov / NOAA Graphic)

Buildings in downtown Anchorage were damaged and roads were ruined when a magnitude-7.0 earthquake hit Alaska’s biggest city today.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake occurred at 8:29 a.m. Alaska time (9:29 a.m. PT) and was centered 8 miles north of Anchorage. The main quake was followed by aftershocks in the range of magnitude 4 to 5.8.

“There is major infrastructure damage across Anchorage,” the city’s police department said in an online alert. “Many homes and buildings are damaged. Many roads and bridges are closed. Stay off the roads if you don’t need to drive. Seek a safe shelter. Check on your surroundings and loved ones.”

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Fossil tells a whale of a tale about evolution

Carlos Peredo with fossils
Carlos Mauricio Peredo, a researcher at the National Museum of Natural History, shows off a 33 million-year-old whale fossil that has been newly classified with the name Maiabalaena nesbittae. (Smithsonian Photo)

A whale that lived 33 million years ago when present-day Oregon was part of the ocean floor has been newly named after a curator at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle.

And Elizabeth Nesbitt’s whale isn’t your typical cetacean: An analysis of the fossil, published in the Nov. 29 issue of Current Biology, suggests that Maiabalaena nesbittae bridged a gap between species of whales that had teeth and species that have a different mouth-feeding mechanism known as baleen.

“For the first time, we can now pin down the origin of filter-feeding, which is one of the major innovations in whale history,” study co-author Nicholas Pyenson, the National Museum of Natural History’s curator of fossil marine mammals and an affiliate curator at the Burke Museum, said in a news release.

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GM shifts its president to CEO spot at Cruise

Cruise Automation executives
Cruise Automation’s newly reshuffled executive team includes chief operating officer Dan Kan,; Kyle Vogt, who will become president and chief technology officer; and GM President Dan Ammann, who will become Cruise’s chief executive officer. (GM Photo / Noah Berger)

General Motors has shuffled its executive team to put its president, Dan Ammann, into the CEO spot at its autonomous-vehicle subsidiary, Cruise Automation.

Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt will move out of the CEO role and partner with Ammann to set the company’s strategic direction and lead technology development as its president and chief technology officer, GM and Cruise said today in a news release.

The executive shift is effective Jan. 1, 2019.

San Francisco-based Cruise has grown from 40 employees to more than 1,000 during Vogt’s tenure as CEO. Just last week, Cruise announced that it would be setting up a Seattle-area engineering office with plans to add up to 200 employees by the end of next year.

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NASA picks nine teams for moon deliveries

Lockheed Martin lunar lander
Lockheed Martin is offering its McCandless lunar lander, shown here with an onboard rover in an artist’s conception, for future NASA missions to the moon. (Lockheed Martin Illustration)

NASA says it’s partnering on lunar delivery services with nine commercial teams, headed by companies that run the gamut from the space industry’s heavyweights to startups.

The lineup, announced today by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine at the space agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., will take part in a program known as Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS.

The program is aimed at boosting the development of lunar landing services for NASA and commercial payloads, starting with shipments weighing at least 22 pounds (10 kilograms).

Up to $2.6 billion in delivery contracts will be meted out over the next 10 years, NASA said in a news release.

“Welcome to the competition,” Bridenstine said.

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India launches BlackSky satellite (and 30 others)

PSLV launch
India’s PSLV rocket lifts off to send 31 satellites into orbit. (ISRO Video)

The first Earth observation satellite for Seattle-based BlackSky’s Global constellation has been sent into orbit aboard an Indian rocket.

Global-1 was just one of 30 secondary payloads for the PSLV-C43 mission, launched at 9:57 a.m. local time Nov. 29 (8:27 p.m. PT Nov. 28) from the Indian Space Research Organization’s Satish Dhawan Space Center at Sriharikota. All those satellites went into a sun-synchronous, nearly pole-to-pole orbit at an altitude of 504 kilometers (313 miles).

The primary payload aboard the four-stage Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle was India’s Hyper Spectral Imaging Satellite, or HySIS, which is designed to capture Earth imagery in visible, near infrared and shortwave infrared wavelengths from a height of 636 kilometers (395 miles). Potential applications range from weather and climate research to agriculture monitoring and water management.

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Human gene-editing experiment put on hold

He Jiankui
Chinese researcher He Jiankui addresses the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong. (National Academies via Twitter)

The Chinese researcher behind a controversial experiment to produce gene-edited children took the stage at a Hong Kong conference to explain his work, and acknowledged that the international outcry has brought a halt to the experiment.

“The clinical trial was paused due to the current situation,” He Jiankui, a biomedical researcher at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, said today at the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing.

The university says He (pronounced “Heh”) has been on unpaid leave since January, and today Chinese news outlets reported that his lab on campus has been shut down and sealed off for investigation.

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