Paris (ESA) Apr 02, 2021
ESA's M-Argo mission will be the first CubeSat to traverse interplanetary space under its own power. Due to launch in 2024-5, the suitcase-sized spacecraft will travel to a near-Earth asteroid, up to 150 million km away. CubeSats are small, cheap satellites assembled from standardised parts in 10 cm boxes - M-Argo is a 12-unit CubeSat. Originally intended for educational purposes and techn

Moffett Field CA (SPX) Apr 02, 2021
BioSentinel gets a step closer to flight. Having completed assembly and a battery of tests, the BioSentinel team at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley is in the final stretch of preparations to ship the spacecraft to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for launch. BioSentinel's deep space flight will go past the Moon and into an orbit around the Sun. It's one of

Lynchburg VA (SPX) Apr 02, 2021
BWX Technologies, Inc. reports that it is continuing its groundbreaking Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) design, manufacturing development, and test support work for NASA. NTP is one of the technologies that is capable of propelling a spacecraft to Mars, and this contract continues BWXT's work that began in 2017. Under the terms of a $9.4 million, one-year contract awarded to its BWXT Adva

Beijing (XNA) Apr 02, 2021
The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) in Guizhou province, which officially opened to the world on Wednesday, has invited astronomers from around the world to apply on its website (fast.bao.ac.cn/proposal_submit) for outer-space observations. Which means FAST, the world's most sensitive and largest single-dish radio telescope, opened to the world less than four m

Bath UK (SPX) Apr 02, 2021
Space scientists at the University of Bath in the UK have found a new way to probe the internal structure of neutron stars, giving nuclear physicists a novel tool for studying the structures that make up matter at an atomic level. Neutron stars are dead stars that have been compressed by gravity to the size of small cities. They contain the most extreme matter in the universe, meaning they

Washington DC (UPI) Apr 2, 2021
NASA has started intense planning to capture public attention with high-definition video, photos and possible live streaming from the moon during upcoming Artemis missions. Grainy delayed footage - sometimes only in black and white - was a hallmark of the first Apollo moon landing in 1969. But even that captured 650 million viewers around the globe. Artemis moon missions will f

Washington DC (SPX) Apr 02, 2021
"Tango delta. Touchdown confirmed. Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking the signs of past life." For more than six years, the Mars Entry, Descent, and Landing Instrumentation 2 (MEDLI2) team waited to hear these words. NASA's Perseverance rover successfully landed Feb. 18, 2021, beginning its robotic exploration of the Red Planet. MEDLI2 was one of the crucial

Pasadena CA (JPL) Apr 02, 2021
NASA's InSight lander has detected two strong, clear quakes originating in a location of Mars called Cerberus Fossae - the same place where two strong quakes were seen earlier in the mission. The new quakes have magnitudes of 3.3 and 3.1; the previous quakes were magnitude 3.6 and 3.5. InSight has recorded over 500 quakes to date, but because of their clear signals, these are four of the best qu

Cleveland OH (SPX) Apr 02, 2021
The thruster system that will propel NASA's Gateway around the Moon was recently fired up for the first of many ground tests to ensure the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) is ready for flight. NASA, along with Maxar Technologies and Busek Co., successfully completed a test of the 6-kilowatt (kW) solar electric propulsion (SEP) subsystem destined for the PPE. The hot fire tests were

Tucson AZ (SPX) Apr 02, 2021
NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission is on the brink of discovering the extent of the mess it made on asteroid Bennu's surface during last fall's sample collection event. On Apr. 7, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will get one last close encounter with Bennu as it performs a final flyover to capture images of the asteroid's surface. While performing the flyover, the spacecraft will observe Bennu from a distance