The Asteroid/Comet Connection's
daily news journal about
asteroids, comets, and meteors

Today's issue status: done, updated

• News briefs – mission technologies + bits & pieces
• Risk monitoring – no news

Cover: Jim Gamble's infrared all-sky fisheye camera caught this sunset meteor flickering brightly over his home in El Paso, Texas at 8:38pm Sunday, flying from just east of north toward the south-southwest (north is up and east is left). He has posted the QuickTime 789Kb MOV video, which is black and white with false coloring added to enhance detail.

Mission technologies:  There are articles from yesterday at Nature and New Scientist about solar sailing (see recent news thread, “Bits & pieces”). Nature has comments from Wolfgang Seboldt, “who led the European Space Agency's solar sail project until [put] on hold in spring this year.” Why all of this could be important to minor object science can be seen for example in papers such as “Solar Sails at Asteroids: Close Proximity Operations for Scientific Missions” (2000), and one Seboldt co-authored, “Multiple rendezvous and sample return missions to near-Earth objects using solar sailcraft” (2003).
Update:  The Planetary Society has a news item dated 11 August about progress toward launching its Cosmos 1 “to perform the first controlled solar sail flight.”

ESA has a news item from yesterday about interplanetary networking demonstrations involving ESA's Mars Express orbiter and NASA surface rovers. And SpaceRef.com posted a news release today from the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) saying that “Data communications protocols developed by CCSDS now fly on over 300 international missions, including every spacecraft associated with the Mars mission.”

Bits & pieces:  Caltech has a news release from yesterday, “Hints on Photographing the Perseid Meteor Shower the Night of Wednesday, August 11.”

Florida Today has an article today about how a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission would proceed using the Dextre robot. An item by Keith Cowing of NASA Watch from yesterday indicates that how to proceed with a repair mission actually remains much more muddled than has been reported by so many news outlets this week.

Risk monitoring 11 August

There is no news to report today about risk monitoring.