Todd Humphreys from the University of Texas has figured out how to unofficially piggyback on Starlink synchronisation sequences and repurpose them as a positioning system with 30 metre accuracy.
An upcoming satellite moon mission launched by private company Rocket Labs and funded by NASA will deliver a satellite in a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon. The mission is designed to test this stable orbit around the moon, which will later be used by NASA to launch a lunar space station.
Researchers at the University of Florida have successfully grown plants in soil from the moon. The research used soil samples collected during the Apollo 11, 12, & 17 missions to test how well thale cress could or would grow in the extra-terrestrial soil. The cress was a champ and grew in the lunar soil, albeit it at a slower rate than in earth soil, while dealing with metabolic and oxidative stress.
Scientists at the University of California have developed a robot that can jump over 100 times its own height. The robot is intended to help explore the moon and can jump up to 32.9 metres.
NASA recently released a new image from the orbiting High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) satellite. The photograph show sedimentary layers on the rocks in the Danielson Crater, which suggests a cyclical nature to the layering.
This NPR Shortwave episode describes how scientists at NASA analysed the submissions for use of the new James Webb telescope, as well as Hubble and found a huge amount of unconscious bias was leading to the majority of approvals going to submissions from male scientists. They ran some experiments with the submission procedures and found blind submissions as well as more fact based reviewing procedures removed a lot of the biases from the process.
