October 15th, 2019
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“Planned new rocket carries hope for China’s manned lunar landing program,” is the headline on a China Global Television Network (CGTN) story. The Xinhua news agency-sourced story notes that Chinese space engineers have taken a key step in designing a new generation launch vehicle that could help start China’s manned lunar exploration program, citing the […]
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Earth’s Moon is peppered with potential ready and waiting subsurface habitats in the form of lava tubes. These features are good candidates for permanent human shelters. Moreover, these underground niches could reduce hazards to crews from lunar temperature swings, radiation, seismic activity, and meteorite impacts. Evidence for their existence under the surface of the Moon […]
A new study sheds light on how old deposits of water ice at the Moon’s south pole might be. Observations are mounting regarding ice deposits in craters scattered across the Moon’s south pole, also dubbed as “cold traps.” However, when or how that ice got there remains puzzling. A new study published […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2554 duties. A set of scenic images shows the robot’s current surroundings. A number of close-up images of the rover taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) appear to indicate a new selfie may be in production.
RR Auction is offering the Don Eyles Collection in its Fall Space Exploration sale with online bidding running October 11- October 17. As a 27-year-old MIT computer expert, Don Eyles worked at Draper Labs, the place commissioned by NASA to write the computer code that would take us to the Moon. Highlights from the […]
The first picture of China’s Mars explorer has been unveiled, a spacecraft set to be lobbed toward Mars next year. In a China Global Television Network (CGTV) story, Ye Jianpei, chief scientist of Space Science and Deep-space Exploration with the Chinese Space Technology Academy, said: “The mission is going smoothly. If no surprise, the Mars […]
A new consortium has been established to design and carry out the world’s first dedicated commercial small satellite mission to Mars. Nearly a dozen Polish universities have teamed up with Poland-based satellite company SatRevolution and Sir Richard Branson’s small satellite launch company, Virgin Orbit, to carry out the task. First of up to three The […]
In December 2018, an asteroid exploded in the upper atmosphere over the Bering Sea (western Pacific Ocean). That incoming object unleashed an explosive force initially estimated to be nearly 200 kilotons, or over 10 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. Spotted by various sensors This event, which was detected by various sensors and spotted […]
A Proton-M launch vehicle, with a Briz-M upper stage launched the EUTELSAT 5 West B communications satellite along with the Mission Extension Vehicle-1 (MEV-1) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on October 9, 2019, local time. If all goes well, Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV-1) will provide a satellite life-extension service by docking to the Intelsat […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now carrying out Sol 2551 tasks. Reports Kenneth Herkenhoff, planetary geologist at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona, work continues on analyzing the Glen Etive 2 drill sample. The APXS (Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer) was not perfectly centered over the Glen Etive 2 dump pile on Sol […]
