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NASA funds experimental radiation shield and Mars climbing robot

3 March 2022

Several futuristic projects have just been awarded money through NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts programme – here are New Scientist's top five choices

A major component of NASA?s Psyche spacecraft has been delivered to NASA?s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the phase known as assembly, test, and launch operations (ATLO) is now underway. This photo, shot March 28, 2021 shows engineers and technicians preparing to move the Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) Chassis from its shipping container to a dolly in High Bay 1 of JPL?s Spacecraft Assembly Facility. The photo was captured just after the chassis was delivered to JPL by Maxar Technologies. Maxar?s team in Palo Alto, California, designed and built the SEP Chassis, which includes all the primary and secondary structure and the hardware components needed for the high-power electrical system, the propulsion system, the thermal system, guidance and navigation sensors and actuators, and the high-gain antenna. Over the next year, additional hardware will be added to the spacecraft including the command and data handling system, a power distribution assembly, the X-band telecommunications hardware suite, three science instruments (two imagers, two magnetometers, and a gamma ray neutron Spectrometer), and a deep space optical communications technology demonstrator. The spacecraft will finish assembly and then undergo rigorous checkout and testing before being shipped to NASA?s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, for an August 2022 launch to the main asteroid belt. Psyche will arrive at the metal-rich asteroid of the same name in 2026, orbiting for 21 months to investigate its composition. Scientists think that Psyche is made up of mostly iron and nickel ? similar to Earth?s core. Exploring the asteroid could give valuable insight into how our own planet and others formed. Arizona State University in Tempe leads the mission. JPL is responsible for the mission?s overall management, system engineering, integration and test, and mission operations. For more information about NASA?s Psyche mission, go to: http://www.nasa.gov/psyche or https://psyche.asu.edu/ Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

2022 preview: A round-up of the year's most exciting space missions

29 December 2021

Around a dozen missions to the moon are scheduled in 2022, along with a rover landing on Mars and a spacecraft headed to in-vestigate the metal asteroid Psyche

NASA mission takes first close-up images of Ganymede in two decades

7 June 2021

NASA took pictures of Jupiter's largest moon Ganymede with its Galileo and Voyager missions, and now it has returned for the first time in over two decades with the Juno mission

Asteroid-munching microbes could mine materials from space rocks

10 November 2020

Some microbes break down rocks and leach certain elements out of them for nutrients, and experiments in space show they could be used for mining beyond Earth

NASA missions may go to Venus or our solar system’s strangest moons

13 February 2020

NASA has selected four potential future missions – to Jupiter’s fiery moon Io, Neptune’s icy moon Triton, and two that would explore the atmosphere and map the surface of Venus