March 23rd, 2022
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China’s Shenzhou-13 crew turned the in-construction Tiangong space station into an off-Earth school house, giving assembled students a lecture on the impact of microgravity on processes. The lecture given by Zhai Zhigang, Wang Yaping and Ye Guangfu, was broadcast live worldwide by China Media Group (CMG). The experiment demonstrated how oil is separated from water […]
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NASA’s Mars helicopter has performed its 22nd flight over last weekend. The trip lasted 101.4 seconds and Ingenuity got up to 33 feet (10 meters) in the air. Word from the JPL team is that another flight could take place perhaps as early as later this week. The rotorcraft is on its way to setting […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at Gale Crater is now performing Sol 3421 duties. Reports Mark Salvatore, a planetary geologist at the University of Michigan, after the robot made a drive of roughly 50 feet (15 meters) drive to the west along the top of the Greenheugh Pediment, Curiosity is now positioned at an interesting textural […]
China’s space station is a work-in-progress, with two new modules — Wentian and Mengtian — being readied for launch this year to the low Earth orbit construction site. According to the Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization (CSU) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a set of multidisciplinary “frontier scientific experiments” are to be […]
That super-powerful camera — HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) – aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has snagged new imagery of the Chinese Zhurong rover. This HiRISE image, acquired March 11, 2022, shows how far the rover has traveled in the 10 months since it landed in May 2021. MRO’s altitude above Mars when […]
There has been astounding growth in the number of active satellites, increased by 1,702 in 2021, up to a total of 4,852. New data from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) Global Security Program shows that the number of satellites increased 30% annually the last two years, with the number of satellites launched in […]
Numbers of new images from NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter have been posted, acquired on March 10, 2022 using its navigation camera. This camera is mounted in the helicopter’s fuselage and pointed directly downward to track the ground during flight. Stats on the 21st flight of the rotorcraft: traveled 1,214 feet (370 meters) and clocked […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at Gale Crater is now performing Sol 3417 tasks. Abigail Fraeman, a planetary geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, reports that a Monday drive by the robot was successful, and the rover is fully surrounded by the rocks that cap the Greenheugh pediment. “From here we can see hundreds of ventifacts […]
The European Space Agency announced today that the upcoming launch of the ExoMars 2022 mission has been suspended. ESA’s ruling Council, meeting in Paris on March 16-17 assessed the situation arising from the war in Ukraine regarding ExoMars, and unanimously acknowledged “the present impossibility” of carrying out the ongoing cooperation with Roscosmos on the ExoMars […]
After decades of robotic scouring of Mars, that remote world has transmitted a rock-solid message back to Earth. The communiqué from orbiters, stay-put landers and on-the-move rovers is this: The faraway globe is an active, dynamic and largely enigmatic place. Furthermore, a still elusive question that taunts scientists to this day is whether or not […]
