October 15th, 2018
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Next July’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing in July 1969 — a venture that cost U.S. taxpayers $25 billion in then-year dollars — is now a four-coin program: a curved $5 gold coin, a curved $1 silver coin, a curved half-dollar clad coin, and a curved 5 ounce […]
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Following almost a month of not relaying imagery, NASA’s Curiosity rover is back on line, delivering a limited number of photos from Vera Rubin Ridge. The robot is now in Sol 2200. Due to a rover glitch no imagery had been relayed back to Earth since Sol 2172 on September 15th. As of this posting, […]
Space war games are being played out by the Air Force Space Command by way of the 12th Schriever Wargame at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. Initiated on October 11, 2018, the Schriever Wargame scenario, set in the year 2028, will explore critical space issues and investigate the integration activities of multiple agencies associated with […]
The hush-hush mission of a U.S. Air Force X-37B mini-space plane has winged past 400 days of flight. This mission – tagged as Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV-5) — was rocketed into Earth orbit on September 7, 2017 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. […]
Numerous boulders, many rocks, no dust – that’s the report from operators of the MASCOT lander deployed from its mother probe, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa2 mission to the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu. MASCOT is space shorthand for Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout. Never before in the history of space has a body of the Solar […]
Originally, the first uncrewed mission of the combined Space Launch System (SLS)/Orion system known as Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1) had a launch readiness date of December 2017, The first crewed mission of the system known as Exploration Mission-2 (EM-2) was projected to launch in mid-2021. Launch slips However, a new NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) […]
A new report issued today has recommended that NASA should support research on a broader range of biosignatures and environments, and incorporate the field of astrobiology into all stages of future exploratory missions. “An Astrobiology Strategy for the Search for Life in the Universe” is a Congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, […]
NASA’s Curiosity rover is now in Sol 2196. Due to a rover glitch – still being worked on by engineers – no images have been relayed back to Earth since Sol 2172 on September 15th – nearly a month. “As Curiosity continues to mend, I’ve been looking forward to our next drill sample of […]
Just how lonely are we in the universe…or how crowded is it? Astrobiology, the study of the origins of life in the universe and the search for life on other worlds, is a highly interdisciplinary quest. It’s a rapidly changing field at the intersection of biology, chemistry, geology, planetary science, and physics. Recent scientific advances […]
The hardest thing about living on Mars… is us. National Geographic’s Mars (Season 2) starts on November 12th. Go to this new video trailer at: https://youtu.be/dMkZtgJxmvU
