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some really nice pictures from Mercury's flyby mission

I love the comments: "damn i almost thought this was about Mercury messenger... an OSX messenger app..." "I'm just glad we have an atmosphere" "The US is in the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression... and we're spending all this money... for this? What a waste. Get rid of NASA - it will save us trillions! " sic :-(

Open source general mission analysis software. Should we be in as developers?

Basics of Space Flight is a tutorial designed primarily to help operations people identify the range of concepts associated with deep space missions, and grasp the relationships among them.

How to reduce mission costs.

First time I heard about this relevant project. In brief: The mission of the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX) font creation project is the preparation of a comprehensive set of fonts that serve the scientific and engineering community

Should astronauts on long term missions have (chat) bots to talk to in realtime so that they won't go mad with their fellow astronaut buddies...?

an analysis of implications of the Falcon Heavy announcement

I am quite amazed that they apparently still use the capsules to return the pictures??? Hard to believe .... "Kobalt spacecraft reportedly carry canisters to return film to Earth during the satellite's mission, which will last at least several months."

Some interesting future projects from NASA's IAC. (June 2014) NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts awards: "These proposals have been selected based on the potential of their concepts to transform future aerospace missions, enable new capabilities, or significantly alter and improve current approaches."

A common data hub that allows the representation and comparison of data from numerous space missions. "The IMPEx portal offers tools for the visualization and analysis of datasets from different space missions. Furthermore, several computational model databases are feeding into the environment." As they say, with its massive 3D-visualization capabilities it offers the possibility of displaying spacecraft trajectories, planetary ephemerides as well as scientific representations of observational and simulation datasets.

Super cool html5 site (crowdfunded) to describe a space mission.

The paper I talked about with the proof of a gigantic lava tube discovered in 2017 from data of the Japanese lunar mission

Given the size of this thing we may consider a project on city urban planning inside. I would see a rocket-port outside the crater, some lift systems to get in, a closed dome with artificial atmosphere where to develop the city possible trekking routes on the lunar surface, a mirror system to get sunlight in, an energy factory just outside the entry.

first science results reported in Nature (as far as I know) from the Yutu-2 and Chang'e mission .... and they look very good!

Sure they are very useful! It will be even better if they manage to fit the data to modeled circulation of the lunar magma ocean that was formed posterior to the "Theia" body collision with Earth. The collision was the cause of the magma ocean in the first place. The question now is how this circulation pattern of the lava-moon "froze" in time upon phase transition to solid. Because, what crystallizes last in sequence, is more rich in "incompatible" with the crystal structure, elements, we might combine data+models to predict their location. Those incompatible tracers are mainly radioactively decaying elements that produce heat (google publications about lunar KREEP elements (potassium (K), rare earth elements(REE), and phosphorus(P)). By knowing where the KREEP is: - we know where to dig for them mining (if they are useful for something, eg. Phosphorus for plants to be grown on the Moon) - we avoid planning to build the future human colony on top of radioactives, of course. The hope is that the Moon, due to lack of plate tectonics, has preserved this "signature of the freezing sequence". Let's see.

thanks Nasia! very interesting comment

Material point method is an efficient and promising method for simulating complex stuff. Not used much in Astro, a lot in gaming, cartoons etc.... Worth having a look in comparison with SPH in simulation (for example those connected to the HERAS mission)

impressive

Quote: "It's a little queasy sounding, but there's no place for that material to go, and it makes great radiation shielding"

Judging by the color it probably contains a lot of melanin. ;-)

have a look ... article from Claudio