Spaaaaace (Part 1)

Getting a little crowded up there!

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More Boots on Moon delays: NASA stops work on SpaceX human landing system as Blue Origin lawsuit rolls on

NASA is calling a halt to work on its Human Landing System for more than two months while the legal shenanigans triggered by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin run their course.

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Some tools to aid your observation:

https://stellarium-web.org/

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New Evidence Shows That Gus Grissom Did Not Accidentally Sink His Own Spacecraft 60 Years Ago

 

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That panoramic photo is A-MAZING. The sky and the mountains…it looks like earth.

I’m truly blown away by the resolution of the photos taken by the Mars Curiosity Rover.

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Solar System’s fastest-known asteroid spotted, flies closer to the Sun than Mercury

Astronomers have discovered the fastest asteroid orbiting the Sun yet, a one-kilometre-wide space rock that completes a lap of our star every 113 Earth days.

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Small satellite launcher Rocket Lab has been tapped to provide a pair of Photon spacecraft for a mission to Mars in 2024.

The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission (yes, we suspect that there are elements within NASA just as keen on backronyms as we in Vulture Central) is to study Mars’s magnetosphere as well as supporting crewed missions in the future through improved storm prediction.

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China’s National Space Administration has announced that the Zhurong Mars rover has ticked off everything on its to-do list, and is still ticking over, so has been assigned an extended mission.

Zhurong left Earth in June 2020 atop a Long March V rocket, and on May 15th 2021 landed on Mars. That feat made China the third nation to land a working robot on the red planet, but as the Soviet Union’s only successful landing – Mars 3 in 1971 – failed less than two minutes after landing and only sent back one featureless image, China is generally held to have been second to the USA in the rover-landing caper.

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Judge dismisses objections to spaceport in Scotland from billionaire who also wants to build spaceport in Scotland

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Drop the mic.

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Looks like they were right about Pluto…

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They want to find a replacement.

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Damn I love Chas Addams.

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Pluto was demoted to minor planet status before its closeup.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18572

Pluto’s geology is unlike any other
First published findings from NASA’s New Horizons mission lay out the dwarf planet’s wildly varying terrain.

You may argue that under the astronomical definition, none of this geological activity matters. But to a planetologist, the fact that a body clears its orbit is trivial.

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