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Trying the new rocket with humans right away (and 1.5 years to go). What can possibly go wrong? The Trump administration has directed NASA to study whether it is feasible to fly astronauts on the debut flight of the agency's heavy-lift rocket, a mission currently planned to be unmanned and targeted to launch in late 2018, officials said on Friday.

slashdot describes the drill as "a self-driving mole developed by the German space agency (DLR)". This seems to be the drill: GEMS - a mole to explore the interior of Mars, http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/OCEANSE.2009.5278132. Interesting news for all the roots people :)

Nice overview about past missions to other bodies of our solar system.

Sort of makes you wonder what the internet is really about

"A band of space hackers and engineers are trying to do something never done before - recover a 36 year old NASA spacecraft from the grips of deep space and time. With old NASA documents and Rockethub crowdfunding, a team led by Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing is attempting to steer ISEE-3, later rechristened ICE, the International Cometary Explorer, back into an Earth orbit and return it to scientific operations. Dennis says, 'ISEE-3 can become a great teaching tool for future engineers and scientists helping with design and travel to Mars'. Only 40 days remain before the spacecraft will be out of range for recovery. A radio telescope is available, propulsion designs are in hand and the team is hoping for public support to provide the small amount needed to accomplish a very unique milestone in space exploration

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency spacecraft Ikaros now represents the first solar sail to have harnessed sunlight for both attitude control and propulsion, after it first launched May 21 alongside the Venus-bound orbiter Akatsuki.

(don't forget to turn your hype-filters on...) MoNETA (http://cns.bu.edu/nl/moneta.html) stands for "MOdular Neural Exploring Traveling Agent". It is one of projects participating in the DARPA-funded SyNAPSE project ("Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics"): http://www.darpa.mil/dso/thrusts/bio/biologically/synapse/index.htm http://www.darpa.mil/dso/solicitations/baa08-28.html

interesting initiative - also with respect to "space and water" a theme we should explore a bit better in my view ...

"has a new capability to make its own choices about whether to make additional observations of rocks that it spots on arrival at a new location"

"NASA's proposed budget for 2011 is $19 billion," Brown says. "That's about three weeks of the war in Iraq." + interesting video on new rover design ("tumbleweed" rover)

that's why I quit ESA - I'll join NATO, more promising career ahead

I thought you became an EC bureaucrat ...

nice

Is it a yearly thing?

well a bit misleading title...

Just read about this, it looks like an interesting example of bottom-up innovation and self-organization.

this might come very handy in case we explore further the idea of a virtual ACT - one of the key points: you still have to meet from time to time physically ...

Sounds pretty much Sci-Fi...

This review provides an overview of the progress in using the low-gravity environment of space to explore critical phenomena and test modern theoretical predictions.