Tag Archives: NASAs

Winners and losers About five years ago NASA awarded initial space station development contracts to four different companies: Northrop Grumman, Blue Origin, Axiom Space, and Voyager Space. Since then Northrop has dropped its effort and joined Voyager’s team. There has also been some interest from other companies, most notably Vast, which is working with SpaceX to develop its initial space …

Instead, Curiosity and its younger sibling Perseverance each use their MMRTG nuclear power source, which relies on decaying plutonium pellets to create energy and recharge the rover’s batteries. Providing ample power for the rovers’ many science instruments, MMRTGs are known for their longevity (the twin Voyager spacecraft have relied on RTGs since 1977). But as the plutonium decays over time, …

NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer sits in a clean room at Lockheed Martin Space in Colorado during testing in August 2024. The mission was to investigate the nature of the Moon’s water, but controllers lost contact with the spacecraft a day after launch in February. Lockheed Martin photo via NASA Aug. 4 (UPI) — NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer mission to the moon ended …

Sign up for the Starts With a Bang newsletter Travel the universe with Dr. Ethan Siegel as he answers the biggest questions of all. Out there in the Universe, a great existential question remains unanswered: are we alone in the Universe? Despite all that we’ve learned — about matter, about the Universe, about all the other stars and planets out …

The first crew slated to fly in NASA’s Orion spacecraft during the Artemis II mission around the Moon early next year entered their spacecraft for a multi-day training at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Crew donned their spacesuits July 31 and boarded Orion to train and experience some of the conditions they can expect on their mission. NASA …

NASA’s Europa Clipper probe checked out its radar as the spacecraft hurtled past Mars on the way to Jupiter’s moon Europa. The Mars flyby in March was primarily to use the planet’s gravitational pull to tweak the Europa Clipper’s trajectory. However, boffins were able to use the proximity of the planet to calibrate the spacecraft’s infrared camera and test its …

New capabilities allow the rover to do science with less energy from its batteries. Thirteen years since Curiosity landed on Mars, engineers are finding ways to make the NASA rover even more productive. The six-wheeled robot has been given more autonomy and the ability to multitask — improvements designed to make the most of Curiosity’s energy source, a multi-mission radioisotope …

NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft successfully tested its ice-penetrating radar system during a close flyby of Mars earlier this year, proving that the probe is ready for its main mission: peering beneath the frozen crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa to search for signs of subsurface liquid water and possibly even determine if those oceans have the ingredients to form and sustain …

The Lunar Trailblazer mission to the moon officially ended on July 31, but it wasn’t a complete journey. NASA today that its teams lost contact with the satellite shortly after its launch several months prior. The NASA satellite was part of the IM-2 mission by Intuitive Machines, which took off from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center …

NASA’s New Radar Just Pulled Off Something Impossible on Earth  SciTechDailyView Full Coverage on Google News Source link