Copernical Team
NASA rover preparing to take first Mars rock samples
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The Perseverance Mars rover is preparing to collect its first rock sample from the site of an ancient lake bed, as its mission to search for signs of past life begins in earnest, NASA said Wednesday.
The milestone is expected to take place within two weeks in a scientifically interesting region of the Jezero Crater called the "Cratered Floor Fractured Rough."
"When Neil Armstrong took t NASA Perseverance Mars Rover to acquire first sample
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NASA is making final preparations for its Perseverance Mars rover to collect its first-ever sample of Martian rock, which future planned missions will transport to Earth. The six-wheeled geologist is searching for a scientifically interesting target in a part of Jezero Crater called the "Cratered Floor Fractured Rough."
This important mission milestone is expected to begin within the next ASU-led LunaH-Map spacecraft safely delivered to NASA's Kennedy Space Center
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The ASU-led team that built NASA's Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper, or "LunaH-Map" for short, has safely delivered their spacecraft to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in preparation for a launch expected later this year on NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) Artemis I rocket.
LunaH-Map is a fully functional interplanetary spacecraft about the size of a large cereal box and weighing about 3 NASA funds hopper to explore lunar polar craters
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Arizona State University is partnering with Intuitive Machines on a mini extreme mobility lunar vehicle, called Micro-Nova, that will hop around the moon's surface and take the first-ever pictures inside craters close to the lunar south pole.
On July 16, 2021, NASA awarded the project a $41.6 million "Tipping Point" contract to develop, fly and operate a deployable lunar "hopper lander" on Russia launches Nauka module to space station after years of delay
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After years of delays, Russia launched a new multipurpose laboratory module named Nauka to the International Space Station on Wednesday from Kazakhstan.
A Russian Proton-M rocket carrying the module lifted off about10:58 a.m. EDT from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome. The mission reached a successful orbit, according to NASA.
Besides a laboratory, whose name means "science" in Englis Russia launches lab module to International Space Station
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LunaH-Map spacecraft safely delivered to NASA's Kennedy Space Center
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The ASU-led team that built NASA's Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper, or "LunaH-Map" for short, has safely delivered their spacecraft to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in preparation for a launch expected later this year on NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) Artemis I rocket.
LunaH-Map is a fully functional interplanetary spacecraft about the size of a large cereal box and weighing about 30 pounds. It is the first mission to be led, designed, assembled, integrated, tested and delivered from the ASU Tempe campus. Its destination is in orbit around the moon, from which it will map water-ice in permanently shadowed regions of the lunar south pole.
ERA launch replay
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Video:
00:03:07
The European Robotic Arm (ERA) is on its way to the International Space Station after being launched on a Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, at 16:58 CEST on 21 July 2021.
The 11-m-long robot is travelling folded and attached to what will be its home base – the Multipurpose Laboratory Module, also called ‘Nauka’. The Proton-M booster placed Nauka and ERA into orbit around 10 minutes after liftoff, nearly 200 km above Earth.
The International Space Station already has two robotic arms; Canadian and Japanese robots play a crucial role in berthing spacecraft and transferring payloads and astronauts. However, neither
View from Juno during its flyby of Ganymede and Jupiter
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Visualizations shape how we perceive space exploration. Whether it's the Pale Blue Dot, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, Earthrise, or any other myriad images captured as part of this great endeavor, they all help inspire the next generation of explorers. Now, with advances in image capture and processing technology, we can finally start to take the next step in those visualizations—video. Ingenuity was recently captured on video during its first flight a few months ago. And this week, NASA released a breathtaking video of Juno's view of Jupiter and Ganymede, one of its moons, as it flew past the gas giant.
The views themselves are stunning, with lightning flashing on Jupiter's night side and Ganymede's textured terrain coming across in full force.
Astrophysicist outlines plans for a gravitational wave observatory on the moon
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Vanderbilt astrophysicist Karan Jani has led a series of studies that make the first case for a gravitational wave infrastructure on the surface of the moon. The experiment, dubbed Gravitational-Wave Lunar Observatory for Cosmology, uses the moon's environment and geocentric orbit to analyze mergers of black holes, neuron stars and dark matter candidates within almost 70 percent of the entire observable volume of the universe, he said.
"By tapping into the natural conditions on the moon, we showed that one of the most challenging spectrum of gravitational waves can be measured better from the lunar surface, which so far seems impossible from Earth or space," Jani said.
"The moon offers an ideal backdrop for the ultimate gravitational wave observatory, since it lacks an atmosphere and noticeable seismic noise, which we must mitigate at great cost for laser interferometers on Earth," said Avi Loeb, professor of science at Harvard University and bestselling author of books about black holes, the first stars, the search for extraterrestrial life and the future of the universe.
