Washington (AFP) Dec 21, 2022
NASA said farewell on Wednesday to the InSight lander that spent four years probing the interior of Mars. The US space agency said mission control had been unable to contact the spacecraft on two consecutive attempts, leading to the conclusion that its solar-powered batteries have run out of energy. "InSight may be retiring, but its legacy - and its findings from the deep interior of Ma

NASA has officially ended the mission of the InSight Mars lander after power levels on the spacecraft dropped to the point where it could no longer communicate with Earth.

The post NASA declares end of InSight Mars mission appeared first on SpaceNews.

Press Release N° 72–2022

Arianespace announced early today the failure of Flight VV22 carrying Pléiades Neo 5 and 6 satellites.

Image: Young ESA team prepare Ariane 6 passenger

The fiscal year 2023 omnibus spending bill provides two agencies with much, but not all, of the budget increases they requested to take on new or expanding commercial space work.

The post Omnibus includes budget increases for Office of Space Commerce and FAA commercial space office appeared first on SpaceNews.

Image: This Copernicus Sentinel-3 image shows the wide-coverage of snowfall in the Alps, which hopefully bodes well for the coming year.

Pasadena CA (JPL) Dec 20, 2022
Sometimes, I think Mars rocks are just a bunch of toddlers whom we have told to tidy their play room. And the more we want something, the more resistance we get. The latest episode of 'This-rock-is-too-hard-to-drill, says the rock,' reminded me of our drill attempt at Vera Rubin Ridge. In June 2018, we had drilled Duluth and also weathered the dust storm. We then tried to drill a specific type o

Edwards AFB CA (SPX) Dec 18, 2022
Northrop Grumman Corporation's (NYSE: NOC) RQ-4 RangeHawk supported the first flight of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket during the recent Artemis I mission. RangeHawk is part of SkyRange, the Department of Defense Test Resource Management Center's uncrewed high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE), responsive mobile flight test initiative. "Supporting the Artemis I uncrewed flight test

Houston TX (SPX) Dec 20, 2022
Rice University astronomer Megan Reiter and colleagues took a "deep dive" into one of the first images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and were rewarded with the discovery of telltale signs from two dozen previously unseen young stars about 7,500 light years from Earth. The published research in the December issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society offers a gli