NASA announces new lander contracts for Moon Base Phase One
MILAN — The European Space Agency will rely on external lunar topographic data during the design phase of its Argonaut lunar lander, and possibly for its first mission, while working toward developing its own lunar mapping capability for later missions. Argonaut, first proposed at ESA’s Ministerial Council in Paris in 2022 and confirmed at the…
United Launch Alliance (ULA) will launch another batch of Amazon’s internet satellites to orbit early Thursday morning (July 2), and you can watch it live. An Atlas V rocket carrying 29 Amazon Leo spacecraft is scheduled to lift off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday, during a 29-minute window that opens at…
Flight testing is a team sport. For nearly 80 years, teams at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, have used flight testing to push the limits of aerodynamics and advance aviation. Earlier this year, NASA’s Crossflow Attenuated Natural Laminar Flow (CATNLF) initiative tested a wing concept that would maximize the smooth flow of…
The Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) draws in over 2,000 attendees for five days of discussions on the latest results from the fleet of spacecraft exploring the Solar System. Credit: Lunar and Planetary Institute. Scientific conferences play an undervalued, yet essential, role in the exploration of the Solar System. Since the end of the Apollo…
Even relatively small asteroids can have surprisingly eventful histories. NASA’s Lucy spacecraft recently revealed that asteroid Donaldjohanson is a wobbling, peanut-shaped object that has been shaped by collisions, sunlight, and even a brief encounter with liquid water long ago. The asteroid formed about 155 million years ago when fragments from a violent collision gradually came…
This article is for students grades 5-8. Mass distribution affects everything from galaxy shapes to aircraft design to planetary rotation. It’s used to map stars in our universe, figure out what planets are made of, and even to determine how luggage is loaded onto an airplane. Mass distribution can be a tricky thing to understand….