Items tagged with spacecraft

In a new paper, scientists do not rule out that horizontal protrusions that were photographed by NASA's Curiosity rover could have come from an alien spacecraft. The image in question was taken by Curiosity between sol 3786 and 3800 during its time in Mars' Gale Crater with its ChemCam. Back in April of this year... Read more...
NASA engineers and technicians are performing some of the final preparations for the Psyche spacecraft before its liftoff which is scheduled for October 5, 2023. Teams are working around the clock at Cape Canaveral, Florida, to make sure the spacecraft is ready for its journey to orbit a metal-rich asteroid, also... Read more...
The European Space Agency (ESA) has launched its Euclid mission that will explore the mysteries of the dark universe. The space telescope is on its way to map out a large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies located as far away as 10 billion light-years. Scientists... Read more...
Researchers have discovered that Enceladus's ocean should contain phosphorus, one of the basic elements for terrestrial life. The scientists used geochemical modeling to predict just how much phosphorous could be present in the ocean of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Observations by the Cassini spacecraft have already... Read more...
The Mars Curiosity rover sent NASA a panoramic postcard capturing both the morning and afternoon views of the Red Planet. The postcard is a combination of two separate images taken of the Marker Band Valley just before the rover said goodbye to the area. NASA has shared some incredible images from Mars that its... Read more...
NASA believes there is a very good chance of finding signs of life once it lands back on the Moon, beginning with its Artemis III mission. Current research by the space agency suggests that the most likely candidate for the existence of microbes on the moon to be from humans. As NASA prepares for its upcoming... Read more...
After deciding to delay a mission to send a spacecraft to asteroid Psyche last summer, an independently appointed review board has given NASA and the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) the green light to carry on. NASA and JPL convened the board last summer following the mission team's request to delay the... Read more...
A message in a bottle is headed to Jupiter's moon Europa later this year, and anyone can add their name to it. The message contains a poem written by US Poet Laureate Ada Limon titled, "In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa." The "Message in a Bottle" campaign will include names received before midnight on... Read more...
NASA's Voyager 2 is getting an energy boost that will help keep its science instruments running until 2026 and perhaps beyond. This is all made possible by a rather simple hack on NASA's part. Widely regarded as two of the most successful space probes ever, Voyager 1 and 2 have been plugging along for the past 46... Read more...
Japanese company ispace learned the hard way that landing a spacecraft on the surface of the moon is far from easy. The company's attempt to be the first private company to make a moon landing ended with a loss of communication with its Hakuto-R lander before crashing into the lunar surface. With so many successful... Read more...
As space tourism becomes more of a reality, one group of scientists is pondering the thought of "uncontrolled human conception" in space. The scientist's green paper suggests space sex could happen within the next decade and we need to start preparing for it now. The group says tourist behavior will differ greatly... Read more...
A Japanese company called ispace is attempting to be the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon today, and you can watch live. It launched its Hakuto-R lander onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in December of last year. After launching the Hakuto-R lander on December 11, 2022, ispace had the... Read more...
NASA's Mars Curiosity rover captured an image on April Fool's Day that left one person seeing 'the back of a fossilized Martian dragon, curled up in its final resting place.' Others thought the image resembled a mackerel fillet, a fir tree branch, and the skeleton of a prehistoric creature. This is not the first... Read more...
NASA's Mars Perseverance rover continues its exploration of the Red Planet, as it begins a new science campaign. The rover took its first core sample of the new campaign at the top of Jezero Crater's delta on March 30, 2023. Since launching back in July 2020, NASA's Perseverance rover has been surveying and probing... Read more...
NASA's Perseverance rover captured a fantastically eerie video of drifting clouds just before sunset on the Red Planet. The series of images were collected by one of the Martian rover's navigation cameras on March 18, 2023, the 738th Martian day. Since Perseverance made its landing on Mars, scientists and... Read more...
Scientists have found direct evidence of active volcanism on Venus, Earth's twin, for the first time ever. The 30-plus-year-old evidence will be followed up on with NASA's upcoming VERITAS mission. Surprisingly, the newly found evidence was found in archival radar images from the 1990s, during NASA's Magellan... Read more...
While sand dunes come in many shapes and sizes on Mars, the nearly perfect circular sand dunes found recently are unusual. The images were captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which was launched in 2005 and arrived at Mars in 2006. The images were captured by the High Resolution Imaging Science... Read more...
NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft smashed into asteroid Dimorphos at 13,000mph on September 26, 2022. The intergalactic collision sent over 1,000 tons of dust and rock hurtling off the space rock. The DART mission was an attempt by the space agency to prove whether or not an impact of this... Read more...
NASA's SpaceX Crew-6 mission launched successfully from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the early morning hours. The crew onboard the Dragon spacecraft are currently preparing to dock autonomously to the space-facing port of the station's Harmony module at approximately 1:17a.m. EST, Friday, March 3... Read more...
A planetary scientist is urging NASA to send a probe to Uranus in order to learn more about the icy planet. Kathleen Mandt of Johns Hopkins University says that there is a launch window for such a probe opening in 2032, when Jupiter's alignment with Earth will provide the opportunity for a slingshot maneuver toward... Read more...
NASA is scouring engineering data taken by the orbiter's JunoCam in order to understand why the majority of images from the spacecraft were not acquired. The missing data is from Juno's most recent flyby of Jupiter on January 22, 2023. The Juno spacecraft began its journey toward Jupiter back in August 2011. After... Read more...
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured a time-lapse video that shows 133 days in the life of the Sun in just one hour. SDO is a geosynchronous-orbiting satellite designed to help researchers understand the Sun's influence on Earth by studying the solar atmosphere. A recent video posted by NASA chronicles... Read more...
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