The test version of a unique satellite navigation receiver has been delivered for integration testing on the Lunar Pathfinder spacecraft. The NaviMoon satnav receiver is designed to perform the farthest ever positioning fix from Earth, employing signals that will be millions of times fainter than those used by our smartphones or cars.

"This engineering model of our NaviMoon receiver is the very first piece of hardware to be produced in the context of ESA's moonlight initiative, to develop dedicated telecommunications and navigation services for the moon," explains Javier Ventura-Traveset, Head of ESA's Navigation Science Office and managing all ESA lunar navigation activities.

"It will be flown aboard the Lunar Pathfinder mission into orbit around the moon, from where it will perform the furthest satellite navigation positioning fix ever made, at more than 400 000 km away to an accuracy of less than 100 m. This represents an extraordinary engineering challenge, because at such a distance the faint Galileo and GPS signals it makes use of will be barely distinguishable from background noise.

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has captured dramatic footage of Phobos, Mars' potato-shaped moon, crossing the face of the Sun. These observations can help scientists better understand the moon's orbit and how its gravity pulls on the Martian surface, ultimately shaping the Red Planet's crust and mantle.

Captured with Perseverance's next-generation Mastcam-Z camera on April 2, the 397th Martian day, or sol, of the mission, the eclipse lasted a little over 40 seconds—much shorter than a typical solar eclipse involving Earth's Moon. (Phobos is about 157 times smaller than Earth's Moon. Mars' other moon, Deimos, is even smaller.)

The images are the latest in a long history of NASA spacecraft capturing solar eclipses on Mars. Back in 2004, the twin NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity took the first time-lapse photos of Phobos during a solar eclipse. Curiosity continued the trend with videos shot by its Mastcam camera system.

But Perseverance, which landed in February 2021, has provided the most zoomed-in video of a Phobos solar eclipse yet—and at the highest-frame rate ever.

In collaboration with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), a team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has developed a sustainable method for making bricks out of Martian soil, using bacteria and urea. These "space bricks" can be used to construct building-like structures on Mars that could facilitate human settlement on the red planet.

The method for making these space bricks has been outlined in a study published in PLOS ONE. A slurry is first created by mixing Martian soil with guar gum, a bacterium called Sporosarcina pasteurii, urea and nickel chloride (NiCl₂). This slurry can be poured into molds of any desired shape, and over a few days the bacteria convert the urea into crystals of calcium carbonate. These crystals, along with biopolymers secreted by the microbes, act as cement holding the soil particles together.

An advantage of this method is the reduced porosity of the bricks, which has been a problem with other methods used to consolidate Martian soil into bricks.