Space News Pod

NASA and SpaceX investigating Crew Dragon Explosion before launching humans to ISS.

While headlines routinely report on "close shaves" and "near-misses" when near-Earth objects (NEOs) such as asteroids or comets pass relatively close to Earth, the real work of preparing for the possibility of a NEO impact with Earth goes on mostly out of the public eye. For more than 20 years, NASA and its international partners have been scanning the skies for NEOs, which are asteroids and comets that orbit the Sun and come within 30 million miles (50 million kilometers) of Earth's orbit. International groups, such as NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO), the European Space Agency's Space Situational Awareness-NEO Segment and the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) have made better communication of the hazards posed by NEOs a top priority.

NASA’s InSight lander set down the French SEIS seismometer on the surface of Mars. On 6 April, on the 128th Martian day or ‘sol’ of the mission, a quiet but distinct seismic signal was detected similar to quakes detected on the surface of the Moon by the Apollo missions. 

NASA's next Mars mission is slowly coming together in a "clean room" in California. Technicians at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory assembled the capsule that will keep the Mars 2020 rover secure for its wild ride to the Red Planet's surface. https://patreon.com/spacenewspodcast

 China unveiled a colossal Mars survival simulation base camp on Wednesday in the Gobi desert of Jinchang, Northwest China's Gansu Province. According to a project employee, the simulation camp will become an astronaut training facility in the future.  

The helium hydride ion (HeH+) the scientists detected wasn't the original one created just after the Big Bang, but it has the same molecular structure — helium combined with hydrogen — they theorized formed at the time. https://patreon.com/spacenewspodcast

NASA is working right now to send American astronauts to the surface of the Moon in five years, and the agency has its sights set on a place no humans have ever gone before: the lunar South Pole. 

 Researchers compared DNA extracted from Neolithic human remains found across Britain with that of people alive at the same time in Europe. The Neolithic inhabitants appear to have traveled from Anatolia (modern Turkey) to Iberia before winding their way north. https://patreon.com/spacenewspodcast

 NASA has chosen SpaceX to work on its first-ever attempt to deflect a space rock that's hurtling at high speed in space. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will take flight placed on a Falcon 9 rocket in June 2021 from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. https://patreon.com/spacenewspodcast

SpaceX makes history with first ever Falcon Heavy 3 Stage Landing. SpaceIL crash lands its private Moon lander on the surface of the Moon.

Georgia is immensely proud of its ancient wine-making tradition, claiming to have been the first nation to make wine. Now it wants to be the first to grow grapes on Mars  https://patreon.com/spacenewspodcast

 The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of Messier 87 and its shadow. The shadow of a black hole seen here is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across. While this may sound large, this ring is only about 40 microarcseconds across — equivalent to measuring the length of a credit card on the surface of the Moon. Although the telescopes making up the EHT are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorde

In this episode we talk about how the ISS is as dirty as an Earth gym and really cool pumpkin toadlets that live in brazil and glow under UV lights.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, an un-manned spacecraft the size of a small family car, is already the closest man-made object ever to the Sun – now a mere 15 million miles (24 million km) away from its fiery surface. European Space Agency operations specialists are helping flight planners at new European space startup PTScientists, headquartered in Berlin, pilot their way to the moon. 

 Youtuber, Tom Staniland, known as "Killem" said the goal of his mission wasn't just to launch said burger into space, but to be able to actually eat a burger that had breached earth's atmosphere. 

ALH-77005, a Martian rock found in Antarctica, contains numerous mineralized ‘biosignatures,’ including coccoidal, filamentous structures and organic material, according to a team of scientists from Hungary.  The agency and Mattel, the company that makes Barbie, partnered to create two Cristoforetti-look-alike dolls in honor of Barbie's 60th "birthday" this year, according to a statement from the ESA. One of the dolls wears a stylized reproduction of NASA's Extravehicular Mobility Unit, the suit that astronauts wear on spacewalks, and the other Barbie wears a blue ESA flight suit complete with patches from the agency.  

 An Israeli lander is now orbiting the Moon ahead of a lunar landing on the 11th of April

 Amazon wants to launch thousands of satellites so it can offer broadband internet from space.   "Project Kuiper" is Amazon's plan to launch 3,236 satellites to build a network to provide global high-speed internet. The move represents the latest space ambition from Jeff Bezos. There's a race among several major players to build a next-generation broadband network in space, including Elon Musk's SpaceX and SoftBank-backed OneWeb.

 NASA sees risk to ISS after India's Mission Shakti: The ISS is at constant risk of collision from space debris, and once in a while needs to navigate away in order to avoid collisions.

 MIT and NASA engineers demonstrate a new kind of airplane wing. Assembled from tiny identical pieces, the wing could enable lighter, more energy-efficient aircraft designs.   Scientists have pondered Saturn's rings since Galileo peered at the planet through an early telescope in 1610. From the angle at which he observed it, Galileo surmised that Saturn wasn't a single star, but was actually three: a large middle star with two ear-like appendages sticking out of it, which he thought might be large moons.