February 7th, 2019
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NASA and the China National Space Administration (CNSA) are coordinating efforts focused on the recent touchdown of China’s Chang’e-4 Moon lander and Yutu-2 rover. The robotic probe throttled itself down on January 3 within the Von Kármán crater in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the farside of the Moon. The U.S. space agency has also […]
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“It is the pinnacle of the mission!” Those are the words of Japan’s Hayabusa2 team officials, prepared to land atop asteroid Ryugu. The touchdown operation to collect a sample from Ryugu will be between February 20th – 22nd. Hayabusa2 is scheduled to begin the descent from February 21, and touchdown on the surface of Ryugu […]
NASA’s InSight Mars lander has “skirted” the issue of fully deploying the wind and thermal shield (WTS) over the French-built seismometer. Photos taken by the lander’s Instrument Context Camera (ICC) show the gold-coated thermal skirt. The WTS was developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The WTS consists of an aerodynamically shaped aluminium cover with a […]
NASA’s sharp-shooting Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has successfully imaged China’s Chang’e-4 spacecraft on the floor of Von Kármán crater. On January 3, 2019 the Chinese spacecraft landed on the Moon’s farside. Four weeks later, on January 30, as LRO approached the (116 mile (186 kilometer) diameter crater from the east, it rolled 70° to the […]
NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars is well into Sol 2312 operations. Curiosity is targeting small bedrock patches, pebbles, and soil reports Roger Wiens, a geochemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Over the weekend Curiosity completed a drive over 65 feet (20 meters). Heading east “Curiosity is heading east and will […]
Bryce Space and Technology, an analytics and engineering firm for space and satellite, cyber, and R&D clients, has released two informative reports: Smallsats by the Numbers: 2019 and 2018 Orbital Launches Year in Review. Organizations have deployed more than 1,300 smallsats since 2012. This latest report from Bryce includes data on commercial, government, and […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2310 duties. New imagery from February 3 is available of the robot’s new surroundings:
China’s lunar rover Yutu-2 has begun taking its second snooze today, a midday nap, on the farside of the Moon. According to China Central Television (CCTV), without a good thermal control ability, the rover is experiencing midday temperatures surpassing 100 degrees Celsius. The rover will be awakened again on Friday. Nighttime temperatures The Yutu-2 […]
InSight has deployed its domed Wind and Thermal Shield (WTS), setting it atop the French-supplied SEIS, short for Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure – a seismometer. The WTS has a tripod and a protective skirt that tightly ‘hugs’ the ground around the seismometer to stop wind blowing and influence measurements. Next up…and down! […]
India continues to advance its human spaceflight goals. On January 30, Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) officials inaugurated a Human Space Flight Center (HSFC) at ISRO Headquarter campus in Bengaluru. Dignitaries posed in front of a full scale model of the Gaganyaan crew module during the event. End-to-end mission planning According to an ISRO press […]
