NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission held a critical design review (CDR) last week with a NASA Standing Review Board (SRB). This mission-level review was the culmination of individual CDRs conducted for all the instruments and subsystems.
NASA's Psyche spacecraft is shown in a clean room on Dec. 8, 2022, at Astrotech Space Operations Facility near the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The spacecraft was powered on and connected to ground support equipment, enabling engineers and technicians to prepare it for launch in 2023. Teams working at Astrotech and at NASA's …
NASA's Lucy mission team has decided to suspend further solar array deployment activities. The team determined that operating the mission with the solar array in the current unlatched state carries an acceptable level of risk and further deployment activities are unlikely to be beneficial at this time. The spacecraft continues to make progress along its …
The final two investigations for the Geospace Dynamics Constellation mission—or GDC—have been selected. NASA recently announced that the Thermal Plasma Sensor (TPS)—led by Phillip Anderson from the University of Texas, Dallas, and the Near Earth Magnetometer Instrument in a Small Integrated System (NEMISIS)—led by Mark Moldwin from the University of Michigan, will join the GDC …
On Dec. 18, 2022, NASA's InSight did not respond to communications from Earth. The lander's power has been declining for months, as expected, and it's assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations. It's unknown what prompted the change in its energy; the last time the mission contacted the spacecraft was on Dec. 15, …
On Dec. 6, 2022, NASA's Parker Solar Probe began the 14th of 24 planned close approaches to the Sun, eventually coming within 5.3 million miles of the solar surface.
As of Dec. 12, 2022, InSight is generating an average of ~285 watt-hours of energy per Martian day, or sol. The tau, or level of dust cover in the atmosphere, was estimated at .96 (typical tau levels outside of dust season range from 0.6-0.7).
The CubeSat to Study Solar Particles (CuSP) launched as an Artemis I payload on 1:47 AM EST on Nov. 16, 2022. CuSP was deployed from its canister about eight hours after launch. Approximately two hours after deployment, CuSP transmissions were received by an Open Loop Receiver (OLR) operated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Radio Science …
On Nov. 25, 2022, NASA's Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) team lost contact with the spacecraft. The ICON spacecraft is equipped with a built-in onboard command loss timer that will power cycle or reset the spacecraft after contact is lost for eight days. On Dec. 5, after the power cycle was complete, the team was still …
On Nov. 28, NASA's LunaH-Map spacecraft acquired its first star tracker image, showing the constellation Auriga and its two brightest stars, Menkalinan and Mahasim. The LunaH-Map navigation team used these images to test a new type of autonomous optical navigation software that can be run on the spacecraft's flight computer. On Dec. 2, LunaH-Map also …