Space Roundup Oct 18th, 2020
Hi, space lovers!
Here’s the weekly Space Roundup for you. There’s a lot of exciting stuff going on at the moment. Please, take a seat and enjoy!
News
Very exciting lunar progress ahead! NASA has awarded more than $400 million in contracts to both demonstrate technologies needed for future lunar exploration and to send an ice-drilling payload to the south pole of the moon - read more
One of those experiments will be SpaceX’s very relevant refueling experiments. Refueling in orbit is one of the most important milestones we can do to make deep space exploration a reality, so this is indeed a very important experiment to watch! - read more
Eight countries have signed an accord as part of NASA’s Artemis program (I hope more will come very soon) - read more
Busy week for the ISS! Three new astronauts onboarded after a successful flight from Kazakhstan, while they experienced an oxygen leak that they located with a tea bag and fixed with sticky tape :O
Amazing science: Have you ever wondered how a black hole can “eat” a star? Scientists have recently caught the moment in unprecedented detail - check it out here!
Video of the week
Blue Origin successfully launched their amazing New Shepard mission last October 13th. Apart from many different science experiments onboard they flew very important precision lunar landing technologies that are key to the Artemis program
You can see the exciting mission replay here:
Picture of the week
This image, taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, depicts a special class of star-forming nursery known as Free-floating Evaporating Gaseous Globules, or frEGGs for short. This object is formally known as J025157.5+600606. You can read more about it here.
Upcoming Events and launches
Monday, October 19th - NASA will stream OSIRIS-REx mission on asteroid Bennu - watch it here! https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive
Launch! Oct. 21 SpaceX Falcon 9 • Starlink V1.0-L14
October 29th - Workshop on planetary exploration robots https://planrobo20.ethz.ch/
Space jobs!
Project Manager at Astroscale, UK - https://astroscale.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=48
System Administrator Montreal, Canada, Sapienza Consulting - https://www.space-defence-security-jobs.com/newspace/18425/system-administrator/
Spacecraft Operations Engineer Darmstadt, Germany, ESA https://www.space-defence-security-jobs.com/space/18133/spacecraft-operations-engineer/
that’s it for this week! :)
If you have any feedback, news, or topics you want to be covered, please leave a comment below.
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Cheers from sunny Spain!
Juan, the Curious Astronaut