The Parker Solar Probe is the stuff of superlatives and marvels. Later this week, it will pass but 5.3 million miles from the sun -- much closer than Mercury or any other spacecraft have ever come -- and it will be traveling at a top speed of 101 miles per second, the fastest human-made object …
NASA Should Build a Grand Observatory Designed to Search For Life Beyond Earth, Top Panel Concludes
NASA should begin developing a mission that can tell us whether life in the near galaxy is abundant, rare or essentially absent, The National Academy of Sciences recommended yesterday. The call for a next Grand Observatory telescope with this ambitious goal represents the first time that the Academy, in its Decadal Survey for Astronomy and …
Metal Mini-Asteroids Detected Passing Near Earth, Offering Potentially Great Science and Maybe Future Mining
Metal asteroids offer something rare in the solar system -- the core of a planet without all the rock that normally surrounds it. Since it is impossible to directly examine a planetary or lunar core if the parent body remains intact, metal-rich asteroids where the upper mantle and crust layers have been lost to a …
A Call To Action on Ensuring That Extraordinary Claims About ET Life Come With Extraordinary Evidence
The global scientific search for signs of life beyond Earth has produced cutting-edge and paradigm-shifting science for several decades now, and it has clearly found eager audiences around the world. This search is a high-priority goal of NASA and other space agencies, as well as institutions, universities and companies. While the successes in this broadly …
Sample Return from Mars Begins in Earnest
For the first time ever, a sample of pulverized rock from another planet has been drilled, collected and stored for eventual delivery to the highest-tech labs on Earth. Yes, a storehouse of rocks were collected on the moon by Apollo astronauts and delivered to Houston, and some small samples of two asteroids and one comet …
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The Many Ways The James Webb Space Telescope Could Fail
When a damaged Apollo 13 and its crew were careening to Earth, mission control director Gene Kranz famously told the assembled NASA team that "failure is not an option." Actually, the actor playing Kranz in the "Apollo 13" movie spoke those words, but by all accounts Kranz and his team lived that phrase, with a …
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Will The Habitable Exoplanet Observatory (HabEx) — Or Something Like It — Emerge As NASA’s Next Great Observatory?
Some time later this summer, it is predicted, the National Academy of Sciences will release its long-awaited Decadal Survey for astrophysics, which is expected to recommend the science and architecture that NASA should embrace for its next "Great Observatory." Many Worlds earlier featured one of the four concepts in the running -- LUVOIR or the …
UFOs, Redux
A U.S. government report found that there was no evidence to conclude that the more than 140 unidentified flying object sightings in recent years involved extraterrestrial beings. The government was unable to determine whether the flying mysteries were atmospheric events distorting readings from sensors, confusions in judging objects in motion, spacecraft from other potential hostile …
China’s Presence in Space Grows and So Do Its Accomplishments
These are heady days for the Chinese space program. On the heels of a successful 2019 mission to the dark side of the moon and the launch of the core of an ambitious low Earth orbit space station, the Chinese National Space Administration has done what only NASA has accomplished before -- landing a rover …
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Novel Sights and Sounds on Mars
The helicopter Ingenuity has now flown three times on Mars and has proven itself to be a dependable (for now) and potentially ground-breaking addition to Mars science. Ingenuity, brought to Mars as part of the Perseverance rover landing, took off early Sunday morning on its third and most ambitious Martian mission yet. The 4-pound …
Many Worlds 