Sunday Space Links
Apr. 14th, 2019 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nathanielbuildsatesseractSpaceX: Falcon Heavy launches with Arabsat 6a, recovering all three of the launch vehicle's cores and the payload fairing. At this point, Falcon Heavy really does appear to be fully operational. Two more launches are tentatively planned this year.
NASA: Two cubesats demonstrated the viability of optical data links between orbiting spacecraft by shining the laser on one satellite towards an infrared detector on the other. Neither instrument was designed for this purpose, but still managed to pick up the signal over a 2400 km distance.
SpaceIL: The privately-operated Beresheet lander failed in its attempt to land on the Lunar surface. It would appear that a combination of propulsion and telecommunications issues during the final descent compounded to result in an impact at about a kilometer per second, which is...non-trivial. Beresheet was nevertheless a very impressive first deep space flight.
ESO: If by some chance you managed to miss this story, astronomers used a network of multiple observatories on four continents to image the supermassive black hole at the galactic core of M87:
