January 10th, 2019
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China’s Yutu-2 lunar rover has been reactivated on Thursday, following a planned “nap,” reports China’s Global Television Network, or CGTN. “China’s space engineers care about the reactivation as the last model [Yutu-1] failed its first awakening in February 2014,” CGTN said. Chang’e-4 landed on January 3 within the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) Basin, the largest […]
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Invite to the Colorado space community Join me in a special presentation I’ll be giving concerning Our Future on the Red Planet (and on the Moon too!) Wednesday, January 16, 2019 Chautauqua Community House 900 Baseline Road Boulder, CO 80302 Doors: 6:30 PM Showtime: 7:00 PM Tickets: $12.00 ($9.00 Concert Member)* […]
Technosearch is a new-web-based tool that includes all published Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) listen and look-sees from 1960 until the present. The tool also allows users to submit their own searches and keep the database current. Keeping it current Jill Tarter, SETI pioneer and co-founder of the SETI Institute, has launched Technosearch: “I started […]
New ideas for an interstellar probe are percolating. Ambitious science and strategic plans are being formulated for the fastest flight ever out of our solar system, almost six times faster than the milestone making Voyager 1 spacecraft. With the goal of reaching 90 billion miles from the Sun, this robotic explorer would push the limits […]
Russian engineer, Yuri Artsutanov, known as one of the fathers of the modern space elevator program, died earlier this month. Artsutanov’s proposal, created in the early 1960s, used newly discovered graphite whiskers to propose an Elevator to Space using cables attached to a satellite, and running in both directions. Eifel tower inspiration The concept of […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is currently performing Sol 2284 tasks. “It’s a wonderful day for SAM,” reports Vivian Sun, a planetary geologist at NASA/JPL in Pasadena, California. The rover is continuing a drill campaign at the red Jura target “Rock Hall.” The plan called for drop-off of the Rock Hall sample to the SAM (Sample […]
China’s Chang’e-4 mission to the farside of the Moon is expected to provide “breakthrough findings.” As the lander and the recently dispatched Yutu-2 rover survey their lunar surroundings, important discoveries are on tap. “The farside of the Moon has very unique features, and has never been explored in situ, so Chang’e-4 might bring us breakthrough […]
Now in Sol 2081, a set of holiday science duties were completed by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, reports Claire Newman, an Atmospheric Scientist at Aeolis Research in Pasadena, California. The holiday planning completed successfully and included 10 sols of five-hour-long morning meteorological observations by the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS), Newman adds, during the […]
China’s lunar rover is driving smoothly on the Moon’s farside. The state-run Xinhua news service explains that the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said late Friday that both the lander and rover are currently gathering data. At 17:00 local time in Beijing, the three 16-foot (5-meter) antennas of the low-frequency radio spectrometer on the lander […]
NASA’s New Horizons flyby of Ultima Thule (a Kuiper Belt Object beyond Pluto) is an outbound spacecraft carrying a number of “foreign” objects – from Planet Earth. One item onboard is a piece of a past milestone in itself: A section of seat from SpaceShipOne – the first private craft to enter space. SpaceShipOne was […]
