August 25th, 2017
Author: 
It’s crowded out there… With origins in the Oort Cloud – a group of icy bodies beginning roughly 300 billion kilometers away from the Sun – have periods of thousands or even millions of years. A team of astronomers report that large, distant comets are more common than previously thought. In fact, the researchers […]
Posted in 
NASA has a long tradition of interacting closely with and inviting advice from the scientific community, which is integral to the culture of its scientific programs. In a newly published monograph, Science Advice to NASA: Conflict, Consensus, Partnership, Leadership, the author, Joseph Alexander, looks at two main sources of scientific advice: the NASA Advisory Committee […]
Opening up Titan – a moon of Saturn – to robotic exploration is the thrust behind a proposal from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. An APL team is proposing an instrumented, radioisotope-powered dual-quadcopter to explore Titan, one of a number of “ocean worlds” in our solar system that hold […]
A new report by the National Academies of Sciences (NAS), Engineering, and Medicine has taken a look at NASA’s large strategic missions. The message stemming from the report is that NASA should continue its large strategic missions to maintain United States’ global leadership in space. But there’s a caveat. Controlling the costs of these large […]
Update: Successful launch, first stage booster return, satellite in orbit! Today’s SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch is set to deliver FORMOSAT-5, an Earth observation satellite for Taiwan’s National Space Organization (NSPO), to a low-Earth orbit (LEO). Following stage separation, Falcon 9’s first stage will attempt to land on the “Just Read the Instructions” droneship that will be […]
Now in Sol 1793, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover experienced limited arm activities and a less lengthy weekend drive than planned, reports Abigail Fraeman, a planetary geologist at NASA/JPL in Pasadena, California. Colder than expected “Unfortunately, some of the arm activities and the drive we planned over the weekend didn’t execute because Mars was slightly […]
CASPER, Wyoming – To paraphrase the legendary fighter, then Cassius Clay chiding his opponent, Sonny Liston, it was a celestial punch that was a true knockout – “a total eclipse of the Sunny!” “It’s all about what the eclipse means to you, what it means to you and to you only,” and how personally it […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is performing Sol 1790 science duties – ready to carry out a list of tasks. The robot did not cover a planned drive of 50 feet (15 meters), instead chalking up about 36 feet (11 meters). But the rover moved far enough down the road to get in good position to […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now busy at work during Sol 1789. Christopher Edwards, a planetary geologist from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona reports: “After completing a successful drive back to the strategic route to continue up the Vera Rubin Ridge, we arrived at a workspace filled with sand and a lone rock outcrop […]
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire mogul behind Amazon.com and the head of his Blue Origin rocket group, is passionate about space exploration as well as its historical roots. Bezos recently told his story regarding dredging up Apollo remembrances – hardware resting three-miles deep in Atlantic Ocean waters. For more information on Bezos and his salvaging of […]
