AlphaRocketry

  The campaign to bring pristine Martian samples to Earth will now include two mini helicopters. Artist's illustration of the vehicles that will participate in the Mars sample return campaign organized by NASA and the European Space Agency.   (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) NASA officials involved with the Mars sample return (MSR) effort announced yesterday (July 27) that they plan to redesign the mission, abandoning a previous concept that called for a European Space Agency (ESA) "fetch rover" that would touch down on its own lander. NASA's Perseverance rover, expected to still be active when a NASA MSR lander touches down in 2031, will now be tasked with bringing the samples it is collecting and caching to a Mars ascent vehicle. Failing that, however, two helicopters much like Ingenuity, which landed with Perseverance last year, will be backup options to pick up the caches themselves. The helicopters will be similar to Ingenuity in terms of size and ma...

A fresh image based on brand-new deep-space data appears to show a wormhole spinning before our very eyes. The appropriately named "Phantom Galaxy" glows eerily in a new image by Judy Schmidt based on James Webb Space Telescope data collected nearly a million miles away from our planet using the observatory's mid-infrared instrument (MIRI). "I've been doing this for 10 years now, and [Webb] data is new, different, and exciting," Schmidt told Space.com. "Of course I'm going to make something with it." The image highlights the dust lanes in the galaxy, which is more properly known as NGC 628 or Messier 74. Dubbed the "perfect spiral" by some astronomers because the galaxy is so symmetrical, the Phantom Galaxy is scientifically interesting because of the intermediate-mass black hole scientists believe is embedded at its heart. The image highlights the dust lanes in the galaxy, which is more properly known as NGC 628 or Messie...

NASA announced Thursday (July 21) it will task a team led by Draper to carry a suite of science and technology payloads to Schrödinger Crater(opens in new tab), an impact basin on the moon's far side. Touchdown of the Draper SERIES-2 lander is scheduled for 2025. The $73 million Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract, if successfully executed, will represent the first time NASA science has touched down on the far side of the moon. (This is the eighth CLPS contract announced so far and also, the first CLPS mission to target the far side.) An illustration of Draper’s SERIES-2 lunar lander, scheduled to send science and technology payloads to the moon for NASA in 2025.   (Image credit: Draper) Only one country has successfully completed a mission on the moon's far side, and relatively recently: China's Chang'e k4 lander carrying the Yutu 2 rover arrived in Von Kármán Crater on Jan. 2, 2019. Complexities in landing on the far side of...

Space tech startup Agnikul Cosmos today inaugurated India's first-ever facility to manufacture 3D-printed rocket engines in Chennai. Named Rocket Factory 1, it was unveiled by Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran and Isro chairman S Somanath in the presence of Pawan Goenka, the chairman of IN-SPACe (Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre). The 10,000-square-foot facility is located at IIT-Madras Research Park. It will have a 400mm x 400mm x 400mm metal 3D-printer from  EOS that will enable end-to-end manufacturing of a rocket engine under one roof. The manufacturing facility has a capacity to make two rocket engines per week and thereby one launch vehicle every month, Agnikul co-founder Srinath Ravichandran told TOI. "This s a milestone for us as we go from R&D phase into core manufacturing with the opening of this facility, and begin productionizing the launch vehicle engine making. We have a lot of inbound interest [for launches] from global quarters...

  There is a layer of Earth's atmosphere that scientists know very little about. Dubbed the "ignorosphere," this layer at the edge of space plays a huge role in determining the intensity of space weather events.  A new space mission is in the works that will attempt to shed more light on the processes that take place there, but it won't be ready before the current solar cycle ends.  When bursts of charged particles from the sun that form the solar wind hit Earth, strange things happen in the planet's gaseous coat. Those heavy particles (protons, electrons and heavy ions) collide with atoms in the upper atmosphere, energizing them, Juha Pekka Luntama, the head of space weather at the European Space Agency (ESA), told. Most of this energy exchange happens in the thermosphere, the second-highest layer of Earth's atmosphere that extends between altitudes of 60 miles to 360 miles (100 to 600 kilometers). The excess energy warms up ...

NASA's Artemis 1 moon mission completed a crucial preflight milestone today (June 20), wrapping up a two-day set of tests known as a wet dress rehearsal.  Those tests included fueling up Artemis 1's huge Space Lakunch System (SLS) rocket and performing a simulated countdown that took the vehicle and NASA's Orion capsule through most of the progressions they would endure on launch day before engine ignition. The simulated countdown reached its conclusion at 7:37 p.m. EDT (2337 GMT), bringing an end to the wet dress. Not everything went perfectly smoothly. The Artemis 1 team noticed a hydrogen leak during fueling today, and they intentionally "masked" data associated with the issue to let the countdown continue. (During an actual launch countdown, such data would have raised red flags, NASA officials said.) This change meant the countdown was halted at T-29 seconds before "liftoff," instead of T-9 seconds as originally planned. But that hiccup didn...

The Indian space agency is literally growing new wings as it gets ready to test a scaled down version of what can easily be described as the `swadeshi Space Shuttle'. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) calls it the `Reusable Launch Vehicle' or RLV. If all goes to plan very soon it will be seen flying over the Science City in Challakere, Karnataka, where the first landing experiment is being planned. S Somanath, Chairman, ISRO says "We are working silently on reusable rocket technology, with a very low budget, low cost and low investment." In the past USA and Russia have flown full-fledged winged space vehicles. Russia/USSR flew its vehicle called `Buran' only once in 1988 and the program was then shelved. USA made 135 flights of the Space Shuttle and in 2011 it was retired. Since then in a new burst of energy, USA, China and India are the only countries having an active program of re-useable rocket development. If all goes as per plan India's full...