CNET spoke to the systems and deputy program manager for the Hubble Space Telescope at Lockheed Martin, who remembers the first 1995 "deep field" image from the Hubble Space Telescope — taken over 10 days and revealing 3,000 galaxies. But he also remembers just how revolutionary it was. "To look at a 'dark' sliver of the sky and see so many stars and galaxies really drives home how much we still have to learn about the universe."

Looking back, that was only from 340 miles above our atmosphere — not the million miles from Earth travelled by the Webb Space Telescope (which also scours the universe "for cosmic bits emanating luminescence elusive to human eyes, otherwise known as infrared light.")

Yet while this has been a glorious month for astronomy, "We will absolutely still need Hubble," said Cornell University astronomer Nikole Lewis. "In fact, I'm in the process of trying to put together a budget for a large treasury program on Hubble." Lewis is after something Hubble has but JWST lacks. She studies exoplanets and intends to use visible and ultraviolet light wavelengths to decode clouds and hazes of foreign worlds — the type of light JWST isn't sensitive to. "There's a lot of important information at those wavelengths."

Despite JWST's clout, Hubble is also still the top candidate for scrutinizing galaxies moving along the X or Y axis, rather than the Z axis. "While galactic motion 'toward' and 'away' from Earth is very easy to measure with redshift," a JWST specialty, "'side to side' motion is harder," Caplan said.

In truth, this unique Hubble power turns out to be how we realized a pretty massive detail about galaxies. Many of them are on a crash course right now. By staring at Andromeda over the years — the galaxy that Hubble's namesake used as evidence in 1923 to prove our universe extends beyond the Milky Way — and measuring how its light on individual pixels transferred from one to the next, JWST's predecessor showed us that this galaxy isn't just orbiting ours. "They really will collide," Caplan explained. Would JWST have caught that?

Nonetheless, all of this is to say that as JWST continues to flood the internet with colorful depictions of space's outer reaches, we should remember that it isn't Hubble's replacement. JWST is its successor. It'll work in tandem with Hubble and wouldn't exist in a world without it.... And though the James Webb Space Telescope's story began with a bang, we ought not to let Hubble's end with a whimper. "They're not shutting Hubble down," said Dave Meyer, a Northwestern University professor focused on Hubble discoveries.

"We still think that's about a decade away."
And that systems and deputy program manager for the Hubble Space Telescope at Lockheed Martin also shared another part of its legacy: inspiring the next generation of astronomers. "I grew up being fascinated by the Shuttle program and was mesmerized watching the astronauts service Hubble.

"That was definitely part of my inspiration to become an aerospace engineer."

"A small space rock has proven to have a big effect on NASA's newly operational deep-space telescope," reports Space.com, causing "significant uncorrectable change" according to a new report from NASA engineers. But fortunately, "Seventeen mirror segments remain unblemished and engineers were able to realign Webb's segments to account for most of the damage." A micrometeoroid struck the James Webb Space Telescope between May 22 and 24, impacting one of the observatory's 18 hexagonal golden mirrors. NASA had disclosed the micrometeoroid strike in June and noted that the debris was more sizeable than pre-launch modeling had accounted for. Now, scientists on the mission have shared an image that drives home the severity of the blow in a report released July 12 describing what scientists on the mission learned about using the observatory during its first six months in space.

Happily, in this case the overall effect on Webb was small....

Based on fuel usage, the telescope should last 20 years in space. But scientists aren't sure how much of an effect micrometeroid strikes will have upon its operations, the report authors stated. Micrometeroids are a known danger of space operations, and facing them is by no means new to scientists; the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope are among long-running programs that are still operational despite occasional space rock strikes. However, Webb's orbit at Lagrange Point 2 about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from the Earth may change the risk profile considerably....

In this case, however, the overall impact to the mission is small "because only a small portion of the telescope area was affected...." Engineers are still modeling how frequently such events will occur....

One remedy could be minimizing the amount of time Webb points directly into its orbital direction, "which statistically has higher micrometeoroid rates and energies," the team wrote.
Thanks to Tablizer (Slashdot reader #95,088) for sharing the article!

NASA is aiming to launch its new monster rocket, the Space Launch System, on its first trip to deep space as early as late August, the agency announced today. The Verge reports: NASA says it has placeholder dates for August 29th, September 2nd, and September 5th for the rocket's debut, though there is still plenty of work left to do on the vehicle between now and then. NASA officials stressed that they are not committing to any of these dates at the moment, but the announcement puts the rocket closer than it's ever been to its launch. The SLS has been in development for roughly a decade, and its inaugural launch date has been an ever-moving target. NASA originally planned to launch as early as 2017, but schedule delays, development mishaps, and poor management have caused the rocket's debut to slip again and again.

But after conducting a mostly full dress rehearsal with the rocket back in June, NASA is in the development end game, and an actual launch looms on the horizon. A more solid launch date should come closer to actual liftoff. "We'll make the agency commitment at the flight readiness review, just a little over a week before launch," NASA's Jim Free, associate administrator for exploration systems development, said during a press conference. "But these are the dates that the team is working to and have a plan to."

If NASA rolls out SLS to the launchpad in mid-August but cannot launch by September 5th, then the rocket's liftoff could see a significant delay. It all has to do with the SLS's flight termination system, which is used to destroy the rocket if something goes catastrophically wrong during the launch and the vehicle starts to veer off course. Teams must fully test the flight termination system before launch, and that work can only be done inside the VAB. Once the SLS is rolled out from the VAB, there is a 20-day time limit for the flight termination system before it has to be tested again. That means the rocket has to launch within 20 days of its rollout, or it must be returned to the VAB so that the flight termination system can get checked out again. That testing takes time, so if SLS is forced to come back to the VAB after rolling out in August, chances are it wouldn't be ready to fly until late October.

Using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has detected two new extrasolar planets. Phys.Org reports: The newfound alien worlds, designated TOI-5152 b and TOI-5153 b, are the size of Jupiter but about three times more massive than the solar system's biggest planet. [...] TOI-5152 b has a radius of about 1.07 Jupiter radii and is approximately three times more massive than Jupiter. It orbits its parent star every 54.19 days, at a distance of some 0.31 AU from it. The planet's equilibrium temperature was measured to be 688 K. The host TOI-5152 is a G1-type star nearly two times larger than the sun, located about 1,200 light years away from the Earth. Its age is estimated to be between 1.4 and 6.8 billion years.

TOI-5153 b has a mass of 3.26 Jupiter masses, while its radius was estimated to be 1.06 Jupiter radii. The orbital period of this exoplanet was measured to be 20.33 days and its distance to the host is nearly 0.16 AU. The astronomers calculated that the equilibrium temperature of TOI-5153 b is at a level of 906 K. The parent star is of spectral type F8. It is about 40% larger than the sun and is assumed to be 5.4 billion years old. The distance to this planetary system is about 1,270 light years. Therefore, TOI-5152 b and TOI-5153 b are warm and massive Jupiter-sized alien worlds. The astronomers noted that they are both metal-enriched and their heavy element content is consistent with the mass-metallicity relation of gas giants. Given that the two planets orbit moderately bright stars, the authors of the paper added that they are ideal targets for additional observations. The findings have been reported on the arXiv pre-print repository.

"NASA astronauts will go back to riding Russian rockets under an agreement announced Friday," reports the Associated Press, "and Russian cosmonauts will catch lifts to the International Space Station with SpaceX beginning this fall." The agreement ensures that the space station will always have at least one American and Russian on board to keep both sides of the orbiting outpost running smoothly, according to NASA and Russian officials. The swap had long been in the works and was finalized despite tensions over Moscow's war in Ukraine, a sign of continuing Russia-U.S. cooperation in space....

No money will exchange hands under the agreement, according to NASA....

Friday's news came just hours after the blustery chief of the Russian space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, was replaced by President Vladimir Putin, although the move did not appear to have any connection to the crew swap. Rogozin was expected to be given a new post.
CBS News explains the NASA-Roscosmos agreement: "The station was designed to be interdependent and relies on contributions from each space agency to function," the NASA statement said. "No one agency has the capability to function independent of the others..."

Russia provides the propellant and thrusters, either on the station or visiting Progress cargo ships, to change the station's orbit and offset the effects of atmospheric drag. NASA provides the bulk of the lab's electrical power, the massive gyroscopes that help maintain the station's orientation and a station-wide computer and communications network.

Russian cosmonauts are not trained to operate U.S. systems and vice versa, meaning at least one astronaut and one cosmonaut must be aboard at all times. If either side pulled out, the other likely would have to depart as well, or quickly come up with alternative systems.
"NASA wants to operate the space station through 2030," adds CBS, "but Russian cooperation is required. And it's not yet known whether Russia will go along."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: [N]ew research from the University of California, Irvine reports that trees in California's mountain ranges and open spaces are dying from wildfires and other pressures -- and fewer new trees are filling the void. "The forests are not keeping up with these large fires," said study co-author James Randerson, the Ralph J. and Carol M. Cicerone Professor of Earth system science at UCI. Across the entire state, tree cover area has declined 6.7 percent since 1985. "These are big changes in less than four decades," he said. It's the first time that researchers have been able to measure tree population declines in California, and attribute the changes to such pressures as wildfires, drought stress and logging.

For the study, the UCI-led team used satellite data from the USGS and NASA's Landsat mission to study vegetation changes between 1985 and 2021. They found that one of the starkest declines in tree cover was in Southern California, where 14 percent of the tree population in local mountain ranges vanished, potentially permanently. The rate and scale of decline varies across the state. Tree cover in the Sierra Nevada, for instance, stayed relatively stable until around 2010, then began dropping precipitously. The 8.8 percent die-off in the Sierra coincided with a severe drought from 2012 to 2015, followed by some of the worst wildfires in the state's history, including the Creek Fire in 2020.

Fortunately "in the north, there's plenty of recovery after fire," said [Jonathan Wang, a postdoctoral researcher in Randerson's research group, who led the study published in AGU Advances], perhaps because of the region's higher rainfall and cooler temperatures. But even there, high fire years in 2018, 2020 and 2021 have taken a visible toll. The tree decline has also affected carbon storage abilities in the state, said Randerson, who added that the next step is to precisely quantify the impact on forests' ability to absorb anthropogenic carbon dioxide.

Dmitry Rogozin, the blustering head of Russia's state space corporation, Roscosmos, is out of the position following a big shake-up in the Russian government. From a report: He is being replaced by Yury Borisov, Russian deputy prime minister of space and defense, bringing an end to Rogozin's dynamic reign as general director of the country's space program. Rogozin has been in charge of Roscosmos since his appointment as director general in 2018, though prior to that, he was deputy prime minister since 2011, overseeing space and defense. He's been a controversial figure for most of that tenure, resulting in strained relations with NASA -- Russia's largest partner in space. Rogozin was sanctioned by the United States in 2014 and barred from entering the country due to his time as a deputy prime minister during Russia's annexation of Crimea.

As the head of Roscosmos, Rogozin became known for making wildly outlandish statements and threats, many of which put NASA in rather uncomfortable positions. His bombast got renewed focus when Russia began its invasion of Ukraine this year, prompting Rogozin to go into overdrive and make ludicrous claims that many interpreted as threats against NASA and the US / Russian space partnership. For instance, at the start of the war, Rogozin seemed to hint that Roscosmos might pull out of the International Space Station partnership and cause the ISS to come crashing down to Earth. And, after declaring that Russia would no longer supply rocket engines to the United States, Rogozin said NASA astronauts could use "broomsticks" to get to orbit.

David Matthews writes via Nature: See whether this sounds familiar: you build a piece of software to solve a research question. But when you move on to the next project, there's no one to maintain it. As it ages, it becomes obsolete, and the next academic to tackle a similar problem finds themselves having to reinvent the wheel. [...] Now, a funding initiative hopes to help ease that burden. [...] In January, Schmidt Futures, a science and technology-focused philanthropic organization founded by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy, launched the Virtual Institute for Scientific Software (VISS), a network of centers across four universities in the United States and the United Kingdom. Each institution will hire around five or six engineers, says Stuart Feldman, Schmidt Futures' chief scientist, with funding typically running for five years and being reviewed annually. Overall, Schmidt Futures is putting US$40 million into the project, making it among the largest philanthropic investments in this area. The aim is to overcome a culture of relative neglect in academia for open-source scientific software, Feldman says, adding that support for software engineering is "a line item, just like fuel" at organizations such as NASA. "It's only in the university research lab environment where this is ancillary," he says. [...]

Those setting up VISS centers say Schmidt Futures' steady, relatively long-term funding will help them to overcome a range of problems endemic to academic software. Research grants rarely provide for software development, and when they do, the positions they fund are seldom full-time and long-term. "If you've got all of this fractional effort, it's really hard to hire people and provide them with a real career path," says Andrew Connolly, an astronomer who is also helping to set up the Washington centre. What's more, software engineers tend to be scattered and isolated across a university. "Peer development and peer community is really important to those types of positions," says Stone. "And that would be extraordinarily rare in academia." To counter this, VISS centers hope to create cohesive, stable teams that can learn from one another. [...]

Dario Taraborelli, who helps to coordinate another privately funded scientific-software project at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) in California, says that such initiatives fill a key gap in the scientific-software ecosystem, because funding agencies too often fail to prioritize crucial software infrastructure. Although there are now "substantial" grants dedicated to creating software, he says, there's precious little funding available to maintain what is built. Computer scientist Alexander Szalay, who is helping to set up a VISS centre at Johns Hopkins, agrees, noting that very few programs get to a point where enough researchers use and update them to remain useful. "They don't survive this 'Valley of Death,'" he says. "The funding stops when they actually develop the software prototype."

"On Monday, July 11, President Joe Biden released one of the James Webb Space Telescope's first images in a preview event at the White House in Washington," reports NASA in a press release. The full set of Webb's first full-color images and spectroscopic data will be released tomorrow on Tuesday, July 12 at 10:30 a.m. (14:30 UTC). You can watch the live broadcast of the unveiling here. From the report: This first image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb's First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail. Thousands of galaxies -- including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared -- have appeared in Webb's view for the first time. This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length by someone on the ground.

Released one by one, the first images from the world's largest and most powerful space telescope will demonstrate Webb at its full power, ready to begin its mission to unfold the infrared universe. The first images will be added to this page as they are released.

In October 2020, the agency's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft nearly sank into the surface of the rubbly asteroid while picking up rocks for shipment to Earth in 2023, team members revealed Thursday (July 7). The spacecraft only escaped getting stuck or sinking into oblivion within Bennu by firing its thrusters at the right moment. Space.com reports: "We expected the surface to be pretty rigid," principal investigator Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, told Space.com. "We saw a giant wall of debris flying away from the sample site. For spacecraft operators, it was really frightening." Now that the spacecraft (more formally known as Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) is safely on its way back to our planet to deliver its precious cargo, scientists are digging into the science implications of the dramatic moment.

"It turns out that the particles making up Bennu's exterior are so loosely packed and lightly bound to each other that they act more like a fluid than a solid," Lauretta said in a University of Arizona statement. That structure is why the OSIRIS-REx sampling probe had such a close call, he and his colleagues determined. The loose surface, made up of particles jostling against each other like plastic balls in a children's play area, has implications for how asteroids were formed and also for planetary defense techniques to protect against potential rogue space rocks coming near our planet, NASA added in a second statement.

On Wednesday evening NASA released a "test" image from the telescope that suggests the forthcoming scientific images and data will be spectacular. Ars Technica reports: The release of the test photo, which NASA casually says is "among the deepest images of the Universe ever taken," almost feels like a flex because it is so good for a throw-away engineering image. The space agency collected the image in late May during a week-long stability test intended to demonstrate the capabilities of the telescope's Fine Guidance Sensor. This instrument helps Webb find and lock onto astronomical targets, and it was built by the Canadian Space Agency.

"The resulting engineering test image has some rough-around-the-edges qualities to it," NASA said in a news release. "It was not optimized to be a science observation; rather, the data was taken to test how well the telescope could stay locked onto a target, but it does hint at the power of the telescope. It carries a few hallmarks of the views Webb has produced during its postlaunch preparations. Bright stars stand out with their six, long, sharply defined diffraction spikes-- an effect due to Webb's six-sided mirror segments. Beyond the stars, galaxies fill nearly the entire background." Ars notes that we will see the public release of the first science images from the James Webb Space Telescope in just five days, beginning at 10:30 am ET (14:30 UTC).

Tuesday Ars Technica reported that "after more than a decade and more than $20 billion in funding, NASA and its litany of contractors are very close to declaring the 111-meter tall rocket ready for its debut launch." Long-time Slashdot reader added "It seems silly saying SLS will launch 'in just two months' for a rocket that was supposed to have first flown in 2016, but here we are."

From Ars Technica's report: On June 20, NASA successfully counted the rocket down to T-29 seconds during a pre-launch fueling test. Although they did not reach T-9 seconds, as was the original goal, the agency's engineers collected enough data to satisfy the requisite information to proceed toward a launch.

During a pair of news conferences last week, NASA officials declined to set a launch target for the mission. However, in an interview Tuesday with Ars, NASA's senior exploration official, Jim Free, said the agency is working toward a launch window of August 23 to September 6. "That's the one we're targeting," Free said. "We'd be foolish not to target that right now. We made incredible progress last week."

Next up is rolling the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft back to the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center for final launch preparations, including arming the flight termination system. A team of technicians and engineers will also replace a seal on a "quick disconnect" where a hydrogen leak was observed during fuel loading.... [W]orkers have made their plans to process the vehicle during a relatively quick turnaround. "That group knows exactly what they need to do when we get back," he said. "I don't think we're stretching ourselves to get there. We're probably pushing ourselves a little bit, but we're not going to do something stupid." On this timeline, the SLS rocket could roll back to the launch pad in less than two months.
Friday the Register reported that the rocket's rollback encountered "a delay caused by concerns over the crawlerway" — that is, the 4.2-mile (6.8 km) road of rocks: The massive transporter used to move the Space Launch System between Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) and launchpad requires a level pathway and teams have been working on the inclined pathway leading to the launchpad where the rocket currently resides to ensure there is an even distribution of rocks to support the mobile launcher and rocket.
But NASASpaceflight.com reported that the roll back actually happened on Saturday — apparently taking ten hours and 18 minutes, "slightly faster than the expected travel time of 11 hours....

"After returning to the VAB, SLS has another six to eight weeks of final launch preparations ahead of the rollout for the debut mission. This still makes the planned launch window possible, although the margins are slim."

CNN reports that a professor and his students at Stanford's Autonomous Systems Lab have received "phase II" funding from NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program (which supports space robotics research) after proving the feasibility of their plan for robots to crawl through space caves. "The team will use the next two years to work on 3D simulations, a robot prototype, develop strategies that help the robot avoid risk, and test out [their cave robot] in a realistic mission environment — likely a cave site in New Mexico or California."

One of the students explains to CNN that "Caves are risky environments, but they're scientifically interesting. Our idea for this robot is to go far before people would get there to do interesting science and scope out the area."

CNN explains why space caves are so crucial: New research suggests that the best chance of finding past or present evidence of life on Mars requires going below its surface — at least 6.6 feet (2 meters) below. Mars has an incredibly thin atmosphere, which means that the surface of the red planet is bombarded by high energy radiation from space, and that could quickly degrade substances like amino acids that provide fragile evidence of life. Those harsh surface conditions also present a challenge for astronauts, which is one reason scientists have suggested that caves on other planets could be the key to future exploration. Vast cave systems on the moon and Mars could act as shelters for future space travelers.

Caves could also contain resources like water, reveal more about the history of a planet — and be havens for evidence of microbial life. On Earth, there are a varied range of cave systems, many of which remain unexplored, and they support diverse groups of microorganisms. But caves are dangerous — and since we've never peered inside a Martian cave, it's difficult to know what to expect.
The cave robot would presumably to be equipped with cameras, microscopes and LIDAR remote sensing, and the team envisions it will be tethered to a power-supplying rover on the surface.

One team member even told CNN the robots could be adapted to perform maintenance and upkeep on the planned "Gateway" lunar outpost between Earth and the moon.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The short version of this story is that skywatchers led by Bill Gray had been tracking an object for months that, based on their calculations, would soon impact the moon. It was obviously a piece of rocket trash (rockets produce a ton of trash), but no one stepped up to say "yes, that's ours, sorry about that." Based on their observations and discussions, these self-appointed (though by no means lacking in expertise) object trackers determined that it was likely a piece of a SpaceX launch vehicle from 2015. But SpaceX didn't cop to it, and after a while Gray and others, including NASA, decided it was more likely to be the 2014 Chang'e 5-T1 launch out of China. China denied this is the case, saying the launch vehicle in question burned up on reentry.

Maybe they're telling the truth; maybe they don't want to be responsible for the first completely inadvertent lunar impact in history. Other spacecraft have struck the moon, but it was on purpose or part of a botched landing (in other words, the impact was intentional, just a little harder than expected) -- not just a wayward piece of space junk. Perhaps we'll never know, and really, that's the weirdest part of all. With hundreds of terrestrial telescopes and radars, space-based sensor networks and cameras pointing every which way -- and that's just the space monitoring we know about! -- it seems amazing that a whole rocket stage managed to sit in orbit for six or seven years, eventually getting all the way to the moon, without being identified.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Scientists at top universities in China propose sending a spacecraft powered by nuclear fission to orbit Neptune -- the outermost planet in our solar system -- in 2030. Astronomers have not yet been able to look at Uranus and Neptune in much detail. The best data collected so far comes from NASA's Voyager 2, the only spacecraft to have flown by the big blue orbs way back in 1986 and 1989. [...] The challenges involved are considerable. The outer solar system is cold, dark, and cruel. Spacecraft flying far from the Sun cannot rely on solar power, and need other sources of energy to maintain steady orbits and keep their instruments from freezing.

The Chinese authors envisioned a spacecraft with a mass up to 3,000 kilograms powered by a nuclear fission reactor at one end. It would also carry four smaller satellites -- two to study Neptune's atmosphere and another two to probe Triton, its largest moon, The Planetary Society first reported. Triton is an odd object -- it orbits in the opposite direction to its host planet, is geologically active, and may harbor liquid oceans beneath its icy crust. The best time to launch such a spacecraft would be 2030, the scientists reckoned. It could fly aboard China National Space Administration's Long March 5 rocket, and would reach Neptune a decade later after flying by the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn.

Martian rock samples collected by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover show signs of key ingredients for life as we know it on Earth. Space.com reports: The venerable Curiosity Rover drilled samples from Gale crater, the site of an ancient lake on Mars. Using these samples, scientists were able, for the first time, to measure the total amount of organic carbon in Martian rocks, according to a statement from NASA. Organic carbon, which is carbon bound to a hydrogen atom, is a prerequisite for organic molecules created and used by all known forms of life. However, organic carbon can also come from non-living sources, such as meteorites and volcanic eruptions. While previous studies have detected organic carbon in smaller quantities in Martian rock samples, the new measurements provide insight into the total amount of carbon in organic compounds.

"Total organic carbon is one of several measurements [or indices] that help us understand how much material is available as feedstock for prebiotic chemistry and potentially biology," Jennifer Stern, lead author of the study and a space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in the statement. "We found at least 200 to 273 parts per million of organic carbon. This is comparable to or even more than the amount found in rocks in very low-life places on Earth, such as parts of the Atacama Desert in South America, and more than has been detected in Mars meteorites."

[...] However, in addition to organic carbon, the researchers identified other signs suggesting Gale crater may have once supported life, including the presence of chemical energy sources, and chemical compounds such as oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur and low acidity. "Basically, this location would have offered a habitable environment for life, if it ever was present," Stern said in the statement. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A small NASA-financed spacecraft launched from New Zealand on Tuesday, kicking off the space agency's plans to send astronauts back to the moon in a few years. From a report: The spacecraft, called CAPSTONE, is about the size of a microwave oven. It will study a specific orbit where NASA plans to build a small space station for astronauts to stop at before and after going to the moon's surface. At 9:55 p.m. local time (5:55 a.m. Eastern time), a 59-foot-tall rocket carrying CAPSTONE lifted off from a launchpad along the eastern coast of New Zealand. Although the mission is gathering information for NASA, it is owned and operated by a private company, Advanced Space, based in Westminster, Colo.

For a spacecraft headed to the moon, CAPSTONE is inexpensive, costing just under $30 million including the launch by Rocket Lab, a U.S.-New Zealand company. The first two stages of Electron rocket placed CAPSTONE into an elliptical orbit around Earth. For this mission, Rocket Lab essentially added a third stage that will methodically raise the altitude of the spacecraft over the next six days. At that point, CAPSTONE will head on its way to the moon, taking a slow but efficient path, arriving on Nov. 13.

"China's Mars sample return mission aims to collect samples from the Red Planet and deliver them to Earth in 2031, or two years ahead of a NASA and ESA joint mission," reports SpaceNews: Lifting off in late 2028... the complex, multi-launch mission will have simpler architecture in comparison with the joint NASA-ESA project, with a single Mars landing and no rovers sampling different sites. However, if successful, it would deliver to Earth the first collected Martian samples; an objective widely noted as one of the major scientific goals of space exploration....

The mission will build on the Mars entry, descent and landing technologies and techniques demonstrated by Tianwen-1 in May 2021, as well as the regolith sampling, automated lunar orbit rendezvous and docking, and high velocity atmospheric reentry success achieved by the 2020 Chang'e-5 lunar sample return mission.... Landing on Mars would take place around September 2029. Sampling techniques will include surface sampling, drilling and mobile intelligent sampling, potentially using a four-legged robot.

The ascent vehicle will consist of two stages, using either solid or liquid propulsion, and will be required to reach a speed of 4.5 kilometers per second, according to the presentation. After rendezvous and docking with the waiting orbiter, the spacecraft will depart Mars orbit in late October 2030 for a return to Earth in July 2031.

Sun Zezhou [chief designer of the Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter and rover mission], added that the Tianwen-1 orbiter will conduct an aerobraking test in Mars orbit later this year as part of the sample return mission preparation.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm for sharing the story!

The grave of a rocket body that slammed into the moon more than three months ago has been found. Space.com reports: Early this year, astronomers determined that a mysterious rocket body was on course to crash into the lunar surface on March 4. Their calculations suggested that the impact would occur inside Hertzsprung Crater, a 354-mile-wide (570 kilometers) feature on the far side of the moon. Their math was on the money, it turns out. Researchers with NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission announced last night (June 23) that the spacecraft had spotted a new crater in Hertzsprung -- almost certainly the resting place of the rogue rocket.

Actually, LRO imagery shows that the impact created two craters, an eastern one about 59 feet (18 meters) wide superimposed over a western one roughly 52 feet (16 m) across. "The double crater was unexpected and may indicate that the rocket body had large masses at each end," Mark Robinson of Arizona State University, the principal investigator of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), wrote in an update last night. "Typically a spent rocket has mass concentrated at the motor end; the rest of the rocket stage mainly consists of an empty fuel tank," he added. "Since the origin of the rocket body remains uncertain, the double nature of the crater may help to indicate its identity."

As Robinson noted, the moon-crashing rocket remains mysterious. Early speculation held that it was likely the upper stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) mission for NASA and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in February 2015. But further observations and calculations changed that thinking, leading many scientists to conclude that the rocket body was probably part of the Long March 3 booster that launched China's Chang'e 5T1 mission around the moon in October 2014. China has denied that claim.

The fourth and most recent attempt at a full launch rehearsal of NASA's Space Launch System went reasonably well, and despite some lingering issues and uncertainties, the agency is sending the rocket back to the hangar for final preparations in advance of its first flight. That inaugural launch will represent Artemis 1, the first mission in NASA's Artemis lunar program. Gizmodo reports: In a press release today, NASA -- to my surprise -- said it is done testing SLS after reviewing data from the recent launch rehearsal. That another full-blown rehearsal would be required seemed likely to me on account of an unresolved hydrogen leak linked to a faulty quick-connect fitting, which subsequently prevented ground teams from practicing the fully scheduled launch countdown on Monday. The goal was to reach T-10 seconds, but the launch controllers decided to quit the rehearsal at T-29 seconds for safety reasons. "NASA plans to return SLS and Orion to the pad for launch in late August," says the release. "NASA will set a specific target launch date after replacing hardware associated with the leak."

Despite the hydrogen leak and the incomplete countdown, Monday's wet dress did appear to go well. The ground teams finally managed to fully load SLS with propellants. Upwards of 755,000 gallons of cryogenic liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen were supplied to the rocket's two stages, which the teams had failed to do during the first three attempts. What's more, all of the issues experienced during the first three wet dress rehearsals appear to have been resolved. The Orion spacecraft, currently sitting atop the rocket, also performed well during the test. Said Tom Whitmeyer, NASA's exploration systems manager, during a media teleconference on Tuesday: "We think that we had a really successful rehearsal," adding that there is "relative risk" is running a fifth wet dress, with the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket standing fully exposed on the launch pad.