The unanticipated clumpy nature of the Martian soil at Elysium Planitia, the equatorial landing site, offers little friction for digging meaning a probe cannot be buried.
Flying autonomously more than 208 million mi. from Earth, NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft made brief successful contact with the boulder-strewn surface of the asteroid Bennu, according to data from the probe received by the mission operations and science teams on Oct. 20.
Introduced in April, the “Honey, I shrunk the NASA payload” global crowdsourcing competition is moving on to “Honey, I Built the NASA Payload, The Sequel.”
The experimental aircraft would be one of a suite of demonstration projects to mature key technologies for a next-generation subsonic commercial transport by the mid-2020s.
Fourteen U.S. companies are to receive an estimated $370 million in NASA “Tipping Point” agreements intended to advance technologies needed to achieve a sustained human presence on the Moon during the 2020s and support the human exploration of Mars thereafter.
The first countries to sign bilateral Artemis Accords agreements with the U.S. are Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.
NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have selected a new technology for planetary sample collection and return for future missions to the Moon and Martian moon Phobos.
As NASA continues feasibility studies into nuclear propulsion for deep space missions, DARPA has awarded an initial contract to help pave the way toward possible orbital tests of a nuclear-powered rocket for U.S. military use in and around cislunar space.
The scrub of Northrop Grumman’s 14th NASA contracted resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) was logged at 2 min. 40 sec. prior to a planned liftoff on Oct. 1 at 9:43 p.m., EDT.
The rate of the leak has "slightly increased, so the teams are working a plan to isolate identify, and potentially repair the source,” NASA says, stressing that it poses "no immediate danger to the crew or the space station.”
Resources like the vast quantities of water ice believed to reside within shadowed craters at the Moon’s south and north poles promise to reduce the costs of initial exploration substantially.
The combined 40-ft.-plus structure includes the Blue Origin lander and the Lockheed Martin ascent module that is expected to house NASA’s Artemis astronaut crews during their initial, weeklong lunar sorties.
The board will assess the joint effort with the European Space Agency to retrieve and return to Earth samples of rock cores drilled and preserved by the Perseverance Mars 2020 rover.
A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral AFS on July 30, sending the $2.4-billion NASA Perseverance rover on its way to Mars to search for signs of past life and cache promising rock and soil samples for a future return to Earth.
The commercial human lander system is a critical part of the Trump administration’s directive that NASA accelerate its return to the surface of the Moon with human explorers from 2028 to 2024.
