August 20th, 2019
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NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2502 duties. The Mars machinery is headed for a conjunction, a few-week period when Mars goes behind the Sun and ground controllers stop communicating with spacecraft that are there. “Our last planning day before conjunction will be next Friday and thinking about that fast approaching day […]
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India is celebrating the Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI) of the country’s Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft. “The LOI maneuver was performed successfully today morning using the onboard propulsion system for a firing duration of about 29 minutes,” said Dr. K Sivan, Chairman, Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), in an August 20 press briefing. “This maneuver precisely injected […]
It is called Great Lunar Expedition for Everyone (GLEE) – hundreds of tiny circuit boards to carry out local and distributed science missions on the Moon. The concept stems from team work at Cornell University that developed a tiny spacecraft called ChipSat, a way to radically reduce the costs of spaceflight and exploration in […]
China Central Television (CCTV) reports: China’s new carrier rocket Smart Dragon-1 (SD-1), designed for commercial use, made its maiden flight on Saturday, sending three satellites into the orbit. The rocket, developed by the China Rocket Co. Ltd. affiliated to the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALVT), blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2499 duties. New rover Navcam imagery shows the scenic whereabouts of the Mars machinery, on the prowl since August 2012. Landscape looks via Curiosity Navcam Right B, taken on Sol 2498, August 16, 2019. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Help wanted: Within the archival film holdings from NASA at the National Archives, you will find a treasure trove of video relating to the space agency’s space flight programs, including Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and the joint United States-Soviet Union program, Apollo-Soyuz. Meticulous steps This incredible series of films includes footage […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2497 tasks. Curiosity is go for analyzing a new drill sample, reports Ashley Stroupe, a mission operations engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. After seeing that the redo of the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) Instrument Suite preconditioning in Monday’s plan was successful, […]
China is offering space experiment “room and board” on the country’s future space station, as well as upcoming Moon, asteroid and comet explorers. In early June, the China Manned Space Agency announced the first batch of nine international cooperation projects for the country’s space station involves 23 entities from 17 countries. The deadline for […]
If you have your eyes on the Moon and making money on water mining operations, a new analysis concludes the current market is over $200 billion. The new market study has looked at the need for water in space over the next three decades. Producing water on the Moon is considered to be viable […]
The Chandrayaan-2 lunar orbiter/lander/rover mission has successfully entered Lunar Transfer Trajectory. The final orbit raising maneuver of the Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft was carried out August 14, 2019 at 02:21 am IST. During this maneuver, the spacecraft’s liquid engine was fired for about 1,203 seconds. With this burn, Chandrayaan-2 entered the Lunar Transfer Trajectory. Spacecraft health Earlier, […]
