• Space Missions: Good News for an Asteroid Sample, But Bad News for a Lunar Rover

    First, let discuss the good news. The capsule carrying the sample material from the asteroid Bennu successfully landed in the Utah desert earlier today, as planned. NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission was a success. The space agency has plenty to celebrate. And now for the bad news. India’s Chandrayaan-3…

  • A Day in Autonomy: The Discovery of Neptune

    On this day in 1846, astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle discovered the ice giant Neptune, the eighth and most distant planet in the solar system. Two other astronomers are credited with coming up with the mathematical calculations related to the discovery – France’s Urbain Le Verrier and England’s John Couch Adams. Here are some interesting facts about…

  • Asteroid Sample Coming to Earth This Weekend

    This weekend will should see the safe landing of a asteroid sample from far away. On Sunday, NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft will return to Earth with sample material from asteroid Bennu, which it encountered two years ago. Launched on Sept. 8, 2016, the spacecraft spent about two years…

  • Pic of the Week: Shackleton Crater

    This week’s image shows the Shackleton Crater located at the Moon’s South Pole. To create what you see above, an image from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) was combined with another image from ShadowCam, a NASA instrument on board a KARI (Korea Aerospace Research Institute) spacecraft called Danuri, Here is more information from NASA concerning…

  • Space Quote: Venezuela Aims for the Moon

    “…scientific, technological, industrial and aerospace cooperation will sooner rather than later (send) the first Venezuelan man and woman to the moon in a Chinese spacecraft.” –Statement by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in reference to an agreement with China that would train Venezuelan astronauts in China in preparation for a future Moon mission. China has previously…

  • Study Findings: Constraining Cosmological Parameters Using the Cluster Mass–Richness Relation

    If you don’t understand the research title, you are not alone. The abstract is even worse: The cluster mass–richness relation (MRR) is an observationally efficient and potentially powerful cosmological tool for constraining the matter density Ωm and the amplitude of fluctuations σ8 using the cluster abundance technique. We derive the MRR relation using GalWCat19, a publicly available galaxy cluster…

  • Space Stories: New Lunar Water Estimates, Coronal Mass Ejection, and Oxygen on Mars

    Here are some recent stories of interest. —Southwest Research Institute: “New Findings Suggest Moon May Have Less Water Than Previously Thought“ A team recently calculated that most of the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) are at most around 3.4 billion years old and can contain relatively young deposits of water ice. Water resources are considered key…

  • Audit Results: SLS Program is Unaffordable

    The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently completed a review of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), which is the cornerstone of the Artemis program. GAO assessed the extent to which (1) NASA has established plans to measure the SLS program costs post-Artemis I, and (2) the program has made progress with its plans to reduce projected…

  • Where is This? September 16, 2023 Quiz

    Take a look at the image above. Can you determine where this image originated? Take a guess and then check your answer by going to the “Where is This? The Answer Sheet” page.

  • Another Crew Heads for the ISS

    Earlier today, US astronaut astronaut Loral O’Hara as well as Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub departed from Kazakhstan on a Soyuz rocket that will take them to the International Space Station (ISS). The space station will be crowded again until the three relieved crew members, including US astronaut Frank Rubio, can return to…