Archive for the 'Space' Category
China Landed Rover on Moon
December 14th, 2013Update: Chinese Rover Landed on Moon and Launched Successfully Via: CNN: China’s first lunar rover deployed successfully from the unmanned spacecraft Chang’e-3 that landed on the moon Saturday. Jade Rabbit (called Yutu in Chinese) is a six-wheeled lunar rover equipped with at least four cameras and two mechanical legs that can dig up soil samples […]
NASA Unveils ‘Valkyrie’ Robot for DARPA Competition
December 13th, 2013Via: IEEE Spectrum: Valkyrie (officially designated “R5” by NASA) is a 1.9 meter tall, 125 kilogram, 44 degree of freedom, battery-powered humanoid robot. A team from NASA’s JSC in Houston, in partnership with the University of Texas and Texas A&M and with funding from the state of Texas itself, built the robot for the DRC, […]
Darpa’s Giant Folding Spy Satellite Will Dwarf All Other Space Telescopes
December 10th, 2013Via: Wired: Spying could become much easier if a new lightweight, folding satellite concept gets off the ground. Darpa, the military’s futuristic research agency, says it has plans to “break the glass ceiling” of space telescopes by shooting a new design into orbit that’s made of plastic and unfolds into a mammoth satellite that would […]
Moon Express Unveils Commercial Lunar Lander Design
December 6th, 2013Via: NBC: A commercial space company has revealed the design of the lunar lander that it aims to send to the moon in 2015. California-based Moon Express unveiled the blueprint and first images of its MX-1 lunar lander on Thursday in Las Vegas, during the last day of the Autodesk University computer-aided design conference. In […]
Manned Fly-By Mission to Mars in 2017?
November 20th, 2013Via: Washington Post: Billionaire Dennis Tito, tired of being told that we can’t send humans to Mars just yet, on Wednesday revealed his scheme for launching two astronauts to the red planet as early as December 2017. Dubbed “Inspiration Mars,” the fly-by mission would exploit a rare alignment of Earth and Mars that minimizes the […]
Stuxnet Infected Russian Nuclear Plant, International Space Station
November 11th, 2013Via: SC Magazine: Stuxnet had ‘badly infected’ the internal network of a Russian nuclear plant after the sophisticated malware caused chaos in Iran’s uranium facilities in Natanz. The malware, widely considered to have been developed by the US Government as a means to disrupt Iran’s uranium enrichment plans, had crossed a physically separated ‘air-gapped’ network […]
A Recently Discovered Bacterium Thrives in NASA’s Spacecraft Clean Rooms
November 8th, 2013Via: JPL: A rare, recently discovered microbe that survives on very little to eat has been found in two places on Earth: spacecraft clean rooms in Florida and South America. Microbiologists often do thorough surveys of bacteria and other microbes in spacecraft clean rooms. Fewer microbes live there than in almost any other environment on […]
Scientists Estimate 4.4 Billion Earth-Like Planets in Milky Way Galaxy
November 5th, 2013Via: Bloomberg: About 4.4 billion planets are similar to Earth in size and temperature, suggesting they may be able to host life, according to a survey of the galaxy using telescopes operating in space and on the ground. The number is an estimate based on information taken from 42,000 stars similar to the Earth’s sun […]
DARPA to Start Reusable Launch Vehicle Program
September 18th, 2013Via: Space News: The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is about to start a program to develop a reusable first stage that could be used to launch medium-sized satellites for as little as $5 million each. Speaking Sept. 12 at the AIAA Space 2013 conference in San Diego, Pam Melroy, deputy director of […]
Moon Water Discovery Hints at Mystery Source Deep Underground
August 29th, 2013Via: Space.com: Evidence of water spotted on the moon’s surface by a sharp-eyed spacecraft likely originated from an unknown source deep in the lunar interior, scientists say. The find — made by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 probe — marks the first detection of such “magmatic water” from lunar orbit and confirms […]
