Some guy.
On Sunday, September 24, 2023, a little capsule touched down in the Utah desert. It is the sample return mission from OSIRIS-REx, a space probe that touched down on asteroid 101955 Bennu in October of 2020, and collected a sample to return to Earth. I vaguely remember the touchdown on the asteroid, one of humanity’s […]
Checking in with the Perseverence rover, the news this week is the Martian donut, or rather a donut-shaped rock that the SuperCam Remote Micro-Imager snapped a photo of. Is it a meteorite fragment? That’s one theory, put forward by SETI, but when contacted by CNN, Jim Rice, a scientist in at Arizona State University, does […]
I swear I didn’t intend this to be a space news blog but I have to share this historic news, the crew of the first crewed mission to the moon in my lifetime. Meet the astronauts! Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen will make a trip to the moon and back, although […]
One of the mission objectives of the Perseverance Mars rover is to retrieve samples from Martian rocks and soil and keep them until a future mission retrieves them. The retrieval missions are still at the early proposal stages, but Perseverance has already collected its samples. Some are stored in the robot’s body. and the rest […]
NASA’s Orion spacecraft, which launched on the Artemis I mission on November 16th last month, made a successful return to Earth after doing two lunar flybys. It splashed down yesterday at 9:40 a.m. PST off the coast of California, 50 years to the day of the Apollo 17 landing, humankind’s last trip to the moon. Congrats […]
Earlier today, we saw the successful launch of the uncrewed Artemis I mission, the first launch in the Artemis missions that will bring humanity back to the moon again. Despite the numerous setbacks and delays, the rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft blasted off without incident from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 01:47:44 Eastern Time. […]
Two weeks ago, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) hit the tiny asteroid Dimorphos, with the goal of changing its orbital trajectory to see if we can indeed use a rocket to deflect asteroids. NASA’s press release yesterday confirms that they indeed managed to do this, after their team analyzed the data they’ve obtained thus […]
Ten months ago, NASA launched a rocket into space to rendezvous with Dimorphos, a tiny asteroid 11 million kilometers away. It was part of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, a planetary defense test to see if we could deflect any incoming asteroids that might collide with Earth. On September 26, 2022, at 7:14 […]
Today NASA released a set of amazing images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, and I’ve saved them here for posterity. The first is a cluster of galaxies, called SMACS 0723. The light from these galaxies have taken billions and billions of years to reach us, and this is a snapshot from the earliest […]
Our little Linux-copter that could, Ingenuity, is still operational and flying around on Mars. On its 26th flight on April 19, 2022, it took a photo of the backshell and parachute that helped Perseverance land back in February.