July 21st, 2015
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NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has completed a wheel inspection, producing some striking images of growing damage on one of its wheels. A Sol 1046 campaign of wheel imaging completed nominally, and the rover is a little over one-meter from its previous location. According to Ken Herkenhoff of the USGS Astrogeology Science Center in […]
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On June 7, 2015 the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, made it to its final destination when it entered orbit around the Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L1), some 1.5 million kilometers sunward of the Earth. A NASA camera on DSCOVR has returned its first view of the entire sunlit side of […]
My wife Barbara and I had an incredible weekend with Buzz Aldrin at the ShareSpace Foundation Launch Gala, Celebrating Apollo 11, on July 18, 2015 at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. Met with Buzz and actor John Travolta, along with legendary musician Roger McGuinn of The Byrds. McGuinn is a space […]
A new booster for commercial launch has been announced by International Launch Services (ILS) – Russia’s Angara 1.2 launcher. The Angara 1.2 vehicle will be available for launch in 2017. Launches will be conducted from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Northern Russia. According to ILS, given the availability of the Angara booster, augmented with […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover completed a drive of 28-feet (8.5 meters) on Sol 1044. That drive left the machinery in a relatively flat and smooth area that is suitable for imaging of the wheels. “Wheel imaging is done periodically to assess wear, and it’s time to acquire new […]
Images taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during the close flyby of Pluto and its moons have begun to filter from the spacecraft back to Earth. New close-up imagery of a region near Pluto’s equator released today reveal a giant surprise: a range of youthful mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above […]
The New Horizons mission to Pluto was a triumph of science…and a feat of project management. Daniel Terdiman, a San Francisco-based journalist at Fast Company, has written a fascinating article titled: “How to Plan the Ultimate Long-Term Project, From the Team Who Got Us to Pluto.” Terdiman explains that planning a project whose culmination […]
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko continues to produce striking, up-close data regarding the celestial wanderer. ESA has issued tell-all images that focus on Apis and Atum regions on the comet. Context imagery show details of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko’s surface features close to regional boundaries on the comet’s large lobe, […]
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft phoned home to eagerly awaiting Earthlings – giving the “hi-sign” that it survived its high-speed and close flyby of distant Pluto and its system of moons. At the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, jubilant scientists and engineers breathed a sigh of relief that the data-collecting New Horizons […]
The New Horizons spacecraft has made a historic flyby of Pluto, with the probe making its closest pass at 7:49 a.m. ET on July 14. The piano-sized robotic spacecraft zoomed by distant Pluto at a distance of 7,750 miles away, zipping by at nearly 31,000 miles per hour. The flyby for […]
