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mission

SPACE: Musk’s Firm Wins Contract for New Lunar Lander

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Moon Landing - Deposit Photos

NASA said on Friday it has awarded billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s private space company SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to build a spacecraft to fly astronauts to the moon, picking it over Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and defense contractor Dynetics Inc. The bid by Tesla Inc chief Musk beat one from Amazon.com Inc’s founder Jeff Bezos, who had partnered with Lockheed Martin Corp, Northrop Grumman Corp and Draper. Bezos also owns the Washington Post. The U.S. space agency made the announcement in a videoconference. “We should accomplish the next landing as soon as possible,” said Steve Jurczyk, NASA’s acting administrator. … Read more

Another Mars Mission This Month – This One from NASA

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Mars Perseverance - NASA

NASA’s new Mars rover will launch toward the Red Planet this Thursday, July 30. The Mars Perseverance rover will explore the planet for ancient habitable environments and signs of fossilized microbial life at Mars’ Jezero crater, which was once a lake. The launch window opens at 7:50 a.m. EDT, according to NASA. Pre-launch coverage will begin at 7:00 a.m. EDT. The launch window will stay open until about 9:50 a.m. EDT, with opportunities to launch every five minutes in that two-hour timeframe. The pre-launch and launch will be livestreamed on Live Science. Mars Perseverance is part of NASA’s Moon to … Read more

SPACE: Answering the Big and Small Questions of the Universe

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space - ESA

Our universe is incredibly vast, mostly mysterious, and generally confusing. We’re surrounded by perplexing questions on scales both great and small. We have some answers, for sure, like the Standard Model of particle physics, that help us (physicists, at least) understand fundamental subatomic interactions, and the Big Bang theory of how the universe began, which weaves together a cosmic story over the past 13.8 billion years. But despite the successes of these models, we still have plenty of work to do. For example, what in the world is dark energy, the name we give to the driving force behind the … Read more

SPACE: NASA Wants to Send Humans to Live in the Clouds on Venus

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Venus Cloud Living - NASA==

Popular science fiction of the early 20th century depicted Venus as some kind of wonderland of pleasantly warm temperatures, forests, swamps and even dinosaurs. In 1950, the Hayden Planetarium at the American Natural History Museum were soliciting reservations for the first space tourism mission, well before the modern era of Blue Origins, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic. All you had to do was supply your address and tick the box for your preferred destination, which included Venus. Today, Venus is unlikely to be a dream destination for aspiring space tourists. As revealed by numerous missions in the last few decades, rather … Read more

President Obama: We’re Going to Mars

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President Barack Obama

One of my earliest memories is sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders, waving a flag as our astronauts returned to Hawaii. This was years before we’d set foot on the moon. Decades before we’d land a rover on Mars. A generation before photos from the International Space Station would show up in our social media feeds. I still have the same sense of wonder about our space program that I did as a child. It represents an essential part of our character — curiosity and exploration, innovation and ingenuity, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and doing it before anybody else. … Read more

NASA’s Dawn Spacecraft Orbits A Dwarf Planet

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Ceres

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft made history at 4:39 a.m. PST Friday morning when it reached Ceres and became the first man-made object to orbit a dwarf planet. According to NASA, the objective of the Dawn mission is to “study the asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres, celestial bodies believed to have accreted early in the history of the solar system. The mission will characterize the early solar system and the processes that dominated its formation.” Dawn was launched from Cape Canaveral in September 2007, with an ultimate destination of the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter. Dawn’s first target … Read more