November 11th, 2020
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A telescope is on tap for the Moon’s Schroter’s Valley and aims to capture images of the Milky Way Galaxy Center from the lunar surface. The International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA Hawaii) has contracted Intuitive Machines of Houston Texas to fly its ILO-X payload on the IM-1 Nova-C lander mission set to launch in […]
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NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2939 tasks. Curiosity continues to investigate the stair-step-like “rock benches” as the rover climbs higher up Mt. Sharp, reports Melissa Rice, a planetary geologist at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. The robot is viewing different types of rocks in this area, Rice explains: “recessive” […]
A just-issued NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG)/Office of Audits report takes a hard look at the space agency’s plans to build the Gateway—essentially, a small space station—to provide a staging location for lunar missions and future deep space operations. Among comments made by the OIG, two central take away messages are: — Schedule Delays […]
China’s farside Moon mission — the Chang’e-4 lander and Yutu-2 rover have resumed work for the 24th lunar day, according to China National Space Administration (CNSA). The Chang’e-4 mission touched down within Von Kármán crater on January 3, 2019, with the hardware now surviving 677 Earth days on the Moon. China’s Xinhua news agency reports […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2938 tasks. Abigail Fraeman, a planetary geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, reports that the rover’s latest drive has placed it on top of one of the “rock benches” that are present throughout the area. A visual bonus: the views are just gorgeous. “There are dinner plate-sized […]
The creation of Space Port Japan is being advanced, a move to make the country a base for future space travel business. This proposal for a complex commercial facility connects conventional means of transportation with the operation of commercial horizontal takeoff and landing spacecraft. Also in the planning is to have the Space […]
A secretive military X-37B space plane has flown over 175 days in Earth orbit and is now under the wing of a newly established U.S. Space Force unit called Delta 9. Delta 9, a component of the U.S. Space Force, was established and activated July 24, 2020. “Delta 9 Detachment 1 oversees […]
A Long March-6 launch vehicle launched 13 satellites from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, Shanxi Province, northern China, on November 6, 2020. The main payload consisted of 10 commercial remote sensing satellites developed by Satellogic (Argentine). Credit: China Central Television (CCTV). Go to: https://youtu.be/sWC-_EvMCtE For its maiden launch, the Ceres-1 launch vehicle launched […]
NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission is slated to head back to Earth, delivering its precious cargo of newly acquired Bennu asteroid samples – but the probe may have a new target in 2029. “We have developed a mission design that allows us to put the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft into […]
Those Fast Radio Bursts, or FRBs, are among the most unexplained astronomical phenomena ever observed. The powerful, millisecond-duration radio waves come from deep space and are among the brightest sources ever seen in the sky – and then disappear. FAST-paced research Recent work done at the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in Guizhou, China […]
