Planetary Society Blog for Thursday 18 September 2014

Planetary Society Blog

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NASA Kicks Off a Private Space Race Between Boeing and SpaceX

Posted: 17 Sep 2014 10:55 AM PDT
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/casey...vate-race.html

Boeing and SpaceX have won multi-billion dollar contracts to ferry
astronauts to the International Space Station.

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Comet Siding Spring Mars encounter: One Mars Express plan becomes two

Posted: 17 Sep 2014 08:44 AM PDT
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest...two-plans.html

The Mars Express Flight Control Team at ESOC have been actively preparing
for the flyby of comet C/2013 A1/Siding Spring on October 19. Initial
estimates gave the possibility that Mars Express might be hit by 2 or 3
high-speed particles. Happily, additional observations by ground and space
telescopes have shown the risk to be much lower – and perhaps even as low
as zero. In today's blog post, the team explain how this (happy!)
real-life, real-time development is affecting their preparations for fly-by.