On the morning of 17 June, China launched the first astronauts to its Tianhe space station module, with a Long March 2F rocket sending the crewed Shenzhou-12 spacecraft into orbit. Overlooked from this major success, however, was that downrange from its Gobi Desert launch site, empty rocket stages fell to ground. As getting to orbit […]
How do you pack food for a trip to Mars? This is not a trick question. As astronauts and space scientists gear up for longer missions and spaceflights—just the journey to and from Mars takes about six months—they will need an adequate supply of food, for which they need refrigeration. The problems: Earthly refrigerators don’t […]
The era of just tossing rockets willy nilly into space and then littering orbit, the ocean, and the occasional backyard with their remains may finally be drawing to a close. This week, Relativity Space is announcing the Terran R, a 65 meter tall entirely 3D-printed two stage launch vehicle capable of delivering 20,000 kg into […]
Look, I know that the Perseverance rover has brought some flashy stuff to Mars. It’s got lasers, it’s got a big robot arm, it’s got a little robot arm, and it even launched a helicopter. That’s all great, but tucked up inside of Perseverance is another instrument about the size of a car battery that […]
Ever since humans started launching rockets into space, the amount of junk flying around Earth has been growing, to the point where debris has damaged satellites or forced the space station to shift its orbit. Now researchers in Australia want to use lasers to track the wayward particles, and even shove them out of the […]
Encased inside a payload fairing atop a huge Long March 5B rocket at Wenchang spaceport sits Tianhe, the first module for China’s space station project. The Tianhe space station module launch, unofficially expected around 11 p.m. EDT on April 28 (Thursday), will end nearly three decades of preparation and kick off an intense period of 11 major […]
NASA’s Perseverance rover made its spectacular landing on Mars in February, but there’s another spacecraft still awaiting its chance at setting down on the Red Planet. Tianwen-1, China’s first interplanetary expedition, successfully and spectacularly entered Mars orbit February 10. Consisting of both an orbiter and rover, the spacecraft has been circling Mars, preparing for its own […]
When NASA first sent humans to the moon, astronauts often made risky blind landings on the lunar surface because of billowing dust clouds churned up during their descent. Astronauts could avoid repeating those harrowing experiences during future missions to the moon with the help of a 3D-printed lunar landing pad designed by a NASA-backed student team. The landing pad developed by students from […]
NASA’s spacecraft have to function with exquisite precision in extraordinarily harsh environments. An essential part of making that happen is rigorous quality assurance on the systems that go into these spacecraft. Jeanette Plante, a quality-engineering technical fellow in NASA’s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA), is one of the people charged with ensuring that […]
They used to call it “Seven Minutes of Terror”—a NASA probe would slice into the atmosphere of Mars at more than 20,000 kilometers per hour; slow itself with a heat shield, parachute, and rocket engines; and somehow land intact on the surface, just six or seven minutes later, while its makers waited helplessly on Earth. The computer-animated landing […]