While NASA watchers are still guessing at what direction the incoming Trump administration will assign to America’s space agency, it is increasingly obvious that it won’t include the outgoing Obama administration’s badly beleaguered and generally unloved Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM. That mission would see a small boulder plucked off a Near Earth Asteroid by […]
NASA’s Science Mission Directorate is counting down to the launch of yet another ground breaking (in this case, literally) spacecraft, from Cape Canaveral. Flying aboard the ever-reliable ULA Atlas-V in its 411 configuration, the Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security – Regolith Explorer, or Osiris-REx, will journey to the Near Earth asteroid Bennu, where it will collect and […]
Coming right on the heels of the announcement by Moon Express that it has received clearance for a historic first commercial trip to the Moon, Deep Space Industries is officially announcing plans to send the first private mission to an asteroid. Notably, while the company’s long term goal is asteroid mining, its first mission […]
A paper published in Geophysical Research Letters concludes that in addition to whatever ice reserves the dwarf planet Ceres may harbor under its surface, (and they could be substantial, including even a subsurface ocean) the largest body in the main asteroid belt has also likely accumulated quite a bit of water ice in permanently shadowed […]
Last week, astronomers announced the discovery of a small “quasi satellite” of Earth, asteroid 2016 HO3, which is locked into a rather rare orbit which has it circling our planet at a variable distance in a dance between the Earth and the Sun. While not totally stable, it could last for some time. The complete […]
Two recent news items highlight the slow, but steady progress being made to set the stage for the robotic exploration and utilization of space beyond low Earth orbit. First, the tiny European nation of Luxembourg, already home to two of the world’s largest ComSat companies, announced a new initiative, called spaceresources.lu to promote space mining and […]
As the NewSpace era gradually transitions from addressing the challenges of reaching orbit to building out the business cases for what can happen once you do, regulatory issues are going to continue to play a significant, and in many cases, enhanced role. For those who are prone to be unhappy about seeing the advance of […]
A bit if interesting news regarding Ceres that comes not from the Dawn spacecraft, but rather from the ground based observation from the European Southern Observatory. From ESO: “Observations made using the HARPS spectrograph at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile have revealed unexpected changes in the bright spots on the dwarf planet Ceres. Although […]
A key element of NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM, is being pushed back one year. According to reports from a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s human exploration and operations committee which took place last week, ARM’s program director Michele Gates said: “Under the new schedule, the ARM robotic mission would launch in December […]
Apparently some Russian scientists have been watching the SYFY channel’s horrendous Saturday night movies, and would like to make their own contribution to the “What could possibly go wrong? ” category. From TASS: “Russian scientists have developed a project of upgrading intercontinental ballistic missiles to destroy near-Earth meteorites 20-50 meters in size, leading researcher of […]
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