February 26th, 2020
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NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2687 duties. “We’re wrapping up our Hutton drill campaign literally at the tail end,” reports Scott Guzewich, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. A recent plan focused on studying those drill “tailings” (gray material surrounding the drill hole with the rover’s […]
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Rocky Mountain Star Stare (RMSS) is an annual star party sponsored by the Colorado Springs Astronomical Society. Circle this year’s gathering: June 17 – 21, 2020. Located on 35 acres of land, RMSS’s “Starry Meadows” is conveniently located just over two hours southwest of Colorado Springs (outside of Gardner, CO), between the Sangre de […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now carrying out Sol 2685 tasks. Susanne Schwenzer, a planetary geologist at The Open University, Milton Keynes, U.K., reports that Mars scientists are still in the middle of the Hutton drill campaign. “This gives us lots of things to do, but power constraints restrict what we can achieve each planning. […]
Eight Years to the Moon – The History of the Apollo Missions by Nancy Atkinson, Page Street Publishing Company; July 2019; Hardback; 240 pages, $35.00 There was a literary landslide of books tied to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. But author Nancy Atkinson has written a truly impressive, behind-the-scenes look […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2682 tasks. Curiosity has kicked off her fifth Mars Year, reports Michelle Minitti, a planetary geologist at Framework in Silver Spring, Maryland. The robot had a successful and busy schedule last weekend, operating both the Chemistry & Mineralogy X-Ray Diffraction/X-Ray Fluorescence Instrument (CheMin) and the Sample Analysis […]
Strategies to explore for present life on Mars are blossoming as researchers are actively doubling-down in furthering the search for extant life on the Red Planet. And for good reason: New research approaches, including improved knowledge of Mars’ geologic diversity and history, better appreciation of life in extreme environments here on Earth, and […]
Research using an artificial neural network has shown that some asteroids that are now thought not dangerous can impact the Earth in the future. Astronomers at Leiden University in The Netherlands have used a supercomputer, integrating the orbits of the Sun and its planets forward in time for 10,000 years. They then traced the […]
On the farside of the Moon, China’s Chang’e-4 lander and Yutu-2 rover have resumed work for the 15th lunar after “sleeping” during the extremely cold night. According to the Xinhua News Agency the lander woke up at 6:57 a.m. Tuesday (Beijing time), and the rover at 5:55 p.m. Monday. Reportedly, both are in normal working […]
In the event you’re off-planet and haven’t caught the latest Earth-based bio-hazard news. A new virus called the 2019 novel Coronavirus is the cause of the outbreak that started in China and is spreading worldwide. Relatively little is known about the virus so far, also called COVID-19. For now, there isn’t much known about this […]
An update on that troubled Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) experiment deployed by NASA’s InSight lander on Mars. The “mole” is part of the HP3 and has only managed to partially bury itself since it started hammering in February 2019. “Mars (and the mole) continue to make our lives…how should I say…interesting,” explains […]
