March 2016
Searching for water in the Solar System
... NASA’s New Frontiers programme. It will perform detailed characterisation as well as a sample return. The third mission, the Near Earth Asteroid Scout CubeSat is currently in development as part of NASA’s human exploration programme. It would reach...
January 2017
New oceans beckon for solar sail technology
...), in mid-2018 NASA is developing its own deep space solar sail mission called the Near Earth Asteroid Scout. NASA plans to send humans to a Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) in the early part of the next decade as part of a long-range plan to send...
August 2017
Big science from small spacecraft
... will also be the first planetary cubesat mission to use ‘green’ propulsion. Another project under development is the Near-Earth Asteroid Scout, which will deploy a solar sail that catches sunlight to steer a flight path taking it from a lunar...
24 September 2018
Hayabusa2 rovers land successfully on Ryugu
...which has been in orbit around the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu since June, has successfully deployed two... its primary goal of returning a sample from the surface of the asteroid back to Earth in 2020. The small rovers, MINERVA-II1. Rover-1A is on the...
04 February 2022
NASA’s real-life “Don’t Look Up” programme
..., the ATLAS system has discovered more than 700 near-Earth asteroids and 66 comets, along with detection of 2019 MO and 2018 LA, two very small asteroids that actually impacted Earth. The system is specially designed to detect objects that approach...
July 2019
Who owns outer space?
.... It has set its sights on Near-Earth Asteroids which pass within about 50 million km of Earth’s orbit and views them as ‘outer...model that reflects the way humans feel about the Moon and near-Earth objects - that they are ours? About the author Angela...
