NASA today announced further evidence supporting the existence of plumes erupting from the global salt water ocean which is believed to exist on Jupiter’s moon Europa. The discovery is based on a series of observations in the extreme ultra-violet end of the visible light spectrum as Europa passed in front of Jupiter during its the […]
While NASA’s Juno spacecraft is just getting settled in for its stay in orbit around the solar system’s largest planet, a new study based on information from ground based instruments sheds light on how Jupiter’s gravity and shadow affect one of its moons. Perhaps one of the most tortured bodies in the solar system, Io’s […]
It is in many ways high summer for NASA’s fleet of robotic spacecraft deployed throughout the solar system. On Monday evening, as the fireworks were lighting up the night sky across much of the United States, the space agency’s latest probe, Juno, arrived in orbit around Jupiter. Coming nearly five years after it launched from […]
NASA’s Juno spacecraft has entered Jupiter’s magnetic field on its way to a July 4th orbital insertion around the solar system’s largest planet. The Juno spacecraft, which launched on August 5th, 2011 will spend 20 months looking deep into the gas giant’s atmosphere, hopefully yielding a treasure trove of information regarding its origins, and inner […]
The Wall Street Journal reports that Lockheed Martin has been eliminated from NASA’a CRS-2 competition to award the next round of space station cargo resupply missions. According to the article, which quotes unnamed sources, the decision has been widely understood since the summer, and was made primarily based upon price. The Lockheed Martin proposal, a […]
Following another delay in selecting winners for the second round of its Commercial Resupply Program (CRS2), NASA has ordered two more Cygnus cargo missions from Orbital ATK (SpaceNews). That order raises the total number of missions from eight in the original $1.9 billion dollar to ten. Terms of the two order extension have not been […]
Artists Concept: Image CredIt JPL One recurring theme in coverage from Innerspace.net is a lamentation over the lack of any flagship class outer planet mission to follow in the wake of the spectacularly successful Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. While Innerspace is predominately focused on human exploration and settlement, and in particular the contributions being made […]
Although Innerspace.net tends to focus on Mars as the most inhabitable planet outside Earth, Saturn’s system holds a unique fascination, much of it due to the amazing Cassini space probe. It is also the case because even though it is much further out than Jupiter and its many moons, Saturn’s system does not present the […]
Image credit: JPL A fascinating news release out of JPL suggests once more just how weird and wonderful our own solar system is turning out to be. Today’s story offers speculation that Jupiter’s moon Ganymede may have “layered” oceans in which water alternates with different tiers of ice, depending on the relative salt content. Furthermore, […]
NASA released the particulars of its FY 2015 budget request yesterday, and the 713 page document revealed some disappointing news on two programs with long term implications. The first issue is the very tenuous support for a new outer planets mission to Jupiter’s enigmatic moon, Europa. Probably second only to Mars in terms of the […]
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