Space Roundup Nov 1st, 2020
Hi, space lovers!
What a wonderful week full of progress!
News
First, NASA announced that the moon has more water than expected, and not only in shadowed areas but also on sunlit surfaces, which is great news for all teams working on future water extraction.
Then Airbus and ESA announced they’ve found a way to extract oxygen (and metals) from the moon regolith. Yay!
In the asteroid mining world, NASA’s OSIRIS-REX successfully stowed almost a kilogram of rocks and steroid dust on a sealed capsule, now safe and ready to get back to earth for analysis and research.
Science: there seem to be some contradictions regarding last month’s discovery of phosphine on Venus, according to two new studies.
The Mars missions are already half-way through their trip to the red planet! 235 Million kilometers from earth now. Wow.
Successful launches this week from SpaceX and RocketLab, while NASA’s and SpaceX’s Crew 1 mission gets rescheduled to November 14th after some issues found and fixed in the rocket.
Pic of the week
Located 7,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia, the Bubble Nebula contains a star that is 45 times larger than our sun. Its strong solar winds push away the interstellar gasses into a 'bubble' around the star.
Launches
Nov. 3: A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket will launch a classified spacecraft payload for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office.
Nov 4th, US, Space X - SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the U.S. Air Force’s fourth third-generation navigation satellite
Nov 6th, India - India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), designated PSLV-C49, will launch the RISAT 2BR2 radar Earth observation satellite for the Indian Space Research Organization
Nov 6th, China - A Chinese Long March 6 rocket will launch 10 ÑuSat Earth-imaging satellites for Satellogic
Space jobs!
Avionics Quality Inspector Long Beach, United States (USA), Rocket Lab
Software Engineer Serco Europe Italy
and that’s it for this week! :)
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Cheers from sunny Spain!
Juan, the Curious Astronaut