April 2nd, 2016
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Jeff Bezos, the rocketeer and Amazon.com billionaire, reports today that his Blue Origin team has aced yet another flight of their New Shepard suborbital vehicle. “We’ll share mission video including aerial as soon as we’re able to get it processed,” Bezos posted on Twitter. The rocket flight was done from the Blue Origin spaceport in […]
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The prospect that a planet lurking in the “out there” may trigger comet showers roughly every 27 million years that then wipes out life on Earth is receiving increased attention. Not long ago, Caltech researchers suggested that a still-to-be-found Planet X is about 10 times the mass of Earth and could currently be up to […]
The Curiosity rover on Mars has entered Sol 1299. A drive of the machinery on Sol 1296 was halted after just (13 feet) 4 meters of progress, reports Ken Herkenhoff of the USGS Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona. The reason for the halt was due to the rover’s suspension on its left side was […]
The U.S. government’s General Accountability Office (GAO) has released an informative and detailed look at 18 major NASA projects. This report is a GAO annual snapshot of how well NASA is planning and executing its major acquisition projects. In March 2015, GAO found that projects continued a general positive trend of limiting cost and schedule […]
Small is beautiful…and in space, nano along with micro is big news. SpaceWorks Enterprises, Inc. (SEI) in Atlanta, Georgia has issued its annual assessment of markets for nano/microsatellites. The appraisal spotlights this sector and notes its growth in recent years, led by large constellation plans from the commercial industry. SEI projections indicate more than 400 […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now in Sol 1296 after making a drive of 55 feet (17 meters) on Sol 1294. Images relayed from the robot show delicate features that have apparently been formed by windblown sand abrasion, notes Ken Herkenhoff of the USGS Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona. Bedrock targets On its current […]
The long awaited debut of the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) is near at hand. BEAM is a product of the private group, Bigelow Aerospace of North Las Vegas, Nevada. The technology was developed under a NASA contract in an effort to test and validate expandable habitat technology. Beyond the BEAM is the prospect […]
NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover is looking at “gnarly” terrain ahead! Now in Sol 1292, Curiosity made a drive of over 75 feet (23 meters) on Sol 1290. According to Lauren Edgar, a research geologist at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, the plan is to keep driving across the Naukluft Plateau on the Red […]
Last night’s successful launch of the Cygnus supply ship to the International Space Station is loaded with equipment – including an experiment to observe and record incoming meteors and reentering objects from Earth orbit. Called the Meteor experiment, once installed onboard the ISS the plan is for the gear to operate for 2 years, balanced […]
State-run news agencies in China report that the country’s first space lab — Tiangong-1—has ended data service. That function was terminated by China’s space engineering office. The spacecraft has been in an “operational orbit” of 1,630 days. Tiangong-1 was launched in September 2011 with a design life of two years. The space lab was […]
