July 1st, 2014
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A plug for the special edition of Sky and Telescope magazine dedicated to Mars exploration. Buzz Aldrin and I co-wrote a humans to Mars article that we hope you’ll find of interest. •How can we find current or extinct life on Mars? •What happened to Mars’s atmosphere? •How will humans explore […]
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So close, yet so far…Gliese 832 c is the nearest best habitable world candidate to date. An international team of astronomers, led by Robert Wittenmyer from the University of New South Wales, Australia, have reported the discovery of a new potentially habitable Super-Earth around the nearby red-dwarf star Gliese 832 – a mere hop, skip […]
UPDATE: At a NASA telecom today regarding the LDSD test, lead engineers detailed that the key elements of the project – the parachutes, the hardware-lofting balloon, the saucer-shaped test article – all were recovered in ocean waters. Also recovered is a huge amount of video and other recorded data contained within black boxes. The Supersonic […]
A spectacular interactive panorama of images snagged by NASA’s Curiosity rover at Gale Crater has been produced by “panoramacist” Andrew Bodrov of 360cities.net. Bodrov made use of images obtained by Curiosity’s Mast Camera. A special tip of the space helmet visor goes to Nancy Atkinson, Universe Today’s Senior Editor, for posting about this unique panorama. […]
Space officials in China are detailing new plans to send a rover to Mars in 2020, followed a decade later by hauling back to Earth Martian samples. The robotic Mars mission would consist of both an orbiter and a landing rover that will explore the planet jointly, said Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist with the Chang’e […]
Filmmaker Tate Taylor has signed up to direct In the Event of a Moon Disaster for FilmNation. The movie is inspired by a 1969 speech written for U.S. President Richard Nixon by William Safire, then on White House duty as a presidential speechwriter. The July 18, 1969 document was sent to White House official, H.R. Halderman, […]
Engineers on Earth are trying to get a little traction about wheels on Mars. NASA’s Curiosity rover is showing wheel “wear and tear” that engineers did not expect this early into the mission. Getting to Mount Sharp is a priority, but the robot has had to adjust its driving to compensate for the wheel damage. […]
My latest up on SPACE.com: Research Center Launched to Combat Space Junk Menace http://www.space.com/26344-space-junk-research-center-coder.html
Question: How do you feed a six-person crew on a three-year mission to Mars? Answer: It’s not easy! That point was underscored during a June 23 panel discussion on living and working in extreme conditions at the 2014 Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) Annual Meeting & Food Expo held this week in New Orleans. A […]
How do everyday objects here on Earth stand a chance of surviving on distant Mars? To find out, over two-dozen UK students have flown 80 experiments high above Earth courtesy of the MARSBalloon project. The experiments were lofted 18.6 miles (30 kilometers) up into Earth’s atmosphere on a high altitude balloon named Tharsis – after a […]
