How far do you think a 90s-era Mac can go? Actually, it can go to Mars. NASA’s rover Perseverance, which reached the Red Planet on February 18, is powered by the PowerPC 750 processor, the same chip that is inside the iconic 1998 iMac G3.
Read More
The launch provider that has made themselves famous for launching dedicated missions for SmallSats on their Electron rocket is moving up to a new market. In a video Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck announced they are building a medium-class launch vehicle that will be able to launch not just heavier and larger satellites but also in the future crew.
Expand Expanding Close
Brazil is about to launch its first fully developed and operated satellite in the country. Amazonia 1, as it’s called, is scheduled to be launched into space in the early hours of this Sunday morning in Brazil (or Saturday night if you’re in the US), and you can watch the launch live on the web.
Expand Expanding Close
In celebration of Black History Month Vice President Kamala Harris was invited on board to the ISS to speak virtually with Astronaut Victor Glover about what it is like to be in space.
Expand Expanding Close
The new heavy-lift launcher was supposed to take its first flight later this year but that was taking into account they would get the recent NSSL contracts from the Department of Defense which ended up going to SpaceX and ULA. Now the company has revised its plan for when it will debut its new launcher.
Expand Expanding Close
After a relatively quiet week at SpaceX’s Starship facility in Boca Chica, Texas we finally got to see Starship SN10 come to life for a quick static fire on Test Stand A. The vehicle has been out on the pad for about a month now, being moved from the manufactory facility while SN9 was still on Test Stand B.
Expand Expanding Close
Spaceflight Inc has been the go-to company for getting your payload into space for the past 10 years. They went from a scrappy start-up trying to find excess space in missions to fly their customers to launching dedicated rideshare missions tailored for their customers. We were able to speak with their CEO, Curt Blake, and learn more about how they operate.
Expand Expanding Close
Join Space Explored’s Seth Kurkowski and Jared Base this week as they discuss NASA landing its newest rover on the surface of Mars, the newest crewmate to join the Inspiration4 mission to space, and an update to Starship progress in Boca Chica.
After battling cancer at the very hospital she now works at to help other children battling cancer, Hayley Arceneaux is already an inspiration to us all. Now she will get to continue her amazing life story by partaking in the first all civilian mission to space.
Expand Expanding Close
With the recent landing of Perseverance on the 18th and the first-of-its-kind video release on the 22nd, we are getting access to interplanetary imagery rivaled only by the Juno mission and its JunoCam. The website for the Perseverance rover will be the home for all the pictures, videos, and sounds taken by the rover for the public to view.
There are 2 picture sections on the site: Images and Raw Images. The Images section will contain all the NASA-created and edited content such as graphics and edited Perseverance pictures. The Raw Images section contains exactly what the name entails, raw images. You will find that most of these pictures are in black and white while some others may be in color but have a strange hue to them. This is to be expected as little to no editing should have been applied.
As of writing this, there are currently 4,796 total images in the Raw Images section. That’s a lot to go through. You may notice that there are some very small pictures along with normal-sized pictures. That is because they also put the thumbnail pictures they get from the rover up on the site too.
Thumbnail pictures are the low-resolution copies that they get from the rover first before getting the much larger normal resolution files downlinked. You can filter out these thumbnail images using the filters in the sidebar if you want to focus on the normal resolution images instead.
With these raw images, you can create your own edits of Perseverance pictures. I use Adobe Photoshop 2021 to create my edits but you can also create edits in GIMP, a free photoshop alternative. You will need to use the black and white frames that are individual color bands (Red, Green, and Blue) to construct a full-color image.
Here are some of the edits I have made using Photoshop, Astronomy Tools Action Set (For constructing the RGB image and contrast enhancement), and Topaz Labs GigaPixel AI (for AI image up-scaling)
Help others find us by following on Apple News and Google News. Be sure to check us out on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, join our Discord!
After yesterday’s mind-blowing Entry Descent and Landing (EDL) video reveal and dump of raw images for the public to gloss over, some have been looking closer at the pattern used on the parachute. While most parachutes use special designs, JPL has been know to hide secret messages all around their spacecraft and in less than a day Redditors decoded it.
Expand Expanding Close
After 3 days of downloading data from the rover via JPL’s Deep Space Network NASA finally shared with us the videos that documented the entry descent and landing process that took place on Mars last Thursday.
Expand Expanding Close
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars drone recently landed on Mars with the Perseverance rover. It is now preparing to take its first flight on the Martian planet. The downlink was received shortly after the landing, indicating the helicopter and base station are working correctly.
Read More
With NASA’s Perseverance rover was taking up much of the limelight last week, we didn’t see much in terms of Starship activity other than lots of improvements to the landing facility and further work on future Starship vehicles but that might change this week.
Expand Expanding Close
One of the craziest experiments a part of the Mars 2020 mission, Ingenuity the small helicopter attached to the belly of the Perseverance rover, has messaged home to controllers at JPL. It saying that it and its base station are in good health on Friday. This is the first transmissions teams have gotten of the helicopter since it landed on the surface of Mars the day before, an important step in getting the helicopter ready to fly.
Expand Expanding Close
Richard Branson’s satellite launcher Virgin Orbit has selected their first Chief Operating Officer to help get the company ready for commercial operations after the success of their Demo 2 mission. This mission successfully deployed 10 NASA payloads from NASA’s Launch Services Program into orbit around Earth bringing them officially online as a company capable to send satellites into orbit.
Expand Expanding Close
With less than a day on its life on Mars Perseverance has already wowed us with its first still image during one of the most difficult and dangerous times of the descent. Like its twin rover Curiosity, cameras captured stop-motion video of the rover being lowered by the Skycrane. Today we get the first glimpse of what it will look like.
Expand Expanding Close
Almost a decade of development and waiting has finally led to the moment the world has been waiting for. NASA’s Mars 2020 mission was launched onto its journey to Mars back in July of 2020 and teams have monitored its safety all the way there. Now the rover and teams of researchers back on earth get to start looking for signs of life on Mars.
Expand Expanding Close
Spaceflight Inc, one of the big players in launch services is supporting Brazil in launching their first Earth observation satellite that was completely designed, built, tested, and will be operated in the country. It plans to launch by the end of February on top of India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV).
Expand Expanding Close
Not too often do we get to witness a brand new rover land on another planet, Curiosity landed on Mars back in 2012. Today NASA will be providing a wide range of ways to watch it land no matter what your age or preferences.
Expand Expanding Close
Last July NASA’s newest Mars rover lifted off from SLC-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This began its roughly 6-month journey to the Red Planet and tomorrow will bring the long awaiting landing of the rover onto the surface, reusing the similar Skycrane maneuver used by its twin rover Curiosity.
With Mars being about 200 million kilometers (124 million miles) away from Earth, it isn’t possible to control Perseverance in real-time from the ground. It will take about 11 minutes to know if the rover landed safely, by the time teams on the ground see it start it has entered the atmosphere, the rover has already landed one way or another.
Expand Expanding Close
Today California-based small satellite launcher Astra announced that Benjamin Lyon is joining their team as their new Chief Engineer. Lyon leaves his position as Apple’s Senior Director of the Special Projects Group, the team that brought the company many of its greatest innovations. According to Bloomberg, Lyon most recently worked on Apple’s car team.
Expand Expanding Close
The secretive rocket company created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has been developing rockets to compete in both the space tourism and commercial launch markets named New Glenn after the first American to reach orbit, John Glenn.
The rocket has been in development for almost 9 years and since then we’ve only seen rare glimpses of the current stages of development. They plan to make their debut launch of the rocket later this year and we’ve luckily got a glimpse of what will be used to test their new launchpad for this coming flight.
Expand Expanding Close
Apple is launching its first podcast series connected to an original series on its Apple TV+ video streaming service. For All Mankind: The Official Podcast is hosted by actor Krys Marshall, who plays astronaut Danielle Poole on the show. The weekly podcast series will include interviews with more cast members, space experts, and former astronauts.
Read More