Enlarge / What a docking of Boeing’s Starliner to the International Space Station will look like. (credit: Boeing) About five weeks have passed since Boeing updated the status of its Starliner spacecraft, with the company saying it was “evaluating” a new target launch date for its next mission. This test flight of Starliner, which will not […]
Lego’s latest official NASA set is this massive model of space shuttle Discovery on mission STS-31. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ] The ongoing collaboration between Lego and NASA continues to delight. Back in 2017, the Danish toymaker brought out a highly detailed Saturn V—a model ably assembled in time lapse by Ars’ Eric Berger before […]
The Psyche spacecraft chassis was delivered to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in late March, 2021. [credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech ] A satellite company named Maxar recently delivered a passenger van-sized chunk of spacecraft to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. This chassis will serve as the backbone for a robotic spacecraft that will explore a metallic asteroid […]
Early on Monday, a Crew Dragon was docked at the “forward” port of the Harmony module. [credit: NASA TV ] Early on Monday morning, four astronauts donned their flight suits and clambered into their Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Resilience. But they were not coming home. Rather, NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, as well […]
Enlarge (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) On Tuesday, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) hosted a press conference where it detailed the plans for the Ingenuity drone that hitched a ride to Mars attached to the underside of the Perseverance rover. The scientists and engineers behind the drone announced that they’ve now picked a site for what is expected […]
The SLS Core Stage ignites, beginning a nominal full-duration hot-fire test on March 18, 2021. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann / Ars Technica ] It has been a long, difficult, and expensive road for NASA and its Space Launch System rocket. But on Thursday afternoon, the space agency got to taste some success with what appeared to […]
Enlarge (credit: Simon Stacpoole | Offside | Getty Images) The heads of the Chinese and Russian space agencies signed an agreement on Tuesday to work together to build a “scientific” station on the Moon. Under terms of a memorandum of understanding, the two countries will cooperate on creation of an “International Lunar Science Station” and […]
Enlarge / Perseverance’s two Mastcam-Z imagers (in the gray boxes) are part of the rover’s remote sensing mast. (credit: NASA) The seven minutes of terror are over. The parachute deployed; the skycrane rockets fired. Robot truck goes ping! Perseverance, a rover built by humans to do science 128 million miles away, is wheels-down on Mars. […]
Enlarge / Perseverance has landed about two kilometers from a delta system, shown in the upper left of this image. In their first press conference following Perseverance’s successful landing on Mars, NASA and JPL scientists revealed some information on where the rover landed and what to expect for the next several days and weeks as […]
Enlarge NASA’s Perseverance rover has successfully landed on the surface of Mars, transmitting telemetry information and the first images of its landing site. A low-resolution driving-camera image shows a field of dust-covered rocks, with the unmistakable shadow of the rover hardware. The early images are so fresh that you can still see the dust kicked […]