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Feb 24 | News
Suddenly, and for the first time in a long time, America’s space agency finds itself without a mission plan. Filling the void are a mix of old and new ideas, including the revived goal of an electric propulsion engine (they still lack thrust), and the possibility of making the next manned landing on a near-Earth asteroid (no gravity).
Feb 3 | News
Workers at NASA and Northrop Grumman had to invent the techniques, materials, and mechanisms needed to build the James Webb Space Telescope’s complex sunshield system. The tennis court-sized solar deflector relies on five layers of Kapton, each as thin as a human hair.
Feb 2 | RDBlog
Monday was probably a bittersweet day for NASA. Told that it would no longer be following President Bush’s lunar comeback effort or even launching its own astronauts into space, the agency must now look to contractors for their escape velocity needs.
Feb 1 | News
Someday soon, the national space agency might no longer be responsible for putting astronauts into space. This idea of private space has been debated for years, but now the Obama administration is expected to push billions of dollars toward this goal in a budget to be proposed today.
Jan 29 | News
The Constellation Program, once called “Apollo on steroids”, is on President Obama’s chopping block. A new budget that is to be proposed next week for the space agency will give it an additional $5.9 billion over five years, but this money is not for moon landings. Instead, it will extend the life of ISS and advance the exploration philosophy of the “flexible path”.
Jan 21 | News
The HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been building maps of Mars surface since 2006, taking 13,000 observations in all. But Mars’ surface is still not entirely explored by the satellite, and NASA is now fielding suggestions for image target locations with an online tool. The camera can show details as small as a desk.
Jan 12 | News
Though not designed to survive the temperature extremes and ice loads of Martian winter, there is a small chance, says NASA, that the Mars Lander that operated for five months in the Martian arctic during 2008 may be able to operate during the approaching summer.
Jan 6 | News
The quest to discover whether Mars ever hosted an environment friendly to microscopic forms of life has just gotten a shot in the arm. The addition of an molecular analysis experiment tailored to do exactly that has been added to the Mars Science Lab mission that will land on the red planet in 2012.
Jan 5 | News
Along with the announcement that NASA’s spaceborne Kepler Telescope has already discovered five exoplanets of the gas giant variety comes the announcement this week that two other objects were found that defy explanation. At 26,000 degree Fahrenheit, these planet-sized bodies are far hotter than most stars.
12/30/2009 | News
The largest space observatory ever constructed will rely
heavily on infrared eyes to see farther back in time than even the Hubble Space
Telescope. Now there's a short movie that shows what the Webb’s mid-infrared instrument
detectors (MIRI) detectors are all about and what they can do.