Their simulated mission to Mars tested “how future astronauts may react to isolation and confinement during deep-space journeys,” according to NASA. The crew of four went through 18 health studies during their stint at a 650-square-foot habitat at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Outside of each other’s company, the crew kept four pet triops shrimp: Buzz, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore.
The contract granted by NASA — worth up to $843 million — will see SpaceX develop a vehicle to safely deorbit the space station “in a controlled manner after the end of its operational life in 2030.”
NASA says the station will remain in use until then, and expects both the station and deorbit vehicle to break apart upon re-entry to avoid risk to populated areas.
The GOES-U satellite launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday.
It’s one of four National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites equipped with powerful new tools to monitor weather in space and on Earth. They’ll provide advanced imagery to inform forecasts, map lightning activity in real time, and detect solar flares.
Closing a loop that began with this 2016 launch, NASA is about to send the fourth and final satellite in the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) – R Series into space as part of a system for much better real-time weather forecasting.
NASA has pushed back the capsule’s return to Earth from the ISS to examine helium leaks and a valve issue. The Starliner ran into multiple delays before finally launching earlier this month.
The agency is targeting a return “no earlier than” June 22nd, and plans to hold a teleconference at 12PM ET on June 18th to talk over details of the delayed departure.
NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick, who’s been on the International Space Station since March, seems to enjoy sharing his camera settings. For the picture of the Boeing Starliner below, he followed up:
For the photography nerds: 1 second exposure, f 1.4, ISO 2000, 24 mm lens.
It includes images of cloud vortices (white), an aurora (pink), a solar flare (light blue), Jupiter’s North Temperate Belt (brown), Jupiter’s moon Io (yellow), Mars (orange), the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (black), a red sprite cluster (red), an algal bloom (green), Neptune (blue), and crab nebula (purple).
Happy Pride!
NASA, Boeing, and the United Launch Alliance had hoped for a shorter delay, but NASA says the ULA is taking more time to troubleshoot an issue with ground launch systems that halted the mission less than four minutes from liftoff.
The next launch window begins on June 5th.
With just 3 minutes and 50 seconds to go, one of three redundant ground computers involved in the launch was slow to respond, triggering a hold and the call to abort liftoff, United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno said during a press conference today.
The next target for launch is 12:03PM ET tomorrow.
We’ve been waiting for the Quesst X-59 and the return of supersonic air travel for years now, and NASA’s latest update says things are moving along:
A Flight Readiness Review board composed of independent experts from across NASA has completed a study of the X-59 project team’s approach to safety for the public and staff during ground and flight testing.
The Crew Flight Test was scrubbed Monday night just as the astronauts settled into position, but now NASA says the launch will be pushed back by a couple of weeks, at least.
NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test now is targeted to launch no earlier than 6:16 p.m. EDT Friday, May 17, to the International Space Station. Following a thorough data review completed on Tuesday, ULA (United Launch Alliance) decided to replace a pressure regulation valve on the liquid oxygen tank on the Atlas V rocket’s Centaur upper stage.
The China National Space Administration released a video showing its concept for a future lunar base, which it says it will have set up by 2045, writes Space.
The China Global Television Network appears to have blurred out the Shuttle in the video on YouTube.
Scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope recently produced the “sharpest infrared images to date” of the Horsehead Nebula, according to the European Space Agency.
As BBC Science Focus explains, images like this are made up of multiple composites taken at different infrared wavelengths, then shifted to the visible spectrum and combined.
NASA has finally found a fix after the 46-year-old space probe stopped sending readable data to Earth in November. Voyager 1 can only send information about its health and status for now, but NASA says it’s working to get it back to transmitting scientific data, too.
The spacecraft is being readied to carry astronauts Barry Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station, with liftoff from Cape Canaveral scheduled for no earlier than 10:34PM ET.
The crew is expected to spend about a week at the orbiting laboratory before their capsule makes an airbag and parachute-assisted landing in the southwestern United States.
After making its final flight in January, NASA’s Mars helicopter has transmitted its last message to Earth and will now serve as a stationary testbed for collecting up to 20 years’ worth of data. Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity’s project manager, gave it this moving farewell:
“Whenever humanity revisits Valinor Hills — either with a rover, a new aircraft, or future astronauts — Ingenuity will be waiting with her last gift of data, a final testament to the reason we dare mighty things. Thank you, Ingenuity, for inspiring a small group of people to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds at the frontiers of space.”
Everything you need to know about the upcoming solar eclipse
What you need to know to safely view the total solar eclipse on April 8th.
The mission will launch “hopefully the first of May,” according to Commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore, who was joined by fellow astronaut Suni Williams during a NASA press conference yesterday.
NASA postponed the first crewed Starliner flight test last summer over safety concerns. When the mission launches, Wilmore and Williams will dock with the International Space Station for up to two weeks before returning to Earth.
BurstCube is aboard SpaceX’s Dragon resupply spacecraft, which launched on the Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral on Thursday. After it arrives and is unpacked, the shoebox-sized CubeSat will be released into orbit, where it will locate and study gamma-ray bursts linked to the gravitational waves that were first detected in 2016.
You can see NASA’s simulation of the BurstCube below.
NASA’s Crew-8 mission, comprised of US astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, is set to fly to the International Space Station, where they’ll serve a six month stint as flight engineers.
Weather halted yesterday’s planned takeoff from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA writes on Crew-8’s mission blog that after launch, video coverage will stop until about 1AM ET on March 5th.
Varda Space Industries captured its W-1 capsule’s descent from low-earth orbit for the rest of us to watch in 4K on YouTube. Ars Technica has a thorough write-up about the mission.
Varda’s clip isn’t quite as dramatic as the 25-minute Artemis I reentry video you can download from NASA, but the clarity makes it a sight to behold.
During a NASA press conference Friday evening, Intuitive Machines co-founder and CEO Steve Altemus showed the attitude of its lunar lander, the first from the US to reach the Moon’s surface in over 50 years.
As Swapna Krishna explains, they believe it tipped over after catching a foot on the surface while landing, but fortunately, it’s still getting sunlight to power the battery. Plans for the coming days include deploying a CubeSat it’s carrying called EagleCam to take photos from the surface.
After a stressful few minutes of waiting beyond the estimated 6:24PM ET touchdown, the mission director said, “...we can confirm, without a doubt, our equipment is on the surface of the Moon, and we are transmitting.”
NASA engineers told Space that “effectively, the call between the spacecraft and the Earth was still connected” after its transmissions stopped making sense last year, “but Voyager’s ‘voice’ was replaced with a monotonous dial tone.”
The scientists are reportedly holding out hope they can fix it, but if they aren’t able to, that would leave Voyager 2 as humanity’s only still-communicating spacecraft in interstellar space.
After the sample was returned last year and NASA scientists went through some tribulation to break into the canister containing it, they say they gathered 121.6 grams of asteroid bits from Bennu.
NASA had hoped to gather at least 60 grams of material from the asteroid when its OSIRIS-REx mission craft punched its surface in 2020.