Rocket Lab is known (mostly) for its orbital flights, but its interplanetary efforts will soon bear fruit. The startup has received an order to build two spaceships for ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers), a mission selected by NASA to investigate how solar wind is removing the Martian atmosphere and changing the planet’s … Read more
It’s been a busy spring for many of us, but hopefully no one has forgotten that NASA is currently flying a drone on another planet. The Ingenuity helicopter recently completed its sixth flight. However, a new problem arose with this issue – a timing issue with images being received from its navcam gave the helicopter … Read more
When NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter made its third flight in April, the ground team met the last of the three goals required to label the technology demo project a success. For this reason, for its fourth test flight, the Ingenuity team wants to improve the performance of the machine on Mars by flying further over more … Read more
After a relatively quiet month, all the feature film news came at once. No, it’s not another Uncharted delay (that we know of), but a new, reimagined Mortal Kombat movie lands tomorrow. According to screenwriter Greg Russo, violence and blood can be expected (of course), but ensuring the humor of the Mortal Kombat characters translated … Read more
A small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity made history in space exploration on Monday as it took off from the surface of Mars and floated in the blurry air of the red planet. It was the first machine from Earth to fly over another world like an airplane or a helicopter. The achievement extends the long, … Read more
NASA’s Mars helicopter’s first flight test plans have been postponed after failing to complete a test last weekend. Now the team behind it says that the vehicle has completed a turn at full speed. As described in a blog post and video update, the team appears to have taken two approaches to solving the problem … Read more
Chris Voorhees, President of First Mode, and engineers Brian Geddes and Sophia Kim check the newly completed goniometer before shipping it to Western Washington University. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) The 3 foot wide device, built in First Mode’s Seattle workshop, looks like a science fiction movie with spinning gears and a flashing beam of … Read more