A satellite that was part of a joint effort between the China and Brazil failed to enter orbit earlier this week. The satellite launched Monday in northern China, but it failed to enter the proper orbit. The satellite was going to be used to monitor deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. The liftoff for the satellite […]
NASA has successfully tested its Morpheus lander prototype. It launched today over a flame trench at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center’s Shuttle Landing Facility, climbed 50 feet into the air, hovered for 15 seconds, flew 23 feet and landed on the designated pad. Once put into service, the Morpheus model will be used to deliver cargo […]
We all have to crawl before we can walk, and NASA’s Morpheus lander is no different—well, except for the fact that "crawl," in this case, actually means burst into a pile of flames. But all that’s in the past, and NASA’s taken to their YouTube and Instagram accounts to show off the absolutely stunning success of the new Morpheus prototype’s very first (successful) free flight.
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In November 2014, after traveling 10 years and hundreds of millions of miles, a European spacecraft will touch down on a two-and-a-half-mile-wide ball of ice and dust as it hurtles through space towards the sun. And if all goes according to plan, this unprecedented feat could finally give us what we need to understand the origins of life on Earth. It’s just the "according to plan" that’s the tricky part.
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Robots might not be at a Terminator level of sophistication, but the technology is growing rapidly, and NASA has revealed what it calls “another milestone” in humanoid space robotics: legs for the Robonaut 2, more commonly called R2. The agency’s engineers are presently working on the climbing legs, which will give the robot a new […]
Blue Origin, the private space flight start-up funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has successfully tested off-the-shelf hydrogen rockets ahead of 2018 unmanned missions starting, though the company says it expects to switch eventually to rockets of its own design. The company, which will present its engine work to NASA in May 2014 as part […]
The possibility that Mars was once home to all kinds of life is looking better and better with each new Curiosity discovery. According to newly published research, the rover has stumbled across a site in the Gale Crater that scientists believe might have once been a lake full of life.
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This week the NASA folks behind the Curiosity Mars rover mission have published a set of papers which suggest that they’re closer than ever to finding habitable environments on the planet. These findings are pre-emptive in finding actual organic materials, and show how life could maybe, possibly have existed on Mars at one time. Basically […]
As nations around the world launch more and more satellites into geosynchronous orbit above the Earth, the danger of them accidentally colliding and creating a Gravity-esque cascade of destruction increases exponentially. To keep tabs on everything zooming around 22,000 miles above the surface, DARPA’s developed this keen-eyed space surveillance telescope.
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The International Space Station has been in orbit for over a decade above the Earth. The ISS is a multinational project with astronauts living and working in space for months at a time. The US-made ISS node called Unity and the Russian Zarya module opened for the first time on December 10, 1998. That means […]
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