Copernical Team
Second Time's the Charm: Sols 3671-3673
As happens occasionally, our previous plan did not execute quite as expected. There was an issue with the rover's avionics in Wednesday's plan just before MAHLI was to take images of our contact science target "Roxinho." This precluded that imaging, the subsequent drive and observations taken from our remote sensing mast. Thankfully our engineering team here at JPL assessed the fault and felt co Plant on China's Shenzhou-15 spaceship begins growing
The Arabidopsis thaliana plant boarding on China's Shenzhou-15 manned spaceship has begun growing, the China Science and Technology Daily reported on Monday.
The Shenzhou-15 spaceship was launched at 11:08 p.m. on Nov. 29, 2022. About 20 hours later, Chinese astronauts placed the Arabidopsis thaliana in a biological incubator in the life and ecological experiment cabinet inside the Wentian Methods for building lunar landing pads may involve microwaving moon soil
Establishing a Moon base will be critical for the U.S. in the new space race and building safe and cost-effective landing pads for spacecraft to touch down there will be key.
These pads will have to stop lunar dust and particles from sandblasting everything around them at more than 10,000 miles per hour as a rocket takes off or lands since there is no air to slow the rocket plume down. Giant mantle plume reveals Mars is more active than previously thought
On Earth, shifting tectonic plates reshuffle the planet's surface and make for a dynamic interior, so the absence of such processes on Mars led many to think of it as a dead planet, where not much happened in the past 3 billion years.
In the current issue of Nature Astronomy, scientists from the University of Arizona challenge current views of Martian geodynamic evolution with a report on NASA's Orion spaceship slingshots around Moon, heads for home
NASA's Orion spaceship made a close pass of the Moon and used a gravity assist to whip itself back towards Earth on Monday, marking the start of the return journey for the Artemis-1 mission.
At its nearest point, the uncrewed capsule flew less than 80 miles (130 kilometers) from the surface, testing maneuvers that will be used during later Artemis missions that return humans to the rocky cel Researchers say space atomic clocks could help uncover the nature of dark matter
Studying an atomic clock on-board a spacecraft inside the orbit of Mercury and very near to the sun might be the trick to uncovering the nature of dark matter, suggests a new study published in Nature Astronomy.
Dark matter makes up more than 80% of mass in the universe, but it has so far evaded detection on Earth, despite decades of experimental efforts. A key component of these searches is an assumption about the local density of dark matter, which determines the number of dark matter particles passing through the detector at any given time, and therefore the experimental sensitivity.
In some models, this density can be much higher than is usually assumed, and dark matter can become more concentrated in some regions compared to others.
One important class of experimental searches are those using atoms or nuclei, because these have achieved incredible sensitivity to signals of dark matter.
NASA delivers first flight hardware to ESA for Lunar Pathfinder
NASA delivered the first flight hardware for the Lunar Pathfinder mission to ESA (European Space Agency), which formally accepted the instrument on Nov. 4. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, developed the instrument, a laser retroreflector array, which will test new navigation techniques for lunar missions.
NASA and ESA plan to launch Lunar Pathfinder via a future Commercial Lunar Payload Services delivery. In addition to testing navigation capabilities, Lunar Pathfinder will operate as a commercial communications relay satellite and provide communications services for exploration missions on the lunar surface.
The Lunar Pathfinder mission is led by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL), and ESA arranged for the mission to provide communications services to NASA. Teams from NASA, ESA, and SSTL completed inspections when the laser retroreflector array arrived at SSTL's facility in Guildford, U.K., where it will be installed in the satellite.
NASA capsule flies over Apollo landing sites, heads home
NASA's Orion capsule and its test dummies swooped one last time around the moon Monday, flying over a couple Apollo landing sites before heading home.
NASA is testing a new robotic arm that really knows how to chill out
Future planetary missions could explore in extremely cold temperatures that stymie existing spacecraft, thanks to a project under development at JPL.
When NASA returns to the moon with Artemis, the agency and its partners will reach unexplored regions of the lunar surface around the South Pole, where it can get much colder at night than even on frigid Mars.
Artemis lunar flyby: Orion is coming home
Today at 17:43 CET (16:43 GMT) the European Service Module for Orion fired its main engine at less than 127 km from the Moon's surface to put the Artemis spacecraft on a collision course with Earth.