April 28th, 2022
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Rocket Lab is slated to launch in May a pathfinding cubesat mission that supports NASA’s Artemis return-to-the moon program. The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment — mercifully called CAPSTONE for short — tips the scales at a modest 55-pounds. This microwave-oven sized spacecraft will be lofted from New Zealand aboard a […]
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Technicians have unloaded China’s Shenzhou-13 spacecraft on Tuesday, removing items carried to space, weighing over 73 kilograms, including numbers of experimental equipment and instruments. Engineers of the China Academy of Space Technology took objects out of the return capsule. Among them are crop seeds brought to the space for biological experiments, which is a tradition […]
China will start engineering development of the fourth phase of its lunar exploration program this year, according to a senior official of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), as reported by the state-run Xinhua News Agency. The Chang’e-6, Chang’e-7 and Chang’e-8 lunar probes will be launched successively, and the country will endeavor to make breakthroughs […]
Yet another space causality of the ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine is the European Space Agency’s withdrawal of cooperation on Russia’s reactivation of Moon exploration. But what are the ripple effects of this move? Go to my new Scientific American story: “Europe Cancels Joint Moon Missions with Russia – Russia will move forward with lunar […]
The European Space Agency’s Space Debris Office has published an annual Space Environment Report. A bottom line: humankind’s behavior in space is improving but is still unsustainable in the long term. On one hand, Earth is encircled by spacecraft carrying out important work to study our changing climate, deliver global communication and navigation services and […]
On December 1, 2020, the 57 year old 305-meter Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico collapsed after a series of failures of the supporting cables. While no longer collecting scientific data, components of the telescope may be preserved for historical and educational purposes. An Arecibo Observatory (AO) Salvage Survey Committee reports the retrieval of items that […]
For you future moonwalkers, you may be wearing a knapsack that provides precise navigation capabilities on the Moon. NASA’s Kinematic Navigation and Cartography Knapsack (KNaCK) Instrument project is designed to overcome the lack of global positioning and navigation systems on a person’s lunar outings. KNaCK is to support missions that are part of NASA’s Artemis […]
A NASA technology demonstration mission integrates several new technologies aboard a small satellite to validate solar sail propulsion. Solar Cruiser is sponsored by the NASA Heliophysics Division’s Solar Terrestrial Probes Program. Utah State University’s Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) in North Logan Utah announced today that it has been awarded a contract to build two […]
The End of Astronauts – Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees; The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (April 2022); 192 pages; Hardcover: $25.95 My guess is that the reader will either hate or love this book! However, the authors provide a provoking argument for space exploration sans […]
Russia’s Roscosmos continues to implement a national lunar program, planning to implement three lunar missions in the coming years: Luna-Glob (Luna-25) Luna-Resource-1 (Luna-26) with an orbital spacecraft Luna-Resurs-1” (“Luna-27) with a lander “To date, the Luna-25 spacecraft, which is the first of the renewable domestic lunar program, is fully equipped with standard models of […]
