Wyoming Space Grant flew a Stratostar balloon mission 15 October 2019; the mission launched from Prexy’s Pasture in Laramie and landed near Hereford, Colorado after achieving an peak altitude of 28.6 km.
Wyoming Space Grant is also searching for University of Wyoming students interested in ballooning to apply to its 2020 LIFT Project. The deadline is 31 October 2019.
Civil Air Patrol and the US Air Force continue to search for the pilot of a missing Cessna 172, N6483B, lost en route to Oakes, North Dakota after departure from Aberdeen Regional Airport at about 10 October 2019 0315 UT, just before a blizzard began to cross the plains. Weather and crop cover has hampered the response effort.
Also in the wake of the weather, a servicemember assigned to Ellsworth Air Force Base was found dead near their off-base residence, 14 October 2019.
REGIONAL NEWS
04 Oct 2019 – Jim Bridenstein visit to the University of North Dakota in September featured on Space.com
04 Oct 2019 – Michelle Brekke (Boeing CST) serves as Grand Marshall of University of Minnesota homecoming
07 Oct 2019 – Bennett Bartel (Carthage College) featured by WiSGC
08 Oct 2019 – Saskatchewan engineer Doug Campbell ends 6 days underwater
08 Oct 2019 – Nobel Prize in Physics awarded jointly to Manitoba-born James Peebles OM, the originator of modern physical cosmology, elucidating topics like the Cosmic Microwave Background, the kinematics of galaxies, and the expansion of the universe, and to Swiss astrophysicists Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, for the discovery of exoplanet 51 Pegasi b in October 1995, using the ELODIE spectrograph on the 1.93m telescope at the Haute-Provence Observatory.
09 Oct 2019 – Breanna Keith (Bemidji State) featured by MnSGC
09 Oct 2019 – University of Minnesota’s SmallSat program (SOCRATES, EXACT) featured by MnSGC
SOCRATES will orbit on 2 Nov 2019 with Cygnus NG-12
ORBITAL EVENTS
04 Oct 2019 1850 – Taiyuan CZ-4C launch
Gaofen-10 Earth observation satellite
06 Oct 2019 – EVA214 – P6 battery swap
08 Oct 2019 1017 – Baikonur Proton-M launch:
Northrop Grumman MEV-1 on-orbit service drone,
Eutelsat 5 West B commsat
FURTHER NEWS
04 Oct 2019 – Blue Origin will not fly passengers until 2020
07 Oct 2019 ~ 20 new moons of Saturn announced
10 Oct 2019 – Bridenstein-Musk summit: Crew Dragon DM-2 postponed to Q1 2020
CBC Saskatchewan featured Doug Campbell, a biomedical engineer and astronaut candidate, whose latest achievement is spending an unusual 6-day stay at Jules’ Undersea Lodge in the waters off Key Largo, Florida. Isolation training is a feather in the cap for Campbell, who has not yet been selected by any space agency for official duties, though, in a new age of private astronautics, government training may no longer be necessary.
On 30 September 2019, The US Geological Survey released new samples of Landsat data, leading up to Landsat Collection 2, a global multi-instrument survey of Planet Earth. Data processing will continue all through next year and is expected to be fully available in 2021.
If you’d like to try your own hand at processing Earth Observation Satellite data, you can take a look at the sample datasets at the USGS Landsat website.
