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A plan for a robotic rover to be sent to Mars has run into budget problems, forcing NASA to make hard choices.

Source: By KENNETH CHANG

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The mission to service the telescope will be delayed until next year, NASA officials said.

Source: By DENNIS OVERBYE

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The provision would allow NASA to buy seats on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft until 2016, thereby granting the agency continued access to the International Space Station.

Source: By JOHN SCHWARTZ

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Filed under: Transportation

Wipe those tears away, budding astronaut. SpaceX’s latest failure wasn’t completely in vain. According to head honcho Elon Musk, the problem came just after a “picture perfect first stage flight” when a longer than expected thrust decay transient of the new Merlin 1C regeneratively cooled engine became “just enough to overcome the stage separation pusher impulse.” You honestly may need to be a rocket scientist to digest all of that, but here’s something even the layman can understand: Musk wants flight 4 in the air as early as next month. We’re told that the long gap between flights 2 and 3 was simply due to all that engine engineering, but technologically speaking, nothing will change for the next attempt. Godspeed, Falcon 1 (v4).

[Thanks, Kenneth]

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Source: Darren Murph

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A privately funded rocket was lost on its way to space, bringing a third failure in a row to an Internet multimillionaire’s effort to create a market for low-cost space-delivery business.

Source: By JOHN SCHWARTZ

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The first stars in the universe were short-lived brutish monsters that changed the nature of the cosmos forever, new computer simulations suggest.

Source: By DENNIS OVERBYE

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Filed under: Storage

Although it’s been several years since the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, it looks like some of the data gathered during the orbiter’s final mission will be put to good use. A hard drive salvaged from the wreckage contains the results of an experiment to study the way xenon gas flows in microgravity, and the results were published in the April edition of a journal called Physical Review E. The 400MB Seagate drive was originally thought to be destroyed, but workers and engineers reconstructing the orbiter from the remaining debris found it during the process and sent it off for recovery, where 99 percent of the data was extracted. It then took several years for lead researcher Robert Berg and his team to analyze the findings, but they’re happy with the results — we only wish they hadn’t come at so dear a price.

[Thanks, Laura]

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Source: Nilay Patel

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

We’ve seen some pretty out there solar installations, but JAXA, the Japanese space agency, is about to get really far out with its latest project: a space-based solar array that beams power back to Earth. The agency is set to begin testing on the microwave power transmission system on February 20th, with an attempt to beam enough power over the 2.4GHz band to power a household heater at 50 meters (164 feet). That’s certainly not the sort of large-scale sci-fi power system we were hoping for, but fret not — if the tests are successful, JAXA’s plan is to eventually launch a constellation of solar satellites, each beaming power to a 1.8-mile wide receiving station that’ll produce 1 gigawatt of electricity and power 500,000 homes.

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Source: Nilay Patel

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