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Other worlds aren't the only difficult terrain personnel will have to traverse in humanity's exploration of the solar system. There are some parts of our own planet that are inhospitable and hard to travel over. Inner Mongolia, a northern province of China, would certainly classify as one of those areas, especially in winter. But that's exactly the terrain team members from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASTC) had to traverse on December 16th to retrieve lunar samples from the Chang'e-5 mission. What was even more unique is that they did it with the help of exoskeletons.

Strangely enough, the workers wearing the exoskeletons weren't there to help with a difficult mountain ascent, or even pick up the payload of the lunar lander itself (which only weighed 2 kg). It was to set up a communications tent to connect the field team back to the main CASTC headquarters in Beijing.

The exoskeletons were designed to help people carry approximately twice as much as they would be able to. Local state media described a single person carrying 50kg over 100m of the rough terrain without becoming tired. Setting up communications equipment isn't all the exoskeletons are good for though. They were most recently used by Chinese military logistics and in the Himalayas, where the country has been facing down the Indian military over a disputed line of control.

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WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives on Dec. 28 voted 322-87 to overturn President Donald Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2021. 

The measure is now headed to the Senate floor for a vote expected this week.

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WASHINGTON — Viasat has petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to perform an environmental review of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation, arguing that the satellite system poses environmental hazards in space and on Earth.

In a Dec.

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WASHINGTON — An agreement between the United Kingdom and the European Union will allow the UK to remain in the Copernicus Earth observation program after it formally exits the EU.

The UK and EU announced a broad agreement Dec.

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WASHINGTON — Congressional defense committees and industry groups over the holiday break called on the House and Senate to override President Trump’s Dec. 23 veto of the National Defense Authorization Act.

The NDAA for fiscal year 2021 authorizes $740 billion for national defense spending and sets policies affecting every aspect of military activities.

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Greenbelt MD (SPX) Dec 21, 2020
Lengthened to the size of a tennis court, the five-layer sunshield of NASA's fully assembled James Webb Space Telescope successfully completed a final series of large-scale deployment and tensioning tests. This milestone puts the observatory one step closer to its launch in 2021. "This is one of Webb's biggest accomplishments in 2020," said Alphonso Stewart, Webb deployment systems lead fo
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Los Alamos NM (SPX) Dec 18, 2020
A combination of astrophysical measurements has allowed researchers to put new constraints on the radius of a typical neutron star and provide a novel calculation of the Hubble constant that indicates the rate at which the universe is expanding. "We studied signals that came from various sources, for example recently observed mergers of neutron stars," said Ingo Tews, a theorist in Nuclear
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Washington DC (UPI) Dec 17, 2020
Astronomers have discovered a massive intergalactic gas filament measuring at least 50 million light years in length - the longest yet to be found. Intergalactic filaments are long threads of hot gas that weave their way through galaxies and link together galactic clusters. Just five percent of the universe is made up of ordinary, or visible, matter. So far, astronomers have vis
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Moscow (Sputnik) Dec 25, 2020
The United States may buy a seat on Russia's Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft to deliver its astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS) in the spring of 2021, a source in the space and rocket industry told Sputnik. In November, the Russian state space corporation of Roscosmos said that the crew of the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft, whose launch is scheduled for April 9, will consist of three Russia
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Washington DC (UPI) Dec 25, 2020
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic demanded the attention of thousands of scientists, but they had a lot to look in to, including vaccines and treatments for the novel coronavirus. Many scientists kept their attention on the skies, searching for answers to cosmic mysteries and preparing for the next chapter in the history of human spaceflight. Here are five of the most astounding space-r
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Changsha, China (XNA) Dec 25, 2020
China plans to launch the core module of its manned space station in the first half of 2021, a senior official said Friday. The core module will be sent by a Long March-5B Y2 rocket from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in Hainan Province, said Zhou Jianping, chief designer of China's manned space program, at a handover ceremony for the return capsule of the Shenzhou-10 manned spacecraf
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Changchun, China (XNA) Dec 25, 2020
An international team of researchers has identified over 109,000 previously unrecognized impact craters on the moon using machine learning methods. The study, led by researchers from Jilin University, was published in the journal Nature Communications. Impact craters are the most prominent lunar surface feature and occupy most of the moon's surface. With traditional automatic identif

Fluvial Mapping of Mars

Thursday, 24 December 2020 23:06
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Washington DC (SPX) Dec 25, 2020
It took fifteen years of imaging and nearly three years of stitching the pieces together to create the largest image ever made, the 8-trillion-pixel mosaic of Mars' surface. Now, the first study to utilize the image in its entirety provides unprecedented insight into the ancient river systems that once covered the expansive plains in the planet's southern hemisphere. These three billion-year-old
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Orlando FL (UPI) Dec 25, 2020
Elon Musk's SpaceX, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and a lesser-known company, Huntsville, Ala.-based Dynetics, are preparing for a major decision by NASA early in 2021 about which company will build human-carrying landers for trips to the moon. The three space firms were selected in April to submit proposals early this month. Having done that, they now await NASA's decision, which is scheduled
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Beijing (XNA) Dec 25, 2020
China's lunar rover Yutu-2, or Jade Rabbit-2, has survived 719 Earth days and traveled 600.55 meters on the far side of the moon as of Tuesday. Both the lander and the rover of the Chang'e-4 probe have ended their work for the 25th lunar day, and switched to the dormant mode for the lunar night due to the lack of solar power, according to the Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center of t
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