January 16th, 2019
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NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now wrapping up Sol 2291 duties. The robot is concluding a single sol of activities on Sol 2291, reports Rachel Kronyak, a planetary geologist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. “As we begin to wrap up our activities at the Rock Hall drill site, Sol 2291 is chock full […]
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China’s Chang’e-4’s biological experiment returns the first farside results: a cotton seed has sprouted on the Moon. The mini-biosphere onboard the lander, designed by Chongqing University, is a canister containing the seeds of cotton, rapeseed, potato, and arabidopsis, as well as eggs of the fruit fly and some yeast. After Chang’e-4 touched down on the […]
Long-duration spaceflight leads to marked muscle atrophy. However, another negative consequence of disuse is intramuscular fatty infiltration. Notably, few studies have investigated the effects of spaceflight on intramuscular fatty infiltration, or how muscle atrophy is associated with in-flight exercise. New research by Katelyn Burkhart of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program and colleagues analyzed […]
For those local to the Boulder, Colorado area, I hope you can take part in my presentation at the Chautauqua Community House this Wednesday, January 16 with doors open at 6:30 PM; Showtime: 7:00 PM. Are we at a crossroad in exploring the space frontier? Are we opting out as a nation – to build upon […]
The State Council Information Office of China (SCIO) held a press conference to discuss the January 3 landing of the country’s Chang’e-4 farside mission. Discussed at the January 14 event were future Moon exploration plans by China, particularly the launch by year’s end of the Chang’e-5 mission to bring lunar samples back to Earth. […]
China’s Chang’e-4 lander/rover is about to be cold-soaked, as darkness falls on the Von Kármán crater landing site. On January 3, the probe softly touched down on the South Pole’s Aitken Basin on the farside of the Moon. China’s Xinhua news agency reports that the farside Moon mission is equipped to measure the moody Moon […]
China’s Chang’e-4 farside mission toted to the Moon a unique biological experiment. China Global Television Network (CGTN) reports that a team of scientists from Chongqing University developed a small biological payload that’s aboard the Chang’e-4 lander. This small tin weighs less than 7 pounds (3 kilograms) and carries seeds of cotton, potato, Arabidopsis, rapeseed, fruit […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has just begun Sol 2289 activities. Reports Susanne Schwenzer, a planetary geologist at the Open University; Milton Keynes, the U.K.: “We will soon be leaving the Rock Hall area, thus this one last look at the drill site from a hazard camera perspective. Seeing those holes always is special, even for […]
Now in Sol 46, NASA’s InSight Mars lander acquired these images on January 13 using its robotic arm-mounted, Instrument Deployment Camera (IDC). Operators will soon make use of the five mechanical fingers of the grapple to pick up the Wind and Thermal Shield, placing it on top of the […]
NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) imagery has been used to further pinpoint the landing locale of China’s Chang’e-4 farside lander. Looking at the just released Chang’e-4 descent frames to the surface made it easy to find the exact landing spot in a Narrow Angle Camera image produced by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC. […]
