Pasadena CA (JPL) Jan 18, 2024
In January 2004, twin NASA rovers named Spirit and Opportunity touched down on opposite sides of Mars, kicking off a new era of interplanetary robotic exploration. They arrived in dramatic fashion three weeks apart, each nestled in a cluster of airbags that bounced along the surface around 30 times before coming to a stop and deflating. The golf cart-size rovers' mission: to look for evidence th

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Jan 18, 2024
On January 18, 2023, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swedish astronaut, Marcus Wandt, will embark on a pioneering journey to the International Space Station (ISS). This mission, known as Muninn, will mark the first time an ESA astronaut participates in a commercial mission organized by the U.S. launch service provider Axiom, aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule from NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

London, UK (SPX) Jan 17, 2024
An experiment outlined by a UCL (University College London)-led team of scientists from the UK and India could test whether relatively large masses have a quantum nature, resolving the question of whether quantum mechanical description works at a much larger scale than that of particles and atoms. Quantum theory is typically seen as describing nature at the tiniest scales and quantum effec

Istanbul (AFP) Jan 17, 2024
When Turkey's first astronaut blasts off for the International Space Station (ISS) this week, he will embody his country's pride and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's grand geopolitical ambitions. Alper Gezeravci, a 43-year-old fighter pilot and colonel in Turkey's air force, was due to take off Wednesday from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida for a two-week mission. But l

Beijing (XNA) Jan 18, 2024
China's Tianzhou 7 cargo spacecraft has successfully completed its journey to the Tiangong space station, docking without any issues. Launched from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province, Tianzhou 7, aboard a Long March 7 rocket, lifted off at 10:27 pm. The launch was a spectacle of precision and technological prowess, as the rocket placed Tianzhou 7 into its designated low-Earth or

Kennedy Space Center, United States (AFP) Jan 17, 2024
An all-European crew including Turkey's first astronaut are poised to blast off to the International Space Station in a mission with Axiom Space, as countries hungry for a taste of space turn increasingly to the private sector. The launch, Axiom's third, is scheduled to see the four-member crew lift off in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule fixed to the top of a Falcon 9 rocket at 4:49 pm local ti

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jan 18, 2024
NASA's innovative approach to building large-scale infrastructure in space has reached a new milestone with the Automated Reconfigurable Mission Adaptive Digital Assembly Systems (ARMADAS). This cutting-edge project, developed by a dedicated team at NASA's Ames Research Center, is geared towards meeting the critical needs of future long-duration and deep-space missions. Christine Gregg, th

St. Louis, MO (SPX) Jan 18, 2024
Eighteen years after NASA's Stardust mission returned to Earth with the first samples from a known comet, the true nature of that icy object is coming into focus. Stardust collected material from Wild 2, a comet that likely formed beyond Neptune and currently orbits the sun between Mars and Jupiter. Painstaking analyses of the microscopic samples, recently described in the journal Geochemi

Washington DC (UPI) Jan 17, 2024
The SpaceX launch of the private Axiom-3 mission to the International Space Station was scrubbed until Thursday, the company said on social media just before noon on Wednesday. The flight, the third private industry flight carrying four astronauts the orbiting laboratory was scheduled to blast off late Wednesday afternoon. "Now targeting Thursday, Jan. 18 for [the] launch of the

Image: Heart of ESA vacuum testing