July 20th, 2023
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Wait a minute – here we go again! Next week, the House Oversight Committee’s National Security Subcommittee in Congress will hold a hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAP. The July 26 hearing is titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency.” Firsthand accounts According to a statement the […]
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Practice makes perfect, as they say. NASA’s first mission to collect a sample from an asteroid — Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) – is zipping its way back to Earth. OSIRIS-REx collected specimens of asteroid Bennu in October 2020. Drop zone Loaded with those precious collectibles, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will […]
Immersive Mars Issue of Tech Briefs: Mars: Past, Present, Future; NASA’s New, Resilient Approach to Moon, Mars Exploration; Robotic Exploration of Caves on Mars; Developing High–Fidelity Martian Regolith Simulants; Astronaut Smart Glove for Mars EVA Spacesuits; Earthly Twin Offers Test Bed for NASA’s Peserverance Mars Rover; and 3D–Printed Mars Habitat Simulated on […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at Gale Crater has just begun performing Sol 3893 tasks. A recent weekend drive successfully brought the robot some 90 feet (28 meters), bringing it closer to the “crater cluster,” a series of small craters grouped close together, reports Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, a planetary geologist at the University of New Brunswick; Fredericton, […]
It is an early, up-front message from 20th century Apollo moonwalkers. The Moon is one big dust bowl. It can jam up machines. It is abrasive to delicate science gear, and adheres to space suits. It’s also a hazard to humans breathing in the stuff within the comfy confines of a lunar habitat after a […]
Russia’s Luna-25 robotic Moon lander continues to make preparations for its launch from the Vostochny cosmodrome. Recently, electrical and other spacecraft checkouts were carried out (from July 12 to July 16) with Russia’s Roscosmos adding that “the results are positive and without any comments!” Liftoff of Luna-25 by a Soyuz-2.1b rocket with a Fregat […]
The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) on Monday issued an announcement to solicit proposals for payloads to be carried by the country’s human Moon mission set to take place in 2030. According to the CMSA, the lunar lander will carry scientific payloads solicited from research institutions, universities and high-tech enterprises. Investigative fields would include lunar […]
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 […]
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 […]
