Pasadena CA (JPL) Aug 08, 2023
The agency's Cold Atom Lab is getting its second major upgrade and will be using it to explore the quantum realm. On Tuesday, Aug. 1, a major hardware update for NASA's Cold Atom Lab lifted off aboard a Northrop Grumman Cygnus resupply spacecraft on its way to the International Space Station. About the size of a small refrigerator, the lab is sometimes called the coolest place in the known

Pasadena CA (JPL) Aug 08, 2023
The helicopter performed a short hop to help the team better understand why its previous flight was interrupted. NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter successfully completed its 54th flight on Aug. 3, the first flight since the helicopter cut its July 22 flight short. The 25-second up-and-down hop provided data that could help the Ingenuity team determine why its 53rd flight ended early.

New Delhi (XNA) Aug 09, 2023
The injection of Chandrayaan-3 into the lunar orbit and the subsequent moves marked a major milestone in India's ambitious $75-million lunar mission, experts said. The Indian Space Research Organisation, or ISRO, on Sunday completed the Lunar-Orbit Insertion to put the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft into the moon's orbit. The spacecraft carrying the Moon Mission-3 is expected to land on th

Pasadena CA (JPL) Aug 08, 2023
Data sent by the spacecraft before it retired last December has provided new details about how fast the planet rotates and how much it wobbles. Scientists have made the most precise measurements ever of Mars' rotation, for the first time detecting how the planet wobbles due to the "sloshing" of its molten metal core. The findings, detailed in a recent Nature paper, rely on data from NASA's InSig

Pasadena CA (JPL) Aug 04, 2023
Earth planning date: Friday August 4, 2023: We're planning a special weekend today - Saturday is the 11th (Earth) anniversary of Curiosity's landing! I was newly graduated from high school when I watched Curiosity touch down, and it still seems surreal sometimes that I get to be part of a mission I followed with such fascination back then. We have an exciting anniversary (or 'landiversary'

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Aug 09, 2023
Rocket Lab USA, Inc. (Nasdaq: RKLB) has signed a new launch services agreement with a confidential customer for a HASTE (Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron) mission from Launch Complex 2 at Virginia's Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport within NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in 2024. The contract signing with a new customer came just days after Rocket Lab successfully launched the

Westminster CO (SPX) Aug 08, 2023
Advanced Space LLC., a leading space tech solutions company, is pleased to announce that NASA has selected two of our new Phase I concepts under the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The first project, won under the Flight Dynamics and Navigation Technologies subtopic, will support NASA's future efforts to design spacecraft trajectories for vehicles flying in cislunar spac

Image: Before the vacuum

Ariel, ESA’s next-generation mission to observe the chemical makeup of distant exoplanets, has passed a major milestone after successfully completing its payload Preliminary Design Review (PDR).