Acting NASA administrator Steve Jurczyk said Friday that under President Biden’s budget request, the agency’s Artemis mission has a new goal: in addition to landing the first woman on the Moon, it will also send the first person of color to the lunar surface. So far, the only Earthlings to touch the Moon’s surface have […]
NASA’s Perseverance rover released the Ingenuity helicopter onto the surface of Mars Saturday, leaving behind the experimental flying drone to survive on its own power until attempting a historic hop in the Red Planet’s thin carbon dioxide atmosphere. The milestone kicks off a week of checkouts and testing before NASA commits to the $80 million […]
SpaceX launched its fourth Starship prototype in less than four months March 30, only to have the vehicle apparently crash once again. The Starship SN11 vehicle lifted off at approximately 9 a.m. Eastern from the company’s Boca Chica, Texas, test site, despite heavy fog that made it all but impossible to see the vehicle ascend. […]
NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) handily beat its goals. The space agency has revealed that its spacecraft has spotted over 2,200 potential planets since beginning its mission in 2018. Hundreds of those are smaller planets, some of which could include rocky worlds that are more Earth-like (though not necessarily habitable). TESS was originally expected […]
A mysterious streak of lights dazzled the night sky over parts of Oregon and Washington, leaving stargazers wondering what the unusual sighting might be. After some people speculated that it was a meteor shower, the National Weather Service said it was more likely to be debris from a SpaceX rocket “that did not successfully have […]
NASA is set to launch a test flight for their prototype helicopter called ‘Ingenuity’ for the first time in the next month. The agency mentioned that it plans to oversee the test flight by April 8th. Ingenuity made its way to Mars attached to NASA’s Perseverance rover which successfully landed on the surface of the […]
SpaceX has delivered another 60 Starlink satellites to orbit meaning it has sent 180 in total to join its 1,000+ strong constellation in the past two weeks alone. Today’s launch also set a record for SpaceX for its Falcon 9 rocket reusability program, since it was the ninth flight and ninth landing for this particular […]
Russia and China have unveiled plans for a joint lunar space station as Moscow seeks to recapture the glory of its space pioneering days of Soviet times, and Beijing gears up its own extraterrestrial ambitions. The International Scientific Lunar Station that Russia and China will work on is “a complex of experimental research facilities created […]
NASA’s rover Perseverance, which reached the Red Planet on February 18, is powered by the PowerPC 750 processor, the same chip that is inside the iconic 1998 iMac G3. According to New Scientist, the Mars Perseverance rover uses the RISC CPUs that Apple went all in on before switching to Intel. The iMac G3 was […]
Virgin Galactic has announced that it is pushing its space tourism program launch date back to “early 2022,” abandoning hopes it would begin the program this year. The announcement came Thursday afternoon in an earnings call. The news follows problems with a disappointing December 2020 launch, when the rocket motor of SpaceShipTwo did not ignite. […]
NASA’s latest mission to Mars has been a successful one thus far. After providing photos of Perseverance’s safe descent to the surface last week, the agency has revealed footage of the critical moments of the landing: the moments when the rover touched down. The video shows the rover falling towards the planet, using its parachutes […]
The FAA seems satisfied with its investigations into Elon Musk’s last two SpaceX Starship tests, each of which ended in an explosive crash, and the conclusion of those investigations should clear the way for a new SN10 flight in the very near future. “The FAA closed the investigation of the Feb. 2 SpaceX Starship SN9 […]
NASA landed a rover named Perseverance on Mars. I, along with 2 million other people, watched the landing happen live on YouTube. In its bid to use software that was “safe and proven”, NASA turned to Linux and open source. “This the first time we’ll be flying Linux on Mars,” said Tim Canham, Mars Helicopter […]
CNBC reports, Virgin has delayed the SpaceShipTwo test flight after determining that it needed extra time for “technical checks” while conducting pre-flight work. The space tourism company didn’t say when it might try again, although it previously said it could try later in February if a hoped-for launch on the 13th wasn’t viable. “We have […]
NASA has awarded Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, approximately $93.3 million to deliver a suite of 10 science investigations and technology demonstrations to the Moon in 2023. The delivery, planned for Mare Crisium, a low-lying basin on the Moon’s near side, will investigate a variety of lunar surface conditions and resources. Such investigations will […]