Space and astronomy news
What if we had the ability to chase down interstellar objects passing through our Solar System, like Oumuamua or Comet Borisov? Such a spacecraft would need to be ready to go at a moment’s notice, with the capacity to increase speed and change direction quickly. That’s the idea behind a new mission concept called the …
Ever feel like no matter how far you fly you end up in the same spot? Ingenuity certainly does. The helicopter that has been making dozens of headlines lately for all of the firsts it is achieving as part of its mission on Mars so far has only returned back to its original take-off point. …
Continue reading “Ingenuity Makes a one-way Trip for the First Time, Flying to a new Landing Site”
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter just completed its fourth flight, once again setting records for extraterrestrial flight.
The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter just completed its third test flight and set new records for traveling farther and faster than ever before.
According to the immortal words of Ian Malcom (Jeff Goldblum) “Life..uh…finds a way”. Back in 2005, an article in Nature used the famous quote from Jurassic Park to describe the possibility of life surviving on Mars. It encapsulates the hope that life’s adaptability, which it has proved itself so many times over on Earth, could …
Continue reading “Mars has the Right Conditions for Life Just Under the Surface”
Since they were formed in the early solar system, many meteorites offer an unadulterated view into what that solar system was made out of, or what happened to it as we reported before. Recently a team of researchers led by Maggie Thompson at University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) took a look at the chemical …
Continue reading “Meteorites Hold Early Atmospheres From Across the Solar System”
Mars has been in the news a lot lately, and for good reason. With the historic landing of the Perseverance Rover earlier in the year, and the successful flight of Ingenuity, the first-ever aircraft to fly in another atmosphere, earlier this morning (April 19, 2021), there’s no shortage of exciting stories of technical brilliance from …
Continue reading “This Is a Collapsed Pit on Mars, Not a Pimple”
NASA pulled off a Wright Brothers moment on Mars early today by successfully flying the tiny Ingenuity helicopter for approximately 40 seconds. “We can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcraft on another planet,” said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity’s lead engineer, speaking to her colleagues gathered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California …
Space research, like much else in capitalist societies, is driven by funding. The biggest source of that funding for that space research is usually the US government. Which is why, when US presidents release their budget proposals, the space community takes notice. Especially because that budget affects NASA, the largest space funding agency in the …
Continue reading “Biden Administration is Looking for a 6.3% Increase in NASA’s Budget for 2022”
NASA’s SHERLOC and WATSON, two spectrometers designed to look for biosignatures, could answer if there’s life on Mars on inside the Solar System’s icy moons.