Perth, Australia (SPX) Aug 11, 2022
New Curtin research has provided the strongest evidence yet that Earth's continents were formed by giant meteorite impacts that were particularly prevalent during the first billion years or so of our planet's four-and-a-half-billion year history. Dr Tim Johnson, from Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the idea that the continents originally formed at sites of giant meteo

Pasadena CA (JPL) Aug 10, 2022
Curiosity is continuing to press on through Paraitepuy Pass with the successful completion of last plan's drive and another coming up on the first sol of today's two-sol plan. The terrain continues to be tricky, with lots of sand and rocks, as you can see in the Hazcam image, and the rover planners are working hard to determine the best and safest way forward. In between carefully creeping

Cologne, Germany (SPX) Aug 11, 2022
Three mannequins, a beagle and a sheep fly around the Moon in a giant rocket ... extraordinary, isn't it? This special crew is part of NASA's Artemis I mission, scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on 29 August 2022. On board are three mannequins, Helga and Zohar, two identical model females from the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt; DL

Magna UT (SPX) Aug 11, 2022
Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC) is expanding its solid rocket motor manufacturing facilities with the groundbreaking of new state-of-the art facilities to support nearly every phase of solid rocket motor manufacturing, including case manufacturing, propellant mixing and casting, and final assembly. The infrastructure investment and expansion of solid rocket motor manufacturing wil

Zurich, Switzerland (SPX) Aug 11, 2022
Humankind has maintained an enduring fascination with the Moon. It was not until Galileo's time, however, that scientists really began study it. Over the course of nearly five centuries, researchers put forward numerous, much debated theories as to how the Moon was formed. Now, geochemists, cosmochemists, and petrologists at ETH Zurich shed new light on the Moon's origin story. In a study just p

Newark DE (SPX) Aug 11, 2022
Sustained space exploration will require infrastructure that doesn't currently exist: buildings, housing, rocket landing pads. So, where do you turn for construction materials when they are too big to fit in your carry-on and there's no Home Depot in outer space? "If we're going to live and work on another planet like Mars or the moon, we need to make concrete. But we can't take bags

San Antonio TX (SPX) Aug 11, 2022
Astroport Space Technologies, Inc. has been awarded its second NASA Phase 1 Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) contract for the construction of landing pads on the Moon. Astroport and its research partner, The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), will develop geotechnical engineering processes for "Lunar Surface Site Preparation for Landing/Launch Pad and Blast Shield Construc

Buffalo NY (SPX) Aug 11, 2022
In trying to understand the nature of the cosmos, some theorists propose that the universe expands and contracts in endless cycles. Because this behavior is hypothesized to be perpetual, the universe should have no beginning and no end - only eternal cycles of growing and shrinking that extend forever into the future, and forever into the past. It's an appealing concept in part becau

San Diego CA (SPX) Aug 11, 2022
A new analysis of seismic data from NASA's Mars InSight mission has revealed a couple of surprises. The first surprise: the top 300 meters of the subsurface beneath the landing site near the Martian equator contains little or no ice. "We find that Mars' crust is weak and porous. The sediments are not well-cemented. And there's no ice or not much ice filling the pore spaces," said geo