ESA Sponsored Tethers and Galaxy Gazing

Scheduled to fly later this month is a European Space Agency (ESA) student project that will find a space tether performing a capsule deorbit maneuver. Parts of Africa, the Middle East, South America (below 55 degrees S), Antarctic Peninsula (above 82 degrees South), Eastern Russia and Western Alaska (above 170 degrees East) should find the tether visible.


Known as YES2 (Young Engineers’ Satellite 2), the launch will occur at the Baikonur center via a Soyuz rocket on September 14th. A small company in Holland, Delta-Utec, was significantly involved in this project as the company has worked on maturing tether technology. Rather than use a rocket engine, space is exploited by using a massive slingshot, a 30 km tether, to accurately deliver a small capsule from space to the Earth. The capsule, known as Fotino, is 40 cm in diameter and weighs only 6 kg and is planned to land on the steppes of Kazakhstan on September 25th. The tether, manufactured using Dyneema, is only 5 kg in weight and will become the longest man made structure ever placed in space.



The best way to actually obtain a feel for this amazing experiment is to watch a short video at the YES2 website, a video that is also available for viewing on YouTube. The URL is https://www.yes2.info/ and you can find the video approximately two-thirds of the way down this page. Worth the time to watch. YES2 was given the green light for launch by the ESA last June after five years of design and development work and preparation of the flight model at the European Space Research and Technology Center (ESTEC) and other locations.






Also before the close of this year, the assembly of the ESA’s far-infrared space observatory will be completed. This latest mission is to study the formation and evolution of stars and galaxies. The Herschel mission is equipped with the largest telescope ever launched into space (3.5m diameter). Astronomers will have the best capability ever presented to explore the universe at far infrared and sub-millimeter wavelengths. Measuring the light at these wavelengths, scientists can then see into the “cold” universe to observe star forming regions, galactic centers and planetary systems. The final integration of the payload module, cryostat, service module, telescope and solar arrays will be completed in the next few months. The spacecraft will be launched via an Ariane 5 ECA Rocket toward the end of July in 2008.