Lifeboat Foundation

HELSINKI — China is set to launch the first module for its own space station next week after rolling out a Long March 5B rocket at Wenchang spaceport late Thursday.

The 53.7-meter-long Long March 5B is now expected to launch the 22-ton Tianhe space station core module around April 29, although authorities have not officially released a launch time.

The launch will mark the beginning of an intense construction phase for the three-module space station. China plans 11 major launches of modules, cargo and crewed spacecraft across 2021–22.

SpaceX’s Crew-2 mission lit up the sky with a spectacular spaceflight show this morning (April 23) with a successful crewed launch to the International Space Station.

SpaceX lit up the sky with a spectacular rocket show before dawn today (April 23) with a successful Crew-2 astronaut launch to the International Space Station for NASA.

Riding a Falcon 9 rocket, the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Endeavour, lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida as the sun slowly crept above the horizon, making for an especially colorful and striking view.

A remote island could host Elon Musk’s new Space X project — but its residents are not impressed.

Circa 2018

KOOTENAY NATIONAL PARK IN CANADA— The drumming of the jackhammer deepens. Then, a block of shale butterflies open, exposing to crisp mountain air a surface that hasn’t seen sunlight in half a billion years. “Woo!” says paleontologist Cédric Aria of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China, bracing the top slab of rock upright.

Its underside bears charcoal-colored smudges that look vaguely like horseshoe crabs or the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. “It’s a spaceship landing area here,” says expedition leader Jean-Bernard Caron, curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, Canada.

Continue reading “Some of Earth’s first animals—including a mysterious, alien-looking creature—are spilling out of Canadian rocks” »

NASA has logged another extraterrestrial first on its latest mission to Mars: converting carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere into pure, breathable oxygen, the U.S. space agency said on Wednesday.

The unprecedented extraction of oxygen, literally out of thin air on Mars, was achieved Tuesday by an experimental device aboard Perseverance, a six-wheeled science rover that landed on the Red Planet Feb. 18 after a seven-month journey from Earth. read more

In its first activation, the toaster-sized instrument dubbed MOXIE, short for Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, produced about 5 grams of oxygen, equivalent to roughly 10 minutes’ worth of breathing for an astronaut, NASA said.

Circa 2020 o,.o.

“Our Martian brine electrolyzer radically changes the logistical calculus of missions to Mars and beyond.” says Vijay Ramani. “This technology is equally useful on Earth where it opens up the oceans as a viable oxygen and fuel source.”(Credit: Getty Images)

When it comes to water and Mars, there’s good news and not-so-good news. The good news: there’s water on Mars! The not-so-good news? There’s water on Mars.

The milestone, which the MOXIE instrument achieved by converting carbon dioxide into oxygen, points the way to future human exploration of the Red Planet.

The growing list of “firsts” for Perseverance, NASA ’s newest six-wheeled robot on the Martian surface, includes converting some of the Red Planet’s thin, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into oxygen. A toaster-size, experimental instrument aboard Perseverance called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) accomplished the task. The test took place April 20, the 60th Martian day, or sol, since the mission landed on February 18.

While the technology demonstration is just getting started, it could pave the way for science fiction to become science fact – isolating and storing oxygen on Mars to help power rockets that could lift astronauts off the planet’s surface. Such devices also might one day provide breathable air for astronauts themselves. MOXIE is an exploration technology investigation – as is the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) weather station – and is sponsored by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) and Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate.

On April 17, 2021, the New Horizons spacecraft passed 50 astronomical units — 50 times Earth’s distance from the sun — while speeding toward interstellar space. It also captured an image of another earthly spacecraft, even farther out.

In the weeks following its launch in early 2006, when NASA ’s New Horizons was still close to home, it took just minutes to transmit a command to the spacecraft, and hear back that the onboard computer received and was ready to carry out the instructions.

As New Horizons crossed the solar system, and its distance from Earth jumped from millions to billions of miles, that time between contacts grew from a few minutes to several hours. And on April 17 at 12:42 UTC (or April 17 at 8:42 a.m. EDT), New Horizons reached a rare deep-space milepost – 50 astronomical units from the Sun, or 50 times farther from the Sun than Earth is.

Here’s one way to imagine just how far 50 AU is: Think of the solar system laid out on a neighborhood street; the Sun is one house to the left of “home” (or Earth), Mars would be the next house to the right, and Jupiter would be just four houses to the right. New Horizons would be 50 houses down the street, 17 houses beyond Pluto!