Enlarge / This image depicts the ground tracks of NASA’s Perseverance rover (white) and Ingenuity Mars Helicopter (green) since arriving on Mars on Feb. 18. The upper yellow ellipse depicts the “South Séítah” region, which Ingenuity flew over during its 12th sortie. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) NASA’s tiny helicopter on Mars, which has a fuselage about the […]
Enlarge (credit: NASA) Last week, NASA’s Perseverance rover shot for a new milestone in the search for extraterrestrial life: drilling into Mars to extract a plug of rock, which will eventually get fired back to Earth for scientists to study. Data sent to NASA scientists early on August 6 indicated a victory—the robot had indeed […]
Enlarge / Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos announces the company’s partnership with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper to develop a Human Landing System in 2019. (credit: Glowing blue Origin) On Wednesday, the US Government Accountability Office released its full-but-redacted decision that ruled in favor of NASA’s selection of a Human Getting System contractor. The […]
Enlarge / Close-up of the Boeing CST-100 Starliner capsule, white room attached, atop the mighty Atlas V launch vehicle at Cape Canaveral’s SLC-41. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann) For a week leading up the much-anticipated launch of Boeing’s Starliner test flight on Tuesday, officials with NASA and the aerospace company said the spacecraft and its Atlas V […]
Enlarge / Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith (black hat) walks with Jeff Bezos after his flight on Blue Origin’s New Shepard into space. (credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Shaun Bezos published an open letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on Monday morning and offered to pay more than $2 billion to get the agency’s Human Landing […]
Ashton Kutcher was this close to going to space… until Mila Kunis talked some sense into him that is! The That 70s Show actress reminded her former co-star (and hubby and baby daddy) that he’s got a family with young children at home, and maybe space travel isn’t the smartest thing to be doing at this […]
Enlarge (credit: NASA ) NASA announced on Friday that it has switched to backup computing hardware on the Hubble Space Telescope, potentially ending over a month of uncertainty regarding the telescope’s future. The success came just two days after the agency indicated that it had narrowed down the source of the original fault. The iconic […]
Enlarge / Roscosmos Head Dmitry Rogozin gives a press briefing after the failure of the MS-11 mission. (credit: Alexei FilippovTASS via Getty Images) After Sir Richard Branson’s spaceflight this weekend, the particular leader of Russia’s main space corporation, Roscosmos, offered some kind words about the achievement on Twitter . Dmitry Rogozin called the flight a […]
Enlarge (credit: NASA) On June 13, the Hubble Space Telescope took itself offline due to a fault in its payload computer, which manages its scientific instruments. Since then, NASA has been doing the sort of troubleshooting that might be familiar to many of us—with the added twist that the hardware is irreplaceable, in space, and […]
Enlarge / Bill Nelson was confirmed by the US Senate to become NASA administrator on April 30. (credit: NASA) NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the space agency expects a decision from the US Government Accountability Office on a lunar lander protest by August 4. This would seem to set a firm timeline after which NASA […]