March 22nd, 2019
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A December 2018 fireball that zipped through the Earth’s atmosphere exploded about 16 miles (26 kilometers) high above the Bering Sea, unleashing an estimated 173 kilotons of energy. That’s a significant happening. This incoming object was captured by a NASA satellite. Two NASA instruments aboard the multi-national Terra scientific research satellite spotted the fireball fly-in […]
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The super-camera system on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) continues to monitor the whereabouts and wanderings of China’s Yutu-2 rover on the Moon’s farside. Over the next few months, the Sun will rise higher and higher over the landing site when LRO is overhead, providing the opportunity to obtain images with no shadows, according to […]
THE WOODLANDS, Texas – The Earth was on the receiving end of a little-noticed intruder back in late 2018. A hefty space rock detonated over an isolated stretch of the Bering Sea, between Russia and Alaska. The blast occurred at roughly 16 miles above the ocean, yielding an energetic, high-altitude punch judged to be […]
Russia’s SIRIUS (Scientific International Research in Unique Terrestrial Station) experiment is now underway and simulating a flight to the Moon. Six members of the international SIRIUS crew started a 120-day experiment to simulate the flight to the Moon at Moscow’s Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) on Tuesday. Cosmonaut commander The SIRIUS-19 experiment is […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2353 duties. Curiosity has made the drive to a rock called “Muir of Ord,” which has a cracked surface, reports Dawn Sumner, a planetary geologist at the University of California Davis in Davis, California. The network of cracks in this Martian rock slab called “Old […]
This trio of images acquired by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft shows a wide shot and two close-ups of a region in asteroid Bennu’s northern hemisphere. The wide-angle image (left), obtained by the spacecraft’s MapCam camera, shows a 590-foot (180-meter) wide area with many rocks, including some large boulders, and a “pond” of regolith that is mostly […]
The Woodlands, Texas – Moon exploration via an ultra-small rover about the size of a printer. Planetary scientists at Brown University are collaborating with the New Jersey-based company, OrbitBeyond, to plan the scientific mission of a small-scale lunar rover. The rover was originally designed to compete for the Google Lunar X PRIZE by a team […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2349 tasks. “Curiosity is back to work after another hiatus due to a computer reset,” reports Scott Guzewich, an atmospheric scientist at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland “These sorts of resets do happen from time to time for operating spacecraft and we’re able to […]
Earth’s moon taunts. There is a growing chorus of experts that view this “eighth continent” as a near-by world of natural resources sitting there at the edge of Earth’s gravity well – ready for the picking. Visionary zeal aside, clarity is step one. Wanted is the right combination of vision, gobs of moon moola, make-it-happen […]
China’s lunar rover Yutu-2, or Jade Rabbit-2, has driven nearly 540 feet (163 meters) on the Moon’s farside. Controllers on Earth expect the machinery to work longer than its three-month design life. Both the rover and the lander of the Chang’e-4 lunar probe switched to a dormant mode on Wednesday as the extremely cold […]
