Image: Webb stickers for Ariane 5 fairing

Week in images: 29 November - 3 December 2021

Discover our week through the lens

Barely three weeks into space life, first-time flyer Matthias Maurer has operated a robotic arm twice, welcomed a docking module, slept in a brand-new bed and changed plans a few times due to space debris alerts. Even science has not been routine, as he ran a handful of experiments for the very first time in orbit.

A part of the White Nile state in Sudan is featured in this false-colour image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.

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The ExoMars rover used in the Earth-based Mars Terrain Simulator makes escaping from a sand trap look easy in this exercise.

The rover initially has its front two wheels almost completely buried in sand, but easily escapes using its unique wheel-walking mode.

It takes about 20 minutes to complete the 2 m drive – slow and careful being the key to getting out of a difficult situation.

Rovers on Mars have previously been caught in sand, and turning the wheels dug them deeper, just like a car stuck in mud or snow. To avoid this, the ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin

Washington DC (SPX) Dec 01, 2021
Launched in 2021, DARPA's ReSource program aims to revolutionize how the military procures critical supplies on the battlefield by engineering self-contained, integrated systems that rapidly produce large quantities of supplies from feedstock collected on-site. Performer teams are tasked with developing systems to break down mixed waste, including common plastics, reformulate the waste at

Burlington VT (SPX) Dec 01, 2021
To persist, life must reproduce. Over billions of years, organisms have evolved many ways of replicating, from budding plants to sexual animals to invading viruses. Now scientists have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction - and applied their discovery to create the first-ever, self-replicating living robots. The same team that built the first living robots has discove

Moscow (Sputnik) Dec 02, 2021
In recent weeks, the US media outlets have been ramping up fears about adversaries especially China - allegedly planning different ways to target the United States and beefing up its weaponry in order to do so. Under this pretext, calls have emerged for Washington to "catch up?? US Space Force General David Thompson said that American satellites are being attacked "every single day" by adv

The earliest launch date for Europe’s latest Galileo satellites is now during the night of 3-4 December.