From the fertile imaginings of the 1950s and 60s in the American aerospace industry came a wealth of Space-launcher ideas in all seemingly conceivable (and sometimes, inconceivable) shapes and sizes. So as we continue to investigate some of the ‘biggest rockets that never were’ and cannot examine them all, let’s Read more…
A rare astronomical event due to occur in the late 1970s inspired the desire to send a spacecraft to the most distant planets in our Solar System and beyond. That decision almost 40 years later has meant humans have created and launched a spacecraft which has travelled to the boundary Read more…
NASA’s Curiosity rover’s safe arrival in Gale Crater,Mars,thanks to some innovative technology, is still being applauded throughout the world.It is easy to forget that the one-tonne robot is not the first Mars rover.The most incredible new-era technology had already been deployed on Mars by NASA, is executing crucial missions at Read more…
NASA Mars Exploration Program Team are now achieving such a level of accuracy in landing craft on the Martian surface that the targeted landing area for Curiosity was like an arrow hitting the bull’s-eye from hundreds of kilometres away. Proportionally this bull’s-eye equates to a landing zone on Mars measuring Read more…
I had my doubts, but NASA didn’t let us down when the Agency’s Curiosity rover was successfully landed in Gale Crater, Mars at 5.14 UTC on 6 August 2012. The first images are unimpressive (but are of course from the hazcams, small low resolution cameras for evaluating potential Read more…
On 6 August, while many of us are enjoying the Olympics, staff at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will be nervously watching their monitors, waiting for a message from Mars.If all goes well, their Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft will scream through the tenuous Martian atmosphere, until its parachute cracks open, followed Read more…
Spirit, one of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers has finally transmitted its last data back to Earth. We look back upon the career of this valiant space explorer. Our neighbouring planet Mars came closer to Earth than it has for thousands of years, in August 2003. NASA had decided in 2000 Read more…
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is to use a unique system called a “sky crane” to touch down next year on the Red Planet. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have just released a video of this previously untried mechanism under test. (UPDATE: it all worked perfectly, for more detail see Read more…
NASA’s Deep Impact probe flew past comet Hartley 2 and revealed a odd-looking peanut-shaped nucleus. What are the first impressions from these exciting images? Only about a mile (1.6 km) from end to end, the nucleus of Comet Hartley2 is hardly the most impressive member of the Solar System. Never Read more…