Tag: Missions

Auction offers Neil Armstrong’s reply to NASA engineer’s Apollo 11 mission patch ideas

NeRD

Neil Armstrong was appreciative, but as explained in his handwritten letter, it was too late. The Apollo 11 commander and his crewmates had already arrived at a design to represent the first moon landing. Armstrong’s note and the mission patch proposal that inspired it are up for auction in Goldberg Coins & Collectibles’ Feb. 27 public sale in Los Angeles. The emblem art and first moonwalker‘s reply are part of the Clark C. McClelland collection, an archive of astronaut autographs, cscale rocket models and flown memorabilia from the estate of…

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NASA will beam Super Bowl LIX to orbit for astronauts aboard the International Space Station

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Are you ready to catch the big game? On Sunday (Feb. 9), across the United States and around the world, Americans and American football fans will tune in to watch the top two teams in the National Football League (NFL) go head-to-head in the ultimate post-season game, and even astronauts living in space will have the chance to watch the action live. Sunday evening, the American Football Conference (AFC) champions, the Kansas City Chiefs, will face off against the National Football Conference (NFC) champions, the Philadelphia Eagles, in Super Bowl…

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Putin axes Yuri Borisov, head of Russia’s space agency

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Russia has a new space chief. Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed Yuri Borisov after 2.5 years in charge of the nation’s space agency Roscosmos, The Moscow Times reported today (Feb. 6). His replacement is 39-year-old Dmitry Bakanov, who most recently served as Russia’s deputy transport minister and led the state-backed Gonets satellite communications system from 2011 to 2019. New Roscosmos chief Dmitry Bakanov, at the time deputy minister of transport of the Russian Federation, attends a session on “LET’S GO: Integrated Unmanned Freight Transport Hits the Motorway for the…

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What brand of golf ball did Alan Shepard hit off the moon? The world may never know

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Carlos Villagomez owns a golf ball that he believes was flown to the moon. If indeed it was, he may also hold the answer to a more than 50-year-old bit of trivia that otherwise may be forever lost to time. Villagomez was gifted the ball by Alan Shepard, the first American astronaut to fly into space, fifth human to walk on the moon and the world’s first (and to date, only) lunar golfer. Wrapping up his second of two moonwalks on NASA’s 1971 Apollo 14 mission, Shepard took a swing…

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Perseverance Mars rover finds ‘one-of-a-kind treasure’ on Red Planet’s Silver Mountain

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The Perseverance Mars rover has collected a rock sample on Mars unlike any other it has picked up so far. NASA’s Perseverance rover is currently exploring hills and rocky outcrops along the rim of Jezero Crater, where it has been collecting rock samples to reveal the area’s geological history. This week, NASA announced that the robotic explorer picked up a “one-of-a-kind treasure” in the form of a 1.1-inch (2.9-centimeter) rock sample from an area known as “Silver Mountain.” “My 26th sample, known as ‘Silver Mountain,’ has textures unlike anything we’ve…

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Hubble Space Telescope spots a spectacular Bullseye in deep space (image)

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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope managed to capture an incredible image of a galaxy that looks an awful lot like a bullseye. “This was a serendipitous discovery,” said Imad Pasha, the lead researcher and a doctoral student at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in a statement. “I was looking at a ground-based imaging survey and when I saw a galaxy with several clear rings, I was immediately drawn to it. I had to stop to investigate it.” In reality, this striking pattern formed 50 million years ago, when a small…

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NASA Presses Forward Search for VIPER Moon Rover Partner

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NASA’s VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) sits outside a testing chamber after completing its thermal vacuum testing in the fall of 2024. Credit: NASA/JSC David DeHoyos To advance plans of securing a public/private partnership and land and operate NASA’s VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) mission on the Moon in collaboration with industry the agency announced Monday it is seeking U.S. proposals. As part of the agency’s Artemis campaign, instruments on VIPER will demonstrate U.S. industry’s ability to search for ice on the lunar surface and collect science data.…

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Station Science Top News: Jan. 31, 2025

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Seeds survive space A close-up view of the Materials International Space Station Experiment hardware housing materials for exposure to space. NASA Researchers found that plant seeds exposed to space germinated at the same rate as those kept on the ground. This finding shows that plant seeds can remain viable during long-term space travel and plants could be used for food and other uses on future missions. Materials International Space Station Experiment-14 exposed a variety of materials to space, including 11 types of plant seeds. The work also evaluated the performance…

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Station Nation: Meet Tandra Gill Spain, Computer Resources Senior Project Manager in the Avionics and Software Office 

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For astronauts aboard the International Space Station, staying connected to loved ones and maintaining a sense of normalcy is critical. That is where Tandra Gill Spain, a computer resources senior project manager in NASA’s Avionics and Software Office, comes in. Spain leads the integration of applications on Apple devices and the hardware integration on the Joint Station Local Area Network, which connects the systems from various space agencies on the International Space Station. She also provides technical lead support to the Systems Engineering and Space Operations Computing teams and certifies…

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NASA’s Juno spacecraft watches most powerful volcanic event ever seen on Jupiter’s moon Io

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Even for Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanic body in the solar system, a recent volcanic event witnessed by NASA’s Juno spacecraft takes the biscuit. The event was just one eruption centralized in a newly found hotspot region of Io estimated to be larger than Lake Superior on Earth. The currently unnamed region is so powerful that the energy it belts out is equivalent to six times the energy produced by all of Earth’s power plants combined. The team behind these findings used data collected by Juno, which made flybys…

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