Image:

No one saw the Chelyabinsk meteor of 15 February 2013 coming – the largest asteroid to strike Earth in over a century. Just after sunrise on a sunny winter’s day, a 20-metre, 13 000 tonne asteroid struck the atmosphere over the Ural Mountains in Russia at a speed of more than 18 km/s.

The relatively small rock exploded in the atmosphere at an altitude of 30 km, releasing about half a megaton of energy (equivalent to 35 Hiroshima-sized bombs). Two minutes later, the shockwave reached the ground damaging thousands of buildings, breaking windows and

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Feb 14, 2023
Space exploration is a topic that has captured the imagination of people for centuries. From ancient civilizations observing the stars to the moon landing in 1969, the pursuit of exploring the unknown has been a central theme in human history. In this post, we'll guide you through the process of writing a discussion post about space exploration and its significance in our lives. b>U

Ithaca NY (SPX) Feb 14, 2023
Ursa Space Systems, a leading satellite-analytics-as-a-service provider, has announced the release of a Python toolbox for satellite analytic and data ordering within Esri ArcGIS Pro, a full-featured professional desktop GIS application. Ursa Space leverages the world's most comprehensive and progressive satellite data virtual constellation, comprising synthetic aperture radar (SAR), Optic

Madrid, Spain (SPX) Feb 15, 2023
"BOOTES is the result of almost twenty-five years of continuous effort, since we installed the first station in 1998 at INTA (Arenosillo, Huelva), the institution that initially supported the project. The complete deployment represents a scientific milestone since it is the first robotic network with a presence on all continents", according to Alberto J. Castro-Tirado, scientist at IAA-CSIC acti

Beijing, China (SPX) Feb 15, 2023
The second phase of China's deep space observation radar facility, dubbed "China Compound Eye", started construction Tuesday in southwestern Chongqing, according to the Beijing Institute of Technology. Covering an area of more than 300 mu (20 hectares), the new phase will see the construction of 25 high-resolution radars, each with a diameter of 30 meters, and is expected to be completed i

Boulder CO (SPX) Feb 15, 2023
Ground-penetrating radar from China's Martian rover Zhurong reveals shallow impact craters and other geologic structures in the top five meters of the red planet's surface. The images of the Martian subsurface are presented in a paper published in Geology Thursday. The Zhurong rover was sent to Mars as part of China's Tianwen-1 mission. Launched in July 2020, the rover landed on the surfac

Pasadena CA (JPL) Feb 15, 2023
The Red Planet rover snapped a portrait of the sample depot it has assembled with 10 backup sample tubes that could be returned to Earth by a future mission. Even space robots know what "pics or it didn't happen" means: NASA's Perseverance Mars rover provided a panorama of its recently completed sample depot - a big milestone for the mission and humanity's first collection of samples on an

San Antonio TX (SPX) Feb 15, 2023
NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) spacecraft has completed the Mission Critical Design Review and is on track to meet its scheduled 2025 launch. Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is managing the payload office, providing the scientific instrument Compact Dual Ion Composition Experiment (CoDICE) and is participating on other instrument teams for the mission, which will s

Space Coast FL (SPX) Feb 15, 2023
The launch of the unmanned Soyuz MS-23, a replacement vehicle for the damaged Soyuz MS-22, was postponed until March 2023; it was originally planned to launch on February 19th, 2023, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. MS-23 will serve as a rescue spacecraft that will bring Cosmonauts Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin, and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio back to Earth from the International Spa

Space Coast FL (SPX) Feb 15, 2023
Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company Blue Origin revealed on February 10, 2023, in their blog that since 2021 they have been developing an in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) technology called "Blue Alchemist" a solar cell and electricity transmission wire prototype by using a material "chemically and mineralogically equivalent" to lunar regolith. "We can make power systems on the moon directly