US achieves first Moon landing in half century with private spacecraft
Updated: 5:30pm (AEDT) Reuters A spacecraft built and flown by Texas-based company Intuitive Machines landed near the Moon’s south pole on Thursday, the first US touchdown on the lunar surface in more than half a century and the first ever achieved by the private sector. NASA, with several research instruments aboard the vehicle, hailed the […]
Essay: Cybersecurity for satellites is a growing challenge, as threats to space-based infrastructure grow
SYLVESTER KACZMAREK, chief technology officer at Imperial College London, looks at the increasingly threats to satellite security…
Know It All: Moon landings
Japan recently became the fifth country to land a craft successfully on the Moon. DAVID ADAMS looks at some facts and figures about that and previous landings…
NASA delays astronaut Moon landing to 2026 amid spacecraft ‘challenges’
Washington DC, USReuters NASA on Tuesday added more delays to its Artemis Moon program, scheduling for 2026 its first astronaut lunar landing in half a century while spacecraft from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Lockheed Martin and other contractors face development challenges. The US space agency’s first two Artemis missions involving astronauts were each pushed back nearly […]
Essay: NASA’s robotic prospectors are helping scientists understand what asteroids are made of – setting the stage for miners to follow someday
Planetary geologist VALERIE PAYRÉ looks, in an article first published on The Conversation, at how the push to find out more about asteroids could open up new mining opportunities…
Scientists surprised by source of largest quake detected on Mars
Washington DC, USReuters On 4th May, 2022, NASA’s InSight lander detected the largest quake yet recorded on Mars, one with a 4.7 magnitude – fairly modest by Earth standards but strong for our planetary neighbor. Given Mars lacks the geological process called plate tectonics that generates earthquakes on our planet, scientists suspected a meteorite impact […]
Annular solar eclipse transfixes crowds across the Americas
Campeche, Mexico Reuters Thousands of people across the Americas gazed at the heavens on Saturday to witness a rare phenomenon known as an annular solar eclipse, when the moon passes in front of the sun, momentarily producing the appearance of a “ring of fire” in the sky. “It’s one of those things you can’t miss,” […]
NASA unveils newly returned carbon-rich asteroid sample
Reuters NASA on Wednesday gave the public a first glimpse of what scientists found inside a sealed capsule that was returned to Earth last month carrying a carbon-rich soil sample scooped from an asteroid’s surface, including water-bearing clay minerals. A small quantity of the material collected by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft three years ago from the […]
NASA’s first asteroid sample parachutes into Utah desert
Reuters A NASA space capsule carrying the largest soil sample ever scooped up from the surface of an asteroid streaked through Earth’s atmosphere on Sunday and parachuted into the Utah desert, delivering the celestial specimen to scientists. The gumdrop-shaped capsule, released from the robotic spacecraft OSIRIS-REx as the mothership passed within 107,826 kilometres of Earth […]
NASA names chief of UFO research while in Mexico, ‘alien bodies’ presentation panned as “stunt”
Washington DC, US Reuters NASA on Thursday said it has named a new director of research into what the government calls “unidentified anomalous phenomenon,” or UAP, while the US space agency’s chief said an expert panel that urged deeper fact-finding on the matter found no evidence of an extraterrestrial origin for these objects. Administrator Bill […]