Results tagged “NASA”

NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency have joined to share resources and expertise on three future science missions to Mars. In three separate robotic missions (the first in 2016), both agencies will study the possibility of past life on the Red Planet, as well as test communications relays and other geochemical and biological mysteries. The third mission, in the 2020's, will return to Earth a sample taken from the Martian surface. Canada will co-develop the MATMOS instrument onboard the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter.

Canadians will once again be at the forefront of the ongoing exploration of Mars as it was announced yesterday by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) that they would be contributing to ExoMars mission. Canada's contribution will be the shared development with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the Mars Atmospheric Trace Molecule Occultation Spectrometer (MATMOS) instrument onboard the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. MATMOS is scheduled for launch in 2016.

The wheels and suspension system have been installed on NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity, a key step in assembly and testing of the flight system for the Mars Science Laboratory mission slated to launch next year. The centerpiece of MSL, Curiosity has six wheels and a rocker-bogie suspension system like its smaller predecessors: Spirit, Opportunity and Sojourner. Each wheel has its own drive motor and the corner wheels also have independent steering motors. Unlike earlier Mars rovers, Curiosity will also use its mobility system as landing gear when the mission's rocket-powered descent stage lowers the rover directly onto the Martian surface on a tether in August 2012.

A group of researchers from academia, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and NASA are currently at Pavilion Lake in British Columbia exploring and studying the origin of rare freshwater carbonate rock formations found there. This research not only helps us better understand our knowledge of the earth it prepares for future exploration of the moon and Mars.

NASA's Space Shuttle Atlantis lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center right on time at 2:20 p.m. EDT, rising into a picture-perfect Florida sky and capping a relatively problem-free countdown.

You know it's a quiet mission when the journalists are more focused on milestones than the missile just launched. An hour after the near-flawless dawn flight to space by shuttle Discovery on April 5, the reporters on site talked about this fourth-last flight of the program, that record number of women in space, and the two Japanese meeting face to face for the first time.

The Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee has released it's long awaited report (PDF) and it states that the U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. However if NASA had a less-constrained budget with increasing annual expenditures by approximately $3 billion in real purchasing power they could sustain a viable exploration program.

Former astronauts Steve MacLean of the Canadian Space Agency and Charles Bolden of NASA, heads of their respective space agencies, signed a Framework Agreement in Washington today.

NASA released Thursday newly restored video from the July 20, 1969, live television broadcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk. The release commemorates the 40th anniversary of the first mission to land astronauts on the moon.