A NASA probe designed to gather information about the moon’s atmosphere reached its planned orbit on Wednesday. Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer will circle the moon once every two hours for 100 days to help scientists examine the lunar dust environment, NASA said Thursday. “A thorough understanding of the characteristics of our lunar neighborRead… Read more »
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory will lead a study into the surfaces of asteroids and the moon for NASA as the agency aims to explore those areas with humans and robots. The five-year initiative aims to build on APL’s previous Lunar Science Institute project for NASA that sought to learn more about the geologyRead… Read more »
An experimental communication system on board a NASA lunar probe has used laser pulses to send data back to Earth at speeds of up to 622 megabits per second. The Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration system also works to transmit data at 20 Mbps between a ground station located in New Mexico and the spacecraft inRead… Read more »
NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer has started to orbit around the moon this week and has been protected from effects of the government shutdown, Space.com reports. Miriam Kramer writes LADEE made three elliptical orbits around the Earth, then moved into a higher orbit after each lap around the planet. The moon’s gravity tookRead… Read more »
How many blue planets do you know…and love? Today is the day to celebrate Planet Earth — the one with the atmospheric thin blue line that supports life as we know it. Earth: Thin Blue Line Pretty amazing, when you think about it. Of all the stars and all the galaxies out there, our fragileRead… Read more »
Cross-posted from Wired to Share – In a new book that applies systems thinking to complex government initiatives, “If We Can Put a Man on the Moon … Getting Big Things Done in Government,” authors Bill Eggers and John O’Leary describe the moment that a public initiative translates from design to reality – the momentRead… Read more »
W. Henry Lambright writes an interesting report about Griffin and NASA. A summary of the report is that President George W. Bush told NASA to return to the moon and prepare for manned exploration of Mars. The man he put in charge, Michael Griffin, was a certified rocket scientist with a passion for manned spaceRead… Read more »