NASA
• Gerelle Q. Dodson
President Donald Trump will present the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to Artemis II astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen at a ceremony on Aug. 28 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The crew are the first astronauts to fly around the moon in more than 50 years.
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Japan has revealed the spacecraft for its Martian Moons eXploration mission, scheduled to launch Oct. 19. MMX will travel to Mars’ moon Phobos, collect surface material and return the samples to Earth, providing a closer look at one of the Red Planet’s enigmatic satellites.
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President Donald Trump will present the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to Artemis II astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen at a ceremony on Aug. 28 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The crew are the first astronauts to fly around the moon in more than 50 years.
JAXA has set an October launch target for its Martian Moons eXploration mission, a sample-return effort focused on the Mars region. The schedule establishes a near-term milestone for Japan’s planetary exploration program and a mission designed to bring material from the Martian moons back to Earth.
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China is preparing to launch Chang’e-7 late Sunday on a complex, multi-spacecraft mission to study the lunar south pole and land nearby. The mission will search for evidence of water ice, a resource of significant interest in future lunar exploration and surface operations.
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NASA and Katalyst Space have abandoned an attempt to dock with and raise the orbit of the aging Swift observatory after persistent attitude-control problems disabled the LINK servicing spacecraft. The decision ends a low-cost effort to extend Swift’s operational life and preserve its gamma-ray science mission.
NASA has abandoned an effort to save a failing space telescope, leaving the spacecraft destined to reenter and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. The decision marks the end of recovery efforts for a space-based observatory, though the available reporting does not identify the telescope or explain the failure.
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NASA and Katalyst Space have called off an experimental mission to boost the aging Swift gamma-ray observatory after the recently launched servicing spacecraft suffered irredeemable technical problems in orbit. Without the rescue, Swift is expected to reenter Earth’s atmosphere later this year, ending an effort to extend its operational life.
NASA has revealed the new livery of a 13-year-old Boeing 737-700 being converted into a reduced-gravity research aircraft at King Aerospace in Oklahoma. The airframe previously served for years as a classified U.S. Air Force flying testbed before transferring to NASA for its next mission.
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