Showing posts with label European Space Agency. Show all posts

Thursday, February 20, 2014

The British Bloodhound supersonic car project : a 1.000mph + car.

WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesùs.

The British Bloodhound supersonic car project will use a Norwegian rocket in its bid to drive beyond 1,000mph (1,610km/h).

The Nammo company, based in Raufoss, will supply "hybrid" motors and technical support to the World Land Speed Record attempt.

Currently under construction, the car should be ready to run in 2015.

Bloodhound will need both a rocket and a jet engine to raise the current record of 763mph (1,228km/h).

Nammo is a world-renowned name in propulsion technology.

Its motors are found in military missiles, and are used also to separate the stages on the European Space Agency's (Esa) big Ariane 5 rocket.

The Bloodhound team had been developing its own hybrid power unit in collaboration with Manchester-based Falcon Project Ltd, and gave this rocket its first UK test firing in October 2012.

And although this demonstration was deemed a success at the time, it became clear that considerable sums of money and time would be needed to perfect the design.

A decision was therefore made to go with Nammo, which is also developing hybrid technology, but which has the extra resources and dedicated test facilities to bring its concept to fruition much faster.

"It's a perfect match, a perfect opportunity," said Bloodhound's chief engineer, Mark Chapman.

"It was almost uncanny when we started looking at the power requirements, the duration of burn, the scale and size - to find Nammo was already working on something very close to what we wanted."

In rocketry, "hybrid" means a mixture of solid and liquid propellants.

In this case, the Norwegian motors will be burning a combination of a solid, rubber-like fuel (HTPB, or hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene) and a liquid oxidiser (high-test peroxide, HTP).

Nammo's proposal is for a unit of similar thrust to the Falcon rocket but one that has a quite different configuration.

Instead of one large combustion chamber, Nammo's design calls for a cluster of perhaps four or five smaller motors.

This is a concept the Raufoss company has been advancing in studies conducted jointly with Esa.

The company's eventual goal is to produce a "sounding rocket" that can put small scientific payloads in space from launch sites in Scandinavia.

To get there, Nammo sees the Bloodhound project as an ideal testbed to mature its technology.

"We feel we have a very robust and simple concept, and this gives us a lot of confidence that we will reach this end goal of providing the thrust Bloodhound needs to break the Land Speed Record," said Nammo's Onno Verberne.

Bloodhound will use its Rolls-Royce Eurofighter-Typhoon jet engine to raise its speed to about 350mph. It will then ignite the Nammo rocket motor to go supersonic.

The intention is to try to break the existing land speed record in 2015, and then push it beyond 1,000mph in 2016.

All the running will be done on a specially prepared dried-out lake bed in South Africa.

To achieve the ultimate mark of 1,000mph, the Rolls-Royce turbo fan and the Nammo hybrid will need to provide together a thrust of about 47,700lbf (212kN). Just over 27,000lbf (120kN) of this will have to come from the rocket.

For the engineers at Bloodhound, switching rockets will mean having to make some subtle modifications to the car, not just to fit the new hybrid into the available space, but to position its mass in a way that does not upset the balance of the car.

"Nammo will have test firings next year in Raufoss and when we get the data off those we can decide on precisely what the packaging requirements will be," said Mr Chapman.

"I'm confident though that we can absorb any changes into our design for Bloodhound."

Dr Verberne added: "I think Bloodhound and Nammo will make an excellent team. We share the same philosophy on technology and want to show the world what we're capable of doing; and for a company like Nammo, Bloodhound gives us a window to an audience that we normally cannot reach."

The car's chassis will have to accommodate a jet engine and a rocket.

Nammo technology is used to separate Ariane's side boosters from the central core stage.

Friday, January 31, 2014

Space: The Wolrd`s First One-Billion Pixel Camera Mapping the Galaxy.Videos

WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesùs.

Gaia's mission aims to pick out celestial objects 400,000 times fainter than the human eye can see. The 1,000,000,000 pixel camera will map our galaxy in 3D with an unprecedented accuracy and test Einstein's theory of relativity with greater precision than before. The Gaia space telescope, built by Astrium, holds the largest instrument ever created fully in Siliconcarbide.

Today could change the way we look at the universe. EADS space unit Astrium is launching the highly-expected Gaia mission from Kourou in French Guiana. The goal? 3D mapping the stars, thanks to the largest camera ever made for a space mission.

Astrium’s Gaia telescope begins journey into space to map the stars.

• Gaia, Europe’s most advanced space telescope has been successfully launched and is now en route towards its final orbit, the L2 Lagrangian point, to be reached mid of January

• Designed and built by Astrium for the European Space Agency, Gaia will map the Milky Way in 3D to improve understanding of the origins and evolution of our galaxy

• Gaia draws on the best in space technology, including Silicon Carbide for the structure, a billion pixel sensor and cold gas micro-propulsion

The scientific satellite Gaia, designed and built by Astrium – the world's second largest space company – has been successfully launched from Kourou, French Guiana aboard a Soyuz.

Europe’s most advanced space telescope Gaia, built for the European Space Agency (ESA), will produce a highly accurate 3D map of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and discover and map objects far beyond its boundaries so as to improve our understanding of its origins and evolution. The Gaia mission is also expected to discover hundreds of thousands of unknown celestial objects, including extra-solar planets and failed stars, known as brown dwarfs. And within our solar system, Gaia will be able to identify tens of thousands of asteroids.

Gaia draws on the best in space technology and will carry ultra-modern instruments, including the most sensitive telescope ever made. This cutting-edge equipment draws on unique expertise developed by Astrium in the field of silicon carbide (SiC) telescopes, such as that used for the space telescope on ESA’s Herschel mission, as well as for all the instruments made by Astrium for Earth observation missions.

Through their space programmes, Astrium and its partner Boostec have created a successful new economic sector. The SiC produced in the French Midi-Pyrénées region enables Astrium and its partners to produce exceptional optical payloads for scientific missions and Earth Observation.

“Gaia is an unparalleled space system: the precision of its instruments and its technical conception once again prove Astrium‘s unique expertise in optical payloads,” said Eric Béranger, CEO of Astrium Satellites. “Mastering these exceptional technologies enables us to maintain Astrium’s rank as the world leader in the export of Earth observation satellites.”

Gaia will also use a ‘photographic’ sensor of unprecedented accuracy. The precision of the measurements taken by Gaia’s optical instruments will be extremely high. For instance, Gaia would be capable of picking out a strand of hair from a distance of 700 kilometres –the equivalent of the altitude of Earth observation satellites – by using its huge focal plane made up of 106 CCD detectors gathering 1 billion pixels. For its attitude control, the spacecraft will use a cold gas propulsion system with micro-thrusters, enabling it to remain perfectly stable and point with the required extreme accuracy.

Gaia will be located at one of the five Lagrangian points in the Sun-Earth system, at the L2 point. The Lagrangian points in our solar system are points of gravitational balance where a body such as a spacecraft orbits around the Sun at the same rate as Earth, thereby remaining in a fixed position relative to the Earth-Sun line. Located 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, the L2 point is vital for astronomy observation missions, which require high pointing stability.

About Astrium

Together, pioneering excellence

Astrium is the number one company in Europe for space technologies and the second in the world. It is the only global company that covers the full range of civil and defence space systems, equipment and services.

In 2012, Astrium had a turnover over €5.8 billion and 18,000 employees worldwide.

Its three business units are: Astrium Space Transportation, the European prime contractor for launchers, orbital systems and space exploration; Astrium Satellites, a leading provider of satellite system solutions, including spacecraft, ground segments, payloads and equipments; Astrium Services, the Space services partner for critical missions, providing comprehensive fixed and mobile solutions covering secure and commercial satcoms and networks, and bespoke geo-information services, worldwide.

Astrium is a wholly owned subsidiary of EADS, a global leader in aerospace, defence and related services. In 2012, the Group – comprising Airbus, Astrium, Cassidian and Eurocopter – generated revenues of €56.5 billion and employed a workforce of over 140,000.

Effective from January 1, 2014, Astrium will be integrated into Airbus Defence and Space together with Airbus Military and Cassidian.

Press contact

Jeremy Close Tel.: +44 (0)1 438

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