WASHINGTON — A delay of up to two years in the next New Frontiers planetary science mission competition won’t change the potential destinations for that mission.

NASA announced May 12 it was delaying the release of a draft announcement of opportunity for the fifth New Frontiers mission from this October to as late as October 2023.

WASHINGTON — Chinese attempts to steal U.S. space technology remain a problem despite significant efforts by the Pentagon to protect intellectual property data, the head of Air Force acquisitions Darlene Costello told lawmakers May 26.

Image: Jupiter antenna that came in from the cold

Washington (AFP) May 27, 2021
Are aliens watching us? That's what Americans hope to find out when a report on the US government's secret files on UFOs goes to Congress next month after years of sightings and videos suggesting that highly advanced extraterrestrials are, indeed, out there. But the report from the Director of National Intelligence, pulled together with classified military files, could fall short of exp

Moscow (Sputnik) May 27, 2021
Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russian state space agency Roscosmos, announced on Tuesday that he invited the newly appointed head of NASA, Bill Nelson, to visit Russia to discuss cooperation in space. "The new head of NASA, Mr. Nelson, is a respected and honored person and specialist. I will be glad to meet him. We have already invited him to Russia and are ready to discuss openly and constr

London, Canada (SPX) May 27, 2021
With Elon Musk keen to settle on Mars, and NASA planning its own human missions, there's more to it than finding a safe place to land on the red planet. When it's no longer just robots, rovers and drones arriving, accessing the untapped abundance of ice that lies beneath the Martian surface will be key for astronauts too. Expertly checking both boxes, planetary geologists at Western have n

Kennedy Space Center FL (SPX) May 27, 2021
Moon dust isn't like the stuff that collects on a bookshelf or on tables - it's ubiquitous and abrasive, and it clings to everything. It's so bad that it even broke the vacuum NASA designed to clean the Moon dust off Apollo spacesuits. With NASA's return to the Moon and its orbit, it will need to manage the dust, which is dangerous for people too. The first step is knowing how much is arou

Livermore CA (SPX) May 27, 2021
Nearly 40 years ago, scientists first predicted the existence of helium rain inside planets composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, such as Jupiter and Saturn. However, achieving the experimental conditions necessary to validate this hypothesis hasn't been possible - until now. In a paper published by Nature, scientists reveal experimental evidence to support this long-standing predicti

Las Cruces NM (SPX) May 22, 2021
Virgin Galactic has completed its third spaceflight and the first ever spaceflight from Spaceport America, New Mexico. The flight, which took place May 22nd, sees New Mexico become the third US state to launch humans into space. VSS Unity achieved a speed of Mach 3 after being released from the mothership, VMS Eve, and reached space, at an altitude of 55.45 miles before gliding smoothly to