Week in images: 02-06 September 2024

Discover our week through the lens

Rover trials in a quarry in the UK showing a four-wheeled rover, known as Codi, using its robotic arm and a powerful computer vision system to pick up sample tubes. 

The rover drives to the samples with an accuracy of 10cm, constantly mapping the terrain. Codi uses its arm and four cameras to locate the sample tube, retrieve it and safely store it on the rover – all of it without human intervention. At every stop, the rover uses stereo cameras to build up a 180-degree map of the surroundings and plan its next maneouvres. Once parked, the camera

In 2022 NASA’s DART spacecraft made history, and changed the Solar System forever, by impacting the Dimorphos asteroid and measurably shifting its orbit around the larger Didymos asteroid. In the process a plume of debris was thrown out into space.

The latest modelling, available on the preprint server arXiv and accepted for publication in the September volume of The Planetary Science Journal, shows how small meteoroids from that debris could eventually reach both Mars and Earth – potentially in an observable (although quite safe) manner.

ESA’s Metal 3D Printer has produced the first metal part ever created in space. 

The technology demonstrator, built by Airbus and its partners, was launched to the International Space Station at the start of this year, where ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen installed the payload in the European Drawer Rack of ESA’s Columbus module. In August, the printer successfully printed the first 3D metal shape in space.  

This product, along with three others planned during the rest of the experiment, will return to Earth for quality analysis: two of the samples will go to ESA’s technical heart in the Netherlands