Helicopter on Mars! NASA webcast teaches kids about Ingenuity’s upcoming 1st flight

NASA’s education team hosted a special webcast for students on Thursday (April 8) to talk about the Mars helicopter Ingenuity and its upcoming first flight on the Red Planet.  The webcast, hosted by Brandon Rodriguez and Taryn Bailey from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, provided an overview of Ingenuity’s historic mission and answered questions submitted by students. If you missed the live webcast, you can watch a replay on the JPL Education YouTube channel at any time.  The 4-lb. (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity helicopter traveled to the Red…

Read More

Soyuz MS-18 crew launches to station 60 years after first human spaceflight

A three-person crew embarked for the International Space Station on Friday (April 9), launching just three days shy of the 60th anniversary of the first human spaceflight. Cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov of Russia’s state space corporation Roscosmos and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei lifted off aboard Russia’s Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft for a three-hour, two-orbit rendezvous with the space station. The Soyuz took flight at 3:42 a.m. EDT (0742 GMT or 12:42 p.m. local time) from Site 31/6 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, near where cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin…

Read More

You can watch a Soyuz rocket launch a US-Russian crew to the International Space Station early Friday

[embedded content] A Russian Soyuz spacecraft will launch an American astronaut and two cosmonauts to the International Space Station early Friday (April 9) — and you can watch it live online. The Soyuz capsule carrying NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov is scheduled to launch atop a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 3:42 a.m. EDT (0742 GMT or 12:42 p.m. local time) on Friday for a quick, three-hour ride to the International Space Station. You can watch the action live here at Space.com,…

Read More