March 28th, 2014
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It’s alive! The Philae comet lander has been successfully reactivated and broke its planned radio silence by sending data to Earth on March 28. Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft — with the Philae lander on board — has been making its way through space since March 2004 to investigate Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. What exactly is to be expected […]
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US Air Force’s Secretive X-37B Space Plane Shatters Orbital Endurance Record By Leonard David, Space.com’s Space Insider Columnist March 27, 2014 11:44am ET http://www.space.com/25245-secret-x37b-space-plane-orbital-record.html Video: http://www.space.com/25244-skywatcher-captures-video-of-x-37b-unmanned-military-space-plane-video.html
I asked Yong-Chun Zheng, an associate researcher at the National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, to provide an update on the overall health of the Chang’e 3 moon lander and the Yutu rover. Both mooncraft are soon to enter their next celestial slumber. On the Moon, there are roughly 14 days of sunlight/14 days […]
NASA has released its 2014 Strategic Plan, with the space agency’s Office of Strategy Formulation identified as the responsible office. “Our long-term goal is to send humans to Mars. Over the next two decades, we will develop and demonstrate the technologies and capabilities needed to send humans to explore the red planet and safely return […]
Want your own glimpse of Apollo 11’s grab and go samples from the Moon, in all 48 pounds (22 kilograms) of rock and soil specimens? This collection has been created through collaboration between The Open University in the United Kingdom and the NASA curation facility. You can now examine Apollo 11 thin sections using the […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has reached areas where orbital images had piqued researchers’ interest in patches of ground with striations all oriented in a similar direction. Here’s a sampling to whet your own curiosity that you may find of interest.
Made in the Shade Idea: Imaging Exoplanets http://spacecoalition.com/blog/made-in-the-shade-idea-imaging-exoplanets
Later this year, it’ll be a hot time for increasing Europe’s knowledge base for future reentry missions. The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV) project is to tackle the basic European needs for reentry from low Earth orbit. IXV’s launch, using Europe’s new Vega light launcher, is scheduled for October 2014. Flight […]
The idea of power-beaming from space to Earth has long been studied. Lots of issues brought forward within lots of reports over lots of years. New work by the U.S. Naval Laboratory (NRL) has shed new light on how to build spacecraft to first capture solar power in space and then transmit that power down […]
Citizen science is blazing a trail into Earth orbit. Onboard the SpaceX Falcon 9/Dragon capsule soon to be headed for the International Space Station (ISS) are microbes collected from across the United States. The effort is known as Project MERCCURI. It investigates how microbes from different places on Earth compare to each other and to […]
