Emergency detected in pre-moon landing maneuver by Russia's Luna-25 probe
Sunday, 20 August 2023 05:20
Write a comment
An "emergency" was detected on Saturday during a maneuver by Russia's Luna-25 probe prior to its Moon landing, Russian space agency Roscosmos said.
"Thrust was released to transfer the probe onto the pre-landing orbit," Roscosmos said in a statement.
"During the operation, an emergency situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the carrying out of the maneuver within the specified conditions."
The lander, Russia's first such mission in almost 50 years, was successfully placed in the Moon's orbit on Wednesday after being launched from the Vostochny cosmodrome in the country's Far East.
Roscosmos did not say if the incident would delay the landing, due to take place on Monday, north of the Boguslawsky crater on the lunar south pole.
In June, Roscosmos chief Yuri Borisov told President Vladimir Putin that such missions were "risky", with an estimated success probability of around 70 percent.
The probe is expected to stay on the Moon for a year, where it is tasked with collecting samples and analyzing soil.
Cameras installed on the lander have already taken distant shots of the Earth and Moon from space.
Luna-25 malfunctions during lunar orbit maneuver
Saturday, 19 August 2023 16:32
Chandrayaan-3 Lunar orbit update
Saturday, 19 August 2023 10:33 Write a comment
The Chandrayaan-3 mission continues to make significant strides as its Lander Module has now achieved an orbit of 113 km x 157 km around the Moon. This crucial development was shared by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). With a keen focus on the anticipated soft landing on the Moon's South Polar region on August 23, a second de-boosting is already planned for August 20.
The mis Neptune's Disappearing Clouds Linked to the Solar Cycle
Saturday, 19 August 2023 10:33 Write a comment
Weather forecast for Neptune: After sunny weather for the past few Earth years, we'll see increasingly more clouds over the next few years.
In 1989, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft provided the first close-up images of linear, bright clouds, reminiscent of cirrus clouds on Earth, seen high in Neptune's atmosphere. They form above most of the methane in Neptune's atmosphere and reflect all colo Scientists review the trajectory design and optimization for Jovian system exploration
Friday, 18 August 2023 16:53 Write a comment
The Jovian system has long attracted the interest of human exploration. However, Jupiter and its four Galilean moons form a unique and complex multi-body dynamical environment that greatly challenges trajectory design and optimization.
Moreover, the extremely strong radiation environment of Jupiter and the low available fuel of spacecraft further increase the difficulty of trajectory design. In order to satisfy the requirements of diverse missions of the Jovian system exploration, develop new mission concepts, and obtain higher merit with lower cost, a variety of theories and methodologies of trajectory design and optimization were proposed or developed in the past two decades.
There is a lack of comprehensive review of these methodologies, which is unfavorable for further developing new design techniques and proposing new mission schemes.
In a review article recently published in Space: Science & Technology, scholars from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey provide a systematic summarization of the past and state-of-art methodologies for four main exploration phases, including Jupiter capture, the tour of the Galilean moons, Jupiter global mapping, and orbiting around and landing on a target moon.
NASA's Psyche mission to a metal world may reveal the mysteries of Earth's interior
Friday, 18 August 2023 16:23 Write a comment
French novelist Jules Verne delighted 19th-century readers with the tantalizing notion that a journey to the center of the Earth was actually plausible.
Since then, scientists have long acknowledged that Verne's literary journey was only science fiction. The extreme temperatures of the Earth's interior—around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,537 Celsius) at the core—and the accompanying crushing pressure, which is millions of times more than at the surface, prevent people from venturing down very far.
Still, there are a few things known about the Earth's interior. For example, geophysicists discovered that the core consists of a solid sphere of iron and nickel that comprises 20% of the Earth's radius, surrounded by a shell of molten iron and nickel that spans an additional 15% of Earth's radius.
That, and the rest of our knowledge about our world's interior, was learned indirectly—either by studying Earth's magnetic field or the way earthquake waves bounce off different layers below the Earth's surface.
But indirect discovery has its limitations. How can scientists find out more about our planet's deep interior?
Using supernovae to study neutrinos' strange properties
Friday, 18 August 2023 13:14 Write a comment
In a new study, researchers have taken an important step toward understanding how exploding stars can help reveal how neutrinos, mysterious subatomic particles, secretly interact with themselves.
One of the less well-understood elementary particles, neutrinos rarely interact with normal matter, and instead travel invisibly through it at almost the speed of light. These ghostly particles ou AFRL opens extreme computing facility, announces $44M in additional funding
Friday, 18 August 2023 13:14 Write a comment
The Air Force Research Laboratory's, or AFRL, new Extreme Computing Facility at the Information Directorate in Rome, New York, is a vital component to national defense research, and AFRL is using the most cutting-edge Quantum Computing technology available to protect the nation and deliver game-changing technologies to the warfighter.
AFRL's Information Directorate welcomed U.S. Senate Maj Embracing the future we need
Friday, 18 August 2023 13:14 Write a comment
When you picture MIT doctoral students taking small PhD courses together, you probably don't imagine them going on class field trips. But it does happen, sometimes, and one of those trips changed Andy Sun's career.
Today, Sun is a faculty member at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a leading global expert on integrating renewable energy into the electric grid. Back in 2007, Sun was an The oldest and fastest evolving moss in the world might not survive climate change
Friday, 18 August 2023 13:14 Write a comment
A 390-million-year-old moss called Takakia lives in some of Earth's most remote places, including the icy cliffs of the Tibetan Plateau. In a decade-long project, a team of scientists climbed some of the tallest peaks in the world to find Takakia, sequence its DNA for the first time, and study how climate change is impacting the moss. Their results, publishing in Cell on August 9, show that Taka Studying rainforests from the skies - radar technology measures biomass
Friday, 18 August 2023 13:14 Write a comment
At present, there are only estimates of how much forest biomass exists worldwide. However, its extent is crucial in order to accurately assess global warming. This information could be used to predict the consequences of climate change and to take appropriate countermeasures. Researchers at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) are working on technologies t BAE agrees to buy Ball Aerospace for $5.55 billion
Friday, 18 August 2023 13:14 Write a comment
British military equipment maker BAE Systems announced on Thursday that it had agreed to buy US company Ball Aerospace from the Ball Corporation for about $5.55 billion.
BAE said it hoped to complete the acquisition of the aerospace firm in the first half of 2024, with an anticipated tax credit taking the "underlying economic consideration for the business" to $4.8 billion.
The proposed Global collaboration leads to new discoveries in lightning research
Friday, 18 August 2023 13:14 Write a comment
With operations based out of Tampa, Florida, the ALOFT field campaign logged approximately 60 hours of flight time across Central America and the Caribbean. The team used NASA Armstrong's ER-2 aircraft to fly near thunderclouds as tall as 18 kilometers (10 miles) in altitude in order to measure gamma-ray glows and flashes produced by the electric fields of thunderclouds.
ALOFT is short for NASA Software Catalog Offers Free Programs for Earth Science, More
Friday, 18 August 2023 13:14 Write a comment
Each year, NASA scientists, engineers, and developers create software packages to manage space missions, test spacecraft, and analyze the petabytes of data produced by agency research satellites. As the agency innovates for the benefit of humanity, many of these programs are now downloadable and free of charge through NASA's Software Catalog.
The 2023-2024 Software Catalog contains more th 
