February 1st, 2023
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Years ago I wrote a story for AIAA’s Aerospace America magazine. In my view, the reasons and revelations that haunt me to this day about the tragedy are far from being revealed. I covered the loss of the crew for Space.com at the time, reporting on the investigation from my perspective as I attended a […]
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NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at Gale Crater is wheeling about finding and photographing some interesting features, including “foreign stones,” reports Ashley Stroupe, a mission operations engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A recent photo taken by the robot shows a rock about which Mars researchers are intrigued. The rock Curiosity parked in front of is […]
Taking a whiz on Mars, it’s a must-do for future Red Planet crews. But doing so turns out to be good for on-the-spot cultivation of food to help sustain the extraterrestrial experience. A new study suggests the possibility of using a blend of astronaut urine and Mars regolith to grow cyanobacterium called Synechococcus nidulans. “We […]
The coming year will surely see a persistence of debate, discussion and disbelief regarding anonymous airborne occurrences. Today they are branded as Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP). But perhaps UAP is an off-shoot of “flying saucers” from afar, and once identified will satisfy those hungry for a governmental confession that over the decades Unidentified Flying Objects […]
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter that’s overflying Jezero Crater on behalf of the space agency’s Perseverance rover produced several color images during its 41st flight on January 27th. The mini-chopper acquired these images using its high-resolution color camera, mounted in the helicopter’s fuselage and pointed approximately 22 degrees below […]
For more than six decades of reporting on and assessing global space activities I have amassed loads of paper, reports/documents, books, photos, and countless tape recordings of space experts (some now long-gone) – never mind years of swag that I have accumulated. This combined “collected works” now resides within a home office, but for […]
New Imagery: Flight 41 from Ingenuity Mars Helicopter: NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter acquired these images using its navigation camera mounted in the helicopter’s fuselage and pointed directly downward to track the ground during flight. This select set of Images were acquired on Jan. 27, 2023: Pre-flight: 41 Stats via NASA/JPL-Caltech Flight date: No […]
Serving as the exploration zone for NASA’s Perseverance rover is Jezero Crater. It turns out to be a site for swirls of dust…so much so that one device has been damaged on the rover by two passing dust devils. The rover’s Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer is known as MEDA. It produces weather measurements such […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at Gale Crater is now performing Sol 3724 duties. Susanne Schwenzer, a planetary geologist at The Open University; Milton Keynes, U.K., reports that recent planning started with a discussion where the robot should drive next. Triple junction “We had spotted features in the distance, including a triple junction of rock […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at Gale Crater is now performing Sol 3722 duties. Despite giving it the “old college try,” Curiosity’s attempt to drill into the Marker Band at the “Encanto” site did not reach sampling depth, reports Sharon Wilson, a planetary geologist at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. “Because other rocks around […]
