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The team controlling NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has received telemetry (detailed spacecraft data) down from the spacecraft and has also been able to send commands up to the spacecraft, according to Matt Wallace, the mission’s deputy project manager. The team, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, has confirmed that the spacecraft is healthy and on its way to Mars.

Wallace provided a more detailed update on two issues during launch operations:

First, the proximity of the spacecraft to Earth immediately after launch was saturating the ground station receivers of NASA’s Deep Space Network. This is a known issue that we have encountered on other planetary missions, including during the launch of NASA’s Curiosity rover in 2011. The Perseverance team worked through prepared mitigation strategies that included detuning the receivers and pointing the antennas slightly off-target from the spacecraft to bring the signal within an acceptable range. We are now in lock on telemetry after taking these actions.

Mathematicians typically appreciate either generic or exceptional beauty in their work, but one type is more useful in describing the universe.

At the heart of every white dwarf star—the dense stellar object that remains after a star has burned away its fuel reserve of gases as it nears the end of its life cycle—lies a quantum conundrum: as white dwarfs add mass, they shrink in size, until they become so small and tightly compacted that they cannot sustain themselves, collapsing into a neutron star.

This puzzling relationship between a white dwarf’s mass and size, called the mass-radius relation, was first theorized by Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in the 1930s. Now, a team of Johns Hopkins astrophysicists has developed a method to observe the phenomenon itself using astronomical data collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and a recent dataset released by the Gaia Space Observatory. The combined datasets provided more than 3,000 white dwarfs for the team to study.

A report of their findings, led by Hopkins senior Vedant Chandra, is now in press in Astrophysical Journal and available online on arXiv.

The next Mars rover mission, Perseverance, is on its way to the Red Planet to look for signs of ancient life and collect samples for return to Earth.

United Launch Alliance teams have started the countdown for launch of an Atlas 5 rocket Thursday from pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station with NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover. The two-hour launch window opens at 7:50 a.m. EDT (1150 GMT).

LIVE COVERAGE: https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/07/28/atlas-5-av-088-mission-status-center/

Astronomers have discovered a mysterious stream of ancient stars at the distant edges of the galaxy: a strange stellar breed so unlike any we’ve seen before, they may very well be the last of their kind.

This unusual collection of stars – called the ‘Phoenix stream’, after the Phoenix constellation in which they are visible – is what’s known as a stellar stream: an elongated chain of stars that used to exist in a spherical form, known as a globular cluster.

Continue reading “Astronomers Find Stream of Early Universe Stars, Torn Apart” »

Read more about the aeronautical innovators at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory & NASA Ames Research Center who worked together to prepare for NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover’s #CountdownToMars: https://go.nasa.gov/2CQLLeA

Photo: courtesy of china national space administration

Tianwen-1, China’s first Mars probe, has smoothly flown more than 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth, leaving Earth’s gravitational field, and entering planned interplanetary orbit, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said on Tuesday.

According to a press release the CNSA provided to the Global Times on Tuesday, the spacecraft is operating properly. Flight control and data communication is underway in an orderly and clear fashion.

Use this interactive launch guest packet to learn more about the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover launch and download all the printable resources available for launch.