June 12th, 2019
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NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now carrying out Sol 2435 duties. Reports Mariah Baker, a planetary geologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland: “It’s a good thing that Curiosity doesn’t have any competition on the road as she drives fervently across undulating terrain towards a large geologic ridge of unknown origin…informally named Waypoint 4.” […]
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The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) and the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) announced today the winners of their joint opportunity to conduct experiments on board the China Space Station (CSS). Six winning projects were selected, and three were conditionally selected. They were carefully evaluated by a team of around 60 experts […]
The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) is showcasing the modules of the country’s Chandrayaan-2 that is scheduled to be launched between July 9 and 16 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. Chandrayaan-2 will attempt to soft land the lander -Vikram and rover- Pragyan in a high plain between two craters, Manzinus C […]
The Space Elevator is closer than you think. That’s the topic of a free webinar offered June 14-15 by the International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC). This online seminar will have four short talks on the concept and the current planning and research to build a space elevator for Earth. The webinar will be presented […]
It is not quite the monolith uncovered at Clavius crater in the epic 2001: A Space Odyssey movie – but still a surprise. New research points to the existence of a large excess of mass in the Moon’s mantle under the South Pole‐Aitken basin. It may contain metal from an asteroid that crashed into the […]
A Reason Foundation study is calling for, and has outlined, a 10-year plan for shifting from a space exploration model centered on NASA to a commerce-based structure. That structure is one in which the private sector assumes responsibility for all space transportation, large payload launch vehicles and launch operations, in-space facilities and […]
Flashes of light that occur on the Moon are attracting renewed attention. Called transient lunar phenomena, or TLPs for short, these bursts of light from the lunar surface have been known since the 1950s. Claims of short-lived lunar phenomena go back at least 1,000 years. Maintaining a systematic and a long-term lunar look-see is on […]
China is set to announce selected experiments to be flown on the country’s space station. In May 2018, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) published an “Announcement of Opportunity” inviting Member States to submit applications to conduct scientific experiments onboard China’s space outpost. By October, 42 applications from 27 countries had […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2430 duties. Brittney Cooper, an atmospheric scientist at York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada reports that the original plan for Sol 2429 involved a “touch-and-go” where the rover would have engaged in contact science (that’s the “touch” portion) followed by a drive (the “go” portion). However, the instrument […]
I wanna see it painted, painted black Black as night, black as coal I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky I wanna see it painted, painted, painted, painted black — “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones Last month, the SpaceX launch of the first group of sixty Starlink satellites signaled the […]
