July 2nd, 2023
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NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter has captured navigation camera images during the rotorcraft’s 52nd flight on April 26. Images were taken by its navigation camera, mounted in the helicopter’s fuselage and pointed directly downward to track the ground during flight. “Sixty-three days is a long time to wait for the results of a flight,” reports JPL’s […]
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After a prolonged hiatus, NASA’s Mars helicopter has made its 52nd flight. The craft flew on April 26, but mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory lost contact with Ingenuity as it descended for a landing. “The Ingenuity team expected the communications dropout because a hill stood between the helicopter’s landing location and the Perseverance […]
A new study spotlights how gullies on the slopes of craters on Mars could have formed by on-and-off periods of meltwater from ice on and beneath the planet’s surface. The results from the new study suggest that gully formation was driven by periods of melting ice and by carbon dioxide (CO2) frost evaporation in other […]
While the Artemis return to the Moon effort is indeed one giant leap for the United States to regain a foothold there, much work is ahead to sustain living and work-a-day activities within the harsh and stark lunar environment. A next step for getting hardware to run in tip-top shape on the Moon is […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at Gale crater is now performing Sol 3873 duties. A recent drive by the robot was successful, reports Alex Innanen, Atmospheric Scientist at York University; Toronto, Ontario, Canada. “This put us in a perfect position for our split touch-and-go plan – lots to see, and no need to worry that […]
There is a growing business in selling fake Moon dirt. It is labeled as “simulant,” customized concoctions of lunar topside that are celestial stand-ins for different areas on the Moon. The airless body is pounded by solar wind, radiation and micrometeorites. The Moon is blanketed by grayish, sharp-edged particles and rocky debris termed the lunar […]
GOLDEN, Colorado – Breathe easy. There’s good news from Mars. The first experiment to suck in the planet’s thin, carbon dioxide-laden air has achieved a major milestone in transforming that native resource into oxygen. The toaster-sized device, if built to a larger scale, can be used not just for astronaut expeditions to Mars for […]
Virgin Galactic is GO for launch. Departing Spaceport America in New Mexico, the target data for the Galactic 01 scientific research mission is June 29. The three-person crew from the Italian Air Force and National Research Council of Italy will be onboard VSS Unity for a 90-minute suborbital flight, carrying out a series of in-cabin […]
Five days without downlink from Mars – What’s going on? Video commentator, Mars Guy, notes that NASA’s Perseverance rover rolling about at Jezero Crater sends back a daily stream of images from its many cameras. Those images are quickly posted to a NASA public website. But on June 16th, the stream […]
India is readying its Chandrayaan-3 Moon lander, reportedly eyeing a launch in mid-July. The lunar lander is equipped with scientific payloads and a small rover, geared to conduct studies of the lunar surface in the southern lunar hemisphere. This upcoming mission is similar to Chandrayaan-2 which failed in 2019 when the program’s Vikram lander […]
