Copernical Team
European Space Agency plans network of moon satellites
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The European Space Agency plans to build a communications and navigation network of satellites around the moon to aid future missions, including NASA's planned Artemis astronaut crews.
The agency has initiated a study of potential designs for the network, named Moonlight, that would tap private companies for proposals. Those firms include the United Kingdom's Surrey Satellite Technology Salts could be important piece of Martian organic puzzle
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A NASA team has found that organic, or carbon-containing, salts are likely present on Mars, with implications for the Red Planet's past habitability.
A NASA team has found that organic salts are likely present on Mars. Like shards of ancient pottery, these salts are the chemical remnants of organic compounds, such as those previously detected by NASA's Curiosity rover. Organic compounds an Plans underway for Ingenuity's 6th flight
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Plans are underway for NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter to make its sixth flight on the Red Planet in the next week. The flight is the first to be executed during the helicopter's operations demonstration phase and includes scouting multiple surface features from the air and landing at a different airfield.
In this new phase, data and images from the flight will be returned to Earth in the NASA fires up fourth RS-25 engine test
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NASA conducted its fourth RS-25 single-engine hot fire of the year May 20, a continuation of its seven-part test series to support development and production of engines for the agency's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on future missions to the Moon.
The engine was fired for more than 8 minutes (500 seconds) on the A-1 Test Stand at Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, the same amount SpaceX's 22nd Commercial Resupply Mission to ISS
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The 22nd SpaceX cargo resupply mission carrying scientific research and technology demonstrations launches to the International Space Station from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida no earlier than June 3. Experiments aboard include studying how water bears tolerate space, whether microgravity affects symbiotic relationships, analyzing the formation of kidney stones, and more.
Highligh Video: Bringing connectivity to the moon
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As international teams across the world forge plans to revisit the moon, ESA is elaborating how best to facilitate this exploration.
As part of its moonlight initiative, the agency is encouraging European space companies to put a constellation of telecommunications and navigation satellites around the moon.
To succeed, the proposed lunar missions will require reliable navigation and telecommunication capabilities. Building these independently would be costly, complex and inefficient.
If this work were outsourced to a consortium of space companies, each individual mission would become more cost-efficient.
Having one system dedicated to lunar telecommunications and navigation could reduce design complexity, liberating missions to concentrate on their core activities.
Because missions could rely on this dedicated telecommunications and navigation service, they would be lighter. This would make space for more scientific instruments or other cargo.
An accurate and reliable telecommunications and navigation service would enable missions to land wherever they wanted. Radio astronomers could set up observatories on the far side of the moon.
Rovers could trundle over the lunar surface more speedily. It could even enable the teleoperation of rovers and other equipment from Earth.
Talking to the moon: Europe pitches lunar satellites plan
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The European Space Agency presented a vision Thursday to put satellites in orbit around the moon that would facilitate future missions to Earth's closest neighbor.
Rare 4000-year comets can cause meteor showers on Earth
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Comets that circle the Sun in very elongated orbits spread their debris so thin along their orbit or eject it out of the solar system altogether so that their meteor showers are hard to detect. From a new meteor shower survey published in the journal Icarus, researchers now report that they can detect showers from the debris in the path of comets that pass close to Earth orbit and are known to return as infrequently as once every 4,000 years.
"This creates a situational awareness for potentially hazardous comets that were last near Earth orbit as far back as 2,000 BC," said meteor astronomer and lead author Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute.
NASA AI technology could speed up fault diagnosis process in spacecraft
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New artificial intelligence technology could speed up physical fault diagnosis in spacecraft and spaceflight systems, improving mission efficiency by reducing down-time.
Research in artificial intelligence for spacecraft resilience (RAISR) is software developed by Pathways intern Evana Gizzi, who works at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. With RAISR, artificial intelligence could diagnose faults real-time in spacecraft and spaceflight systems in general.
"The spacecraft reporting a fault is like a car with a check engine light on," Gizzi said. "You know there is an issue, but can't necessarily explain the cause. That's where the RAISR algorithm comes in, diagnosing the cause as a loose gas cap."
Right now, the ability to make inferences about what is happening that go beyond traditional 'if-then-else' fault trees is something only humans can do, Gizzi said.
Infographic: Moonlight - Navigation for the Moon
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Infographic: Infographic: Moonlight - Navigation for the Moon 
