by Jonathan Nally | Jan 9, 2020 | News, Space missions
NASA’s buoyant robot roams under the sea-ice near Australia’s Casey research station. Photo: NASA/JPL/SETI Institute/Australian Antarctic Division. A PROTOTYPE OF A ROBOT designed to explore underneath the ice crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa, has been tested at...
by Jonathan Nally | Dec 20, 2019 | News, Planets, Space missions
Above: The aeroshell and heat shield for the Mars 2020 mission. Image courtesy Lockheed Martin. The contraption in the foreground of this image looks a bit like the Jupiter 2 spaceship from the TV series Lost in Space, but it is in fact part of the aeroshell for the...
by Jonathan Nally | Sep 23, 2019 | Features, News, Space missions
Above: An artist’s impression of a future lunar base. Courtesy NASA. The federal government has committed to investing $150 million into Australian businesses and locally developed technologies to support NASA’s lunar exploration campaign. The five-year...
by Jonathan Nally | Feb 14, 2018 | News, Space missions
For a short time, this New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) frame of the ‘Wishing Well’ star cluster, taken December 5, 2017, was the farthest image ever made by a spacecraft, breaking a 27-year record set by Voyager 1. About two hours later, New...
by Jonathan Nally | Feb 14, 2018 | News, Planets, Space missions
Rohit Bhartia of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission holds a slice of a meteorite scientists have determined came from Mars. One of two slices will be used for testing a laser instrument for NASA’s Mars 2020 rover while it’s still on Earth; the other slice will...
by Jonathan Nally | Feb 9, 2018 | News, Planets, Space missions
Star-shaped and swallowtail-shaped tiny, dark bumps in fine-layered bright bedrock of a Martian ridge are drawing close inspection by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover. This set of shapes looks familiar to geologists who have studied gypsum crystals formed in drying lakes...
