Tag Archives: space program

The Verge reports: A new mission involving a drone-like lander will explore the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. The mission — called Dragonfly — received a coveted funding slot from NASA’s New Frontiers program, which funds ambitious missions to explore objects in our Solar System. The Dragonfly mission will send a dual-quadcopter the surface of Titan. It will look like …

The Times Of Israel reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Thursday for a printed Bible to be carried to the moon by the next Israeli spacecraft to make the journey, and credited Judaism’s foundational text for the “daring” and “spirit” Israelis demonstrate in the attempt. Speaking at the International Bible Quiz for Youth, the prime minister vowed to send a …

Space.com reports: Scientists just felt the Red Planet move under their feet — robotically from millions of miles away, on the stark surface of Mars. On April 6, NASA’s InSight lander sensed its first confirmed marsquake, a phenomenon scientists suspected, but couldn’t confirm, occurred on the neighboring planet. Measuring the Martian equivalent of earthquakes, seismic waves traveling through the interior …

The BBC reports: The first privately funded mission to the Moon has crashed on the lunar surface after the apparent failure of its main engine. The Israeli spacecraft – called Beresheet – attempted a soft landing, but had several technical and communication problems. The aim of the mission was to take pictures and conduct experiments. Only government space agencies from …

NBC News reports: Japan’s space agency said an explosive dropped Friday from its Hayabusa 2 spacecraft successfully blasted the surface of an asteroid for the first time to form a crater and pave the way for the collection of underground samples for possible clues to the origin of the solar system. Friday’s mission was the riskiest for Hayabusa 2 because …

The Associated Press reports: A sleek American-built capsule with just a test dummy aboard docked smoothly with the International Space Station on Sunday in a big step toward putting the U.S. back in the business of launching astronauts. The white Dragon capsule, developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company under contract to NASA, closed in on the orbiting station nearly 260 …

The Independent reports: NASA’s Opportunity rover is officially dead, the space agency has said, after it disappeared in a dust storm on Mars. Clearly emotional NASA staff, standing in front of a life-sized replica of the rover, said they had not heard back from the rover and that the mission would come to an end. “I am standing here with …

Roll Call reports: Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is lobbying his former colleagues to do more to study unidentified flying objects. “I personally don’t know if there exists little green men other places, I kind of doubt that, but I do believe that the information we have indicates we should do a lot more study,” the Nevada Democrat said. …

Science News reports: NASA’s Juno orbiter has captured images of a volcanic plume on Jupiter’s moon Io during the mission’s 17th flyby of the giant planet. Four instruments onboard Juno — a camera called JunoCam, the Stellar Reference Unit, the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper and the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph — observed Io for over an hour, providing a glimpse of …

Space.com reports: Humanity just planted its flag on the far side of the moon. China’s robotic Chang’e 4 mission touched down on the floor of the 115-mile-wide (186 kilometers) Von Kármán Crater Wednesday night (Jan. 2), pulling off the first-ever soft landing on the mysterious lunar far side. Chang’e 4 will perform a variety of science work over the coming …

The New York Times reports: Ultima Thule, an icy world 4 billion miles from the sun, looks like a big snowman. At a news conference on Wednesday, scientists working with NASA’s New Horizons mission released several images that the spacecraft took as it flew by on Jan. 1. The scientists now say with confidence that Ultima Thule long ago was …

Engadget reports: NASA now has proof that its New Horizons probe completed its record-setting flyby of the Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule. The mission team confirmed the flypast at 10:31AM Eastern Time after receiving telemetry data indicating that the spacecraft was “healthy.” It technically flew past Ultima Thule at about 12:33AM , but the combination of data collection and the …

Axios reports: On New Year’s Day, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is expected to make history by conducting the most distant flyby ever, by zooming past an object a billion miles past Pluto. It’s called “Ultima Thule,” meaning “beyond the known world.” The goal of the mission is to learn more about the building blocks of planets. The spacecraft, which is …

CBS News reports: Eleven billion miles from Earth, NASA’s long-lived Voyager 2 probe, still beaming back data 41 years after its launch in 1977, has finally moved into interstellar space, scientists revealed Monday, joining its sister ship Voyager 1 in the vast, uncharted realm between the stars. Voyager 2 moved past the boundary of the heliosphere, the protective bubble defined …

Axios reports: SpaceX successfully reused for a third time a Falcon 9 rocket booster on Monday — a company first. It also launched 64 satellites from 34 organizations into space from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The mission, on behalf of the private company Spaceflight, set a record for the largest single launch of satellites from U.S. soil, SpaceX …

CBS News reports: NASA has released the first image of the spacecraft InSight from the surface of Mars after it successfully reached the planet after almost seven months travelling through space. The Mars Odyssey orbiter relayed images of the spacecraft from its landing site, known as Elysium Planitia. The US space agency tweeted one photograph, showing part of the InSight …

TechCrunch reports: The mysteries lying beyond our planet have puzzled and inspired scientists throughout the centuries. But today, the scientific community (and many others) have their eyes on Mars, where NASA’s InSight lander is set to touch down on the Red Planet. The whole thing is going down at 3pm ET today, and you can follow along with the exhilarating …

Agence France-Presse reports: China is planning to launch its own ‘artificial moon’ by 2020 to replace streetlamps and lower electricity costs in urban areas, state media reported Friday. Chengdu, a city in southwestern Sichuan province, is developing “illumination satellites” which will shine in tandem with the real moon, but are eight times brighter, according to China Daily. By reflecting light …

The BBC reports: A US astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut were forced to make an emergency landing after their Russian Soyuz rocket malfunctioned en route to the International Space Station (ISS). Shortly after taking off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Nick Hague and Alexey Ovchinin reported a problem with the rocket’s booster. The men were forced into a “ballistic descent”, …

The Associated Press reports: The hole discovered in Russia’s International Space Station last week was likely deliberately drilled to destroy the mission, space agency officials said Tuesday. Astronauts last week noticed a drop in pressure caused by a small hole and thought the gap was caused by a tiny meteorite, the country’s space agency chief told Phys.org. An astronaut ended …