Tag: Space
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After a decade and $1.2 billion, NASA reveals its booty from Bennu: 121 grams
After years of speculation, NASA finally revealed on Thursday the totality of the asteroid sample returned from Bennu to Earth last fall: 4.29 ounces (121.6 grams). To put that number into perspective, the total mass is only slightly more than one-half cup of sugar or a box of 100 paper clips. It’s about the same…
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Fueling a spacecraft while it’s on a rocket? “Not trivial,” SpaceX official says.
Are you ready for round two of the lunar lottery? As early as Thursday morning, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a privately developed lunar lander may launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The vehicle, built by a Houston-based company called Intuitive Machines, will be the second US-made lunar lander to launch from Florida in…
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Before Ingenuity ever landed on Mars, scientists almost managed to kill it
MiMi Aung could barely contain her excitement as she drove up Oak Grove Drive, the leafy thoroughfare leading to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Aung had spent her formative years in Burma and Malaysia, two countries without a space program. A career in aerospace seemed beyond her reach. Yet here she was, at 22 years old,…
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Rocket Report: US military still wants point-to-point; India’s big 2024 ambitions
Welcome to Edition 6.30 of the Rocket Report! Looking ahead, there are some interesting launches coming up in the middle of this month. Here are some we have our eyes on: Intuitive Machines’ lunar lander on a Falcon 9 and a re-flight of Japan’s big H3 rocket next week; then there’s an Electron launch of…
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Virgin Galactic and the FAA are investigating a dropped pin on last spaceflight
Virgin Galactic reported an anomaly on its most recent flight, Galactic 06, which took place 12 days ago from a spaceport in New Mexico. In a statement released Monday, the company said it discovered a dropped pin during a post-flight review of the mission, which carried two pilots and four passengers to an altitude of…
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Daily Telescope: A stunning new image of Io reveals a volcanic plume
Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a…
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Starlab—with half the volume of the ISS—will fit inside Starship’s payload bay
The Starlab commercial space station will launch on SpaceX’s Starship rocket, officials said this week. Starlab is a joint venture between the US-based Voyager Space and the European-based multinational aerospace corporation Airbus. The venture is building a large station with a habitable volume equivalent to half the pressurized volume of the International Space Station and…
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For the first time NASA has asked industry about private missions to Mars
NASA is starting to take its first steps toward opening a commercial pathway to Mars. This week, the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory issued a new solicitation to the industry titled “Exploring Mars Together: Commercial Services Studies.” This is a request for proposals from the US space industry to tell NASA how they would complete…
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Fuse leads $6M round for Quindar, which uses AI for satellite support and is partnering with KSAT
A screenshot shows Quindar’s spacecraft management platform at work. (Image via Quindar) A space-centric startup called Quindar says it has successfully closed an oversubscribed $6 million funding round that will give a boost to its cloud-hosted, AI-supported software platform for satellite management. The seed extension round was led by the Seattle-area venture capital firm Fuse,…
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It turns out NASA’s Mars helicopter was much more revolutionary than we knew
Much has been written about the plucky exploits of NASA’s small Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. And all of the accolades are deserved. “The little mission that could” did, flying 72 sorties across the red planet and pushing out the frontier of exploration into the unknown. Yet as impressive as Ingenuity‘s exploits were over the last…