– News of March 31, 2020 – We know that the LOP-G, the space station in lunar orbit designed by NASA, will not be part of the program for the return of humanity to the Moon in 2024, named Artemis. The space station is not canceled, it is simply deemed non-essential for the first manned…
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– News of November 5, 2019 – The Chinese space agency will postpone its lunar samples return mission, called Chang’e 5. Expected for this year, this mission will finally take off in the last months of 2020, because of the Chinese heavy launchers . The Long March 5 launcher continues to be the cause of…
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– News of October 22, 2019 – InSight’s drill rig has been stuck for 8 months The HP3 drill rig installed on the InSight lander has been designed to dig to a depth of 5 meters, unwinding thermal sensors. This should make it possible to study how the heat propagates in the Martian crust. But…
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– News of October 22, 2019 – NASA continues to advance on the technical solutions of its Artemis program. The US Space Agency has just authorized Boeing to expand its operations for the manufacture of the SLS. This should allow NASA to place an order for ten launchers at Boeing, probably as early as 2020.…
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– News of October 13, 2019 – The gravitational lens effect was predicted by Albert Einstein in 1936. When two massive objects, for example two stars, are perfectly aligned with an observer, the object in the middle, called the lens, will act as a magnifying glass on the light emitted by the farthest, called the…
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– News of October 8, 2019 – Hayabusa 2 is completing its exploration of the asteroid Ryugu. The Japanese space probe dropped on September 28, 2019 the last of its rovers. MINERVA 2, the little octogonal robot, will reach its target on October 8, 2019. There is some suspense in this descent because the JAXA…
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– News of October 8, 2019 – The Juno space probe has just made a very long propulsive phase so as not to succumb to the shadow of Jupiter. It takes almost 12 hours to cross the Jovian night at orbital speed. 12 hours without sun is very long for a space probe that is…
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Water vapor detected on K2-18b, a habitable exoplanet ? – News of September 17, 2019 – Of the 4000 planets discovered outside the solar system, the vast majority are completely hostile to life. Whether they are too massive, too close or too far from their star, it is hard to imagine how liquid water and…
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AI SpaceFactory wins $500,000 thanks to its 3D printed martian home – News of September 1, 2019 – The works of AI SpaceFactory are very interesting concerning the 3D printing of buildings on the Martian surface. They were awarded a US $500,000 prize by the US Space Agency after creating a one-third scale Martian base…
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In 1957, the USSR became the first nation to place an object in Earth orbit. But far from being satisfied with this feat, two years later the Soviet federation launched its first space probe to the Moon. Despite a high failure rate of its first space adventures, the ideological competition with the United States pushed…
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How was the thick atmosphere of Titan formed ? – News of July 21, 2019 – Titan is the only moon in the solar system with a thick atmosphere. However, there is still no consensus on the cause of this exception. The large quantities of nitrogen found there could be brought in the form of…
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The Dragonfly mission will fly towards Titan in 2026 – News of July 2, 2019 – It was one of the most anticipated decisions in 2019. The US Space Agency had to choose between two candidates for the fourth mission of the New Frontiers program. NASA can only fund one of them. The first mission…
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The Comet Interceptor mission will study comets very closely – News of July 2, 2019 – ESA has just validated a new mission for the next decade as part of its Cosmic Vision program. This mission is called Comet Interceptor. Since its creation, ESA has specialized in comet exploration. Thanks to this new mission, the…
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Postponement of Spektr-RG space observatory launch due to discharged batteries – News of June 25, 2019 – Since the fall of the Sovietic Union, Russia’s economic difficulties have canceled most major scientific programs. That’s why the launch of the Spektr-RG space observatory by a Proton rocket that was planned last Friday is very important. The…
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The development of the Psyche space probe continues – News of June 18, 2019 – The Psyche mission will be launched in 2022. It will explore the asteroid that bears the same name, an asteroid almost entirely composed of iron and nickel. We think that this is the heart of a protoplanet that has disappeared.…
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OSIRIS-REx orbits less than one kilometer from Bennu – News of June 18, 2019 – The solar system continues to reveal its secrets. Comets and asteroids are exploration targets increasingly studied by space agencies. NASA has thus dedicated the OSIRIS-REx space probe to the asteroid Bennu, a Type C near-Earth object of about 500 meters…
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ESA is very active regarding its lunar program – News of June 11, 2019 – The Moon exploration is very trendy nowadays. More than a dozen public and private entities plan to land robots on the Moon in the next five years. Three manned flight programs are under development in the United States, China and…
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Starshade could help space telescopes to observe exoplanets – News of June 9, 2019 – To observe exoplanets is very difficult. We must work on contrasts. The stars are indeed much brighter than their planets. Ideally, it is much easier to be able to hide the light of the star to focus only on the…
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Triton’s geysers will be targeted by the Trident mission or other missions – News of May 12, 2019 – Thirty years ago, the Voyager 2 space probe made the unique flyby of Neptune and Triton. The trajectory of the space probe was studied to fly only 40 000 kilometers height above the largest moon in…
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The Europa Clipper mission will embark 8 scientific instruments to study Europa – News of May 12, 2019 – The Europa Clipper mission will not have a lander, but it will be specially equipped to collect a lot of data from Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter. NASA will have to carefully prepare the scientific…
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Trident space mission to study Triton, Neptune’s Biggest Moon – News of April 30, 2019 – The outer planets of the solar system are still almost unexplored. Uranus and Neptune in particular have been stealthily flown over by the Voyager 2 space probe. A new orbiter could be sent around one of these two worlds.…
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The LUVOIR space telescope could study exoplanets thanks to a 15-meter mirror – News of April 28, 2019 – The LUVOIR space telescope (Large UV Optical Infrared Surveyor) is currently only a project. This is one of the four concepts studied to become one of NASA’s future big telescopes. LUVOIR would work primarily on visible…
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Parker Solar Probe flew over the sun for the second time – News of April 9, 2019 – The Parker Solar Probe spacecraft is now dangerously close to the sun. The American spacecraft has just completed its second flyby of our star. It has passed only 24 million kilometers from the surface of the sun.…
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The usefulness of the SLS is more and more challenged – News of March 17, 2019 – Currently, every day there is a new announcement about the Space Launch System (SLS). NASA’s 2020 budget proposal contemplates deleting many missions of the SLS. The SLS will not be used to assemble the LOP-G, nor to launch…
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The observation of another planetary system could explain the orbit of a planet X – News of March 12, 2019 – FarFarOut is part of a class of objects named extreme transneptunians objects. Other objects in this category all have a very eccentric orbit. This is why some researchers believe that a massive object has…
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A new moon of Neptune has just been discovered – News of February 24, 2019 – A new moon of Neptune has been known since 2013, but sometimes it takes time to formalize a discovery. It was named called Hippocamp. This moon is very small, so it looks like an asteroid. However, it could teach…
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Goodbye Opportunity ! – News of February 17, 2019 – After 15 years on the planet Mars, the rover Opportunity was finally declared dead on February 13, 2019. In fact, the rover no longer sent any sign of life to NASA since many months. But NASA wanted to give it a chance to resume communications.…
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Soyuz 5 engine tests will begin soon – News of February 12, 2019 – On February 4, 2019, Vladimir Putin and the director of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, took stock of the future of the new Russian launchers. The development of Soyuz 5 seems to be progressing well. The Soyuz 5 engine is being prepared for…
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New Horizons unveils the true form of Ultima Thule – News of February 12, 2019 – Ultima Thule is intriguing. The first series of photos transmitted by the spacecraft New Horizons unveiled a world in two parts, like a kind of snowman. New Horizons has just uploaded a new series of photos. This time, these…
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HERA mission to inspect results of DART mission in 2026 – News of February 12, 2019 – The Hayabusa mission and the OSIRIS-REx mission continue to explore Ryugu and Bennu, sometimes presented as dangerous for the Earth. The risk that one of these two objects collides with our planet is actually very small, but one…
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