Tucson AZ (SPX) Nov 12, 2021
A near-Earth asteroid named Kamo`oalewa could be a fragment of our moon, according to a new paper published in Nature Communications Earth and Environment by a team of astronomers led by the University of Arizona. Kamo`oalewa is a quasi-satellite - a subcategory of near-Earth asteroids that orbit the sun but remain relatively close to Earth. Little is known about these objects because they

Toronto, Canada (SPX) Nov 12, 2021
MDA has been awarded a contract by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to undertake a Phase A initial design study for a Canadian Lunar Rover mission to the Moon. As part of the CSA's Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program (LEAP), the Lunar Rover will advance eight key technologies that are foundational building blocks for planetary rovers, including mobility, communications, operations, thermal cont

Pasadena CA (JPL) Nov 11, 2021
Every time we collect a rock sample on Mars, Perseverance performs an hours-long set of carefully choreographed operations with its robotic arm, the coring drill, and the Adaptive Caching Assembly. One of these operations is docking: the process by which the arm aligns itself with the Bit Carousel on the front of the rover, so that the corer can drop off and pick up new drill bits. Docking

Beijing (XNA) Nov 11, 2021
China has released the information of the third batch of lunar samples brought back by the country's Chang'e-5 mission. Public users can log on to the website of China's Lunar and Deep Space Exploration (www.clep.org.cn) to check for the related information of the 15 new samples and submit applications for research. The Chang'e-5 probe returned to Earth on Dec. 17, 2020, retrieving a

Tucson AZ (SPX) Nov 11, 2021
A new technique developed in part by Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Nader Haghighipour has allowed astronomers to quickly detect a transiting circumbinary planet orbiting around two suns, according to a new Astronomical Journal paper on which Haghighipour is an author. Circumbinary planets are planetary bodies that rotate around two stars. Although for years, they were merely

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Nov 10, 2021
A team of scientists has forecast the scientific impact of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's High Latitude Wide Area Survey on critical questions in cosmology. This observation program will consist of both imaging, which reveals the locations, shapes, sizes, and colors of objects like distant galaxies, and spectroscopy, which involves measuring the intensity of light from those objects at

Video: 00:06:35

Relive the moment the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, Endurance, docked to the International Space Station with ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer and his NASA colleagues Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron on board.

Docking took place at 23:32 GMT Thursday, 11 November/00:32 CET Friday, 12 November, around 22 hours after Crew-3 was launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA.

Crew Dragon docking is autonomous. Once docked, astronauts on Endurance and aboard the Space Station conducted standard leak checks and pressurisation before the hatch between the two spacecraft was opened at 01:25 GMT/02:25

Morpheus, a German propulsion startup that opened an office in Los Angeles earlier this year, unveiled a suite of products, called the Sphere ecosystem, that are designed to work together to reduce the cost and complexity of satellite constellation operations.

The plan to develop a reusable rocket came as a surprise because “reusability” was nowhere to be seen in the government’s budget request for 2022 — in which South Korea’s next-generation rocket was supposed to be an expendable rocket.

arly education about the value created by space technology should be a national priority, the top enlisted leader of the U.S. Space Force said Nov. 11.

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