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One of the many milestones in the leadup to the launch of Artemis is its rollout: this is when a crawler will carry the SLS rocket with Orion and ESM from the Vehicle Assembly Building to launchpad 39B. NASA’s John Giles gives us a tour of the crawler and explains the adaptations made to this “wonderful piece of machinery” since it was first built for the Apollo programme in the 1960s. ESA is playing a key role in NASA’s Artemis programme, which will bring astronauts back to the Moon. The European Service Module – or ESM –

ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer is scheduled to perform his first spacewalk next week, stepping outside the International Space Station on Wednesday 23 March alongside NASA’s Raja Chari.

Beijing (XNA) Mar 18, 2022
China launched a remote sensing satellite from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the northwestern Gobi Desert on Thursday afternoon, according to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. The State-owned space contractor said that the Yaogan 34-02 satellite was placed in a preset orbit aboard a Long March 4C rocket that lifted off at 3:09 pm. The satellite will team up wi

Barcelona, Spain (SPX) Mar 18, 2022
Researchers from the UAB, IFAE and University College London propose using the variations in distance between the Earth and the Moon, which can be measured with a precision of less than a centimeter, as a new gravitational wave detector within a frequency range that current devices cannot detect. The research, which could pave the way for the detection of signals from the early universe, was pub

Munich, Germany (SPX) Mar 18, 2022
When the nearest service engineer is a 2-hour helicopter flight away, manual troubleshooting and firmware updates really aren't an option. So who does OneWeb trust for remote management of their user terminals? Axiros. As if it wasn't demanding enough managing your core network components out in space, there are also extreme on-the-ground challenges for a satellite operator like OneWeb. Th

Mejillones, Chile (AFP) March 18, 2022
When Chilean scientist Osvaldo Ulloa led an expedition 8,000 meters under the sea to an area where no human had ever been, his team discovered microscopic organisms that generated more questions than answers. The January submarine expedition dove into the Atacama Trench, created by the meeting of two tectonic plates in the eastern Pacific Ocean. "We pulled off the feat of taking humans i

Pasadena CA (JPL) Mar 18, 2022
Our Monday drive was successful, and we are now fully surrounded by the rocks that cap the Greenheugh pediment. From here we can see hundreds of ventifacts - a term that describes rocks which have been abraded by wind-blown sand into distinctive, flattened facets with crisp edges. This terrain is very different from what we've become used to seeing during our climb up Mt. Sharp! Today's pl

Warsaw, Poland (SPX) Mar 18, 2022
In an official letter of intent with the leading responsive space company Virgin Orbit (Nasdaq: VORB), the Polish Space Agency (POLSA), the agency overseeing Poland's space development, conveyed its strong interest in bringing a domestic launch capability to Poland, a development uniquely made possible through Virgin Orbit's air-launched LauncherOne system. The signed letter codifies the P

Washington (AFP) March 18, 2022
Plot twist: American comedian and actor Pete Davidson isn't going to space next week after all. The 28-year-old star of Saturday Night Live, who has been in the news recently because of his relationship with Kim Kardashian, is "no longer able to join the NS-20 crew on this mission," Blue Origin said in an announcement late Thursday. The space company owned by Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos di