In a rare encounter, two lunar spacecraft crossed paths as they orbited the Moon in opposite directions.
NASA outfitted its aging communications network with a hybrid antenna that allowed it to receive both radio frequency and laser signals for the first time, helping the space agency keep up with its increasing number of missions traveling through deep space.
NASA’s diligent lunar orbiter transmitted a laser beam to a dome-shaped aluminum device the size of a billiard ball on India’s Vikram lander, pinging its location on the Moon. This laser-enabled technique could one day help NASA astronauts find their way on the lunar surface.
NASA just combined all of my favorite things: space, lasers, and cats. In a first-of-its-kind demonstration of deep space optical communication, the space agency streamed a high-definition video from 19 million miles away from Earth. And as it turns out, NASA is just as obsessed as we are when it comes to sharing cat…
It departed our planet just over two months ago, but NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is already 16 million miles from Earth, well on its way to its main destination: the asteroid Psyche.
A gold-capped laser transceiver attached to the asteroid probe Psyche saw its first light on Tuesday, sending and receiving data through laser beams from far beyond the Moon for the first time.
Update: October, 13, 11:17 a.m. ET: Psyche is finally in space. The Falcon Heavy lifted off on time, sending the probe on its 2.2 billion-mile journey to a highly metallic asteroid.
Wedged between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the main asteroid belt contains over 1 million rocky objects, but perhaps few of them are as intriguing as Psyche. The metal-rich asteroid might have once been an ancient planetary building block that was stripped of its outer rocky shell as our solar system came to be.…
The Bezos-Musk rivalry intensifies this week as Amazon gears up for the launch of two demo internet satellites. This marks the beginning of the Amazon billionaire’s 3,236-satellite-strong megaconstellation that might one day compete with Musk’s leading space-based service, SpaceX—with “one day” being the operative…
NASA’s mission to a metal-rich asteroid is back on track after a minor setback. Psyche is now all set to launch on October 12.