June 26th, 2023
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Virgin Galactic is GO for launch. Departing Spaceport America in New Mexico, the target data for the Galactic 01 scientific research mission is June 29. The three-person crew from the Italian Air Force and National Research Council of Italy will be onboard VSS Unity for a 90-minute suborbital flight, carrying out a series of in-cabin […]
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Five days without downlink from Mars – What’s going on? Video commentator, Mars Guy, notes that NASA’s Perseverance rover rolling about at Jezero Crater sends back a daily stream of images from its many cameras. Those images are quickly posted to a NASA public website. But on June 16th, the stream […]
India is readying its Chandrayaan-3 Moon lander, reportedly eyeing a launch in mid-July. The lunar lander is equipped with scientific payloads and a small rover, geared to conduct studies of the lunar surface in the southern lunar hemisphere. This upcoming mission is similar to Chandrayaan-2 which failed in 2019 when the program’s Vikram lander […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at Gale crater is now performing Sol 3867 duties. In a fresh plan, the robot completed a drive taking it near, or just past the border of a new quad, reports Scott VanBommel, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. “A quad, or quadrangle, is an […]
The recent meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has produced a number of space-related initiatives. In a White House statement, the two “set a course to reach new frontiers across all sectors of space cooperation.” To that end, India has inked the growing list of countries signing the U.S.-led […]
Perhaps there’s a new sidebar to looking for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (UAP)? That topic keeps me up and night, armed with my telescopes, binoculars and other “all seeing” instruments. UAP, Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), crashed or still in the air flying saucers, alien visits…on and on! This morning, in my daytime off-hours of sky […]
In the early “space race” days of the former Soviet Union and America there was an ongoing contest to claim space firsts. One major milestone was achieved on June 13, 1963. Sitting in her Vostok-6 spacecraft, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to travel into Earth orbit. In just under three days, Tereshkova’s […]
Mining the Moon is near at hand. What better group to assess what’s ripe for the picking on that desolate, cratered world than the U.S. Geological Survey. The name says it all. When it comes to economic extraction and sustainable management of the Moon’s resources, the USGS has turned its attention skyward to understand the […]
That missing submersible geared to visit the final resting spot for the Titanic has several links to space exploration and public space travel. Onboard the tourist submarine is Hamish Harding who flew on Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard rocketship in June 2022. Harding also joined Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin to the South Pole in […]
A round of new papers has taken a sharp look at what’s now termed Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAP. For some, UAP is a new three-letter term for Unidentified Flying Objects or UFOs – a flying saucer stand-in that conquers up crashed or captured craft of extraterrestrial origin, even recovered pilots or passengers from […]
