Ars Technica
• Stephen Clark
A NASA official says the agency is staffing up and accelerating work on its first Venus missions in a generation. The available report does not identify the missions, schedule or scale of the hiring, leaving the program’s specific milestones unclear.
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A NASA official says the agency is staffing up and accelerating work on its first Venus missions in a generation. The available report does not identify the missions, schedule or scale of the hiring, leaving the program’s specific milestones unclear.
Christina Koch will become NASA’s acting deputy chief engineer on Nov. 1, stepping away from active spaceflight duties. Her move means all four Artemis II crewmates have now left active astronaut assignments, shifting the mission’s crew from flight roles into other work ahead of the lunar mission.
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Four years after NASA’s DART spacecraft deliberately struck an asteroid, Europe’s Hera probe is arriving to examine the collision site. The mission is intended to establish what the first-of-its-kind impact accomplished, providing a closer look at the consequences of the test.
Astronauts traveling to Mars or elsewhere in deep space will face radiation and weightlessness—hazards that Earth’s surface shields people from. The article highlights the potential threat these conditions pose to the heart, making human health a central concern for future deep-space missions.
An international team led by Shandong University used observations from NASA’s Juno spacecraft to find that Jupiter’s magnetodisk is a wavy, rippling structure that rotates with the planet. The result challenges the previous understanding of how the giant planet’s magnetodisk behaves.
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A Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 6:33 a.m. EDT on Oct. 13 for NASA’s 35th commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station, carrying more than 6,300 pounds of supplies and hardware. The mission also deployed GHGSat’s Eleanor and Aidan satellites, expanding its methane-monitoring constellation.
Leading NASA is a full-time job, particularly as the agency’s administrator seeks to reshape the organization and accelerate plans to return humans to the moon. The article considers the political savvy required to manage that agenda.
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Perseverance reached 28.10 miles (45.22 kilometers) on Oct. 11, surpassing the 28.06-mile (45.16-kilometer) record set by NASA’s Opportunity rover, which explored Mars from 2004 to 2018. The milestone makes Perseverance the farthest-driving vehicle on the surface of another world.
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