Spacecraft

A stream of highly charged particles from the sun is headed straight toward Earth, threatening to plunge cities around the world into darkness and bring the global economy screeching to a halt. This isn't the premise of the latest doomsday thriller. Massive solar storms have happened before - and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England. Much of the planet's electronic equipment, as well as orbiting satellites, have been built to withstand these periodic geomagnetic storms.

NASA'sfirst hard look at the protoplanet Vesta has given scientists an unprecedented view of its makeup, terrain and history - and revealed that major activity on this ancient rock occurred far more recently than researchers had expected. Images sent back from NASA's trailblazing Dawn spacecraft reveal the full size of a massive crater in the southern hemisphere and indicate that it may have been made just 1 billion years ago, well after Vesta formed more than 4.5 billion years ago, according to one of half a dozen studies published in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

Fame in the aerospace industry has been typically reserved for the people who pilot flying machines — Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Chuck Yeager, Neil Armstrong. Not so much for the people who design the technology. Maverick aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan may be an exception. Five of his planes now hang in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, including the Voyager, which in 1986 became the first airplane to fly around the world without refueling, and SpaceShipOne, which in 2004 became the first private rocket plane ever to put a man into space.

A solar flare that sparked a spectacular light show Monday took a convenient left turn. But although Earth is now safe from the impact of a solar storm, some NASA spacecraft are in the line of fire. A solar observatory that monitors space flares; the Mars Science Laboratory, now traveling to Mars with precious cargo, the rover Curiosity; and the Spitzer Space Telescope will feel the effects of the solar storm, said solar astrophysicist Alex Young. "The Spitzer Space Telescope is going to take the biggest impact," Young said Tuesday in an interview with The Times.

It may seem like a harmless, miniature version of the space shuttle, but some industry analysts are wondering if the secretive robotic spacecraft set to launch Thursday from Cape Canaveral has a more sinister side. "Are we looking at a new space vehicle or an orbital bomber that's capable of attacking from space?" said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a website for military policy research. "At this point, it's hard to say." The U.S. Air Force, which has been developing the X-37 pilotless space plane, isn't saying much.

A solar flare that sparked a spectacular light show Monday took a convenient left turn. But although Earth is now safe from the impact of a solar storm, some NASA spacecraft are in the line of fire. A solar observatory that monitors space flares; the Mars Science Laboratory, now traveling to Mars with precious cargo, the rover Curiosity; and the Spitzer Space Telescope will feel the effects of the solar storm, said solar astrophysicist Alex Young. "The Spitzer Space Telescope is going to take the biggest impact," Young said Tuesday in an interview with The Times.

NASA's newest mapping mission, designed to sniff out the dimmest residents of our neighborhood in space, launched successfully this morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The Delta II rocket carrying the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft lifted off at 6:09 a.m., Pacific time. About eight minutes later, the 1,485-pound WISE craft entered space. About 52 minutes into the flight, the craft's second-stage rocket ignited again, placing the vehicle into its assigned polar orbit 326 miles above the Earth.

A spacecraft intended to demonstrate deployment of a solar sail was damaged while undergoing testing in Russia, a mission official said Wednesday. The extent of damage was unclear, and the craft's launch will be delayed weeks or months, said Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society in Pasadena and the Cosmos 1 project director. The craft was scheduled for launch April 26 from a Russian missile submarine in the Barents Sea.

Launching a spacecraft powered by 72 pounds of plutonium could harm millions of people if there were an accident, opponents of the Cassini space mission said. NASA officials disagreed, saying independent experts have examined the craft and found it to be safe. Leaders of groups opposed to any nuclear-powered spacecraft said at a news conference that they are asking President Clinton to stop the Cassini launch next month to protect the Earth from the plutonium risk. Cassini is a $3.

A team taking a low-budget stab at the $10-million Ansari X Prize for private manned spaceflight had a setback Sunday, when their rocket malfunctioned and exploded after shooting fewer than 1,000 feet in the air. No one was hurt in the test of the Rubicon 1 just south of Olympic National Park in Washington. The 23-foot-long, 38-inch-diameter spacecraft held three dummies in place of astronauts.

The smallest planet in the solar system keeps serving up big surprises. Scientists working on the Messenger mission to Mercury have found that the planet has unexpected inner layers and craters with tilted bottoms, and it may have been geologically active far later into its life than previously imagined. In the first of two studies released Wednesday by the journal Science, a team led by MIT geophysicist Maria Zuber scanned the surface of Mercury's northern hemisphere and found the planet's surface to be unusually flat when compared with the terrain of the moon or Mars.

Hawthorne rocket venture Space Exploration Technologies Corp. again delayed its mission to rendezvous with the International Space Station. The company, better known as SpaceX, planned to send its Dragon capsule into space aboard its 18-story Falcon 9 rocket Feb. 7 from Cape Canaveral, Fla. But on Monday the company said that more engineering work was needed before it would embark on the historic mission. SpaceX did not give a new launch date. The company already has a $1.6-billion contract to haul cargo in 12 flights to the space station for NASA.

An ill-fated 14.6-ton Russian spacecraft built to explore the Martian moon Phobos is expected to crash back to Earth this weekend, Russian officials said. Exactly where and when Phobos-Ground will strike, nobody knows. But scientists say it could fall as far north as London or as far south as Patagonia, leaving most populated portions of the planet at risk. Most of the craft will burn up as it reenters the atmosphere, and because the majority of Earth's surface is covered by water, chances are the space vehicle won't crash on land.

For half a century, the sprawling 110-acre aerospace complex in Redondo Beach has played host to the development of the nation's most advanced and secret spacecraft. Known as Space Park, the site was built at the height of the Cold War after the launch of Sputnik for engineers to develop a high-powered rocket that could deliver a nuclear warhead 6,000 miles away in less than an hour to virtually wipe out an entire city: the intercontinental ballistic missile. The complex's 47 buildings have served as a nerve center for the development and construction of high-powered lasers, cutting-edge electronics and sophisticated spacecraft.

Russian controllers battled Wednesday to redirect a space probe stuck in a low orbit, raising fear that it could crash back to Earth. The $167-million unmanned Phobos-Ground spacecraft was launched early Wednesday from Baikonur cosmodrome in neighboring Kazakhstan. But when the probe separated from its booster rocket, the engines did not fire to put it on the path to Phobos, one of Mars' two moons. "We had a hard night because for a long time we couldn't detect the spaceship," Vladimir Popovkin, who heads the Roskosmos space agency, told reporters.

Bringing commercial spaceflight a step closer to reality, a privately funded aerospace firm has built a production plant where it will assemble the world's first fleet of passenger-ready spaceships. The 68,000-square-foot facility next to a runway at the Mojave Air and Space Port about 100 miles north of Los Angeles is one of the first aircraft assembly plants to be built in the region in decades. It'll be home to Spaceship Co. — a joint venture of Mojave-based Scaled Composites and British billionaire Richard Branson's space tourism company, Virgin Galactic.

An experimental unmanned spacecraft bankrolled by a real estate magnate rocketed into orbit Wednesday and successfully inflated itself in a test of technology that could be used to build a commercial space station. The Genesis I satellite "successfully expanded," Robert Bigelow said in a statement posted on his website. The satellite flew aboard a converted Cold War ballistic missile from Russia's southern Ural Mountains at 6:53 p.m. Moscow time.

A small robotic spacecraft that looks like a miniature version of the space shuttle was successfully launched Thursday from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The 29-foot-long spacecraft, dubbed the X-37, was sent up atop an Atlas V rocket built by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co. The unmanned space plane has been shrouded in secrecy. The Air Force, which has been developing it, hasn't said much, fueling speculation that it could be used as a weapon.

The desert planet of Tatooine is home to all manner of wonderful creatures — womp rats and banthas and jawas. But any proper "Star Wars" fan knows that the planet's most dynamic feature is its two suns, creating a magnificent double sunset that a young Luke Skywalker stares into during his wistful moments. On Thursday, astronomers announced the discovery of a real planet that orbits two suns, a scenario that breaks so many galactic rules that it was thought by many to exist only in science fiction.

As word spread of the greenish, glowing, fast-moving fireball streaking across the southwestern U.S. sky, speculation raged among conspiracy theorists and armchair astronomers. Many took to social media Wednesday night with the theory that it was a spacecraft that suffered a SkyLab-style reentry. Some said it was a piece of low-orbiting space junk. Others went to a far darker place: It was the opening volley of an alien invasion. But experts say none of those scenarios is the most likely explanation.