September 29th, 2020
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The launch of Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket is slated to occur later this week, delivering NASA science investigations, supplies and equipment to the International Space Station. One payload: 60 pills to test how they cope with the rigors of space radiation and microgravity. The University of Adelaide is investigating how pharmaceutical tablet formulations […]
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Scientists diving back into decades-old data collected by NASA’s Pioneer Venus spacecraft mission have found evidence for phosophine in the clouds of Venus – considered a potential biosignature for life. Pioneer Venus went into orbit around Venus in December 1978. The spacecraft made a destructive plunge into the planet’s atmosphere on October 8, 1992. Re-examine […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2897 tasks. Nearly a month ago the rover team started taking Remote Micro-Imager (RMI) telescope images to study the stratigraphy of some sedimentary benches over 300 – 650 feet (100-200 meters) distant from the robot’s current location. Reports Roger Wiens, a geochemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2896 duties. Claire Newman, Atmospheric Scientist at Aeolis Research in Pasadena, California, reports that the rover regularly looks at the Martian atmosphere, making use of its Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument using a “Passive Sky” observation. “Among other things, this allows us to measure the amount of […]
How intense and hazardous to humans is cosmic radiation on the Moon? To be sure, any long-term stays on the Moon will expose astronauts’ bodies to high doses of radiation. An instrument provided by Germany onboard China’s Chang’e-4 farside lander has measured space radiation in temporal resolution for the first time on the lunar […]
A high-tech pioneer for NASA’s Gateway — the deep space outpost that’s part of the Artemis return-to-the-moon agenda — is being readied for departure early next year. NASA’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment – mercifully called CAPSTONE in space agency shorthand — is destined to be the first spacecraft to function […]
The absence of surface water doesn’t preclude the potential for life elsewhere on a rocky object, like deep in the subsurface biosphere – be it at Mars or Earth’s Moon. New research analyzes the “thickness” of subsurface regions on those worlds, places where water and life might exist in principle and whether the […]
China’s Chang’e-4 lander and the well-wheeled rover have been switched to dormant mode within the Von Kármán crater in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the farside of the Moon. The farside mission landed on January 3, 2019. According to the Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center of the China National Space Administration the […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is presently performing Sol 2892 tasks. Susanne Schwenzer, a planetary geologist at The Open University; Milton Keynes, U.K., reports that Mars researchers are continuing to finish recent drilling activities. They are taking a look at the instrument inlets on top of the rover deck to make sure no sample is […]
New space missions to hellish Venus have repeatedly gotten the cold shoulder over the years, but exploring that cloud-veiled globe now appears to be receiving a renewed lease on life, quite literally. An international team of researchers, led by Jane Greaves of Cardiff University, announced September 14 the detection of a rare molecule – phosphine […]
