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WASHINGTON, Jan 21, 2024 (AFP) – NASA has re-established contact with its tiny helicopter on Mars, the US space agency said Saturday, after an unexpected outage prompted fears that the hard-working craft had finally met its end. Ingenuity, a drone about 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) tall, arrived on Mars in 2021 aboard the rover Perseverance and became the first motorized craft to fly autonomously on another planet. Data from the helicopter are transmitted via Perseverance […]
TOKYO, Jan 22, 2024 (AFP) – Japan switched off its Moon lander almost three hours after a historic touchdown to allow for a possible recovery of the craft when the sun hits its solar panels, the space agency said Monday. With its unmanned Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) mission — dubbed “Moon Sniper” for the craft’s precision landing capabilities — Japan became the fifth country to achieve a soft lunar landing. But after the […]
WASHINGTON (AFP) – NASA has lost contact with its tiny helicopter Ingenuity during the hard-working craft’s 72nd flight, the space agency said. The agency’s engineers are attempting to re-establish communications, which ended abruptly on Thursday as the craft was making its descent from a test flight, NASA said late Friday. Ingenuity, which resembles a large drone, had arrived on Mars in 2021 with the rover Perseverance and became the first motorized craft to fly autonomously […]
By Natsuko Fukue and Katie Forster TOKYO, Jan 19, 2024 (AFP) – Japan on Saturday became only the fifth nation to achieve a soft Moon landing, but the craft’s long-term fate was in doubt after space agency officials said its solar cells were not generating power. With the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM), Japan followed the United States, the Soviet Union, China and India in landing on the lunar surface. After initial uncertainty, space […]
By Natsuko Fukue and Katie Forster TOKYO, Jan 19, 2024 (AFP) – Japan’s precision Moon lander “appeared” to have landed on the lunar surface early Saturday, but confirmation was still awaited, space agency JAXA said. If its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) mission succeeds, Japan will be the fifth nation to pull off a fiendishly tricky “soft landing” after the United States, the Soviet Union, China and India. Japan’s mission is one of a […]
WASHINGTON, Dec 29, 2023 (AFP) – SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket blasted back into space on Thursday night to ferry the US military’s secretive X-37B drone to a research mission. After weeks of delays, the rocket launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 8:07 pm Eastern Time (0107 GMT Friday) in a liftoff livestreamed on SpaceX’s website. It is unclear where exactly the uncrewed and autonomously operating spacecraft is headed on its seventh mission. […]
MOSCOW, Dec 28, 2023 (AFP) – Russian and US space agencies have agreed to keep working together to deliver crews to the International Space Station (ISS) until at least 2025, Russian corporation Roscosmos said Thursday. The space sector — including its so-called cross-flights that involve sending crews from different nationalities on one spacecraft — is a rare area of cooperation remaining between Moscow and Washington since Russia sent troops to Ukraine. “An agreement was reached […]
TOKYO, Dec 25, 2023 (AFP) – Japan’s SLIM space probe entered the Moon’s orbit on Monday in a major step towards the country’s first successful lunar landing, expected next month. The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) is nicknamed the “Moon Sniper” because it is designed to land within 100 metres (328 feet) of a specific target on the lunar surface. If successful, the touchdown would make Japan only the fifth country to have successfully […]
By Issam AHMED Blue Origin launched its first rocket in more than a year on Tuesday, reviving the US company’s fortunes with a successful return to space following an uncrewed crash in 2022. Though mission NS-24 carried a payload of science experiments, not people, it paves the way for Jeff Bezos’ aerospace enterprise to resume taking wealthy thrill-seekers to the final frontier. The New Shepard suborbital rocket blasted off from the pad at Launch Site […]
By Juliette Collen PARIS (AFP) – Six exoplanets have been spotted in a perfectly synchronised dance around a nearby star, offering clues about the formation of our own Solar System, astronomers said on Wednesday. The six planets orbit the bright star HD 110067 around 100 light years away from Earth. The star is visible from the Northern Hemisphere as part of the Coma Berenices constellation. The planets are so close to their star that all […]
By Daniel Lawler PARIS, Oct 19, 2023 (AFP) – Years ago, something happened in a distant galaxy that sent an incredibly powerful blast of radio waves hurtling through the universe. It finally arrived at Earth on June 10 last year and — though it lasted less than a thousandth of a second — a radio telescope in Australia managed to pick up the signal. This flash from the cosmos was a fast radio burst (FRB), […]
HOUSTON, Oct 14, 2023 (AFP) – After spending more than a year in space, Frank Rubio now has to get used to that pesky thing Earthlings call gravity. “Walking hurts a little bit the first few days, the soles of your feet and lower back,” he said at a news conference Friday at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. “I think there is a certain level of pain that comes with the fact […]
