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Weather on Mars: Chilly with a chance of 'dust devils'![]() Ithaca NY (SPX) Feb 20, 2019 If you're planning a trip to Elysium Planitia on Mars, pack a sweater. Starting this week, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will provide daily weather reports for Mars, courtesy of the red planet's newest robotic resident, InSight. "The InSight lander is close to the Martian equator - just north of the equator - so it is experiencing Martian winter," said Cornell's Don Banfield, the mission's lead for the lander's Auxiliary Payload Subsystem (APSS), a suite of meteorological sensors on the l ... read more |
InSight is the Newest Mars weather servicePasadena CA (JPL) Feb 20, 2019 No matter how cold your winter has been, it's probably not as chilly as Mars. Check for yourself: Starting today, the public can get a daily weather report from NASA's InSight lander. This pub ... more
Northwestern study of analog crews in isolation reveals weak spots for Mission to MarsEvanston IL (SPX) Feb 19, 2019 Northwestern University researchers are developing a predictive model to help NASA anticipate conflicts and communication breakdowns among crew members and head off problems that could make or break ... more
Mars Rover Opportunity Ends Mission After 15 YearsIthaca NY (SPX) Feb 13, 2019 The Mars rover Opportunity, NASA's robotic geologist fitted with an array of tools to search for evidence of water, ended its mission Feb. 13 - three weeks after its 15th anniversary and long past i ... more
New study suggests possibility of recent underground volcanism on MarsWashington DC (SPX) Feb 13, 2019 A study published last year in the journal Science suggested liquid water is present beneath the south polar ice cap of Mars. Now, a new study in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters argues ... more |
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NASA's MAVEN spacecraft shrinking its Mars orbit to prepare for Mars 2020 RoverGreenbelt MD (SPX) Feb 12, 2019 NASA's 4-year-old atmosphere-sniffing Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission is embarking on a new campaign to tighten its orbit around Mars. The operation will reduce the highest po ... more
Developing a flight strategy to land heavier vehicles on MarsUrbana IL (SPX) Feb 12, 2019 The heaviest vehicle to successfully land on Mars is the Curiosity Rover at 1 metric ton, about 2,200 pounds. Sending more ambitious robotic missions to the surface of Mars, and eventually humans, w ... more
Curiosity Mars Rover Departs Vera Rubin RidgePasadena CA (JPL) Feb 11, 2019 After exploring Mars' Vera Rubin Ridge for more than a year, NASA's Curiosity rover (https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl) recently moved on. But a new 360-video lets the public visit Curiosity's final dri ... more
NASA Administrator says Agency plans to 'go to the Moon and stay'Washington DC (Sputnik) Feb 11, 2019 Jim Bridenstine, the space agency's administrator, said that NASA plans to return people to the Moon and have astronauts explore more of the surface for longer periods. The NASA administrator ... more
More than 835 recovery commands have been sent to OpportunityPasadena CA (JPL) Feb 11, 2019 Mars atmospheric opacity (tau) over the rover site is estimated to be somewhere in the range of 0.9 to 1.3. No signal from Opportunity has been heard since Sol 5111 (June 10, 2018) during the ... more |
![]() ESA's Mars rover has a name - Rosalind Franklin
Beyond Mars, the Mini MarCO Spacecraft Fall SilentPasadena CA (JPL) Feb 06, 2019 Before the pair of briefcase-sized spacecraft known collectively as MarCO launched last year, their success was measured by survival: If they were able to operate in deep space at all, they would be ... more |
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InSight's Seismometer Now Has a Cozy Shelter on MarsPasadena CA (JPL) Feb 05, 2019 For the past several weeks, NASA's InSight lander has been making adjustments to the seismometer it set on the Martian surface on Dec. 19. Now it's reached another milestone by placing a domed shiel ... more
What Can Curiosity Tell Us About How a Martian Mountain FormedWashington DC (SPX) Feb 01, 2019 The density of rock layers on the terrain that climbs from the base of Mars' Gale Crater to Mount Sharp is less dense than expected, according to the latest report on the Red Planet's geology from a ... more
Innovative GEDI Instrument Now Gathering Forest DataGreenbelt MD (SPX) Feb 04, 2019 NASA instrument scientist Bryan Blair had just finished writing the flight software for the agency's Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter, or MOLA, when he was invited in 1991 to fly a lidar instrument aboa ... more
Research Uses Curiosity Rover to Measure Gravity on MarsCollege Park MD (SPX) Feb 01, 2019 Apollo 17 astronauts drove a moon buggy across the lunar surface in 1972, measuring subtle changes in gravitational pull with an instrument called a gravimeter. Although there are no astronauts on M ... more
Curiosity Says Farewell to Mars' Vera Rubin RidgePasadena CA (JPL) Jan 29, 2019 NASA's Curiosity rover has taken its last selfie on Vera Rubin Ridge and descended toward a clay region of Mount Sharp. The twisting ridge on Mars has been the rover's home for more than a yea ... more |
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Russia mulls offering US upgraded space vehicle for lunar orbit station supplies Moscow (Sputnik) Feb 18, 2019
Russia is planning to offer the United States to deliver supplies to the future international lunar orbital station with the use of the modernized Progress-L cargo spacecraft, a Russian space industry source has told Sputnik.
It was reported earlier that NASA, together with other countries, plans to build a manned LOP-G station (Lunar Orbital Platform - Gateway) in lunar orbit in the 2020s ... more |
China improves Long March-6 rocket for growing commercial launches Beijing (XNA) Feb 12, 2019
China announced Monday that it is developing the modified version of the Long March-6 rocket to add four solid boosters to increase its carrying capacity.
The improved medium-left carrier rocket will be sent into space by 2020, according to the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, which designed the rocket.
The Long ... more |
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Rosetta's comet sculpted by stress Paris (ESA) Feb 19, 2019
Feeling stressed? You're not alone. ESA's Rosetta mission has revealed that geological stress arising from the shape of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has been a key process in sculpting the comet's surface and interior following its formation.
Small, icy comets with two distinct lobes seem to be commonplace in the Solar System, with one possible mode of formation a slow collision of two ... more |
Tiny Neptune Moon Spotted by Hubble May Have Broken from Larger Moon Washington DC (SPX) Feb 21, 2019
Astronomers call it "the moon that shouldn't be there."
After several years of analysis, a team of planetary scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has at last come up with an explanation for a mysterious moon around Neptune that they discovered with Hubble in 2013.
The tiny moon, named Hippocamp, is unusually close to a much larger Neptunian moon called Proteus. Normally, a ... more |
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Scientist sheds light on Titan's mysterious nitrogen atmosphere San Antonio TX (SPX) Jan 24, 2019
A new Southwest Research Institute study tackles one of the greatest mysteries about Titan, one of Saturn's moons: the origin of its thick, nitrogen-rich atmosphere. The study posits that one key to Titan's mysterious atmosphere is the "cooking" of organic material in the moon's interior.
"Titan is a very interesting moon because it has this very thick atmosphere, which makes it unique amo ... more |
Earth's atmosphere stretches out to the Moon - and beyond Paris (ESA) Feb 21, 2019
The outermost part of our planet's atmosphere extends well beyond the lunar orbit - almost twice the distance to the Moon.
A recent discovery based on observations by the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, SOHO, shows that the gaseous layer that wraps around Earth reaches up to 630 000 km away, or 50 times the diameter of our planet.
"The Moon flies through Earth's atmosphe ... more |
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Space behaviour focus of Expedition 58 Paris (ESA) Feb 20, 2019
Europe's Columbus laboratory enters its eleventh year in space with steady operations, a few upgrades and several experiments in full swing.
The physical behaviour of particles, liquids and cells in microgravity was the focus of ESA's activities on the International Space Station during the first weeks of February.
The three astronauts from Expedition 58 living in space worked on e ... more |
NIST 'Astrocomb' Opens New Horizons for Planet-Hunting Telescope Washington DC (SPX) Feb 20, 2019
The hunt for Earth-like planets, and perhaps extraterrestrial life, just got more precise, thanks to record-setting starlight measurements made possible by a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) "astrocomb."
NIST's custom-made frequency comb-which precisely measures frequencies, or colors, of light-ensures the precision of starlight analysis by an instrument called a spect ... more |
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NASA tests urban drone traffic management in Nevada, Texas Moffett Field CA (SPX) Feb 20, 2019
NASA has selected two organizations to host the final phase of its four-year series of increasingly complicated technical demonstrations involving small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), commonly known as drones.
The Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems in Las Vegas and the Lone Star UAS Center for Excellence and Innovation in Corpus Christi, Texas, will host demonstrations to confirm NA ... more |
LOFAR radio telescope reveals secrets of solar storms Helsinki, Finland (SPX) Feb 20, 2019
An international team of scientists led by a researcher from Trinity College Dublin and University of Helsinki announced a major discovery on the very nature of solar storms in the journal Nature Astronomy.
The team showed that solar storms can accelerate particles simultaneously in several locations by combining data from the Low Frequency Array, LOFAR, with images from NASA, NOAA and ESA ... more |
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Russia Completes Engine Tests of Soyuz Rocket's 2nd Stage Using New Fuel Bengaluru, India (Sputnik) Feb 21, 2019
The engine for the second stage of the Soyuz-2 rocket using the new naphthyl rocket fuel instead of kerosene was successfully tested, a spokesperson for the United Engine Corporation told Sputnik on the sidelines of the Aero India exhibition in the Indian city of Bengaluru on Wednesday.
"On February 12, 2019,... the first 'marketable' RD-108A liquid rocket engine of the central bloc of the ... more |
Tidal tails mark the beginning of the end of an open star cluster Heidelberg, Germany (SPX) Feb 18, 2019
In the course of their life, open star clusters continuously lose stars to their surroundings. The resulting swath of tidal tails provides a glimpse into the evolution and dissolution of a star cluster. Thus far only tidal tails of massive globular clusters and dwarf galaxies have been discovered in the Milky Way system.
In open clusters, this phenomenon existed only in theory. Researchers ... more |
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US-UK-Australia funding to improve global gravitational wave network Washington DC (SPX) Feb 18, 2019
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is awarding Caltech and MIT $20.4 million to upgrade the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), an NSF-funded project that made history in 2015 after making the first direct detection of ripples in space and time, called gravitational waves.
The investment is part of a joint international effort in collaboration with UK Research an ... more |
Where is the Universe Hiding its Missing Mass? Huntsville AL (SPX) Feb 15, 2019
Astronomers have spent decades looking for something that sounds like it would be hard to miss: about a third of the "normal" matter in the Universe. New results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory may have helped them locate this elusive expanse of missing matter.
From independent, well-established observations, scientists have confidently calculated how much normal matter - meaning hyd ... more |
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Can we trust scientific discoveries made using machine learning? Washington DC (SPX) Feb 18, 2019
Rice University statistician Genevera Allen says scientists must keep questioning the accuracy and reproducibility of scientific discoveries made by machine-learning techniques until researchers develop new computational systems that can critique themselves.
Allen, associate professor of statistics, computer science and electrical and computer engineering at Rice and of pediatrics-neurolog ... more |
China improves Long March-6 rocket for growing commercial launches Beijing (XNA) Feb 12, 2019
China announced Monday that it is developing the modified version of the Long March-6 rocket to add four solid boosters to increase its carrying capacity.
The improved medium-left carrier rocket will be sent into space by 2020, according to the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, which designed the rocket.
The Long ... more |
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