March 20th, 2019
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NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2353 duties. Curiosity has made the drive to a rock called “Muir of Ord,” which has a cracked surface, reports Dawn Sumner, a planetary geologist at the University of California Davis in Davis, California. The network of cracks in this Martian rock slab called “Old […]
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This trio of images acquired by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft shows a wide shot and two close-ups of a region in asteroid Bennu’s northern hemisphere. The wide-angle image (left), obtained by the spacecraft’s MapCam camera, shows a 590-foot (180-meter) wide area with many rocks, including some large boulders, and a “pond” of regolith that is mostly […]
The Woodlands, Texas – Moon exploration via an ultra-small rover about the size of a printer. Planetary scientists at Brown University are collaborating with the New Jersey-based company, OrbitBeyond, to plan the scientific mission of a small-scale lunar rover. The rover was originally designed to compete for the Google Lunar X PRIZE by a team […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2349 tasks. “Curiosity is back to work after another hiatus due to a computer reset,” reports Scott Guzewich, an atmospheric scientist at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland “These sorts of resets do happen from time to time for operating spacecraft and we’re able to […]
Earth’s moon taunts. There is a growing chorus of experts that view this “eighth continent” as a near-by world of natural resources sitting there at the edge of Earth’s gravity well – ready for the picking. Visionary zeal aside, clarity is step one. Wanted is the right combination of vision, gobs of moon moola, make-it-happen […]
China’s lunar rover Yutu-2, or Jade Rabbit-2, has driven nearly 540 feet (163 meters) on the Moon’s farside. Controllers on Earth expect the machinery to work longer than its three-month design life. Both the rover and the lander of the Chang’e-4 lunar probe switched to a dormant mode on Wednesday as the extremely cold […]
The Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) has issued a new report: Spaceports of the World (1957–2018) Written by Thomas G. Roberts, program manager and research associate at the CSIS Aerospace Security Project, this report is accompanied by an interactive data repository. With the rate of space launches projected to grow exponentially in […]
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) have agreed to consider the possibility of collaborating on international space exploration. As a first step, JAXA and Toyota will accelerate an ongoing joint study of a two-person, pressurized Moon rover. Electric vehicle The pressurized rover would employ fuel cell electric vehicle technologies, having […]
Effective countermeasures are needed for astronauts to be able to live in space, on the Moon or on Mars for long periods of time in the future. Artificial Gravity as a countermeasure (AGBRESA) is a major long-term bed-rest study that will be carried out by the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; […]
The surface conditions on the Moon are clearly a harsh mistress of a world, with high doses of ultraviolet irradiation, wide temperature extremes and low pressure – then toss in high levels of ionizing radiation. A new report takes a look at microbial survival on lunar spacecraft – even suggesting where best to go […]
