NASA’s rover must plow through Mars’ atmosphere at supersonic speeds, deploy a parachute to slow itself, then fly to safety with a jetpack.
Category: space – Page 682
Next stop Mars: Three spacecraft arriving at Red Planet from tomorrow
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The UAE’s orbiter reaches Mars on Tuesday, followed less than 24 hours later by China’s orbiter-rover combo. NASA’s Perseverance rover is due to land on February 18.
Study of Supergiant Star Betelgeuse Unveils the Cause of Its Pulsations – Not at All Close to Exploding
Recalibrated Betelgeuse’s mass, radius, and distance. Betelgeuse is normally one of the brightest, most recognizable stars of the winter sky, marking the left shoulder of the constellation Orion. But lately, it has been behaving strangely: an unprecedentedly large drop in its brightness has been observed in early 2020 (Figure 1), which has prompted speculation that Betelgeuse may be about to explode.
DARPA to survey private sector capabilities to build factories on the moon
WASHINGTON — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants to hear from the space industry about their capabilities to manufacture large structures on the moon.
This is a new project that DARPA announced Feb. 5 called “Novel Orbital and Moon Manufacturing, Materials and Mass-efficient Design.”
DARPA Opens Door to Producing “Unimaginable” Designs for DoD
DARPA’s TRAnsformative DESign (TRADES) program, which began in 2017, set out to develop foundational design tools needed to explore the vast space opened by new materials and additive manufacturing processes commonly called 3D printing. The program recently concluded having successfully developed new mathematics and computational techniques, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, that will allow future designers to create previously unimaginable shapes and structures of interest to defense and commercial manufacturing.
Apollo 14: ‘A Wild Place Up Here’
50 years ago today, Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell landed on the Moon for a 33-hour stay full of science, as fellow crew member Stuart Roosa conducted observations from lunar orbit. Revisit this # Apollo50th anniversary: youtu.be/l7MMTm1-DAA
Mars Missions From China and UAE Are Set to Go Into Orbit – Here’s What You Need to Know
How times have changed since the Apollo era. Within the space of a few days, two space missions from China and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), respectively, are set to reach Mars. The UAE’s Hope mission will go into orbit around Mars on February 9. The next day, the Chinese Tianwen-1 mission – an orbiter and lander — will swing into orbit, with a predicted landing date sometime in May.
It is a very big moment for both countries. Hope is the first interplanetary mission by an Arab nation ever. And if China succeeds, it will be the first country ever to visit and land on Mars on its first try. The odds are stacked against them with nearly 50% of all Mars missions failing. China already lost a Mars orbiter mission (Yinghuo-1) back in 2011.
