Archaeologists Chase Childs and Sarah Parcak remove an upper grass layer at the Point Rosee site in Newfoundland. (Credit: Greg Mumford / UAB)
Archaeologists worked hard to unearth what might well be only the second Viking site ever discovered in North America – but they had a little help from a higher power.
To be precise, 386 miles higher, in the form of DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-3 satellite.
It was the satellite’s near-infrared imagery that set Sarah Parcak, an archaeologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and her colleagues on a quest to excavate the site on the southwestern coast of Newfoundland, known as Point Rosee.
“It screams, ‘Please excavate me!’” said Parcak, who won a $1 million TED Prize for her satellite sleuthing in Egypt.
The Falcon 9 rocket’s engines flare during a last-second shutdown. (Credit: SpaceX via YouTube)
A wayward boat and a load of liquid oxygen that got too warm forced SpaceX to abort what might have been a successful launch of the SES-9 telecommunication satellite today, just as the engines were firing up.
The snags mean SpaceX will have to wait until at least Tuesday for the next opportunity to launch its Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, and to try landing the first-stage booster on an oceangoing platform in the Atlantic.
Today marked the third scrub for the launch, which is aimed at putting Luxembourg-based SES’ satellite into orbit to provide TV and data services to customers in the Asia-Pacific region. The first two delays were due to concerns over chilling down the rocket’s liquid oxygen propellant to the optimal temperature. Liquid oxygen played a role in today’s postponement as well, but there were a couple of additional twists.
The countdown was held up for more than a half-hour because an unauthorized vessel was in the “keep-out zone,” which is meant to keep boat traffic out of harm’s way as the rocket passes overhead. After a helicopter went out to shoo the ship out of the zone, SpaceX got clearance to launch at 7:21 p.m. ET (4:21 p.m. PT).
When the countdown clock reached zero, the engines flared up – and then immediately shut themselves down.
SpaceX’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, said in a tweet that the shutdown was triggered by a low-thrust alarm about the engines. He said rising temperatures in the liquid oxygen tanks contributed to the weak thrust, and suggested that the launch might have gone ahead if it weren’t for the earlier countdown hold.
Archaeologist Sarah Parcak wants to create a crowdsourcing project called Global Xplorer, using $1 million in seed money from TED. (Credit: Ryan Lash / TED)
Space archaeologist Sarah Parcak says she’ll use this year’s $1 million TED Prize to create a game that gives players the chance to make real-life discoveries of ancient sites.
The project, known as Global Xplorer, was announced Feb. 16 at the TED2016 conference in Vancouver, B.C. It follows through on the TED tradition of giving its prize recipients a million dollars to help one of their dreams come true.
“I wish for us to discover the millions of unknown archaeological sites across the globe,” said Parcak, a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “By building an online citizen science platform and training a 21st-century army of global explorers, we’ll find and protect the world’s hidden heritage, which contains clues to humankind’s collective resilience and creativity.”
Parcak was chosen to receive the prize last November, in recognition of her use of satellite imagery to look for archaeological sites that have literally been covered by the sands of time.
In 2011, her team at the Laboratory for Global Observation identified 17 potential pyramids in Egypt, plus more than 1,000 forgotten tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements. More recently, the lab has been documenting ancient sites facing destruction due to looting and civil strife in Egypt and the Middle East.
Spaceflight’s SHERPA carrier is set to deploy 87 satellites. (Credit: Spaceflight)
Federal agencies can now buy a satellite launch as easily as they buy pencils, thanks to a new arrangement with Seattle-based Spaceflight.
OK, maybe it’s not quite that easy. You still have to get the go-ahead to put something into orbit, whether you’re a climate scientist at NASA or Agent Fox Mulder at the FBI. But once that go-ahead is given, the launch can be ordered from a standardized menu instead of going through a months-long contracting process.
“What this does is make it a more expeditious process,” Spaceflight’s president, Curt Blake, told GeekWire.
Spaceflight is the first launch service provider to be awarded what’s known as a General Services Administration Professional Services Schedule. That means any federal official who’s authorized to spend the money can order a CubeSat or a MicroSat launch online, via the GSA Advantage’s eBuy site.
Toyota’s Mirai fuel-cell vehicle is equipped with Kymeta’s satellite antenna system. (Credit: Kymeta)
Redmond-based Kymeta Corp. and Toyota took the wraps off their collaboration on a satellite antenna system that can send data to cars at broadband speeds.
Toyota’s antenna-equipped, hydrogen-powered Mirai fuel-cell vehicle was unveiled today at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. The prototype communication system can download satellite data at 50 megabits per second, which is better than typical LTE wireless service. The transmission speed is expected to rise past the gigabit-per-second mark within a few years.
Kymeta said Mirai Creation Investment Limited Partnership, a Japan-based fund in which Toyota participates, is providing a strategic investment to push the initiative along. The company declined to specify how much is being invested, other than to say that the amount is significant. On Monday, Kymeta said it closed a $62 million investment round that includes money from Mirai.
For now, the satellite antenna system is being installed on Mirai research vehicles, but not on cars being sold to customers. Kymeta President and CEO Nathan Kundtz said that status is likely to change within the next couple of years.
During SpaceX’s Seattle announcement about an Internet satellite network, the company’s logo lit up Fisher Pavilion at Seattle Center. (GeekWire photo)
It’s been nine months since SpaceX’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, announced plans to put up a constellation of 4,000 satellites to provide global Internet service, and scores of employees are being hired in the Seattle area to start making it so. But today SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell signaled that the company is reconsidering those plans.
The project is technically doable, she said. “But can we develop the technology and roll it out with a lower-cost methodology so that we can beat the prices of existing providers like Comcast and Time Warner and other people? It’s not clear that the business case will work,” she said.
An infrared image from the Suomi NPP satellite’s VIIRS instrument shows the well-defined eye of Hurricane Patricia as of 9:20 GMT Friday. (Credit: NASA / NOAA / CIMSS)
Even the International Space Station’s commander is worried about Hurricane Patricia, the strongest storm ever tracked by the National Hurricane Center.
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who is currently heading the station’s crew during his yearlong tour of orbital duty, passed along a picture showing the monstrous whirl of white clouds as it approached Mexico today:
A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifts off in April, sending cargo to the International Space Station. The payloads included Planetary Resources’ A3R satellite, which was flown under an arrangement with Seattle-based Spaceflight. (Credit: SpaceX)
In the first deal of its kind, Seattle-based Spaceflight says it’s buying a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will be set aside exclusively for launching other people’s small satellites into orbit.
The first dedicated rideshare launch is due to go into sun-synchronous low Earth orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California during the latter half of 2017, said Curt Blake, president of Spaceflight’s launch business. Sun-synchronous orbits are particularly popular for Earth imaging satellites, and Spaceflight anticipates buying a dedicated SpaceX Falcon 9 every year to service the market.
“By purchasing and manifesting the entire SpaceX rocket, Spaceflight is well-positioned to meet the small-sat industry’s growing demand for routine, reliable access to space,” Blake said in a statement issued Wednesday.
