India to Launch Single PSLV Rocket Carrying World Record 104 Payloads, Also Advancing Public and Private Missions to the Moon

India Space Research Organization (ISRO) is set to launch PSLV-C37 with primary passenger Cartosat 2D on February 14 from Satish Dhawan Space Center at Sriharikota, a barrier island off the Bay of Bengal in the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh. Mainstay of India national and commercial launch sectors, PSLV is 44 meters tall with 2.8-m diameter and mass of 320,000 kg. ISRO Chairman A. S. Kiran Kumar announced it was recovering from the foreign payload customers on this 37th launch of PSLV half the cost of launching the latest in its own CartoSat series of Earth-imaging satellites for national cartographic and other geographical information system applications. The USA contingent of secondary payloads is represented by 88 Dove CubeSats being launched for Planet. There are also payloads from Germany, Israel, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UAE. The government’s Union Cabinet has declared an average cost of US$31M for production, program management and launch of the 15 PSLV rockets it plans to fly 2017-2020. Hoping to break another record altogether India GLXP competitor Team Indus is vying to become the first company to independently land on the Moon. The Bangalore-based operation is advancing the winning experiment of its Lab2Moon competition and has announced a new Moonshot Wheels initiative in cooperation with Ratan Tata to take science to rural India. The ISRO Chandrayaan-2 lunar lander is being prepared for launch aboard the heavy-lift GSLV in 2017-18. (Image Credit: ISRO, Team Indus, GLXP)

MONDAY

Feb 13 — Cornell University, Ithaca NY: Lecture: The Architecture of Planetary Systems Around the Most Common Stars; Brendan Bowler, Hubble Fellow from University of Texas at Austin , 12:15.

Feb 13-14 — ESA, Rome, Italy: 3rd ESA International Security Symposium (ISS).

ISS Expedition 50 Looks Forward to Dragon CRS-10, EVAs, CubeSat Deployments

Six-member Expedition 50 crew of Commander Shane Kimbrough and Flight Engineers Andrey Borisenko, Sergey Ryzhikov, Thomas Pesquet, Peggy Whitson and Oleg Novitskiy are circling the Earth 16 times a day at 8 km per second with ~200 experiments ongoing at any given time. During their mission, they are scheduled to perform U.S. EVAs 40 & 41, deploy CubeSats and oversee the rendezvous / departures of Progress 66P, Cygnus OA-7 and Dragon CRS-10. SpaceX CRS-10 resupply is set to take off February 18 from the newly modified Launch Complex 39A at NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida. LC-39 is also intended to support future SLS and Human missions. SpaceX is working to launch every 2-3 weeks, finish repairs on Cape Canaveral launch pad, complete construction of 4th launch site in Texas, debut Falcon Heavy this year, start carrying Astronauts to ISS late 2018 and build the Interplanetary Transport System for Solar System settlement. The other Human-rated Space Lab in LEO, Tiangong-2, may see its second crew before the end of the year, and is planned to receive Tianzhou-1 cargo ship in April for 305-day mission to test technologies related to cargo transport system, propellant re-supply, rapid rendezvous and docking. (Image Credit: NASA, SpaceX)

Feb 13 — Apollo Asteroid 2017 BT93:

Continued from…

Oct 15 – Sep 4, 2017 — Peabody Essex Museum, Salem MA: Lunar Attraction Exhibit; featuring 60 Apollo memorabilia, paintings, sculptures, photographs, books, movies, jewelry that illustrate our profound connection to the Moon.

Feb 12-17 — Swiss Institute for Particle Physics (CHIPP), Swiss Academy of Sciences, Sorenberg, Switzerland: Swiss Institute for Particle Physics (CHIPP) Winter School of Particle Physics.

Feb 12-18 — University of KwaZulu-Natal, Astrophysics and Cosmology Research Unit, National Institute for Theoretical Physics, National Research Foundation, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa: Cosmology on Safari 2017.

TUESDAY

Feb 14 — ISRO, Launch PSLV-C37 / Cartosat 2D & Multi-payload, Satish Dhawan Space Center, Sriharikota, India: ISRO 37th Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle to launch 104 satellites setting world record; 101 payloads for international customers from Israel, Kazakhstan, Netherlands, Switzerland, USA; and 3 from India – Cartosat 2D, INS-IA and INS-1B.

Feb 14 — Arianespace, Launch Ariane 5 / Intelsat 32e / Sky Brasil 1 & Telkom 3S, Kourou, French Guiana: Arianespace Ariane 5 ECA rocket, designated VA235, to launch Intelsat 32e / Sky Brasil 1 and Telkom 3S communications satellites.

Feb 14 — Team Indus, Bengaluru, India: Winner Announced for Lab2Moon experiment allowing selected project to fly on GLXP Team Indus craft to Moon surface 2017; project should fit inside 330-ml can, weigh less than 250 grams & ‘catalyze the evolution of Humankind as a sustainable Multi-Planetary Species.’