Space Technology

Since the Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater on Mars in February, the rover and its team of scientists back on Earth have been hard at work exploring the floor of the crater that once held an ancient lake. Perseverance and the Mars 2020 mission are looking for signs of ancient life on Mars and preparing a returnable cache of samples for later analyses on Earth.

The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has captured its first views of its destination planet Mercury as it swooped past in a close gravity assist flyby.

In a distant star system — a mere 1,300 light years away from Earth — researchers may have identified the first known planet to orbit three stars. Unlike our solar system, which consists of a solitary star, it is believed that half of all star systems, like GW Ori where astronomers observed the novel phenomenon, consist of two or more stars that are gravitationally bound to each other.

Honda Motor Co Ltd has introduced the technology development direction the company is currently pursuing for the challenges Honda is taking on in new areas while leveraging its core technologies.

Space. The final frontier, the first step in a journey just beginning, or a horrifying void matched only by your deep fear of the ocean? Whatever your feelings on space, technology has been steadily pushing forwards to take exploration further, faster, and foodier than ever before.

Engineers have successfully shown how water and oxygen can be extracted by cooking up lunar soil, in order to support future Moon bases.

In 2023, NASA's Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will land near the western edge of the Nobile Crater at the Moon's South Pole to map and explore the region's surface and subsurface for water and other resources. Part of Artemis, VIPER will launch on a SpaceX Falcon-Heavy rocket for delivery to the Moon by Astrobotic's Griffin lander under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative.

MakerBot, a Stratasys company, announced that Lockheed Martin has extended its use of MakerBot 3D printers to produce parts and designs for its upcoming space projects. MakerBot 3D printers have been in use for about five years and have provided easily accessible 3D printing for a host of projects for Lockheed Martin's team of engineers.

On Wednesday, September 15 at 8:02 p.m. EDT, 00:02 UTC on September 16, SpaceX's Falcon 9 successfully launched the Inspiration4 mission - the world's first all-civilian human spaceflight to orbit - from historic Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.