August 26th, 2018
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Contemporary artist Trevor Paglen’s Orbital Reflector, the satellite, will have no commercial, military, or scientific purpose. Instead, it will be a public sculpture, visible from the ground without a telescope — a satellite that belongs to everyone, the artist explains. In partnership with the Nevada Museum of Art and in collaboration with aerospace engineers, […]
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In a Sol 2150 report, Roger Wiens, a geochemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico said a decision was forthcoming whether to re-do the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) Instrument Suite analysis or not. Now that the rover’s drill is being operated with the feed immobile in the extended position, Wiens said the […]
REMARKS Remarks by Vice President Pence on the Administration’s Space Policy Priorities Issued on: August 23, 2018 Johnson Space Center Houston, Texas 12:51 P.M. CDT THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you, Administrator Bridenstine. To the members of Congress who are here; Director Geyer; to all our distinguished guests, including the Chief of the Astronaut […]
The Fifth Community Workshop on Achievability and Sustainability of Human Exploration of Mars: Three Scenarios for the 2030s. Based on work accomplished in four previous workshops and other related activities, participants in this workshop developed three architectures that span the range of plausible options for human missions to Mars, with each of these missions leading […]
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Hayabusa2 spacecraft will deploy in October the Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout (MASCOT). In consultation with more than 100 international and national partners, the MASCOT landing site was selected. MASCOT’s landing is scheduled for October 3, 2018. Rover landing spots Also, the locations at which the Hayabusa2 spacecraft is expected […]
NASA’s Curiosity rover is performing Sol 2149 duties. “With seventeen sampling holes and several test holes, you might imagine that Curiosity is creating a rather long and erratic golf course in Gale crater,” explains Roger Wiens, a geochemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. “After all, Alan Shepard shot a golf ball […]
The Moon research community is beaming about the new evidence of exposed water ice in the lunar polar regions. Using data from the NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) spectrometer experiment, a team of researchers — led by Shuai Li of the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology in Honolulu, Hawaii — searched for and […]
As multiple nations have exploration crosshairs on Earth’s Moon, there’s also increasing discussion of the military utility of cis-lunar space and lunar territory too. Moon expert, Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute, has written this reflective piece: The Moon’s Role in the New U.S. Space Force – The military implications of […]
The view that Earth’s Moon is a foreboding, dried out, desolate world may be all wet. The first direct and definitive evidence for surface-exposed water ice in areas of permanent shadow at the moon’s polar regions is being claimed by a research team. The finding is based on detection of near-infrared absorption features of […]
Recent Curiosity Mars images of a “foreign object” on Vera Rubin Ridge show it moved from spot to spot. But why and what is it? It’s an alien gum wrapper or a Martian band-aid, declared a few observers. “Now I know where my lost sock went,” decried one Mars photo onlooker. Spacecraft debris? […]
