Tag: rover
SpaceX’s Starship will carry an SUV-sized rover to the Moon in 2026
While its next-generation rocket has yet to fly, that’s not stopping SpaceX from booking Starship flights. On Friday, a startup named Astrolab revealed that it had recently signed an agreement with Elon Musk’s private space firm to reserve a spot on an uncrewed Starship cargo mission that could launch as early as mid-2026. “This is SpaceX’s first commercial cargo contract to the lunar surface,” Jaret Matthews, CEO of Astrolab, told The New York Times, adding his company was one of a few customers involved in the flight.
Astrolab is building a vehicle it hopes will one day carry equipment, supplies and people across the lunar surface. The Flexible Logistics and Exploration (FLEX) rover is about the size of a Jeep Wrangler, making it a bit bigger than NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars. It also features a robotic arm for assisting with cargo and can travel up to 15 miles per hour. Oh, and FLEX can carry up to two astronauts.
Once it lands on the Moon, Astrolab claims FLEX will become the largest rover to travel the lunar surface. Matthews told The Times Astrolab already has customers waiting to use the rover to carry cargo during the 2026 Starship mission. Looking further to the future, Matthews said FLEX could assist with building a permanent human presence on the Moon and beyond. “Ultimately our goal is to have a fleet of rovers both on the Moon and Mars,” he said. “And I really think I see these vehicles as the catalysts ultimately for the off-Earth economy.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/spacexs-starship-will-carry-an-suv-sized-rover-to-the-moon-in-2026-213926510.html?src=rss
NASA Mars Rover Has a New Pet Rock Along for the Ride – CNET
New NASA Images Reveal the Grim State of China’s Mars Rover
China’s Zhurong rover appears to still be snoozing since entering into hibernation mode a little less than a year ago. The Chinese robot was supposed to wake up in December but recent images captured by a NASA orbiter reveal that the rover hasn’t moved from its position on the Martian surface for months.
NASA Captures 10 Mars Rover Sample Tubes in a Single Glorious Image – CNET
‘Clearest Evidence Yet’ of Ancient Lake on Mars Found by NASA’s Curiosity Rover
But they add that the evidence “appeared in an unlikely place.”
The rover is traversing an area of Mars called the “sulfate-bearing unit” that researchers previously thought would only show evidence of mere trickles of water, as scientists believed the rocks there formed as the surface of the red planet was drying out. Instead, the rover found some of the clearest evidence yet of ancient waters.
“This is the best evidence of water and waves that we’ve seen in the entire mission,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement. “We climbed through thousands of feet of lake deposits and never saw evidence like this — and now we found it in a place we expected to be dry….”
“Billions of years ago, waves on the surface of a shallow lake stirred up sediment at the lake bottom, over time creating rippled textures left in rock,” according to a NASA news release.
From NASA’s announcement:
Having climbed nearly a half-mile above the mountain’s base, Curiosity has found these rippled rock textures preserved in what’s nicknamed the ‘Marker Band’ — a thin layer of dark rock that stands out from the rest of Mount Sharp….
Far ahead of the Marker Band, scientists can see another clue to the history of Mars’ ancient water in a valley named Gediz Vallis. Wind carved the valley, but a channel running through it that starts higher up on Mount Sharp is thought to have been eroded by a small river.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NASA rover discovers a hefty meteorite on Mars
After more than a decade on Mars, NASA‘s Curiosity rover is quite used to traversing the Red Planet in solitude.
But last week, on its 3,724th Martian day rumbling over Mount Sharp, it encountered another foreign visitor, something that also traveled an extraordinary distance through space before winding up in the dusty barren desert: a one-foot-wide meteorite.
NASA is calling the space rock Cacao, one of a handful of meteorites the plucky robot has discovered since it arrived on Mars in 2012. Using its Mast Camera, Curiosity snapped a photo showing its new find on Jan. 27, with its own Johnny-5-like shadow creating a frame. The selfie [see below] has ragged edges because it is actually composed of six images stitched together.
“There’s no way to date these,” NASA said through its anthropomorphized Curiosity account on Twitter. “But it could have been here millions of years!”
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
On Earth, scientists estimate about 48.5 tons of billions-of-years-old meteor material rain down from space daily, much of which vaporizes in the atmosphere or falls into the ocean, which covers over 70 percent of the planet. More than 60,000 meteorites have been discovered on our planet. The vast majority comes from asteroids, but precious few originated on Mars or the moon, according to NASA. At least 175 identified here hail from the Red Planet.
“It could have been here millions of years!”
Curiosity, a car-size rover, and its predecessors have found meteorites before, and The Meteoritical Society is starting to keep a database of their finds. The international organization has given formal name recognition to 15 such specimens since 2005.
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It’s not clear which planet, moon, or asteroid Cacao expatriated, but mission scientists say it’s an iron-nickel meteorite. This class of space rock isn’t rare among those found on Earth, but it is less common than stony meteorites. Other meteorites that rovers have discovered on their expeditions have had similar iron compositions.
Scientists speculate iron meteorites may be resistant to erosion on the Red Planet. That could explain why this big space rock appears to be sitting on flat ground rather than in a hole.
“There likely was a BIG crater in the ancient past,” Curiosity tweeted. “Over time, erosion and other forces flatten the area around it, carving away everything but the hardest material.”
Perseverance Rover Captures Ominous Sign of Mars’ Impending Cloudy Season
The sky is a hazy shade of—er, summer—on Mars, as captured in a new image by NASA’s Perseverance rover.