It’s not Lunar New Year yet, but there is something new on the moon. In a major milestone for space exploration, China announced that its lunar program has successfully soft-landed a probe on the far side of the moon, making it the first one to do so. The historic landing was reported by Xinhua, China’s […]
View More China’s lunar probe makes history by successfully soft-landing on the far side of the moonCategory: Space Exploration
Virgin Galactic reaches the edge of space
Richard Branson, who is competing with the likes of Tesla and Amazon, is reaching new heights. The SpaceShipTwo passenger rocket hit a new height of 82.7km. It took off from the Mojave Desert in California. Read more…More about Space, Mashabl…
View More Virgin Galactic reaches the edge of spaceNASA spacecraft finds signs of water on Bennu asteroid
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NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has found water on the asteroid Bennu, after finishing its two-year trip to the formation.
Sitting 12 miles (19 kilometres) from the surface, the probe has discovered water hidden inside the asteroid’s clay minerals, thanks to data obtained from the probe’s spectrometers.
During its two-year, 1.4 million-mile (2.2 million-kilometre) trip to the asteroid, instruments aboard OSIRIS-REx — that’s the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer — began to make scientific observations of Bennu between mid-August and early December. Read more…
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View More NASA spacecraft finds signs of water on Bennu asteroidNASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft is now flying through the stars
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Voyager 2, at 11 billion miles from Earth, has entered the stars.
Monday morning NASA announced that the legendary exploration spacecraft had left a protective bubble produced by the sun’s wind and energy, called the heliosphere, and is now hurtling through interstellar space.
Voyager 2 is the second spacecraft to ever reach the outer limits of the solar system and enter into the interstellar wilderness. Voyager 2’s counterpart, Voyager 1, previously entered the stars in 2012.
“This is what we’ve all been waiting for,” Suzanne Dodd, NASA’s Voyager project manager, said in a statement. “Now we’re looking forward to what we’ll be able to learn from having both probes outside the heliopause.” Read more…
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View More NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft is now flying through the starsWhat Space Camp is like when you go as a grown-up
The Orion MultiPurpose Crew Vehicle is designed to take America back to the Moon, and possibly further. It is being built by NASA and the ESA at a total projected cost of more than $20 billion. Some personal news: I’ve been chosen as Comman…
View More What Space Camp is like when you go as a grown-upNASA spacecraft captures first images of the asteroid it will soon land on
A NASA probe speeding through the solar system has captured its first image of the asteroid Bennu, which the space agency will try to land on in 2020.
Once that happens, the spacecraft OSIRIS-REx is designed to collect up to 4.4 pounds of ancient spa…
Here are the glorious proposed logos for Donald Trump’s Space Force
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Donald Trump really seems intent on making his proposed Space Force a thing.
On Thursday morning, Vice President made a pitch for the sixth branch of the military dedicated to space. Then, on Thursday afternoon, the Trump/Pence team sent out an email asking for readers to vote on one of six proposed logos for Space Force that will be used on a “new line of gear.”
Space Force all the way!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 9, 2018
The logos range from something for a kid’s camp to, well, pretty cool, actually. I mean, once you get past the idea, which is kind of crazy, especially considering the amount of money this whole thing would cost and the need for that money to go elsewhere. Read more…
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View More Here are the glorious proposed logos for Donald Trump’s Space ForceSpace is open for business
Space is no longer the exclusive domain of engineering behemoths with a “monumental mission” mindset – a new ecosystem of technology innovators are democratizing extra-terrestrial commerce.
View More Space is open for businessNeptune looks extremely sharp and very blue in these new images
Several billion miles from Earth, Neptune’s looking particularly sharp in a set of new images captured by one of the most powerful telescopes in the world.
Located in Chile, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) used what’s k…
These are the clearest views of Saturn’s moon Titan we’ve seen yet
Long live Cassini, which has delivered the clearest views of Saturn’s moon, Titan, to date.
Six infrared images of Titan have been captured by the noble Cassini spacecraft, which, after 13 years of exploration, finally (and sadly) burned up in Saturn…
Americans aren’t sold on the idea of sending astronauts back to the moon
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Interest in the final frontier isn’t going anywhere.
Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center surveyed more than 2,500 American adults, revealing that 70 percent of Americans believe it’s essential for the United States to be at the forefront of space exploration.
However, when put up against some of NASA’s other initiatives, like keeping track of our changing climate, Americans believe that human space exploration should be taking a back seat.
In fact, of the nine ways people think NASA should be utilizing its resources, anything related to physically exploring space received very little attention. Only 19 percent of those surveyed think traveling to Mars should be a “top priority” and even fewer, at 13 percent, think sending astronauts back to the moon should be a top priority. Read more…
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View More Americans aren’t sold on the idea of sending astronauts back to the moonNASA finds organic matter on Mars, but sorry, that doesn’t mean it’s aliens
More than 3 billion years ago, Mars was a very different place.
It wasn’t the rusty, dead seeming world we see today. Instead, lakes, rivers, and deltas likely covered much of the planet’s surface. Thanks to previous NASA research, we know that…