Science News

Blue Origin Lands Another Reusable Rocket

Image Credit: Blue Origin

The private spaceflight company founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has landed another reusable rocket after firing it off into space.

This latest successful landing of a reusable rocket by the company marks its third success in launching a rocket into space and safely bringing it back down to Earth. The rocket, known as the New Shepard, was launched out of the company’s test site located in West Texas. It touched back down on Earth at 11:18 a.m. (EST) on April 2, 2016.

Bezos, the billionaire founder of the retail empire that is Amazon, referred to the rocket’s booster assisted landing as “perfect” in a tweet from his confirmed Twitter account.

A day prior, on April 1, Bezos noted that his private spaceflight company would “have drone cameras in the air” that would “hopefully” provide them with some “good aerial footage to share.”

While the test launch and landing might seem like just another day in the world of Blue Origin and their rival SpaceX, the test actually marks the successful application of a “more efficient RCS algorithm” implemented by the team at Blue Origin. Notably, the test proved to be a success, marking what Bezos referred to as a big win for the company.

Earlier today, Bezos noted that the company would be sharing video from the successful mission just as soon as they’ve managed to process it.

The company’s first successful vertical landing was made on November 23, 2015.

While the latest mission was unmanned, the Crew Capsule launched held a couple of science experiments. The first of which, the Collisions in Dust Experiment, was conjured by a team of University of Central Florida researchers. It entails a marble dropping on dust, which is intended to help researchers study early solar system collisions and their impact on particles.

Joshua Colwell, the study’s principal investigator and a professor of physics at UCF, was quoted by the Orlando Sentinel as having explained that on our planet, “things just stick together” whereas “we’re less certain” as to what happens when gravity is not a factor.

On the Earth things just stick together […] Without gravity we’re less certain.

The other experiment, known as the Box of Rocks, is literally a box full of rocks that’s intended to help researchers study the movements of rocks in a weightless environment. It was whipped up by a group of researchers at the Southwest Research Institute with the goal of furthering our understanding of the movements of rocky soil on small asteroids.

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