Tempe AZ (The Conversation) Feb 05, 2021
Jim Bell is a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University and has worked on a number of Mars missions. On Feb. 18, NASA's Mars 2020 mission will be arriving at the red planet, and hopefully will place the Perseverance Rover on the surface. Bell is the primary investigator leading a team in charge of one of the camera systems on Perseverance. b>What's

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Feb 05, 2021
When drought hits the Horn of Africa, it's a threat to lives and livelihoods. Communities need access to water for sanitation, hydration, livestock and agriculture -?and in many cases, tapping groundwater supplies is the difference between a "drought" and a "drought emergency." But maintaining the thousands of groundwater pumps that supply fresh water to drought-prone areas in east Africa is a s

Washington DC (UPI) Feb 05, 2021
President Joe Biden supports NASA's plan to return Americans to the surface of the moon, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday, relieving some doubt as to the fate of the Trump-era Artemis program under the new administration. The Trump administration called for NASA to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 as part of an overall mission to ultimately send humans to Mars. But

Washington DC (UPI) Feb 4, 2021
Elon Musk's SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida early Thursday with the mission to send a cluster of 60 Starlink communication satellites into low-Earth orbit. The 21-story, two-stage rocket launched at 1:19 a.m. EST Thursday from Complex 40 at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. While weather at the launch site was favorable, officials said they

Honolulu HI (SPX) Feb 05, 2021
A team of astronomers using SPIRou, the spectropolarimeter / high-precision velocimeter at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), measured the mass and density of a close-in Neptune-like planet orbiting the hugely-active newborn star AU Microscopii (AU Mic), showing that this warm planet, named AU Mic b, orbits in the equatorial plane of its host. These observations mark the very first

Updated 9:30 p.m. Eastern to revise launch plans.

WASHINGTON — NASA has selected Firefly Aerospace to deliver a set of 10 research payloads to the moon in 2023, the latest award in its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

NASA has selected Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) of Hawthorne, California, to provide launch services for the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) mission.

JOHANNESBURG — The European Space Agency (ESA) signed a €650 million ($790 million) contract with Airbus Space and Defence to produce three more service modules for NASA’s Orion crewed spacecraft.

The European Service Module (EMS) is the 15,000-kilogram powerplant of NASA’s Orion spacecraft.

WASHINGTON — The White House gave its support for NASA’s Artemis program of lunar exploration, but offered no details on potential changes it may make in the scope and schedule of the effort.

At a Feb.

Image: Inside a martian canyon