January 24th, 2017
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NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is performing science duties as it works its way through Sol 1589. This past weekend saw the robot drive roughly 92 feet (28 meters), reports Ryan Anderson, a planetary scientist at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona. Heavy on observations The plan for Sol 1589 has the rover […]
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Work is underway in China to carry out the first Moon-sample return to Earth mission in over four decades. Liftoff of Chang’e-5 is to occur at the end of November, according to the Xinhua news agency. The robotic craft is to ride atop China’s Long March-5 booster, departing from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now at work on its Sol 1587 agenda. The robot drove 43 feet (13 meters) back on Sol 1585, placing the Mars machinery in a good position for contact science. “But the telemetry also showed that ChemCam [Chemistry & Camera] had been marked ‘sick,’ so we will not be able […]
Moonshine – space exploration style! A team of University of California San Diego (UCSD) engineering students is in ferment – all hopped up to see if beer can be brewed on the Moon. Their experiment is designed to test the viability of yeast on the Moon. The brewmasters stem from UCSD’s Jacobs School of […]
Observers on Earth have imaged both the International Space Station as well as China’s now un-crewed Tiangong-2 space lab. The ISS outpost is the largest structure in orbit, spanning the size of a football pitch, but at 400 km altitude it still appears tiny through a telescope. Sequence of images Michel Breitfellner, Manuel Castillo, Abel […]
Two NASA rovers are busily working on the Red Planet – Opportunity and the Curiosity robots. “Opportunity is mainly traversing uphill to the southwest on Cape Tribulation, trying to get back to the Meridiani Plains to head south to Cape Byron and the top of a gully system before the end of the southern […]
NASA’s Curiosity rover has indeed found another iron-nickel meteorite, now called “Ames Knob,” on the surface of the Red Planet. As reported earlier on Inside Outer Space, the object spotted by the robot is mostly iron, some 90 percent iron with a small amount of nickel, says Roger Wiens, Curiosity’s Chemistry & Camera […]
Want To Live On Mars, Or Saturn’s Moon? Space Settlements May Be Closer Than We Think Settlers on Mars could mine ice to build 3D printed igloos. A bit farther out, on one of Saturn’s moons, residents might strap on wings, flap their arms, and fly. These are the visions of two authors who […]
A space watchdog group dedicated to aerospace safety has “yellow flagged” NASA’s Journey to Mars activity, noting that work underway lacks substantive risk reduction, technology maturation, and advanced systems development to achieve stated objectives. The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), an advisory committee that reports to NASA and Congress, has issued its 2016 annual report […]
Judges in China are sifting through thousands of names and logo artwork for the country’s first Mars exploration project, slated for launch in 2020. The judging panel consisting of academicians in the field of China’s lunar and deep space exploration, space engineering experts and artists have chosen eight names and eight logos after preliminary assessments. […]
