Spacecraft
Sub-orbital, orbital, lunar, interplanetary and interstellar vehicles designed to navigate space- Explore more »
A&S Interview: Chris Kraft
NASA's first Flight Director assesses the state of the space program 40 years after Apollo.
March 2010 |
By Michael Klesius
Stuck in Transit – Unchaining Ourselves From the Rocket Equation
Last fall, after much anticipation, the Augustine Committee presented us with their assessment of the future of space exploration. Its basic conclusion was that at currently envisioned budgets, the Program of Record (a.k.a. ESAS, Project Constellation) would not get us back to the Moon before many...
March 11, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Phobos Up Close
Given all the angst recently about NASA astronauts needing a new destination, it's good to step back and review the options. There aren't many. There's the moon, of course, and Mars. A near-Earth asteroid. And one more possibility, often forgotten—the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos.Tomorrow at 3:5...
March 02, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Ice at the north pole of the Moon
Last year, India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter spent eight months mapping the surface of the Moon. I had the honor of being the Principal Investigator of an experiment on that mission, the Mini-SAR imaging radar. The purpose of this experiment is to map and characterize the deposits within perman...
March 01, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Our Favorite Martians
For the scientists and engineers who drive the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, Mars exploration is personal.
March 2010 |
By Michael Klesius
Creation of a Cover Shot
Photographer Eric Curry shows how he made our March 2010 cover.
March 01, 2010 |
By The Editors
Talismanic Thinking
Wild claims are being tossed about regarding the future U.S. space program. Recipes for success are touted and e-mailed around – concepts based more on wishful thinking than on solid science and engineering. My friend Rand Simberg refers to those who would replicate anew the means we devised to g...
February 27, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Confusing the Means and the Ends
The release of the proposed NASA budget and new “direction” has led to an intense “cage fight” in the blogosphere over who has the best rocket and the best architecture. Many “New Space” advocates are ecstatic, viewing the cancellation of the Constellation program as vindication of their view that...
February 13, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Vision Impaired
The release of the new proposed budget for NASA has unleashed a blizzard of news articles and commentary. The administration proposes to terminate Constellation, the agency effort to design and build a new space transportation system to carry people to low Earth orbit and beyond. In its place, th...
February 03, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
No More A-Roving
NASA’s Spirit rover goes into survival mode on Mars.
January 28, 2010 |
By Michael Klesius
Have We Forgotten What Exploration Means?
Yet again, the U.S. space program is in the slough of despond, whereby previous assumptions are questioned, the current path is discarded, the program is re-directed, and luminous enthusiasm heralds the new direction…And then it all tapers off to nothing.As long as we are navel-gazing during this p...
January 25, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Beyond LEO - Flexible Path Revisited
In an interesting post at Vision Restoration, “Ray” tackles the desultory Flexible Path (FP) architecture of the Augustine committee, which calls for human missions to low gravity destinations and delays missions to the lunar and martian surface. The problems he finds with FP are similar to points...
January 23, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Robotic Sample Return and Interpreting Lunar History: The Importance of Getting it Right
Deciphering the cratering history of the Moon is an important scientific problem. My previous post discussed early lunar cratering history, the apparent impact “cataclysm” 3.8 billion years ago, its significance to Earth’s early history and how remaining questions might be resolved by collecting a...
January 11, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Cataclysmic Events on the Moon
NASA recently announced that it has down-selected three New Frontiers mission concepts for additional study. One of these missions, Moonrise, proposes to return rock and soil samples from the floor of the largest impact crater on the Moon, the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin, centered on the souther...
January 09, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Kepler's First Planets
It's nice when an expensive new machine works as advertised—nicer still when that machine has the ability to revolutionize a whole field of science.At this week's meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, scientists couldn't stop gushing about the exquisite performance of NASA's K...
January 08, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
The Search for a Real "Pandora"
In the three years since film director James Cameron wrote the script for his new blockbuster Avatar, a lot has changed in the field of exoplanet research (the study of planets around other stars). Nobody knows this better than one of its leading practitioners, Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smith...
December 30, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Inching Closer to Clarke's Prediction
In the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, written as Stanley Kubrick was adapting it to a screenplay for his 1968 film, author Arthur C. Clarke philosophizes deeply on the convergence of man and machine. While the human astronauts Frank Poole and David Bowman affect an almost robot-like discipline and de...
December 28, 2009 |
By Mike Klesius
Inside Track
The Cassini probe to Saturn and Titan is just one of those spacecraft that keeps returning very cool stuff, such as the beautiful view of Saturn during its equinox a few months ago.Now, the mission has just released tantalizing footage of Saturn's moon Janus, which is about 111 miles across, overta...
December 24, 2009 |
By Mike Klesius
Wet World
Announcements of newly discovered planets come so frequently these days that it's hard to tell which ones are significant. But GJ 1214b deserves its moment of fame.Discovered by a team led by David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the planet is only 5.4 times the diam...
December 17, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
