China's first Mars rover will be named Zhurong after a traditional fire god.
The rover is aboard the Tianwen-1 probe that arrived in Mars orbit on February 24 and is due to land in May to look for evidence of life.
It is part of Chinese space plans that include launching a crewed orbital station and landing a human on the moon. China in 2019 became the first country to land a space probe on the little-explored far side of the moon and in December returned lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since the 1970s.
The rover's title fits with the Chinese name for Mars — "Huo Xing," or fire star, the China National Space Administration said.
The name "signifies igniting the flame of China's planetary exploration," a deputy CNSA administrator, Wu Yanhua, was cited by the official Xinhua News Agency as saying.
Nasa's Mars Helicopter makes it Three from Three
The US space agency's Ingenuity Mars helicopter has now made its third successful flight on the Red Planet.
The little chopper rose to a height of 5m before speeding off laterally for 50m - half the length of a football field.
Ingenuity then came back to its take-off spot, for a total flight time of 80 seconds.
This sortie was the most ambitious yet, but engineers say they plan to push the technology harder still.
They want to find the chopper's limits, even if that means crashing it in the process.
Apr 24, 2021
Small NASA Rocket Will Study Boundary of Interstellar Space
For a few brief minutes, a suborbital rocket from NASA has an ambitious plan to seek out particles from interstellar space.
A mission called Spatial Heterodyne Interferometric Emission Line Dynamics Spectrometer (SHIELDS) will lift off from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico no earlier than Monday (April 19). It will soar to a peak height of 186 miles (roughly 300 kilometers) — a little more than half the altitude of the International Space Station — and peer at the sky for a few minutes with its telescope.
With this capability, it is possible to see light from particles from beyond our solar system even on a short flight outside the Earth's atmosphere. The mission follows a similar study in 2014; this mission will extend the project's scope.
Apr 23, 2021
Russia Wants to Build its Own Space Station to Replace the ISS
The 23-year partnership between the United States and Russia that has kept the International Space Station (ISS) in orbit could soon come to an end, Russian officials suggested this week.
Yury Borisov, the Russian Deputy Prime Minister, reportedly said in a government meeting that the nation might withdraw from the ISS in 2025. Borisov cited the deteriorating condition of the space station, which was launched in 1998 by NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, as the primary reason for the potential departure.
Apr 22, 2021
NASA's Mars Rover Makes Oxygen on another Planet
According to US space agency, NASA has logged another extraterrestrial first on its latest mission to Mars: converting carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere into pure, breathable oxygen.
The unprecedented extraction of oxygen, literally out of thin air on Mars, was achieved by an experimental device aboard Perseverance, a six-wheeled science rover that landed on the Red Planet in February after a seven-month journey from Earth.
In its first activation, the toaster-sized instrument dubbed MOXIE, short for Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilisation Experiment, produced about 5 grams of oxygen, equivalent to roughly 10 minutes' worth of breathing for an astronaut. Although the initial output was modest, the feat marked the first experimental extraction of a natural resource from the environment of another planet for direct use by humans.
Microsoft Building New App Store for Windows 10
Microsoft is reportedly working on a new app store for Windows 10 that will introduce a modern and fluid user interface, as well as bring changes to the policies that govern what kind of apps can be submitted to the store by developers.
The new store will feature a new user interface (UI) and big policy changes for app developers.
The new app store will follow the same design refresh that the rest of Windows is following with Sun Valley, which is expected to ship towards the end of this year.
Apr 20, 2021
Mars Helicopter Ingenuity Takes Flight, 1st for another Planet
NASA's experimental Mars helicopter 'Ingenuity' rose from the dusty red surface into the thin air, achieving the first powered, controlled flight on another planet.
The triumph was hailed as a Wright Brothers moment. The mini 4-pound (1.8-kg) copter named Ingenuity, in fact, carried a bit of wing fabric from the 1903 Wright Flyer, which made similar history at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Flight controllers in California confirmed Ingenuity's brief hop after receiving data via the Perseverance rover, which stood watch more than 200 feet (65 metres) away. Ingenuity hitched a ride to Mars on Perseverance.
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