Copernical Team
Mars helicopter Ingenuity performs well before first flight
NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity, the first powered aircraft on another planet, is free of the Perseverance rover that carried it and appears to be functioning well ahead of its first flight on Sunday, the space agency said.
NASA plans to broadcast the results of that first flight at 3:30 a.m. EDT Monday after the helicopter transmits data and images to Perseverance, which will send the Ningbo to build $3.05b rocket launchpad site
The port city of Ningbo in Zhejiang province is building a 20 billion yuan ($3.05 billion) rocket launch site to meet surging demand for putting satellites into orbit and further develop the industrial cluster of the commercial aerospace sector, according to the local authorities.
Highlighted in the recently revealed draft for mega projects in Zhejiang during the 14th Five-Year Plan period Webb Telescope packs its sunshield for a million mile trip
Engineers working on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have successfully folded and packed its sunshield for its upcoming million-mile (roughly 1.5 million kilometer) journey, which begins later this year. The sunshield - a five-layer, diamond-shaped structure the size of a tennis court - was specially engineered to fold up around the two sides of the telescope and fit within the confines of its NASA's OSIRIS-REx completes final tour of Asteroid Bennu
NASA's OSIRIS-REx completed its last flyover of Bennu around 6 a.m. EDT (4 a.m. MDT) April 7 and is now slowly drifting away from the asteroid; however, the mission team will have to wait a few more days to find out how the spacecraft changed the surface of Bennu when it grabbed a sample of the asteroid.
The OSIRIS-REx team added this flyby to document surface changes resulting from the To Odyssey marks 20 years of mapping Mars
NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft launched 20 years ago on April 7, making it the oldest spacecraft still working at the Red Planet. The orbiter, which takes its name from Arthur C. Clarke's classic sci-fi novel "2001: A Space Odyssey" (Clarke blessed its use before launch), was sent to map the composition of the Martian surface, providing a window to the past so scientists could piece togethe Perseverance's take selfie with Ingenuity
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover took a selfie with the Ingenuity helicopter, seen here about 13 feet (4 meters) away in this image from April 6, 2021, the 46th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Perseverance captured the image using a camera called WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering), part of the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminesce NASA's Webb Telescope packs its sunshield for a million mile trip
Engineers working on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have successfully folded and packed its sunshield for its upcoming million-mile (roughly 1.5 million kilometer) journey, which begins later this year.
The sunshield—a five-layer, diamond-shaped structure the size of a tennis court—was specially engineered to fold up around the two sides of the telescope and fit within the confines of its launch vehicle, the Ariane 5 rocket. Now that folding has been completed at Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California, the sunshield will remain in this compact form through launch and the first few days the observatory will spend in space.
Designed to protect the telescope's optics from any heat sources that could interfere with its sight, the sunshield is one of Webb's most critical and complex components.
Probing for life in the icy crusts of ocean worlds
Long before NASA's Perseverance rover touched down on the Red Planet on Feb. 18, one of its highest-level mission goals was already established: to seek out signs of ancient life on the Martian surface.
ESA Agenda 2025 media briefing
Video:
01:00:59
ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher spoke to journalists on 7 April 2021 to introduce ESA Agenda 2025, setting out ESA's strategic priorities and goals.
Lunar Gateway will maintain its orbit with a 6 kW ion engine
When NASA sends astronauts back to the moon as part of the Artemis Program, they will be taking the long view. Rather than being another "footprints and flags" program, the goal is to create a lasting infrastructure that will ensure a "sustained program of lunar exploration." A major element in this plan is the Lunar Gateway, an orbital habitat that astronauts will use to venture to and from the surface.
The first step in establishing the Gateway is the deployment of two critical modules—the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) and the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE). According to a recent update, NASA (along with Maxar Technologies and Busek Co.) recently completed a hot-fire test of the PPE propulsion subsystem—the first of many that will ensure that the PPE and HALO will be ready for launch by 2024.
This propulsion subsystem is a cluster of Hall effect thrusters (aka ion engines), which use electromagnetic fields to accelerate ionized gas through engine nozzles to generate thrust. In this case, the engine system is a 6-kilowatt solar electric propulsion (SEP) concept that incorporates Maxar-built electronics and a xenon feed system with four Busek-built BHT-600 thrusters.
