Spacecraft
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NASA has lost contact with its Voyager 2 deep-space probe. On July 21, 2023, Mission Control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) sent a series of commands that "inadvertently" caused the robotic spacecraft to turn its antenna away from Earth.
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In cramped spacecraft or space stations, there isn't room to store multiple robots that are each designed for a specific task. The Mori3 system was designed with that fact in mind, as it can be used to create different types of robots as needed.
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ESA is preparing to test a very cool new fold-out heat shield for protecting spacecraft on re-entry. The Pridwen won't burn away like ablative heat shields, and it'll also slow falling satellites down enough to be caught in a hover net.
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NASA's Juno deep space probe has made its closest flyby yet of Jupiter's volatile moon Io. During its 51st orbit of the giant planet, the solar-powered robotic spacecraft came within 22,600 miles (35,500 km) of Io's volcanic surface.
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ESA's Juice Jupiter mission is back on track after Mission Control in Darmstadt, Germany managed to shake loose and deploy the stuck ice-penetrating Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME) antenna that was stuck due to a tiny pin.
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Space startup Vast has announced that it intends to launch what it calls the world's first commercial space station, Haven-1, sometime after August 2025 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the first element of a 100-m (330 ft) rotating station.
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Astronomers are tracking nearby asteroids, but there’s one glaring blindspot in the sky – the Sun. Thankfully, ESA plans to plug the gap soon with NEOMIR, a mission that will give us advance warning of any Earth-bound rocks from that direction.
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Evolution has shaped the load-bearing skeletons of animals over aeons with incredible precision. Now, an accelerated simulation of the evolution process is helping NASA create stronger, lighter parts for its spacecraft projects – in record time.
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Sci-fi fans may recall the bipedal robots from the 1972 film Silent Running, which performed maintenance on the outside of the spaceship. Well, the new MARM robot is reminiscent of them – except it has three limbs, for optimum dexterity and mobility.
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Dark matter remains elusive despite decades of searching. Now physicists have proposed a new experiment that would try to find signals by sending atomic clocks to where dark matter should be at its most dense – right near the Sun.
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With a reported sonic boom, the US Space Force's open-secret X-37B spaceplane returned to Earth on Saturday. The robotic craft touched down at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 5:22 am EST after a record-breaking 908 days in orbit.
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Astronomers have been keenly watching the asteroid Didymos since the historic DART mission successfully crashed a spacecraft into it last month. And now, Hubble has detected something unexpected – the asteroid has sprouted two tails.
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