First view of OSIRIS-REx returning with asteroid sample (22 Sep 2023)

Is it a spacecraft? An asteroid? Well, both. This small central speck is the first image of a spacecraft on its way home, carrying with it a sample from an asteroid hundreds-of-millions, if-not-billions-of-years old. The spacecraft is NASA's OSIRIS-REx, the asteroid is Bennu. On Sunday 24 September, the mission will drop its rocky sample off to fall through Earth's atmosphere and land safely back home, before it continues on to study the once rather scary asteroid Apophis. Spotted on 16 September by ESA's Optical Ground Station (OGS) telescope in Tenerife, OSIRIS-REx was 4.66 million km from Earth. This image is a combination of 90 individual images, each 36-second exposures. They have been combined in a way that takes into account the motion of the spacecraft, which is not travelling in a straight line, causing the seemingly stretched background stars to curve and warp.

See more - link: https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/First_view_of_OSIRIS_REx

New Mars gravity analysis improves understanding of possible ancient ocean (22 Sep 2023)

The first use of a novel method of analyzing Mars' gravitational force supports the idea that the planet once had an extensive northern ocean. In doing so, the method defines the scope of what scientists refer to as the northern Martian paleo-ocean in more detail. The work was published in July in the journal Icarus, which is affiliated with the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences. The research was led by Jaroslav Klokocnik, professor emeritus at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Gunther Kletetschka, associate research professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, is among the three co-authors. Kletetschka is also affiliated with Charles University in the Czech Republic.

See more - link: https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/New_Mars_grav

Autonomous systems help NASA's Perseverance do more science on Mars (22 Sep 2023)

In about a third of the time it would have taken other NASA Mars rovers, Perseverance recently navigated its way through a field of boulders more than 1,700 feet wide (about a half-kilometer). While planners map out the rover's general routes, Perseverance managed the finer points of navigating the field, nicknamed "Snowdrift Peak," on its own, courtesy of AutoNav, the self-driving system that helps cut down driving time between areas of scientific interest.

See more - link: https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/

On the up and up, the view just keeps getting better: Sols 3953-3954 (18 Sep 2023)

Earth planning date: Monday, September 18, 2023: Coming in to planning today, we were greeted with another spectacular view back down Mt. Sharp and the distant crater rim visible through the haze (see the image). I am the TUL (Tactical Uplink Lead) today, but my trainee Kathryn is doing most of the work. We are continuing to drive southeast toward our next drilling location. In addition to contact science, targeted science, and driving, we are also doing some extra atmospheric observations because we are still seeing a lot of dust in the atmosphere. Today's 2-sol plan has most of the activities on the first sol of the plan to ensure that we get all the data down before we plan again on Wednesday. Curiosity begins her day with some contact science. We use the DRT brush to clean he target "Sugarloaf," a standard bedrock target that is very flat and dusty.

Link: https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/On_the_up

New milestones despite tricky boulders (23 Sep 2023)

For the past couple of planning sols, Perseverance has been working on a complex navigation out of a boulder field on one of the lobes on top of the fan. The engineering team planned specific maneuvers and utilized Perseverance's autonomous navigation capabilities to navigate around and eventually out of the boulder field. This drive took Perseverance to Mandu Wall, part of the margin carbonate unit. Mandu Wall is our first interaction with the margin carbonates and and the closest we have been to the Jezero crater rim, which is now in the distance of Perseverance's landscape imagery.

See more - link: https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/New_milestones

Moon crew visits European powerhouse (23 Sep 2023)

From left: the Artemis II astronauts, Christina Koch, Jeremy Hansen, Victor Glover, and Reid Wiseman, visited the European Service Module (ESM) assembly hall at Airbus in Bremen, Germany, last week. Exciting developments are taking place in preparation for NASA's Orion spacecraft's next journey to the Moon. The four astronauts will be part of this second mission - a two-week show of the functionality of the Orion spacecraft and its European Service Module. ESA is overseeing the development of Orion's service module, the part of the spacecraft that supplies air, water, electricity, and propulsion, as well as regulating the temperature. The Artemis II crew had the privilege of seeing the only lunar human spaceflight vehicle in production first-hand during their visit to the clean rooms in Bremen, where Airbus plays a pivotal role in the European Service Module assembly process.

See more - link: https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Moon_crew

NASA team simulates a glimpse of our galaxy in gravitational waves

Astronomers using simulated data have produced a glimpse of the sky as it would appear in gravitational waves, cosmic ripples in space-time generated by orbiting objects. The image shows how space-based gravitational wave observatories expected to launch in the next decade will enhance our understanding of our galactic home. Since 2015, ground-based observatories have detected about a hundred events representing the mergers of systems that pair stellar-mass black holes, neutron stars, or both. The signals typically last less than a minute, have relatively high frequencies, can appear anywhere in the sky, and their sources lie far beyond our galaxy. "Binary systems also fill the Milky Way, and we expect many of them to contain compact objects like white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes in tight orbits," said Cecilia Chirenti, a researcher at the University of Maryland, College Park, and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "But we need a space observatory to 'hear' them because their gravitational waves hum at frequencies too low for ground-based detectors."

See more - link: https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/NASA_team_simulates