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ERNEST Rover, Psyche Mars Flyby & 14,000 Undetected Asteroids
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA's ERNEST rover just hit 10x the speed of Curiosity in a desert field test — and that's only the start of today's space news. From Psyche's Mars gravity assist to 14,000 city-killer asteroids still undetected, this episode covers the stories shaping planetary science right now.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA just proved that the next generation of Mars rovers could move ten times faster than anything currently on the surface of the Red Planet. That's not a projection anymore.
While ERNEST was proving itself in the desert, the Psyche spacecraft was completing a precision gravity assist at Mars. The flyby happened on May fifteenth.
Perseverance crossed another threshold this week. As of June fourteenth, the rover surpassed twenty-six point two miles on the Martian surface, completing the equivalent of a marathon.
The James Webb Space Telescope released new near-infrared images of Orion Molecular Cloud Two, a stellar nursery sitting roughly one thousand two hundred and eighty light-years away. The images show young stars in the process of forming, with visible outflows of gas and dust pushing into the surrounding cloud.
The less comfortable story this week involves what we haven't found yet. NASA has catalogued roughly forty-five percent of approximately twenty-five thousand asteroids large enough to destroy a city if they struck one.
The near-term watchpoints are clear. ERNEST's scaling tests will determine whether its field performance holds at operational size.
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