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Liftoff: 360 view of final Ariane 5
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By European Space Agency
Video: 01:00:00 Watch the replay of the media briefing on Ariane 6 during which ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher outlines the progress achieved after the successful hot firing test on 23 November 2023 at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, as well as the upcoming steps in the Ariane 6 development test campaign, including ESA, CNES and ArianeGroup targeting the first launch of Ariane 6 between mid June and end of July 2024. Participants also includes Martin Sion, CEO, ArianeGroup ; Philippe Baptiste, President of CNES and Stéphane Israël, CEO, Arianespace.
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By European Space Agency
Video: 00:02:16 Scenes from the combined hot-fire test held for Ariane 6 on 23 November 2023. Teams on the ground went through a complete launch countdown followed by a seven-minute full firing of the core stage’s engine, as it would fire on a launch into space.
This video shows the Ariane 6 mobile building opening its doors, the building rolling away to leave the Ariane 6 test model on the launch pad and the seven minutes of firing.
On the launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana, the Ariane 6 test model fired of its Vulcain 2.1 main stage engine for seven minutes. This engine, on a real flight, would work with the boosters to propel the 62-m-tall rocket off Earth and into space. For the test the rocket stayed firmly on the ground, but its engine burnt through 150 000 kg of supercooled liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuel for the duration of a real flight. Not only was the core stage being tested, but all aspects of the launch pad and operations, too, from the delicate procedure of fuelling both the main engine and the orbital stage stacked above it to testing the thermal effects of a launch on mechanical and electrical components.
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By NASA
3 min read
NASA’s Dragonfly to Proceed with Final Mission Design Work
Artist’s Impression: Dragonfly Departs and heads off toward its next landing spot on Titan. Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben NASA’s Dragonfly mission has been authorized to proceed with work on final mission design and fabrication – known as Phase C – during fiscal year (FY) 2024. The agency is postponing formal confirmation of the mission (including its total cost and schedule) until mid-2024, following the release of the FY 2025 President’s Budget Request.
Earlier this year, Dragonfly – a mission to send a rotorcraft to explore Saturn’s moon Titan – passed all the success criteria of its Preliminary Design Review. The Dragonfly team conducted a re-plan of the mission based on expected funding available in FY 2024 and estimate a revised launch readiness date of July 2028. The Agency will officially assess the mission’s launch readiness date in mid-2024 at the Agency Program Management Council.
“The Dragonfly team has successfully overcome a number of technical and programmatic challenges in this daring endeavor to gather new science on Titan,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters in Washington. “I am proud of this team and their ability to keep all aspects of the mission moving toward confirmation.”
Dragonfly takes a novel approach to planetary exploration, for the first time employing a rotorcraft-lander to travel between and sample diverse sites on Titan. Dragonfly’s goal is to characterize the habitability of the moon’s environment, investigate the progression of prebiotic chemistry in an environment where carbon-rich material and liquid water may have mixed for an extended period, and even search for chemical indications of whether water-based or hydrocarbon-based life once existed on Titan.
Dragonfly is being designed and built under the direction of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, which manages the mission for NASA. The team includes key partners at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado; Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin company; NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California; NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia; Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania; Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, California; Honeybee Robotics in Pasadena, California; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; CNES (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales), the French space agency, in Paris, France; DLR (German Aerospace Center) in Cologne, Germany; and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) in Tokyo, Japan. Dragonfly is the fourth mission in NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the Science Mission Directorate.
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Last Updated Nov 28, 2023 Editor WILLIAM KEETER Related Terms
Dragonfly Planetary Science Planetary Science Division Saturn Science & Research Science Mission Directorate The Solar System View the full article
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By European Space Agency
Video: 00:01:25 Cinq, quatre, trois, deux, un. Allumage Vulcain! This is the moment Ariane 6’s main engine was sparked into life, and the entire main stage of the new rocket and the many parts of the launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana, practised for the full duration of a launch. Of course, as planned, the test model did not leave the ground.
Without its boosters, instead of piercing the clouds Ariane 6’ created its own on Earth: a clean byproduct of the Vulcain 2.1 engine’s oxygen and hydrogen propellants, which came together to send out impressive swirls of H2O.
After the almost 150 tonnes of propellant was burnt through and the clouds dispersed, the curtains closed on the successful rehearsal. The data from thousands of monitors around the rocket will be crunched in the coming weeks to learn all that’s needed for Ariane’s next, real, flight.
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By European Space Agency
Video: 00:08:32 On 23 November 2023, in preparation for its first flight, Ariane 6 went through its biggest test to date: a full-scale rehearsal that meant complex fuelling, a launch countdown and ignition of the core stage Vulcain 2.1 engine, followed by over seven minutes of engine burn that covered the entire core stage flight phase, just as would happen during a real launch into space.
The engine roared into action after a slight anomaly meant there was a suspenseful pause to the automated sequence, before the countdown was reset and began to tick again. The live feed continued until just after core stage operations were complete and the engine had burnt through all of its propellant.
For this rehearsal the boosters were not ignited, so the Ariane 6 test model stayed firmly on the launch pad at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. This was the longest ‘full-stack’ run performed to date for the rocket’s liquid propulsion module with a Vulcain 2.1 engine.
The Vulcain 2.1 engine burnt through almost 150 tonnes of propellant supplied from the Ariane 6 core stage tanks – liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen – supercooled to temperatures below -250°C.
With thousands of monitors situated around the launchpad, the data from this rehearsal will be analysed meticulously and used for Ariane 6’s next and first real flight.
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