Copernical Team
Sols 3403-3404: Tiptoe to the Pediment
The terrain continues to challenge us as we make our way up onto the Greenheugh pediment. Monday's drive ended sooner than expected when the rover sensed the road was rockier than anticipated, so it paused to wait for further instructions from Earth. In the mean time, we took advantage of this brief pause to 'sniff' the rock field all around us.
First, we took ChemCam and Mastcam of "Tobar NASA begins assembly of Europa Clipper
When it's fully assembled, NASA's Europa Clipper will be as large as an SUV with solar arrays long enough to span a basketball court - all the better to help power the spacecraft during its journey to Jupiter's icy moon Europa. And just about every detail of the spacecraft will have been hand-crafted.
The assembly effort is already underway in clean rooms at the agency's Jet Propulsion Lab A River Runs Through It: Onward to the Delta
The delta is calling and we must go! With one Earth year in its rearview mirror, the Perseverance rover has been racking up the odometry en route to the site of it's next science campaign. It's been a trip down memory lane since leaving Seitah on Sol 340 (Feb 2, 2022) and retracing our tracks back to the Octavia E. Butler landing site.
Familiar views and rocks greet us like old friends as Integrated Deterrence at Center of Upcoming National Defense Strategy
With China, Russia, Iran and North Korea all pursuing advancements in their own nuclear capabilities, and both China and Russia developing advanced hypersonic weaponry and space capabilities, the United States will continue to rely on nuclear weapons as a central part of its own strategic deterrence. But there will need to be more than just nuclear weapons if the U.S. is to maintain its own secu Sino-European joint space mission conducts magnetometer extension test
A China-Europe joint space mission, Solar Wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE), has successfully carried out the extension test of its payload magnetometer in Europe, Science and Technology Daily reported Wednesday.
The test shows that the function and performance of the magnetometer subsystem integrated with the payload module meet the mission requirements and that the rese Tiangong scheduled for completion this year
China's Tiangong space station is scheduled to be completed before the end of this year and will become a massive spacecraft stack with a combined weight of nearly 100 metric tons, according to a program leader.
Zhou Jianping, chief designer of the nation's manned space program, said the assembly phase of the Tiangong program will begin in May and will involve the launch of two astronaut c Russia stops deliveries of rocket engines to US, Roscosmos Head Says
Earlier in the week, Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin refuted claims that the Russian space agency had allegedly "lost control" of its satellites, stressing that any cyberattacks against the country's satellites are a "casus belli".
Russia will stop deliveries of rocket engines to the United States, Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin announced Thursday.
"Not only are we refusing to supply th NASA rocket mission to study the origin of slow solar winds
The Sun's atmosphere, or corona, is beaming with activity. Solar flares and coronal mass injections send high-energy particles out into space and the corona constantly releases particles known as the solar wind.
Just as winds on Earth vary, the solar winds departing the Sun travel at different velocities—from a mere 700,000 mph, called slow solar winds, to the fast winds travelling up to 1.7 million mph.
Solar winds interacting with the Earth's atmosphere may interfere with communications, GPS signals, and electrical energy grids.
Beginning March 7, NASA will be ready to launch an experiment called HERSCHEL, or HElium Resonance Scatter in the Corona and HELiosphere. HERSCHEL will study the origin of the slow solar wind, investigate the variation of helium abundance in the corona, and facilitate future investigation of coronal mass ejections and other solar dynamics.
Scientists think an old rocket just hit the Moon going 5,800 mph
Add one more crater to the long list of pockmarks on the lunar surface.
According to orbital calculations, a rocket hurtling through space for years crashed into the Moon on Friday, but the strike wasn't directly observed, and there might be a wait for photographic evidence.
The impact would have taken place at 7:25 am Eastern Time (1225 GMT), on the far side of the Moon, said the astronomer Bill Gray, who was the first to predict the collision.
Racing through the cosmos at around 5,800 mph (9,300 kph), the roughly four ton object should make a crater "10 or 20 meters across," Gray told AFP.
Its speed, trajectory, and time of impact were calculated using Earth-based telescope observations.
"We had lots (and lots) of tracking data for the object, and there is nothing acting on it except the forces of gravity and sunlight," he said, with the latter pushing the cylinder gently away from the Sun.
Scientists help recover gases from moon rock time capsule
Scientists from Washington University in St. Louis are helping to recover gases from a container of lunar soil that astronauts collected and sealed under vacuum on the surface of the moon in 1972. The effort is part of NASA's Apollo Next Generation Sample Analysis (ANGSA) initiative.
Apollo 17 astronauts Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan collected the sample from the site of an ancient landslide in the moon's Taurus-Littrow Valley. The astronauts used a coring device to dig out a column of lunar regolith—a rough mixture of dust, soil and broken rock from the surface of the moon—and sealed it in a container. Back on Earth, NASA carefully placed the container in the lunar vault at NASA's Johnson Space Center, where it has remained in pristine condition, virtually untouched until now.
"For the last 50 years, the lunar core was enclosed in a core sample vacuum container, which was then enclosed in an outer vacuum container," said Alex Meshik, a research professor of physics in Arts & Sciences and faculty fellow of the university's McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences. "They were nested together, almost like Russian dolls.