Space Exploration

After evaluating three commercial designs for new Artemis moon landers, NASA on Friday awarded a single $2.9 billion contract to SpaceX, rejecting more expensive proposals from a team led by Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and another led by Dynetics.

The contract will cover one unpiloted test flight from lunar orbit down to the surface and back again, and one piloted flight carrying two astronauts launched to the moon in a Lockheed Martin Orion capsule atop NASA's Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket.

Russian space agency Roscosmos says it has signed an agreement with China's National Space Administration to develop research facilities on the moon's surface, in orbit or both. Both countries' space agencies say the facilities will be available for use by other nations.

The news comes as Russia prepares to celebrate the 60th anniversary of its first-ever crewed space flight.

SpaceX dared another test flight with a Starship on Tuesday (Texas time). The launch and flight of the SN10 were successful. The landing also looked successful at first, but then the rocket exploded. The cause could be methane leaking from the tanks of the brake engines.

According to the Orbital Assembly Corporation (OAC), the construction of the private space station named Voyager is expected to start in 2025.

The current design features a large ring structure that is planned to spin in order to create artificial moon-like gravity.

Planned for 2021-2024 is the construction of multiple tools to construct the space station in orbit.

Cyanobacteria could thrive excellently even under the inhospitable conditions on Mars, produce oxygen and thus enable astronauts to survive self-sufficiently in the future. This is the conclusion reached by Humboldt Fellow Cyprien Verseux from the Center for Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) at the University of Bremen. He and his team now present some of their findings in the scientific journal "Frontiers in Microbiology".

Cyanobacteria are known primarily as blue-green algae, which can proliferate in lakes in summer, the scientists explain. On Mars, their full potential comes into play, as they produce oxygen through photosynthesis. This ability is found in almost all plants, but cyanobacteria can also grow on the basis of the nutrients that are present on Mars

NASA's Perseverance rover successfully touched down on Mars Thursday afternoon, as part of one of the agency's most ambitious deep-space missions to search for signs of ancient life on the red planet.

More than a century after the first motorized flight on Earth, such a maneuver is soon to take place on another planet for the first time. As part of the "Mars 2020" mission, the U.S. space agency Nasa plans to bring its Mars rover "Perseverance" together with the ultra-light helicopter "Ingenuity" to the Red Planet on Thursday (Feb. 18). There, "Ingenuity" is to fly through the Martian atmosphere. This is a particular challenge because the Martian atmosphere is only one percent as dense as the Earth's atmosphere.

"Ingenuity" is actually more like a drone. Nasa engineers had to make the mini-helicopter as light as possible so that it could take off in the extremely thin Martian atmosphere. It weighs just 1.8 kilograms and consists of four feet, a missile, and two propellers. The propellers rotate 2400 times per minute, about five times faster than a normal helicopter.

"Ingenuity" is expected to complete up to five flights over the surface of Mars. The aircraft can ascend up to five meters and fly up to 300 meters. However, the first test will cover a much shorter distance. Each flight can last up to one and a half minutes.

Since it takes about 20 minutes to transmit data from Mars to Earth, "Ingenuity" is not remotely controlled, but flies independently. Nasa issues only basic commands after which "Ingenuity" orients itself with a series of sensors. The results of the flights will not be available until some time later.

Axiom has begun bringing in revenue for its space stations already, with NASA awarding the company a contract to connect one habitable module to the ISS as early as 2024. The seven-year contract has a maximum award value of $140 million, which Suffredini said goes beyond development to include launching and operating the module once connected to the space station. Suffredini said that Axiom has procured the parts of its modules that take the longest to arrive from supplies, with "contracts in place with major providers" and "early design work" completed.

Mars is getting crowded! After being on the space-road for seven months, China's Tianwen-1 probe has successfully entered Mars orbit on Wednesday, just one day after UAE's Hope orbiter and eights days before NASA's Perseverance rover.

"Tianwen-1 is going to orbit, land and release a rover all on the very first try, and coordinate observations with an orbiter," mission managers wrote before launch in the journal Nature Astronomy. "No planetary missions have ever been implemented in this way. If successful, it would signify a major technical breakthrough."

Perseverance is in its home stretch. NASA's Mars rover is scheduled to land on Mars on February 18, almost six months after it started its journey to the red planet.

"I am thrilled to be here today as our countdown to Mars winds down from months to just weeks. Perseverance is closing in on the Red Planet, and our team is preparing for her to touch down in Jezero Crater.," Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, said.

After landing, Perseverance will search for ancient life on Mars on the floor of Jezero.

The proposed Ax-1 mission will use a SpaceX rocket to put three paying customers - American Larry Connor, Canadian Mark Pathy and Israeli Eytan Stibbe - into low-Earth orbit on the space station. Stibbe plans to do experiments for Israeli researchers, working with the Ramon Foundation and Israel's space agency. The crew will be led by former NASA astronaut and space station commander Michael López-Alegría.

Axiom hopes to arrange up to two trips per year, and the company also wants to build its own privately funded space station.

The Japanese company Sumitomo Forestry and the Kyoto University have joined forces to develop what they hope will be the world's first satellites made out of wood by 2023.

As space junk becomes an increasing problem, wooden satellites would burn up without releasing harmful substances into the atmosphere or raining debris on the ground when they plunge back to Earth.

We're going back to the Moon! 18 astronauts, nine of them women, are training for NASA's upcoming Artemis missions to travel to the Moon and, eventually, to Mars. The group includes the first woman who will walk on the lunar surface in 2024.

According to the project manager for the asteroid mission, Dr Yuichi Tsuda, the capsule with asteroid samples has been successfully landed in Australia, and "the capsule collection was perfectly done". The samples will now be analyzed for research purposes in order to gather further information about our solar system.

The Crew Dragon capsule, placed atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, is expected to launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday at 19:49(ET). Three NASA astronauts — Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker — will be joined by Soichi Noguchi, an astronaut with Japan's space agency, JAXA, on the trip.

The flight of four astronauts to the International Space Station in a Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket follows the success of the Demo-2 mission and its historic splashdown. It will also set a few key spaceflight milestones.

Recent experiments aboard the International Space Station have shown that some microbes can harvest valuable rare-earth elements from rocks, even when exposed to microgravity conditions. Microorganisms are already used on Earth to mine economically important elements from rocks, including rare earth elements, used in mobile phones and electronics.

It's unlikely to be economically viable to mine these elements in space and bring them back to Earth, according to Charles Cockell, a professor of astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics and Astronomy, who led the project.

NASA has successfully contacted the Voyager 2 spacecraft for the first time since March. The Deep Space Station 43 in Canberra, Australia, is the only radio antenna that is able to contact and command the Voyager 2, which is now 43 years old, and has been under maintenance to receive repairs and upgrades since March. Now it has successfully re-contacted the spacecraft and Voyager 2 has confirmed the signal and executed the commands that had been sent.

Work on the radio antenna is expected to wrap up in February.

Unlike previous detections of water in permanently shadowed parts of lunar craters, scientists have now detected the molecule in sunlit regions of the Moon's surface.

Speaking during a virtual teleconference, co-author Casey Honniball, a postdoctoral fellow at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said: "The amount of water is roughly equivalent to a 12-ounce bottle of water in a cubic metre of lunar soil." Her Nasa colleague Jacob Bleacher, from the agency's human exploration directorate, said researchers still needed to understand the nature of the watery deposits.

"It's critical to participate in our democracy," Rubins told AP. "We consider it an honor to be able to vote from space." A 1997 law allows astronauts to cast their vote when in "spaceflight," which is forwarded from Mission control to the space station to the county clerk.

The Finnish company Nokia has announced that they have been awarded a contract by Nasa to build a mobile network on the moon. Initially it will be based on the 4G/LTE technology and later upgraded to 5G.

The network will serve as a foundation for astronauts to make phone calls and send data. Ground stations on Earth will also be able to control devices and vehicles remotely.