It's a long way to Mars, and explorers headed there will either have to take enough food and supplies to last the whole trip or use in-situ resources to make what they need. A recent ESA Discovery project led by the Universitat de València explored whether microalgae extracted from lichen could survive on Mars and be used to produce oxygen, food and other useful substances.

To kick off this year’s ESA Academy Experiments programme, five university student teams from across Europe were invited to visit the experimental test facilities at ESTEC – ESA’s technical centre in the Netherlands – and Novespace, France.

Tokyo (AFP) Mar 4, 2025
Japanese startup ispace on Tuesday set a June 6 target touchdown date for its Moon lander, following the success of its rocket "rideshare" buddy, a spacecraft from a US firm. ispace's unmanned Resilience lander was launched in January on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket together with Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost - which aced its lunar landing on Sunday. Blue Ghost is only the second private

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Mar 04, 2025
The Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC) experiment has successfully arrived on the lunar surface, where it will operate for one full lunar day-equivalent to 14 Earth days-conducting research on how lunar dust adheres to various materials under the Moon's harsh environmental conditions. "Sunday morning marked a defining moment in both our company's journey and the future of commercial

Boston MA (SPX) Mar 05, 2025
When Zoe Fisher was in fourth grade, her art teacher asked her to draw her vision of a dream job on paper. At the time, those goals changed like the flavor of the week in an ice cream shop - "zookeeper" featured prominently for a while - but Zoe immediately knew what she wanted to put down: a mad scientist. When Fisher stumbled upon the drawing in her parents' Chicago home recently, it fel

Madrid, Spain (SPX) Mar 06, 2025
The Mobile Satellite Services Association (MSSA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) have announced a strategic alliance aimed at enhancing the future of 5G and 6G open architecture, standards-based satellite Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs). This collaboration seeks to integrate satellite and terrestrial networks for Direct-to-Device (D2D) services, expanding connectivity solutions while ensurin

Washington (AFP) Mar 6, 2025
A drill to search for ice. A 4G network test. Three rovers and a first-of-its-kind hopping drone. After becoming the first private firm to land on the Moon last year, Intuitive Machines is aiming for its second lunar touchdown on Thursday, carrying cutting-edge payloads to support future human missions. The Houston-based company is targeting no earlier than 12:32 pm ET (1732 GMT) at Mons

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Mar 06, 2025
Channels carved by rivers, lava, and ice all exhibit winding, sinuous patterns, yet a new study from The University of Texas at Austin has identified a fundamental difference in the way rivers bend compared to volcanic and ice-carved channels. This discovery may provide a new method for determining the origins of planetary channels where direct observation is not possible. While the specif

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Mar 06, 2025
Lonestar Data Holdings has reached a critical milestone with the successful testing and operation of its commercial data center payload while traveling through space en route to the Moon. This achievement marks a major step toward establishing the first-ever commercial lunar data center, reinforcing the vision of a robust and resilient space-based data infrastructure. Since its launch on F

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Mar 06, 2025
NASA has implemented energy-saving measures to keep the Voyager spacecraft operational for as long as possible, despite their decreasing power supply. On February 25, mission engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California powered down the cosmic ray subsystem aboard Voyager 1, and on March 24, they will deactivate Voyager 2's low-energy charged particle instrume