Seattle WA (SPX) Feb 22, 2023
The red streaks crisscrossing the surface of Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, are striking. Scientists suspect it is a frozen mixture of water and salts, but its chemical signature is mysterious because it matches no known substance on Earth. A team led by the University of Washington may have solved the puzzle with the discovery of a new type of solid crystal that forms when water and tabl

Washington DC (UPI) Feb 21, 2023
The Department of Defense awarded a $1.5 million contract to New Frontier Aerospace to continue its work on a 3D printed rocket engine. The aerospace manufacturer announced the deal in a press release on Tuesday with funding coming from the National Security Innovation Capital. The company is developing a plastic-fueled rocket engine called Mjolnir. Development began with a $750,000 co

Paris (ESA) Feb 22, 2023
This year started with a nice imaging opportunity for Solar Orbiter, and a chance to further improve the quality of its data. On 3 January 2023, inner planet Mercury crossed the spacecraft's field of view, resulting in a transit where Mercury appeared as a perfectly black circle moving across the face of the Sun. A number of the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter's instruments captured the transit. In

Space Coast FL (SPX) Feb 22, 2023
Roscosmos on Tuesday blamed an "external impact," not a manufacturing defect, for a coolant leak from an unmanned Russian supply ship docked at the International Space Station on February 11. High-resolution pictures of the Progress MS-21 spacecraft were taken by cosmonauts using the ISS' 17-meter-long Canadarm2 robotic arm, which revealed a 12-millimeter hole where the coolant fluid pour

Image: Farming on the Moon

Copernicus Sentinel-2 helps explorers unearth rare meteorite

Beijing (XNA) Feb 20, 2023
China has released a new batch of datasets from the payloads installed on the Chang'e-4 probe on the official website of the Lunar and Planetary Data Release System. The datasets include 3,991.1 MB of 803 data files obtained by the four scientific payloads on the Chang'e-4 lander and rover between December 26, 2021 and January 10, 2022. The Chang'e-4 probe, launched on Dec 8, 2018, m

Pasadena CA (JPL) Feb 20, 2023
The team was eagerly awaiting our downlink this morning to hear how the drill attempt from Sol 3742 went. The images came down and indeed there was a drill hole... a mini drill hole... and sadly not deep enough to get to a sufficient depth for the drill assembly to start collecting sample. This was our fourth attempt to drill this marker band, and we gave it our best shot from both a geology and