August 17th, 2017
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NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now busy at work during Sol 1789. Christopher Edwards, a planetary geologist from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona reports: “After completing a successful drive back to the strategic route to continue up the Vera Rubin Ridge, we arrived at a workspace filled with sand and a lone rock outcrop […]
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Jeff Bezos, the billionaire mogul behind Amazon.com and the head of his Blue Origin rocket group, is passionate about space exploration as well as its historical roots. Bezos recently told his story regarding dredging up Apollo remembrances – hardware resting three-miles deep in Atlantic Ocean waters. For more information on Bezos and his salvaging of […]
Continuously occupied since early November 2000, the International Space Station (ISS) is being viewed as an archaeological site. The orbiting complex is eyed by The International Space Station Archaeological Project (ISSAP) as the first large-scale space archaeology project. Boldly going where no archaeologists have gone before are scholars Justin Walsh of Chapman University in Orange, […]
Now in Sol 1787, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is commissioned to do less driving, more science. That’s the word from Michael Battalio, an atmospheric scientist from Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. Driving issue At the start of rover operations in the last day, it was discovered that a recent drive faulted prematurely […]
How best to robotically tow back to Earth soil and rock samples of Mars is now in vigorous discussion. The enterprise calls to mind part of the lyrics from a Stevie Wonder classic: “Here I am baby. Oh, you’ve got the future in your hand. Signed, sealed, delivered, I’m yours.” NASA’s Mars 2020 […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now in Sol 1787, driving over last weekend over MSL drove over 105 feet (32 meters) to a sandy area with a few bedrock blocks. However, the robot’s Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) has suffered an anomaly, reports Ken Herkenhoff, a planetary geologist and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in […]
The Barringer, or Meteor Crater in Arizona is arguably the world’s best preserved and most dramatic looking impact crater. Because of its similarity to lunar terrain, NASA used the crater during the Apollo era as a site for testing equipment that would be used on the lunar surface and for training astronaut crews. Expanded […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 1786 science tasks. A new traverse map through Sol 1785 has been issued showing the robot’s drive and current location. Numbering of the dots along the line indicate the sol number of each drive. North is up. The scale bar is 1 kilometer (~0.62 mile). […]
Astrobotic and United Launch Alliance (ULA) released today an end to end mission video for Astrobotic’s projected flight to the Moon during the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 2019. Astrobotic Technology Inc. is a lunar logistics company that delivers payloads to the Moon for companies, governments, universities, non-profits, and individuals. The Peregrine Lunar Lander […]
One of the largest of the near-Earth asteroids, will approach close to Earth at the end of August, and will shoot safely by our world on September 1. “Although many known asteroids have passed by closer than this, all of them were smaller asteroids. Florence is the largest asteroid to pass this close to […]
