March 8th, 2018
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A House Subcommittee on Space carried out a hearing on March 7: An Overview of the NASA Budget for Fiscal Year 2019 The sole witness was NASA’s Robert Lightfoot, Jr., Acting Administrator. Moon: proving ground In an opening Statement Space Subcommittee Chairman Brian Babin (R-Texas) noted that Mars has been, and will remain, […]
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Just how hard is a rock and any way to tell ahead of drilling? That’s the question raised by Roger Wiens, a geochemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in Los Alamos, New Mexico. “Last week when the first Vera Rubin Ridge drill-hole attempts turned out to be too shallow at ‘Lake Orcadie’ discussion in […]
Welcome to Luna City, a bustling metropolis on the Moon in the year 2175. Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe is offering an off-world experience via Emerge – a free art, science and technology festival that explores the future in evocative ways through an annual public event. Emerge will transform the state-of-the-art Galvin Playhouse […]
“Vera Rubin Ridge is as hard as a rock!” That’s the call from Scott Guzewich, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “After two drilling attempts, Curiosity’s drill was not able to dig into the bedrock sufficiently to collect a sample of rock at this location,” Guzewich reports. Engineers […]
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE: Integration and Test Challenges Have Delayed Launch and Threaten to Push Costs Over Cap. The James Webb Space Telescope, the planned successor to the Hubble Telescope, is one of NASA’s most complex and expensive projects. NASA recently announced that JWST’s launch would […]
Apollo moonwalkers between 1969 and 1972 brought back to Earth a total of nine containers of lunar materials that were sealed on the lunar surface. Two of the larger sealed samples were collected from Apollo 17. Three sealed samples from Apollo 15, 16, and 17 remain unopened. According to several key lunar researchers, now […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now carrying out Sol 1982 science duties. The Red Planet robot is getting back in gear in terms of reactivating drilling operations reports Ken Herkenhoff, a planetary geologist at the USGS in Flagstaff, Arizona. Feed-extended drilling “All of the data returned for the second drill target, called “Lake Orcadie […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now in Sol 1977. “After a successful drill preload test, Curiosity was primed to drill for the first time in about a year,” reports Christopher Edwards, a planetary geologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. “Unfortunately, due to a light downlink from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, we didn’t get all […]
Two new space policy papers have been released by the Center for Space Policy and Strategy (CSPS) under the rubric of The Aerospace Corporation. Reconfigurable space fleets The first paper, On-Orbit Assembly of Space Assets: A Path to Affordable and Adaptable Space Infrastructure, surveys the new on-orbit assembly paradigm and provides a roadmap toward reconfigurable […]
An exclusive interview of Luis Elizondo, the former head of a secret Pentagon project to investigate Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), provides more detail about the work of the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program (AATIP). Elizondo’s video was aired at the recently held 2018 International UFO Congress in Scottsdale, Arizona. The International UFO Congress was established […]
