100 days of Minerva

ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti was launched to the International Space Station on 27 April as a part of Crew-4 for her second mission, Minerva. One hundred days in, mission Minerva is still going strong. From completing cutting-edge research in the world’s only orbiting laboratory to sharing daily life on the Space Station via TikTok, it’s all in a day’s work for an ESA astronaut.
Space Development Agency to take another stab at space-to-aircraft laser communications

SDA is seeking proposals for a demonstration of laser communications between orbiting satellites and aircraft in flight
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Aging Telesat satellite running out of fuel as projected LEO costs soar

Canada’s Telesat is bracing for a revenue hit in 2023 after being forced to retire its Anik F2 satellite from full service three years earlier than planned.
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FCC considers opening up more Ku-band to non-GEO satellite operators

The Federal Communications Commission is considering opening up more Ku-band spectrum to Starlink and other non-geostationary satellite (NGSO) operators to improve broadband speeds.
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10 years since landing, NASA's Curiosity Mars rover still has drive

Despite signs of wear, the intrepid spacecraft is about to start an exciting new chapter of its mission as it climbs a Martian mountain.
Ten years ago today, a jetpack lowered NASA's Curiosity rover onto the Red Planet, beginning the SUV-size explorer's pursuit of evidence that, billions of years ago, Mars had the conditions needed to support microscopic life.
NASA Goddard's 'Web Around Asteroid Bennu' shows in SIGGRAPH film fest
Alongside cultural heavyweights such as Disney's "Encanto" and Warner Brothers' "The Batman," a short film created at Goddard shares the screen next week at a festival honoring standout works of computer animated storytelling.
"A Web Around Asteroid Bennu" highlights the tricky navigation it took for NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to collect a sample from asteroid Bennu in 2020. Produced at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the video will show in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Aug. 8 in the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference's Electronic Theater, a qualifying venue for Academy Award consideration.
OSIRIS-REx completed a series of complicated maneuvers around Bennu over the course of two-and-a-half years before collecting its sample with a touch-and-go, or TAG, maneuver and exiting orbit. The various segments of this web-like flight path were highlighted in full by data visualizer Kel Elkins, of NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio at Goddard.
"I started working with the trajectory data in 2015," Elkins said. "And when you first see an image of all the different maneuvers it looks like a rat's nest. But it was really exciting to see these complicated maneuvers in 3D space.
NASA's ShadowCam launches aboard Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter

NASA's ShadowCam is heading to the Moon aboard Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI)'s Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) mission. KPLO, also known as Danuri, launched at 7:08 p.m. EDT on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Launch Complex 40 on the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on August 4.
Developed by Arizona State University and Malin Space Science Systems, ShadowCam is one of five instruments on board KARI's KPLO spacecraft.
A hypersensitive optical camera, ShadowCam, will collect images of permanently shadowed regions near the Moon's poles. This will allow ShadowCam to map the reflectance of these regions to search for evidence of ice deposits, observe seasonal changes, and measure the terrain inside the craters.
Entire NASA astronaut corps eligible for Artemis missions

As NASA prepares to select the crew of the second Artemis mission, the agency’s chief astronaut says the entire astronaut corps, and not a previously announced subset, is eligible for that flight and future missions to the moon.
Italian satellite may fly NASA Earth science payload

NASA is in talks with the Italian Space Agency to fly an Earth science instrument originally planned to go on a commercial smallsat.
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India’s new SSLV rocket suffers “data loss” in maiden flight; satellites’ status unaccounted for

The Aug. 6 maiden flight of India’s newly developed Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) went awry with “some data loss” that occurred in the terminal stage of the mission.
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