July 27th, 2017
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A team at NASA’s Ames Research Center has created a simulated lunar environment to study lighting conditions experienced at the unexplored poles of the Moon. Because of low angle sunlight and soil that reflects light like a blanket of fresh snow, navigating the lunar surface at the poles could be hazardous for rovers. Obstacles The […]
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NASA has initiated a contest seeking packaged and deployed concepts for a radiation shield that would envelop the habitation portions of a Mars spacecraft. “We are seeking novel folding/origami-based patterns and concepts for packaging a large radiation shield within a single launch vehicle that can be deployed around a Mars vehicle in cis-Lunar space,” according […]
China is setting up its first Mars Village analog site to simulate scientific experiments. According to China Global Television Network, or CGTN, the village is to be situated in the Haixi Mongolian and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in northwest China’s Qinghai Province. China’s Science and Application Center for Moon and Deep Space Exploration (SACMDE) of the […]
Researchers have discovered a region on Mars with 130 small volcanoes at the base of Valles Marineris – a potential site for uncovering fossilized life. Published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, the study was led by Petr Brož from the Institute of Geophysics of the Czech Academy of Science. Their work points […]
If you’re shooting for the stars via an interstellar spaceship, start the journey by attending the fifth Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop (TVIW). A comprehensive schedule of events for TVIW 2017 – “Step by Step: Building a Ladder to the Stars” — is set for October 3-6 in Huntsville, Alabama. TVIW was founded to outline and […]
Use of digital holographic microscopy, using lasers to record 3-D images, may be our best bet for spotting extraterrestrial microbes. The technique is being advocated by Caltech’s Jay Nadeau and colleagues as a way to sample and identify living microbes in the outer solar system. The work has been published this month in the journal […]
Worth a watch, with or without popcorn! On the heels of Moon Day OMEGA has produced a short documentary called “Starmen,” featuring one of the first men on the moon, Buzz Aldrin, and George Clooney. In the film, Clooney gets the chance to watch the original Apollo 11 footage with his boyhood hero — […]
Book Review: Calculated Risk – The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom by George Leopold, Purdue University Press, 416 pages (Hardcover); U.S. $29.95. Today, back on July 21, 1961, Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom piloted a suborbital mission of Project Mercury, boosted by a Mercury-Redstone 4 rocket that was topped by an escape tower and […]
Apollo 11’s Moon landing on July 20, 1969 took place 48 years ago. That history-making first human touchdown on the lunar landscape was celebrated at the Kennedy Space Center last Saturday during an evening gala held under a massive Apollo Saturn V booster. While a reflection on decades past, the event proved to […]
In a historical retro-fire, it was 48 years ago today that the first human landing on the Moon took place – the seminal space voyage of Apollo 11 that saw Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk across the lunar landscape. That signature event was saluted last weekend at the Kennedy Space Center – a […]
