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Astros get to play with VR while Boeing’s Starliner stays on the ground
Pittsburgh-based space robot specialist Astrobotic has been picked by NASA to drop a rover onto the surface of the Moon.
The $199.5m contract is the second awarded to the company under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program and will see the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) deposited on the south pole of the Moon in 2023.
VIPER is all about hunting for water ice on the Moon and the golf-cart sized robot, armed with four science instruments including a one-metre drill, will collect approximately 100 days’ worth of data to build a lunar water resource map.
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Out on a tangent: Almost two decades into its 5-year mission, INTEGRAL still delivers the gamma ray goods
Space Extenders In this penultimate edition of The Register 's series looking at how ESA keeps its fleet of spacecraft ticking over, years or even decades after their expiry dates, we turn to INTEGRAL.
Launched on 17 October 2002, atop a Proton from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, ESA’s International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) is a mission aimed at helping crack some of the biggest mysteries in astronomy.
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58 Starlinks scattered across sky, Rocket Lab aims for back-to-back launches, and Skyrora hops 6km above Shetland
The company [Rocket Lab] is aiming to demonstrate a rapid turnaround time with another launch from the same facility within the next three weeks. The mission, dubbed “Pics Or It Didn’t Happen”, is targeting a launch no earlier than 3 July 2020 from Pad A and will deploy seven satellites to a 500km orbit.
Named for the imaging nature of the payload, the primary craft on board is Canon Electronics’ CE-SAT-IB, a microsatellite aimed at showing off the company’s high-resolution and wide-angle imaging tech ahead of possible mass production.
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Looking for a home off-world? Take your pick: Astroboffins estimate there are nearly 6bn Earth-likes in the Milky Way
There may be more than five billion Earth-like planets that are rocky, potentially habitable and orbit main-sequence stars like our Sun scattered across the Milky Way, according to the latest estimates.
The frustrating bit is that we’ll never get there to take a closer look.
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NASA scientists mull sending a spacecraft on a 13-year mission to visit Neptune’s ‘bizarre’ moon, Triton
NASA is considering sending a spacecraft to fly by Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, in a bid to study its random spurts of ice and strange atmosphere filled with charged particles.
The proposed mission named Trident, after the spear carried by Neptune, the Roman god of the sea, is currently undergoing review as a potential candidate in NASA’s Discovery Program. If Trident is selected, the space agency hopes to send out a spacecraft to Triton in 2025.
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NASA to send Perseverance, a new trundle bot, and Ingenuity, the first interplanetary helicopter, to sniff out life on Mars in July
NASA is gearing up to launch its Perseverance rover and Ingenuity drone helicopter to hunt for signs of microbial life on Mars next month.
The Mars 2020 mission is the first step towards the space agency’s goal of obtaining samples of rock and soil and preparing them for return back to Earth.
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Check out the night sky in all its X-ray glory: Everything from hot gases to supernovas and massive black holes
Astronomers have mapped the hot gas floating in our Milky Way for the first time – and identified more than a million X-ray-emitting objects in the universe – by piecing together images snapped by the eROSITA telescope.
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“Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.” - Carl Sagan
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With intelligent life in scant supply on Earth, boffins search for technosignatures of civilizations in the galaxy
Astronomers are on the hunt for signs of alien civilizations in space by searching for things like extraterrestrial solar panels or planetary atmospheres spewing pollutants.
The team, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the University of Rochester in the US, believe these so-called “technosignatures” are evidence of intelligence in other places than Earth. If advanced life forms exist they’ll be using electronics, the thinking goes, and that means emissions that could be detected.
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Virgin Galactic inks deal with NASA to train astro-tourists looking to buy a seat to the International Space Station
Virgin Galactic, the company that has yet to send a paying passenger on a sub-orbital lob, let alone trouble anything more challenging, has opened the door to “Private Orbital Spaceflight”.
Not that its SpaceShipTwo, which has notched up a pair of sub-orbital flights, will be going anywhere near orbit. The deal is strictly for training and procurement, a disappointment for fans and investors alike hoping for something a bit more dramatic in the wake of SpaceX sending astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).
No longer a planet and left out in the cold, Pluto, it turns out, may have had hot beginnings
Pluto, the icy dwarf planet hanging out in the Kuiper Belt, may well have been hot when it formed and could have supported a subsurface liquid ocean early in its development.
ETA:
China has signalled it anticipates further collaboration with Pakistan around Beidou, the middle kingdom’s satellite navigation constellation.
“Pollution Technosignature”
Great Band Name, sad assumption that aliens will be as dumb as us.
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US starts sniffing around UK spaceports – though none capable of vertical launches actually exist right now
Wired: China’s Beidou satnav system, 35th bird in orbit. Tired: America’s GPS. Expired: Britain’s dreams of its own
The delayed launch of China’s 35th and final third-gen Beidou satellite today gives the Middle Kingdom a completed advanced global positioning network.
The so-called BDS is now the fourth global satnav system up in space; the others being the United States’ GPS, the somewhat incomplete Russian GLONASS network, and Europe’s much-delayed Galileo effort.
