09 September 2016
OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on its way to study Bennu after successful launch Thursday
...designed it.” The mission plans for OSIRIS-REx to go to Bennu, a near-earth asteroid of about 500 meters in diameter. Bennu is on the list of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (read about another such asteroid here). The next time Bennu will fly inside...
27 June 2017
New Roll-Out Solar Array tested at the ISS
..., it is envisaged that the robotic mission could utilise a technology like ROSA to visit a large near-Earth asteroid, retrieve a multi-ton boulder from the asteroid’s surface and then redirecting the object into a stable orbit around the moon...
April 2019
On-board propulsion set to drive the smallsat revolution
...problem encountered on the Hayabusa spacecraft of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on its return voyage from a near-Earth asteroid in 2007-2010. ThrustMe’s second innovation is the use of a novel RF acceleration technique that allows the...
October 2020
Connecting the global space community
... material for a future Mars sample return mission. Meanwhile, JAXA’s Hayabusa mission will return samples from near-Earth asteroids (at the end of 2020), so next year we might have some interesting scientific results. These...
May 2018
Why national space laws on the exploitation of resources of celestial bodies contradict international law
... regulating such exploitation. This is only a matter for the international community to do. Painting showing an asteroid mining mission to an Earth-approaching asteroid. And we have very clear attempts for such regulation. The Moon Agreement of 1979...
24 July 2019
LightSail 2 unfurls its sails and soars through space
... sails attached to a satellite that is now whizzing around Earth powered by nothing more than the energy of the sun...not be the last of its kind as NASA plans to launch its Near Earth Asteroid Scout early in the next decade. It too will employ the use ...
