February 18th, 2023
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NASA’s intrepid Ingenuity helicopter on Mars made its 43rd flight on February 16th. A selection of images from that flight shows the sky-high perspectives of the Jezero Crater, taken by the mini-chopper’s Navigation Camera mounted in the helicopter’s fuselage and pointed directly downward to track the […]
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Preparations are quickening to launch Russia’s Soyuz MS-23 in uncrewed mode. At the Baikonur cosmodrome the Soyuz MS-23 was transported to that 31st site of the launch complex. Roscosmos specialists are readying the ship for general assembly with the Soyuz-2.1a rocket. Russia’s RSC Energia hosted a Council of Chief Designers dedicated to the launch […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at Gale Crater is now performing Sol 3746 duties. Reports Lauren Edgar, a planetary geologist at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona: “The team was eagerly awaiting our downlink this morning to hear how the drill attempt from Sol 3742 went. The images came down and indeed there was […]
The amateur radio community continues to be in a buzz about those unidentified flying object shoot downs: one in Alaska, Canada, and over Lake Huron in the Midwest. In one case, the object blasted out of the sky over Canada, Yukon by a U.S. Air Force jet might have been an amateur radio pico […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now carrying out Sol 3744 tasks. The robot has been at work on the new drilling target, “Dinira.” Keri Bean, a rover planner deputy team lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, reports that scientists and engineers have been closely working together to adjust the drilling strategy to give them the […]
Progress is being reported on the Space Solar Power Initiative orchestrated by the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research (SSPIDR) program. MMA design of Louisville, Colorado has developed and delivered a flight deployment subsystem for the AFRL’s Arachne flight experiment. The Arachne experiment utilizes components known as “sandwich tiles” to perform […]
The amateur radio community is a buzz about those unidentified flying object shoot downs. In one case, the object blasted out of the sky over Canada, Yukon by a U.S. Air Force jet might have been an amateur radio pico balloon, specifically K9YO-15, launched from Independence Grove Forest Preserve in Libertyville, Illinois, north of Chicago. […]
A new crowdsource project is calling upon citizen scientists to search for life in the universe. The University of California’s UCLA SETI effort will give members of the public an opportunity to help scientists find signs of extraterrestrial intelligence by classifying radio signals that may have been emitted up to tens of thousands of light-years […]
Head of Senate Intelligence, Senator Marco Rubio, discusses recent classified briefing on the downing events that have caught public and military attention. The lawmaker calls for access by scientists to the collected data, information that should be cross-referenced and made public. Meanwhile, take a read of my Scientific American story, noting the new dedicated […]
China’s future space station plans include sending two piloted spacecraft and one or two cargo spacecraft into space every year. This plan will be followed after the full completion of the country’s space station construction achieved in late 2022. A statement from the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) indicates that the country’s space station project […]
