18 October 2021
NASA's Lucy mission launches, encounters problem with solar panel
...’s elusive Trojan asteroids. But, in order to assure that there is enough energy to power the spacecraft throughout the mission, the solar panels will need to deploy flawlessly, said Principal Investigator Hal Levison of the Southwest Institute...
23 July 2020
China's Tianwen-1 Mars mission launches successfully
... on the ground. Ahead of their own launch, NASA chief Jim Bridenstine congratulated China’s successful start to their mission; “With today’s launch, China is on its way to join the community of international scientific explorers at Mars. The United...
20 January 2021
"Mole" on NASA's InSight mission to dig no more
... “Fortunately, we’ve learned a lot that will benefit future missions that attempt to dig into the subsurface.” While NASA’s ... lander scraped the top layer of the Martian surface, no mission before InSight has tried to burrow into the soil. Doing ...
10 December 2021
SpaceX launches NASA's IXPE mission
...Italian Space Agency, the IXPE observatory is NASA’s first mission dedicated to measuring the polarization of X-rays from the ... Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Together...
July 2018
Using algae to support astronauts on deep space missions
...but reproduced during the experiment, indicating very low stress levels to the animals. In 2011 on China’s Shenzhou-8 mission, German scientists flew a type of algae known as Euglenoidea together with snails as part of the Science in Microgravity Box...
17 August 2016
NASA Asteroid Redirect Mission Review Complete
... provide final anchoring of the boulder to the capture mechanism. Credit: NASA artist’s concept The Asteroid Redirect Mission is expected to send a robotic spacecraft to an asteroid in near-earth space. The spacecraft will retrieve a boulder of a few...
