January 9th, 2023
Author: 
Once again, the Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA) advised the country’s public to take precautions related to launch of China’s Long March 7A from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan Island. That booster hurled three satellites, Shijian-23, Shiyan-22A and Shiyan-22B, into orbit from Wenchang on January 8, 2023, at 22:00 UTC (9 January, at 06:00 […]
Posted in 
An old, two-ton + spacecraft made its uncontrolled and fiery nose dive into the Earth’s atmosphere over the Bering Sea – off the coast of Alaska, near the Aleutian Islands. NASA and the US Department of Defense report that the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite, ERBS for short, reentered Earth’s atmosphere at 11:04 p.m. EST on […]
Red Planet researchers that have benefited by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter are advocating extending the spacecraft’s mission, a probe launched back in June 2003. The Mars Express team is soliciting the support of the global scientific community for a mission extension. That orbiter’s work in progress is to end in March of […]
Start Me Up is the first launch of Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket from the United Kingdom – the firm’s first mission outside the United States – departing Spaceport Cornwall at Cornwall Airport Newquay. The mission will be livestreamed on Virgin Orbit’s YouTube channel on Monday, January 9th The Start Me Up launch window officially opens […]
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter chalked up some new stats at Jezero Crater, flying above the Red Planet on its 38th flight. On this trek the micro-device flew on January 4, 2023, reaching a horizontal distance of roughly 364 feet and approximately 33 feet in altitude. Overall, the flight lasted 74.3 seconds. Here’s what happens when […]
NASA’s Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBS) spacecraft is nearing its uncontrolled death plunge into the atmosphere. Weighing in at nearly 2.5 tons (2,449 kilograms), NASA expects most of the satellite to “burn up” as it dives through the atmosphere. However, some components are expected to survive the reentry. The space agency’s risk of harm […]
A cash flow cascading from the heavens is a provisionary but promising harvest from asteroid mining. It’s already a “claim jumping” enterprise with assertions that billions, trillions, even quadrillions of dollars are looming in deep space, ripe for the picking and up for grabs. Several space mining groups, eager to dig into extraterrestrial excavation of […]
Work is progressing on scoping out a Moon-based radio telescope. A Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) on the lunar farside, currently funded by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, is a proposed nearly 1,150 feet (350 meter) in diameter reflecting telescope on the farside of the Moon. Cosmology duties As foreseen by Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay […]
Solar sailing has been a slow-motion affair, but the concept is meant to be just that! The idea is not to use classic and conventional “gas guzzling” propulsion. Rather, the notion is to employ ever-present and energetic solar photons to nudge you through space. Over time, this steady thrust from sunlight can move the spacecraft […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at Gale Crater is now performing Sol 3702 duties. Reports Lucy Thompson, a planetary geologist at the University of New Brunswick; Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada: “The team came into our first day of planning for 2023 to learn that all our holiday activities had executed as expected!” Thompson notes that, as […]
