January 13th, 2022
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NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at Gale Crater is now performing Sol 3355 duties. Ashley Stroupe, a mission operations engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reports that Curiosity has been doing a little bit of everything: some contact science, some targeted science, and a little driving. The robot snagged a view of the small ledge in […]
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There are key advantages of a radio telescope in lunar orbit, or on the surface of the lunar farside, for conducting the search for extraterrestrial intelligence – to give an ear for technosignatures from other starfolk. A new research paper on the topic has been led by Berkeley SETI undergraduate intern Eric Michaud. Breakthrough […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at Gale Crater is now performing Sol 3353 duties. “On the second sol of the weekend plan, Curiosity took an unexpected break,” reports Michelle Minitti, a planetary geologist at Framework in Silver Spring, Maryland. The robot stopped its arm motion on the way to deploying the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) […]
A new report from NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) flags a number of issues regarding the space agency’s astronaut corps. The processes NASA uses to size, train, and assign astronauts to specific missions are primarily calibrated toward meeting the current needs of the International Space Station. “However, the astronaut corps is projected to fall […]
The U.S. Air Force’s robotic space drone, the X-37B, has flown more than 600 days circuiting the Earth. This craft is labeled Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV-6), also called USSF-7 for the U.S. Space Force, and was launched on May 17, 2020 by an Atlas-V 501 booster. As for the vehicle’s primary agenda that remains classified, […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at Gale Crater is now performing Sol 3351 tasks. Recent imagery shows the robot’s surroundings:
China’s Chang’e-5 lunar lander has provided the first on-location detection of water on the Moon. The finding was published in Science Advances on January 7, written by a joint research team led by Lin Yangting and Lin Honglei from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGGCAS). Data acquired […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at Gale Crater is now performing Sol 3349 duties. Lucy Thompson, a planetary geologist at University of New Brunswick; Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, reports another successful drive on Mars by the robot. The drive resulted in a dusty bedrock workspace with nodules and small raised ridges in front of the rover, […]
NASA’s Ingenuity rotorcraft is slated to take place no earlier than today, Friday, January 7. Martin Cacan, Ingenuity Pilot at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, reports the scout vehicle will fly out of the South Séítah basin, across the dividing ridge, and up onto the main plateau. The precise landing target for Flight 19 is […]
China has tested a key step in completing its space station by the end of this year. A mechanical arm of China’s Tianhe core module shifted the Tianzhou-2 cargo spacecraft, then re-docked and locked the hardware to the core cabin. The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said early Thursday morning that the experiment will be […]
