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July 2 failure destroyed three Glonass-M navigation satellites

Recent observations with the Hubble Space Telescope point to highly energetic mergers of binary neutron stars or neutron/black hole pairs as the source of mysterious, short-duration gamma-ray bursts. The findings, published online Aug. 3 in the journal Nature, address a mystery dating to the detection of powerful but unsourced gamma-ray flashes by U.S. Vela satellites placed in Earth orbit during the 1960s to document violations of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (signed by the U.S., the former USSR and the U.K.).

Country’s first Mars orbiter will launch later this year

MAVEN PREPARED: NASA’s next Mars spacecraft is at Kennedy Space Center, Fla., being prepared for its November launch aboard at Atlas V -401 rocket. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (Maven) spacecraft was flown to Kennedy on Aug. 2 from Buckley AFB, Colo., near Lockheed Martin’s facility in Littleton, where it was built.

Boeing’s 702 Small Platform electric satellite series has cleared its critical design review, permitting the first spacecraft to move into the assembly phase and remain on schedule for launch in the first quarter of 2015.

Deputy NASA Administrator Lori Garver, who has been a policy lightning rod at agency headquarters as the Obama administration worked to shift U.S. human spaceflight from a government-run operation to a commercial venture, has resigned to take a job as general manager of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA). Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot, the agency’s No. 3 manager and top-ranking civil servant, is a likely possibility to fill Garver’s post on an acting basis until the White House can nominate another political appointee.

Says can handle high pressure as well as the low temperatures