A Mysterious Rock in an Ancient Martian Riverbed NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed in Jezero Crater in 2021, has been on the hunt for signs of past life. In an ancient river channel called Neretva Vallis – once a conduit for water into Jezero’s lake – the rover spotted something unusual last year washingtonpost.com theguardian.com. A flat, fine-grained…
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3I/ATLAS (C/2025 N1 ATLAS) was discovered July 1, 2025 by the ATLAS survey telescope in Chile and is on a hyperbolic, unbound path with eccentricity ~6.2, making it the third confirmed interstellar object after 1I/‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov. Early estimates suggested a diameter of several kilometers, and Hubble data later indicated a nucleus of about 5–6…
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SpaceX Launches & Reusability Milestones On Aug. 27 SpaceX’s Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying 28 Starlink V2 Mini satellites, and its first-stage booster (B1095) successfully returned to SpaceX’s droneship in the Atlantic. Spaceflight reports confirm this landing marks the company’s 400th ocean recovery of a Falcon first stage space.com space.com. The booster had…
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NASA formally ended the Lunar Trailblazer mission on July 31 after a Feb. 26 liftoff, a ~$94 million low-cost orbiter meant to map lunar ice with two novel instruments that lost contact the day after launch and showed misaligned solar panels draining the batteries. NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity marked 13 years on Mars, with software…
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SpaceX launched back-to-back Falcon 9 missions for Starlink within 24 hours: on July 26 at 5:01 a.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral with 28 Starlink satellites and on July 27 at 12:31 a.m. EDT from Vandenberg with 24 Starlinks, with first-stage boosters landing on droneships on their 22nd and 19th flights respectively and the company pushing…
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Over 2,000 senior NASA employees have resigned amid budget cuts, with a potential 25% funding reduction threatening missions, while Sean Duffy, a former congressman and reality TV star, was named interim NASA administrator and serves as both NASA administrator and Secretary of Transportation. An alleged Iranian missile strike destroyed a $15 million U.S. communications radome…
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The space-based solar power (SBSP) concept was proposed in 1968 by Peter Glaser to place satellites in orbit and beam power to Earth. In 2023 Caltech’s Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1) conducted three beaming tests in May, June, and July 2023 using the MAPLE flexible array to show ground reception of orbital power. In June…
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Relay 2 was a NASA experimental communications satellite built by RCA, launched January 21, 1964, atop a Delta B rocket from Cape Canaveral, designed to relay television signals and study Earth’s radiation belts. Ground support for Relay 2 ended by September 1965, and its transmitters began failing, with the first transponder dying on November 20,…
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Relay-2 launched January 21, 1964 from Cape Canaveral as part of NASA’s Relay program to relay television and telemetry signals and study the Van Allen belts. Relay-2 operated 1964–1967, with the first transponder failing on November 20, 1966 and the second on June 9, 1967, after which it was retired. After deactivation, Relay-2 drifted in…
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Parker Solar Probe, launched August 12, 2018 on a Delta IV Heavy, became NASA’s first mission to fly through the Sun’s corona and “touch the Sun” in April 2021 when it crossed the Alfvén critical boundary during its 8th orbit. At its closest approaches Parker reaches about 3.8–4 million miles (6.2 million km) from the…
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