Space.com
• Leonard David
NASA is starting a new initiative, the Perseverance Sample Retrieval Architecture, to revisit how it could return samples collected on Mars to Earth. The effort renews work on a long-standing planetary science goal: bringing Red Planet material home for study.
Space Exploration & Science Missions
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NASA is starting a new initiative, the Perseverance Sample Retrieval Architecture, to revisit how it could return samples collected on Mars to Earth. The effort renews work on a long-standing planetary science goal: bringing Red Planet material home for study.
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The only spacecraft to fly past either ice giant, Voyager 2 found that Uranus and Neptune have magnetic fields unlike those of the other planets. Their fields are markedly tilted and irregular, characteristics linked in the article to the planets’ distinctive interiors.
The four spacecraft will demonstrate key instruments for China’s planned space science missions, including a lunar-orbiting radio array. The pathfinder mission is intended to validate technologies ahead of those larger scientific programs.
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Launched Nov. 11, 1966, with Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin aboard, Gemini XII was the program’s final mission. Despite a failing rendezvous radar and a balky Agena, the flight put docking and spacewalking through a final test, helping set the stage for Apollo’s lunar landing program.
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NASA is taking an “all-hands-on-deck” approach to returning humans to the Moon, describing the pace and nature of its procurements as unprecedented. The shift puts the agency’s acquisition activity at the center of its lunar effort.
The Audible release of Andy Weir’s “Exoplanet” turns attention to whether the conditions faced by the story’s Wild Blue Yonder crew could exist on a real exoplanet. The article considers the distinction between fictional worlds and the criteria for habitability.
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The prospect of robotic spacecraft extracting valuable materials from asteroids is moving, slowly, from science fiction toward reality. A future influx of asteroid-derived platinum could disrupt the metal’s market, while the article frames that outcome as beneficial for Earth.
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