Space News reports that on 31 May 2019, NASA awarded lunar landing contracts initially to three companies out of the nine finalists in the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS). The three winners of the contracts worth a total of US$250 million will make one...
While Hollywood has long flagged the dangers of asteroid and comet impact via its science fictional disaster movies Meteor (1979), Deep Impact (1998) and Armageddon (1998), real life space seemed to have no solution to the threat. Now NASA, in conjunction with John...
The Israeli privately-financed SpaceIL Beresheet (B’reshit) unmanned lunar landing probe has crashed on the Moon following a complication that caused its landing engine to be cut off at a key moment. Having hitched a paid-for ride on a Falcon 9 launch on 22 February,...
French space and geophysics expert, Professor Avril Fou, has warned that the Earth’s rotation rate is slowing down, with long term implications for the seasons* and the weather. “To ignore this slow down would be foolish,” Avril Fou warns. So can...
NASA has selected the SPHEREx astronomy mission to progress to operational status as a NASA Medium-class Explorer (MIDEX) type mission. SPHEREx – Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Re-ionization and Ices Explorer – will conduct...
The construction of the FLEX – the Fluorescence Explorer spacecraft which is to study “vegetation fluorescence” to determine global photosynthetic activity – has been officially ordered. Having been originally selected in Novemer 2015 as the...
