March 28th, 2019
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SPACE ACQUISITIONS: DOD Faces Significant Challenges as it Seeks to Accelerate Space Programs and Address Threat. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) many major Department of Defense (DOD) space programs exceed their budgets and are late. For instance, the cost of a satellite communications system has grown 117% and its first launch was delayed […]
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Europe’s ExoMars 2020 hardware is moving forward. ExoMars is a joint endeavor between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Russia’s Roscosmos, with landing on the Red Planet set for 2021. Essential to the undertaking is the “Kazachok” landing platform of the ExoMars 2020 mission, manufactured and assembled at Russia’s NPO Lavochkin. Kazachok means “little Cossack.” […]
“Just as the United States was the first nation to reach the Moon in the 20th Century, so too will be — we’d be the first nation to return astronauts to the Moon in the 21st century,” explained Vice President Pence at the Fifth Meeting of the National Space Council, held March 26th in Huntsville, […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has just started performing Sol 2359 duties. “At the start of Sol 2359, Curiosity found herself parked in front of some layered bedrock outcrops, a rarity in the rubbly landscapes that we’ve explored so far in the clay-bearing unit,” reports Vivian Sun, a planetary geologist at NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, […]
A new partnership has been struck between Google and the NASA Haughton-Mars Project (HMP) on Devon Island, in the High Arctic. The HMP is a leading international Mars analog field research project centered on the Haughton meteorite impact crater site and surrounding terrain on Devon Island, Nunavut, Canada. This new partnership “will allow us to […]
There’s a growing call to protect the Moon’s farside, to guard this unique real estate. Future space planners “need to think ahead and preserve the precious space resources that still remain unpolluted by humankind,” explains Claudio Maccone of the International Academy of Astronautics and Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Italy. “For this reason, we […]
Work is progressing on fleshing out designs and capabilities of a new habitable structure near the Moon, known as the Gateway. Late last year, the European Space Agency (ESA) commissioned two consortia – one led by Airbus and the other by Thales Alenia Space – to undertake parallel studies into the design of […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2356 science tasks. Meanwhile, a new Curiosity traverse map has been issued by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, showing the robot’s mobility through Sol 2354 (March 22). Numbering of the dots along the line indicate the sol number of each drive. North is up. The scale bar is […]
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 […]
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 […]
