July 17th, 2023
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NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter has relayed some new imagery, acquired on July 14. A black and white image was taken by the mini-chopper’s Navigation Camera mounted in the helicopter’s fuselage and pointed directly downward to track the ground during flight. The color image was produced by Ingenuity’s high-resolution color camera mounted in the helicopter’s fuselage […]
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India’s Moon-bound Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander/rover is toting a NASA laser retroreflector array. In NASA acronym-land, better known as an LRA. The device, mounted atop the lander, is from the LRA project based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Daniel Cremons and Xiaoli Sun are leading the LRA project for the Chandrayaan-3 lander. They are also […]
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust – a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist who wrote the novel In Search of Lost Time. A new line of evidence points to the presence of a more intricate organic geochemical cycle on Mars than […]
China’s Landspace booster is one signal of the rise of Chinese liquid-fueled commercial rockets. From the Dongfang Hour: “Landspace achieved a groundbreaking success on July 12, 2023 with the first orbital launch of a methalox rocket worldwide: the Zhuque-2.” “This new rocket also triples the payload capacity of the largest Chinese commercial rocket to date, […]
Switzerland startup, the Astrostrom company, has designed a Greater Earth Lunar Power Station, or GE⊕-LPS for short. The Greater Earth Lunar Power Station (GE⊕-LPS) is a habitable space station in lunar orbit that is designed to provide solar energy for lunar operations. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), the study envisages a solar power […]
China’s LandSpace group launched its liquid oxygen and liquid methane-powered booster from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, Gansu Province, China, on July 12. Commenting on the launch that placed it successfully into orbit, Dai Zheng, deputy chief designer and deputy commander of the Zhuque-2 carrier rocket mission, told GLOBALink/China Central Television (CCTV): “Liquid oxygen methane […]
The China Manned Space Agency released Wednesday a preliminary plan for landing a Chinese crew on the Moon before 2030. The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) noted use of two carrier rockets to transfer a Moon lander and a crewed spacecraft into lunar orbit. The two would then rendezvous and dock with each other. Crew […]
French researchers are ready to begin studies of lunar samples retrieved by China’s Chang’e-5 mission, rocketed back from the Moon to Earth in December 2020. The lunar samples are from the 1,700 grams returned to Earth from the Statio Tianchuan in the northeastern Oceanus Procellarum on the near side of the Moon. Two containers of […]
Russia’s Luna-25 robotic Moon lander is at the Vostochny cosmodrome in Amur Oblast, Russia. The craft will be headed for the south pole of the Moon, reportedly targeted for launch on August 11, 2023. At the cosmodrome, Luna-25 will undergo pre-flight checkout and undergo ground tests, and then fitted to a Fregat upper stage and […]
As NASA revs up its plan to “re-boot” the Moon through the Artemis program, a long-term aim calls for explorers to hunker down thanks to “sustainable” infrastructure on the lunar landscape. The key to doing so is use of on-the-spot lunar resources, known in NASAese as in-situ resources utilization, or ISRU for short. Cutting the […]
