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One of NASA’s Solar Orbiter tools caught its first video of a coronal mass ejection

One of the instruments aboard Solar Orbiter, a probe built by the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA, caught its first video of a coronal mass ejection while whizzing around the other side of the Sun in February. Solar Orbiter, which launched in early 2020, has detected these massive bursts of energy in the past, but the explosion captured in February this year was an exciting first for NASA.

NASA built the Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager, or the SoloHI instrument for the Solar Orbiter. It recently captured an energetic gust of solar plasma jetting from the star’s surface as the spacecraft was meandering around the Sun. Scientists didn’t expect the spacecraft to beam back any exciting images at this point — data is slow to reach Earth from such a far distance, and Solar Orbiter’s main mission doesn’t kick off until November.

The first coronal mass ejection captured by the Solar Orbiter’s Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI).

ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/SoloHI team/NRL

But SoloHI delivered the goods anyway, as it came out from behind the Sun and reentered Earth’s line of sight, beaming back what NASA called a “happy accident.” Two other instruments aboard the Solar Orbiter, the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) and the Metis coronagraph, may have captured different views of the coronal mass ejection around the same time.

Scientists are still piecing together the images from the different instruments to get a clear picture of what was going on near the Sun that day. Around the same time that SoloHi recorded its first detection of a coronal mass ejection, EUI and METIS detected a pair of coronal mass ejections. Other solar-focused spacecraft also captured images and video of the eruptions that day.

The same coronal mass ejection Solar Orbiter’s SoloHI instrument observed, captured by NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory-A — one of two spacecraft launched in 2006.

NASA/STEREO/COR2

Coronal mass ejections are lively bursts of plasma that send geomagnetic shockwaves across the solar system. The bigger ones that cross paths with Earth can wreak havoc on satellites in space, potentially disrupting radio transmissions or (for really rare and massive ones) knocking power grids offline. The plasma emitted from these ejections pummel Earth’s protective magnetosphere and slide around into its polar regions, clashing with the atmosphere and giving rise to the Northern and Southern Lights, or aurora.

Solar Orbiter’s main mission is to study the Sun up-close, helping scientists understand the causes of solar wind and how it affects Earth. The minivan-sized craft, coming as close as 26 million miles from the Sun, is among the closest human-made objects to probe the star. It’s second only to NASA’s Parker Solar Probe which is designed to get even closer, zipping around the Sun at a distance of just 3.8 million miles.

In July last year, Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager nabbed some high-resolution shots of what scientists dubbed “campfires” — tiny surface explosions more formally called nanoflares.

China is set to land on Mars for the first time

Sometime between tonight and next Wednesday, China will attempt to land a pair of robots on the surface of Mars, making a daring bid to become the second country to land and operate a rover on the Red Planet. The Tianwen-1 spacecraft, which has been orbiting Mars since February, will eject a rover and lander bundled together for a seven-minute plunge through the thin Martian atmosphere.

The mission marks China’s first independent trek to Mars, about 200 million miles away from Earth. Only NASA has successfully managed to land and operate rovers on the planet in the past. (The Soviet Union’s Mars 3 spacecraft landed on the planet in 1971 and communicated for about 20 seconds before unexpectedly going dark.) China’s mission, involving three spacecraft working together, is ambitiously complex for a first-timer — the first US mission, Viking 1 in 1976, only involved a lander deployed from its probe.

If it sticks a clean landing at Utopia Planitia, a flat swath of Martian land, China’s lander will deploy its Zhurong rover, a six-wheeled solar-powered robot named after the god of fire in ancient Chinese mythology. The rover carries a suite of onboard instruments, including two cameras, a Mars-Rover Subsurface Exploration Radar, Mars Magnetic Field Detector, and Mars Meteorology Monitor, according to Chinese media CCTV.

“Tianwen-1 probe has functioned normally since its successful launch on July 23rd, 2020,” the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said in a statement Friday morning, adding that it has collected a “huge amount” of scientific data while in Martian orbit. “With the evaluation of the flight status, Tianwen-1 probe is scheduled to perform landing campaign targeting Utopia Planitia at the proper slot from the early morning of May 15th to May 19th Beijing time,” CNSA said.

Photo by Wang Zhao / AFP via Getty Images

The landing attempt might come toward the very beginning of that time slot. One report on Twitter quoted Ye Peijian of the China Association for Science and Technology as saying the landing attempt could begin at 7:11PM ET on Friday.

The Tianwen-1 orbiter, clutching the rover-lander bundle, has been scoping out the Utopia Planitia landing site for over three months, flying close to Mars every 49 hours in an elliptical orbit (an egg-shaped orbital pattern), according to Andrew Jones, a journalist covering China’s activities in space. Utopia Planitia is the same region on Mars where NASA’s Viking 2 lander touched down in 1976.

“The main task of Tianwen-1 is to perform a global and extensive survey of the entire planet using the orbiter, and to send the rover to surface locations of scientific interests to conduct detailed investigations with high accuracy and resolution,” the mission’s top scientists wrote in Nature Astronomy last year. The roughly 240kg rover is nearly twice the mass of China’s Yutu Moon rovers.

Tianwen-1 is the name of the overall Mars mission, named after the long poem “Tianwen,” which means “Questions to Heaven.” It marks the latest in a quick succession of advances in space exploration for China. The country became the first nation in history to land and operate a rover on the far side of the Moon in 2019. It also completed a brief lunar sample mission in December last year, launching a robot to the Moon and swiftly returning it back to Earth with a cache of Moon rocks for evaluation.

China’s Long March 5B, the same rocket used to send Tianwen-1 to Mars, launches a space station module last month.

Photo by STR / AFP via Getty Images

More recently, China launched the first core module of its planned space station, Tianhe, which will serve as living quarters for groups of astronauts. The rocket that launched that module spawned an international freakout over where on Earth it might reenter. (It eventually reentered over the Indian Ocean, and large chunks of the rocket splashed down roughly 30 miles off an island in the Maldives, the Chinese government said.)

Despite this ambitious trek to Mars with its trio of three robots, China’s focus seems to be fixed on the Moon — the same immediate destination for NASA’s Artemis program. Earlier this year, China announced plans to build a lunar space station and base on the Moon’s surface with Russia, NASA’s longtime partner on the International Space Station.

From Texas to Hawaii: SpaceX plans first orbital Starship test

SpaceX plans to have its first Starship test flight to orbit launch from Texas and splash down off the coast of an island in Hawaii, according to a document the company filed with the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday. The orbital flight test would mark the first time SpaceX stacks both elements of its massive Starship system together, the next key development step in its attempt to build a rocket that could one day land on Mars.

As outlined in the document, a super heavy booster stage will launch Starship from SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas, facilities and separate in midair nearly three minutes into flight. About five minutes later, that booster stage will return back to Earth and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico — or as SpaceX puts it: it will “perform a partial return and land in the Gulf of Mexico approximately 20 miles from the shore.”

Meanwhile, Starship (the top half of the entire rocket system) will continue into orbit, nearly completing a full trip around Earth before plunging back through the atmosphere over Hawaii roughly 90 minutes after launching from Texas. Starship will aim to nail a “powered, targeted landing” on the ocean about 62 miles off the northwest coast of Kauai, the state’s northernmost island.

A Starship prototype in March carries out its complex landing-flip maneuver before attempting to land — a technique similar to how it would land off the coast of Hawaii.

SpaceX

The document didn’t name a specific date for Starship’s orbital flight. CEO Elon Musk and SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell have said it could happen by the end of 2021, but an email that accompanied Thursday’s filing indicated it could happen any time in the next year, before March 1st, 2022. That email also says the maximum altitude for Starship is 72 miles — an extremely low orbital altitude sitting just north of the boundary between space and Earth’s atmosphere.

SpaceX’s Starship system is the centerpiece of Musk’s goal to enable routine interplanetary travel. The system, designed to send humans and up to 100 tons of cargo to the Moon and Mars, recently won a $2.9 billion contract to serve as NASA’s first ride to the Moon carrying astronauts since 1972. SpaceX has launched five high-altitude Starship prototypes from its south Texas rocket facilities since December, nailing a successful landing on its fifth test flight earlier this month. A few more of those suborbital “hop” tests are planned in the next month or so.

Whenever it happens, the orbital test will demonstrate Starship maneuvers that can’t be simulated using computers, SpaceX says in the document. “SpaceX intends to collect as much data as possible during flight to quantify entry dynamics and better understand what the vehicle experiences in a flight regime that is extremely difficult to accurately predict or replicate computationally.” The flight data gleaned from Starship’s test “will anchor any changes in vehicle design… and build better models for us to use in our internal simulations,” SpaceX said.

Musk has envisioned using Starship for rapid orbit-based transportation between any two cities on Earth, an ambitious (or pretty wild) idea called point-to-point travel. A Starship trip (Startrip?) between New York and London, for example, would take an hour. The 90-minute trip from Texas to Hawaii somewhat mirrors the idea, though it’s just a test, and it’s been a while since SpaceX or Musk have discussed any updates on point-to-point travel plans.

With its new Moon lander contract from NASA — which has stirred quite a bit of FOMO in the space industry, likely to NASA’s ire — SpaceX is racing to test Starship for deep-space missions with a deadline to put humans on the lunar surface by 2024.

Proposed bill aims to toss a new wrench in NASA’s Moon lander plan

A senior lawmaker proposed a controversial piece of legislation on Wednesday that directs NASA to pick a second company to build the agency’s next Moon landers — in addition to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which was awarded a $2.9 billion NASA contract to build a lander earlier this year. The bill hasn’t passed the full Senate yet, but it marks a new front in an ongoing effort to overturn or rejig NASA’s decision. It also sets up the first political challenge for NASA’s new administrator, former Sen. Bill Nelson.

NASA’s choice of SpaceX last month to build the agency’s first lunar lander since 1972 spawned a wave of opposition from some lawmakers and the two losing companies in the running: Jeff Bezos’ space firm Blue Origin and Dynetics. Those companies lodged formal protests against NASA’s decision, triggering a procedural pause on SpaceX’s new contract. Among other things, the protests maintain that NASA should have picked two firms instead of one.

Amid a lobbying effort from Blue Origin, those calls have found their way into a NASA authorization bill, proposed as an amendment to the Endless Frontier Act by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee overseeing NASA. Cantwell represents Blue Origin’s home state of Washington. Under Cantwell’s language, NASA would be required to reopen the competition within 30 days and allow it to use $10 billion of its budget to pick a second lunar lander provider.

Before choosing SpaceX, NASA had been expected to pick two companies, a strategy that guaranteed a backup in case one lander fell behind. But the agency went only with SpaceX — its bid was half of Blue Origin’s — after funding shortfalls from Congress. “It was in NASA’s best interest, along with the budget that was there, for us to award to one,” NASA’s human spaceflight chief, Kathy Lueders, who led the decision to pick SpaceX, said last month.

Simply adding another company to build NASA’s Moon lander, as proposed in Cantwell’s amendment, could run afoul of the existing agreements with SpaceX, agency officials say. “It’s not as simple as picking the next in line,” says one person familiar with the process, speaking anonymously to chat frankly about legal matters. Going through the long and protracted process of picking another company would also endanger NASA’s rush to get to the Moon by 2024, agency staff say. (Blue Origin argues the opposite: that not picking a second company risks the 2024 goal.)

NASA declined to comment on the bill, citing the ongoing litigation from Blue Origin and Dynetics’ protests.

Blue Origin argues NASA can simply add another company, and it’s well within the agency’s ability to do so legally. That’s because, company employees say, SpaceX’s award falls under a kind of research and development category of government contracting that would permit another player to join, unlike more legally rigid contract programs for routine transportation services.

It’s unclear what specific legal jargon could (or could not) permit NASA to pick another company to develop a lunar lander alongside SpaceX. But Cantwell’s proposed amendment aims to assert a straightforward solution.

SpaceX’s $2.9 billion award is for two flights to the Moon using Starship, the company’s fully reusable rocket system that’s still under development in Texas. The first mission would require Starship to make an uncrewed lunar landing, followed by another landing carrying astronauts.

NASA’s asteroid-punching spacecraft begins its trek back home

The NASA spacecraft that snatched a sample of rocks from the distant Bennu asteroid last year fired up a suite of thrusters on Monday and committed to its two-year journey back home. The maneuver kicks the minivan-sized spacecraft, dubbed Osiris-REx, onto a winding cosmic path around the Sun and toward Earth’s orbit. When it returns to Earth in 2023, it’ll toss a capsule packed with asteroid samples through the atmosphere somewhere over Utah.

The spacecraft’s Asteroid Departure Maneuver (ADM) was no sweat for the Osiris-REx team, but it marked a significant step towards the return of the first pristine cache of asteroid samples in NASA’s history. Spacecraft engineers inside a Lockheed Martin center in Littleton, Colorado confirmed the seven-minute thruster firing began at 4PM ET Monday and celebrated success shortly after.

“All stations, the ADM burn has completed. We had a nominal ADM burn, and we’re bringing our samples home!” declared Navigation Team Chief Pete Antreasian, prompting applause inside the control room.

Osiris-REx launched from Florida in 2016 to journey over 100 million miles to Bennu, an acorn-shaped asteroid named after a mythological Egyptian deity that symbolized the world’s creation. Scientists hope Bennu, an ancient remnant from the earliest days of the solar system, will hold clues to the origins of life on Earth.

Last year, Osiris-REx entered Bennu’s orbit, becoming the first US spacecraft to circle an asteroid. It gradually approached the space rock’s surface and extended an 11-foot robotic arm with a showerhead-shaped collection device on the end. In a dramatic event that lasted only a few seconds, the sampling head touched down on Bennu’s surface and emitted a blast of pressurized gas strong enough to kick up rocks and asteroid debris to catch them in the sampling head’s container. Bennu’s surface was surprisingly soft, and the touch-and-go maneuver splashed up more rocks than scientists expected. The asteroid scoop was so hearty — collecting about two ounces — that rocks jammed the sampling container door open.

Osiris-REx’s sampling arm plucks a sample from the Bennu asteroid on October 20th, 2020.

NASA

But engineers managed to close up the rock suitcase and stow it safely inside the spacecraft’s capsule. Osiris-REx stayed in Bennu’s neighborhood for a few more months to bask in the cloud of asteroid dust it punched up, and to study the crater it left on the asteroid’s surface. Now, it’s finally on its way home.

“It’s a new chapter in the mission,” says Osiris-REx project scientist Jason Dworkin, who maintains the scientific integrity of the sampling mission, serving as the operational glue between the spacecraft engineering team and the teams of scientists eagerly awaiting the asteroid samples. “I’ve been waiting a long time to get this sample to the laboratory,” he tells The Verge. “I started in 2004. My daughter was in diapers, and now she’s graduating from high school.”

The first thruster burn on Monday was precisely timed to put Osiris-REx in Earth’s path two and a half years from now, a little over 6,000 miles from the surface. The spacecraft will orbit the Sun twice along the way, using its thrusters to intricately nudge itself closer and closer to Earth and tallying 1.4 billion miles total in its return expedition. “This is really the finality — we’re done at Bennu, we aren’t going back,” says Sandy Freund, Lockheed Martin’s Osiris-REx Mission Operations Program Manager. “There’s a little bit of sadness, in that we’ve gotten to know this asteroid, we’ve learned so much. But then there’s that excitement of what we’re going to learn when these samples are here on Earth.”

The spacecraft will eject its dishwasher-sized asteroid sample capsule and send it careening through Earth’s atmosphere for a landing at the Utah Test and Training Range on September 24th, 2023. Osiris-REx will stay in space. If it manages to save enough fuel during its years-long return from Bennu, NASA might assign it a new mission to another asteroid sometime in the future, the agency said in a blog post on Monday.

As soon as it touches down in Utah, NASA teams will carefully transport the capsule and its precious cargo to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the agency’s Moon rocks currently live.

Only 25 percent of the Bennu material will be used for immediate inspection by scientists around the world. The other 75 percent will be stored for future scientists, some of whom haven’t been born. The researchers hope later generations can explore the samples using technologies that haven’t yet been invented — an apt way to anticipate innovation and prolong the scientific value of rare cosmic rocks.

“That means every decision I make has the weight of history on it,” Dworkin says. “So I want to make sure that I arm all future scientists with the best tools I can, so they can use the samples as best as possible. That’s one of the things that a project scientist does — they help enable more science to be done than they can personally do.”

“I look forward to in 50 years, or longer, maybe your readers, or your readers’ children or grandchildren, may be inspired to ask new questions with new techniques on these old samples,” he says. “It would be thrilling.”

Watch — and hear — NASA’s Ingenuity copter zip around on Mars

NASA just released video and audio of its mini Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, flying around the Martian surface during its fourth flight test, as captured by the craft’s robotic partner Perseverance from nearly a football field’s distance away.

The footage, combining audio and video of an Ingenuity flight test for the first time, starts off with the soft, rumbling hum of the Martian wind. Ingenuity can be seen stationary on the surface in the right-hand corner of the frame before taking off for flight. When the copter ascends, the ambient hum intensifies; the faint, muffled sound of Ingenuity’s twin rotor blades spinning at 2,537 RPM picks up and it eventually zips across the frame.

Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z device captured the video, a sequence of hundreds of images compiled at six frames per second. That camera has returned stunning images and video of Ingenuity in the past, but those views were never synced with audio until now.

The audio was recorded using Perseverance’s SuperCam laser instrument, a device that zaps Mars rocks with a laser beam and records the zapping sounds with an onboard microphone. While a spectrometer visually analyzes the makeup of the dust kicked up by the laser, the microphone captures audio to help scientists get an aural idea of how hard the rock is.

That microphone worked overtime last Friday to bring us the first AV experience of Ingenuity’s fourth flight in its legendary test campaign.

David Mimoun, science lead for SuperCam’s microphone, said in a statement that prior tests on Earth indicated the device would barely be able to hear Ingenuity’s flight. But hearing the gentle hum of the helicopter’s blades on Mars was “a very good surprise,” he said. “This recording will be a gold mine for our understanding of the Martian atmosphere.”

The four-pound helicopter arrived on Mars nestled inside NASA’s Perseverance rover on February 18th and was deployed on the surface on April 4th. Its first flight on April 19th made history as the first to take place on another world. Initially, engineers planned to conduct just five flight demonstration tests with Ingenuity inside a 31-day window so Perseverance — working as both a photographer and communications hub for Ingenuity — can carry on with its primary mission of hunting for signs of ancient life.

But engineers, impressed with the helicopter’s performance, gave Ingenuity another 31-day mission to carry out a few more flights while Perseverance begins its hunt nearby.

SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience safely returns four astronauts to Earth

Four astronauts returned from the International Space Station early Sunday morning aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico nearly six months after arriving at the orbital laboratory in November last year as the first operational, long-duration crew under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.

NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Soichi Noguchi boarded Crew Dragon and undocked from the space station at 8:35PM ET Saturday to begin their roughly six-hour trek home. The crew splashed down off the coast of Panama City, Florida at 2:56am ET on Sunday, NASA said in a news release.

The crew’s return was initially set for Wednesday, April 28th, but was delayed due to high winds in the splashdown zone.

The astronaut quartet tallied 167 days aboard the space station, a science laboratory orbiting Earth 250 miles above ground that has continuously housed international crews of astronauts for over two decades.

This particular Crew Dragon spacecraft, dubbed Resilience by its crew, was the second SpaceX capsule to fly humans, coming after SpaceX’s first crewed mission, Demo-2, in May 2020. Resilience broke the record for the longest-serving US spacecraft to be docked on the ISS, surpassing the 84 days tallied by the 1974 Skylab 4 crew.

Crew Dragon Resilience’s return marked the first nighttime splashdown of a crewed US spacecraft since December 1968, when Apollo 8 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, NASA said.

The first splashdown of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule took place in August 2020 for the Demo-2 mission, returning NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley from space after a two-month test mission.

That splashdown, in the Gulf of Mexico, attracted a swarm of Florida boaters coming dangerously close to Crew Dragon. NASA and the US Coast Guard beefed up protections for Crew-1’s splashdown to make sure no one comes close. (The concern: Crew Dragon might leak highly flammable fuels that, if ignited, would endanger anyone coming too close. The crew inside would be safe.)

NASA suspends SpaceX’s $2.9 billion moon lander contract after rivals protest

NASA has suspended work on SpaceX’s new $2.9 billion lunar lander contract while a federal watchdog agency adjudicates two protests over the award, the agency said Friday.

Putting the Human Landing System (or HLS) work on hold until the GAO makes a decision on the two protests means SpaceX won’t immediately receive its first chunk of the $2.9 billion award, nor will it commence the initial talks with NASA that would normally take place at the onset of a major contract.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX was picked by NASA on April 16th to build the agency’s first human lunar lander since the Apollo program, as the agency opted to rely on just one company for a high-profile contract that many in the space industry expected to go to two companies.

As a result, two companies that were in the running for the contract, Blue Origin and Dynetics, protested NASA’s decision to the Government Accountability Office, which adjudicates bidding disputes. Blue Origin alleges the agency unfairly “moved the goalposts at the last minute” and endangered NASA’s speedy 2024 timeline by only picking SpaceX.

“Pursuant to the GAO protests, NASA instructed SpaceX that progress on the HLS contract has been suspended until GAO resolves all outstanding litigation related to this procurement,” NASA spokeswoman Monica Witt said in a statement.

Starship, SpaceX’s fully reusable rocket system under development to eventually ferry humans and cargo to the Moon and Mars, won NASA’s award mainly for its massive cargo capability and its proposed bid of $2.9 billion — far cheaper than Blue Origin’s and Dynetics’, according to a NASA source selection document.

Starship’s development to this point has been driven primarily by Musk, SpaceX’s billionaire founder and chief executive. The company has launched several Starship prototypes in short- and high-altitude test flights at its Boca Chica, Texas, launch facilities. Landing the prototypes after soaring over six miles in the air has proved to be a formidable challenge — all of SpaceX’s high-altitude prototype rockets have been destroyed in landing-phase explosions.

SpaceX’s private Starship development will likely continue. The company’s most recent test of a Starship prototype, SN15, is slated to launch within the next few days after clinching license approval from the Federal Aviation Administration this week.

NASA has said picking one company was the best decision it could make at the time with the funds made available from Congress. Last year, Congress gave the agency $850 million of the $3.3 billion it requested to procure two lunar landers.

SpaceX’s award was a key “first step” in a broader program to secure transportation to the Moon, NASA’s human spaceflight chief Kathy Lueders said at the time, promising that new contract opportunities will open up in the near future.

Acing its fourth flight on Mars, NASA’s Ingenuity will advance to a new testing round

After acing a set of historic test flights on Mars, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter will embark on a new, more advanced test mission, engineers said today. Having proved itself capable of flying higher and farther with its fourth flight on Friday, the mini helicopter will get ready to demonstrate how it could help Mars rovers, like Perseverance, scout for new locations and probe areas inaccessible to wheeled robots.

Ingenuity, which became the first helicopter to fly on another world earlier this month, was initially set to retire forever when its flight demonstration phase ends next week, after completing five flights. But the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory okayed another round of testing because Perseverance’s post-landing health checks are ahead of schedule — and Ingenuity isn’t ready to put its twin carbon fiber rotor blades to rest yet.

For the first (and current) test phase, the four-pound helicopter proved it’s possible to achieve powered lift in the thin Martian atmosphere, opening up a new mode of transportation for planetary exploration. The next test phase will be slightly different, and more ambitious, than the first: Ingenuity will observe specific science targets on Mars, scout for interesting locations for Perseverance, and look for new potential flight zones for future flights.

“The lessons learned from that exercise will benefit future missions with aerial platforms tremendously,” said MiMi Aung, the helicopter’s project manager, adding that the craft’s test capabilities will be pushed with each flight. This phase will only contain one or two flights, spaced further apart. But engineers signaled more could be planned depending on the helicopter’s performance. And Perseverance, acting as Ingenuity’s comms mothership from a distance of a few hundred feet, won’t use its onboard cameras to take photos of the helicopter, as it’s doing for the first phase.

Since deploying from the belly of Perseverance on April 4th, Ingenuity has nailed four flight tests so far, each with increasing complexity: The first flight was a 40-second hover 10 feet above the ground, and its third flight rose 16 feet, then zipped 164 feet across its flight zone at about 4.5 miles per hour. Ingenuity made its fourth flight on Friday, and engineers are currently analyzing troves of data.

An initial image taken by Perseverance’s Hazcam shows Ingenuity, appearing as a small speck in the upper-middle-right part of the frame, flying its fourth flight test.

Image: NASA/JPL

Perseverance landed on Mars with Ingenuity on February 18th. The rover’s primary mission is to hunt for signs of fossilized life and pack soil samples into cigar-sized tubes to leave scattered around the Martian surface. A future “fetch” rover will retrieve those tubes sometime in the next decade or so. The recent decision to collect those soil samples near Ingenuity’s flight zone helped NASA make the call to keep Ingenuity in service — suddenly, having Perseverance stick around to keep tabs on the helicopter’s health became possible.

Ingenuity’s fourth test flight demonstrated farther and faster travel, and served as a scout mission for the flight zone it’ll use for its next testing phase. Its fifth flight, scheduled to take place in the coming days, will be a one-way trip to that new location.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin protests NASA’s $2.9 billion SpaceX contract

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin is protesting NASA’s decision to award SpaceX $2.9 billion for a pair of missions to land on the Moon by 2024. NASA’s Human Landing System program, which funded development of three rival lunar lander prototypes (including Blue Origin’s), was expected to pick two of those landers in April. But NASA opted for just one — SpaceX’s Starship — because of short funding from Congress.

The 175-page Blue Origin protest was filed with the Government Accountability Office less than two weeks after NASA’s selection of SpaceX. Blue Origin has been developing its Blue Moon lunar lander with a “National Team” of established space and defense contractors: Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Draper.

“NASA has executed a flawed acquisition for the Human Landing System program and moved the goalposts at the last minute,” Blue Origin said in a statement released on Monday. “In NASA’s own words, it has made a ‘high risk’ selection. Their decision eliminates opportunities for competition, significantly narrows the supply base, and not only delays, but also endangers America’s return to the Moon. Because of that, we’ve filed a protest with the GAO.”

Developing…

Ingenuity takes its third flight on Mars

NASA’s tiny Ingenuity helicopter made its third successful flight on Mars early Sunday, and flew higher and faster than it did even when it was being tested on Earth. At about 1:31 AM ET, the helicopter ascended 16 feet and flew 164 feet during its 80 second third flight, at a top speed of 6.6 feet per second.

NASA received the flight data shortly after 10AM ET. “Today’s flight was what we planned for, and yet it was nothing short of amazing,” NASA’s Dave Lavery said in a statement. “With this flight, we are demonstrating critical capabilities that will enable the addition of an aerial dimension to future Mars missions.”

In its second mission on Thursday, Ingenuity made a 51.9-second flight, traveling seven feet. For Ingenuity’s first flight on April 19th, the little craft lifted 10 feet off the surface of Mars for 39 seconds.

Ingenuity arrived on Mars February 18th with its parent rover Perseverance, whose mission is to look for signs of life and take Martian soil samples. While Ingenuity isn’t the main focus of the Perseverance mission, its ability to fly in Mars’ thin atmosphere will provide data useful for future explorations of Mars.

NASA says it’s planning a fourth flight for Ingenuity in a few days.

SpaceX capsule with four astronauts on board docks with the International Space Station

A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft with four astronauts aboard successfully docked with the International Space Station early Saturday to start its six-month mission, NASA announced. Crew-2, as it’s been dubbed, is SpaceX’s third astronaut mission under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. It brings NASA’s Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Thomas Pesquet, a French aerospace engineer from the European Space Agency (ESA) to the ISS, which travels at more than 17,000 miles per hour in orbit roughly 250 miles above Earth.

A Falcon 9 rocket which was used for SpaceX’s Crew-1 mission in 2020, launched early Friday for its 24-hour trip to the ISS. The Falcon 9 carried Endeavour, the same Crew Dragon capsule that launched SpaceX’s debut astronaut mission last year.

The four astronauts were welcomed aboard the ISS shortly before 8AM ET by the Expedition 65 crew of Shannon Walker, Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Mark Vande Hei of NASA, as well as Soichi Noguchi of JAXA and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov.

Kimbrough, McArthur, Hoshide, and Pesquet will now spend six months in space conducting science experiments, including a focus on “tissue chips,” which NASA describes as “small models of human organs containing multiple cell types that behave much the same as they do in the body.” The chips may help identify drugs or vaccines more quickly than the current processes.

The mission marks the first time SpaceX has reused a craft for a crewed mission. SpaceX has launched and reused several Falcon 9 rockets and uncrewed Dragon capsules as part of an initiative to save time and money on space exploration.

SpaceX launches its third astronaut crew, the first on a used Crew Dragon capsule

SpaceX launched its third crew of astronauts to the International Space Station early Friday morning, reusing a Crew Dragon space capsule to fly humans for the first time. The mission, dubbed Crew-2, is the latest flight under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, and will add four more astronauts to the orbital space station.

A used Falcon 9 rocket, last flown for SpaceX’s Crew-1 mission last year, lifted off at 5:49AM ET from Cape Canaveral, Florida carrying Endeavor, the same Crew Dragon capsule that first launched SpaceX’s debut astronaut mission nearly one year ago. For this flight, the Endeavor capsule carried four astronauts from three different countries — SpaceX’s most diverse NASA-managed crew yet.

“Off the Earth, for the Earth, Endeavor is ready to go,” NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough, the mission’s spacecraft commander, told SpaceX mission control in Hawthorne, California minutes before lifting off.

Kimbrough and fellow NASA astronaut Megan McArthur, serving as the pilot, accompanied mission specialists Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Thomas Pesquet, a French aerospace engineer from the European Space Agency (ESA). The crew will spend roughly 23 hours in transit as Endeavor autonomously raises its orbit toward the ISS ahead of a 5:10AM ET docking tomorrow, April 24th.

Sunlight beamed into the windows of Crew Dragon Endeavor as it separated from its Falcon 9 second stage booster roughly 12 minutes after its pre-dawn liftoff, prompting cheers and applause from engineers on a video feed in SpaceX’s mission control. “Thanks for flying our first flight-proven, crewed Falcon 9,” mission control said to Endeavor.

“We’re great, it’s good to be back in space for all of us, and we’ll send our regards to Crew-1 when we get there,” Kimbrough replied from Endeavor. The capsule’s separation occurred just as Falcon 9’s first stage booster returned back to Earth for landing on SpaceX’s “Of Course I Still Love You” drone-ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

Kimbrough, McArthur, Hoshide and Pesquet will spend six months in space and join seven astronauts already aboard the space station, an orbital science laboratory flying more than 17,000 miles per hour in orbit roughly 250 miles above Earth. Two days after the crew’s arrival, four other astronauts from SpaceX’s Crew-1 mission, which launched to the ISS November 15 last year, will board a separate Crew Dragon capsule and return to Earth to cap their own six-month stay.

Crew-2 marks SpaceX’s third astronaut mission under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, the agency’s public-private initiative to revive its human spaceflight capabilities after a nearly 10-year dependence on Russian rockets. It’s the second of six operational missions SpaceX is contracted to fly under that program, which awarded the company $2.6 billion in 2014 to develop and fly Crew Dragon. SpaceX’s first crewed mission in May 2020, carrying Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, counted as a test flight.

Accompanied by two Russian cosmonauts and NASA’s Mark Vande Hei, who all launched on a Russian Soyuz rocket on April 9th, Crew-2’s stay aboard the ISS will make for an 7-person crew in space for the next several months. During their stay, the crew will conduct an array of microgravity science experiments. The Crew-2 astronauts’ science efforts will center on a cassette-sized device containing human cells to study how those cells respond to various drugs and health conditions in microgravity.

The increased crew size means other science experiments, including a few projects tracking how plants grow and behave in space, will also see some progress. “It’s like a party up there,” said Annmarie Eldering, a project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory working on Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3, a device astronauts will use to measure carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. “When you get all those measurements from space, in the same time, same place, it’s really powerful for science,” Eldering said Friday morning in a live NASA broadcast.

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How to watch SpaceX’s third crewed mission to the ISS

SpaceX is slated to launch its third crew to the International Space Station early Friday morning, ferrying two astronauts from NASA, one from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and the first European Space Agency astronaut to fly a private US spacecraft to orbit. The four-person crew will launch atop SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket at 5:49AM ET on Friday.

The mission, dubbed Crew-2, marks the second operational mission under the Commercial Crew Program, NASA’s public-private initiative to revive its human spaceflight capabilities after a 10-year dependence on Russian rockets. It will mark the first time NASA astronauts fly a reused crew capsule — Crew-2’s ride first flew in May 2020 as SpaceX’s first astronaut mission, carrying Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley.

The crew includes NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough, the mission’s spacecraft commander, and Megan McArthur, serving as the pilot. JAXA astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet, a French aerospace engineer, will serve as mission specialists. All the astronauts are in Florida ahead of the launch, and they’ll wake up at 11:09PM ET Thursday to prepare for flight.

NASA’s live coverage of the mission will begin hours before liftoff, at 1:30AM ET Friday. Liftoff is at 5:49AM ET. The trek to the International Space Station will take a little less than a day — the crew is scheduled to dock with the space station at around 5:10AM ET Saturday, April 24th. They’ll spend six months on the station.

WHAT TIME IS SPACEX’S CREW-2 LAUNCH?

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will take off on Friday, April 23rd, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Scheduled launch time: New York: 5:49AM / San Francisco: 2:49AM / London: 10:49AM / Berlin: 11:49AM / Moscow: 12:49PM / New Delhi: 3:19 PM / Beijing: 5:49PM / Tokyo: 6:49PM / Melbourne: 7:49PM

HOW TO WATCH SPACEX’S CREW DRAGON LAUNCH LIVE:

Live stream: NASA’s live stream coverage can be found on YouTube and on the agency’s website.

This speaker uses dancing ferrofluid to visualize music

A speaker made by artist Dakd Jung, spotted by Gizmodo, visualizes music with ferrofluid, a liquid filled with tiny magnetic particles. The ferrofluid, a viscous black blob, reacts to an electromagnetic device and dances around in sync with the sounds being played.

The video shows Jung’s process for putting the speaker together: treating the glass container so the ferrofluid won’t stick, sanding the 3D-printed casing, and wiring up the electromagnetic device. The full prototype in action is a little less mesmerizing than his initial test that’s shown in the video because the blob breaks apart, but Jung says the speaker is still in development. He’s used ferrofluid in artworks before, including a huge ferrofluid panel and a ferrofluid “pond.”

Ferrofluid was originally developed by NASA for moving fuel into rocket engines without the help of gravity. It didn’t work out for that purpose, but it did succeed in looking cool as hell and having other practical uses. It can be used for speaker dampers, as a lubricant in ball bearings, or as a sealant in hard drives. Some day it might even be used in biomedicine.

The liquid has been used to visualize music before, like in the video below, but having it in a closed container is much more appealing because it’s a very messy substance. Plus it’s just more fun to have a lava lamp responding to your tunes than a vat of liquid chilling next to your speaker system.