July 19th, 2017
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The New Shepard rocket and crew capsule is on tap on make a “touchdown” at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s (EAA) 65th annual fly-in convention at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. On display the week of July 24-30, Blue Origin’s exhibit will feature a 1:1 mockup of New Shepard’s astronaut crew capsule, roomy enough […]
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Reliable commands to NASA’s Curiosity rover has now ended. The robot on the Red Planet has disappeared behind the Sun for about three weeks. This made planning “feel as if the Sun were setting on our normally active rover activities,” explains Michelle Minitti, a planetary geologist for Framework in Silver Spring, Maryland. Napping on […]
A synthetic nose – the e-Nose – has been developed to sniff out environmental conditions that foster elevated microbial growth of bacteria and fungi. These organisms attack the materials on the International Space Station (ISS). The device successfully sniffed microbial contamination in the Russian ISS sector from December 2012 to May 2013 by analyzing substances […]
Now in Sol 1756, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover will cease operations this weekend. The team will check on the rover on August 4 and re-start full operations on August 7. “In the meantime, Curiosity might just get lonely,” reports Roger Wiens, a geochemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He is Principal […]
The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) has reissued a notification by China on the future uncontrolled re-entry of the country’s Tiangong-1 space lab. On March 16, 2016, the Tiangong-1 ceased functioning and to date the spacecraft has maintained its structural integrity. The space lab’s operational orbit is under constant and close surveillance […]
NASA’s Curiosity rover is performing Sol 1754 science tasks, recently carrying out pre-drive science followed by a drive and making untargeted observations, reports Abigail Fraeman, planetary geologist at NASA/JPL in Pasadena, California. “There were a variety of light and dark colored veins near the rover that were visible in the Navcam images, so the science […]
The best way to find laser flashes from another civilization is to always look everywhere The SETI Institute in Mountain View, California has released details of “Laser SETI: First Ever All-Sky All-the-Time Search – an essential capability when looking for intermittent signals. Flash drive The first flash from the group is they’ve launched a […]
Back in February of this year, an Indian Space Research Organization rocket deployed over a hundred miniature spacecraft into Earth orbit, the largest stream of petite spacecraft, called CubeSats, dispensed into space courtesy of a single heave-ho booster. On July 7 a volley of five cubesats carrying amateur radio payloads — dubbed the BIRDS-1 […]
Curiosity performed a “jam-packed” weekend of contact and remote science on some beautiful sand deposits, reports Rachel Kronyak, a planetary geologist from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. The Mars machinery is now wrapping up Sol 1752 duties. Long-distance mosaic A current plan uses the rover’s Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) to target “Grogg Ledge,” a […]
While the impact from the recent China Long March 5 booster failure is still unknown, space engineers in that country are working on the bold Chang’e-5 lunar return sample mission. The mooncraft was originally targeted for a November liftoff atop a Long March 5 booster. It would depart from the newly completed Wenchang Space […]
