Robotic engineers are no stranger to turning to nature for inspiration. In recent years, birds, dogs, extinct sea creatures, and even humans themselves have all served as jumping off point for new mechanical designs. Now, researchers from Stanford are citing ...
Read More »Mars rover snaps pics of dusty craters that may have once roared with water
In its two years and three months of exploring the Red Planet, NASA’s Perseverance Rover has been one busy moving Martian science lab. It has detected signs of past chemical reactions, begun building a Martian rock depot, and recorded audio ...
Read More »Robot plants could be used to grow infrastructure in space from scratch
This article was original featured on MIT Press.This article is excerpted from Dario Floreano and Nicola Nosengo’s book “Tales From a Robotic World.” In the early 2010s, a new trend in robotics began to emerge. Engineers started creating robotic versions ...
Read More »Name a better duo than NASA’s hard-working Mars rover and helicopter
On April 19, 2021, a little more than a century after the Wright Brothers’ first test flight on Earth, humans managed to zoom a helicopter around on another planet. The four-pound aircraft, known as Ingenuity, is part of NASA’s Mars2020 ...
Read More »31 award-winning astronomy photos: From fiery horizons to whimsical auroras
An unexpected and astonishing find located more than 2.5 million light-years from Earth took top honors at the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year awards this week. Amateur astronomers Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner, and Yann Sainty captured an ...
Read More »To create a small Mars colony, leave the jerks on Earth
When it comes to building a sustainable settlement on Mars, the technological and engineering challenges are steep. But they take a back seat to the Human Resources department. Forget sophisticated vehicles or sensitive instrumentation—the most temperamental, fragile things we send ...
Read More »Space junk is a precious treasure trove to some archaeologists
Terms like “cultural heritage” and “archaeology” might conjure Indiana Jones-lie scenes of old and ancient things buried under the sands of time. But even now, each one of us is producing material that could interest future humans trying to record ...
Read More »NASA’s newest office is all about putting humans on Mars
NASA officials have talked for years about using the moon as a stepping stone to explore Mars. But now the space agency is finally reorganizing its administration to crystallize that aim in its bureaucratic structure. At the end of March, ...
Read More »NASA rover finds evidence of carbon-based chemistry in Martian crater
NASA’s Perseverance rover has detected evidence for an array of different organic molecules in Mars’ Jezero Crater. The findings are detailed in a paper published July 12 in the journal Nature. This latest discovery suggests that a more complex geochemical ...
Read More »July’s skies heat up with the Buck Moon, a shimmery Venus, and more
July 1 Conjunction of Venus and Mars July 3 Full Buck Supermoon July 7 Venus at its Brightest July 16 Lāhaina Noon Begins July 29-30 Delta Aquarids Meteor Shower Peaks With the summer solstice behind us, it’s true that we ...
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