Collaborate Disseminate
Six years after its initial launch date, the first crewed flight of Boeing’s ill-fated Starliner spacecraft has been postponed once again until at least March 2024 due to ongoing issues with the capsule’s reentry parachutes and related safety issues.Co… Continue reading First crewed Starliner flight to ISS delayed until at least March 2024
In a dramatic bit of improvisation, NASA’ Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, has managed to reestablish communications with the Voyager 2 spacecraft 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion km) from Earth after losing contact on July 21.C… Continue reading “Interstellar shout” reestablishes contact with Voyager 2
In a scary first, scientists have discovered a 2021 solar eruption so large that it was, for the first time, detected simultaneously on Earth, the Moon, and Mars, highlighting the radiation dangers posed by such events to deep space travelers.Continue … Continue reading Supersized solar eruption detected on Earth, the Moon, and Mars
Not satisfied with sending rovers to other worlds one at a time, NASA is sending three miniature robots to the Moon in 2024 as part of the Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration (CADRE) project. The goal is to see how such explorers can… Continue reading NASA to set a CADRE of autonomous rovers loose on the Moon
Want a flying skateboard? Your own personal home fusion reactor? A wearable MRI scanner you can buy online? If a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconducting material really has been found, that is just the tip of the technological iceberg.Contin… Continue reading Get ready for the age of the superconductor (maybe)
In anticipation of one of history’s most ambitious planetary missions, NASA has successfully tested the two solid rocket motors that will be used to help return the first geological samples from Mars to Earth for laboratory analysis.Continue ReadingCat… Continue reading NASA tests rocket motors for returning Mars soil samples to Earth
NASA has lost contact with its Voyager 2 deep-space probe. On July 21, 2023, Mission Control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) sent a series of commands that “inadvertently” caused the robotic spacecraft to turn its antenna away from Earth.Continu… Continue reading NASA loses contact with Voyager 2 but detects a “heartbeat”
Lockheed Martin is raising the bar on its 300-kW laser weapon system, announcing it is scaling it up to 500 kW under a new contract from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering (OUSD (R&E)).Continue ReadingCategory: Mili… Continue reading Lockheed Martin juices up its laser weapon to half a megawatt
In an historic experiment, ESA has made a controlled reentry of its Atmospheric Dynamics Mission-Aeolus (ADM-Aeolus) satellite in a maneuver designed to reduce the risk of such end-of-life events creating space debris or fragments reaching the ground.C… Continue reading Aeolus satellite burns up in historic controlled reentry
The first crewed mission to Mars may get there and back a bit faster and safer if a contract DARPA has awarded to Lockheed Martin bears fruit. The contract is to rapidly advance and fabricate a nuclear thermal rocket engine scheduled to fly by 2027 for… Continue reading DARPA taps Lockheed Martin to build nuclear deep space rocket