On Friday, sometime around 9pm AEST, China sent a probe the moon.
NASA’s Mars Spirit Rover, now a stationary probe stuck in the sands of the Red Planet, may not survive the Martian Winter.
Fresh from the (possible) success of its Hayabusa comet dust hoover, Japan is planning a new space mission – sending a rotating mirrored probe to the currently fashionable planet Mercury.
See that? It might be a dust particle from an asteroid! Or it might be a flake of dried skin from a man in the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency factory that built the Hayabusa probe. No one knows yet.
NASA captured the re-entry of Japan’s troubled but still successful Hayabusa probe early this morning over Australia. The payload reportedly ejected without incident and parachuted to earth. What you see here is everything else going to hell (by design):
Martian rovers with wheels are so 2009, man. And they get stuck in the sand way to easily. What we need is an army of tumbleweed beach ball robots surveying hundreds of miles of Martian surface. NASA’s on the case.
