Space Exploration

On November 17, 2019, ESA’s Mars Express orbiter made a close flyby of Phobos, the larger and inner of the two natural satellites of Mars. The probe tracked Phobos as the tiny moon passed in front of the spacecraft’s High Resolution Stereo Camera, capturing Phobos’ motions and surface in detail. …

NASA’s Juno spacecraft spied the new Jovian cyclone on November 3, 2019, during its 23rd science pass of the gas giant. A series of JunoCam images from Juno’s 23rd close science pass by Jupiter on November 3, 2019, revealed a sixth circumpolar cyclone in the cluster around Jupiter’s south pole. …

  NASA’s OSIRIS-REx space probe reached the asteroid Bennu just over a year ago, and now the agency has decided where it will descend to pick up a sample from the space rock. The site, known as Nightingale, is a gravel-strewn pit near the asteroid’s north pole. It’ll be a …

Proton aurora, a type of Martian aurora first identified in 2016, forms when protons from the solar wind interact with hydrogen in the extended portions of the Martian atmosphere and travel to lower regions. According to multi-year observations made using the Imaging UltraViolet Spectrograph (IUVS) onboard NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere …

Using NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, a team of planetary researchers have measured the speed and direction of winds in the Martian upper atmosphere between about 150 and 200 km (93-124 miles) above the surface. The results are published in two papers in the journal Science and …

Using data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey orbiter, a team of planetary researchers have crated a map of the water ice depth on the Red Planet. Published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the new map shows that water ice is present sometimes just a few inches …

  NASA is working on the necessary technology to return to the moon, but that’s just a stepping stone to the agency’s goal of sending the first humans to Mars. Reaching Mars will be a challenge, but the agency is already working to narrow down landing sites. A new NASA-led …

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft recently observed several particle ejection events on the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta and colleagues have analyzed the properties and behavior of particles ejected from Bennu to determine the possible mechanisms of ejection …

Generally, you do not desire rocket gas containers to fracture since that most likely implies something will take off. The gas is intended to remain within where it can take off in a regulated way upon leaving the rocket. The exemption to the no-rupture policy is when you’re screening a …

The populace of the International Space Station (ISS) will rise by one, yet it will not be an additional human resident. It’ll be an AI-powered flying robotic called CIMON-2, a followup to the speculative CIMON robotic that debuted in 2015. The ISS’ most recent AI crawler need to get to …