March 9th, 2022
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The European Space Agency (ESA) has chosen a consortium, led by Thales Alenia Space in the UK, to design and fabricate an experimental payload to extract oxygen from the surface of the Moon. Following a competition, the winning consortium has been tasked with producing equipment that will evaluate the prospect of building larger lunar […]
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China’s Mars sample return project will mirror to a large degree the technological prowess the country exhibited in their Chang’e-5 lunar sample return mission. Chang’e-5 landed on the Moon in December 2020 and rocketed back to Earth 1,731 grams of lunar rocks and soil. Wu Weiren, chief designer of China’s lunar exploration program and an […]
With increasingly regularity, Earth’s ocean waters are the drop zones for incoming leftovers from space. For decades, Russian Progress spaceships loaded with tons of waste from the International Space Station are purposely augured into what’s labeled as the Pacific Ocean’s “spacecraft cemetery.” Similarly, there’s the Cygnus cargo supply vehicles, filled with rubbish from the space station […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at Gale Crater is now performing Sol 3406 tasks. “The terrain continues to challenge us as we make our way up onto the Greenheugh pediment,” reports Fred Calef, Planetary Geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A recent drive by the robot ended sooner than expected when it sensed the road was […]
China continues to press forward on construction of its Tiangong space station, scheduled to be completed before year’s end. Zhou Jianping, chief designer of the nation’s manned space program, said the assembly phase of the Tiangong program will begin in May and will involve the launch of two astronaut crews, two space labs and […]
That out-of-control rocket stage has smacked into the Moon’s far side, given early predictions of its scheduled demise. The discarded hardware has been identified as a wayward Chinese Long March 3C rocket stage from the Chang’e 5-T1 mission in 2014. Tagging the out-of-control stage to China comes from Bill Gray, manager of Project Pluto that […]
The time grows closer for that wayward rocket stage to bombard the Moon and the March 4 impact on the Moon’s far side has earned scientific attention. The Goldstone Solar System Radar near Barstow, California was set to observe the object a few days before impact. But the radar track had to be cancelled on […]
New color imagery taken by NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter on Mars has been posted. These images were acquired by the aerial device using its high-resolution color camera, mounted in the helicopter’s fuselage and pointed approximately 22 degrees below the horizon. Photos were acquired on Feb. 25, 2022 (Sol 362 of the Perseverance rover mission). This was […]
Note: The ExoMars 2022 mission has been slated for September 20 (the opening of a 12-day launch window); lifting off from Baikonur, Kazakhstan atop a Proton booster. European Space Agency (ESA) statement regarding cooperation with Russia following a meeting with Member States on February 28, 2022: “We deplore the human casualties and tragic consequences of […]
On January 15, 2022, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted off the coast of Tonga in the South Pacific Ocean, generating a tsunami and triggering resulting wave action alerts around the world. We now know quite a bit about the undersea upsurge. And there appears to be take-away messages for those concerned about an […]
