Los Angeles CA (SPX) Aug 23, 2024
A global team of 45 scientists studying meteor showers has uncovered that comets break apart in different ways when nearing the Sun, with these variations tied to the environments where the comets initially formed 4.5 billion years ago. The findings, recently published in the journal 'Icarus', suggest that these differences in comet disintegration are influenced by the conditions in the protopla

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Aug 26, 2024
A recent study reveals that NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, which collided with the asteroid moon Dimorphos in 2022, permanently altered both its shape and its orbit. The impact deformed Dimorphos, creating a large crater and reshaping it to the extent that it disrupted the moon's natural evolutionary trajectory. Researchers now believe that Dimorphos might start "tumb

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Aug 26, 2024
Researchers have pinpointed a range of materials, including specific plastics, rubber, synthetic fibers, and Martian soil (regolith), as effective options for shielding astronauts from harmful space radiation on Mars. These insights are critical for developing protective habitats and spacesuits, paving the way for extended Mars missions. The thin atmosphere and lack of a magnetic field on Mars l

Huntsville AL (SPX) Aug 23, 2024
Winning the 2024 Human Rover Explorer Challenge (HERC) provided an engineering student team at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), a part of the University of Alabama System, the opportunity to perform STEM outreach in the Dominican Republic (DR) this summer. UAH rover team THESEUS members traveled to the DR capital to give presentations to attendees at the Instituto Tecnologico de Sa

Sydney, Australia (SPX) Aug 23, 2024
Water is vital for human survival on the lunar surface, making it a significant focus of research. A team led by Prof. WANG Junqiang at the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has introduced a novel approach to generate substantial amounts of water through a reaction between lunar regolith and endogenous hydrogen. Findin

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Aug 26, 2024
NASA has transferred a portion of the asteroid Bennu sample, collected by its OSIRIS-REx mission, to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) as part of an asteroid sample exchange. The handover took place during a ceremony on Aug. 22 at JAXA's Sagamihara campus in Japan. This exchange follows the November 2021 event when JAXA provided NASA with a sample from asteroid Ryugu, retrieved

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Aug 23, 2024
NASA and Boeing's engineering teams are conducting extensive data analysis as they approach a significant decision regarding the Starliner spacecraft's return from the International Space Station (ISS). This decision, which will determine if Starliner will return to Earth with astronauts on board, is anticipated no earlier than Saturday, Aug. 24. The determination will follow an agency-level rev

Bethesda, MD (SPX) Aug 23, 2024
One day soon we may have long-term orbiting colonies circling the planet in microgravity space stations with complete, self-sustained ecosystems, governance bodies and a completely independent society that operates as a sovereign entity. The relationship between on-Earth societies and colonists would likely be complicated. Several factors would shape this relationship, including the very d

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Aug 23, 2024
Scout Space Inc., a prominent provider of in-space observation services focusing on space security and autonomous solutions, is set to achieve a major milestone with the first demonstration of an innovative Space Domain Awareness (SDA) capability in very low Earth orbit (vLEO). This demonstration, named "Morning Sparrow," will take place aboard a reusable, taskable, sub-orbital spaceplane platfo

Atlanta GA (SPX) Aug 23, 2024
Most space mission systems historically have used one spacecraft designed to complete an entire mission independently. Whether it was a weather satellite or a human-crewed module like Apollo, nearly every spacecraft was deployed and performed its one-off mission completely on its own. But today, space industry organizations are exploring missions with many satellites working together. For